The story so far: In Holland, a gigantic winter hurricane has destroyed Amsterdam. Anneliese Grotius, the curator of the Flemish collection at the Rijksmuseum, has managed in an act of supreme heroism to rescue Rembrandt’s Night Watch, a painting that is emblematic of gallant volunteer action to protect the human community. On the massive levee of the new Potomac Sea, Noah Blazo, the brilliant engineer who devised the Blazo solar battery, despairing at the inaction of governments and corporations, meets a remarkable lady, Lucy Wu, the quantum computation expert—and a new “creative commons” answer to the climate catastrophe begins to emerge. They begin to recruit a team to help. We have met two of them already: big gloomy Ala, the agronomist from Nigeria who has survived the Boko Haram, and Chandra from Bangladesh, the hydraulics expert and savior of Dhaka. The poet Nemo unwillingly takes up the task of telling the story.
Book 2. The Four Seasons Conference
Will Noah and Lucy succeed in recruiting their dream team of geo-engineering experts? And who are the enemies of their plan to save the world? Will Anneliese, mourning the death of her family, respond to Noah’s invitation?
At happy hour Lucy maneuvers Noah
Into a booth with Chandra Engineer.
(Gopal has found the unaccustomed food
Together with the jet-lag, “rather much.”)
“Chandra,” she says, “You know of Noah Blazo,
And he’s a great admirer of your work—
I am surprised you didn’t meet at Tata.
It’s time you got together; you will find
That you have certain common interests.”
Chandra is exquisitely courteous:
“It is an honor to have met the man
Whose batteries lit up my satellite
And helped to save my city from the flood.”
“That flood,” says Noah, “hasn’t gone away,
As you and I both know. If all we do
Is what this meeting will end up proposing,
To make the planet simply hold its breath,
The seas will rise three meters anyway,
Enough to sink your Dhaka, Venice, Florida.
We want to tame the flood, and to this end
We think you have a piece of the great puzzle.”
“You flatter me,” says Chandra, “and I sense
That your word ‘tame’ means something I want too.
But can we take the Earth’s reins in our hand
And not inflict greater catastrophes
By every effort to correct our course?
You have a myth of an unready god
Who crashed the fiery chariot of the sun10;
We have a myth of the just Yudisthira11
Whose chariot fell because he spoke unwisely.
Was I just lucky when I piloted
The Ganga flood from that same satellite?
Might I have caused a greater accident
By fending off the less? Can we tame Chaos?”
“I see. You play the devil’s advocate
In such a kind self-deprecating way,”
Says Noah, “but yes, perhaps we must play god.
It’s not as if nature is now in balance
And if we change the rules nature will die.
It’s not as if nature were ever balanced;
Nature, as you well know, is imbalance,
And were it balanced everything would cease.
We sit as many risks, Thoreau once said,
As ever we could run. I sometimes think
That though our farming since the Neolithic
Has recognized that we must be in charge,
Industrially we’re hunter-gatherers,
Killing and burning and then moving on.
It’s time we saw we can’t be innocent,
And recognized that we’re the planet’s brains—
A terrifying thought, admittedly.
It’s up to us, unready as we are,
And flawed as even Yudisthira was,
To be the governors of this chaos system,
And we must hop to keep the thing together.
This is the burden of the Neolithic:
To have to take the measure of the Nile,
And take the measure of the holy Ganges
And put the gods to work to turn the wheel.
And when I look at us, my heart is doubtful.
We still, though, have some aces in the hole.
We can play games and see how they come out;
We can make models, crash them, and revise.
We can dream sometimes with intelligence,
And you’re a dreamer that we sorely need.”
“You speak as did Arjuna’s12 charioteer,”
Says Chandra with a gleam, “Rebuking him
For his repining at his task. So tell me
What can I do to help you ‘save the world’?”
“First, join our team. We need a mathematician
Who sees in more dimensions than just four,
And, if I have it right, has redefined
The meaning of dimension in itself.
We need a craftsman in the art of water
Who knows its flavors and the way it flows.
And more immediately, we need your help
To solve a tricky piece of politics—
I’d better turn to Lucy to explain.”
“You’ve seen the way the conference is going,”
Lucy picks up. “What do you think of it?”
“I take it,” Chandra says, “that both of you
Share my unease about the whole affair.
Perhaps it’s irresponsible in me
To find it boring and to want to see
Something with rather more imagination.
The program’s slanted in the old direction.
Yes, they’re the congress of the paleoliths,
Asking what’s happening to all the game
And scared of the new cities with their dams.
Still, there are city folk here all the same,
We three, for instance, who’re conspiring here.
The problem with all cities, though, is war:
They’ll always be suspicious of each other,
Would rather quarrel than negotiate.
It seems that though we’re a minority,
If we cooperated, we could start
Something that might be much more interesting.”
“Exactly what we feel,” says Lucy, grinning,
“And here, Chandra, is what we have in mind.
You worked with Tata on the Maldive causeways:
You must have got to know Firushan Koi.”
“Yes, we were ‘drinking buddies,’ as they say.
And that means something in a Muslim nation,
Especially if you’re the head of state.
