Last Sunday morning rose to reveal a dead raccoon in the gutter of the street in front of my house. The lady a couple of doors down was already on the phone to the city: She said she had called twice already to get someone to come and remove it. I called myself; the operator sounded tired and resigned. There's a backlog, she said: They won't get to it for some time. A couple of hot days went by – 32 degrees one day, 33 the next – and the animal started to smell. A cloud of flies gathered. Then it began to bloat. The smell reached the front window.
One hates to use overly heavy metaphors, but when one is feeling a great foreboding and a metaphor is rotting outside one's house, one can indulge oneself. I get fearful in the first week of September: It's back to school. My son's walk to his first day in Grade 1 was rainy and tearful – for both of us. (Oh, all the little rain boots and umbrellas.) There is the whole nervous history of Septembers hanging over all of us, a tension response imprinted in everyone who ever felt afraid of grim schoolyards and rooms with rows of desks, for anyone who ever went away to university for the first time and had to spend that first sleepless week finding one's way among concrete buildings. I have never got over my back-to-school anxiety and now I experience it both directly and vicariously, and even better, it is taking the form of a slowly swelling corpse just outside my window.
Meanwhile, we read the news of the world: The refugee crisis and its respondent impotence, the sense of death spreading outwards from some fanatic desert.
Art is taking its time in reflecting the tragedy. That art which addresses the migration head-on has been largely clever and subtle. Syrian artist Tammam Azzam just had some pieces in a London group show called Art4Peace: His photographic collages superimpose works of canonical Western art over scenes of the destruction caused by civil war. The most striking of them uses Gustav Klimt's 1908 work of sensual decadence, the shimmering gold-leafed painting The Kiss, Photoshopped onto a bomb-scarred Syrian wall. Other images show Matisse's nymphs and Van Gogh's Starry Night dancing over similar destruction. This is not didactic work: It merely juxtaposes Western education and privilege over the present-day reality knocking at Europe's doors.
Azzam was one of the artists exhibiting in Banksy's Dismaland, a parody of a theme park that opened, under rain, in a down-at-heels British seaside resort town at the end of August. This whole installation is a rather more heavy-handed critique of European policies, a more obvious representation of a police/surveillance state with rude border guards and high walls. There was a moat around it with refugees trying to swim across it to safety. One "ride" offered visitors a chance to pilot a boatload of refugees.
Some recent art pieces that echoed the migration's ripples did so tangentially or unintentionally. San Francisco-based sound artists Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst recently had an installation at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, called "everywhere and nowhere," that aimed to create the soundscape of an imaginary underground or subculture. The floors of the gallery were littered with scraps of paper – "fortune cookie messages" – printed with the invisible population's slogans ("we are everywhere and nowhere" and "all voices coalesce in a whisper"). Coincidentally, the main exhibition halls of that city are serving as temporary shelter for hundreds of recently arrived refugees, a very visible and real subculture.
Outside my front door, on the fourth day, the raccoon cadaver was crushed by a truck, its intestines smeared over the street, its stink expanded. By the fifth day it was a thick, flat paste of putrefaction the size of a tablecloth – intriguing to my six-year-old and now more abstract, a representation of death rather than an embodiment.
In Canada, the poet Lynn Crosbie has just published, on her online magazine Hood, a haunting ode to Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy. It takes as its title the skeptical newspaper headline "Story Begins to Unravel About Drowned Syrian Boy" and goes on to unravel the famous image of the toddler in its own plangent and surreal way.
I read this with pain and fascination as steamy rain poured down on the dead raccoon paste. After a few more pulverizing truck visits, that entity was nothing more than traces, a film of death. My local government had not sent anyone, over the course of five days of phone calls, to relieve the problem. My boy came home happy from his first day of school, the smell abated a bit, and I turned from art about our non-response to suffering to my own non-response: I have to get over my dread and get ready for my own school, a shiny campus in the vast empty rich suburbs of this vast empty rich country, where I will teach about art to a lucky few.