Tuvalu by Albert Goldbarth
This was posted in another blog, and it made me think, so I swiped it and posted it in my journal.
Tuvalu
By Albert Goldbarth
O where are the snows of yesteryear?
—Villon, The Ballade of Lost Ladies
Most U.S. high school seniors have a poor grasp of history…57% of seniors could not perform at the basic level.
—USA Today coverage of a Department of Education report
Meteorologists will find interesting Vitruvius’ description of wind currents and, particularly, of the wind tower built at Athens by Andronicus of Cyrrha.
—Marshall Claggett, Greek Science in Antiquity
1.
But my students won’t—no, not if the wind
was the tiniest cry through needle-eye holes in the marble;
and not if it moaned through a hole as outsized as a human mouth
in agony; and not if the figure of bronze on top,
a great free-swiveling vane, was one of the gods
(and it was: Triton)… no, my students won’t be interested,
my self-sequestered bubble-boys and -girls, so stuck
in the gluey streets of immediacy: last week, one sophomore
couldn’t guess even the century of the American Civil War.
I’m the same with my wedding anniversary. Not one of us
is guiltless in this, “history” being synonymous
with “fuel”—and the present requiring constant motion.
Even subatomic condiments or rabbit-tracks or underwears—whatever
names the physics whizzes squeeze out of their brains these days—smash
into one another in enabling ways that newly recombine themselves,
although obliteration of their old selves is the price of this;
the music at the quarky heart of things is elegiac.
Now we can’t walk on the moon without a valley
of mummies dissolving into fine Egyptian powder; can’t
remarry without a fist of coal millennia old
unloosing itself as a one-hour rose of fire. When Pliny
the Younger reported his uncle’s death at Pompeii, he added:
“These details are not important enough for history; you
will hear them without a true intention of saving them.” He knew:
indifference buries us as surely as volcano ash.
2.
Tuvalu is starting to sink, that nation (population
about 10,000) housed for uncountable generations on nine atolls
600 miles north of Fiji—sinking, inches even as I write this.
Even now, the hungry licking of Pacific waves is coveting
the tava crops; and even now, “the places that were playgrounds
when we were children have disappeared”—Koloa Talake,
Tuvalu elder. “So eventually, in 50 years or so, the islands
will disappear. And the people there will also disappear,
along with their land.” Then who will think to sing the praises
of the maidens and their dances of the coral-dragons’ mating,
or record the words of the dying on “the final wings,” those plaques
of scalloped shell? Who will remember the taste, or even
the idea, of tava? Every year, the World Memory Championship
is held in London (America’s version is called the Memoriad);
the reigning heroes strut their mental stuff. Scott Hagwood
of Fayetteville, North Carolina, can exactly recall
“the order of a full deck of cards,” and “a software engineer
from Alpharetta, Georgia” can reel off “a thousand-digit number
to the eighty-eighth place” *—but I have doubts
that we can pile sandbags of retention in a heap enough
to stop, or even slow, the slow erasure of the waters
as they seep across Tuvalu. And “Pompeii”—the word itself now
is a flake of ash. “Charlemagne”…”Caravaggio”…”Sojourner Truth”…
The ocean giveth; it taketh away.
O, where are the shores of yesteryear?
* 7695904900492977462841609669633321586330959054454837496737084410015166758447512670720827
3.
On Sixth in Austin, Texas, there’s a combo bookstore (mystery, sci-fi)
which says (by way of this duality) how, for all of the lollapalooza kaboom
in inventing the future, there’s an equal urge to reconstruct
and solve the past. It’s what detective novels do: they fuss at what
took place; the least case—say, the rub-out of a cheeseball poolhall hustler
and his ho’—is still commemorative. Now tell me who
in 2002 will raise a small memorial to Fanny Burney’s September 30th, 1811
mastectomy: with only “one wine cordial” for her anaesthesia, she endured
“the most torturing pain. I felt the knife rackling against the breast bone
—scraping it! cutting against the grain, attom after attom” until
“the air rushed into those delicate parts, and felt like a mass
of minute but sharp & forked poniards.” This is the same one air
(well, duh: there only is one air, in its omniamoebic capacity) that
stroked the offered ankles of the lovers as they jutted
from a blanket on the sands the first night Coney Island opened;
is the air that bore the seeds of the London conflagration
Pepys reported: “So, with one’s face in the wind you were almost burned
with a shower of Firedrops.” Eventually the fire “was one entire
arch of above a mile long.” Six hundred years ago. Now who
will weep, as Pepys did? For a while along the coast near Pompeii,
“the wind was full in my uncle’s favor”—and Pliny the Elder
docked his ship. Already, the air was scalding char.
Elsewhere, dewy. Elsewhere, enraged. That wind
is our wind, as surely as it was Caesar’s, Mahatma Gandhi’s, Joan of Arc’s.
It won’t stop. Only we stop.
