Buscando Borges

The infinite Aleph of Borges' 1949 story, "The Aleph," is "a small irridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness" that contains all of universal space without changing its actual size. It is in the basement of Carlos Argentino's family house near the corner of Avenida Garay and Calle Tacuari. Is the house (and the Aleph) still there? The story suggests not. Zurno and Zungi, CA's neighbors were expanding their "enormous cafe" and were going to tear down CA's house in the late 1940's. Maybe, I think, I'll just stroll over there and see whether the building is still standing. What's more, CA's lawyer, Licenciado Zurni has an office at Tacuari near Avenida Caseros which "is one of proverbial sobriety." That is two blocks south of CA's important basement. It's not a long walk.

Ample discouragement of this adventure to Plaza Constitucion arises. Everyone tells me not to show up in that barrio unless I really want to be separated from my wallet. Or my head. A NY Times Article(5/14/06; sorry no link now) seems to confirm this. The author passes the corner shielded in a moving taxi and charitably describes the site as "anonymous." He doesn't stop to get out and look around. A predominantly gray photo on Flickr (sorry no link now) clinches the deal. There is nothing to look at. Walk canceled.

Instead I select a walk on the nearby eponymous street in Palermo Viejo. Number 2135 of the street formerly known as Serrano bears a simple plaque that the building was there JLB lived a century ago (1901-1914) as an infant. It is a two-story, brick home with a sharply pointed, arched entryway. Is the front entrance Romanesque? Norma? Does that have anything to do with JLB's later interest in North European lanuages and myths? I am no expert.

Today the building's first floor is occupied by a hair salon humorously dubbed "Maldito Frizz."I imagine that JLB might be surprised by this development. And by the nearby "Cybrborges" internet store. But maybe not.

These speculations are easily resolved by taking the 3 block walk to the zoo and observing JLB's beloved Tigres. When I arrive, the tiger is lying down. After a while she gets up to stroll the cage and observe the observers. Borges would have been delighted. I certainly was.

The Ceremony

I started calling his children, his spouse, his ex-spouses, people he liked, people he worked with. At first nobody knew anything at all about the notebooks. Finally, his daughter said she didn’t have all of them, but she did have what she thought was the final one. A Moleskine. Apparently with squares. One that opens from the top. She had never read it. And she was quite reluctant to let me read it. It was, she said, an important, private keepsake. She did not want to part with it. She’d consider my request to read the others if she found them

One day he died. Then there was the memorial service. Then months went by. And then one morning inexplicably I wondered about his notebooks. Where were they? What had happened to them?

He was a writer. He was always writing in them. At the kitchen table. Under an umbrella at the beach. On a park bench. In a cafe. He said he was scribbling. Asked about what he was writing, he offered only irony. Yes, he was writing in them, but his handwriting was so bad he’d never be able to decipher what he wrote, that this was, therefore, just a ritualized way to think about things as he put them down. He’d never be able to retrieve his words later on. He must have been writing stories, or a third novel, or ideas for new work, or articles, and trying to keep them a secret.

And the notebooks themselves. They were, as I remember them, a bizarre collection of sublime Moleskines, cuadernos filled with cheap toilet paper he bought in Mexican supermarkets, spiral ones of all shapes, many with strange lines. I imagined them an unruly heap of dusty, yellowed, frayed pages, stained with coffee and red wine, all tied together sloppily with brown, garden twine. Where could they be now? I wanted to read them.

About a month later, after hearing nothing from her, I called his daughter again. “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t call you because there aren’t any other notebooks. They’re all gone.”

She had finally managed to read the one she had. It was an excruciatingly difficult struggle and very time consuming to parse all the scribbling, but she had managed ultimately to understand what was in it.

His horrible handwriting, he claimed, was the visible legacy of McCarthyism. In first grade, when it was time to learn to write, he refused to single himself out to be segregated in the first row by the windows, his desk turned to the right. No. That was humiliating. Instead, he made believe that he too was right handed. At that point nobody could write enough with either hand for it really to matter. His unreadable penmanship was begun. It would stick with him until the end.

In an entry written shortly before he passed on, his daughter told me, he was railing at Max Brod for publishing Kafka’s work posthumously despite Kafka’s direction to destroy it. And he was ranting about a short story by Ricardo Piglia which purported to discover a lost work of Roberto Arlt. The entry was as illegible as it was furious. It digressed uncontrollably, and ended with his dread that anyone would ever exhume his many notebooks and read them. He was plainly quite agitated when he wrote the entry. He had no intention to let anyone read what he had written.

The entries, he claimed, were all virtually identical. For more than forty years he had been engaged in elaborating some of the infinite variations on the same very simple theme.

“Did he say what that was?”

