by Nathan Austin
[…] to “think through the feeling and phenomenology of disaster” in a present moment that is haunted by the absence of either the here or the now.
The windows on the south side of our apartment open onto a courtyard; immediately outside them, a second-floor walkway. When the pandemic came, we shut them to keep from sharing air with passers by. Most of the time, we keep the blinds closed too—to keep the heat out—and in the afternoon, we watch our neighbors’ silhouettes come and go.
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For the past six months, I’ve been no further than one-point-six-four miles from my front door: the nearest mountaintop, one Empire State Building high, I say to the friends I left in Brooklyn when I moved back to California. On a clear day, you can see Catalina. “Twenty-six miles, so near, so far,” goes the old song my mom sometimes sings. The map says it’s more like fifty. If the local newspaper’s online wildfire map is accurate, the particulate matter smudging today’s sky is from the Bobcat fire, which means it’s come twenty miles or more.
For the past week, a strange bird has kept me awake—calls that sound like someone screaming. There was a heat wave and then it passed. A few days ago, I was startled in the night by helicopters dropping water on a brush fire less than a mile away. I start to wonder if the bird was displaced by the world-historical wildfires the western states are battling. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated, at least. “No jays, crows, ravens, quail, turkeys, or hawks,” birders report. Birds overcome by smoke and heat drop dead.
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From Oakland, my sister explains that the smoke she’s seeing there is from fires in Oregon and Washington, blown far out to sea to the west and north, then rushed back on shore by the jet stream. A couple days later, I see a photo: greasy grey clouds sucked offshore and into a vast spiral a thousand miles away from the flames, higher up than planes fly.
A thousand miles away, people are reminding each other to turn off their porch lights so migratory hummingbirds don’t lose their way.
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The word solastalgia—a kind of homesickness you feel when your home is dying—has been in the air for weeks now. Read “mood” for “word.” For “air,” “air”: the sky smells bad today. In 2019, Kimberly Skye Richards defined solastalgia by listing artworks that gave it expression before it had a name. Picture Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”: “a contorted figure in anguish against a lurid red sky.” He said blood red.
Add to the list Monet’s "fog effects" in his paintings of the Thames, J.M.W. Turner’s polluted sunsets. A photo in the New York Times shows Mt. Shasta as an island adrift in a sea of fouled air.
“Home isn’t safe now either,” the news reports; “wildfires bring ashen air into the house.” Every once in a while, our smoke detector goes off, just for a moment, then resets itself. At the end of last year, the heater slowly filled our apartment with carbon monoxide. I read somewhere that luxury cars with self-driving AI have been mistaking the sun—turned an otherworldly magenta by smoke-overcast skies—for an endless stoplight.
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“The apartment where one happens to be may be identical to one’s apartment in a particular city,” Jalal Toufic writes. “But one may look out of the window and discover that one is rather in a different city or the desert.” Compare this dissociative experience with that of taking in the view from a room you’ve never seen. WindowSwap users share ten-minute videos from all over the world; it’s a substitute for travel, the site’s creators claim. But it’s much more unsettling than that: I feel like an intruder in someone else’s room. Sometimes, background noise makes it clear there’s someone else there, too. Noise from the street comes in my own window, behind me, blending with the sounds of someone at home far away. I spend several minutes squinting at a spot on my screen, maybe two inches square, looking for what almost looks like a face. When the person—behind me, in the virtual room implied by what’s on my screen—stands up, I gasp.
I watch someone else’s sun set. The mountains beyond the city vanish into the night; when the video loops back and begins again, the pre-darkened sky comes on like a flash of lightning.
In another browser window, I’m watching as the evening sun is swallowed in time-lapse by a murk almost a hundred miles away. The stream was produced by a publicly funded network of webcams mounted on utility companies’ infrastructure and designed to monitor for fire. “Buildings and other structures,” a note explains, “have been blocked out from field of view.” Greyish rectangles obscure buildings already lost in haze.
