Two aerial photographs appear on the front page of today’s Varsity (our first of the new semester, the New Year). One depicts Indonesia’s coast last June, and the other, after it was ravaged by a tsunami on December 26.
The birds-eye view of the catastrophe is haunting-perhaps even more than the now-familiar panorama of dead bodies wrapped in white sheets, or airplane cargo bays filled up with cardboard coffins. Perhaps they have the subtle capacity to move us more than compassionate photographs of a mother mourning her dead child, or a child left without a mother. What is stirring in these before-and-after images is their austere lack of human life, or death.
As opposed to more familiar representations, these images portray the tragedy in a light that is cold, flat, and distant. The ordered world depicted in the before picture is eerily absent in the one next to it. Straight lines, and clearly marked partitions of land have given way to blurry and jagged ones; the once geometric landscape is now hauntingly irregular, and yet serenely natural.
It suggests that our linear, civilized way of life is precarious, unprotected from interruption from the organic, undisciplined mother that has, for a brief few million years, allowed us to build here. In a matter of minutes, we have been reminded violently of our vulnerable place on the earth that has sustained us, but will not do so forever. It is unfortunate that it takes a horrific loss of life to awaken us to this fact.
