The Art of History and the Interpretation of Clouds
Photo by Malhar Rathod on Unsplash. Edited.
History
I fell in love with Jimmy at the cavern under a street crossing near the Luan River before it enters Pohat Bay. The river had been diverted in the Great Rebuilding. The cavern was a remnant of the primordial bed of the river, when it had snaked under the rocks for several miles before reappearing in a gentle widened force. During dry years gambling had occurred in the cavern. During wet years, opiate addicts populated the upper portions.
My father, who had been a harbor policeman shortly after appeasement with the West, had rousted many gambling clubs and gangs from the caverns, and had marked on one wall near the entrance how many thousands of people, in neat stacks of ten as if kindling or wheat tied together at the shaft. He also had perished there, when a sudden and swift autumn storm had flooded the river in a matter of hours and had trapped an old man’s opiate club. He had entered the cavern with the water nearly to the top and had come out with three old men, one hanging to him, the other two like chained flowers hanging to the stems of the other. My father had been exhausted, doubled over, vomiting, yet the city prelate ordered him to go back in, the prelate smiling for the cameras, as if having fun. So back in my father went, looking for the last two men.
As soon as he entered, he snagged one old man, and pushed his body up the funnel to two other harbor policemen. He did not leave the water. A woman who was a diver in Pohat Bay came in neoprene gear and volunteered to enter the waters, but the prelate held her back, dismissing her with one hand and still waving to the cameras with the other. The crowd waited for minutes, grew unruly, pressed forward to the entrance, then to the floor with the trap door that led to the funnel that led to the cavern. They pushed the prelate so far forward he almost lost his balance and fell down the funnel.
My father never returned, instead his body came bobbing up downriver where the waters re-entered the sky at the place called Shén shuǐ zhī shǒu, or the head of god water. A teenage boy out for a wild rampage on a skiff used a grappling hook to snare my father’s shirt, and brought him to the shore boasting as if he had caught a tremendous fish. A crowd gathered, and fifteen minutes later the crowd at the funnel joined. That is where Jimmy and I joined them. To this day I imagine moaning, gulping back of tears, old women sobbing and falling to their knees, a collection of wailing sounds for all the loved ones now dead.
But what we heard was anger, the crowd in ire at the prelate, pushing him, pummeling him, pulling his hair, stripping him of his coat and hat, knocking him over, removing his shoes and his pants, kicking him in the head, and then tying him to the hood of a car, then staying for a night and a day while he pleaded for forgiveness and spewed retribution and revenge, alternately crying like a child and swearing such that his spit foamed. He choked. He sputtered. He turned his head from the morning sun.
Policemen came to break up the crowd but made no headway, even when with batons they began to beat the outside of the ring. Young men from gangs quickly filled that outer circle and beat them back, with a whirling force that made the police run. The army was called in, but their appearance only solidified the crowd. On the second day it seemed the crowd dispersed more from boredom with the standoff and that they needed to work, to eat, and had made their complaint loud enough, though what the complaint was no one seemed to fully understand. The prelate was untied. He stood and screamed with such force that the veins on his neck almost seemed to rise above the skin. He collapsed, and died. His death came from an aneurysm, the published account said, but we all knew it was from a pocket of evil that had burst in his brain.
There is no solace in knowing your father died on behalf of saving others. There is no pride. The words are nice words, necessary words, but they have no beauty to them. He lived with such dignity. His role was not of suppression of people, but of small orderliness—boat traffic control, keeping kids safe, reminding teenagers, catching thieves, listening to fishmongers and old women tell tales of abundance now that goods were becoming scarce. He ate less as he aged so that I could eat more. He could speak with such eloquence my mother told us he was a poet in the wrong uniform, that he should have been living on a mountain like a hermit, as the poets, venerated. He recited stories to us at bedtime of animals and dragons. He sang little songs of nonsense that made us laugh. He said when I was going off to college that he wished he could sing one song that might change the difficult world to a pleasurable one for me. Of course, he did not have such insights as the old poets, but words rolled off his tongue like rain on the mountainsides.
That I wrote pleased him. After he died, when we searched his things and the large wooden box that had his memories and treasures, we found a letter opener and small notes from my mother when she was in grade school. But nothing in his original hand. My mother said she could not remember him writing a single thing. Perhaps it was that longing to change a difficult world into a pleasurable one was an insurmountable task. Perhaps he felt it was being asked to do the impossible. Perhaps when he saw the river dive, he never saw it rise again.
