I'm wondering why I feel vaguely queasy after having just spent two hours in front of the TV waiting for the tsunami to hit. It's too easy to chastise CNN, or the Weather Channel, or any other media outlet that wants to hostage our attention. I'm just thinking tonight about the endless human hunger for spectacle, and how many of us organized our afternoons around it, and how we shared in the announcers' disappointment when the water never rose, as expected, over the shrubs, the beach, the parking lots. "It looks like Hawaii dodged a bullet," said the newscaster, but his relief didn't sound quite authentic. It wasn't really what he wanted to report. And maybe I shouldn't blame him, because it's only human to want to be reminded of our deaths, from the safe distance of our living rooms.
Meanwhile, at least 217 people are dead in Chile tonight. The rational part of me thinks there is no cause and effect link between this quake and the Haiti quake, but then there's that over part of me that's been troubled by these tweets I read this morning:
---the world does feel rather out of whack and chaotic
---I am stunned. Another earthquake. There but for the grace of God.
---does anyone else feel like the earth is trying to get our attention?
---The planet is so angry & tsunami warning for Hawaii. This freaks
me out. I adore Hawaii.
---The Chile earthquake was 1,000 x more powerful than Haiti
---Damn. Chile. I hope Neruda’s house came through okay
Hard, then, to write anything that measures up to all that. I am working every day on my new memoir, which inevitably gives one a vehicle for trouble in the world. And we're about to travel; motion will come as a relief after this deeply interior, snowy winter. On Tuesday, Mark and I are headed to Milledgeville, Georgia, to read at the Georgia College and State University, the undergraduate alma mater of the wondrous Flannery O'Connor. We're going to be taken on a tour of Andalusia, the O'Connor family farm. Will there be peacocks? Will we see her desk, touch her chair? I'm sure I will have pictures, but in the meantime I thought you'd be interested in this article about Milledgeville from the Boston Globe.
*****
UPDATE: There are peafowl, new peafowl, at Andalusia. Name the Peafowl: A Contest.
21 comments:
for a while this afternoon, we had the tv tuned to cnn to wait for the tsunami and i was following tsunami news on twitter. i told myself that i just like to keep up with things...
is the world more out of whack than ever? or do we simply have too many methods for trying to keep track of it all?
Did all that waiting make you feel anxious? It did a number on my brain! A tsunami is so compelling to me, even as a metaphor. The drama of cause and effect playing out in such physical terms-- a crisis in one part of the world triggering a crisis in another.
About the world being out of whack: I just saw that four out of the four deadliest quakes have happened since 2004. You're right: I think the world's always been whack, but I think it might be more out of whack than ever!
i had the news on most of the afternoon. i'm such a news junkie, so these things give me a strange thrill. however, i realized after the fact that we're so far along scientifically that we get annoyed if a tsunami is not on time. there's something really upsetting about that! it is a natural event and i think that sometimes, we have to relinquish control just a little bit.
jayme, you're so right! we would have downgraded it if it was an hour late.
I was out and about so I missed the whole glued to the tv anxiety thing. But I live in an earthquake zone, so somehow I feel shaken, even though there was no seismic activity up here. Or not that I've heard about, anyway. Yet. You can bet we'll be re-stocking the earthquake kit now.
btw, Chile was the site of the world's strongest recorded quake: a 9.5 in 1960. That's some shaking.
A very striking metaphor, Paul, indeed.
Very sad way to be! Everything is becoming this way: Blood! we want to see blood, misery, catastrophic things...
Terrible! All that is just voyeurism... and the news only make pornography!
Come on! Wake up people!
I've written elsewhere about the tsunamis of my dreams. They happen appear from time to time. The great wave coming into the shore from the horizon. It opens its jaws like a lion ready to swallow me up and invariably I wake up.
I'm glad the oceans stayed calm. For all the desire for excitement in life, having dreamed my fill of tsunamis I want no more in real life, even from the comfort of my living room.
Here's an interesting perspective. From the writer Don Mitchell, who writes from Hawaii. A log of the day's events.
Click here.
A quote from his log:
How to make sense of the day? I can’t. It’s too complicated, emotionally. It’s wrong to feel disappointment because a natural disaster didn’t live up to expectations. It was so scheduled, and I admired that. The warning system, the computer models. The emergency preparations were precise and well-executed. Everything worked as it was supposed to. At Civil Defense they must be celebrating, and they should be. And yet I feel certain that among them, there are some who are disappointed that they will have very little post-tsunami work to do.
Thanks, Jayme, Lakin, Nola, Elisabeth!
My first comment should read "four out of the FIVE" deadliest quakes.
I thinking about what it's like to live in two places, one which is in a hurricane zone, the other, an apartment, in Manhattan. This is probably something I'm going to write about at some length, but all I can say is that I never want to live through another 9/11 again.
