Excerpts from Serenade to the Photosphere

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Susan Jahoda has been the editor (and now coeditor, with Jesal Kapadia) of the arts section of RM for fifteen years. Here, in a version of a work in progress, Excerpts from Serenade to the Photosphere>/i>, she explores the complex dynamic of human and natural ecology occasioned by the ``great yellow dust clouds'' that currently cross national boundaries and have come to encircle the globe. Of course, it is only possible to see the polluting dust as clouds, together with the widespread agricultural and industrial practices that cause them, in photographs from NASA spacecraft. And perhaps it is only over time that can we measure the accumulating effects of the yellow dust on and in our bodies. But to ignore the clear signals of how the two are intertwined---of how human activities create a ``sky that is rotting a malignant milk'' and how the ``chemical hum of tomato yellow'' is destroying the air we breathe and seeping into our torsos and limbs---leaves the existing political economy of environmental destruction unchallenged. It has the effect, therefore, of allowing the entire planet to be covered in a ``mustard yellow of sour.''

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