And now, in the cavern, I hear this voice, melodic, with sweeping long phrases, with lushness, with adjectives strung together one after the other about personal freedom, about freedom of thought, about self-literacy, about the blessing of being meek, about inheritance not of wealth but of peacefulness, not dictated to, not mannered and combed to remove a hair out of place, but effusive, available, equalitarian, perhaps wild.
It was the voice of my father sprung from his lips into the mouth of another person, my Jimmy, myself. The river had been underground for many years after my father died. Now, before me, before this intensely quiet, listening body, it had risen. My father had taught me how to move in the underground without light, palms pressed to walls, and in so doing prepared me in serving the party through translation, how to tell the shell of the path of truth. I had been assigned to do the brushstrokes for a rewriting of wars, of the rightful capturing of other people, of cultural dominance, of leaders as gods. Darkness.
Interpretation
I am to deliver my calligraphy of the historical western United States fires that began in 2020 and ended in 2026 with the destruction of over 600,000 homes and businesses. The complaint of my censors is that I have painted, which is a faux pas in interpretation, a blurring by beauty of a grim circumstance that the common people will not understand, a pathos of historical interpretation. But that too is a cloud, a cirrus streak across the sky dimming the inspection of light.
I think of the old couple evacuated from their home packing their dog almost like a backpack or piece of luggage, a few pictures, a mass of photos, an urn of ashes, a set of clothes, and flames flying this way and that across the road. They were lower middle class, professionals, but not upward mobile professionals, forced to live in the forest, until the forest with a strike of electricity threw them out. How do you write about the loss of a home, and your work, and your contentment, at such a time of life? How do you write about an environmentally-forced dementia on this couple?
With tenderness, my pen tip barely lights on the paper, the ink does not spread into the fabric of the paper but bubbles, then bursts, like a fire bolt, like an ember from a burning tree lifted by the wind like a feather and flown a distant mile to terrorize. Is that what I wish, to write the history of fire and terrorize the reader? To have an ellipsis in time between contentment and total loss of place, of emotional stillness, to terror? What connects in that space of time, that is what I wish to write. That too is history, those small minutes between the ember uplifted and the ember settling into the grass near the home, the settled ember igniting the grass, the grass igniting a branch, a branch igniting the bark of the trunk, the trunk igniting, the embers from the tree picked up by the wind and carried by the wind to another distance. Those small minutes from contentment to terror. What did they do in those last moments? Is that the same space as going to the doctor healthy for a checkup and then hearing you have cancer? To the silence that starts when a child calls a mother and begins with I love you, Mom, and the mother waits for the next sentence, warm from the words, but clenching her teeth for the next cold words: I have cancer, I’m getting divorced, I lost the baby.
I want to spend my ink on the small window of time before the lightning strikes and the fire consumes.
Interpretation
When I was a child, during a storm, I dreamed a large crow came and sat on our neighbor’s roof and fell through, and the crow was the darkness in my neighbor’s house. My father said when clouds go wild and make trees flail as if they are not rooted in the ground, the earth itself trembles. Ordering people and land, The Everlasting Party is the firmament, and I am a cloud. They inspect each brushstroke with fear.
Clouds
We climbed. My father and I rose over the first layer of cloud, an accumulation of dirt, dust, exhaust, and evaporated ground moisture to a thousand feet of clarity beneath the gray wool of the second layer of clouds, a low-pressure system that would bring rain.
In the clearing we could see harvesters with sacks of tea on their backs making their way down the mountain on circuitous routes, footpaths on dry soil soon turning to mud. I wondered how they would get back up after the rain and father said they would stick to the paths, only walk with legs wide on the brims at the side of the path the way strider beetles walk on water, and he made a jaunty motion that reminded me of a hanging wooden toy with splayed legs.
He was happy. He kept looking back at me as we wound our way into the second layer of clouds, as if taking photos with his eyes, and the winks were the closing of the shutter.
We stepped into darkness, into the massive cloud and its fulminating, wind slapping us from different directions, and though not raining our clothes becoming saturated with moisture. We could barely see the soil and rocks beneath our feet, hung on to scrub brush even while standing still. He smiled wide and almost with a giddiness I had never seen.
The world no longer exists, he yelled. We are atmosphere!