I’d say he trusts me, if that’s what you mean.”
“How do you get along with Khodayar?”
“Oh, Uncle Miland—though he’s far too grand
To call him that now he’s Prime Minister.
The two of us were always thick as thieves.
I think I see where you are going with this.”
“As you have seen, the two constituencies
That most want urgent action on the sea
Are coastal nations and the island states.
They also tend to be at daggers drawn.
India is the biggest coastal nation,
And Koi’s the leader of the islanders;
If we can get them now to work together,
And show them hope, articulate a vision,
Then maybe something wonderful could happen.”
“Would you be willing,” Noah asks, “to chair
A real meeting where they’d be invited?”
♦
When Koi arrives, Chandra brings Noah over
And introduces him. Noah wastes no time
In marketing the Pinatubo Chillout.
“The others, as you know, are asking you—
And all the threatened islanders you lead—
To wait until the water’s in your shoes,
And hope that it’ll stop when it gets there.
They’ll buy concessions with their promises
To slow their carbon output and conserve
Until you have no cards left in your hand.
What we propose is something radical:
A sort of quiet volcano, you might say.
When Pinatubo blew, the planet cooled,
Sweet weather helped the sowing and the harvest,
And Greenland got more snow, and glaciers
Slowed down and sat across Antarctica.
It was the sulfur aerosols that did it,
Reflecting sunlight out and giving shade:
The Earth from space took on a golden glow.
Odd that the hellish element should be
So paradisal in its real effects.
We can at modest cost now reproduce
A golden stratospheric shield of sulfur:
A few hundred air freight-loads every year.
Just imitating nature, you might say.”
Noah has seen Koi’s eyes take on the glow
Of one who is a poet but can’t show it:
Noah takes the risk and plunges on, revealing
His own still boyish, naïve energy.
“And every year the desert winds deposit
Amid their clouds of blowing dust and sand
Some tons of powdered iron in the oceans,
And where they fall, in the great southern seas,
Huge blooms of plankton spread, which, when they die,
Sink to the ocean floor and are sequestered.
They carry with them all their bodies’ carbon,
Millions of tons of it, leaving the ocean free
To suck in carbon from the atmosphere
And purify it of the greenhouse gases.
It has been tried by human agency:
Not only did the same effect occur,
But the whole food chain multiplied and flourished,
Pelagic schools of grazing fish appeared,
Together with their hungry predators,
The tuna, dolphins, whales and ocean birds.
It was as if the seas of the Cretaceous
Teeming and fertile, had returned again,
And fishing banks, once hunted to extinction,
Shimmered with schools of silver seen from space.
Whatever is not done by sulfur seeding
Is done by iron, in our alchemy:
And when the sulfur falls into the ocean
It doesn’t turn to H2SO4—
An acid that can eat the coral reefs—
But feeds the bodies of the phytoplankton
And salps and jellyfish and macrofauna.
What’s left of them when they have lived their lives,
In death and excrement, like ocean snow
Falls to the depths, together with their carbon.
Here’s what we need: some ports to help us load,
Some freighter-loads of slurried iron sulfate—
Iron, the element these oceans miss
To turn into a living paradise
Using the fertilizers that we waste
In runoff from our dry terrestrial fields—
Together with the real political will
To make it happen. Will you stand with us?”
Koi’s skepticism now begins to wane.
This is a new thing for him: he had settled
For putting off the time when he must move
His people, mendicants, to some host state,
Leveraging world pity to acquire
The best deal that he could. But that his islands,
His garden world of turquoise, pink, and blue,
Might yet be saved, opens another world.
Koi promises to get the islanders,
The IC, or the Island Conference,
To any meeting that would push the cause.
♦
At dinner they sit down with Zhang Baojia,
And Manny Dandolo comes over later
And drinks a cup of coffee with his friends.
Shanghai and Venice. They, too, vow to come
To any meeting Noah would convene.
As Manny leaves he stops and turns to Noah.
“Paisan, you need two talents for your team:
A data-miner, and an IP13 lawyer.
Do you know Anneliese Grotius?
She’s both, and maybe she should be on board.”
As soon as dinner’s over, Lucy’s gone,
To reappear some minutes afterwards
With two gigantic people, Ala with
Her jolly bodyguard, a greying Sunday.
After the introductions, Ala asks
In her light English voice (a little odd
If one remembers her quite raucous youth):
“I take it, Dr. Blazo, that you have
A proposition you would like to air?”
Noah looks straight into her eyes and says:
“I do, if you would like to save the world.
We need a farmer and a politician,
One who can take it and can dish it out,
Who doesn’t mind a bit of violence,
Someone who is addicted to ideas.
Lucy here tells me that you are the one.”
Ala had always liked Americans.
In her adventures out in the Sahel
And the morass of Lagos state corruption,
She’d wondered what it must be like to hope,
With earnest trust in other points of view
And utter innocence, for better things:
She felt protective of them, truth to tell.
Noah, though, is something else—reminding her
Of her dead father, whose idealism
Was burned and hardened by experience—
A force as great as hers, strange, white and clear.
