Look, Dear -- More Catastrophes!

But catastrophilia is the sublime's bastard cousin, arising from the discovery of a marketable product -- disaster -- in the violence of natural phenomena. And it is the marketing and sale of that product for public consumption that rides beneath the surface of good intention that we see in coverage of big weather. Catastrophilia's signature formal element is the presence of a frame -- a television set, a windshield or window, a video lens, some form of transparent barrier that creates the illusion of involvement yet provides the safety of distance. The frame creates the sense of spectacle, which one watches but in which one does not participate. One can walk away as one pleases, press down on the accelerator, write a check to the Red Cross, change the channel, and the entire situation -- the destruction of New Orleans, say -- evaporates as if it had never happened in the first place. Ask any tornado survivor -- or anyone right now in the Gulf Coast, anyone recovering from the seven hurricanes that have struck Florida since August 2004 -- how long it takes to piece one's life together after such a disaster. But catastrophilia rides on momentum, needs another hurricane forming in the tropics. After Hurricane Rita, which, in catastrophilic terms, was a bit of a disappointment, donations to the Red Cross became sluggish. You're only as good as your last disaster.

The truth is that catastrophilia is an absolute end in itself, a phenomenological cul-de-sac, a sideshow tent. Its fixation on big weather is a distraction from history, rather than an engagement with it. It draws us to what historian Daniel Boorstin called a truly "spontaneous event," like sports or crime stories, that offer a momentary respite from the daily deluge of "pseudo-events," manufactured news, "spin" spun to a fare-thee-well.

Maybe, as we move through the Greek alphabet in what's left of this hurricane season, having run through the list of names for storms pre-selected by a committee at the World Meteorological Organization in Switzerland, we have become what a storm chaser I met in Kansas called paparazzi del cielo -- "paparazzi of the sky" -- all of us lying in wait for some variation on the end of the world to arrive. Waitingforweather disaster, the new star of the hour -- or era -- to make its unpredictable, spectacular appearance.

Author's e-mail:

bigweather2005@aol.com

Mark Svenvold, a New York writer and poet, is the author of "Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America" (Henry Holt).