I wondered aloud how the clouds could seem so passive, so penetrable, and then when in a cloud, so wild and impenetrable. I listened to my father speak about refraction and the eyes needing space to maintain wobble, that perpetual scanning we take for granted—the eyes are always moving. How tired they must get, father said. How tired. But here, no need to scan, to need to look for daylight. We are just here. We use our ears to hear, our feet to feel the ground still sturdy beneath our boots. The wind is a song as it rushes by our coats. Here it sing! We have joined the dust and droplets in a way we never can down in the valley. Many prophets and poets have climbed mountains and returned with scrolls, tablets, recitations, and fire. But we bring the essence of the cloud itself—mystery and moisture.
Some, he said, described entering a cloud as disorienting, but it’s really orienting. You find out more of who you are. You find out about fear, isolation, the belonging to earth, to sky, to water. You are not lost when the last village in the valley vanishes beneath you, but when the trail you can no longer see, when you spin one way and return and the path beneath your feet has disappeared the cloud seems to swallow even the branches you grab. Your mother used to cry out God, O Lord, here, the only time other than in the bathroom she could say the name out loud without fear. To her, being in the cloud meant liberation, emancipation, a connection finally that she was denied. Some feel smothered, like the heaviness of wool has closed the pores of the skin. They cannot breathe. But the wind of the cloud makes you breathe. If you stop, it takes over, again and again, as if rescuing you from your fear. Even in meditation when I have tried to reduce my breath such that I could not detect it with my hand or feel it on my mustache suddenly the wind would invade and make me gulp and exhale that gulp, a gasp as if being born into the world. The cloud with its wind would have me pay attention to it and all it obscures. I relate this phenomenon only that you may record it as history.
Today, he tells me, when we sit, as we shall just now on those rocks by where the wind has nearly pulled that little bramble by the roots, you shall find it for yourself. I am excited to think of the brushstrokes you will use.
My father had a keen interest in the single cloud that would form, not a thin cirrus barely a streak in the sky, but a lonely thundercloud with the nearly black bottom and white top, that would move like a grazing steer over land, then stop, and pour, then amble away. How did that cloud form? How did that cloud fulminate with all of the rain that would fall in one week? Why were they always quick to form but so slow to advance, and seemingly with an inexhaustible supply of heavy raindrops until they passed to the sea? A mad warrior, he called it, a proud warrior who has returned last from the battlefield and has stories to tell of death and carnage. This rain, it does not refresh, he would say. If it is hot, it makes the day uncomfortable. If it is cold, the large raindrops feel like bullets of ice. In both cases, you must shield yourself, as when a soldier continues to tell stories of gore and glory without ceasing and you find yourself running into the kitchen and out the back door to give your soul a break. Calming tea does not help. Humor does not help. He will laugh and return to his stories. So the cloud cannot be implored, but buries you for an hour in the most brutal rain.
When February came, father was at his busiest. Not only were the trawlers’ nets brimming with fish and squid and an infant octopus, but clouds took over the sky all the hours of the short days. The sun was hardly seen, and moisture was in the air in spritzing drops at all times. He would never enter our first-floor apartment without removing his jacket and boots outdoors under the eave and shaking his jacket to rid it of as much moisture as possible, and when entering the house making sure the rug was tucked into the corner where his black boots sat and the yellowish jacket dripped onto the floor. I remember in the pale light of the living room how the buckles of that jacket reflected, it seems, a greater light, as if concentrating the radiant light into a flash of greater strength. My father would joke that the mist from our clouds could light the whole world, then, just by the two dim bulbs on the sides of our chairs. Years later I studied concave mirrors and laser beams still trying to make that childish wish come true. After my mother made us some dish with fish and rice, the fish usually a small thing slipped into one of his boots in a pouch he and other dockworkers had made into all their boots, a pouch that could hold up to three two-inch fish, or one fat four-inch fish, then father would watch as I worked on the brushstrokes of ideograms, he making up stories sentence by sentence, and my interpretation in images. The clouds were always both heroes and villains. Sometimes the clouds were bandits, both hero and villain in a single entity.
Sea clouds were like cisterns of garbage my father said, picking up anything from the surface and bearing it like a trash trawler in the air.
Mountain clouds were pure water and dust, accumulated before they skirted over the population.
You do not drink the water from the bilge, nor lap from the shore, he said. But in the mountains you can cup your hands in a rivulet and see only your hands, and you can drink, fearless. It is the same when in the clouds. Out at sea, in a cloud, a storm, you have no place to set your feet when the winds whip. On a mountain, even in the angriest clouds, you have a mooring, a branch to grab that has been through the storm of mountain clouds many times. That is why family is depicted at times as a mountain bush, because you can hold to family in a storm.
