Last night, I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing the image of the Japanese tsunami hitting the Sendai foreshore. I was at a gonging session, surrounded by mood music and lighting, gongs, drums, bowls, everything focused on relaxation and meditation, but I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing black water. Since Friday night, when I first heard the news, I have trawled the Internet, newspapers and television for updates on how this terrible situation has affected the Japanese people. I’ve saturated my psyche with images of those terrible waves. Coming after three months of natural disasters - the big freeze in the northern hemisphere, floods, cyclones, bushfires and the Christchurch earthquake - now there is another earthquake, tsunamis, volcanic eruption and nuclear power stations near melt-down. We don’t just get the news, it’s repeated over and over and over again until we, too, are overwhelmed, inundated, the waves coming in on us.
Someone described it to me recently as 'disaster p*rn'.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a television, so I've missed most of the footage over the last few months but listening to Radio National has kept me up to date.
The footage of that tsunami rolling in to land, a perfect wave, a perfect storm, a beautiful, beautiful, terrible thing ... I pulled it up on the internet and played it over and over like a person mesmerised.
Classic fm is sounding better and better. No words or images, just music.
Denial? Dunno.
Protecting my state of mind? Maybe.
Oh, disaster porn. Yes. And I can't get Plath's 'calamity's magnet' out of my head. Interesting that we posted similar sentiments around the same time, Barbara. A saturation point of sorts, perhaps.
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