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“The change of one word in a line from one day to the next seems to be a minute change,” Stephen Ratcliffe says. For the better part of two decades, he has written a poem a day describing the view from the window of his Bolinas home. The seventh line of each of several poems in a row from September describes the wildfire smoke: “yellow red orange sun in smoke by shoulder of ridge,” and “orange of smoke against invisible shoulder of ridge,” and “grey whiteness of fog against still invisible ridge.”
sky here too apocalyptic orange seemed to stay dark
all day yesterday and early winter evening 5 o’clock
reddish pink sun in smoke against shoulder of ridge
Sometimes, he explains, what “seems to be a minute change … registers, I think, a big change, a cataclysmic change.” On Twitter, someone aggregates the edits to headlines in the New York Times: “Maps showing the major fires that are burning in the Western states.” “Maps showing air quality and where major fires are burning in the Western states.” “Where major fires are burning in the Western states and how unhealthy air quality has become.”
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"I will continue to sit on this bed, to stare out this window,” Katheryn Krotzer Laborde writes. “Anything to keep from looking at the TV, from thinking." She’s talking about Katrina, somehow fifteen years ago now, another anniversary relatively recently passed. I realize that, for some reason, everything feels a little more bearable when I imagine all of the crises of the past twenty years as a single disaster, spread out in space and time. Not a matter of we’ve been through this before so much as this is all there has been for so long now.
I think of Melville’s Bartleby standing staring blankly out the window. “Dead-wall reverie.”
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Miwa Matreyek sends a link via text: “Solastalgia,” a video she made in her apartment, two and a quarter miles away. Indoor plants have been shot to seem superimposed on the plants outside the window, blur the divide between interior and exterior. Breeze let in stirs things: curtain’s fringe, maybe, or a plant’s shadow cast into the corner, stretched out and trembling. Is there a word that means “homesick for someone else’s house”? In a text a few days later, she compares her place to a space capsule, windows sealed against the smoky air.
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"We first pretend,” Filarete wrote, “to stand at a certain window through which we see everything that we wish to describe and draw on our plane."
An article about the famous "Falling Man" photograph describes a mother telling a "distraught child a consoling lie": maybe they're just birds.
Sparrows in Ratcliffe’s poems say oh dear and dear me. Helen Macdonald tells the century-old story of a pilot reaching from the cockpit of his biplane to pluck birds right out of the sky, mid-flight.
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Sybille Lammes describes a man using Google Street View to track his own movements, as well as those of his wife and children. None of these people are visible in any of the images he’s able to find, but evidence of their whereabouts is: a bicycle in front of a shop, a car not parked in a driveway, a crowd assembled outside a schoolyard. From these clues, the man constructs a spatial story, Lammes explains. As stories go, it’s a peculiar one: at its heart is the question “Where am I? instead of Who am I?” Of course, the answer to one is the answer to the other: a list of my addresses is a list of the people I’ve been. The man Lammes tells us about “made his quest” fixed in place at his desktop computer.
Me? I’m writing in bed.
I start from my childhood home, turn four times to leave the neighborhood, then follow roads between riverbed and canal, past oil refineries northeast towards the other end of town. To create A New American Picture, artist Doug Rickard “acclimated myself to this method of ‘driving’” with Google Street View. Images he captured document the failures of the American project: poverty, austerity, racism. “Thousands of travel hours logged for this project," Spring Warren writes of Rickard, "sitting in a darkened studio and virtually driving."
But “mov[ing] through” the world this way doesn’t resemble driving so much as it does being stuck in traffic: advance twenty or thirty feet and stop, then repeat. It’s barely moving at all, just clicking points on the image of a horizon to load another image. I switch to Satellite View, jump across town, skip ahead in my route. I’m writing in the living room now. Somewhere along the way the road was lifted up along Panorama Drive: it’s the edge of town at the edge of a bluff—below is the river; across that, oil fields. A left turn, a swoop downhill, and I’m back on the valley floor, crossing the river before turning right and following Round Mountain Road as it curves gradually upwards into the foothills of the Sierras.