Evidently it had to do with his use of notebooks to ferret out how he felt, about the conditions of his interior flora and fauna. He was trying to sort out and care for the many species living in his emotional forest. Were the trees full of noisome chatter? Were ravens suffering angst? Were the monkeys critical? Were the ants pleased? Were the coatis satisfied? Mostly he was the game warden. He was the steward of this invisible world, pushing his mind’s clamor and his heart’s many confusions onto the pages, where he could thoroughly examine them. It had nothing to do with making art. Or stories. He was a writer, yes, but, he insisted, the notebooks didn’t contain writing.

Where were the rest of them? Maybe, I thought, they had some stories in them. Or some accounts of his life. Or something he could be remembered by.

She assured me they were all gone. In the winter, he had held what he called “a ceremony.” He built a large fire in the field. The ground was frozen, and there was a crisp coating of brittle snow. A sharp wind blew from the North, scattering sparks and ash across the snow to the South. He burned all the old notebooks, placing them one by one in the fire. At the end, there were only ashes and the scorched wires from the spiral ones, and a few charred paperclips. And a blackened clasp.

He had reduced four decades of introspection to ash, heat, flame and smoke. Eventually even the remaining metal would rust and degrade into dust.

I imagined he must have said something about his intentions for “the ceremony,” its significance.

“No,” she told me, “He didn’t write that down.”





Buenos Aires, 11/26/10

Note: A special thank you to CSM for great editing advice.

Happy Thanksgiving From The Dream Antilles

Tomorrow promises to be an unusual Thanksgiving for me. It's the first I can recall in a very long time on which I was not in the US.

So we'll have our version of Argentinian Thanksgiving tomorrow. No turkeys will need to be pardoned or executed. We'll gather family and friends, go around the table to note our gratitude, and eat far too much. You might enjoy the first parts of this ritual at your own gatherings. For the last you should remember that unless you're a professional on a closed course, you shouldn't try it at home.

Buena Fiesta!

And How Are We Today?

Woof Woof Woof Woof. Repeat as necessary.

Haiti: The Suffering Overflows

Forgive that this diary is too short.

The New York Times his evening is reporting that the cholera epidemic in Haiti is growing rapidly:

The death toll in Haiti’s cholera epidemic has reached more than 900, the government reported Sunday, as aid groups rushed soap and clean water to a disaster-wracked population to fight the disease.

The Ministry of Health reported that as of Friday, there had been 917 deaths and more than 14,600 were hospitalized with cholera-like symptoms. That is up from the 724 deaths and 11,125 hospitalizations reported a few days before.

The disease has been found in 6 of Haiti’s 10 provinces, known as departments, and is most severe where it originated, in Artibonite, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the deaths.

Several epidemiologists have said the disease has not peaked and will likely worsen and break out in other regions of the country, with United Nations health officials estimating about 270,000 may be sickened in the coming years.

And the disease has clearly arrived in Port au Prince, where hundreds of thousands still are living in tents or under tarps or are homeless:

Hospitals in Port-au-Prince, where more than one million earthquake refugees live in congested, squalid tent encampments, are overflowing with patients exhibiting cholera symptoms, and the death toll there has reached 27. The disease was first reported in the capital on Nov. 8.

President René Préval, at a conference on the disease on Sunday in Port-au-Prince, urged people to wash their hands frequently and drink only potable water, The Associated Press reported. But even before the earthquake, most of the population lacked access to clean water and sanitation.

There is very little you and I can do about this other than stand by in horror and watch thousands of people die of the disease. What we can do is two things: we can make a donation to ngo's who are on the scene providing medicine and care for stricken people. I recommend Doctors Without Borders, but there are many other ngo's doing exemplary work in Haiti.

And we can get on the phones and send email and write letters urging our congresspersons to make sure that the 1.15 billion appropriated after the January earthquake is actually delivered to Haiti. There is an immediate need for $170 million for cholera care; that could be eased if the US funds are released.

I am sorry that I didn't provide you with links. And I am sorry that I have been writing basically the same diary for the past week with little attention. It is the least I can do. All that remains is to offer prayers for the health and safety of Haiti's people.

Haiti: UN Appeals For Aid, US Sits On Wallet

Haiti is in need of millions of dollars to combat the cholera epidemic, but the US is still holding back $1.15 billion in Aid that has already been appropriated. It's time to tell your congress members to stop sitting on the wallet and get that money to Haiti, where it's urgently needed.

AFP today reports on the need for $164 million in aid to combat the cholera epidemic in Haiti:

GENEVA — The United Nations on Friday appealed for nearly 164 million dollars in aid to tackle cholera in Haiti and avoid being "overrun" by the growing epidemic.

"We hope we can get this otherwise all our efforts will be overrun by the epidemic," said Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Byrs said UN, other aid agencies and Haiti's health ministry needed 163.8 million dollars for a strategy to stifle the sudden epidemic, which has infected more than 11,000 people and killed 724 since last month.