And Noah is amazed by Ala’s size
In all dimensions spiritual and spatial,
Her gloom, most un-Nigerian, her wit,
Her hint of menace, and her erudition:
He counts himself with Mummy’s Boko Boys.
Between them tiny Lucy’s like a child,
But one made out of concentrated light.
And so they wander off toward the bar
And find a quiet corner for their talk.
It’s Scottish whisky for the three of them,
Sunday remaining sober for his job.
♦
Now Nemo14 must adopt a style not his,
To try to catch the force of their discourse.
I deal, you understand, with godlike people,
Much of whose effort is to damp it down
Lest it oppress their ordinary friends
Or cause offense or ridicule with others.
The only proper diction is old-fashioned;
I live in times when all our language comes
From feelies like the ghastly Oblomovs.
How do I know exactly what they said?
I don’t, but here’s a sort of reconstruction.
Carbon is the world’s great fertilizer,
Yet even flowers out of place are weeds.
When carbon in the air is illth and filth,
Then carbon in the earth is health and wealth.
The carbon on a hill flows down and feeds:
Take carbon from the sea, the cycle speeds.
The ocean sucks the carbon from the sky;
And if there were a way to take that carbon
And bury it upon a hill, we’d thrive.
The salmon show the way. Those mountain meadows
Blazing with flowers and shaded with green pines
Are watered by the streams where salmon spawn.
That water’s lifted effortlessly by
The power of the sun upon the sea,
Carried by winds driven by that same sun,
Thrown on the mountainside in rain or snow.
Flowers and trees are made of two chief things,
Water and carbon. Water is supplied.
Sunlight upon a leaf can carve the carbon
Out of the oxygen of CO2
To keep such dull metabolism going
As drives the moss and lichens of the peaks,
But more is needed if the meadowlands
Of lupine blue and pollen gold and all
The dark sweet ripened berries they engender
And all the life that feeds upon the fruit
Can flourish there, its thick fertility
Renewed before it drains down to the sea.
In their minds’ eye they see the sockeye salmon
Braving the rapids, ospreys, dams, and bears,
Their silver flanks turned crimson and moss-green,
Humping their spine into a mount of threat,
Twisting their calm fish visage to a snarl,
A samurai’s stark grimace, with an eye
Of insane gold. They are in ecstasy,
Leaping against the falls time and again,
Great rotting gashes on their bodies that
They do not feel, in the transcendent rush
Of love and rage, the berserk riastrad
(Cuchulain’s fury15) of the epic hero,
The white-hot honey of the bride and groom.
They reach the headwaters that they can scent
As a sweet hint from their days as fry or parr,
And there—as if their pains were not enough—
They fight each other, mate, and spawn, and die.
A noble, sexual, dreadful smell of rot
Steams from the shallow pools where they decay.
The young feed on the yolk-sac first, then graze
The fecund life their parents’ corpses feed,
Till, as the smolt, they let the current take them
Down to the sea. Now comes the harvesting.
Years in the Bering Sea, the North Atlantic,
Schooling where fat prey browse the ocean plankton,
They store the hydrocarbons of the sea
Until the call comes, to mystical immolation,
To don the armor and the mating garments
And set out on the ancient journey home.
Thousands of tons of carbon, every year
Are borne thus in their bodies deep inland
And up a mile, two miles above the sea.
The willow and the alder and the aspen,
The swales of larkspur, waves of columbine,
The iris and the dazzling mountain daisy
Are built of carbon carried to the sky.
And all that work is powered by desire,
Drawn by mad love into planet-genesis.
Is there a human way of transmigration
That can so turn the flow of entropy
And make a synergy of its decay?
Ala thinks so. As in all kinds of chaos,
To close the loop, and set into the flow
A little governor that tweaks the current,
Can put in play nonzero-sum regimes;
So forms self-organize like beaver dams
Or termite-hills that fertilize the soil
And open up a future where was none.
All of our old arts did the same. The rider
And the gardener, beekeeper and sailor,
The Polynesian surfer on the wave,
All those old games the rich pay well to play,
Are ways to shape the plunge of mere destruction
Into the food of life. And it is done
Not by the force of law, but by desire:
Not whipped by fear, but drawn by pleasure’s pull
Or sucked up by the soul’s evaporation
As the sun sucks up ocean into clouds.
First cool the planet with a sulfur shield,
And bring the seas to life with iron dust—
Life that brings death to everything that lives—
And sink the ocean’s carbon to its floor
With all the deaths of the abundant life,
Make the sea thirst for the air’s CO2,
And then make paradises: just return
A quarter of an Amazon, a Ganges,
Or twenty Rhines or fifty lesser streams
As rivers of seawater to the land—
Brine rich with carbon, minerals and salts
To irrigate some sixty million hectares
Of the world’s derelict and desert coasts.
Breed halophytes for food and fuel and lumber,
Desalinate with Noah’s batteries,
Form archipelagos of coastal mangroves
And brackish wetlands flocked with flowers and birds,
And island eco-tourist destinations,
And a bonanza for good real estate.
