“The disaster ruins everything,
all the while leaving everything intact.”
Maurice Blanchot
Among the pieces I admire in the new issue of KR, out this week, are two poems by Nicole Cooley — “Breach” and “I Spy a Hole, a Crack, a Leak” ??? evoking the flood of emotion that filled those of us from New Orleans as we watched our city drown. As a writer, it’s easy to be swept away by that flood of emotion. But writing about disaster, as we’ve had too many opportunities to learn in recent years, is easy to do in that first rush of anger and grief, and so hard to do well. What I admire about Cooley’s poems is their restraint: the emotion is packed tight as a levee ready to burst under the pressure of all it holds back.
The two poems are in many ways mirror images of each other, in the sense that mirrors reverse what they reflect. “Breach” is a dense prose poem that begins and ends in metaphor, but the rest of the poem resists that impulse, at once shattering the word’s meaning into its component parts and throwing up a hard wall of fact against the temptation to seek meaning in the flood. The poem itself is a breach ??? between word and world, metaphor and meaning ??? and the most “poetic” images are those denied or dismissed as inadequate: “and so the water, no pale lace collar fashioned of delicate mud, no mistress of careful spilling, the water in a storm surge cracks the floodwall apart“” The mind can’t help grasping for metaphors at these moments of disaster, but we feel them swept away by the violence of the real as it swirls around us. One might simply write fact, but even that fails to evoke the pain of the experience in a mind made numb by the blunt truth. Words fail, like governments, when the humanity is drained out of them, leaving one final breach — “a violation, as of a law, trust, faith, or promise” ??? in our souls.
“I Spy a Hole, a Crack, a Leak” turns the other way, toward the temptations of nostalgia in a parent bringing her daughters back to see the ruined city of her childhood. Memory is what survives the flood, writing over what’s gone with the insistent demands of our personal history:
“She drove, over the Industrial Canal, through
the Ninth Ward out to St. Bernard. To Carrollton Avenue
past the park to Lakeview. Then Broadmoor
to South Galvez Street, to Story Street, to see
all the ruined houses she once lived in as a girl.
And while she drove the daughter drowned her daughters
out, found the crack in the landscape to slip through,
climbed inside her childhood dollhouse, roof sealed,
water rising up the tiny, narrow stairs, doll family
trapped in the attic, beating miniature fists on wood.”
We’re all seeking that crack in the landscape to slip through when we gaze at the images of devastation on CNN. The imagination projects the city it once knew over the flood zone, or wanders the streets where bodies now float. Our minds send out these little life-rafts of memory, trying to find solid ground amid the wreckage of what we once could imagine.
That’s why I find that final image of poem so striking: as the mother/daughter of the poem (mother of two daughters who resist this compulsory tour of New Orleans, but lost in her own memories of childhood as she drives them through the ruins) projects herself into the dollhouse where a tiny family drowns, she becomes an image of how our imaginations contend with disaster. The devil is in the details, and so we bring the devastation down to a size our minds can comprehend, one street, one house, one image of terror as the waters rise. Without that reduction to human scale, we’re left only with the bleak emptiness of the event, which passes as all events do into news and history, quickly becoming the kind of clich?? useful only to politicians as they try to shape the disaster to the needs of the moment. Suffering can easily become banality as we retell the story to ourselves again and again, leaving us ??? as Blanchot suggests ??? with everything in ruins, but also safely intact. One can’t write about disaster. One must write about disaster. Only by plunging into the flood can our humanity survive.