The Floating World

*



My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself--
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Dolphin
Robert Lowell



Caught in the shadows, in the tiny spaces, there on the streets of past lives, there before the Christmas that never came. It was a terrible time of year. Everyone had gone away on holidays. Everyone that is who had any money to escape the city. Everyone who hadn't pissed everything up against a wall, who weren't walking around the streets with a head full of sad and disconnected thoughts, travelling far, a journey without end, a journey that led him precisely nowhere, back to this same street, these same houses, his abusive, sneering flat mate who spent all of his nights trolling the gay bars of Oxford Street and all of his days boasting about his conquests.

That was it. He would never be able to foresee the future. He didn't know that the gutter awaited. That if he didn't stop drinking and carrying on he would die in Belmore Park, shouting at skyscrapers, a broken man, alcoholic. None of this he understood. He still thought it was all a great adventure, a nice bloke having a rough trot. Between jobs. Between lovers. Between careers and motivation. Certainly between happiness. Nice day if you like that sort of thing was as cheerful as he got. He didn't understand why everyone else wasn't caught up in this brutal, grinding, universal angst. He didn't understand why they smiled happily at each other, embracing in the street.

And he would never understand where it all went wrong. He knew some of the biggest crims in the city. He was their court jester, their poet, recording their secret lives, their furtive dartings, the undertow of threat. He was not in danger, he knew that. His personal camouflage consisted of a shambling, shambolic self. No one could pick the intelligence behind that eccentric form. He shambled through their lives and made himself good company; in receipt of the best drugs in town.

Years later, gainfully employed on the city's leading newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald, he returned to that same street, Paddington Street, Paddington, to the same set of houses. Then it was a crazy story about a cat that wouldn't die. The woman who owned the house had died and in her will had insisted that the house not be sold for the life of her beloved cat; and that the boarder could continue to live rent free in return for feeding and caring for her beloved animal. This arrangement lasted about as long as it took for the greedy relatives to think of a way around it.

They trapped the cat and sent it to an animal refuge. As part of the story we had to photograph the dam cat in the animal refuge, surrounded by other old cats living out their lives on the bequests of their owners. And he paced up and down the same street where he had been so unhappy, unformed, suffering at the derision of yet another bitch. The giant terraces underneath looming elm trees looked much the same from the outside, despite the frenzy of renovating that had transformed their interiors.

He was in shadow, strung together by glue. Only he knew the story of the cat on which an entire inheritance had hung; the devious machinations of the greedy relatives to get rid of the spoilt, spitting black and white ball of fluff. Only he knew how desolate he had felt that Christmas, way back then, way back when, how the streets merged into a universal grey; how the cat had got on the front page and his fame, or notoriety, had spiralled briefly higher. None of these things mattered any more. The bitch had long ago disappeared from Sydney, to die with a lover in an AIDS plagued affair, to live out his final days in sick misery, clinging to the good times to the very end.

Each time he drove through Paddington he avoided Paddington Street. The trees were larger still, shrouding it in shadow, the houses even more renovated and considerably more expensive than before. And his memory of the bitch and the cat their last reflections in the floating world. He chose not to bring them back to life, not if it could be avoided.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hHdia2TAGvPkZ6UaX2qzFYqYehBgD94HJ4AO0

Obama promises leadership on climate change

By LIZ SIDOTI – 22 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Calling climate change an urgent challenge, President-elect Barack Obama promised Tuesday that Washington would take a leading role in combating it in the United States and throughout the world. "My presidency will mark a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change," Obama said in a video message to governors and others attending a Los Angeles summit on the issue.

In the roughly four-minute message, Obama reiterated his support for a cap-and-trade system approach to cutting green house gases. He would establish annual targets to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them another 80 percent by 2050. Obama also promoted anew his proposal to invest $15 billion each year to support private sector efforts toward clean energy.

President Bush has been criticized for failing to do enough to combat climate change and Obama has promised quick action to address the issue. He may have to start tackling the issue through administrative actions, given that leaders in the Democratic-controlled Congress have indicated that they aren't likely to act until 2010 on a bill to limit the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming.

At a news conference Tuesday, a coalition called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership — made up of 32 leading corporations, including electric utilities and oil companies, and environmental groups — urged Obama to press Congress to approve legislation next year for a mandatory cap-and-trade system to limit the release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases. Opponents of such action argue controls on carbon dioxide emissions will increase energy costs.