The freshwater we would have used to grow
The biomass of food and fuel now goes
Back to recharge the sunken aquifers;
The seawater sinks down to float the fresh
That now can raise the falling water table.
Milton’s lost paradise was watered by
A fountain pressured by a hidden sea.
Earth’s barren desert seacoasts add up to
Two hundred million hectares of waste land.
Take sixty million hectares, water them
With Faustian canals and dykes, and green
The deserts with the breath of chlorophyll,
Sequestering the carbon as good soil,
And the Earth’s carbon balance is restored,
Three billion people fed, a flood of money
Swelling the veins of its economy.
And how they dreamed! A peaceful Africa
Basks in abundance: shrimp and samphire oil
For Europe, hauls of sweet tilapia,
Forests of mangrove, fodder for the goats
And camels of the growing farms, and milk
To make expensive cheeses for the world.
They dreamed of how the halophytes would suck
The carbon from the brine, and turn the seas
Into a sink to soak up greenhouse gases,
And so finesse the world’s entropic flow.
This sort of thing exhausts me, I confess,
But still, for lack of anything that’s better,
I write my own John Hancock underneath
And put my own queer shoulder to the wheel.
Suffice to say, Ala is quite won over.
“You certainly know how to treat a girl,”
She says, a rare smile breaking on her face,
“I feel quite rumpled with this crazy talk.
Just let me chat with my associates,
And I shall give you times when I’ll be free.”
As things turn out, it seems that group can meet
In two month’s time, at Noah’s headquarters,
Banks Island, in the Polynesian chain.
♦
It seems there’s a conspiracy afoot,
But it’s not unobserved. That Terry Moyle
Whose strong discouragement sent Noah away
To his chance meeting with Professor Wu,
Appears on schedule at Michel Richard
And claims the corner table set for brunch.
He gets a hock, a deviled egg, and waits.
As usual Benedict’s ten minutes late,
And when he comes he is accompanied
By Tom Martinez, the ecologist
And Greenie congressman, whom Terry knows.
“I wanted Tommy here so he could hear
What you can tell us about what went on,”
Says Benedict, soi-disant Dick Rousseau
The trillionaire, the President’s supporter,
And he’s a problem for this narrative.
It’s pretty obvious I detest the fellow,
But still I must admit he’s a good man.
Indeed, the way things turned out to evolve,
Three decades later, sometimes makes me think
That maybe he was part right all along.
So please take this admission, folks, in lieu
Of that ironic view, that knowingness,
That dialogic clash of weltanschauungs
They say that epics lack, and novels own.
When Lucy interrupted Noah’s thoughts
Upon the parapet just yesterday,
The most important faction on his list
Was what he’d kept for last and was for him
The most respected and most difficult:
The real bio-scientists of the world,
Inheritors of centuries of work
Unraveling in thought the tangled web
Of ecosystems spread across the planet.
But being scientists, their ethic was
Not to disturb whatever processes
They sought to understand: to simplify
And not to complicate; to stand apart
As the detached observer (and forget
That such a thing is quite impossible);
And to assume complexity is fragile
And testify it’s irreplaceable.
Such geo-engineering Noah sought
Would be anathema to such as these,
And Noah clearly saw their point of view;
But then he did not think they saw his own,
His Heraclitean philosophy
Of open feedback and of steered imbalance.
Beyond expedience, his question was
How to unsettle their conservatism
That always warned of catastrophic dangers,
Urged more research when it must have no end,
And ended up permitting changes that
Already were imperiling the world—
Effectually throwing their support
Behind the burners and the pillagers.
Now Tom Martinez, the new-minted chair
Of Congress’s Advisory Committee
On Climate Change and the Environment
Was one of these, and Dick and Noah both
Believed in his innate integrity.
So it is he who now greets Terry Moyle.
An hour later, after Terry’s given
His brief account of how the meeting’s going—
Chiefly the maneuvers of the group
They feel most dangerous, the techno-geeks—
They’re deep into what Dick calls “moral hazard.”
If human beings feel they can control
And even turn back Nature’s processes
That rightly threaten our rapacious species,
Then they may lack that salutary fear
Which they will need, to be obedient.
What is required, so Dick Rousseau believes,
Is some authority that can compel
Across the globe a Spartan purity:
A sumptuary law backed by coercion,
Fertility control of population
To cut it by at least six billion persons,
An international enforcement body
To which all countries should give up their arms.
Carbon emissions (thus the turnover
Of passage and event in all Earth’s life)
Must be slowed down to what it must have been
Before the coming of the human species.
And this would mean a triage of those nations
Unable to provide clear governance
Or feed themselves sustainably (and must
Sadly be left to starve) from those wise ones
That are prepared to cede their sovereignty.
Of course these drastic measures are repugnant
To all right-thinking people, but the few
Who face necessity, must sacrifice
Their human feelings now to bring about
A better world and a more modest future
Of peaceful self-supporting villagers
Dwelling in Dasein16 with their native soil.
In Congress, and in “the developed world,”
There is a growing mass of legislators
Who, whether for the nobler ends involved
Or as a means to centralize their power,
Embrace this course, albeit silently.
