Pictures Worth Thousands of Words
Video from security camera in the Atocha railway station of the bomb attacks of March 11 is available here. (It's a Madrid newspaper's web site, so it's in Spanish. If you don't read Spanish, all you need to know is to click on Atocha below the image on the right side of the article to download the entire video. You have a choice of Windows Media Player or Real.)
Although the video is grainy and indistinct, it's still eerily reminiscent of the images we in the U.S. became so familiar with after September 11, 2001, of people fleeing a smoky scene.
When I read that this video was out there, I felt compelled to seek it out and see it, much as I was glued to the television after 9/11 (and felt compelled to visit the site--or get as close as the public was allowed--in the days immediately after). Rob had the opposite reaction after 9/11, as did many folks, and he and others will I'm sure not want to see this video. I guess we each respond in our own way. For me, it's as if I can't wrap my mind around events of this magnitude without seeing them (to whatever degree possible) with my own eyes. The intensity of my need to visit Ground Zero was almost beyond my control; to use a fictional analogy, I felt driven like the characters in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (What had Spielberg witnessed that made him so cognizant of that feeling, that need? Did something make that mark in his life the way 9/11 did in mine?) I wasn't the only one with the need to go to Ground Zero; even now, people come from all over, even though there is nothing to see there but a big concrete pit. I don't know, but I imagine that in Spain people felt compelled to come to Atocha and the other sites of the bombings. And likewise there are probably many who felt a comparable almost physical repulsion, an inability to go near the site of the mangled trains.
I don't know what drives those powerful reactions to these events, or what determines which reaction an individual will have. I would guess their intensity is in some proportion to proximity, though, that the effect spreads among us like ripples on a pond or electromagnetic waves propagating from a place and time of such--what? drama, intensity, sorrow, tragedy? all those words are so overused and made common that, like swear words, they have been robbed of the heft to convey something of such enormity. We may not have the language, but we have the images to speak on their own behalf.
Although the video is grainy and indistinct, it's still eerily reminiscent of the images we in the U.S. became so familiar with after September 11, 2001, of people fleeing a smoky scene.
When I read that this video was out there, I felt compelled to seek it out and see it, much as I was glued to the television after 9/11 (and felt compelled to visit the site--or get as close as the public was allowed--in the days immediately after). Rob had the opposite reaction after 9/11, as did many folks, and he and others will I'm sure not want to see this video. I guess we each respond in our own way. For me, it's as if I can't wrap my mind around events of this magnitude without seeing them (to whatever degree possible) with my own eyes. The intensity of my need to visit Ground Zero was almost beyond my control; to use a fictional analogy, I felt driven like the characters in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (What had Spielberg witnessed that made him so cognizant of that feeling, that need? Did something make that mark in his life the way 9/11 did in mine?) I wasn't the only one with the need to go to Ground Zero; even now, people come from all over, even though there is nothing to see there but a big concrete pit. I don't know, but I imagine that in Spain people felt compelled to come to Atocha and the other sites of the bombings. And likewise there are probably many who felt a comparable almost physical repulsion, an inability to go near the site of the mangled trains.
I don't know what drives those powerful reactions to these events, or what determines which reaction an individual will have. I would guess their intensity is in some proportion to proximity, though, that the effect spreads among us like ripples on a pond or electromagnetic waves propagating from a place and time of such--what? drama, intensity, sorrow, tragedy? all those words are so overused and made common that, like swear words, they have been robbed of the heft to convey something of such enormity. We may not have the language, but we have the images to speak on their own behalf.
posted by Maines at 1:27 PM
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