Here's my question: is our unquenchable appetite for dangerous spectacle a result of our wanting to be reminded of death, or does it come out of some profound human interest in extremity? Those are related, obviously, but maybe there are some differences, too. We know that something extreme could occur at any moment, in the ordinary world, and that now and then it does, unpredictably -- and so do we need to watch examples of the extreme, in order to negotiate with that possibility? Maybe watching the tsunami news is a covert way of practicing contingency? A plane might fall from the sky, a brick tumble from a building onto our unsuspecting skulls... and so one way to feel a little in control of these eruptions of the extreme would be to ritualize them: now, everybody watch the total, massive, inescapable coverage of the horror that is/might be coming, or already came.
M., This is nuanced and so perceptive. Yes, control and ritualizing are the operative words, aren't they? Until now I haven't given much thought to their interconnection, but it makes perfect sense. If we didn't have the rituals of modern media, we'd have something else. So what ritualizing helped to give us a sense of control in the face of (possible) accident in times past? I'm thinking of rituals: bullfighting! the Catholic liturgy! There must be tons of them....
So we couldn't control what happened in Chile, but we thought we could control what happened in HI by stating buoy measurement, estimated wave heights, precise TOA--all that.
I wonder if this ritualizing we were talking about needs to be a mass/group event. The reading of a book, for instance, might not be the same kind of solace.
(Clearly, I'm avoiding the ten thousand things I need to be doing tonight.)
rather than control, the idea that mark's comment gave me was one of pushing limits of human infallibility. we saw the carnage in haiti; let's watch and see how far chile can be pushed before we see their society collapse, too. how many different ways can we describe it? how many different images can be shown until we understand what happened?
granted, i find news compelling for so many reasons, but those extreme stories might also push me to think about how i would react.
Jayme, I was just watching footage of looting in Chile. I know I'd be taking water from the supermarket if someone were thirsty at home.
Is there just something inherently thrilling in seeing evidence that 'everyday reality' is very tenuous? As if we KNOW that all the time, but don't let ourselves take it in, so there's something fascinating about the pitching sidewalk, the car upside down, the insane excess of snow?
Yes, "everyday reality": how much work we put into making that fiction without even knowing how much it exhausts us.
Marcia McNutt, Director, U.S. Geological Survey: "We do know that earthquakes are not distributed randomly in space and time."
I for one mostly felt fascinated with the idea that this is was the first tsunami that seems to have been anticipated and able to be monitored real time, worldwide. The miracle of the modern world. I was glad that nothing happened even if a little annoyed at myself for wasting all that time.
As far as what's happening in the world, I am trying to remember to use it for mindfulness and gratitude...we have everything we need in each moment, and each moment could be our last, so each next one is a gift.
Also, the earth might be giving us a chance to develop increased empathy for ourselves and the suffering of others. Something that will be much needed to save the human species from extinction at our own hands. I think we watch in order to put ourselves in the shoes of others, to imagine what it must be like to be them, to imagine what it would be like for us.
My comment yesterday was informed by my current reading of "The Empathic Civilization" by Jeremy Rifkin, which is a tour de force synthesis of scientific research, human history and philosophical thoughts on the nature of being human.
I am only partway through it, but central to his exploration is the paradox that as we increase our global consciousness and ability to identify with the lives of others through increasingly sophisticated technology (e.g. ability to monitor a tsunami in real time thousands of miles away), we are increasing the pace of our energy consumption, hastening our possible extinction.
"The recognition of another’s finite existence is what connects empathic consciousness to entropic awareness. When we identify with another’s plight, it’s their will to live that we empathize with and seek to support. The laws of thermodynamics, and especially the entropy law, tells us that every living moment is unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible—we grow older, not younger—and for that reason we owe our very existence to the borrowed available energy of the Earth that makes up our physical being and keeps us far away from an equilibrium state of death and decomposition. When we empathize with another being, there is an unconscious understanding that their very existence, like our own, is a fragile affair, which is made possible by a continuous flow of energy through their being."
This is fascinating stuff here, Paul. A little frightening.
I've read a bit about empathy at the coal face as it were of mother infant relations and also the work on mirror neurons, but this is a broader view.
It might help to account for why people in the so-called 'helping professions' suffer burn out from too much exposure to other people's trauma and pain and the call for a continuous empathic response.
Elisabeth, if you have access to the New Yorker archives, search for articles that mention V.S. Ramachandran, such as "Brain Games" and "Two Heads." It will blow your mind!
You can also watch this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html
If for nothing else than to see his really cool leather jacket.
I am in the so-called helping professions and yes, I think mirror neurons are behind compassion fatigue. To be in the resonance field of another human being, intently observing their expressions and gestures and hearing their stories, is at some level to be physiologically experiencing the same thing yourself. It is an art and skill to join them enough in their experience for them to feel understood, but far enough away to help them heal.
I'm stirred by these words about empathy, Gwynne; I'm just coming to them now, days after you posted them. And thanks for letting us know about Jeremy Rifkin's book. What a haunting paradox at the center of it! That idea strikes me as so true, the kind of truth that's so hard for us to take in that we look right past it.
Thanks for the other links, too.
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