The very thought that human enterprise
Might take the reins of life into its hands
Would be a cancer to that global peace:
If people feel there’s an alternative
To changing their insane and prideful ways,
They’ll always take it if they have the chance.
Those techies, with their foolish optimism,
Their gimcrack fixes, somehow must be silenced.
But Tom Martinez, though he can’t reject
The diagnosis, feels the promised cure
Might violate his oath of office; fears
Abandoning his scientific caution.
Rousseau supported his campaign, and Tom
Must guard his own decisions lest they prove
Distorted by his interest and worthy
Neither of his profession nor his office.
Perhaps, though, he can work within the movement,
And mitigate its more extreme prescriptions;
And, after all, the art of politics
Is compromise, and bringing folks together.
And he reflects, if Terry Moyle is with them,
It means the conscience of the human race
(At least a very weighty part of it,
For Terry represents the Vatican)
Would be there to provide the needed cover.
Just two days later up in Rock Creek Park
There’s an attempt on Noah Blazo’s life.
But Ala, who has been around the block,
Has sent poor Sunday, puffing in pursuit,
Along the trail where Noah likes to run.
The corpse of the assassin is not claimed
By any of the parties in the matter.
Noah leaves at once, and next day makes his touchdown
Upon Banks Island’s tiny tree-lined airstrip.
♦
And I was on the plane when Noah landed
And helped him wheel it back into the hangar:
Crisp graphene aerogel, Noah’s own design,
Painted with solar nanobatteries
And weighing all told less than eighty pounds.
Then we biked down to Honey (Huatahaine
On the map) strung out by the harborside,
And drank a Fire Rock ale at Tommy’s Bar.
We’d slept on the commercial flight to Tuva
And now I asked what Noah had in mind
After the high jinks in the Capital.
But clearly I’ve some catching up to do,
And this arrival is a potent echo
Of when I first set foot upon the island
Just ten years earlier, in ’57.
Banks Island! Well now, there’s a memory.
When Noah first found me and then brought me there,
The coral reefs were still sometimes exposed,
The breakers creamed the ocean’s indigo,
Lagoons glowed as if turquoise were transparent,
And gave a lasting pinkish after-image.
And though the corals since have sunk and dimmed,
And rollers then could thunder on the shore,
Banks Island still remained a paradise.
Huge red hibiscus and plumeria
And tiny white kukui swarmed the ahu;
In that fresh oceanic air the forest rose
In every shade from malachite and teal
To palmy yellow, lime, and emerald,
Up to the jet-black crags against the sky.
When his wife Jean had drowned, in ’48,
Noah, alone, felt he’d been left marooned
Upon the island they had bought with what
He’d earned from patent fees and royalties.
He fell into the darkest pit of hell;
But there he found a place of meditation
Where all his later visions would commence.
There he foresaw the whole course of the world,
Or so it seemed to me. And that was when
He started to recruit a band of friends
Whom he had chosen for their brilliance
And for their power to change the subject’s frame,
To switch the figure and the ground, and mark
A blaze upon the frontier of the world.
♦
Now I was in despair. My first small book
Of poetry—the best I’ve ever written—
Had got a few sweet half-convinced reviews
And obloquy from those I’d satirized;
And then of course it disappeared from view.
Who in this world of over-burned sensation
Could give a damn or spare the time for poems?
Yes, it’s a cliché, but I did attempt
A suicide from off the Golden Gate
And sprained an ankle on the safety-netting.
Well, somehow Noah found me. He, to my
Astonishment, had read my little book
With its antique display of rhyme and meter
And wanted me for his recording poet.
I still remember in complete detail
The envelope delivered to my digs
In that old painted lady in the Haight;17
My book, inside; the simple little card
Politely asking for my signature;
The dinner invitation on the wharf
Where I might, if I would, return it to him;
The meeting in the candle-lit cantina,
The rich paella and the sparkling wine,
And then that even more astonishing
Suggestion that I leave it all behind—
The part-time lectureships, my family,
My quondam boyfriend who was tired of me—
And join him in his lunatic campaign.
At first I thought he wanted something else:
I’d had the moves put on me twice before.
But Noah had the sweet naïvety
Of the born straight who’s irredeemable.
We teeter always on the dizzy edge
Between all we have been and what we’ll be:
Of course I’d hesitate; of course I’d go.
Noah had saved my life; and as they say,
It was as if I’d died and gone to heaven.
But suddenly I felt the buyer’s angst:
Was I tied to the old man’s chariot-wheel?
Was this a debt I never could repay
Unless I let him eat my will and soul?
Here too he had anticipated me:
As he told it—and surely I believed him—
I was the one doing the greater favor.
He leaned in by the steady candlelight
(The table open to the Bay, for this
Still night required no plastic awning)
And told me of his own long desolation.
“Ironically,” he began, “It was
The solar battery that caused it all.
Perhaps you never knew how rich I am.
I can’t in truth imagine it myself.
We take for granted electricity
Is cheaper than the air, but every watt
That people use pays me a tiny fee.