The strategy drawn up by the UN "anticipates up to 200,000 people to show symptoms of cholera ranging from cases of mild diarrhoea to the most severe dehydration" over a period of about six months, OCHA and the World Health Organisation said.

That's an urgent need for $163.8 million dollars.

The US previously appropriated $1.15 billion dollars in aid for Haiti, but guess what? That money has not been delivered. In other words, the funds needed to combat the cholera epidemic are already appropriated in the US but Congress is sitting on the wallet and the aid has not been delivered. That means that unless the US releases these funds, aid for fighting the cholera epidemic has to come from elsewhere.

Yesterday's Miami Herald Editorial, which is worth reading in its entirety because it describes the situation in Haiti fully, made the point about these funds clearly:

President Obama can send a signal by calling for lawmakers to move quickly to allow disbursement of $1.15 billion in reconstruction money for Haiti. The president signed a bill approving the money last July, but the funds remain stuck on Capitol Hill while lawmakers quibble over the details of a spending plan.

I agree with that. I haven't heard the President or anybody in government call for the immediate release of these funds. So yesterday I wrote requesting that all of us immediately email and phone and write our congresspersons to demand the release of these funds. Yesterday the silence that resulted from this was disturbing. You'd think we'd want to get these funds released.

So I am trying again today and sending the same message:

It's simple what to do. Email or call your Senators and Congresspersons. Ask them, please, to make sure that these funds get released.

Here's my email, that I sent to Senators Schumer and Gillibrand:

I am deeply concerned that the cholera epidemic in Haiti endangers the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and that US aid to the country is bogged down and has not been received. The Congress appropriated more than $1 billion for aid to Haiti after the earthquake earlier this year. Today's Miami Herald Editorial notes, "President Obama can send a signal by calling for lawmakers to move quickly to allow disbursement of $1.15 billion in reconstruction money for Haiti. The president signed a bill approving the money last July, but the funds remain stuck on Capitol Hill while lawmakers quibble over the details of a spending plan." I am writing because I want you to do whatever is in your power to get this aid delivered to Haiti. This aid is already long overdue. And receipt of this aid in Haiti is urgently needed to save lives.

Please pitch in. I don't want to sit here and watch this cholera epidemic unfold without a major effort to stop it.

The small act of writing or calling Congress can save thousands of lives in Haiti. Please join me in getting these funds released.

Haiti: Time To Email And Call Congress

Enough. I've been writing for the past week, daily, because I'm concerned that the cholera outbreak in Haiti endangers the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and especially threatens the more than a million Haitians who are living in tents or under tarps in Port au Prince and elsewhere in the country.

This morning's Miami Herald Editorial captures exactly what needs to be said in the US about this impending public health disaster:

As of Wednesday, cholera had claimed at least 583 lives and sickened more than 9,000, according to the Health Ministry. Frantic aid workers are fighting to keep the outbreak from spreading into congested earthquake survivor camps in Port-au-Prince.

This is misery piled upon misery, part of the burden of history in a country where natural disasters are practically a chronic affliction. But this time around Haiti's problems have been compounded by the inexcusably slow pace of recovery and reconstruction.

Ten months after the earthquake, more than one million people still live under plastic sheeting, vulnerable to rainstorms and other menaces. Security in these camps is woefully lacking.
Much of the devastation, meanwhile, has not been cleaned up. Mountains of rubble are evident wherever the earthquake hit. So far, only 5 percent has been removed, far short of the amount that could reasonably have been expected. Bureaucratic delays in disbursing available funds are a major reason for the lack of progress.

These are basic relief tasks that have been left undone. Tireless work by an army of relief workers has stabilized the situation, but the cholera epidemic threatens to undo their efforts.
The reasons for the shaky start are not hard to fathom -- the scale of the devastation, widespread poverty, an ineffective government that suffered a crippling blow when the earthquake destroyed virtually all of the federal buildings and killed thousands of public employees.
But that was, we repeat, 10 months ago. Humanitarian emergencies are never easy to cope with, particularly an off-the-charts disaster like the one that rocked Haiti. Yet despite an encouraging international response at the outset and promises of coordination and cooperation at all levels, the effort has bogged down.

You already know that. The editorial then repeats something I have been saying since the first news of cholera was reported and which is the reason we now need to take action:

President Obama can send a signal by calling for lawmakers to move quickly to allow disbursement of $1.15 billion in reconstruction money for Haiti. The president signed a bill approving the money last July, but the funds remain stuck on Capitol Hill while lawmakers quibble over the details of a spending plan.

It's simple what to do. Email or call your Senators and Congresspersons. Ask them, please, to make sure that these funds get released.

