When The Levees Break
In many ways I am a straightforward man and my thoughts are not ponderous. Questions do not haunt me. If they did I would be lying on the floor right now, my head full of crippling electricity as I failed to answer why a litre of water frequently pours out of the light fitting in the toilet. Or why I cannot make this didgeridoo make a noise beyond the sound of someone blowing a raspberry into a Pringles can.
But eighty percent of New Orleans is currently underwater. This has shaken me despite being sitting here in comfort, staring west through a seventeen inch LCD window. But I am guilty here of weird thoughts. The tragedy of the situation hits me through a sense of academic reasoning...it is tragic because a lot of people have died and many more have lost their homes. But emotionally I feel detached.
A sliding scale of importance exists in these situations. A flooded city 5000 miles is less important to the observer as a flooded town 1000 miles away, which is less important than a flooded village 100 miles away, which is less important than a flooded toilet 10 yards away. We would not function if this were not so. A terrible statement that is nevertheless true. This is the abstraction of tragedy; holding the pain in our hands is difficult until we have found the personal connection...a friend of a friend who lives in Boscastle, or even the fact that we travelled through a tube station an hour before a bomb went off.
Ye gods, that was an unpleasant paragraph and I do not know whether I believe it or not now that it is staring reproachfully back at me from the screen. The human brain needs a jolt, though. It is assaulted with sensory overload from all directions, being filled with extremes from violent, noisy films and whatever, and this acts as a barrier when something horribly real happens. It takes the human angle, the tearful woman on the news screaming about her lost husband to the news reporter or a phone call from a friend who was near the site of the accident and wanted to let you know he was all right, before the mental levee is breached. Again, this is the insulation we use to survive, to get through our day without falling into a paralysis of empathy. Hmm...in fact, after seeing the former on the news last night I did indeed feel the jump-leads kickstarting an emotional reaction in my otherwise detached head.
Hang on..."detached head?" That cannot be right... But it amuses me and I will leave it there unedited.
Much is made of displays of national grief, such as after Princess Diana's death, and Rosie Boycott spoke of this in a programme last night in a piece that did little but rehash old arguments (and also in an article the week before in the Observer that existed precisely and in its entirely to promote her programme). What she forgets is that she is part of media that artificially built the woman up into a goddess. And it is the same media that now sneers at the nation for reacting to the death of this goddess. Media on media wankery. Ah, but this cannot excuse easily led people from lapping this hero worship shit up with tongues the size of surfboards. To hell with them and their tiresome neediness.
Now, those weird thoughts I mentioned earlier were more than just to do with the tragedy of the situation and this is what I was going to write about until that jumbled mess above got in the way. The most weird of these thoughts is perhaps inexcusable, and that is the giddy little thrill from witnessing a completely changed landscape. The ordinary becoming alien, a fresh and emotionally charged layer of atmosphere building up. The same is true with a landscape under snow. The atmosphere is completely changed not just visually, but in our hearts and souls, our emotional centres. We are also changed.
Mother of shitty death! I can hear air being sucked through teeth from here... So before this turns into a spiritual nosebleed of gibberish, I must qualify it. An atmosphere that pushes the right buttons is one that makes us react, charges us with thoughts and feelings that a landscape with no atmosphere cannot provide. But the landscape alone does not provide the atmosphere, otherwise all we have is an exercise in filling the gaps. Knowledge is crucial to the atmosphere, the keystone that keeps it in place. A misty graveyard is strangely moving, but unless you know a few stories about the place, a handful of legends or a superstition or two, then all you have is an abstract sense of how photogenic the place looks. Place is nothing without a mental connection, particularly a personal connection...which is something the best filmmakers know by heart. But that is another subject entirely.
Okay. I am trying to avoid trivialising the floods in New Orleans, but I am doing so simply by writing this thing. I have no connection to the situation, I am just using it as a springboard for another thousand words of relentless jabbering. So the best thing I can do now is lie down and shut up forever. Or, at least, for another few days.
