In The Olde Brewery: Japan's Tsunami And Thoughts Of Mortality

"Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment...
"For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time I mattered."
- Harlan Ellison

"Jesus Christ, what are the chances? You'd never win the Lottery, but you might just have been there at the time that f****** hit."
- Simon Kilkelly, watching the news coverage of the tsunami in the Old Brewery, Oranmore

By Charley Brady

On Thursday night I had a Dib Dab. I hadn't had one in over forty years.

Now for the more salacious minds in the audience, a Dib Dab is not some weird sexual practise but is in fact a small packet of lemon flavoured sherbet, that comes with a strawberry flavoured lollipop. No nutritional value whatsoever and, I would imagine, not something to try if you are unfortunate enough to have diabetes.

I approached it with some caution, needless to say; but having once dipped the lolly into the sherbet and from there transporting it to my mouth, well...

What can I tell you? That little packet was a time machine transporting me right back to the 'sixties and the memory of a little runt on the bicycle of a summer's day, stopping off at the beach and taking Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" out of his little bag, then reading a chapter before seeing what he could find in the rock pools.

In his mind every rock pool was able to have it's own miniature "Nautilus", courtesy of Captain Nemo.

Even then I liked the fact that Nemo was a self-proclaimed "citizen of the world". He travelled where he wished and he did what he wanted. I couldn't wait to get to the library and find out what Nemo meant: it turned out to mean "Nobody".

I was absolutely charmed by this at the time. This dude, who built his own submarine long before they came to be in the real world, had so little ego that he would go by the name of "Nobody". Wonderful.

Of course, as a grown man, I have doubts now. It seemed to me even then that he had a kind of authoritarian view as to how people should live. Also, how the hell did he get the thing built in the first place? Was he putting together bits and pieces in different locations and then constructing it... where? Also, his crew. All these men on their own, willing to live off fish every day for the rest of their lives just because they were so mad about their captain?

I guess that some things are just best left unexplained. I never read it again and wonder what I would make of it now.

Isn't it astonishing, though, how our brains are so wired that one sip of a particular drink; one bite into a certain food; one taste of lemon sherbet and so many images and feelings and longings and reminiscences just burst forth, all because something has interacted with your taste buds and from there to long dormant memory cells.

Well, it was in this mood of peaceful recollection that I sat down last Thursday to watch a rather haunting film called "Hereafter", directed by Clint Eastwood. (Thanks for the recommendation, Patrick.)

I'm a huge admirer of Eastwood, especially his directing of the last ten years in particular, with a special mention for "Mystic River", although I'm sure that everyone has their own favourite. He seems to me to be a guy who has consistently refused to be pigeon-holed and that's kind of rare in the world he inhabits. Indeed, it's probably rare in any world.

"Hereafter" - to my mind and I must emphasise that since I have such admiration for him it is only to my mind -- doesn't quite come together in the way that you would expect; but that is very likely due to my own feelings on the subject.

The film explores, through three story strands that encompass France, England and America - all of these being brought together in England - a sort of yearning for a belief in what comes after, as the title implies.

For me the best story strand involves George, the character who is played by Matt Damon, rapidly becoming one of my favourite actors and, following "Invectus", possibly one of Eastwood's as well.

I have seen very few utterly believable portrayals of a man who is so completely alone in every way that would match Damon's subtle and often heartbreaking performance. Yes, I could mention such fine performances as Ralph Fiennes in Cronenberg's "Spider". But that is of a man who is mentally ill. What is so terrible about the plight of Damon's character is that he is perfectly normal, perfectly sane but through a terrible set of circumstances the chances to connect with someone have been taken from him. He's a bit like John Smith in "The Dead Zone". Closer to home, he is also a bit like someone I know personally; and no, it's not me. It's someone far better than I could ever be.

Put it this way: You would love to have a pint with Damon's "George", maybe talk about his fascination with Charles Dickens and how that came about (great cameo from Derek Jacobi here); you would run a mile from Spider's company even if you were in a particularly weird and deranged mood that day.

So would I recommend the film? I don't know and that in itself is an unusual thing to say.

This isn't a film column though, so all of the above is a sort of preamble. It is a slow paced film for those who don't want to listen, so I'm guessing it didn't do that great at the box office, but it opens with one of the most stunning scenes imaginable. It opens with one of the main characters being on holiday when a tsunami hits part of Asia.