Here's my email, that I sent to Senators Schumer and Gillibrand:

I am deeply concerned that the cholera epidemic in Haiti endangers the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and that US aid to the country is bogged down and has not been received. The Congress appropriated more than $1 billion for aid to Haiti after the earthquake earlier this year. Today's Miami Herald Editorial notes, "President Obama can send a signal by calling for lawmakers to move quickly to allow disbursement of $1.15 billion in reconstruction money for Haiti. The president signed a bill approving the money last July, but the funds remain stuck on Capitol Hill while lawmakers quibble over the details of a spending plan." I am writing because I want you to do whatever is in your power to get this aid delivered to Haiti. This aid is already long overdue. And receipt of this aid in Haiti is urgently needed to save lives.

Please pitch in. I don't want to sit here and watch this cholera epidemic unfold without a major effort to stop it.

Haiti: Cholera Epidemic Grows

The news from Haiti continues to be simply awful. The cholera epidemic that started elsewhere has now reached the Haitian capital, Port Au Prince, where it threatens the 1.5 million people who were displaced by the recent earthquake. "Displaced" is a sanitary way of describing the squalor of terrible living conditions which only foster the spread of the disease.

The epidemic threatens the lives of people who suffered so much in the earthquake and who then survived the rain and flooding caused by Hurricane Tomas. Even before these natural disasters, Haiti was wracked by hunger, poor infrastructure, high infant mortality, short life span, poverty and disease. Now weakened people face the onslaught of a cholera epidemic.


The Miami Hearald reports:

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- With 73 people hospitalized for cholera in this quake-battered capital, the epidemic is spreading and has officially made its way into Haiti's largest city.

``We are on a rise,'' said Christian Lindmeier, spokesman for the World Health Organization in Haiti. ``The figures will climb.''

The cholera death toll now stands at 583, and 9,123 Haitians have been hospitalized with acute diarrhea, Haiti's health ministry said Tuesday.

The increase comes amid fears that flooding from last week's Hurricane Tomas will trigger more hospitalizations and even more deaths from the illness that is spread by drinking contaminated water.
Haitian government health officials acknowledged that the epidemic is evolving and has not yet peaked.

The Ministry of Health says the obvious, that the situation "is now a matter of national security." There's no doubt about that:

The spread of the disease to Port-au-Prince is worrisome because the overcrowded capital is not only home to most of the 1.5 million people displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake and still living in tents or under tarps but also to hundreds of thousands of other people living without access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation.

Among those who have become ill are 115 people who sought treatment at a hospital in Cité Soleil, a teeming slum in the capital, Timothee said. Officials say they are still awaiting lab results to see if the patients have cholera or another illness that causes similar symptoms.

What emerges is a dreadful picture of widespread, unmitigated suffering of the Haitian people.

What is to be done about this? As I wrote yesterday and the day before,

Two things are clear: all US aid that was appropriated for Haiti, more than a billion dollars, needs to be freed up and delivered there. And it is also a good time to make contributions to organizations that aid Haiti. I recommend Doctors Without Borders.

I am horrified by what I see approaching in Haiti and the scale of human suffering that it portends. I continue to write about this, but I feel like Cassandra, that I combine insight into the future with utter helplessness.

Haiti: Cholera Found in Port Au Prince

As feared, Cholera appears to have arrived in Port Au Prince, Haiti. A first confirmed case has now been reported: the 3 year-old child with the disease had not left Port Au Prince. This outbreak is a major threat to millions of people. The report:

Haiti's cholera outbreak has spread to the capital Port-au-Prince, putting the lives of millions of homeless people at risk.

Health authorities said a three-year-old boy who has not left the city in the last year had caught the disease....

More than 100 suspected cases of cholera among residents of the capital are being investigated.
The outbreak has already killed at least 544 people in other areas of Haiti, according to health ministry executive director Gabriel Timothee.

He said many of the patients in hospital in Port-au-Prince are believed to have recently arrived from the Artibonite Valley, an agricultural area where more than 6,400 of Haiti's known 8,138 cases have been recorded.

The water-borne disease had never been reported in Haiti before its appearance last month.

The earthquake in Haiti demolished much of the weak infrastructure of that impoverished country. Even before the earthquake, sanitation and drinking water and food were major concerns. The earthquake made conditions far worse, evicting thousands form substandard housing and pushing them into make shift tent and shack encampmets in the capital. Then Tomas arrived. The storm brought intense rain and flooding, which seems to have overwhelmed the city's remaining sanitation systems. The street reek. Excrement is everywhere. It was only a matter of time in these conditions before the disease emerged.

Haiti's suffering continues. And now, there is an even greater risk to the lives of Haitians in the capital. As I wrote just yesterday,

Two things are clear: all US aid that was appropriated for Haiti, more than a billion dollars, needs to be freed up and delivered there. And it is also a good time to make contributions to organizations that aid Haiti. I recommend Doctors Without Borders.

