{"id":1761,"date":"2015-12-05T15:35:41","date_gmt":"2015-12-05T19:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/?p=1761"},"modified":"2016-05-22T11:47:06","modified_gmt":"2016-05-22T15:47:06","slug":"poseidons-rage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/poseidons-rage\/","title":{"rendered":"Poseidon’s Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_6942\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[A revised version of July’s\u00a0Letter in the Mail<\/a>, performed for\u00a0the Marrow<\/a> series at Chicago’s Whistler on August 16. A\u00a0work in progress.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Have you noticed there aren\u2019t that many good stories about Poseidon? Here he is one of the most powerful gods in all of Greek mythology \u2013 Brother of Zeus! Lord of the sea!\u00a0\u2013 and all I can come up with is that he was grumpy and not terribly popular, though he did do all right with the ladies, as he\u00a0left kids scattered all across the Aegean. And I wonder, does Poseidon\u2019s lack of a memorable storyline have something to do with the fact that his tale unfolds mainly under water, where it\u2019s hard for even the other players to get a grip on what\u2019s happening, and harder still to communicate the details to those back on land?<\/p>\n

I was thinking about Poseidon because I\u2019ve been thinking lately about Greece, and about water\u00a0\u2013 its abundance and its absence.<\/p>\n

When I think of Greece, a place I have never been, I think of white sandy beaches and grilled octopus. I think of Odysseus trying in vain to find his way home to his family, thwarted for ten years by Poseidon\u2019s rage, and of democracy, and of war, and of the thousands of migrants now washing up on its shores. And, of course, I think about water. Because, have you been following the Greek debt crisis? The language of global finance is drenched in water. Debt is \u201cunderwater\u201d rather than, \u201cunderground.\u201d Assets are \u201cliquid.\u201d The economy must be kept \u201cafloat\u201d — through a \u201cbailout\u201d of course. Is it because being \u201cunderwater\u201d holds the promise of resurfacing, and the chance to catch your breath, while \u201cunderground\u201d carries the finality of the grave?<\/p>\n

This all also makes me think of Detroit \u2013 where things are so underwater that the city has at times cut its poorer citizens off from the otherwise abundant natural resource of water from the Great Lakes. And of New Orleans, still under water ten years after Katrina drowned the city in despair, despite what the Chicago Tribune editorial board might think. And that for every drowning economy there\u2019s a parched ecosystem to balance the scales. Like poor California, where last month it came to light that Tom Selleck had been stealing water from a Ventura County hydrant and trucking it to his ranch in the hills. Apparently, austerity does not apply to Magnum PI.<\/p>\n

To the north, even notoriously rainy Washington has declared a drought emergency. Just last week, Seattle and the surrounding cities asked residents to cut their water usage by ten percent. Beyond that, the drought\u2019s had little visible effect on humans, but the water table is all out of whack, and in hot and shallow rivers across the state migrating salmon are dying by the thousands. The situation is so dire that in some areas the state is trucking stranded fish to safety in hatcheries upstream.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been out in Seattle, my hometown, for the last several weeks, and I was riveted by the salmon story. The under-watered fish somehow provided a strange counterpoint to my reasons for being there. Because out there in the west, my father has been under water for months \u2013 his damaged heart and lungs struggling for control of a system as out of balance as the Columbia River.<\/p>\n

Until this spring, I didn\u2019t know a whole lot about edema, but it\u2019s a brutally common side effect of heart failure: As the heart struggles to pump blood, fluid backs up in the body, thanks to a little miscommunication with the kidneys. Thus: my father\u2019s feet regularly swell to unrecognizable shapes. Water floods his lungs and seeps from his pores, blisters flower and burst through his skin. We wrap his weeping legs in gauze and in an hour it is drenched and needs to be changed again. He is drowning in his own fluids\u00a0\u2013 dying, in inexorable and weirdly mundane fashion by the force of something as elemental as water.<\/p>\n

From the moment I got the call in March \u2013 \u201cSomething happened. Come now.\u201d \u00a0\u2013 I\u2019ve been underwater as well. That day I couldn\u2019t figure out how to work the Internet, or how to buy a plane ticket. I just stared dumbly at the screen, the white noise of surf flooding my ears. Eventually I managed to enlist a friend to come over and help me pack. (\u201cOK, underwear,\u201d she said, \u201cput it in the bag. Next: socks!\u201d)<\/p>\n

In the Critical Care Unit of the hospital, my father floated on a raft of tubing and machines. Sedated and unable to speak, he squeezed my hand and raised his eyebrows, trying to swim to the surface. Once he did, days later, and the tubes were removed, all he wanted, with furious desperation, was a sip of water \u2013 but of course that was not allowed.<\/p>\n

