The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  Karen Silkwood was run off the road in Oklahoma: Karen Silkwood worked at a plutonium fabrication site in Oklahoma, where her job was to make plutonium pellets for fuel rods in nuclear reactors. At the time of her death, she had raised concerns about health and safety in the facility. Because of lax security, workers had been able to steal plutonium from the facility, and because of lax health standards, many of them brought plutonium home unknowingly in the form of contamination on their clothing. Karen had collected documentation proving that she herself had plutonium contamination on her own body and in her home. On November 13, 1974, she was driving to meet a reporter from the New York Times and her union representative when she died in a car crash under suspicious circumstances.

  14 billion years: A recent art competition in France sponsored by Andra, the nuclear waste agency there, called on artists and collectives to design a warning that could last a hundred thousand years. Notable submissions included a forest of genetically modified trees that would grow an unnatural blue and a children’s song that would perpetuate the warning through shared oral tradition. The prize went to Alexis Pandellé’s Prométhée oublié (Forgotten Prometheus): an enormous scar on the ground suggesting a wound that never heals.

  The law he’s referring to is: CERCLA was authorized in 1980 in response to the discovery in the late 1970s of a large number of abandoned, leaking hazardous waste dumps. Under Superfund, the Environmental Protection Agency identifies hazardous sites, takes appropriate action, and sees that the responsible party pays for the cleanup. The fund was established by what is known as a polluter-pays tax, but that tax expired twenty years ago and has never been reinstated. So for the last twenty years, there has been no fund funding the Superfund.

  the infamous Pruitt-Igoe: The Captain Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William L. Igoe Apartments, known more commonly as Pruitt-Igoe, were a racially segregated housing project on the Near North Side of St. Louis comprising thirty-three eleven-story towers and 2,870 units. In her 2011 doctoral dissertation, “The Manhattan-Rochester Coalition, Research on the Health Effects of Radioactive Materials, and Tests on Vulnerable Populations without Consent in St. Louis, 1945–1970,” Lisa Martino-Taylor reveals that Pruitt-Igoe was chosen as a test site for the spraying of zinc cadmium sulfide; residents were told it was a “smoke screen” that could be used for protection in the case of an enemy attack. Not surprisingly, chronic lung and respiratory problems are associated with exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide, though the army denies any health consequences to the testing program, which ceased in 1994. See “Suit filed over government test-spraying in St. Louis during Cold War” in St. Louis Post-Dispatch. See also The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011), a documentary film directed by Chad Freidrichs.

  asking for water for her headless baby: See White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2007), a documentary film directed by Steven Okazaki.

  We ourselves are a source of radiation: Humans have evolved a threshold for our own natural radiation and for one another’s. Anything beyond that threshold is a risk: medical radiation, ultraviolet radiation, radiation from radio frequencies, radiation from contamination or nuclear bombs. Sufficient radiation exposure can cause changes in individual cells that can result in cancer growth.

  The descriptions of the mechanism by which this happens are technical and laced with jargon, but my understanding is that the risk is expressed as a range of radiation exposure that causes sufficient damage to change a cell but not enough to kill it. Decades may pass between exposure and the onset of cancer.

  One difficulty for researchers, especially in areas like St. Louis, is that cancer caused by radiation exposure is indistinguishable from cancer from hereditary causes or exposure to other carcinogens. Another difficulty is that it is not completely clear whether the wastes at the landfill present a definite cancer-causing risk. The scientific data don’t prove that they will cause cancer, and also don’t prove that they will not.

  ART IN THE AGE OF APOCALYPSES

  art cannot rise to an occasion like this: There was a time, not so long ago now, when I lost all faith in art. My job at that time had led me to Portland, Oregon, for TBA, a performance art festival, where I found myself one night watching a dance that began with this premise: What if one of the postmodern choreographers from Judson Dance Theater had gone uptown to perform in the Harlem ball scene? The performance I attended was one of the festival’s headlining events; its choreographer was a Guggenheim fellow, a Creative Capital fellow, a darling of contemporary dance. As I watched the performance—with the choreographer playing the Judson role, marching back and forth across the stage while a lesser-known (but in my view far more talented) performer vogues from the back of the stage to the front, over and over, until the voguer stops voguing to read a very long section of Sophocles’ Antigone into a microphone—I very nearly walked out.