Haiti: The Threat Of Cholera Continues

Hurricane Tomas could have been significantly worse. The storm moved slightly to the West; it didn't strike Port au Prince directly. Twenty people were killed. The news is reporting that fewer than 6,000 more people were rendered homeless by the storm. Against a backdrop of long term, pervasive suffering, the Hurricane did not harm as many as was feared. But now, amid all of the misery, another threat looms. Will the flooding make the cholera epidemic in Haiti even worse? CNN reports:

Experts feared Monday that the hurricane that battered Haiti over the weekend could worsen the outbreak of cholera that has killed hundreds of people and hospitalized thousands since it began last month.

The official death toll attributed to the outbreak was 544, with more than 8,000 confirmed cases, Health Minister Alex Larsen told CNN Monday.

Though no cases have been confirmed in Port-au-Prince, tests were being carried out on 91 residents of the capital -- all of whom live in or near the city's densely populated Cite Soleil slum, Larsen said. Except for one person who died over the weekend, all the others have recovered, he said.

Hurricane Tomas' trek past Haiti killed 20 people and injured another 36, a Communications Ministry official said Monday. Seven people were missing and 5,954 were homeless, the official said.

Health officials fear that the water dumped by the storm will worsen the outbreak. The concern is that overflow from latrines and septic tanks could contaminate the supply of fresh drinking water and contribute to the spread of the bacteria.

In the capital, the canals were not overflowing, said American Red Cross spokeswoman Andrea Koppel. But that was not the case in cities west of the capital, which bore the brunt of Hurricane Tomas, she said.

Still, even Port-au-Prince looks and smells like a dump -- a caldron of water, garbage and human waste. "We get used to it," said one resident.

It is extremely difficult to grasp how horrible conditions in Haiti truly are. Even before the recent earthquake, conditions were simply dreadful: poor sanitation, lack of clean water, widespread disease, gnawing poverty, pervasive hunger, high infant mortality, on and on and on. Haiti is by far the poorest country in this hemisphere. And this is nothing new. In 2008 the New York Times ran an article implying that conditions were so bad many Haitians wished they were still under the heal of the Duvaliers. That speaks eloquently to desperation.

The earthquake, of course, brought Haiti to a new level of national misery. And now Hurricane Tomas has made its own contribution to increasing Haiti's suffering. Has all of this brought Haiti now to the threshold of a huge cholera plague?

Two things are clear: all US aid that was appropriated for Haiti, more than a billion dollars, needs to be freed up and delivered there. And it is also a good time to make contributions to organizations that aid Haiti. I recommend Doctors Without Borders.

A Winter's Tale

Tonight Eastern Standard Time will begin. Again. And that, around here, is the dreaded beginning of horrible Winter. This, after all, is Upstate New York. I’m nestled against the Massachusetts border. And the beginning of Eastern Standard Time fills me with utter dread.

What stands between me and actual, below zero winter? First, deer hunting season. A very few hunters, fewer by far than a decade ago, will stagger drunkenly into the woods before dawn and send the grotesquely overpopulated deer into an unparalleled panic and frenzy. They’re already crazy because they’re in rut. The deer will then run into the roads and into cars. Why don’t they avoid the cars? Two reasons: first, they think the roads are made of ice, so they’re afraid of running on them. And second, there really is a reason for the phrase “a deer in the headlights.” This doesn’t begin explain why deer run into the sides of passing cars. And it doesn’t explain why the shoulders of all of the roads are filled with deer eyes reflecting headlights and waiting for an unfortunate moment to run into the road.

Second, football. Football around here is closely related to drinking too much. This shouldn’t surprise you. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were a fleet of cabs or volunteers ready to take sports fans home from wherever they are watching the games. But, well, there just aren’t. And there’s no real demand for that. Why is that? People who are very drunk make very bad decisions, chief among them are (1) hitting on women 25 years younger than they are and (2) thinking they are sober enough to drive home. The former gets you a bad reputation and potentially a punch in the nose; the latter, a criminal prosecution. No, I can hear you wondering about this. Let me set the record straight: nobody, no "sports fan" in that condition ever “gets lucky.” Ever. Forget about this idea. It is a delusion.

On weekdays in winter, there are about 12 cars per day on the main road. At night, the police greatly outnumber the drivers. After midnight, police feed on tippling drivers— those are the only ones driving--- as if the cops were lions and the drunk drivers were the Chrisitans or antelopes, or some other horned, edible animal.