But eighty percent of New Orleans is currently underwater. This has shaken me despite being sitting here in comfort, staring west through a seventeen inch LCD window. But I am guilty here of weird thoughts. The tragedy of the situation hits me through a sense of academic reasoning...it is tragic because a lot of people have died and many more have lost their homes. But emotionally I feel detached.
A sliding scale of importance exists in these situations. A flooded city 5000 miles is less important to the observer as a flooded town 1000 miles away, which is less important than a flooded village 100 miles away, which is less important than a flooded toilet 10 yards away. We would not function if this were not so. A terrible statement that is nevertheless true. This is the abstraction of tragedy; holding the pain in our hands is difficult until we have found the personal connection...a friend of a friend who lives in Boscastle, or even the fact that we travelled through a tube station an hour before a bomb went off.
Ye gods, that was an unpleasant paragraph and I do not know whether I believe it or not now that it is staring reproachfully back at me from the screen. The human brain needs a jolt, though. It is assaulted with sensory overload from all directions, being filled with extremes from violent, noisy films and whatever, and this acts as a barrier when something horribly real happens. It takes the human angle, the tearful woman on the news screaming about her lost husband to the news reporter or a phone call from a friend who was near the site of the accident and wanted to let you know he was all right, before the mental levee is breached. Again, this is the insulation we use to survive, to get through our day without falling into a paralysis of empathy. Hmm...in fact, after seeing the former on the news last night I did indeed feel the jump-leads kickstarting an emotional reaction in my otherwise detached head.
Hang on..."detached head?" That cannot be right... But it amuses me and I will leave it there unedited.
Much is made of displays of national grief, such as after Princess Diana's death, and Rosie Boycott spoke of this in a programme last night in a piece that did little but rehash old arguments (and also in an article the week before in the Observer that existed precisely and in its entirely to promote her programme). What she forgets is that she is part of media that artificially built the woman up into a goddess. And it is the same media that now sneers at the nation for reacting to the death of this goddess. Media on media wankery. Ah, but this cannot excuse easily led people from lapping this hero worship shit up with tongues the size of surfboards. To hell with them and their tiresome neediness.
Now, those weird thoughts I mentioned earlier were more than just to do with the tragedy of the situation and this is what I was going to write about until that jumbled mess above got in the way. The most weird of these thoughts is perhaps inexcusable, and that is the giddy little thrill from witnessing a completely changed landscape. The ordinary becoming alien, a fresh and emotionally charged layer of atmosphere building up. The same is true with a landscape under snow. The atmosphere is completely changed not just visually, but in our hearts and souls, our emotional centres. We are also changed.
Mother of shitty death! I can hear air being sucked through teeth from here... So before this turns into a spiritual nosebleed of gibberish, I must qualify it. An atmosphere that pushes the right buttons is one that makes us react, charges us with thoughts and feelings that a landscape with no atmosphere cannot provide. But the landscape alone does not provide the atmosphere, otherwise all we have is an exercise in filling the gaps. Knowledge is crucial to the atmosphere, the keystone that keeps it in place. A misty graveyard is strangely moving, but unless you know a few stories about the place, a handful of legends or a superstition or two, then all you have is an abstract sense of how photogenic the place looks. Place is nothing without a mental connection, particularly a personal connection...which is something the best filmmakers know by heart. But that is another subject entirely.
Okay. I am trying to avoid trivialising the floods in New Orleans, but I am doing so simply by writing this thing. I have no connection to the situation, I am just using it as a springboard for another thousand words of relentless jabbering. So the best thing I can do now is lie down and shut up forever. Or, at least, for another few days.
posted by Jamie at 9:53 AM
3 Comments:
I hear it kicks ass!
Some thought-provoking stuff, Doc. But what enquiring minds want to know is "are you getting any?"
Eh?
"Enough", surely?
Oh.
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