Spill

Abstract

Man looking into the Earth through the eye of satellite “Terra” four days after the disaster mourning for the sea wounded by a cloud of oil. No black tide from space but the waves de-wrinkled by the stuff of life white as sperm. “Oil smoothes the ocean”, Michon Scott from NASA said, “as a result, the oil slick is brighter than the surrounding water”. Pristine and effervescent, it wears the guise of holiness. “Bright white ribbons”, “tendrils”, “the bird’s-foot part of the delta”, Scott reports from Greenbelt, Maryland; his eyes glued to the flickering screen. The metaphors we use to summon beauty to the place of terror