Now, six months later, he rides the tide of chronic illness: in and out of the hospital nine times and counting, choked with water one week; dehydrated the next, stranded between Scylla and Charybdis, the only thing certain the ceaseless uncertainty.<\/p>\n

The roar of surf in my ears has quieted to a dull pulse, just rhythmic waves lapping distractingly, hypnotically, at the shores of consciousness, barely audible but nagging enough to keep me from working, from remembering to answer email, from reading a magazine let alone an entire book.<\/p>\n

In May I went to Puerto Rico, another island with white sandy beaches and grilled octopus, where the underwater debt stands at $72 billion, and where another crippling drought has left neighborhoods on a rotation system \u2013 one day with water, one day without. I was sitting in a plaza in San Juan when I got another call. My father was back in the hospital, for the fourth time, or the fifth. He was, unsurprisingly, feeling pretty down. He wanted to talk about his funeral \u2013 about who should speak, what music we should play. I want you to write my obituary, he said. Here\u2019s what you should say.<\/p>\n

That night I went out to a bar and drank Cuba Libres, and every time I went to the bathroom I had to stop and remember why the toilet wasn\u2019t flushing. That water was being carefully rationed. That that was why there was just a sad little bottle of hand sanitizer sitting in a dry sink.<\/p>\n

What does it mean to bail someone out? And who deserves it? OK, obviously the salmon are blameless. But what about Greece, or Puerto Rico \u2013 those lands of sunsoaked, day-drinking layabouts who brought crisis upon themselves and are now being scolded to suffer the consequences? What about Detroit, or New Orleans? What about my father? Did he seal his fate the day he started smoking and drinking and eating salt, rejecting austerity for not just the needs but the pleasures of the moment?<\/p>\n

Moralizing comes easy on land, but once you\u2019re in the water things get murky. Questions don\u2019t really have good answers\u00a0\u2013 and bailout means to simply do anything you can to stay afloat. Who deserves it? Everyone.<\/p>\n

When my dad was hospitalized in June, for some medical complication the details of which have already drifted away, I went out for a quick visit, and spent four days sitting by his bed with a digital recorder, helping him narrate his life story. A life story in which the sea plays a large part and in which, sort of hilariously, his children seem to barely factor at all. But collectively, as a troika, my sisters and I have decided to forgive that debt, and he now holds onto it like a flotation device. Daily, he harasses me\u00a0\u2013 it\u2019s a running joke: \u201cHave you finished my biography yet?\u201d And of course I haven\u2019t, because if I do \u2013 who do I tell it to?<\/p>\n

Just a few weeks ago, while I was again out west, my father developed an internal hemhorrage and, going into shock, was resuscitated with a massive transfusion of blood and other fluids; he gained 18 pounds overnight. The next day, still shaking the water from my ears, I was talking to a guy I knew only vaguely at a party for a friend\u2019s 50th<\/sup> birthday. Haltingly, I gave him a rundown of the last 24 hours \u2013 minus the gory details. He cocked his head, and looked at me and said, \u201cIs he dying? I know where you are right now.\u201d I wanted to kiss him, I was so grateful he could hear me from the shore.<\/p>\n

In a devastating 2011 essay<\/a> chronicling the illness and death of his infant daughter, Aleksandar Hemon likened the isolation of those days to life inside an aquarium. I can\u2019t imagine the horror of Hemon\u2019s experience, but I do know that an aquarium is a precise metaphor for the climate-controlled, rigorously monitored bubble of the hospital, whose watery byways and language are incomprehensible to those on the outside looking in.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re dealing with the everyday crisis of a dying parent, though, things are less contained. Though the challenge of communicating the texture of the experience stands, you can\u2019t sit in Critical Care forever. So when the conditions of life leave you underwater for the long term \u2013 in economic crisis, in ecological distress, in medical limbo \u2013 you, like Poseidon, have to figure out how to both swim in the sea and walk in the world. To get on with things on land but also, maybe, to accept that under water is the place where your story makes the most sense. That Poseidon\u2019s children \u2013 the naiads and the salmon and the strangers you meet at parties\u00a0\u2013 will, in the end, be those that hear you best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[A revised version of July’s\u00a0Letter in the Mail, performed for\u00a0the Marrow series at Chicago’s Whistler on August 16. A\u00a0work in progress.] Have you noticed there aren\u2019t that many good stories about Poseidon? Here he is one of the most powerful gods in all of Greek mythology \u2013 Brother of Zeus! Lord of the sea!\u00a0\u2013 and … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1761"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1816,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1761\/revisions\/1816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}