The biggest problem is that in Winter it gets dark at 3 pm. And then the sun doesn’t really come out again for three months. This leads to chronic, widespread Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). When the sun does shine, as it does very rarely, it’s utterly blinding, as if we had been living in a dark cave for months on end.. And because of the unremitting cold and dense dark, otherwise sane people immediately want to remove all of their clothing when the mercury hits 20 degrees and bask in the sun’s mighty rays. This is a natural reaction. But it’s also horrifying. My neighbors and I are by then generally pale, and pretty fat to keep warm, and we have no business parading our nakedness. Even in front of our own mirrors. And at 20 degrees hypothermia sets in in minutes.

I can hear you saying, “It can’t be quite that bad.” Hah. I can hear you saying, “There must be things to do.” Hah. You have no idea.

We do have a public radio station to keep us company. But it seems to have only two programs. Prairie Home Companion, which it seems to play on a loop throughout the weekend, and Fundraising, which plays during the week. The station tries to raise $800,000 per fund drive. That is a huge amount of money. And there’s also commentary. Unfortunately, it seems there is only one commentator. And he’s on all the time, expressing his opinion or raising money or both. My opinion? Let me try to remember the last time any sane person asked for that. It seems the radio station has decided to have millions of transmitters and only 3 programs. This is a recipe for seasonal insanity, if not depression.

The rest of it is predictable. And unspeakably ugly. At 25 below zero, nobody’s car will start. When you sit on the seat, it will make a distinctive sound. “Crunk.” You will turn the key. Nothing will happen. Nothing. No click. No lights. Nothing. You will then hurry inside the house, but your face will already be frozen before you get there. And when you get inside, you’ll wonder why there is no real heat inside the house either. The answer to this is that oil is close to $3 a gallon as I write this, and headed higher. Nobody is going to set the interior thermometers at 72 degrees. That is a temperature reserved for Arizona.

I am now watching the clock. I know that later this evening, I will be gifted with an additional hour at the onset of Standard Time. I wish an hour could be taken away from me, deducted from the Winter. I’m worried. Hunting season will come and go shortly, and football with come to an end at the Super Bowl. And then, and then there will be many, many days and nights that are so cold that possums will try to come through the cat door. And small foxes will try to hide in the basement. And you’ll be able to split an oak log by hitting it with a ballpeen hammer. And it will go on like that interminably.

Tonight Winter will begin in all of its glory. I dread it.

Haiti: Tras La Tormenta

(CBS/AP) Hurricane Tomas was downgraded to a tropical storm early Saturday as it passed over the Turks and Caicos Islands, losing steam a day after battering seaside towns in Haiti.

Haiti was pummeled with 85 mph winds and from five to ten inches of rain. A foot of standing water fills the capital of Port-au-Prince, where four people are dead and two are missing. ...

It's been raining all night in Port-au-Prince and, for earthquake refugees living in tent cities, it has been a miserable night, reports CBS News producer John Bentley.

There over a million people living in the portable structures, and the rain has been coming down since the sun went down. The streets are flooded and a lot of rivers and streams are overflowing, causing a lot of problems. But as far as Hurricane Tomas goes, Haiti dodged a bullet - the eye missed Port-au-Prince.

If they didn't get the strong winds and major flooding they were worried about, the other problem will be how the storm affects the water and sewage supplies - important as Haiti battles a cholera epidemic in which 400 people have died.

source

The details:

On Friday, panicked residents fled a coastal city in Haiti that had been slammed twice already this decade by killer floods. The hurricane spared most earthquake-refugee camps in the capital but battered a seaside town to the west that was nearly destroyed by January's earthquake.

Coming ashore at Haiti's far southwestern edge, Tomas slammed the coastline with 85-mph winds and killed at least four people with storm surge and rains.

It then flooded camps harboring earthquake refugees, turning some into squalid islands in Leogane, a town west of the capital that lost 90 percent of its buildings and thousands of people in the Jan. 12 quake. Two people were missing in the city.

Tomas turned streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince, into canals of flowing garbage. The storm largely spared the city's vast homeless encampments, however, allaying fears that an estimated 1.3 million displaced people would suffer from high winds and rain on hillsides and in parks and streets.

Haitians had high hopes that the storm would move on before triggering floods in Gonaives, a northwestern coastal city that completely flooded in 2004 and again in 2008, killing thousands. As rains fell on the city's slums of Raboteau and Jubilee, people living in the low-lying areas began heading for high ground.

"It's not a major flood, but it's flooding in some areas," Doctors Without Borders spokesman Francois Servranckx told The Associated Press.

And so the storm has passed Haiti. It has left a new disaster in its wake. And Haiti will now, again, fade from the traditional media and disappear behind a curtain. That would make this a great time to remember the suffering in Haiti and to send a donation-- even small donations mount up-- to Doctors Without Borders.

May all in Haiti be free from suffering. May all be well. May all be safe.

Haiti: On The Effectiveness Of Ceremonies, Part II

This is working. Really.