Under a cap-and-trade program, the government would establish a ceiling on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be released into the air from burning fossil fuels. A utility or industrial plant would have to purchase emission allowances for every ton of pollution released. Anyone who exceeds the cap must either make pollution reductions or buy additional allowances, while those who cut emissions below the cap would be able to sell allowances. Initially the cap would be relatively high and then be lowered gradually to achieve the targeted pollution reductions.

http://www.spacedaily.com/2006/081119171128.moufx8ea.html

Climate change is fading as a priority in the Pacific Rim as the gloomy state of the global economy takes precedence, a survey of opinion leaders showed Wednesday.

The Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, a non-governmental group, released an annual survey of leaders in government, business and media ahead of a summit in Peru of 21 Asia-Pacific leaders.

Twenty-four percent of some 400 opinion leaders surveyed said the top priority for Asia-Pacific leaders should be addressing the US-bred financial crisis, far outweighing other issues.

Last year, the top priority was reviving stalled global trade negotiations, at 12 percent, but climate change came close at eight percent. Global warming did not even figure among the top priorities this year.

"We've been swamped by bad economic news and you don't have to look at our survey results alone to see that the interest and focus on climate change has dissipated somewhat," said Yuen Pau Woo, co-author of the report.

"You see the same shift in focus in the public away from climate change questions to questions of economic survival and growth," said Woo, president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

The survey was released a day after US president-elect Barack Obama pledged to engage the world on climate change, which UN scientists warn threatens extinction for many species by the end of the century.

George W. Bush, the outgoing president, was the industrialized world's main holdout from the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that mandatory cuts in carbon emissions blamed for global warming were too costly for the US economy.

The survey also found that 78 percent of opinion leaders predicted the United States would suffer much weaker growth in the coming year and that a US recession was the main risk for the region.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2756/218/

Freeman Dyson Debunks Dire Forecasts on Global Warming and Other Tenets
Written by Ellen Gilbert, Town Topics
Wednesday, 19 November 2008

Freeman Dyson gets around. Last Wednesday, for example, the 85-year-old “retired” physicist regaled a lunchtime audience at the Nassau Club with his “heretical” ideas about global warming. Just a few hours later he could be found once again sharing his thoughts on global warming, as well as on intelligent design, nuclear warfare, extraterrestrial life, and HAR-1 (a DNA component that distinguishes human beings from other animals) with a standing-room-only crowd at Labyrinth Books.

Mr. Dyson’s credentials are venerable: the British-born scholar received a BA from the University of Cambridge in 1945, and was, from 1953 until his retirement in 1994, a physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. The absence of a PhD in his resume has been more than compensated for by the 21 honorary degrees he has received over the years.

He seems happiest, however, when he is working at being the rebel, and indeed, one of his books, a compilation of essays published earlier in The New York Review of Books, is called The Scientist as Rebel. Wearing an effusively-colored tie that set off his gray suit, Mr. Dyson began his talk at the Nassau Club by encouraging the audience to interrupt him as he spoke, since, he declared, “it’s much more fun to have an argument than do a monologue.”

In the absence of audience interruptions, Mr. Dyson had an argument anyway with the scores of people (like Al Gore) who weren’t present to defend their belief in the dire consequences of global warming. (“There’s no accounting for human folly,” Mr. Dyson said when asked about Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize.) Saying that on a recent trip he and his wife found Greenlanders to be delighted with their warmer climate and increased tourism, Mr. Dyson suggested that representing “local warming by a global average is misleading.” In his comments at both the Nassau Club and Labyrinth, he decried the use of computer modeling to make “tremendously dogmatic” predictions about worldwide trends, without acknowledging the “messy, muddy real world” and the non-climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide. “There is no substitute for widely-conducted field operations over a long time,” he told the Nassau Club audience, citing the “enormous gaps in knowledge and sparseness of observation” that characterize the work of global warming experts.

Mr. Dyson’s fearless commentary continued later at Labyrinth, where, standing for over an hour and without a microphone, he delighted a full house by declaring the existence of 10,000 string theorists to be “sociologically dangerous” (“one thousand would be enough”), and balked at an audience member’s query about what he would do with a $700 billion grant. “When science gets rich it becomes political,” he observed. As an example of the most expensive efforts not necessarily being the most worthwhile, he pointed to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the subject of much recent attention, noting that it was designed to identify only certain particles, losing much potentially interesting information in the process. “The important things are the ones you don’t expect,” he noted.




Sorghum crops near Gunnedah, NSW, Australia.