As he turned feeble after my mother died, his fingers fumbled to button a shirt and his neighbor would come over to dote on him in the morning to make sure he was dressed. He often forgot his lunch, so she would make one and tie it like a bundle to his jacket so that the mere fact of dressing to be out on the dock or his increasingly mysterious hikes he would have something to eat. He would not think of moving in with me. He would not think of moving in with his neighbor, though she desired his company. But it would not have been companionship.
One day he opened the windows to a storm, turned the latches and secured the curtains with twine, and let the storm into his home. His neighbor found him with hands tucked under his legs, as he always slept, wet and peaceful.
Interpretation
The English question mark resembles a gaffing hook like the one my father used, both for large fish, and, once, for killing a man. When the inspector raises questions on my work, my ethic, the slight lilting of her voice at the end of a phrase feels like the gaffing hook entering my throat, catching with its barb, hauling me out of the water onto a boat where I will be severed head from torso. Some mornings I wake to the mark of interrogation sweating and holding my throat.
The Art
A game of hide-and-stay hidden. My father taught me how to relax in lightning and thunder, that if the lightning frightened it was close and to stick an index finger in each ear. If the lightning did not frighten, I could breathe in and out and patiently await the thunder. I have been assigned to do translation, the party calls it, using new brushstrokes for a rewriting of revolution, of war, of the rightful capturing of people, of cultural dominance over individual freedom, of leaders as gods. These leaders are both darkness and lightning, and I cannot patiently wait any longer.
I am tasked with writing a new history to conform to a new cosmology of how those in power came to power as an inevitable journey toward their becoming gods. Today I write a chapter about conspiracies, but like conspiracies, I have no facts to write about. I have the names and what actions they took, but no evidence of what they supposedly conspired about. It is the same in every country where the powerful or the powerless think a group, a throng, a mob, are in collusion against them, when it is actually the entire system usually launched with concerted agreement of many. Slavery. Re-education. Environmental justice. Environmental catastrophe. A virus. A pathogen. But it is difficult to write about an entire system. How do I combine fact-less hysteria with the grandiosity of science as related by ignorant politicians?
Jimmy says history is like a stone wall without stones. Some people say they still run into it. Other than that they still have to step over it. And the owner of the wall tells people the wall exists, out of myth, to hold power. Myth. That is what I will write about. Conspirators trapped in the clouds of myth.
I write in an old calligraphic brushstroke style, a little flamboyant for my editors, a little lush, too much ink they say. It’s the flourish they don’t like. So I stay within the character, but imbue it with a fullness that belies the sparse words I write.
Often, I am drawn to the window when I research and write. I ponder the clouds as my father once did, valuing his interpretation of clouds as both omens of the future for some people but a history of what has passed for others, the clouds formed by evaporation of the living. All clouds bear both ancestry and descendant, or antecedent, prologue, or whatever historical term I must use to defeat the personalization and treat the human population as in “it” instead of a “they.”
I imagine my father on a bench looking at tornado weather and being satiated with the fulminating clouds, the flashes, the thunder, the opulent fatness of the roiling gray matter. He would have liked a porch, or even a patio, but his apartment was a rectangle of almost obsessive repetition with others, cell block on cell block, a prison construction to house people. The French did it right in Paris, with an almost similar construction, but with a small patio, a patio so narrow you could barely turn around, but you could hang baskets of flowers over those passersby so they could admire, a bouquet of red and white geraniums or purple and white petunias, a splash of orange nasturtiums.
I am interrupted. How to explain the mist that envelopes the city every morning? The earth is dry. The rivers dwindle even as the seas continue to rise. As the shore side paddies shower in salt, we have drought. Yet the morning has mist.
We have little air-borne pollution. No longer does coal coat buildings and lungs, and exhaust decay concrete. So from what dust, what moisture, is this mist created? It does not come from the middle sky as the cumulus and nimbus might travel at night, and cloister together like young ones in a hostel. It does not come from the near sky as smog might portend. It does not come from the wicking of plants breathing into the air, nor the surfaces of water near the city. It does not come from ground fog, for the ground is sere, hard curled saucers of clay. And yet it comes.
