A friend of mine got married in her parents’ garden last year, on a lavishly beautiful late-summer afternoon in Cape Town.
His dream, he explained, was about the garden.
Cape Town’s drought was officially declared a national disaster a couple of months ago, but even last year it was bad enough that using the municipal supply to water your garden was tantamount to taking out an advertisement in the newspaper that read, “I Don’t Care at All About Other People, the Environment, or Anything Except My Thirsty Hydrangeas.” Like many residents of Cape Town’s wealthier southern suburbs, however, my friend’s parents had a borehole.
In the dream, the neighbors believed that my friend’s parents were watering their garden day and night with the municipal supply, and were so enraged at this wanton excess that they staged a protest outside, screaming at guests through bullhorns as they arrived.
I don’t know why I felt it then, and, a year later, I still don’t know how to describe it.
In our waking lives, we worry about other things.
In one, I am in the quad at my old primary school, and I realize that my brother, who in the dream is a little kid, is about to have a swimming lesson but doesn’t know that the pool is empty.
I don’t know how to get out of the building, or how to turn on the lights, or what is going to happen when the person catches up to me.
Morton suggests that living in the age of mass extinction caused by climate change has resulted in “a traumatic loss of coordinates”: we don’t know how to see the world anymore, and we don’t have the words to talk about it.
At the wedding, I didn’t want to think about how much of my youth was spent in swimming pools just like the one in the middle of that lawn, or the one in the dream with my brother, and to wonder at the extent to which I took them for granted.