Fairy Tales and Rain

Rain. Rain. I think we actually had forgotten. It started around 3:00, I think, after the Something noise that was so loud today I cannot even remember it's nature, something recorded, a man's voice or was it a machine noise? With each new noise I think - my slumbered brain - no this, that, this is the most annoying noise so far.

But after that the rain began. So strongly that it terrified, and woke, and I listened to it pounding the tin roof and thought of all the phrases of romance - rain on a tin roof - and how they didn't know, the way of violence in it, too, how even as I lay there saying, you do not need to be afraid, this is not something of which to be afraid. Convince. Convince. Yet it terrified.

How the sound of screaming, or the sound of gunfire/crashing/consistent pounding of an energy directed in packets of such force, that no matter the source: this is the noise that terrifies. Upsets. The thunder I found ok. It made me part of it. Rumbling the entire house, shaking my bed, myself, we'll go down together.

I thought about the advantages of grass and reeds. And hoped that was true. Thought about the hill in Swaziland and how the rain on that reed roof fell padded, and muffled, comforting, and you dry underneath and sure of it. How grass absorbed the noise and took it in, the violence, and made it like the crash of waves on sand, all that force met without resistance, bending, opening, and so losing its very nature, comforted and convinced, a mother with a crying baby who redirects the energy and transforms. That is the difference. The tin resists. It holds together, hits back, will not submit or change. And so it is the anger implicit in the interaction that terrifies. How do I trust a protection (tin roof) that cannot understand that moving with the wind is how you are saved? That is the difference. I want angels of subtlety, grace. The wisdom to sometimes lean in the direction of the fall.

That the earthquakes continue. Little earthquakes all the time. Little tremors and trembling and even through the day I felt it. A moment's thought of dizziness; change of inner ear; measurements? Then laying down at night and a moment calm and then a tremor and watching the mosquito net wave and wobble like the papyrus mat shelf, swinging from the rafters, as if a stiff breeze had just picked up and gusted and me laying there, holding my breath to make sure it wasn't just me influencing these things.

As if breath was all that mattered.

Does it?

Not strong ones. Or that's what you would say, in lieu of thinking about the fact of the earth itself moving, of what it takes, deep down so many meters to shift the roots of grasses, to wave and wobble the things that are suspended, from beneath them. How about that.

How about it.

Like nighttime on a ship and you there hoping it stays only that way, a rhythm for sleeping, not an explosion for waking. Powdered air. That peculiar nausea when your head is hit so hard. These remembered thoughts from Haiti. My thoughts. Others' memories. All absorbed by staring hard enough at what a building looks like After.

Images I almost forget. The water pot shifts while Mama Cele is away at the market on a Sunday and when it does the coals send out pops of ash, burning, embers, except they appear to simply explode in air, not derived from the coals themselves or the brasero where the coals are piled but just a popping sound and magically the air around the leaning pot is filled with brilliant sparks that disappear as soon as they exist, as I stand watching with my coffee spoon paused against the tin cup and as the person next to me piles rice on his plate, unaware that something out of Cinderella is taking place right in front of our eyes. Cinderella.

I think of fairy tales a lot here. It is unclear why. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Thoughts of myth come alive. Striking colors. A place where fires are used again for cooking, and small huts huddle in forests, puffing smoke. A place with baby animals; waddling ducks.

So this is how I wonder right then - watching these sparks - why in our fairy tales we have turned pumpkins magical and so mice and talking pigs and cats and dogs and why in all this anthropomorphism we have never tapped the cooking pot with our wand of storytelling and asked it, too, to talk. I am caught all of a sudden watching magic in front of my eyes, and not understanding it, and thinking about Fantasia and broomsticks, and how we call it Magic just because the air is filled suddenly with something that appears without visual derivative. And what of wind? Why have we let that go? Where is It in our fairy tales?