I’m back in bed again, it’s a new day. I’m right where I left off, driving among hills as dry and pale as bone. "Beavertail cactus is one indicator of the desert influences here. Streams drain westward to canals." A few years ago in the New Yorker, Mathew J. X. Malady described using Google Street View to track down his past: “I plop down in places I’ve been, places that mean something to me, and look around.” He’s looking aimlessly for memories; what he finds is the ghostly image of his dead mother standing in her front yard. But I don’t know what I’m looking for. The exurb my father was living in when he died isn’t covered by Google Street View, and I couldn’t begin to guess where else I’d look for him. And anyway, the route I’m following reenacts a drive I took as a teen to escape him, to flee from the anger he took out on his family. These were things we didn’t talk about. The road winds through canyons cut through the hills, turns to point me towards home again.
In what Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie call a “seemingly interminable, almost five-minute sequence” from Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a freeway’s “long tunnels,” “winding bridges and overpasses” stand in for space flight. "Visually bland" they say; they say "the weakest sequence in the film." When I turn left onto Granite Road, the sky changes dramatically from January to August, the cottonwoods by the creek suddenly green. The “home stretch.” By the time I reach the airport another half-day later, I close the browser window, finished, done.
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In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker attempts to haunt Hitchcock’s Vertigo by retracing Scotty’s spiralling path through San Francisco’s streets. You retrace your steps to find the point where you’ve lost your way. In the movie, Alexandra Stewart explains in voice-over: “It seems to be a question of trailing.” If it could be said that he is searching for a ghost, he finds it: “The small Victorian hotel where Madeleine disappeared had disappeared itself; concrete had replaced it.”
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Olivia texts to say that ants have infested her home. “They navigate by following scent trails,” Sarah says. She suggests cinnamon or peppermint oil; it overpowers the ants’ sense of smell, and they lose their way. Once, a colony swarmed our Brooklyn apartment, and we chased them with a vacuum cleaner as they flew around the kitchen. Just a few days ago, I happened to learn that the term “circular milling” refers to sightless army ants following one another’s pheromone trails in a loop. Some people call it a “death spiral”: around and around, they go nowhere until they exhaust themselves and die.
It’s the anniversary of 9/11, and I’m listening to Disintegration Loops. I’m watching a GIF of the smoke from the wildfires being whisked out to sea, where it forms what looks like a cyclone over the Pacific. A book I’d ordered a week earlier comes in the mail: Allison Cobb’s After We All Died. In it, she describes ants forming supercolonies, ants sharing a social stomach, an ant colony as a superorganism distributed over many bodies.
“The truth is,” Cobb writes, “shelter always eventually fails—the tiles crack, a fire starts, the ants thread their nests through the walls.” “Birds,” Annie M. Bracey explains, “are unable to recognize glass as a barrier.”
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An imagined thriller in which our hero witnesses a murder through WindowSwap. Maybe they’re housebound by a pandemic; maybe they conduct an informal investigation using Google Street View. Traffic outside one window veers through a crooked and uncontrolled intersection, a hubbub of esses and tires hissing on wet asphalt. A driver swings right then turns left in front of another car to park nose-in against the curb. The light
is raining. A cement truck swerves onto a side street; as soon as it’s vanished another appears, coming from wherever the other one went. The rain picks up. Maybe this is the kind of thriller where nothing happens, though it seems like it could. It seems like it’s cold, but someone bikes through the intersection—tentatively—in tank top and shorts. When it’s time for the parked car to leave again, the driver waits for a break in traffic, reverse lights on, ready.
Rain is pouring down now, drowning out the sound of the cars.
