rain, and hungry oceans
Mar. 15th, 2011 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateI had long and complex dreams that I start remembering with being in a house rather like my grandparents' house (which, like ours, is half-way up a rather steep hill, and like the dream house is in the middle of the woods) with rain and a flooding river that kept rising to nearly the level of the first floor windows. I ran down to check the basement and saw only a little trickle of water, and that it was virtually empty except for the dust, and the house stood like a rock through it all. When the water drained away, I realized that it had been flowing the other direction from what I thought, which even in the dream confused me.
Then there was a bit where I was flying (method unspecified) over vast stretches of light winter woodland behind the house and there were huge stone skulls of prehistoric mammals scattered around like the remains of some toppled henge; raccoon-like skulls the size of giant ground sloths, and long-bones nearly to match. And there were people beyond that in long industrially-rectangular wooden halls, half aboriginal, half museum staff, making and talking about carved wooden reliquaries which they claimed were medieval, but had the dark wood & organic curves of tribal art.
People keep talking about Japan, and it's awesome in the old sense of the word: both the natural disaster-- the potential for the world to open up and swallow trains and the sea to eat the land-- and the absolutely amazing scale of the technological improvement for surviving such things. My understanding is that the tsunami pushed the boundaries of what is technically possible in terms of warning systems (but... they're down to needing half an hour's notice to get people out in time. This time it wasn't enough. But how much more time would they have needed fifty years ago?) but I haven't heard the land-related death tolls go up since that first day, and even with everything the devastation still an order of magnitude smaller than the last time they had an earthquake *almost* as bad... and then one starts asking how much that skews percentage-wise when you take into account how much the population has grown in the last ninety years. And how Japan is very nearly the only place in the world that can take that kind of hit and roll with it (literally, as it happens) as well as they are doing.
Just as we are not such rational beings as we'd like to think,* so the world is not as tame and sculptable as people want it to be. And yet, when people start to work with the earth rather just building over it... that is getting very impressive.
*Do you think you're a rational human being? Try drinking a large cup of your beverage-of-choice. Now go somewhere without a bathroom, and try to concentrate on something slightly tedious for a few hours. Still feeling in control of your brain? Add something that under other circumstances would be very minorly annoying... The human body is a remarkably finicky system, and it takes a huge amount of training to keep it from trumping the brain at a moment's notice.
Experimentally cross-posty from dreamwidth. Comments encouraged in either location.
Then there was a bit where I was flying (method unspecified) over vast stretches of light winter woodland behind the house and there were huge stone skulls of prehistoric mammals scattered around like the remains of some toppled henge; raccoon-like skulls the size of giant ground sloths, and long-bones nearly to match. And there were people beyond that in long industrially-rectangular wooden halls, half aboriginal, half museum staff, making and talking about carved wooden reliquaries which they claimed were medieval, but had the dark wood & organic curves of tribal art.
People keep talking about Japan, and it's awesome in the old sense of the word: both the natural disaster-- the potential for the world to open up and swallow trains and the sea to eat the land-- and the absolutely amazing scale of the technological improvement for surviving such things. My understanding is that the tsunami pushed the boundaries of what is technically possible in terms of warning systems (but... they're down to needing half an hour's notice to get people out in time. This time it wasn't enough. But how much more time would they have needed fifty years ago?) but I haven't heard the land-related death tolls go up since that first day, and even with everything the devastation still an order of magnitude smaller than the last time they had an earthquake *almost* as bad... and then one starts asking how much that skews percentage-wise when you take into account how much the population has grown in the last ninety years. And how Japan is very nearly the only place in the world that can take that kind of hit and roll with it (literally, as it happens) as well as they are doing.
Just as we are not such rational beings as we'd like to think,* so the world is not as tame and sculptable as people want it to be. And yet, when people start to work with the earth rather just building over it... that is getting very impressive.
*Do you think you're a rational human being? Try drinking a large cup of your beverage-of-choice. Now go somewhere without a bathroom, and try to concentrate on something slightly tedious for a few hours. Still feeling in control of your brain? Add something that under other circumstances would be very minorly annoying... The human body is a remarkably finicky system, and it takes a huge amount of training to keep it from trumping the brain at a moment's notice.
Experimentally cross-posty from dreamwidth. Comments encouraged in either location.