One, the revenge of the dead:

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Giant plumes of oil floating deep in the Gulf of Mexico could create a new 'dead zone' of oxygen-depleted waters unfit for marine life and wreak environmental damage that will take generations to overcome, scientists warned Monday.

A little recalls this passage in Bleak House:

The blazing fires of faggot and coal—Dedlock timber and antediluvian forest—[blaze] upon the broad wide hearths and wink in the twilight on the frowning woods, sullen to see how trees are sacrificed...

The trees are waiting for their revenge.

Two, in response to this post, the novelist Monica Drake wrote:

Charles, don't forget to mention the rare beauty of that feathery plume! Almost as lovely as a sea creature itself. Only nature could reproduce the delicate way it hangs low in the water, drifting incandescent toward the surface. A marvelous piece of art BP has made, and like all art its a testimony of vanitos, vanity, death as the sure resolution.

(Drake recently optioned her novel to Saturday Night Live cast member Kristen Wiig.)

Three, British-American writer Lesley Hazleton wrote on her blog Accidental Theologist:

Face to face with the industrial sublime — the energy-producing, distance-defeating, plasticizing miracle of oil, as essential to modern society as the sun was to ancient ones — what can a mere human do but submit and worship? Simply by living as we do, we are all followers of the cult of oil, all members of a church that far surpasses any other in size and wealth. Helplessly dependent on it in every aspect of our daily lives — give us this day our daily oil — we abjectly acknowledge its power to sustain us. And panic as we realize the other side of its power, which is to destroy us.

It all gets very biblical: like ancient Israelites who had the temerity to worship other gods than Yahweh, we tremble as the divine wrath turns on us, and with such sublime irony: the current Flood is not just oil instead of water, but oil into water.

I very much feel that the current catastrophe marks the true beginning of what will become the end of a major historical period.