Self-Portrait with Cephalopod by Kathryn Smith

Author:Kathryn Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sulfur

You can fool a man, but not a machine. When the machine is willful, you have to find out why.

—JOHAN RICHTER

Johan Richter had a vision: a machine that never

sleeps, digesting wood chips ad infinitum, steam and salt

and sodium sulfide breaking cellulose down to its elemental

self in the very model of efficiency. The resulting product,

thanks to Richter, would never be inconsistent. No more

would the white plumes rising from the waterfront mill

cease. I was nine years old and already staring down a horizon

that continually manufactured clouds. Thank Johan Richter

for the sky’s perpetuity, the sulfurous air I breathed

as I pedaled the neighborhood. Thank him for the machinery

my father oiled at any necessary hour to ensure the digester’s

endless chugging. For swing shifts and graveyard shifts, my sister

crying when he left for the mill, not knowing when

she’d see him. Thank Richter for work, and for lack of work,

for union strikes and layoffs. For the first move, and the second.

Thank him for fooling us. The devil, as they say, is in

the details: Sulfur’s another word for brimstone, that belching

hell-stench so many preachers slam their fists over. But thanks

to Johan Richter, we know better. We know the god

is in the machine and necessity is the mother of invention.

Consider the Taoists. In their search for a potion to achieve

immortality, they concocted instead an explosive powder

that revolutionized the face of war. Technology

spreads quickly, even when it’s born of irony.

It’s in our chemical make-up, in the sulfur we all hold

in our bodies—more than the oceans hold, more

than the Earth’s crust, though it shifts and shrugs

and spews its brimstone fireworks skyward. Every beauty

is a byproduct of danger. Water seeps beneath the surface

and bubbles up again, warmed by minerals and sulfur,

in the hot springs that soothed my mother’s prearthritic

joints, before the real deterioration set in. Johan Richter

can’t really be blamed. Surely he never imagined we’d see

an end to these trees, or find another way to carry what’s

necessary. There’s such a smooth reliability to paper. Our sacks

filled with hot dog buns and Styrofoam cups, we’d hike a mile

into the forest and sit in the hot springs’ mud, before someone

found a way to redirect the healing waters closer to the road,

built pools encased in concrete, and pumped the water

in. They thought it more civilized, though despite

the locker rooms and showers to scrub our skin and hair,

we still went home smelling like something rotten.

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