Tsunami

What can be said? What can be written? Speech and writing have their value, and have tremendous power, but not only are they impotent in the face of such an event, they feel impertinent. I shall not try to compete with any reportage, or imaginative attempt to empathize with, or gain insight into, the experience of those who were there, or the experiences of those who died, or almost died. It is, in the most mundane sense, unimaginable.

Unimaginable in two ways. The first is the obvious way: that the phenomenon is so unusual and so huge that it is on a different scale from anything most of us will ever experience. The struggle to imagine this is manifest in the news reports that constantly update the death count, that emphasize and re-emphasize the size of the geographical area affected, and that describe the peculiar circumstances such as the sucking of the water away from the shore before the destructive wave returned.

The second way that it is unimaginable is that for each person who died, it was their personal death, as unimaginable as is every death that happens every day, to every person who dies, noticed or unnoticed. Some die amidst horror, others do not. And for those who were there and survived, vision extends only as far as the horizon, and the terror was their local terror, the forces they had to contend with to survive were local. However clear to many that this was a huge event, the enormity is beyond human perception. Nonetheless, for many, it must have been quite beyond belief in this particular way: they were witness to the inescapable death of so many people all around them.

Nothing anyone can say or write can effectively increase our understanding of such things, but perhaps reporting can make our imaginations more blunt. The curiosity to understand catastrophe has clear utility. We have an urge to understand and perceive disaster so that we can avoid it. That becomes instinct, and fuels curiosity, even if we are not proud of it. But the assuaging of that curiosity by news media that daily bombard us with disasters ever described with maximal fake emotion in order to gain our attention, and ratings success, does make us callous. We learn to resist, and then something like this happens.