The idea is to shoot the gap. Put Tomas between the islands. So far so good. A little to the West might be better, but this is definitely looking good.  A work that is progressing.  Whatever you are doing, keep doing it.

Haiti: Hurricane Tomas Remains A Huge Threat

Despite yesterday's hopeful news, that the storm had moved to the west and might be weakening and disorganizing, today brought more bad news about the storm's arrival in Haiti from BBC:

Haiti has been placed on high alert as a powerful storm sweeps in, threatening thousands of earthquake survivors still living in camps.

Forecasters say Tropical Storm Tomas is gaining strength and will begin to lash Haiti by late Thursday, reaching full force by Friday.

Some camps are being evacuated and officials have told those living in tents to move to stronger shelter.

Health workers fear heavy rain will exacerbate Haiti's cholera epidemic.

It looks on todays' forecast map like the storm may have moved "mysteriously" to the West and that it will not directly come ashore in Haiti. That is good news:

But, despite this move, the prediction remains dire: there may be torrential rains leading to mudslides and loss of sanitation and destruction of infrastructure and potentially loss of life:

"On the forecast track, the centre will pass near Haiti or extreme eastern Cuba (late Thursday) and early Friday," the NHC said.

The storm is expected to dump as much as 38cm (15in) of rain over Haiti and the neighbouring Dominican Republic, with more heavy rain over Jamaica and Cuba.

It, of course, remains to be seen whether the storm will actually fortify, whether it will stay on its course, and whether the rainfall prediction is accurate. Jeff Masters ledes this morning with somewhat hopeful news:

Tropical Storm Tomas is headed north towards Haiti, and the northernmost spiral bands of the storm have already reached the tip of Haiti's southwestern peninsula and the eastern tip of Jamaica. It appears at this time that the most dangerous flooding rains of 5 - 10 inches will be confined to the southwestern peninsula of Haiti, and that the earthquake zone where 1.3 million people live in makeshift shelters and tents will experience lesser rains that will cause serious but not catastrophic flooding.

All of this adds up to gratitude for yesterday's shifts in the storm, and the likelihood that further ceremonias can bare greater fruit. I will focus on this this evening; please join me.

On The Effectiveness Of Ceremonies

In connection with yesterday's ceremonies to spare Haiti the brunt of Hurricane Tomas, we find this article today:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- What had been Hurricane Tomas is now a disorganized tropical depression, and forecasters don't expect it to regain hurricane force.

The storm, with winds near 35 mph, is about 390 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and moving west-northwest at about 6 mph.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami believes it will reach Haiti by Friday after brushing past Jamaica.

One forecaster says he's baffled by the sharp decrease in the storm and the hurricane center says there's still a possibility that it will regain strength.

Tomas has already killed at least 14 people and left seven missing in the eastern Caribbean nation of St. Lucia.

That speaks for itself.

And, of course, a very special thank you, thank you, thank you, gracias, gracias, muchas gracias.

Haiti: Hurricane Tomas And Today's Ceremony

This map warns of impending devastation. The news from Haiti this morning remains frightening. Bloomberg reports on the huge scale of the looming disaster:

Tropical Storm Tomas strengthened over the Caribbean Sea as Haiti braced for the system to hit as a hurricane at the end of the week....

Haiti’s government, the United Nations and humanitarian agencies are working on a response based on a projection the storm may affect 500,000 people, according to a statement on the website of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The nation is already reeling from a cholera outbreak and a magnitude 7.0-magnitude earthquake in January that killed an estimated 300,000 people and caused $7.8 billion in damage. ...

The Haitian government has agreed to allow the U.S.S. Iwo Jima to dock in Port-au-Prince if needed for disaster relief, according to the UN. Emergency groups are stocking up on tarpaulins, blankets, soap, hygiene kits and rehydration salts, it said.

More than 1 million Haitians have been living in camps since the January earthquake, while an outbreak of cholera has killed 337 people and infected more than 4,764, the World Health Organization regional branch said on Nov.1.

An article in the Miami Herald provides additional worries:

In Haiti, however, wind speeds won't be as critical as rainfall totals.
Flooding from Hurricanes Hanna and Ike in 2008 killed more than 800 people and the four hurricanes that hit Haiti that year left $1 billion in damage. A tropical deluge also could overwhelm efforts to contain an outbreak of cholera, caused by drinking contaminated water, that already has killed more than 300 people.

Meeting with authorities from the surrounding vulnerable regions around Les Cayes in southwestern Haiti, ... The health ministry was evaluating the possibility of evacuating patients at the government-run hospital, which is prone to flooding....

Still, the southern coast's largest city -- and Haiti's fourth largest, Les Cayes -- is vulnerable to floods even with normal rainfall.
``Once a hurricane hits us, we are in a mess,'' said Pierre Leger, a Les Cayes businessman, recalling how twice in two years mud burried the city of Gonaives after hurricanes.
``We have two canals -- one on the left, one on the right. They are blocked with trash, there are houses built on them. What happened to Gonaives could happen to us.''