Not many people know just how it works:
A fractal carbon surface acres wide,
Packed in a cell too small for you to see
And doped to pump flows of electron holes
Upon the slightest tickle from the sun;
A million cells connected in a sheet
No thicker than a coat of latex paint:
Power pouring from the simple terminals.
But those same cells can store the energy
And yield it when the circuit switch is closed.
Now couple it to an electrolyzer
To give us hydrogen, the purest fuel,
Or hook it to a water chip that carves
The chloride from the brine to make it fresh . . .”
He looked up quickly—I remember this
With much affection—“Sorry, it’s a habit:
The old pitch that I used on crowd investors.
The point is this: I thought I had it made;
Those were the days when I bestrode the earth,
But in myself I was just nerdy me.
“And it was then Jean came into my life.
Why that American aristocrat—
The Katherine Hepburn type, I guess you’d say,
A sailor, horsewoman, and sage
With her outrageous laugh and mocking manners—
Would love a dork like me I still don’t know.
I’m sure you saw the hype on our romance,
The world tour, with the hungry paparazzi,
The multibillion purchase of Banks Island,
And how in our amazing arrogance
We volunteered to take the Aging Treatment
When other “guinea pigs” who’d tried it died.
It’s risky, though, to make yourself a god,
And the old gods of course love irony:
We had survived the Treatment, but the sea
Would make short work of its impunity.
Yet meanwhile we lived out a kind of legend:
We built the rosewood house on Blazo Hill,
The hospital, the harbor, and the school;
We set up the Foundation and the prizes
For viral therapy, peacemaking, Mars;
We found the island’s eastern slopes would grow
A Malbec strain of grapes, and dug a vineyard,
And on the western slopes set coffee-groves.
We’d fly friends in to hike about the coastline
And entertain them in the evening glow;
High up upon Mount Káleákalá
We had a secret eyrie in the clouds
And we would dance upon its bamboo floor
To records on a wind-up gramophone.
And Jean was such a dancer! On my arm
She felt as light and well-knit as a feather,
And music came alive with her quick step.
“Jean loved to cruise the string of clear lagoons,
Explore the tiny groves of island palms
Looking for jetsam from the age of sail.
Elizabethan sailors, it was said,
Had watered here; perhaps there was a wreck
Or buried gold—Jean loved the pirate stories
Remembered from her teenage tomboy days.
Of course you know the rest, or some of it.
The ocean then was rising very fast;
Greenland was green two hundred miles inland,
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet had collapsed,
And almost monthly one of Jean’s loved isles
Was swamped with breakers at the spring tide’s crest.
She was an expert sailor, and her boat,
A lovely outrigger of polished Kauri,
Was seaworthy and stable, I made sure.
What Jean could not have guessed was that the currents,
Which she knew well, had reached a tipping-point,
And as a sudden squall of wind came up, the boat
Was caught in a new tide-rip through a breach
Where the reef barrier had broken with the waves.
The mast snapped off—it must have struck her head—
She would have been swept overboard at once.
We found the wreckage later, on the beach
But never found her body. You can see
How I have torn myself with blame and grief
And self-excuse, and hate for my excuses,
And how I do so still. I tell you this
To help explain what I am up to now
And why I’ve asked you here. One thing, at least,
Beyond myself, I found to blame: the sea,
Or rather, not the sea, but its swift rise,
And therefore all of us who made it happen.
Well, I’m a rich man, and a Blazo, and
I set out then to turn things upside down
And like old Faust try to control the waves.
I might as well be damned for something big.
It’s five years since she died, and in that time
I’ve turned our home, our Blazo Hill, into
Banks Island New World University.”
I stared at Noah, rather stupidly,
And asked “So where do you live now?” He laughed.
“Not quite the question I was looking for—
At least it shows you know what it is like
To be without a home when home is someone
Whom you love. —maybe a better question,
The one that Parsifal had failed to ask.18
I had the boathouse on the bay done over
And live in simple rooms above the boats.
But let me answer what you didn’t ask.
Banks U is my Thélème19, my own Atlantis,
My agora, my academia.
Two hundred students picked for brilliance
From every nation, given a free ride;
Just thirty faculty, the best there are,
Each of whom teaches both the natural
And human knowledges—they must research
Dozens of what were once called “disciplines”
And sort out what’s important, and what’s not.
I put four billion dollars into it:
State of the art, the labs, the IT stuff,
The telescopes, the farm, the number-crunchers—
But best low-tech, whenever possible:
We have a satellite, but still use blackboards.
There’s a first folio, and a gallery,
And we can do a passable concerto.
The job is simply this: to save the world,
To make of it an ark of abundant life.
And this will take not science only, but
Art and humanity. We have adopted
The early Renaissance curriculum:
The first three, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric;
Next number, pure, then called Arithmetic;
Number in space, then called Geometry;
Number in time, called Music; last of all,
Number in space and time, Astronomy.
And here it is, my friend, that you come in.
The poet is the linchpin of it all,
And you’re the one I’d choose from all the others
To be my teacher and my chronicler.
I’m offering a faculty position
With tenure (if you want the prenup thing),
Plenty of money, and a house on Banks.
