States of Calamity

I have been reading DeLillo’s White Noise as of late, and I was struck with an odd, comforting, engaging sense of familiarity. I am in the part of the book where the evacuations occur and our literary family watches in real-time as the feathery plume becomes a great cloud of darkness: a norse god of death, chariot wings and all.

I wondered why this felt all too familiar: the calamity, the chaos; the orderly and controlled evacuations, filled with the unknown, watched from rooftops and windows, from the sidelines and within cars. The state of rural panic, thousands of cars piling onto a thin stretch of road, one after another, making way to their emancipatory destination, was alien and cold to its native population. There is no less true notion in the city. The centers of urban hubbub are in a constant state of national emergency, people walk by in rushes and flurries, packed into traincars headed towards their destinations so that they may finally lay to rest their worries of the now; thousands upon thousands fleeing the in-between moments of life in favor of the exchange between subjects from region to region. When you become part of a city, when you live the city, you become a force of calamity, an intermediary between places, people, things.

Boston is where I call home. I was not always a Bostonian. I grew up in rural Texas. Sirens were a rarity, a treat. It meant one thing and one thing only: something was coming; something formidable, something powerful, something awesome. The earnest drill from the warnings of imminent or preceded disaster came but maybe twice a decade. Bostononians, inhabitants of a city that holds no populous candle to the likes NYC, Paris, or London, or virtually any tier of Chinese city, have become used to the wailing of of hourly sirens from trucks, cars, and vans; emergencies happening so often the stunning sirens coagulate into one doppler-induced 12-tone nearly inauditory white noise.

The controlled siren calamities eroticise disaster. Emancipation from oneself becomes the most desirable form of existence in transient spaces. The rural domiciles are unable to naturally undergo this liberatory ecstatic tranquility. The screaming wanna-be white noise of rural sirens gives its inhabitants glimpses of freedom. Glimpses of urbia.

How is one to live, survive, thrive without having been part of this larger soulless, aimless, and pointed mass, losing themselves to the infinite and immense? There are those in rarer individuals in rural parts who themselves manufacture their own conscious drive towards this phenomenon, experiencing this great interpretative dance of bouncing, gyrating lights, minds, peoples, and ideas without themselves ever having been a real participant. That is not most, however. To live as and in calamity, evacuation, constant movement, this is what it is to engage with the world, to engage with life. Indeed, rural centers are areas between life and death, existing as an intermediary plane of recovery and rejuvenation, an intended temporary settlement, useful as refuge for mind and soul; the purgatory plane has now been dotted with an assortment of permanent inhabitants which bring vibrancy and actuality. Ironically, the very world intended for brief temporality cannot exist without its permanent maintainers.

So many urbanites mentally perish from lack of rejuvenation, just as proportionally many ruralites reify their consciousness with dejection, fear, and delusion, finding it inhuman and anti-life to submit oneself to the worldly infinite.

Then, it is the case that the rural centers experience this infinity only in a state of chaos: a town evacuation, a natural disaster, a nuclear event, a meltdown, an event that brings all those together in one great into one great heaving organ sharing in the peculiars of the unknown whizzing by them at speeds that they cannot consciously register and dimensions they cannot optically perceive. In these moments they find themselves among the urbanites. They have become city dwellers.