The sequence itself is extraordinary and breath-taking.

As I say, I watched it on that particular night and it was still very much on my mind the following morning when I switched on the news to the earthquake that had hit Japan several hours previously. The TV and radio were warning most of the Pacific Basin to brace themselves for tsunamis. Now that really sat you down.

By now as you read this we probably have a better idea of the devastation that has been caused. There will without a doubt be thousands dead and perhaps thousands that will never even be found.

On Sky News, whether by design or by accident a whole five minutes of footage from the air was played out in complete silence. If you didn't have either tears rolling down your cheeks or were at least awed by the sight of this enormous wave of sludge pouring over everything in its path, you weren't human as I understand the word.

Perhaps that's the difference between this and the 2004 tsunami: As I recall, most of the footage there came from cam cords or mobile phones. Certainly I don't remember ever seeing the birds'-eye shots that we have this time.

There was one thing that Sky did that put everything into focus and that was the ringed image of one solitary, ant-like soul running for their life as this terrible wave of unstoppable horror was speeding remorselessly down on it. Up until that moment you could have been forgiven for thinking that the station was showing that deluge in slow motion; but this one lone figure was running at break-neck speed away from it. It was the silence that accompanied the imagery that got to me.

Awful, just awful.

When I was a kid in the 'sixties, eating my lemon sherbet, we were so confidant about things that our elders told us would be true in the year 2000.

There would be no more war because we would have outgrown that as a species.

There would be computers the size of rooms that would almost be able to think for themselves. We would be able to terraform and we would have the weather under control. (Ha!) We would have whole habitable areas, not only on the moon but on Mars, where we would have set up colonies. We would have become, in Tom Wolfe's fine phrase, albeit in a different context, "Masters of the Universe".

Well, how did that work out for the Big Brains like Arthur C. Clarke (visionary blah blah blah) and world peace by 2010?

When I made a passing remark some months ago in these pages and just mildly noted that maybe Stephen Hawking wasn't right all the time just because we are all supposed to toe the line and hail him as a genius, I thought it was a valid observation. How the hell do I know he's right? He's always saying words to the effect that he got it wrong but having had a chance to think about it he's changed his mind.

Jeez, you would have thought that I had been caught interfering with Kate Middleton and the Pope, the emails I got back on that one.

Now we're getting the usual commentaries that say how Mother Nature is putting us in our place. Oh, give me a break.

This isn't some New Age Global Hippy Vegetarian Commune we're living in. We live on a rather wonderful planet. I happen to like it but why do we have to figure out this terrible, terrible catastrophe in anthropomorphic terms?

Nature is not your Mother. The Universe is not benign. It is not good and it is not bad. It is not cruel.

The universe is totally indifferent. Certain left-overs from the Age of Aquarius can say what they like but the truth is this:

THE UNIVERSE DOES NOT CARE BECAUSE IT CANNOT.

It's just another kick in the nuts to the Egos of Humanity that think themselves to be at the centre of everything.

What we will see come out of this awful human tragedy is human beings at both their best and their worst. At their worst they will have been pushing their fellow humans out of the way in order to try for a few moments of extra life; and at their best they will have been thoughtlessly turning back in order to help someone weaker who was in difficulties.

Humanity, no matter how jaundiced your view, is quite extraordinary in its capacity for love and self-sacrifice.

But please, let's not put this down to anything but what it is.

Nature does not sit around thinking up ways to screw our days no more than a cancer cell is sentient enough to say that it will just rip the life out of someone; or that old age will just take someone who has a lot more go in them than some serial killer who would be better off in the ground.

Cancer doesn't care, because it can't (if anything it's only doing what it's supposed to do); old age doesn't care, because that's the natural order of things.

It's like something else that Simon Kilkelly (from the top of the article) said. "If you're a card player, it's just the luck of the draw."

And long after we are all dust, even down to this rather amazing mud ball that we live on, the Universe will still be there. And it still won't care.

I take comfort in that.

I'll be in other realms next week, but I hope to see all of you miserable humans on the following one. By that time the honeymoon period for the boys in our new government - and they are predominantly male, of course - should be called to a halt.

The shenanigans have begun already, of course, with a real kick in the teeth for the capable Joan Burton. No doubt it will soon be back to business as usual.

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net