What lies beneath

Franz Kafka’s Poseidon

Franz Kafka’s Poseidon

sat at his desk doing the accounts. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work. He could have had assistants, as many as he wanted — and he did have very many — but since he took his job seriously, he would in the end go over all the figures and calculations himself, and so his assistants were of little help to him. It cannot be said that he enjoyed his work; he did it only because it had been assigned to him.

But he did it, nonetheless, and with a kind of regularity and constancy which the CEO of any organisation would have appreciated. Sumatra, Tonga, the Samoas: only the latest entries in the Sea Director’s neat, double-columned book.

That is the point: Poseidon has always known what he is doing. His system of earthquakes and the terrifyingly fast (600 mph) oceanic waves they can generate has been steadily at work for some three billion years. Nothing has been more reliable. But we still don’t understand it and more importantly we can’t predict it. The brilliantly imaginative discovery in the 1960s of the system of plate tectonics was a Copernican moment, but still no one can say when a plate will shift, nor how earthquakes on one side of a plate are connected to others, nor how the stiffness or elasticity of those plate boundaries will play out in real time, nor how or when volcanoes that appear on those boundaries will erupt or with what force. In terms of the mechanics of the earth, we are still at the stage of early 16th-century cosmographers: one or two ideas, essentially wandering in the dark. Even the few tools we have fall foul of other realities.