that overtook your wall

I’ve been obsessed with serial looking (and its transcription) since I first saw six of Monet’s Stacks of Wheat at the Art Institute of Chicago as a teenager. Tracking Lake Michigan’s metamorphosis in hue and harshness from moment to moment across the summers and winters started as a bit of my own private impressionism when I moved here in the oughts; and I have begun many days of the past five years, when I moved to the city’s Eastern verge, observing a narrow sliver of its waters obliquely available to sight, archiving conspicuous dawns and dusks with a cell phone snapshot. It started as a harmless record of beauty and souvenir of change through the seeming monotony of an inland lake for a coastal person. Through it all a fenced breakwater, a landmark planted at sea, marked and protected a neighboring highrise’s slice of beach as private.

Lake Michigan was close to its historic low when I moved here. In 2020 it was nearing a historic high. Warmer atmospheres mean both more evaporation and more intense “rain events,” a euphemism for storms with which infrastructure can’t keep up; these forces compete with one another to produce unprecedented and unpredictable fluctuations in watershed levels. Catastrophic floods visited our block in January and April of 2020, and as the last-ditch sandbags failed overnight to protect the building, we parked on the street. The territoriality of the breakwater held up, while all else flooded around it: beaches, trees, garages, milkweed dunes. The snapshots kept up with the terrifying rise, an acqua alta Illinois. One week after I made this film, in August, a derecho (a windstorm that moves in straight lines, appropriate to our city grid) tore down the block; over the course of several minutes, the derecho and accompanying tornado pulled most of the trees and select power lines onto cars and houses.

….In the same period, plagued by dearer losses, I listened to a talk by Thích Nhât Hanh about falling in love with a cloud—a seemingly doomed affair, though those schooled in the art of looking deeply perceive the darling in its endless forms….

The absurd cruelty or cruel absurdity of placing a wall in water is the shadow of all territorialism. Expanses of water sound extraterritoriality—statelessness—in both the free and the oppressed senses. We encounter echoes of the border exploit everywhere in this nation-state, in the name of luxury, security, and hygienics; in that summer’s closing of the beach—though 2020 also served up reminders of the failure of privacy to keep the air, the water, and every other element—the plazas, freeways, expensive shops on Michigan Avenue—from being public.

Jennifer Scappettone

August 3, 2020

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