Human Error - False Alarm  -  Awe but no shock

We were having an excellent breakfast (banana, coconut, macadamia pancakes) at Hannara's in Waianae this morning. An emergency alarm went off and suddenly everyone's looking at their phones. Needless to say, we're all right. ">The radio was playing, and the alarm didn't play there, which gave me confidence that there was nothing genuinely amiss.  But the alarm was persistent, intermittent and moments after it began in the restaurant itself, people's mobile phones went off and everyone began checking (if they hadn't been already, which most were).  The phone message was clear.  Incoming missile threat--State of Hawaii--This is NOT a test or exercise--Shelter in place. The restaurant cleared out immediately and staff phoned their families.  People cars immediately were heading west (away from Pearl Harbor, honking horns, horning in, flashing lights, running stop signals).  It wasn't pretty.

We were sheltering in place as far as we could figure, certainly as much as we could in the next twenty minutes.  At home, we'd be facing east through a wall of glass.

So I continued to work on my tall stack.  And thirty-seven minutes later.  (That's thirty-seven) minutes, ten minutes after the window for nuclear obliteration, the message came through that this was a false alarm.  We finished our breakfast and headed out for some bread (because we are completely tolerant of gluten--and lactose, for that matter).  The town, the stores were abuzz.  It turns out that the imminent threat of and deliverance from nuclear annihilation makes the aloha spirit absolutely effervesce. People were very cheery, very friendly.  Even our dour waitress laughed.

There were some facts that gave me confidence that we were going to be OK right out of the gate. The first was that the radio kept playing.  I knew that if there were a genuine emergency, as per the tests, all radio programming would be interrupted, and we wouldn't still be listening to Pink's "Try."  Secondly, the signal was intermittent, the signal for tsunami warnings.  My thinking was that if there were a genuine nuclear threat, they would have, as it were, gotten their signals straight.  The signal for nuclear threat is an undulating, constant siren. (I do pay attention to the first of the month noon-day tests.) Finally, only indoor and phone alarms went off, not the very loud, intrusive outdoor alarms.

There were several facts that did not give me confidence.  The first is, what does it mean to "shelter in place"? bring our plates under the table a la 1950s-elementary school?  The second is that, with all the recent talk about buttons, this was caused by "wrong button pushed during shift change." Someone could have hit it with their elbow. It shouldn't be right next to the time clock.  Thirdly: thirty-seven minutes to correct this?  Fourthly, the White House response was that the president, golfing at Mara Lago, was informed and that this "exercise" was, well, nothing.  No explanation from him or the military.  While a lot of frightened people drove frantically away to outrun an imminent nuclear explosion.  I don't begrudge the president golf or Florida.  He can have both as afar as I'm concerned.  But neither he nor the military (I almost said "his" military, but I seriously hope not) have an explanation about a mistake? The problem is that there was no apparent coordination between the phone and building alert, the emergency broadcast radio system, and the outdoor public alarms.

I'm back up, looking out my window to the southeast.  The sun is shining.  The pool is calling to wash and bake out my cold, and this afternoon we're heading west, away from Pearl Harbor to look in awe at the exceptionally high surf.  The faces here will be thirty-five feet.  On the North Shore, fifty.  Gotta get your awe on somewhere.

In honor of All Saints/All Souls Day, and the thirty first anniversary of the death of my father. Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, Paradise Panel from the Ghent Altarpiece. Saints and sinners adoring the lamb. This is the innermost central, bottom panel of the 1432 hinged polyptych altarpiece in St. Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. The whole altar is 11'6" x 15"1". Though parts of it are missing, It's still a massive, complex complex.

The "Adoration of the lamb" is a slightly odd, literal invention, with four groups of souls, heavenly and earthly, saints and sinners, all worshiping the bleeding lamb at the center on the altar. It's drawn from the book of John's Revelation, a vast elaboration of the phrase "Worthy is the lamb." The rest of the panels of the altar are really an elaboration of this theme and they'd be opened and closed, creating an elaborate configuration of iconic narratives coordinated with the church year.

The Altarpiece is the largest extant work of the Van Eyck brothers by far. It was intended for its present location, unlike all off their other work on a much smaller scale which were domestic and private. Painted in oil--an innovation at the time, and tempera (paint with an egg yolk vehicle--the fluid that carries the pigment or color)--on panels.

The altar of the lamb hovers over the well of the water of life on the central axis in a garden setting tight the skyline of Ghent in the distance, the whole panel intensely symmetrical, almost diagrammatic.

