Owls of Apocalypse
On my father’s Haiti, a burning hotel, and art that will vanish
So I was lying on my couch in the East Village, breathing apocalypse smoke from a thousand miles away, feeling sorry for bees and birds and all of us. Above me was my tree-branch of owl families: a Haitian painting purchased for $10 by my dad in 1968 or so.
I wanted to take a time machine to their tree. I wanted to cry. And I thought: what the hell are we doing? Is there anything more important than our air and water? Why do we let corrupt politicians, judges, a president subsidize our own destruction?
I’d ask consolation from my dad, but he’s dead. So here’s me working through it.
My father’s world ran on paper and patience: North Beach cafes, manuscripts with typos x’ed out, mailed in envelopes. It was an analog world, and like most things from that era, it did not announce it was ending.
He loved Haiti the way some men love a first marriage they never got over. He went for two years in his 20s and kept returning for half a century, and the Haiti he described to me as a kid was almost implausibly alive: ceremonies in the mountains, dogs barking across valleys, insects singing, forests to hide gods in. He wrote a book about his life there, called “Best Nightmare on Earth,” knowing that the “best” part was most important. His paradise was the Hotel Oloffson, a gingerbread palace in Port-au-Prince where he held court on the veranda with rum and gossip and novelists and spies.
Last summer gangs set the building on fire and the wooden lace of it went up in a night. My sister Ann’s first thought was: I’m glad Dad didn’t have to live to hear this news.
The mountains my father described are largely deforested now. And the insects are much, much quieter everywhere on earth, not just in Haiti. The dogs and the forests and the owls of his stories live in paintings on my wall.
How do we make peace with so many beautiful things disappearing, being poisoned, being burned? What do we do with the grief of outliving worlds? How do we enjoy beauty if it has a guillotine over it?
I tried to console myself by thinking maybe extinct animals are reincarnated as humans, so they can have the human experience with all its challenges and opportunities. Maybe some owls come back as us, to walk around inside the species that ended them, to feel what it is like from the inside. I don’t know if I believe this. But maybe we’ll all have a chance to be enlightened now, with smoke in the air.
My dad's Haiti is gone, the way your parents' worlds are gone too, everywhere on earth. And also it is not, because he wrote it down, and now when I read those pages the dogs bark again across the valley. This isn’t nostalgia, I guess, since I still love Haiti - but it’s something more like custody, a witnessing.
The hard part is that we now practice this ancient art of loving-the-world inside a machine that is hostile to it. We live in a chaotic vortex of digital competition, winner take all, metricized, ranked, with grace being called inefficiency. The algorithm does not care that I spent ten years on my next movie in the hopes of moving someone. It cares whether we can all be consumed in eight seconds.
My father’s world had gatekeepers and snobbery and its own cruelties, but it also had time, and time is the medium grace lives in.
A few weeks before he died, my dad was generous enough to act in my real-time movie Brother Verses Brother, which I’m showing this weekend in the mountains of central Mexico. I don’t have my dad’s Haiti, but I have Guanajuato, where the analog world my father belonged to lives. Music in the streets, mummies in the hills. A film festival is an event, in the old sense, something that occurs once among strangers who become briefly a congregation. Live cinema is the closest thing I have to a consolation.
You can’t save the forests of Haiti or Canada by making a movie, or re-posting a meme about a new law granting polluters more rights. But you can refuse the terms of the machine. You can make work that only fully exists when people are physically together, to carry the dead forward inside it.
The owls of my dad’s painting are somewhere in the verses my brother and I sing at each other. Maybe we are the owls. Singing, I get to feel for a couple of hours that the disappearing world and the living one are the same world.
Plant a tree even when your heart won’t let you.
Brother Verses Brother is touring festivals through the end of the year. If you’re in Guanajuato or San Miguel de Allende this week, come say hi. I’ll be the one who looks like the other one, but shaves less.
Wow Ari. We'll have to talk about Haiti next time we see each other. I too spent 2 years in Haiti in my 20s, '85-'87. I sat on that same porch at the Olaffson. I lost many friends in 2010. For now it's impossible to go back there and it will never be the same. And not just Haiti.
Thank you Ari, I would love to see the film. We miss Herb and think of him and Leo and Carolyn often. Jerry Garchik in S F