trinity

Photographs always make me sad. They are the ultimate illusion of permanence. This of course is only an issue if you take permanence to be an illusion and a problem, I take both to be such.

Especially saddening are photographs of people and landscapes, dying people on the dying land pretend to not be so in a photograph. Photographs of stone or, say, architecture on the other hand are less saddening. The photograph is a perfect medium for conveying the hard and cold reality of such things.

The other day I listened to a man speak of his pictures taken of the scene around Chernobyl many years after the event. The radiation, he said, left such brilliant colours – streaming reds and oranges – on the walls of the schoolhouse. It opened up wonderful photographic potential.

The photographer, of course, was not the only person to remark on the beauty of the nuclear. While there were doubtless many to do as much, I want to draw your attention here to the observations of Oppenheimer himself. When questioned on how he felt after seeing the explosion at Alamogordo he replied with two quotations from the Bhagavad-Gita (as paraphrased from memory):

"If a thousand suns would suddenly burst forth their light, it would be like unto the light of you oh exalted one."

And, then,

"Death am I destroyer of the worlds, set out to gather in the worlds there."

Why so many of us find such beauty in narcissism I do not know.

the accident

It’s been a while, eh, though the lag has in no part been due to excitement up here in the middle north.... if anything I’ve been getting more boring. Impossible you say.... I've been preparing for a big set of examinations. Tests I need to write.

And, the tests won’t write themselves, if someone's got to do it it may as be me ... Okay, fair enough says I... And to the powers that be I say how about making them in eight months time, they said how about three, I said four, they said okay. I should have said seven and settled on six. I never could think too well on my feet. Anyway, one result of my botched negotiations is that I’m in my head more than ever, but am there mostly to please the judges, only to please.

But this is half of the boredom, over the summer I made a bit of money and decided to buy a few things, like a coach and a microwave. I was thinking this way I can make big troughs of shepherds pie and beef stew and portion the mess into plastic bowls and then heat them up on demand while sitting on the coach watching Hockey Night in Canada.

While I managed to get it all stuff inside okay without twisting an ankle, I’m a terrible shopper. I always feel guilty about buying things, anything. I feel embarrassed about it, I feel the same way with eating... there I go stuffing my face and blowing money in a stream between my teeth while people are going hungry and cold all over the world... So, I should be happy I’m not starving, and chalk that up as one for the human race, you know here’s one more person who’s not starving. Oh, but it comes so easy to me it’s hardly worth keeping track of you say, or, okay but you can’t take on the problems of the whole world boy, true, true, true. And I hope I never say an ill thing to anybody who’s eating a triple hamburger and standing on two prosthetic knees or buying the biggest piece of iron and plastic lawn furniture on the lot. I hope I don’t.

This embarrassment is not borne of some psychological desire for self torture, it’s that in those moments of consumption I feel there is something dreadfully wrong with this place, and the more it goes along the same path the sadder it’s going to get. The world is utter chaos, human beings in the modern age are living in perfect alienation... time is ceasing to exist, history doesn’t make sense any more... Go ask the descendants of Adam and Eve...

Why did Jesus die? To atone for their sins, but and if the probability is as certain as it seems and the two were never real then Jesus died for nothing... 2,000 years of history, another long illusion, religion or science or neither or both. Time holds nothing and there is nothing to replace it stuck in nowhere, it’ll take the seas to leap over the mountains and Venus to spit itself out of Jupiter again before it all gets straightened out.

Okay, so what does time have to do with consumption... time is money... and prepare for the accident... in case of death.... well, read the headlines, everyone’s going to die and this includes you too, it’s really little of an accident at all.