Global Weirding

New York City has the worst air quality in history due to wildfires in Canada. I was out in the wastelands of New Jersey when the continent-spanning cloud of smoke landed and I was stunned by this surreal world’s cinematic power; everything stood out clear and magnified in the yellow light. The view from the path train passing from Newark to WTC—the opening credits of the Sopranos in reverse—had taken on all of the power of an eerie dream, the rail yards, the giant rusting objects and the heaps of industrial slag now brightened in a phantasmagoric glow—Sopranos as directed by Tarkovsky. The bridges crossing high above the rivers reaching dimly to the container cranes across the estuary were all made small inside that huge yellow light; a living diorama of the apocalyptic sublime. I felt as if I had never seen this landscape before now—even while the hot smell of smoke transported me to further landscapes—Kenya, Himachal Pradesh, northern Minnesota, the high desert valleys of British Columbia—places where smoke-smell coded my memory with an indelible link between wasteland NJ and all the other giant clouds of smoke I’ve ever been inside of. The smell has a peculiar aliveness; as if I become alive to my own history only in the global telemetry of air-pollutants. Meanwhile my eyes were stinging, my breathing difficult; I had a headache and I was very sad. I emerged from the subway onto the Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn into a greater haze as the sun set. Everyone was taking pictures of the blaze orange disk shimmering in the flat sky. It was like a weirded Wes Anderson movie: the big tree-lined Parisian boulevard apocalypse-toned, the colors subdued pastel yellows and pinks, tinged with doom; the whole neighborhood was mesmerizing in the twilight’s omnipotent weirdness. Every tree glowed dusky-green with an inward intensity; the trees can also smell this fire.

The Banquet (1958) René Magritte