“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, August 9, 2010

Nagasaki




I spent one of the most upsetting nights of my recent life a couple of days ago, reading John Hersey's accumulation of eye witness accounts of Hiroshima. Today it's Nagasaki's turn. It's strange to think about the energy flash that the witnesses experienced as a silent, sudden bathing of everything in light so intense that they couldn't quite see. This gets towards what I'm thinking about hyperobjects. Light ceases to be a neutral transparent medium in which everything is illuminated, and becomes a potent force. I'm thinking about this over at the Tate Britain Urbanomic exhibition scheduled for early September. There's a painting by Turner (Death on a Pale Horse) that seems as if it was photographed using gamma rays.

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