![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonYou know, I have in my time done bitching aplenty about Minnesota weather. I have griped about the brutal cold, the sweltering heat, the shortness of autumn, the slushy sog of spring, the two-foot snowfalls, the humidity. And while I don't really retract any of that rancor, I am moved to reflect that there's a lot to be said for taking your meteorological pain in small daily doses, instead of in one gigantic sledgehammering knockout.
Also, I was thinking today about the fact that so many otherwise kindly, compassionate, gentle souls that I know are avid fans of destructively violent weather. There have been a couple of posts lately in which people seem clearly to be trying to deal with the subsequent cognitive dissonance--their fascination with such phenomena, their realization of the actual damage it does to actual human lives--and to sort through the odd uneasy guilt about it all. I know I'm not the only one who, in the midst of all the fear and anxiety, felt a shameful thrilled undercurrent of Wow, this is fucking incredible! Wooo-hooo!
There's no real shame, I think, in acknowledging the human fascination with the shadow--or our need for it, even. Kali dances in the dark corners of all our brains, and I'm a big believer that You don't get light without shadow. Perhaps the thing that's so oddly relieving, or exhilarating, even, about natural disasters--especially for those of us who recoil from human violence and like to believe our species is capable of better--is that it gives us our necessary balancing ration of violence, destruction, in a form that's totally inhuman, or ahuman might be more accurate. It has no reference to us. It's impersonal, indifferent, equally free of human causation or human preventability.
Maybe it's just a B&D analogue; we humans tend to be control freaks, and there's release and exhilaration in being put in a situation where it is out of our control, where something else is clearly and totally in charge. Or maybe it's just really late and I'm really tired and no longer making any sense.
(And on a wholly different note,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lunaris_ is clearly on to something about Anderson Cooper's need to put himself in the path of airborne signage. Dude's got his own shadow, and it is aluminum and jaggedy-edged...)
Also, I was thinking today about the fact that so many otherwise kindly, compassionate, gentle souls that I know are avid fans of destructively violent weather. There have been a couple of posts lately in which people seem clearly to be trying to deal with the subsequent cognitive dissonance--their fascination with such phenomena, their realization of the actual damage it does to actual human lives--and to sort through the odd uneasy guilt about it all. I know I'm not the only one who, in the midst of all the fear and anxiety, felt a shameful thrilled undercurrent of Wow, this is fucking incredible! Wooo-hooo!
There's no real shame, I think, in acknowledging the human fascination with the shadow--or our need for it, even. Kali dances in the dark corners of all our brains, and I'm a big believer that You don't get light without shadow. Perhaps the thing that's so oddly relieving, or exhilarating, even, about natural disasters--especially for those of us who recoil from human violence and like to believe our species is capable of better--is that it gives us our necessary balancing ration of violence, destruction, in a form that's totally inhuman, or ahuman might be more accurate. It has no reference to us. It's impersonal, indifferent, equally free of human causation or human preventability.
Maybe it's just a B&D analogue; we humans tend to be control freaks, and there's release and exhilaration in being put in a situation where it is out of our control, where something else is clearly and totally in charge. Or maybe it's just really late and I'm really tired and no longer making any sense.
(And on a wholly different note,
lunaris_ is clearly on to something about Anderson Cooper's need to put himself in the path of airborne signage. Dude's got his own shadow, and it is aluminum and jaggedy-edged...)![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-30 10:42 am (UTC)As of tonight, though, we're past the awesome-power-of-our-world stage and into the simple, grim, human endurance stage, unleavened by shock. I smiled for a moment when I was watching CNN and saw a man on a sidewalk carrying a trayful of newly baked, complicated-looking cream pastries that he explained he was taking to a bunch of stranded tourists in a hotel. Bars had already re-opened, and I thought, good on New Orleans! Then I read that as of the early hours of this morning there'd been a two-block breach in a levee, and the waters of Lake Ponchartrain were pouring into the city, as had been feared.
I'll bet those people in the SuperDome would like to get the hell out of there. Not to mention those people with, say, broken legs, still waiting for medical help. And the amount of destruction in Mississippi is more than I can wrap my mind around right now.
The spectacle has gone, and now there's only suffering and a lot of work.