A Late Night Lament

Drip drop, drip drop, drop, drop, drop.

TS Eliot. “The Waste Land”

Our planet suffers from too much sorrow/too many troubles–– fluorocarbons, cows, prequels, Subarus, homo sapiens, ads, tin pot dictators, lone gunmen, South African billionaires, etc., etc. etc. 

Earth Mama Gaia seems to be doing all she can to shake off these fleas of infestation. 

To wit, in the last four years, we’ve had a plague, Biblical-scale floods in Appalachia, and now these Southern California fires whose widespread devastation makes the great conflagrations of London 1666, Charleston 1861, and Chicago 1871 seem like pep rally bonfires in comparison, at least when it comes to total square miles of smoldering rubble and the billions of dollars of property loss. 

Alas, elitists like I-and-I can’t bother to

[…] bear witness

To what each morning brings again to light:

Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment

Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law

Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof^[1]

because we’re too distracted squinting at tiny screens informing us of the latest sorrows/horrors from practically every square inch of the Planet Earth. Hey, our synapses evolved back in those non-agrarian days of yore on savannas rich in birdsong but devoid of the blare of leaf blowers, so our brains are ill-equipped to deal with all this over-stimulation, the incessant din of our ailing empire–– honk, honk, bang, bang, ahooga, ahooga––  and the never ending volcanic avalanche of distressing news.

No wonder so many of us is gone cruzy and taken to self-medication. 

Envy the nuns and monks of cloisters and monasteries, Mother Teressa and Thich Nhat Hahn, but come to think of it, they’re dead, and to quote Mary Flannery O’Connor, “you can’t be any poorer than dead.”

Here’s another quote, this one from a poem by my wife Caroline Tigner Moore –– “The Earth will outlive this human plague.”So on that note, “Good night ladies, goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, 

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^[1] Richard Wilbur, “Lying”