Some find it depressing to wake each morning to this mist, every day gray or grayer. But to me it is a blessing, not just for the four or five hours it hangs around like a friend, but for what it bids for the future—the earth, the torrents, the currents, will save us. This mist is what I must translate into my work, this mist from something unknowable I must write into my history, must give the people in wet words in such a way that they do not know they have been blessed, a history of hope, of promise.
I write from a cloud, carried on the insubstantial not by science or polemics, but by mist touching my face, adorning the small hairs on my forearms, the dull wool of my pants.
The mist is a form of a cataract, an ecological blurring of vision just as it is a biological blurring of sight. By vision I mean the act of perception, thought, the formation of words. The mist makes one exhausted in trying to see clearly, shifting the nose to point the eyes and the mind’s concentration to find, not unlike a wading bird shifts its head frequently trying to find the right ocular length for one eye or the other to find a fish. It is, I suspect, also a mist that protects my thoughts and my words from finding what is actually there.
My father had cataracts discovered when he had an eye exam and was asked to repeat the assemblage of six letters, nailed the first three, missed the fourth, and nailed the fifth and sixth. Repeatedly, no matter the change in the words. When he came home he laughed about it, said he wanted to keep his lens, not have it changed out for a new one. In the string of characters, he always missed the same one. He wrote that down on a sheet of paper, rolled it up like a scroll, then pinned it to the back of the door. “I always want to see that when I leave the house. It reminds me of your mother.” Several years later, when he was dying, he told me he always imagined the missing letter was my mother, and the space had been worn by touch of his fingers.
Though my editor has said the writing should proceed mechanically, each morning I must inspect my vision for cataracts, inspect my nation which has grown old like a father for things it misses in the fuzziness of remembrance. In writing this new history of ecological warfare, of simple cause and effect, in neutered phraseology and impersonal pages, I am haunted by the paper hung on the door and the caress of my father’s fingertips.
A pollution storm--it comes in the middle of the night with thunder and sheet electricity, with clouds fuliginous. The clouds boil, forming furrowed brows of ferocity, then explode, and a long-rolling thunder shakes the panes of our windows. No rain falls.
I have read in ancient times that the people would huddle in fear that their gods or their earth was writhing in anger, that a storm without rain was deprivation no different than punishing a child for bad behavior by withholding a meal. So the leaders would look to sacrifice, showing a control of social order as appeasement. We look at it today as a type of control that shows the ultimate lack of control, a wicked lesson in ancient ignorance.
Yet today, after a long night of lightning, I arrive at work and secure my ink and begin to write and see others behind their office panes gathered and nodding, and saying yes, yes, yes, and I wonder if I am the one to be sacrificed, if the history is not accepted will I be the one whose life like an ancient innocent be lifted up to unknown powers as pacification.
I write “the earth dries from the willing neglect of capitalist agri-businesses and thirsty cities that waste water, and the skies cry out with lightning and thunder but no rain. Even on days you can wring out your mask and your shirt with captured water from the sky, no rain falls. The sky glows at night with an ominous yellow, the yellow of the eyes of large cats looking for prey. In the morning there are small patches of moisture on the ground as if the clouds have wept a few tears before moving on. Where the communes work in the fields, the air is dense with evaporation from underground irrigation, caught in the tents overhead and dripped back down to the plants. In the cities, the dry air snaps like a whip, the static pulls clothes close to the body, static sparks can be seen even without contact between objects. When the tram pulls away, a small ball of electricity follows, igniting debris, occasionally snapping to the side toward an unsuspecting group of walkers and knocking one or two to the ground.”
Jimmy has been launched into a storefront window by such a blue blur. He laughs when he tells the story, but he says his heart ticks with a different cadence since.
I tighten my backpack, have removed any metal, do not wear rings or bracelets or earrings, until I arrive at the university. When I walk, I make sure I splay out my legs so my pants do not swish.
Interpretation
I know my path—somewhere in the brushstroke I must convey another revolution. But what if in my stroke, lush and perhaps obvious, the reader can sense that love overthrows.
History
I have been assigned the rewriting of atrocities, the mass killing of humans by humans, into the environmental population outsizing perspective. To do that means finding a “natural” hate caused by the will to survive to assign—which has been easy to do with Hitler, but difficult to do with Uighurs or Azanis in Iraq, who were killed and imprisoned for being different. No one wanted their impoverished land. Who wants another’s poverty?
