disastertraeume

National Geographic, Vol. 182, July 1992

photo by Joel Sartore for article "America's Third Coast"

Captioned: Holy Rosary Cemetery shares common ground with the petrochemical plants massed upriver from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. High rates of malignancies among residents have tagged the region Cancer Alley. - article author Douglas Bennet Lee

«The body must be dissolved in the subtlest middle air: the body also dissolves in its own heat and moisture; where the soul, the middle nature, retains dominion over the color of darkness in all parts of the glass: the darkness of nature, which the ancient philosophers called the raven's head, or the black Sun.»

—Marsilio Ficino

Art: Splendor solis, c. 1582

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.