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The news shares maps that predict the entire lower 48 blanketed in smoke. “Like a curtain,” the article says. On BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh describes AI-assisted software misinterpreting a photo of window curtains for Ryan Gosling. He imagines high-tech surveillance systems "finding crimes that never happened in the blur of a street scene," "hearing things … never said in a citywide wiretap." On Twitter a few days ago, Manaugh pointed out that a California town erased by wildfire several years ago still appears on Google Street View, intact. “Eerie,” he said. “The houses are still standing.”
“‘Reflection’ in a lake of old houses that did not exist.” Andreas Mavromatis documents the hallucinations that arise from within the threshold between wakefulness and sleep. In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker finds two different kinds of ghosts: the disappeared hotel and the tower at Mission San Juan Bautista, from which Kim Novak repeatedly falls to her death, and which was never there. In Google Street View, my childhood memory of an empty lot populated by ground squirrels and burrowing owls has transformed into a gas station I’ve never seen in real life.
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Our homes are accumulations of toxic materials, Cobb reminds us. Think asbestos, think lead. When they decompose, they release these toxins, return them to the soil.
In another book, Cobb shows us a decomposed seabird: nothing left but bits of plastic. It’s easy to be reminded of the fact that certain plants evolved seeds that are spread by way of a bird’s digestive system. I contrasted the predictable and direct path through the body with the unpredictable route that the body takes over land and sea.
This book came 344 miles, measured directly from point A to B, a straight line.
“The gift is contact, sensuality,” Roland Barthes says. “You will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us.”
I’ve grown to love the feel of touching distance like this.
Sources (In order of first appearance)
"26 Miles (Santa Catalina)." Bruce Belland and Glen Larson
"As Wildfire Smoke Blots Out the Sun in Northern California, Many Ask: 'Where Are the Birds?'" Deborah Petersen
“California wildfires map.” The Los Angeles Times.
“Solastalgia.” Kimberly Skye Richards
"Now It's Not Safe at Home Either. Wildfires Bring Ashen Air Into the House." Matt Richtel.
(vampires): an uneasy essay on the undead in cinema. Jalal Toufic
WindowSwap. http://window-swap.com/
ALERTWildfire.org
“The Poem That Marks Things.” Stephen Ratcliffe and Linda Russo. Jacket2
Temporality. Stephen Ratcliffe. stephenratcliffe.blogspot.com
@nyt_diff (Editing TheGrayLady)
"The Window of Hope." Katheryn Krotzer Laborde. Callaloo
“Bartleby, the scrivener.” Herman Melville
“Solastalgia.” Miwa Matreyek. Homing: A Group Exhibition. California Botanic Garden
“The Falling Man: An Unforgettable Story.” Tom Junod
"The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down." Helen Macdonald
Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Sybille Lammes
"Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street: An intervew with artist Doug Rickard." Spring Warren
Descriptions of the Level IV Ecoregions of California (poster). G. E. Griffith, et al.
"Commentary." Solaris. Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie
Sans Soleil. Chris Marker
Disintegration Loops. William Basinski
After We All Died. Allison Cobb
"The Gosling Effect." BLDGBLG. Geoff Manaugh
Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep. Andreas Mavromatis
Plastic, an autobiography. Allison Cobb
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Roland Barthes
A partly-improvisatory thinking-through of the vast gulf that differentiates here from there, and about the ways that there has taken on the same charge I associate with the rumor or the mirage. To put it another way: an attempt, as my friend Nick put it, to “think through the feeling and phenomenology of disaster” in a present moment that is haunted by the absence of either the here or the now. And so, a snapshot of a moment seemingly unmoored from both time and place.
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Nathan Austin is the author of (glost), Tie an O, and Survey Says!, as well as the recent broadside Surround Sound (for Éliane Radigue). His work has recently appeared in The Believer, Talisman, ToCall, and Translation: a Halophyte Collective exhibition. He lives in Los Angeles.
Author photo by Sarah Eichman.