I was told to look back at World War II as the first population war, and World War I as the first war begun for the supply of wheat. The baby boomers brought in such quantity as the reaction to the horror of one group trying to thin the herd of another. We would relabel the Pol Pot regime as an internal war, the Chinese purge by Mao as a premonition of the second, and the Middle East “cleansing” that spread into Europe, Russia, and the United States as Eco-War I, but as historians we would have liked to rewrite the label of WWII and call it Eco-War I, and the cleansing as Eco-War II.
Jimmy, a secret husband in that we cannot work in the same field and be married so must work undercover, live undercover, has transcribed the whole of human history away from Hegelian dialectics, religious war theory, and egomaniacal systems, into a simple, elegant web of eco-terrorism, territory grabbing, and population outsizing. The wars, for instance, in the 1980s between Iraq and Iran are reduced to a simple premise—too many young men with nothing to do and not enough resources to support them. Thus war.
The terrorism of the early 21st century is the same, the fear of the old patriarchy that their progeny goes at least existentially hungry, for the terrorists come seldom from luxury but from deserts and starvation. Even in the United States the terrorists come from poor soil and deprivation and a history of lies that turns from the cosmology and mythology of their hallowed text. Jimmy thinks they have never read it.
And then the war of 2026, after the soil gave out and the fresh water became limited and the sun went dark ruining all the efforts at solar power. As I write this, I am pedaling a stationary bike to produce enough power for a small light and my electronic scribe.
Interpretation
We had already dug up enough of the past, so we invented the past in the present, making artifacts for the future.
We are not survivors. Survivors are restored to some semblance of normal life, even with PTSD, minds shocked into numbness. We are still in prisons, awaiting the final electric tap at the temples. We are conscious of the facts, the trends. Humanity, that raucous bubble of growth, like a yeast gone wild, has been popped, and what remains is like a drying skin around the puncture wound. We are that skin.
Ants offer insight. When two nests have sent out searchers, and both find the same source of food, they share, but as the signals transfer that the food supply is running low, a panic sets in. The line with the fastest communication goes amok first, ants walking faster and faster, touching each other with a quick communique, while the second group is still lumbering forward, taking time to fully touch and enjoy all forms of communication, in safety and satiety. But when the second line begins to read the first, already in the hard drive, not only does panic set in, but competition. The ants race almost without touching, without social communication. Their lines become distended, sometimes looped and wayward, spreading more like a flooding river than a channeled stream. They fight. The first colony always wins, because it has more ants in the long line than the second colony, the slower to react. Recognizing first is almost the victory, not the fight. Recognition and sheer numbers win.
History
It was in late August that a few scientists published a paper on the susceptibility of grain to a rust fungus that originated in Siberia tundra, had become a blight in the warming steppes of Russia and had begun spreading across lower Asia, and had infected yields in Africa and Eastern Europe. The rust fungus, which had heretofore had died back in population in the winter, had grown vigorously when it had reached the warming cultures of the Steppes, and bloomed as it traveled into warm weather, tossed in the air and landing on any grain awn it could attach to.
By September the fear of an exceedingly diminished worldwide supply of all of the traditional grains, wheat, oats, barley, rye, rice, millet, and even corn, became reality. Massive acres of grain were burned, which unintentionally rose on the soot and landed everywhere the wind could blow it, ruining even grasses and weeds. The green destruction had begun faster than the destruction of the rainforests. Trees, however, were immune.
Iowa had nearly been destroyed with one storm in a few hours, one-third of its crops leveled, many silos with them. Another had roared like a train through Poland and Belarus collapsing all the structures in towns, and in two cases lifting overpasses and dumping them on the very road they were constructed to pass over. In Saudi Arabia a storm accumulated sand from a stretch six miles long and twenty-one miles wide and dumped the entire contents in a stretch over forty miles, blistering car paint, corroding concrete, breaking windows, and killing one-hundred and seventy-one persons and countless animals. From Mongolia to Kunlun Shan Mountains a massive front traveled over one-hundred and twenty miles and killed or destroyed everything in front of it. Because holiness and divinity had been ascribed to the mountains, many of the western comrades took the storm as a form of retribution against them for following the doctrines of the government, and rebelled. But they had little to rebel against, and many of the survivors starved over the months of the insurrection, leaving few to no inhabitants in many of the cities and villages. The soil became poisoned, a cesspool of infections and bacteria that only time would disintegrate and quell, so the entire territory was left to rot and petrify as if it were a burned forest.
