Flood Songs
Hellen Ascoli, Lake Floor, 2018. From correspondence with the author.
Commissioned for More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas
Ed. Lacy M. Johnson. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2021.
Full text here.
(Excerpt)
…
The noise of the flood is by turns cacophonous, quiet, rhythmic, repetitive, and unbearable— music that can lead us to dance, just as the water moves the earth beneath our feet, and just as we lean in relation to all its muddy possibilities.
“...to survive, we need to relearn multiple forms of curiosity,” write the editors of the collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. They cite “Marrow,” Ursula Le Guin’s poem about listening to a rock and being unable to force a word from it: the stone speaks when it wants, but it does speak. Multiple kinds of listening are necessary, they argue, to face what comes next, to hear what the earth and its movements tell us. Floods are only one symptom of our violent “lean forward” to extract, crush, blow apart, and conquer this land for financial gain.
Many of the artists in my orbit in recent years have been thinking of other ways of listening, especially to the natural world. Gabriel Rodriguez Pellecer invents a machine for hearing the thoughts of the sun; a large metal bowl that he holds to his ear channels the rays of sun into pensamiento. Ascoli weaves a textile to the dimensions of her body and then carries it to the high plateaus of the Cuchumatanes, holding the weave around her and reaching it up, connecting to sky, an antenna to talk to her slain brother. Mario Alberto López builds microphones tuned to the slight vibrations of plants and then translates these sounds to a series of drawings. There are many more.
And what if we listen to a flood as it rolls over what we imagined possible, following or fleeing its unsettling waters, shimmying and dipping to its pummeling rhythms?
This is something the ghost dancers knew: there is power in circling together, appealing to the rains and the mudslides and the living landscapes that surround us, embracing movement as a productive unmooring, a dance, and a shimmer. The music of the flood might be a white noise, an epic crash, a holding, and...also... at last... a quiet. That flood noise lingers in devastation, reconstruction, in social surfaces soaked through; it comes in a shudder and a smell. The music of the flood might be a way of describing our entanglements with the world around us, our inability to make sense of them, our precarious footing even as we keep moving to that beat, as to a beating.
Homes hold a special place in our shared imaginary, I think. As they did for my mother, decades ago, they symbolize certain kinds of stability, even when their symbolism fails the reality of what they hold, neglects the ways they may crumble or wash away. This disconnect between the image of home and its lived decrepitude is at the heart of many battles over national identity, xenophobia, immigration, environmental collapse, and civic values.
We gather at my home in Guatemala City after protests, for meals, to listen to records, when visitors come to town. I certainly participate in a romance with home, as someone whose home is embodied in everything I do, as someone whose home is a personaje, a named character who lives with me and offers respite for others.
And yet, as I write this, a chemical cloud hangs low over Houston. A fire in Deer Park rages at a petrochemical plant and its smoky trail hovers above our homes as poisonous runoff seeps into nearby waterways and the ship channel. And yet, as I write this, a man stops in front of my apartment building and fires a shotgun into my neighbor’s home nine times before speeding away. I gather with my neighbors behind the building, hugging their children to us, breathing in the toxic air, a light drizzle covering our skins with chemical rain. We choose to gather—in our homes, in our scholarship, in our visual practices, in our readings, in our politics—knowing, even as we gather, that it will not save us from the future. We know, too, that gathering holds us in the unstable present. Jorge de León paints Houston flooded, again, just weeks before Harvey hits.
We see the floods coming because they have already come.
….
—Laura August, PhD
Guatemala, March 2019