  It’s possible that the performance made me angry only because I had squandered what could have been a perfectly lovely evening in Portland to see a work I found pretentious and annoying. On paper, it had so much potential, but in practice, the piece by the much-loved and well-sponsored artist was about an obscure aesthetic conversation between minimalism and virtuosity, between pedestrianism and theatricality, with no acknowledgment whatsoever of the power differential between these two moments in movement history. I know of no one at Judson, for example, who was murdered for being a postmodern choreographer.

  I did not understand the performance; I felt excluded from it, as if I had barged in and heard the tail end of a conversation not intended for me. More than anything else, I felt embarrassed. It seemed suddenly very stupid that I should have a job that required me to think and talk about art, since I felt, on the whole, very betrayed by the business of it all.

  When I returned to campus the following week, I heard news that Dom Pérignon had commissioned Jeff Koons to make a limited-edition series of “Venus” balloon sculptures, each of which would contain a bottle of the luxury beverage, though there was no acknowledgment of the complexities of appropriating prehistoric images of fertility and the female form and selling them for twenty thousand dollars each. In fact, this famous investment-banker-turned-sculptor has adamantly disavowed any critical reading or intention in his work. Weeks later, Koons’s similar but much more massively sized Balloon Dog (Orange)—a mirrored stainless-steel sculpture in the shape of exactly what it sounds like: an orange balloon dog—sold at a Christie’s auction for $58.4 million, a record for any work by a living artist.

  Meanwhile, that same month, Renisha McBride was shot in the back of the head on the front doorstep of a house in Dearborn, Michigan, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report that the world’s temperature over land and ocean surfaces had reached the highest levels since recordkeeping began in 1880.

  I realize these two events may seem unrelated to the world of art making, but I think that may be precisely why I suddenly lost faith in the world of art making.

  As the months of the semester ticked on, my job once again led me out of town for art, this time to New Orleans—more specifically, to St. Bernard Parish, just outside New Orleans, where I attended a performance of Cry You One, a work of experimental theater that is “part song, part story, part procession for our lost land.” The audience was sorted into groups, each group led by an in-character performer, shuffled onto buses, and driven down the road a bit, where our group disembarked, and was paired off. Most of the people in our group had come with someone—in fact, a surprising portion of our group consisted of an acrobatic troupe in town for the New Orleans Fringe Festival—so pairing was nearly automatic. As the sole random loner, I got paired with one of the acrobats, a short, slender woman with long reddish hair, whose pupils pulsed like two giant saucers, a sign, I recognized, that she was high on Ecstasy.

  Our leader—in character as a scientist, Dr. Carol Karl—took us on a brief tour of the wetlands with particular attention to all the ways in which the land h
ad been destroyed: the levees just at the edge of this field prevented flooding but had caused land subsidence (or gradual sinking); then hurricanes had brought seawater inland, making the land unfit for growing crops; then the Deepwater Horizon spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the ocean, and now with every storm, toxins blow in to further poison the land.

  A disturbance at the center of the field brought each of the smaller groups together into one large group. Fiddles came out, the performers broke character and began singing and dancing, and it became abundantly clear that everyone in the audience was also expected to sing and dance. My partner, Ecstacy, took my hand and waist eagerly and waltzed me around the field, looking very lovingly at me with her pulsing-saucer eyes. I waltzed along with her, hesitantly, awkwardly, though what I really wanted to do was stand off to the side with my hands in my pockets and watch. In general, I do not like to be touched by strangers, and I certainly don’t like to sing and dance with them with wild abandon without fair warning. Finally, Ecstasy gave up on me and let me make my way to the edge of the crowd, where I kept more or less conspicuously to myself.

  After the singing and dancing concluded, we went back into our groups, where Dr. Karl led us into a small tent, where another performer told a story about how the ongoing environmental crisis continues to decimate her Houma ancestral lands. Then we were ferried across a narrow waterway, during which one member of my group asked if I was sick or something and why did I keep my hands always in my pockets. Back on land, the group was directed to climb to the top of the levee, and I cursed myself while I did so for being so reluctant to sing and dance with all the rest, and what is wrong with me anyway, all shut-up-inside like this, and for what? But when I reached the top of the levee, I saw the devastation for myself—a wasteland of dead trees, dead water, the corpse of a marshland for miles and miles in every direction it seemed. And at once, all the closed things inside me broke open. I saw the wasteland and understood myself. And like that, I was a little changed.

  The performers took to their fiddles, leading the audience as one large group down the levee in a funeral parade for the land. I held hands with total strangers. I sang and danced like everyone else with wild abandon, with Ecstasy even.