What I’d expect would be complete devotion
(Oh, not to me of course, but to the cause),
And years of overwork and ill success,
And politics and most annoying people,
And you the while recording everything
According to what poetry you will.
And meanwhile you must be a Mr. Chips
And love your students, be in touch with them
When we are making trouble everywhere.
No, don’t protest, don’t say I haven’t seen
Your references, vita, or credentials:
I’ve checked you out already, and I’ve read
Darn near everything you ever wrote.
I have been looking for an honest man
Who’s not a fool; a poet who knows his craft,
One who can get inside another’s skin,
One whose capacity for love and beauty
Survives his own most searching irony,
His own advanced penchant for ridicule;
One who like that True Thomas in the ballad20
Must, even to his own harm, tell the truth.
Don’t thank me either, you’d be doing me
The biggest favor one can do another,
To help him work out some kind of redemption.
So what is it to be, Thomas the Rhymer?”
Of course you know the answer that I gave.
But gentle readers, if yet such there be,
I must disown the praise I’ve quoted here,
And keep the name Noah gave me only as
An image that my image in the mirror
Can never hope to match. Nemo I am,
And Nemo, not True Thomas, I remain.
The lights about the bay seemed to get brighter
And suddenly the moist air on the wharf
Had turned to a hot, dry and vital breeze
Blowing offshore. It was the Santa Ana.
I took my jacket off, and Noah smiled—
He noticed then the green smart-aleck words
Written across the black t-shirt I wore:
“The future sucks.” He’d seen the other meaning,
That I’d not seen when Nicky gave it me:
“Time doesn’t happen only by the push
Of what is past, but by the pull, the draw
Of some unfinished absence in the future,
An incompletion and a namelessness
That you have chosen for your nom de plume.”
♦
So we are up to date on this, at least,
Though lately things are coming in a rush,
And I have left our Anneliese hanging,
In a wrecked building, clutching to herself
A remnant of a civilized lost world.
After two days the helicopter comes.
She’s seen the monstrous ruin of her city
Laid out beneath the cold October sun,
Tortured by hope that Griet and Floris might
Have got away before the flood came through,
Yet certain that it was impossible.
She tries them on the phone: there’s no response,
The satellites are clogged with frantic traffic.
The wreckage downstairs is impassable.
She wisely husbands her remote phone charge
Until day two, when she sees EU troops
Set up a WIFI pylon on the stump
Of the old Rembrandt Tower to the east.
She calls in her location but must wait
Till those in greater danger are relieved.
Beneath the beating rotors she insists
That the Night Watch be rescued first of all,
Then swings aloft into the aircraft’s belly.
The friendly German crew gets her hot coffee,
Then tends to other shivering refugees.
Next comes a series of bewildered queues
In overheated rooms in gyms and schools,
And filling out a dozen times the same lost facts,
And camps with bedding in undusted corners
And medical exams and packaged meals.
Her Rembrandt finally helps her establish
Who she might be, and an acquaintance from
The Munich Glyptothek now rescues her
And tries to help her find her house in Zeeburg.
The roads by now are partly cleared, but soon
It’s obvious there’s nothing there, just heaps
Of stinking mud and rubble half submerged
And streaked with sand that once was Vlieland dunes.
She cannot even recognize the place.
So now that she’s relinquished the Night Watch
She’s absolutely lost in this strange world.
Her friend, alarmed at Annie’s apathy,
Puts her neat Munich flat at her disposal
And lends her a computer to connect
With what remains of her identity.
The picture on her screen won’t let her sleep:
Griet riding on her daddy’s cheerful shoulder,
Floris’s grin at the photographer
Who is that person that was once herself?
People are trying now to contact her,
Not only from the orbit of Dutch art
But also from the data-mining world
And one persistent trace from somewhere else—
The odd field of creative property.
Her apathetic daze is breached by this:
There’s still some space for curiosity.
It’s just five questions, with a web address:
Who rightly owns the world’s creative commons?
Can anyone possess a state of change?
What mark can stick upon the deep blue sea?
Who paid the men who paid for The Night Watch?
The last one reads: What do we owe the dead?
And so she opens the provided link.
It’s an old news story, Jean Blazo’s death
By drowning nearly nineteen years ago.
And then a cryptic note from Noah himself:
“I know where you are now. And you can help
Do something about what has put you there.
We need you, and I think you’ll like the ‘we’
That we have got together. Simply put,
We want to stop the flood. When you are ready,
Just let me know, I’ll send someone to fetch you.
We will be meeting anyway, at Banks,
One month from now: the guest list is below.
You would be more than welcome. Let me know.”
Her first reaction is a surge of rage.
How can this man presume upon her grief?
His loss is years ago, hers is just days.
A gentleman of leisure, living off
A dingetje, a truc that he invented,
Whose wife, a trophy sportswoman, screwed up.
But then she is surprised and shocked to find
That she has felt, at last, something that’s real,
And anger can’t be felt by one who’s dead,
As she had thought she was. So now she checks
The “guest list” of the meeting, is impressed
By its credentials, not just in the field
Of flood control and planetary climate,
But in a dozen different disciplines
Whose relevance she can’t exactly see.
