On a planet that is itself alive, safety is an illusion;
psychologyoffers no solace in dealing with larger-than-human
events.
T0 BE A SUDDEN AND HELPLESS PARTICIPANT IN AN EVENT LIKE LAST
JANUARY's 6.8 NORTHRIDGE QUAKE IN LOS ANGELES IS TO BE SUDDENLY AND
HELPLESSLY BEYOND THE REACH OF EVERYTHING ONE HAS EVER BEEN TAUGHT, EVERY
BOOK ONE HAS EVER READ, EVERY PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY--IN SHORT, BEYOND
EVERY NORMAL HUMAN EXPECTATION.
Without warning in the dark there was the shaking, everything
shuddering, shivering, the bed, the walls. There was the shock of being
suddenly and absolutely awake, as awake as it is possible to be, with no
residue of sleep. Many labeled this level of wakefulness "fright," but
that was later, when speaking of it. In the moment, it was one's animal
body in pure wakefulness. It was a lesson in how asleep we normally are
with our eyes open.
In the same instant there was the sense of trying to see what we
could not see in a dark room, a dark world, a world of trembling shadows.
And it was not only the world that trembled, it was us-our bodies were
both being shaken by the quake and shaking within, a double onslaught.
Then to bolt from bed naked, stand in the doorway, shout to each other,
we had to shout for there was a great sound. We were shaking and the
walls were shaking, so this sound seemed to come as much from within as
without. It was as though we were shouting over ourselves, through
ourselves. Shouting each other's names. Your name is a strange and
fragile thing to hear, even shouted, amid such sound.
Then came the surge. Walls that had been shaking now were jolting,
the floor was bouncing, it was hard to stand up and everything was
crashing. There was the sound of many things breaking, the sound of the
walls as they strained, and beyond all this another sound, unthinkable,
indescribable. It was the sound of the quake itself, a souond from deep
in the earth.
Then the building stopped shaking but we didn't. This was also
terribly strange, fumbling with our clothes in the dark amid broken
glass, as though we'd forgotten how to get dressed.
From somewhere not far off there was a huge explosion. It sounded
like (and turned out to be) a house falling down. Then we waited,
outside, in the chill of early morning. But my body was colder than the
dawn chill could account for--I was stone-cold with shock. We sat in the
car, the heater going full blast, but I couldn't get warm. I could
function, but I couldn't stop myself from freezing. And while we waited,
it quaked some more. They call them "aftershocks," but it feels like, and
is, more quakes. That morning they were very strong, rocking the car back
and forth as though it were held in some great hand and were being toyed
with.
GEOLOGY LESSONS
Did the writer of the Book of Revelation experience something
similar? For it felt as if we'd gone to sleep in our world and had
awakened in his. We'd gone to sleep in a world of shared assumptions--a
world in which the most basic assumption is that if we work hard, stay
focused, watch our diet, live decently, and try to be conscious of our
feelings and our thoughts, we'll be all right. We'd "grow," as they say.
We'd learn to be happy and whole.
But we'd awakened to a world in which all of that could be swept
aside in an instant, and there was nothing we could do about it. But,
unlike the vision of Revelation, in our cataclysm there was no one to
blame. The media spoke of "victims" of the earthquake, but when there's
no one to blame how can one be a victim? We hadn't been attacked,
although we felt attacked; we had merely experienced a moment in the life
of the planet, on the planet's own terms.
It's not quite enough to feel the earthquake to adequately
comprehend the psychology of earthquakes, and to assimilate the
earthquake's lessons for our lives. We also need a bit of geology.
When I was a kid, there was a geology book that had maps of the
North American continent as it had been through all the ages of the
Earth. One eon there was a Florida, another eon there wasn't. At one
time, according to that book, the Pacific came all the way in from Baja,
cut around the Rockies and didn't stop till the Texas Panhandle.
Sometimes there was a California, sometimes there wasn't. If you flipped
the pages, you could watch the continent change just like a cloud in the
wind.
A week or so after the Northridge quake, there was a 5.5 temblor in
Wyoming, and (on the same day) another 5 in Idaho. In fact they have many
quakes in the Wyoming-Montana-Idaho area that usually go unreported
nationally. They're part of the geological process that is still forming
that young mountain range called the Rockies--a process that includes the
huge dome volcano we call Yellowstone National Park. The geysers there,
like Old Faithful, are symptoms of that volcano. When you visit
Yellowstone, you are on top of one of the biggest active volcanoes in the
world. It hasn't erupted in recorded history, but that's no comfort.
Recorded history goes back only 5000 years with any consistency; most
volcanoes stay active for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years.
Our small bit of recorded history doesn't give us much to go on when we
speak of volcanoes, fault lines, and the like.
Tags:
animal body,
doorway,
earthquake,
fragile thing,
geology,
illusion,
many things,
onslaught,
participant,
psychological theory,
psychology,
quake,
safety,
shock,
shout,
solace,
vulnerability,
wakefulness