I've been writing about this now for a few days, beginning when I saw that the projected track for the storm turned North, toward the south coast of Haiti. I've hoped that the Traditional Media would pick up the story, and that there could again be an outpouring of aid, this time before the disaster strikes, in time to do some good. That hasn't happened. Watching the animated tracks at NOAA and the flash and java versions feels to me like watching a slow motion train wreck.

I've suggested making donations to Doctors Without Borders and other Haiti aid organizations. I've posted these essays at various group blogs and on Facebook. Response to what I see as an enormous emergency in this Hemisphere has been slight. I choose not to analyze why this might be so: following that thread only makes my small essays seem like the unheeded, repeated warnings of Cassandra.

So I decided to call for help from my friends in the Shamanic Community across the world. I've sent emails (yes, you can send emails to Shamans), I've posted on Facebook (yes, Shamans are on fb), and I've talked with Shaman friends (you don't need Quetzel feathers and a bone through your nose to be a Shaman, btw). Consider, if you've read this far, that this is your personal invitation to help, also. At 11:30 am ET today, I will conduct a small ceremony, and I will ask Pachamama, Santa Madre Tierra, Mother Earth please to turn Hurricane Tomas away from Haiti, and if she must put Hurricane Tomas's landfall in or near Haiti, I will ask Pachamama please to be compassionate and merciful, please to protect the lives of all of those in Haiti, to recognize that they have been devastated already, and are in serious danger. I know already that others on three continents will do ceremonies at the same time. The more, the better. And, of course, there's no prescribed liturgy: each of us will do what we can, each of us will do what feels like the right thing to do in that moment.

In my email I described my plan:

Hurricane Tomas is about to run over Haiti. What do we know about Haiti's current situation? Well, it's dire. The Earthquake destroyed the infrastructure. Many thousands of people are homeless or in shelters that don't really provide shelter or in badly damaged, unreliable housing. There's a cholera outbreak. And now, Hurricane Tomas is coming. If it arrives with any intensity at all, and it appears that it will, it will create even more havoc: loss of life, loss of shelter, loss of food, loss of drinking water. Medicine will be even more scarce, and even more people will need it. The cholera will expand. There will be flooding. Unsanitary conditions will abound. Because of extensive deforestation, there will be mudslides. Roads that are barely repaired from the earthquake will again be impassable. Hospitals will again be overwhelmed and unable to care for the injured and ill.

So what I propose is that we all have ceremonias tomorrow (November 2, 2010) at 11:30 am ET. And that we forward this email to all of our fellow Shamans who might be interested, and that we ask them please to make offerings and do ceremonias at the same time, that we ask for their prayers and offerings. Together we need to move the hurricane to the West so that the most vulnerable people in Haiti will not be harmed. And we need to ask the hurricane, if it must come ashore in Haiti, to be compassionate, merciful, to spare the most vulnerable, to be as gentle as possible.

... I believe that Pachamama responds to these ceremonias, that she guides these storms on their courses, and that when we honor and acknowledge our inner Hurricanes and destructive storms, as Pachamama wants, she in turn is happy to spare others from an actual, fierce Hurricane. ...

I will make a fire at 11:30 am tomorrow. If one of you is in the area, please join me.

In my view, the part about honoring and acknowledging my inner Hurricanes and destructive storms is a key. I dreamt that last night, and I am carrying it and turning it inside myself today.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your contributions.

A Slow Motion Train Wreck: Haiti

A picture is worth a thousand rants. The big island to the right of Cuba is Hispaniola. And the country on the west side of that island, the country that is about to be run over by Hurricane Tomas, is Haiti.

What do we know about Haiti's current situation? Well, it's dire. The Earthquake destroyed the infrastructure. Many thousands of people are homeless or in shelters that don't really provide shelter or in badly damaged, unreliable housing. There's a cholera outbreak. And now, Hurricane Tomas is coming. If it arrives with any intensity at all, and it appears that it will, it will create even more havoc: loss of life, loss of shelter, loss of food, loss of drinking water. Medicine will be even more scarce, and even more people will need it. The cholera will expand. There will be flooding. Unsanitary conditions will abound. Because of extensive deforestation, there will be mudslides. Roads that are barely repaired from the earthquake will again be impassable. Hospitals will again be overwhelmed and unable to care for the injured and ill.

I know that tomorrow is Election Day in the US, and that the Traditional Media are all focused on the T-party and the horserace aspects of the electoral process. But please. Could we please also spread the word on what is happening in Haiti and urge our fellow writers and readers to begin making donations to Doctors Without Borders? That could actually save some lives.