But then, her own peculiar expertises
Do have a common theme that even she
Can’t quite define, a sense perhaps of commons,
And how the commons in itself can grow
Because of, not despite, its depredations
By those who freely use what it provides.
Her curiosity’s engaged still more.
How could he know this much about her? Could
He really give a light to show the way?
The question of the drummer in the painting
Had always nagged at her. Of course Noah’s riddle
Possessed a silly superficial answer:
Nobody paid the schutterijen21 there.
They volunteered to serve the nation’s commons
When their republic needed a militia:
They paid out of their pockets for the piece.
Except the drummer. He got in for free,
Because, perhaps, he brought into the place
To compensate, the same thing Rembrandt did,
The power of his unifying art:
What Shakespeare, Rembrandt’s great contemporary
Had given to the Globe’s rough company.
Then could there be a way of balancing
The costs and benefits of any act,
The assets and the liabilities,
And paying each according to his due?
A sort of anti-tort to match tort law?
And since the harms of all cooperation
Are almost always conquered by its goods—
Those volunteers gained greatly from their place
Within the portrait—might there be a way
To make a meaning out of what she’d lost?
She’d never patented her own conception,
Her searching, wiki-like creative market,
The royalties for each contributor
That now are standard in the IP world.
What do we owe? And what is due to us?
Is there a market that’s beyond the market,
A reciprocity, a better love?
Is Noah offering a role, a place
That is the reflex of her own great loss?
Three days later she sends back: I’ll be there.
♦
And now Banks Island readies for its guests.
Noah knows that future meetings of this kind
May be in hurried hideouts, distant rendezvous,
And that his worldwide economic empire
Will suffer freezes and appropriations,
And so he wants for this occasion all
That can be done to entertain the spirit,
Delight the senses, spur imagination.
Banks University springs to assist:
Its artists have designed a pleasant village
Two miles outside the little port of Honey,
Near Noah’s vineyard on the western ridge
That overlooks Drake’s Inlet on the east
With views toward Crab Island to the north.
It is an airy place, with Norfolk pines
And slopes of meadow interspersed with vines,
The residences tucked, palapa-style
Into the shelter of a poinciana,
Or, built of lava blocks and floored with Koi,
Under a jacaranda’s violet shade;
With open meeting-places and cafés
Wired for Wi-Fi and instant voice translation,
But always with that fragrant ocean breeze.
And so they come. Among them Lucy Wu;
Chandra and Gopal, with a coral boffin22;
From Shanghai, secretively, Zhang Baojia;
Firushan Koi, with two old hands on brine.
Ala arrives, with Sunday, and two more
Large Boko Boys, who will not give their names,
And instantly are christened “Tooks” and “Books,”
The latter for his heads-up Kindle habit
(In fact a cyber-vigilance display):
They’re handling security for Noah.
And even Miland Khodayar has come,
Under tight wraps, supposedly in Bali,
He’ll only stay two days, but he has brought
A master shipbuilder called Sahadeva.
And Manny Dandolo, in a pink suit,
And Ellie Tranh, the plant ecologist,
And Avi Bromberg, who desalinated
The western littoral of the Levant,
And Costas Jack Barsoomian, who’ll film
The whole affair, and dapper Barfield Gates
(Both risks, but Noah knows how much they owe him),
And two retired naval officers:
Commander Peter Frobisher, R.N.,
Sacked in the cutbacks when his brilliant book
On naval tactics criticized his bosses,
And Joed van Heemskerck, once of the Dutch navy.
And yes, our Anneliese Grotius.
10 Phaethon, son of Helios the sun god in Greek mythology↩
11 The just and rightful king, eldest of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata↩
12 Hero of the Mahabharata, brother of Yudisthira. Arjuna’s charioteer was Krishna, avatar of the supreme god Vishnu, who recalled Arjuna to his military duty when Arjuna did not wish to fight his rebel kin.↩
13 IP: intellectual property↩
14 Our narrator↩
15 Cuchulain was the hero of the ancient Irish epic, The Cattle-Raid of Cooley.↩
16 The philosopher Heidegger’s term, sometimes translated “being there”, meaning a state of special awareness of the mystery of one’s being itself↩
17 The beautiful Victorian row houses in the old Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco are locally called “painted ladies.”↩
18 The mysterious question that the hero Parsifal (Perceval, Peredur, Parzifal) fails to ask of the suffering Fisher King, a failure that results in the wasteland. Various versions of the question in different accounts of the myth include “Whom does the Grail serve?”, “Sir, why do you suffer so?” and “Who is the Grail?”↩
19 The ideal academy, as imagined by François Rabelais. Its motto was “Do what thou wilt.”↩
20 In “The Ballad of True Thomas” Thomas is given an apple by the queen of fairyland. To eat it is to become incapable of lying, a gift Thomas does not want. But he is compelled to eat it, and so becomes Thomas the Rhymer, the poet who is forced to tell the truth.↩
21 Dutch for “musketeers”↩
22 “Boffin” is an old but still current British slang term for a geeky expert or maven.↩