A noted author pointed out recent tumultuous occurrences both near and far, which – at least momentarily – diverted my thoughts from the inky smear across the Houston sky.

Like plenty of others, my mind upon hearing about the fire at the Intercontinental Terminals Co. plant drifted to "White Noise," the novel by Don DeLillo that was published in 1985. The middle section of his lauded novel is titled "The Airborne Toxic Event," referencing an unnatural disaster at a train yard.

True to DeLillo's authorial voice, some semantic debate occurs early in the chapter to comic effect:

"That was the Stovers. They spoke directly with the weather center outside Glassboro. They're not calling it a feathery plume anymore."

"What are they calling it?"

"A black billowing cloud."

"That's a little more accurate, which means they're coming to grips with the thing. Good."

DeLillo's Airborne Toxic Event is a fulcrum of sorts in "White Noise." It prompts some narrative action, but serves more to suss out preexisting anxieties and fears: a cloud that bears clarity, particularly in protagonist Jack Gladney, a Hitler Studies professor at a fictional university.

In "White Noise" DeLillo also picks at other themes: consumerism, addiction, and contrasts between the real and the synthetic. In tone and character development, the novel is nothing at all like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," but two similarities caught my attention: both put their protagonists through a disaster – McCarthy's vague but possibly natural, DeLillo's wholly unnatural. And both take a grim view of the future, while flinching ever so slightly at the end. For McCarthy, a wasteland beetle offers some sign of natural hope at story's end, taking flight from a smokeless tobacco tin. For DeLillo, a child pilots his tricycle across a freeway.

In "White Noise" DeLillo coined an enduring phrase: "American magic and dread."

Reading the novel again this week, I was struck at how resistant it is to the nicks and scratches of time, and not just because I drove home two consecutive days beneath our own century airborne toxic event. And not just because a plane fell from the sky last week with a more horrifying end than the aircraft that goes down in "White Noise."

To label it prophetic would be lazy. But its frank presentation of 20th century fears and anxieties is such that they're plenty applicable to the 21st, with a feathery plume – err, a black billowing cloud – of a metaphor for those conflicts, both internal and external.

I reached out to DeLillo's publisher not expecting to get a response. Late last year DeLillo, 82, talked to The Guardian, which likely fills his quota of media time for several years. He's not a recluse, but he does largely let his fiction speak for itself.

To my surprise, a response came a few hours later by email.

"There are cataclysmic events taking place everywhere — Houston to Mozambique, where there is a cyclone in progress, and then back to the Midwest at flood tide," he wrote. "Maybe the earth is entering a biblical phase."

The broad global glance with pinpointed references, the vague biblical reference: The comment feels of a kind with DeLillo's work. He grew up Catholic, but nearly a decade ago said in an interview religion wasn't something with which he worked.

"The Latin mass had an odd glamour – all that mystery and tradition," he said. "Religion has not been a major element in my work, and for some years now I think the true American religion has been 'the American People.'"

I can't speak of DeLillo's intent, but his emailed comment reminded me of Yeats' "The Second Coming," an allegorical poem teeming with biblical imagery penned shortly after the end of World War I.

Both DeLillo's comment and Yeats' poem speak to a loosening of chaotic forces, both natural and unnatural. Not Hell so much as hell, less a place than a metaphor, like a black cloud.

The Deer Park chemical fire appears to have been squelched last night after extending spring break with a three-day rager like an unsupervised teen.

The absence of any information -- definitive answers about its effects, short- and long-term -- have been intriguing and maddening. A small sample of my assorted digitally-connected "friends" suggests that the fire's trail of smoke has exacerbated anxiety among the anxious, while those inclined toward business-as-usual see no cause for alarm.

Because the chemicals in the fire include naphtha and xylene -- both of which are used in gasoline -- we're all complicit to a degree. But justifying the cost of doing business is a nastier cloud than seeking to do business better.

And, as DeLillo pointed out, our airborne toxic event is just one part of a larger, widening gyre. Certainly its effects aren't as immediately catastrophic as those occurring in Nebraska or Mozambique. But there is a wild card quality to it: The repercussions, if any, may not be revealed soon.

Another poem came to mind thinking about our cloud, Louis Jenkins' "Earl," which I heard on a Writer's Almanac more than a decade ago. Jenkins describes a practice in Sitka, in which the locals name every seal Earl, a defense mechanism because each seal stands a chance of becoming an orca's supper.

"Well, how else are you to live except by denial," Jenkins writes. I highly recommend reading the entirety of his wonderful poem here.



The killer whale and the seal function in a more natural order, I suppose, than an airborne toxic event. Still, both cloud and orca serve as effective and ominous metaphors.

So we wait. And everything will be fine, or not.