Over the Top
This whole thing is…intolerable. Just intolerable.
A bus carrying elderly evacuees out of the path of Hurricane Rita has caught fire on a gridlocked motorway, killing up to 24 people…Television pictures showed the entire bus alight, with explosions sending plumes of thick black smoke billowing into the sky. Officer Peritz said the blasts were apparently caused by oxygen containers for the elderly on board the vehicle…The passengers were being evacuated from a nursing home in Bellaire, south-west Houston, when the accident happened…Officer Peritz said the driver, who survived the fire, repeatedly went back onto the bus to try to rescue passengers.
I can’t read that without wanting to blub. Hell and damnation – what next. You’re old and ill and you can’t breathe well, you have to get on a bus to escape a hurricane, you have to sit on that bus in a colossal traffic jam for – what? Many hours, certainly. News reports last night were saying 15 hours. You have to sit in misery for hours and hours – and then the oxygen that some of you need in order to breathe – explodes and burns most of you to death. Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.
And then there is Templeman 3, one of the New Orleans city jails.
As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New Orleans, the sheriff’s department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the city’s jail, Human Rights Watch said today…These inmates, including some who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level…According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmate’s last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench…As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility…Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells…Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.
More flies, more sport.
“More flies, more sport.”
Strange expression for an atheist, Ophelia. I know Gloucester says it in Lear but why do gods suddenly appear here of all places, and in quite such passionate guise? Do they suddenly appear only when we want to blame something or someone? I know it’s just a figure of speech for you at a time of horror, but I still think it’s strange finding it here.
This is not a criticism, it’s just a passing note from a non-scientist, non-philosopher.
I doubt if there was anyone to blame on this occasion. It is a terrible thing and it has happened. I don’t know why we should not expect terrible things to happen, but we don’t and they do. Maybe it’s not to do with blame. Perhaps it is simply the gap through which the gods (take your pick) make their entrance: to contain such terrible largenesses as disaster. And overwhelming beauty too on occasion.
Literary stuff this, but then writers will write and imagine. Someone has to.
George, well, not all that strange, I don’t think. Metaphor. Plus a certain amount of irony – since people over here keep talking about praying, and faith, and thanking god for sparing them, and the like. Plus I’ve always loved that speech, and it certainly seems to fit.
OK. I understand metaphors. But then, being a poet, I have to believe in them too. A figure of speech is not a watertight and firmly closed compartment: it leaks everywhere. In fact it is worth zilch unless it leaks out to some kind of reality. A metaphor is, after all, only a metaphor because it stands in for something, even if only for a desire.
The problem with religion (for me) is not that it exists, in the instincts and feelings that drive it, but in its plonking, authoritarian, literary interpretation of the reality or desire to which it tries to give expression. And if you were to ask me what that reality was or what it was a desire for, I couldn’t tell you, except that without it there’d be no point in the language that articulates it, especially not in words such as Gloucester’s.
Just a thought, not entirely idle perhaps. I think your atheism is of the fiery, more militant kind (and I can see why it should be so, on both moral and scientific grounds). The cruder versions of it though – get rid of religion and all will be well – have very little idea of what that actually means. As if religion were something you could ‘get rid’ of’.
Religion is language for unexplained (I don’t say inexplicable, but not as yet explained or fully explained) experienced states and events. Like all the other languages it is not pure and isolated, but permeates others and is permeated by them. Like metaphor, in fact. You could argue that parts of language are defunct or unrelated to what most people, most of the time would regard as objective, established or falsifiable facts (eg gravity), but its hard to isolate them (as your Lear quotation shows). And desire outruns these in any case.
I’m not arguing for this or that religion, or for ‘religion’ as such, only against the more posturing, all-those-wicked-idiots-out-there-who-do-nothing-but-evil kind of atheism.
And bless my socks (only metaphorically of course) it’s Sunday. And here I am messing with philosophers. I will quickly hide and write a dozen sonnets or engage in a conversation with Gloucester before lunch.
George, yes, I thought that as a poet you probably would understand metaphor!
I don’t know – I never quite know how to understand this – but I think there is a kind of metaphoric area where even emphatic atheists like me have…thoughts, images, something, that we don’t literally believe, yet which have some kind of emotional meaning all the same. Thoughts about dead people for example. And thoughts about stuff happening. They are like Gloucester’s remark, even though we don’t really think there are gods to be like wanton boys torturing flies. It’s a (metaphoric) way of thinking about the cruelties of nature – which is a metaphoric thought. Nature isn’t really cruel, but it seems (and feels) cruel to us – phenomenologically. So even atheists like that kind of metaphor – that’s as close as I can get to an explanation.
I doubt if there was anyone to blame on this occasion.
In the case of the abandoned prisoners that Ophelia mentioned, we can certainly blame people. The warden, the prison guards, the DOC, the mayor. The exploding bus, however, is probably just bad luck. But then again, maybe someone is at fault for that too.
But probably not. That’s part of what’s so agonizing about the bus – it was the result of people trying hard to be careful, to learn from the mistakes during Katrina, not to abandon the old and frail. And look what they get!