My best friend’s house was struck by lightning. Twice. In the same year. The recent storms in the south and midwest gave me occasion to remember this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/us/26storm.html?hp
I grew up in a small town in Texas, close to the Gulf of Mexico, so neither my best friend nor I am a stranger to severe weather. But the incidents at issue didn’t occur during a hurricane. They were just ordinary storms that did extraordinary damage—not only to the house (which had to be rebuilt twice)—but presumably to the psyches of the family living within that house (no one was physically injured either time). My best friend and his family are all good, hard-working, austere Mormons who couldn’t be more humble or kind. I couldn’t help asking my friend, half-seriously after the second lightning-sparked fire: Do you think God is trying to tell you something?
I don’t remember what he said. Undoubtedly, something quite sensible and forthright. My friend is the kind of person whose house can get struck by lightning and simply evacuate, pick up the pieces, rebuild and move on. I’m not like that.
Coming from the Gulf, I have a fascination with weather. Hurricanes feature prominently in both a play I’ve written and a novel I’m writing. What could be more dramatic than the sky opening up to swallow the earth where you stand? When I read articles like the one above, I see the difference between news and art.
Ruin is news. Headlines with grim body counts. Lightning strikes—twice!—and the world takes note.
Art invites us to linger longer, measuring catastrophe, not in lives lost, but in lives altered. Ruin, of course, is awesome and often devastating, but it’s the human resistance to ruin that can be both expansive and even epic.
2 Comments
jgf posted on May 27, 2011 at 9:14 am
i too am fascinated by nature…and the tornados and the mississippi flooding (growing up in cincinnati, the depth of the river is given in daily weather reports)…the other night as i googled info on the tornados i stumbled on a christian site that tried to answer the question, where is god as these monster storms plague the bible belt?…a caring god or a vindictive god, for me, isn’t the point, though i did find it interesting that that’s where people were looking for answers or meaning…
what caught my eye in your post was the nature of art in all this…we–here i’m referring to people in the u.s…are so left-brained logical; all of the spiritual world has been rejected except for forms of religion and the natural, organic world is not fully understood or realized…artists do have a different way of viewing events, processing them, and putting them in a context…for some reason that sort of view has been pushed way to the side in our society…i don’t quite understand why but i do think it’s detrimental, no different that the medical world only looking at the human body in terms of specialties and not a whole being…
just my two cents…
erh20 posted on May 31, 2011 at 8:09 pm
given that you mentioned religion in your last post, its also interesting to explore the relationship between religion and natural catastrophes: is god found in nature or does god control nature? this points to, i think, the question of whether the divine is found within the human or outside the human… if you believe at all, but that’s a whole different topic.
also, check out the work of bill viola. natural disasters feature prominently in his work, as does religion.