Dad died as there result of a bypass surgery that went wrong. I was in Maryland in my second fall teaching at the University, and hadn't gone up to Massachusetts because they assured me that bypass was routine. I cried on the plane on All Souls Day.

Hallowe'en

Happy Hallowe'en

It's October 31st,  Hallowe'en. (I keep wanting to put an okina instead of an apostrophe, so habitual has become my habit of trying two spell Hawai ‘an properly). It's the anniversary of my father's death, in 1986.  He died when I was thirty three, thirty one years ago. He's been gone for almost half my life--dying when I was the age Jesus was when he died. This holiday used to bring me childish pleasure, now it ushers in the season of death.  Our big accident, mom's and mine, happened Thanksgiving week end. She died from the injuries she sustained in it on Christmas Eve of 2009, eight years ago. So much for the autumnal holidays. Autumnal is right. This holiday calls up demons. This holiday melds the mask to the face.

This time of year I often feel my anger, such as it is, burbling up, asphalt through mud and water.  Anger on my parents' behalf. Anger at myself for my imagined disappointing them. Anger at myself for disappointing myself.  It comes up from underneath the guilt of failure, the shame of disappointment and frustration not mastered.  It's the depression of the beginning of the end of the year, even here in Hawaii where seasonal change is much more subtle. It's hard to peel the mask off.

James Ensor, The Entry of Christ into Brussels, 1889, 170" x 200", The Getty, Los Angeles

The masked masses of Brussels conduct a mardi gras parade led by death and Bishop Santa Claus.  Jesus is all but lost in the middle background, haloed and on an ass, flooded in the midst of a sea of caricatures and clowns under the banner "Vive La Sociale", all bearing down on the viewer, threatening to overtake her.  The huge painting was rejected by Les Vingt, an alternative arts organization which Ensor helped to found.  Though it had prominent place in his home and studio, it was never again exhibited publicly until 1929.  Just the same it became, in its impastos smeared with a palette knife, jarring chromatic contrasts, and harsh caricatures of the artist's public, foundation for European Expressionism in the twentieth century.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, oil on panel, 58x46cm

⁸The LORD hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion: he hath stretched out a line, he hath not withdrawn his hand from destroying: therefore he made the rampart and the wall to lament; they languished together.^a

⁹Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.

¹⁰The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.

¹¹Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.

The painting is not an illustration of the text, but inspired by it, creating visual tropes for Jeremiah's internal state. The Old Testament reading from the daily lectionary (in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (and yes, part of my spiritual practice is to pray in the morning over the daily lectionary readings--the Psalms in {very halting} Latin, the Old Testament and New Testament readings in the King James version {because that's the version with which I grew up, and I still find it's language lovely, beautiful, even, pointing to the holy, redirecting my attention from the quotidian language of my every day life}, and the gospel readings in French. Paintings often become a point of meditation for me in this process.) But the Lamentations express in the repetitive, psalm-like ejaculations of grief, Jeremiah's agony over the realization that his prophecies have actually come to fruition.  I can't escape the parallel with the current state of our country, though I'm conscious to resist the presumptuous parallels that the Puritans--and more recent politicians--drew between Israel and Jerusalem and the North American English speakers who became the United States of America. The fall of Judah (Israel had already split off and was suffering its own fate) came as no surprise to Jeremiah.  It was only shocking to his hostile audience, his fellow citizens. 

The painting is small, a little over two feet high, one that I found on my own while wandering in the gleaming forest of the Rijksmuseum's collection in 1973.  Like the portrait of his son, Titus, as a monk, that I've talked about here before, it's an intimate history painting.  A single figure, no action, with the spectacular destruction of the city in flames on the left--just glimpsed in the distance--reclines on, on what? we aren't really shown a furnishing.  Rembrandt only provides diagonal bands of light and dark in his characteristic, dramatic chiaroscuro (contrasting clear/obscure, light and shadow) spotlighting the bald crown of the prophet's head and his hand, limp in impotent despair. He can't resist the gleam on the temple vessels as on the prophet's pate.

I'm sympathetic to arresting grief.  And I love Rembrandt's explorations of internal states in the simplest of dramatic, but often not melodramatic turns, and the subtle moments of emotional transition. My first unschooled responses to the painting, my sympathy and admiration, were enhanced by my undergraduate teacher Ann Millstein, a recent Harvard Ph.D. at the time, who provided me an intellectual and historical foundation for the uninformed meanderings and responses from the year before during my year in Holland and my subsequent years in Boston.  The painting is from Rembrandt's earlyish period.  He's still fascinated by minute representations of texture and narrative (all the more minute in this small size).  But his spiritual penetration and sensitivity is patent early on.