The danger of market capitalism is not corporate greed, a neglect of the public need for distribution of wealth, but the free rein to pollute the public good. No better evidence of this exists than in drug trafficking, which in the first decade of the demise went from cartels from Mexico and Southern Asia making and transporting drugs into the United States for consumption by largely the white society, to the pharmaceutical conglomerates delivering barbiturates to everyone, every race, religion, sex, age, and condition. They hooked nearly one fifth of American society on narcotics, and Americans, if they did not have a pain for the expressed need, invented one, or babied themselves into believing they needed a narcotic to get through a pain that most blacks and browns considered an ordinary part of life.
The pharmaceutical conglomerates pumped the one-dollar tablets into the medical chain with high cost to customers and kickbacks to subscribing doctors, not in cash which could be easily discovered, but vacation trips where a medical conference might be held, a down payment on a bigger house, a one-year payment for a child’s college education made straight to the school, a leased SUV, a timeshare in Hawaii.
While ecstasy lit up their daughters, their wives were hooked on fentanyl.
In capitalism, it is easy to declare a public health emergency when a virus spreads. It is hard to declare an emergency when it is capitalism itself that has created and spread the disease. For a virus, you attempt containment. For an addiction, the conglomerates like a common alley drug dealer, looked for more to infect.
In one mountain town in the eastern United States, a doctor did an inventory of his oxycontin and found his inventory lower than the prescriptions he had written, which were many. He found that his two nurses had forged his signature, and used fake patient names for the prescriptions. He was furious. He went first to one home and then the other, and found both nurses used the oxycontin, as did their partners. He didn’t know what to do. He himself sold oxycontin under the table, made as much as eight thousand dollars a month off the books. So he kept quiet. When he went home that night he found his wife sobbing in the corner of the bedroom. She had run out.
A good socialist would discontinue his practice, but this doctor was a capitalist, a greedy capitalist, an under-the-table capitalist. So he continued selling the oxy, even after his wife went through rehab and then became addicted a second time. Even after one of the partners of his nurse lost his job, and sawed off his hand attempting to lop branches of a tree. Even after he found a stray pill on his son’s floor as he went to kiss him late one night. Even after having a nightmare that he had supplied his entire town and they were all crawling after him pleading for more oxy. He was making so much he thought he could buy rehab for his family and then move them away from the addiction. But he was addicted to money, so never left. His wife left, and took the oxy with her. She did not fight in the War on Drugs. She became a casualty in the War of Drugs, falling, they say, asleep, while driving across a bridge into Ohio. She had entered a coma, and neither screeching through the metal of the barrier at the bridge nor the relentless touch of cold rising water could raise her into consciousness.
Interpretation
You have to see it at the level of the clouds. Humans are like blackbirds, large flocks of blackbirds, but the blackbirds do not act as a single group. Each flock fights for territory, even amongst each other. And at the local level, while you can fault a flock of blackbirds for their terrifying swarm, how they jeer from trees, and destroy the nests of other birds fighting for dominion and food supply. But how do you condemn the entire species? So the same with humans. From a flock level, some did not advance beyond the 19th century, and while their destructive environmental footprint remains small, yet they destroy. And those with latter 20th century footprints destroy greatly. And even those with 21st century eco-appetites destroy greatly--they just imagine they are not invoking the ghosts of carbon. They make fun of cows and methane, but cement production is worse, and coffee, and tea with extravagant use of water, and air travel, sickening. They have lauded replanting trees with cheap pines and firs when the real consumption of carbon is in hardwoods. But it makes a nice story, removes guilt. So from the cloud, though, all is one, the species, that great wrecking ball of earth. Believe me, if the blackbirds could have invented planes, they would have. If bears could have developed plastic containers to store winter food, they would have. It’s the nature of any curious beast in the evolutionary scale. We are, like or not, a path of evolution, and that path includes harnessing and manipulating, and destroying, the earth so we could make a habitat of ease. It is all species' nature. We are where evolution brought us. But we are, as a manipulating population, able to change how we manipulate. But our evolution has been a light bulb that comes on after we hit our shins on dark furniture.
