Sometimes a work of art, or artist, fits so snugly into our cultural landscape that we have trouble ever imagining the world without them. They become so rooted that it quickly becomes mind boggling as to how there could have been a point in time in which they didn’t exist. And it’s owing to this phenomenon that we begin to see the work or their creators as so eerily prescient, so mystically in tune with what were all collectively about to think or say or do, that entire oeuvres of urban mythology build up around them. In a way, thinking that the album Kid A is about 9/11 is as close as I can get in adulthood to the feeling that the neighbor is probably a vampire.
So great art, enigmatic artists, and healthy doses of Death all coagulate into urban legend. It’s why we believe that Tupac is alive, Paul is dead, and the midget hanging himself in The Wizard of Oz isnt at the part of the movie that you think it’s in.
The formula holds true for literature as well. The cover of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, published five years before the 9/11 attacks, shows the twin towers rising up into an otherworldly mist. In the foreground is a church with a very prominent cross. A bird, whose exact size is hard to judge, flies towards one of the towers. Creepy, right?
A recurring character, if you want to call it that, in the book is The Flying Liberian, a mysterious, possibly fake, spectral ship carrying toxic cargo from country to country. Whatever it is that the ship contains is so horrible that its only mentioned by professional waste managers in hushed tones while on business trips. Like the kinds of things that are so excitingly frightening to a child that he only allows himself to think it about it during sleepovers. That’s exactly what the characters in Underworld sound like when talking about The Flying Liberian and it’s phantasmal crew.
And it’s how giddy I was when I read about a real Flying Liberian. Storing an olympic size pool worth of ionized water waste aboard, this Japanese barge was used in less radioactive times as a synthetic island for weary fishermen.
So maybe giddy is the wrong word, but it is exciting as well as frightening in almost equal amounts to see Underworld, once again, predicting from the past the ways in which we live now. Where is this mobile Japanese toxic waste dump going? What less developed country would allow it to dump its contaminated waters near its shores? Will the water just be dumped into the middle of the ocean? What does it all mean?
I have to say I don’t know what I find more invigoratingly overwhelming: our power to create a weird, floating island of strange death, or art so prescient that it displaces time, distorts causality, and convinces us for a moment that it has killed and buried coincidence.
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