The Typhoon Symbol Analysis

How wired and wakeful the earth seems suddenly. It’s not one of the regular typhoons that haphazardly assault these parts of the world, they agree. They can’t see it all, but it’s bigger than projections had previously thought, and moving faster. They send their images, the latitudes and longitudes. They are like fortune tellers, the crew. Fortune tellers who can see and tell the future but do nothing to change or stop it. Soon their orbit will descend away to the east and south and no matter how they crane their necks backward at the earth-viewing windows the typhoon will roll out of sight and their vigil will end and darkness will hit them at speed.

They have no power – they have only their cameras and a privileged anxious view of its building magnificence. They watch it come.

On the ground people are told to evacuate. Images from space coming through, confirming what the eddying birds and running goats already seem to know, which is that this typhoon has found fuel enough to spread itself three hundred miles wide at a pressing speed. To all in the Philippines: get out or hunker down. To those on the tiny eastern islands, just get out. To one particular fisherman and his family, Pietro thinks, get out now, get out yesterday. But get out where? And how? And for the fisherman there’s this protective urge not to leave your things, they being the few things you still have after the last typhoon and the one before that and the one before that. There are maybe twelve hours before it hits, and you are on an island that’s off an island that’s in the ocean, hopelessly low-lying. So all you can do is lie low hopelessly. You survived all the others.

Pietro checks the news to see how far the typhoon has got; it unnerves him that they can no longer see it from their orbit. Meteorologists have decided upon calling it a super-typhoon; they speak of its rapid intensification that’s left everyone ill-prepared, and of the increased regularity of storms like these. He goes to the observation dome to take photographs of the glistening sea and waxing moon, everything buffed and brushed and burnished. God lays the beams of his upper chambers on the waters. Psalm something-or-other, he remembers Shaun once telling him. And it does seem sometimes as though it could be true, this upper chamber that pours light on the seas. He takes photographs; hundreds.

With untold peace and silence, the typhoon hits land. From the stillness of their vantage point, their solar arrays are copper against the night. The darkness of the Indian Ocean cedes to cloud which curdles, and the typhoon is a thick white mass sheened with moonlight. Their orbit proceeds north-east over Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, but these islands are gone.

Nobody here is up to see it; it’s past two in the morning and the spacecraft is dark and humming. Through the great domed window there’s no view but a perspective-less expanse of typhoon. There’s the easternmost arm of its spiral, and the clouds for hundreds of miles around have been whipped into motion. Anybody watching would be struck by vertigo at this swirling earth.