My father had a keen interest in the single cloud that would form, not a thin cirrhus barely a streak in the sky, but a lonely thundercloud with the nearly black bottom and white top, that would move like a grazing steer over land, then stop, and pour, then amble away. How did that cloud form? How did that cloud fulminate with all of the rain that would fall in one week? Why were they always quick to form but so slow to advance, and seemingly with an inexhaustible supply of heavy raindrops until they passed to the sea? A mad warrior, he called it, a proud warrior who has returned last from the battlefield and has stories to tell of death and carnage. This rain, it does not refresh, he would say. If it is hot, it makes the day uncomfortable. If it is cold, the large raindrops feel like bullets of ice. In both cases, you must shield yourself, as when a soldier continues to tell stories of gore and glory without ceasing and you find yourself running into the kitchen and out the back door to give your soul a break. He will laugh and continue his stories, until his power has been drained. So it is with oppression, and we waiting for the break.
The Art
Jimmy had used his influence and position to have his mother cremated individually rather than in the group of thousands. We had secreted the ashes in a large thermos supposedly containing tea that passed the scanners and dogs. The scent of jasmine had never been so powerful. We hiked up the mountain but the clouds were angry against us, so we stopped just below and did not enter into the clouds as we had planned. We shinnied in an outcropping until we found a crag to dangle our legs and eat, Jimmy pointing out the multiple drones like dragonflies over the valley. We saw a throng of butterflies below flitting and then at a point a thousand feet over the peak of a lower mountain turn at a 120-degree angle and push on toward the coast. Jimmy said the mountain had been that tall once and the butterflies remembered it had been in their way, and continued to pay homage to the mountain by turning. He then talked about leaders, and how the people still turned in duty though they were long dead.
We ate peaches, peaches softening and light with juice and hurled the pits into the crag, hoping one might find a pinch of soil and take root, and that in ten years we could return and find a peach tree. And then Jimmy said he loved me, and took the thermos, uncapped it, and poured the ashes into the crevice where we had thrown the pits.
The cloud will bring the water. The cloud will clear and allow the light. That is all we can do, Jimmy said. He rose, cried. He wiped the first tears but the tears were many, and soon fell from his face. He laughed, stood out on the crag and let tears drop down to the wild bushes on the tier below us. I wept, and knew I wept because Jimmy wept, and wept because I had never been able to say goodbye to my mother, wept because I heard the clouds rumble like the old carts drawn through my childhood streets and all around the fragrance of jasmine, the fragrance of the clouds wet and smelling of the tin of black tea. I knew, if we lived, we would return, he and I, and was it acceptable to hope that a peach tree bloomed, a wild tree on a wild mountain with delicious fruit? Was that exaggerated for this time of descendance? I thought yes, and hoped the more.
When we returned, we hid.
The Art of History and the Interpretation of Clouds
In art, in a brushstroke, I can tell truth in a single slash, or a falsehood, by the deeper image or the play on characters that it represents. I can, for instance, make the revelation of a god both an emancipation and a burden to his people.
My brushstrokes, too, hide. They have a voluptuousness, my auditor says, that should not be there, but that is how I hide our desire. At times one line is thicker, for instance, in the word people, which will tell others we are not a singular mass, but vibrating individuals. Goodness shall be thicker than evil. Satisfaction will be deeper than want.
In the early 1900s the first proletarian movements struck for more bread and for more time, time to appreciate family, friends, flowers, meaning room for human’s need for sustenance and a beauty that lives beyond the utilitarian.
I rise to a dense mist from a risen cloud and frost on the inside of the windows but do not dress, preferring to shiver in light pajamas and a pair of thin socks, a brief warmth provided by a cup of tea, then surrender, put on jeans and a cotton shirt and a pullover and a second pair of socks and suddenly all the world has value, the frost like a map to trace, or thin disorganized petals of flowers as if thrown by a child, the birds like emissaries with good news, the low horizon sunshine casting long shadows on the street like the first steps one might take from prison, and while you know so many suffer, you cannot escape that at this moment you are happy, have an impregnable fortress of harmony and earth-communal wealth, are prone to silliness and celebration.
A girl lives in the mist, as all of the impoverished and the neglected and the taken for granted live, who try to sustain a normalcy of happiness flower by flower, love-making by love-making, child by child, in this world. That is where I hide my defiance—in the mist obscuring a glaring and brutish sun, in the wide swing of a brushstroke that resembles the curve of an orchid’s petal, joyous, with the memories of my father, with Jimmy tangible, defiant, and near, the earth hidden below, the heavens hidden above, and we spinning in between.
Jeff Burt has contributed stories previously to The Gilded Weathervane, Green Silk Journal, Lowestoft Chronicle, Muleskinner Journal, Per Contra, and won the 2016 Consequence Magazine Fiction Prize. After growing up in the Midwest, he lives in Santa Cruz County, California.