In the River – by Searlait O’Neill
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
The disaster is the unknown name for that in thought itself which dissuades us from thinking (M Blanchot, The Writing of The Disaster 1980)
St Mary drowned in the floods.
It can be strange seeing objects drown. The eye isn’t looking for movements, because there never were any to begin with. What is the eye looking for?
It was a white marble, her rock body. And it seemed to represent something.
The salt pillar?
Muteness?
All our lost souls watching on?
The cathedral was flooded, but they hosed it out.
Mary was resurrected. Maybe she has something to hope for these days, now that the focus is slowly shifting from the men in her family. Either way, she is there; hosed-down white marble at the front of the church’s silent body.
Pieces of another statue ended up in somebody’s shoulder. The holy absolution, this cleansing water.
In the aftermath, many of the pictures centred on the cathedral, the pub, the clock.
Objects re-signified in drowning.
I wonder how many of the staph infections across the town were driven by the search for things. There was a lot of talk about how to cleanse flood victims’ old film photographs; whether it was possible to preserve originals.
Maurice Blanchot says that disaster disorients the absolute. Mary remains, physically. But the children that normally attend the primary school are absent.
The practicality of hosing out the cathedral takes me by surprise. Despite the hugeness of the flood, I am concerned about whether the gurney is causing damage with its immense stream. I raise such small contentions, with such obvious answers.
Blanchot writes that when we think about disaster we have to say how big and extraordinary it is, because that separates it verbally from the regular way of things, but I want to ask how we can make it ordinary enough to believe it is really happening.
Maybe saying it is extraordinary is a way of making it quiet.
“Maybe saying it is extraordinary is a way of making it quiet.”
It is easier to make it disappear (be normal, learn new patterns of speech and behaviour) than it is to believe in the realness of the happenings, which are not your story, and your own story, at the same time.
But these rivers are as integral to the landscape of this land as arteries that flood from the heart.
When Blanchot writes about disaster, it comes from the heart. For many of us, that is the way. But our hearts are uncanny, filled with the desires of life, and the heart of the world activates us in ways that are hard to escape. Writing about the floods, my mind drifts towards the similarities of feeling in other personal horrors. I am, again, at the funeral of a loved one, at court attending to my divorce, in hospital with an injured family member.
Is it possible to watch what is happening to the world without adding the parts of it to a collection I am building of the terrible things that happened to me?
It feels like another form of extractivism. Extracting a story from the land before the disaster is even through.
Blanchot says that if you criticise or throw the game away, you enter into the game.
Not that the disaster itself is a game. But it is gamified. The race to re-make it has begun.
I meet with friends in Kyogle months after the floods and nearly three years after the bushfires. All of us have been affected by the disasters here in different ways, and have each spent time recording our own or other people’s disaster stories.
We eat pineapple and one of my friends gets up to check on his sick daughter. She’s done two COVID tests so that we can still have our catchup.
Somebody raises the question then: why are we writing about disaster at all?
“Somebody raises the question then: why are we writing about disaster at all?”
Other questions:
If the disaster is gamified, does that mean there will be a winner?
Will the winner be given anything?
Will the something make up for the experience of living through the disaster?
Is living through disaster a privilege? Is it a wonder? Is it only bad?
Is disaster the error of the world?
Will making disaster normal make us worse? Will it make us more careful with the heart of the world?
Blanchot says there can be this point, at least, to writing: to wear out errors.
Writing about disaster is submitting to the mortifying premise of being known to have more than only tragic thoughts on tragedy, and for those thoughts to be mapped on a continuum of future learning that jeers at the limited attempts of the present. There is no good time to be writing about disaster. It is embarrassing to make creative decisions in reaction to tragedy; it is impossible not to.
Blanchot says that not writing is among the effects of writing.
It is a sign of passivity; a means of expression at grief’s disposal.
Maybe this is why I have questions about writing during disaster. Because signs of grief, including the sign of silence, are important in processing.
Others:
Should disaster writing be humourless?
Is it productivity culture in academia, writing and art that makes me believe I need to write about disaster before the sign of silence has marked my grief?
Does the story start as soon as the disaster happens? Does it start even earlier, before the disaster, because of our collective memory for flooding, and the apps that predict how bad or relatively good a time it will be? And the announcements that are texted to us? Did it start in 2017, where we thought the floods were as bad as they would get, or in 1974, when we also thought it? What do we sublimate when we use that dominating pronoun, ‘we’? What about the floods before empirical records: how were they managed? what grief or wholeness was associated with them?
Is a funeral the right place to write about the person who has died?
Is the story mourning, or understanding?
Here is a list of objects I can write about if I am marking the sign of silence for the heart of the world:
Pieces of banksia pressed to the ground and dried like flowers
The rocks outside my window where the blue tongue likes to sit
Pieces of wire caught in one of the trees, where the trunk has grown around it, and now it has a waist
The black bean seed I found on the beach after I saw my baby on a sonogram (a sign of silence for the seed? A silent seed? As my partner would say, the titles write themselves)
The silver and grey parts of my partner’s hair and their different texture to the original parts
The tomato vine that needs watering, not writing
Writing, Blanchot says, is the disaster itself, again.
It sounds funny. Some mimesis to give us back the disaster a second time. Does the mimesis make it easier to bear the original? In some ways, can it make it harder? When there are so many different reflections of the water on screens and in the paper? Are the reflections also a form of silence because they are conjuring, not re-enacting, the event?
Is writing, then, a form of silence?
Blanchot’s fragments, from what I can tell, are supposed to disrupt the idea that the disaster can be represented at all.
