After the flood

 

After the flood

What some people dispute about climate change is whether it is caused by people or that it is a natural phenomenon. Whatever the cause we've had a climate roller coaster this summer. Forest fires, heat waves, and recently a downpour of rain here in Montreal so great that our infrastructure was not able to deal with it; in this part of our neighbourhood, many houses and apartment buildings had flooded basements. Right now the City is removing piles of wet garbage, broken gyprock, flooring, soaked furniture, papers, books, computers, microwaves, and just about anything else you can think of, all of it destroyed in flooded basements. I arrived home on the day of the rain ready to use a bucket and remove water from our basement, but it was a lost cause, the water poured in from a basement shower drain and toilet. I was not alone, for the following week, when driving on adjacent streets, there were huge piles of flood damaged stuff at the end of many driveways. As the week progressed the piles of wet garbage grew larger.

So, as I was throwing my papers from the last ten or so years into contractor bags, my soaking wet archives including letters, notebooks, manuscripts, and photographs, I wondered at how neat I had been, labeling every file folder, placing them in now soaking Bankers Boxes, and I thought what nonsense had propelled me into saving all of this stuff? But the fact is, the more I bagged the more relieved I felt, getting rid of this stuff, these many boxes of papers, now I wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible not just because they were damaged and I wanted to get our home back to normal, but because I wanted to discard the mania of saving all of this stuff. And then the thought that I've been a fool, thinking this stuff had any value and that I could somehow defeat time by writing everything down, in diaries and poems and letters, and saving all of this junk. These papers would have been in my literary archives, the latest and possibly last accrual, but even these papers would have eventually ended up in the dust bin which is how the cosmos works, everything returns to nothing, and it does not favour permanency. I think of the Doukhobors who, finding one of there own has gone over to the side of materialism, no longer a "spirit wrestler", will burn down that person's big house and, they thought, restore the person to a spiritual sense of life. But, at the end, does any of it matters? We are all headed to nothing from the nothing we came from, leaving behind a few words, chalk on sidewalks, or a fragment of a poem, and even that is being optimistic, the rest is like Shelley's "Ozymandias". I am too old for this folly, or any folly for that matter.