  “What are the words you do not yet have?”: See Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.”

  a poem is a “small (or large) machine made of words”: I don’t even particularly care that Williams means this different from how I take his meaning. In his Introduction to The Wedge (1944), he writes:

  To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.

  Looking is a form of recognition: See also Lia Purpura’s On Looking.

  There’s a story I’ve heard . . . Rick Lowe tell: See “Rick Lowe: Heart of the City,” by Nicole Audrey Spector in Guernica, for a retelling of this story.

  Chekov says that art exists to prepare the soul for tenderness: I’m going to be totally honest here. I’ve seen this quote attributed to Chekov by a whole lot a people, but I haven’t been able to find the source.

  “Hope is an orientation of the spirit”: See Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace.

  “[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates”: See Adrienne Rich, “Why I Refused the National Medal of the Arts” in Arts of the Possible.

  THE FLOOD

  Unlike every other essay in this book, this one is neither researched nor meticulously sourced. I wrote all of the material here during a single week when Hurricane Harvey dropped fifty-one inches of rain and threatened to drown my city. At the time, my husband was out being a hero by rescuing people from their flooded homes, and I was stuck in the house with the kids and the dog. I wanted to do something, so I started writing, which, after all of our emergency gear was packed and repacked fifteen times, was the only thing I could think to do. I posted an update each day on Facebook for my family and friends in other parts of the country about how we were faring, but eventually the posts became something more: short essays maybe, about community and sacrifice, and of course (because it’s been on my mind for the past several years) about justice. When I made the posts public, they started going viral, in a way. Mostly I was just trying to convince people that they should care about what was happening here in Houston—to convince even the people who are living in this city and hadn’t been affected by the flooding—even though I wasn’t sure whether anyone is capable of compassion equal to the magnitude of this disaster. We all have our limits. I’m not sure whether empathy can be taught—it’s innate to children, I know, who more often grow up to unlearn it rather than the other way around—but I think I’ve realized it can’t be forced.

  In the end, my own family was extraordinarily lucky: our house did not flood, though the water came, at its highest, after we evacuated—about fifteen horizontal feet from the house. Let me be clear: we have done absolutely nothing in our short lives to deserve this tremendous stroke of luck—what some in Houston are now calling “dry privilege”—just as the people who were flooded did nothing to deserve their flooding. In the past, I may have been content to count my blessings, to say, “Well, thank goodness it wasn’t us,” and then move on. Maybe I might ask someone I knew who had been flooded whether they needed anything. But writing these posts each day while the water rose made me realize that’s not enough. Because if the way the city is built isn’t “good enough” when it floods my neighborhood, or a third of neighborhoods, it isn’t good enough when it floods anyone else’s neighborhood either. Not even one.

  As of this writing, six months after the storm, I don’t know a single person who got flooded out of their house who is back at home yet. And it remains unclear just how much damage the storm caused, since there are very many people for whom this city is home who, because of their immigration status, might be reluctant to ask for help or assistance. For these vulnerable populations, the possibility of “recovery” remains deferred, impeded, fraught.

  theory of the Stranger: See Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Baffler, translated from the German by Ramona Mosse; the essay originally appeared in Simmel’s Soziologie.

  MAKE WAY FOR JOY

  Hate is “a hideous ecstasy”: In 1984, Orwell’s classic cautionary tale, party members of Oceania are forced each day to gather together in a large auditorium for the “Two Minutes Hate.” A video plays in the auditorium, and within moments the crowd begins rioting. Even Winston, Orwell’s conscientious protagonist, joins in: “A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.”

  It’s uncanny how similar it is to the scene that played out across the United States at political rallies for a certain presidential candidate. Think, for example, of all the seemingly normal people who contort their faces and their hearts, who shout racist slurs, who shove and punch and grind down the single dissenter in their midst. The power to make others suffer is all the power they have. And all the while the man who has now become president goads them on, nodding, smiling, for no one’s sake but his own.

  Aristotle considered hatred a judgment about the type of person someone is and the types of suffering that person deserves. Hatred is the opposite of friendship, he wrote: if friendship is a state of wishing for the well-being of another for that person’s own sake; hatred is a wish for another to be harmed, not necessarily for their sake but for our own.

  Running makes a tiny space for joy: Rebecca Solnit writes, “When exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?” See The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

  “The happi
est person in the world”: Emerson actually wrote, “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship,” but that was sexist, so I changed it. See “Nature, Addresses, and Lectures” in Essays and Lectures.

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