When the ground shakes: Looking for meaning in catastrophe

The earth recently shook in western Quebec and eastern Ontario, and in its wake loosed a torrent of descriptions of plate tectonics, post glacial ground uplift and other scientific explanations for the rumbling.

What this didn't do is answer the arresting questions a recently published book entitled The Illustrated History of Natural Disasters presents to its readers.

The book, by two Czech geophysicists, speaks about the world of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis by means of 129 paintings, illustrations, prints and newspaper and magazine covers created in that far away time before photography existed or was much used.

The images come from the more than 2,300 natural disaster depictions which co-author Jan Kozak has been collecting over the last 50 years. (Here's a visual sense of what I am talking about.)

Making sense of catastrophe

The book is divided into two distinct parts. The first describes humanity's efforts to come up with an understanding for what causes the catastrophic upheavals. The Greeks and Romans had visions of a giant angry god imprisoned underground whose breath was flames and whose life was spent rattling the bars of his prison chamber. He rattled; we quaked.

The Japanese were more animalistic in their underworld. They saw quakes being caused by the writhings of a giant subterranean catfish.

In the 20th century we finally arrived at today's really quite mundane notions that the shaking and exploding and giant-wave-generating features of natural catastrophes are a function of plate movements and the nature of the Earth's molten interior.

In Christian Europe, a theological view emerged which argued that every time the earth shook and roared it was proof to doubters that hell was real. The remarks of Father Malagrida after an earthquake and tsunami devastated Lisbon in 1755 are a perfect example. The cause of the destruction and fires in the city, he wrote, "are not comets, are not stars, are not vapors or exhalations, are not phenomena, they are not natural contingencies or causes; but they are solely our intolerable sins."

In the 20th century we finally arrived at today's really quite mundane notions that the shaking and exploding and giant-wave-generating features of natural catastrophes are a function of plate movements and the nature of the Earth's molten interior.

Emotional responses

However, the second part of the Illustrated History of Natural Disasters puts this understanding in very different context. Here the illustrations depict the effect of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis on individual locations and in so doing show us quite surprising things about how we moderns view and react to natural disasters.

Initially it's hard to exactly explain why the images are so arresting. They're not always accurate.

The book points to number of times, such as in a print allegedly describing an earthquake which destroyed Basel in 1356, that what you see is clearly a visual fiction. The picture "most probably created in the 16th century by an artist whose illustration possibly leaned on a verbal description of an event," says the text.

However what always is present — even in its fictional appearances — is something you can't simulate: the emotion these catastrophes generate.

The painter or illustrator is never a camera with a filmic or digital soul who simply records what's in front of it. If you take a look at a depiction of the Sicilian town of Catania when Mount Etna erupted in 1669 you see and feel the fear as people try to flee their crumbling, burning, shaking, murdering home.

You experience this because what you get in the artist's work is the conjoining of what we see and what we feel about what we see. There is always emotional commentary within the images.

And the duality of what an illustrator saw and what he felt about what he saw is hugely educative. A French magazine's cover showing blindfolded and bound-up looters being shot by soldiers after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is beyond disturbing. The city is burning in the background. Death is everywhere, and yet to produce a sort of order in chaos the authorities kill even more people — and in so doing create contradictions beyond measure.

Are we better off today?

All which raises two larger questions.

The first relates to the initial section of the book. Is it any better now that we know what causes the cataclysms? When we moderns look at photographs of Haiti after a quake  killed 230,000 people, injured 300,000 and made a million homeless are we less disturbed because we understand the precise and indisputable geophysical cause of the devastation? Does appreciating plate movements speak to our sense of dread better than the unknown illustrator of the earthquake at Port Royal in Jamaica was who wrote in the margins of his work, "being a dreadful warning to a sleepy world; Or, God's Heavy Judgments showered on a Sinful People, as a Fore-runner of the Terrible Day of the Lord."

We can explain what happens, but that doesn't make a huge amount difference in terms of our fear and awe about what we see.

And the answer, it seems to me, is quite contradictory.

We can explain what happens, but that doesn't make a huge amount of difference in terms of our fear and awe about what we see. When my house in Toronto shook during the little quake recently, I was instantly terrified it was going to collapse upon me. I was back in Lisbon 1755. I was back in Catania 1669. Back in Basel 1356. And like people of old I feared for my life, and there was nothing in the geophysical explanations of modern science that made that fear any less.  

The second thing that looking at the images of natural disasters spreading back over 2,000 years shows is even more contradictory.

The painters and illustrators depict disasters in which those suffering through them were effectively alone in their miseries. What you don't see in their images are massive relief efforts. No tents made in China are being unloaded from the docks. No wheat is coming in from Manitoba. No Doctors Without Borders are administering to the wounded and the dying. What the quakes did in the past was kill and ruin without global mitigation.

Whereas today natural disasters have become a kind of anthem of human unity. When they occur the biggest aftershock is the response of nations almost everywhere to a death and destruction that did not occur within their borders. Today the disasters unleash a tsunami of help and in so doing demonstrate that the nations and religions and language groups of the world are one. Our earth shook. Our planet erupted. Not Haiti's planet. Not Lisbon's planet. Our planet.

The earth still roars and trembles but within today's blue planet sensibility it roars and trembles for everyone. 

And I think that a photo can't capture that feeling adequately. What we moderns desperately need is some great 21st-century painter to create a canvas that expresses how, even as they destroy, earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis are bringing humans together under a banner that reads: We are earthlings all.