Orimupiko 22 and the Haze of History

Abstract

Certain types of chaotic events lure historians and readers. While giving birth is a chaotic, exceptional, creative event it is also a private, universal and prosaic one. While not all women will give birth, all men and women have been born. Wars and natural disasters, however, present a different order of chaos. They are destructive, exceptional and public. Wars and disasters rupture time. What once existed is no more. People die. Mountains collapse. Homes burn. Ships shatter. Villages empty. Residents flee. Roads split. Swamps rise. Forests fall. Some of these events are over in a flash. A dormant fault-line shudders, the earth shakes, buildings crack and crumble and collapse, people are crushed. Others, like wars, go on and on, spreading and intensifying the chaos, knifing time and splitting it apart.