[Hokusai, The Great Wave at Kanagawa, c. 1830]
[some edits below]
First, the sea took the shore. She surged and sucked up the sand and gravel, all the soil and clay. She plucked twisted trees from the earth as if they were turnips. Herons nesting in the reeds, wild deer and hunter, she took them too, washed them down her gullet and belched.
Then she took the roads, pulled them like taffy, tossed trucks and houses like game pieces, dice. She took whole temples into her arms. And then she took back her rivers, swollen beyond their banks until the levees disappeared. She took the farmers’ neat squares of grain, and because she was not satisfied, she took the granaries too.
The fishermen bowed. They gave her rice. Incense was lit.Vessels of the clearest water placed at every altar. She mocked these little vessels, this little water, and she took the barges and boats. With a backhand, she slapped the barges and boats, swatted away the captains and fishermen, into the underbellies of bridges.
And she looked at the brown soup of concrete chunks, stone blocks, crushed automobiles, bloated livestock, monks, worshipers, field hands, grandmothers, and she was pleased. So she said to the fleeing caravan, run if you like, but recognize. From the sea you came, and to the sea your tiny bodies shall return.
* * *
I asked the students in workshop last night to write a genesis or a creation story, after reading Miguel Piñero’s “The Book of Genesis According to St. Miguelito.” I noticed that one student seemed to be having a bit of trouble with the prompt. So I thought I’d try it myself. We watched NHK’s live tsunami footage in horror last night, and this reminded me of the cruel God of Piñero’s poem.
This might be an odd place to go with this, but one of the places your post took me –
It made me think of the European 20th century classical music piece, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the piece — the first time I heard it, when I was about 8 years old, I liked the music, though the relentless and, at times, almost violent discords in the music, the passages full of blaring horns and pounding rhythms, seemed to me a strange choice for music about spring.
(When the music was first performed, in Paris in I think 1913, it caused great upheaval in the audience, which included several of the leading European composers of the day. Some loved the explosively experimental quality of the music, others heard only chaos and clashing noise.)
Many years later, some commentary I read somewhere about the music explained that in parts of Russia and the Asian regions further east, spring is a fairly violent season, at least initially, characterized by roaring winds and sudden bursting of rivers as the winter ice clears.
I once read a short memoir by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who grew up in a small village in Siberia, in which he said that in the spring as the rivers are thawing, the ice breaks with huge loud booming sounds, that can be heard for miles across the open plains.
Once some years back here in Minneapolis one winter, it got cold enough — and quickly enough — one night that the ice on the roofs of buildings stressed and cracked with similar loud booming sounds. There were reports of the loud sounds scattered across the city. It happened on the roof of my apartment building, nothing catastrophic, but a sudden loud boom, as though the building were a bass drum and someone had just struck the drumhead.
I can relate, in one way and another, to the creation story you tell here.