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. A pair of German warning buoys installed off the coast of Java after the 2004 tsunami cost $250,000 each to buy and another $125,000 a year each to maintain. In July 2006, they had been out of the water for a few months, waiting in a dockside warehouse for the funds to repair them, when the next tsunami struck and another 700 Javanese people died.
Richard Hamblyn has written a cool, calm book about this world of intermittent horror and human impotence. He takes four famous earth-based disasters: the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 — the confidence-shaking titanic moment for 18th- century optimists; the gassy, poisonous effusions of Icelandic volcanoes in 1783 which spread a noxious cloud across the whole of the northern hemisphere and killed tens of thousands of people who couldn’t breathe; the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which is famous because it was the first grand disaster in the age of global communication; and the tsunami which attacked the Big Island of Hawaii on April Fool’s Day 1946.
For each of them, he tells a vivid and pathetic story of people not knowing what was happening to them when all the structures of the known world were dissolving around them, their selfishness and ridiculousness in disaster (the Spanish ambassador to Lisbon being killed by the Spanish royal coat of arms on the front of his embassy, which fell on him in the course of the earthquake), followed by the ‘dulled detachment to terrible scenes’ and the ‘state of listless incredulity’ into which we nearly all fall when things go wrong. He quotes wonderful first-hand accounts from wide-ranging sources (bodies of tigers were floating in the Sunda Strait after Krakatoa and the fish were seen to be ‘dizzy’), each of them a lesson that if we happen to witness something that is globally terrific, don’t generalise or moralise in your letters home: describe exactly what you see in front of you, as long and as detailed as you can.
Hamblyn writes as an analyst and rationalist, not a disaster-movie maker, unfussy, laying out the interaction of ant-like people with enormous, violent nature like a man drawing out the lines on a tennis court. He too has a drift towards optimism: that science will understand; that avoidance of catastrophe is possible; that most of the casualties in the past have come about not merely because of the blind savagery of Poseidon’s underlying world but because of the stupidity and forgetfulness of people who should know better. But of all the terrifying images in this book, none is more powerful than the thought of those two German warning buoys, lying inert and useless in the warehouse as the drowning wave came in.
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