Are there then only some kinds of writing that are a form of silence?
And can questions actually substitute for answers when marking the sign of silence for the heart of the world?
“Are there then only some kinds of writing that are a form of silence? And can questions actually substitute for answers when marking the sign of silence for the heart of the world?”
There are many voices in the region I live on. Singular representations seem to do so little in times of crisis. Maybe fragments help, the absences on the page speaking for the absence of knowledge of any one writer at the heart of disaster. Let them speak, at least, for my own absence of knowledge.
The floods the townspeople have witnessed are housed in parts of the body they didn’t know until the water drew against the land. These parts were waiting all along to be inhabited. They could have been filled with anything. They filled with water, which drained back out again.
Before the flood rose to cover the bridge, I stood on it and took a picture of the water. At that point, there was no way of knowing how high the water would be. The picture is of a river in the rain – a sight I have always found so pleasing.
If I imagine a perfect day from the past: I have taken my longboard out at Flatrock Beach in a light storm. The waves turn glossy but they are pocked with extra water. The top layer of the ocean is cool. I can dive down off my board and feel the warmth that lies below the surface.
The pictures from that day and the ones before it mark a sign of silence before the storm. There is an equal silence after a storm, but it is a dense silence. We know what has occurred. We can collect branches that have fallen from palms to clear some of the mess. If it is a well-timed storm, the ground will have already soaked up most of the water.
There is a website called Australia Severe Weather that has records of all the floods in the Northern Rivers, that gives the facts of the events without a story. I have spent hours reading it anyway, as though it is a map for the kind of time created around big water.
Blanchot says that to hold power and not use it is the definition of divinity.
Is the disaster the god, or is the god the time when the disaster is being withheld? Damn all gods and disasters. Or dam them?
That is one of the suggestions raised on the local Facebook groups.
When Blanchot talks about solitude as a great disaster that approaches, I wonder if he means after the actual disaster has passed and everybody is on their own thinking about it.
Sometimes in a disaster, it seems that people can become telepathic.
Or is that just a poor way of describing the lived similitude of being human in tragedy?
The first line of his book is this: the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.
“The first line of his book is this: the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”
A recent discussion of this at a writing conference reminded me that Blanchot is not being tricky with his interest in disaster. He was a Holocaust survivor, and his philosophical inquiry is rooted in this lived trauma.
Writing about the disasters we experience is hard, is an understatement, is insufficient. But does it clear the air?
I have spoken with my friends who have experienced sexual abuse about how, often, discussions about it are unwelcome. If people get a hint that you enjoyed it. That you were part of the spectacle. That you turned it into your art or made it your life’s work to understand. I’m not sure if it is the same with disasters. Some of the same victim panic does come to the fore:
Will I be asked to act as an authority on the weather?
Will they want to know about (friends, family) who lost everything and had to start from scratch?
Will I get it all wrong?
Is it even a tragedy, living, and having these things happen?
Will they want the unnameable details?
More reasons not to write.
I like the way Blanchot talks about nothing.
It gives me something to hold onto.
Also, I am only reading a translation of the original French.
It is comforting, knowing that I am at a distance from what he really said.
The weather has turned dry now. La Niña saw us through the first months of this year, dissolving now into a dry winter, the threat of a tinder-dry summer. I have become obsessed with digital weather mapping, am paying for a subscription that claims to give more insight into how, when, a cyclone may push rain over the Wilson River. We know now how long a pressure system can be caught here: we measured it in the thousands of millimetres. Now, the farm flats are stripped of minerals that hold moisture in the top layer of the earth. It is easier for the grass to dry and grassfires to spread.
My family are the type to avoid alcohol in times of distress. Rather than becoming alcoholics, we would rather control our pain through sobriety. Often, I consider how such rules implemented on the family scale can engender self-abandonment. Believing obstinately that nothing can offer peace as much as something, we engage a narrative created around us rather than experiencing the heart of the world, in its murky darkness. Other habits take the place of alcohol at a wake: over-eating, praise, undiluted lingering.
There should be a self-help group: Lingerers Anonymous.
The aftermath of the floods is like the aftermath of the funeral. We say a lot of the same words over and over. You might think this would become boring, but it doesn’t.
“The aftermath of the floods is like the aftermath of the funeral. We say a lot of the same words over and over. You might think this would become boring, but it doesn’t.”
The coast has been littered with debris for over a year now. I take pictures of the foam left by the soapy, sour river water that floats at the tops of waves on the beach. Even with giant tides and new rain, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for it to go. I am trying to find a red rock with black through it. The foam is supposed to be toxic; there are people playing in it with their children.
There is a feather embedded lightly under the sand, so that the shape of the sand makes the shape of a feather. I wonder if I have imagined that underneath that fine layer, the bird’s wing is actually there, or if the evidence is enough to believe it is so. Or if that matters. Near the water, other birds clean their beaks on rocks and bite the water for tiny fish.
Writing is evaporating. The tiny cosmic world of the artist is under threat. Sometimes we seem to grapple for control by broaching the immensity of tragedy. But there is so little control in life, death and disaster.
Creativity: sobriety for alcoholics?
Creativity: Lingerers Anon.
The creation/writing takes us somewhere else than disaster, like a baby that is both unaffected by the lives the parent has endured and lives out an often-unspoken version of them.
The writer and the disaster live differently on the page, boundaries intact.
The disaster is there in the fragments, but the fragments try to speak softly, remember partially, and gently, like they are whispering about the thing.
I take my camera to the sea
the birds have eaten enough for today
the wind won’t take the foam away, and
the waves miss the maybe-carcass
that lives just under the sand
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Image by the author
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