Keeping Watch

As I watch, from the other side of the world, the disaster in the Carolinas wrought by Hurricane Florence, I have very mixed feelings. I am amazed at the overwhelming response to the event - the number of people either appointed to provide support or volunteers who just want to help the people who live in the path of the storm, who have to endure the high winds, the heavy rains and the floods. But also the media coverage: CNN sent all its top reporters (Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon) to provide 24/7 coverage of what they are calling the "storm of a lifetime."

I find myself bemused by the sheer scale of the disaster response in the States, but not especially surprised. The reason is simply that response to disasters  here in the Philippines where I am living is nonexistent or simply too little, too late. As I write this, a category 5 Super Typhoon named Mangkhut in Asia (but named Ompong in the Philippines for utterly inexplicable reasons) has moved across the northern tip of the main island of Luzon with probable but, as of yet, unreported deaths and damage. There was another typhoon, at least as powerful, that passed close by my location in November 2013. It was named Haiyan to everyone else, but Yolanda to Filipinos, which has led to predictable confusion whenever the storm is mentioned to anyone outside fhe country.

Here are some things you won't see in the wake of Hurricane Florence that happened here after Typhoon Haiyan: police positioned to protect property, like Malls, abandoning their posts and going to help their helpless families; armed gangs going door to door robbing households of everything of value (and raping girls and women there); mass looting - entire malls stripped of their merchandise, grocery stores of their food; fishermen bringing drowned people up in their nets; hundreds of dead bodies interred in mass graves before they are even identified because morgues run out of space and there is no power (for almost 6 weeks); misappropriation of millions of dollars in international relief (the governor on my island detoured rice shipments and sold it all on the black market - I saw it happen); ordinary people setting up makeshift stores to sell the food they looted at exorbitant prices; price gouging of gasoline and other necessities. Plus a death toll at around 8,000 because people's grass huts and wood shacks were blown apart. No warnings, no evacuations, no rescues. No cellphone signal for 10 days, no internet connection for two weeks, no power for almost 6 weeks, no Anderson Cooper, no Chris Cuomo, no Don Lemon providing 24/7 coverage. Nobody cared. 

These massive storms are likely the consequence of climate change, or what they used fo call global warming. I am bemused, but again not exactly surprised, at the American inaction in the face of irrefutable evidence of what is happening and what is probably coming if something isn't done. Watching the news coverage of Hurricane Florence, which has stationed reporters on the shores of the Carolinas, I found myself looking up a poem by Robert Frost called "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep":

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be---
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

It was published in 1936 as part of the collection A Further Range, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The collection also contains "Desert Places," "Design," and "Provide, Provide." It isn't among Frost's best known or most popular poems, both because of its qualities as a poem, which are great, and because it is tacitly critical of his readers, humanity, that can't seem to find its way to looking farther or deeper into the universe. It can't even look at what is in front of its face the things that could spare it a multitude of problems - like climate change.

The poem's broader implications, which can't get much broader than they are, have been discussed to death since its publication. Still, the poem stands apart, unassailably itself. The best commentary on the poem I have read is in Randall Jarrell's book, Poetry and the Age. Jarrell was one of Frost's champions, who argued both against the superficial popular image of Frost as a Farmer's Almanac poet of homespun wisdom and the academic (wilful) ignorance of his occasional greatness, in poems like "Home Burial," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Acquainted with the Night," and "Directive." Here is Jarrell's commentary:

First of all, of course, the poem is simply there, in indifferent unchanging actuality; but our thought about it, what we are made to make of it, is there too, made to be there. When we choose between land and sea, the human and the inhuman, the finite and the infinite, the sea has to be the infinite that floods in over us endlessly, the hypnotic monotony of the universe that is incommensurable with us—everything into which we look neither very far nor very deep, but look, look just the same. And yet Frost doesn't say so—it is the geometry of this very geometrical poem, its inescapable structure, that says so. There is the deepest tact and restraint in the symbolism; it is like Housman's

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.

But Frost's poem is flatter, greyer, and at once tenderer and more terrible, without even the consolations of rhetoric and exaggeration - there is no "primal fault" in Frost's poem, but only the faint Biblical memories of "any watch they keep." What we do know we don't care about; what we do care about we don't know: we can't look out very far, or in very deep; and when did that ever bother us? It would be hard to find anything more unpleasant to say about people than that last stanza; but Frost doesn't say it unpleasantly—he says it with flat ease, takes everything with something harder than contempt, more passive than acceptance. And isn't there something heroic about the whole business, too - something touching about our absurdity? If the fool persisted in his folly he would become a wise man, Blake said, and we have persisted.

The tone of the last lines—or, rather, their careful suspension between several tones, as a piece of iron can be held in the air between powerful enough magnets—allows for this too. This recognition of the essential limitations of man, without denial or protest or rhetoric or palliation, is very rare and very valuable, and rather usual in Frost's best poetry. One is reminded of Empson's thoughtful and truthful comment on Gray's "Elegy": "Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem … And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society would prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy."(1)

Standing on the beach in the middle of a hurricane might seem like insanity, instead of when you're a reporter and a cameraman revealing what is in store for so many of us if we're not more careful. We must go on keeping watch, heedless of our native limitations.

(1) from Poetry and the Age (Knopf, 1953).