The 2010 Chile Earthquake: The Events I saw

On friday sometime between 3 and 3:30 AM I had a dream in which things were shaking. I dreampt this in the same way that a person can dream of music when the neibour is playing some tune particularly loud.

Before long I woke up and found the real world was shaking. I reached out my hand and touched Richard, who was next to me, sleeping. "Tremor" I said, and I shook his arm. He stirred while everything rumbled. "TREMOR" I insisted and shook harder.

"What" he mumbled and stirred. The walls were banging agains the side of the bed, and the whole room seemed to be creaking and grinding.

"Tremor" I said again, and he got it this time. In the darnkness his eyes opened and said "It will be over soon".

He repeated that over the next few seconds, that at the time seemed extremely long but in retrospect seem extremly short. He kept repeating it even though it wasnt true, and then as if to mock his promise the earthquake intensified greatly.

The bed, he and I moved, I think. Cracking, grinding and yawning sounds multipied into a cacauphonous scream as the building wobbled with the force of the quake. At one point I heart huge crashing sounds that sounded like thunder, but all it was was the gigantic structure

giving and breaking in its insides somewhere.

Richard stoped talking, I think, and I thought about the fact that I was about to die. We were on the fourteenth floor, and this was not getting any better. Those sounds were probably the building comming appart. We were going to fall hundreds of feet to our deaths, and be crushed by thousands of pounds of shattered concrete.

My heart was racing, but I wasn´t crying or begging for salvation. The huge beast of a building was going to bury us all in it's fallen skeleton. I was going to be crushed or splattered or trapped. Everything is over now. Okay.

Then the cracking stopped. The 22 story high building stopped moving left to right, the bed started to shake less. We weren't dead yet. We might live through this.

Finnally things ceased in a few seconds of infinite time, and a thousand alarms seemed to go off in the city far below. I got out of the recently/jumping bed and looked at the city below and saw utter depths of darkness, all electricity everywhere was gone. Richard announced it, and he tried the door. It was locked. He told me to get the key. I got it and it didn't work. The door was jammed and we were trapped in this only-god-knows-how-dammaged building. Images ran threw my head of passengers trapped on the low decks of sinking ships. I did not want to be in the aerial version of that.

I started to franticly struggle with the door, but it did not give. The pins inside had broke somehow, and the knob was utterly unresponsive to our attempts to open it.

A half an hour passed, and Richard tried to open it with a knife and later with tweezers (to remove a part that looked like it was broken that was preventing the door from being opened).

Nothing worked.

The neibours were all out doors and we heard them in the hall. Richard was absolutely, stupidly, absurdly and impossibly calm. He was too young, I thought internally, still obstinately afflicted with the juvenile belieif in his own immortality. If he had any sence, I reasoned, he would be more concerned about opening that door now, right now.

I wasn't being stuck in this room, and we were leaving now. I talked to the voices in the either outside the door and told them they were trapped. After an annoying wait someone came and kicked down the door from the other side.

All the time the building rumbled, and I am told taht we experienced heavy aftershocks during the whole proces, one of which itself was not less than 6.9 in itself. Really, over the weekend anyone in the Chilean centre of the country was not a survivor of one earthquake, but of a number of not less than 10 good size seismic events. Events that in and of themselves would merit the title of earthquake if they occured individually in the United States or Europe.

The constant shaking of everything made us into cats. All of our senses were heightened, and we were always on edge.

We went out to the hall after I gathered matches and tissues (I was sick) as well as a package of cookies. Richard took the wad of cash that was our paychecks and I took my passports. A percentage of my brain mentally said goodbye to the room that I was not entirely expecting to return to.

We sat in the hall and faced eachother wondering what to do next. If the neibours stayed or left, I am not sure. I think they left immediately, but others waited near their appartment door listening to a radio.

A breathless man came down the stairs telling us to evacuate. He paused, looked around, then continued his mission down the stairs.

Plaster was lying on the grownd as the mouldings had come off of a lot of the doors. We left rubble in front of our defenseless unlocked door before we left, to leave a trace in case some robber decided to take advantage of us while we evacuated.

We then stupidly took the only remaining elevator down to the grownd floor. When we arrived at the ground floor we quickly observed that everything was flooded everywhere. The whole building's plumbing was dealt a mortal blow by the quake, leaving it a leacky mess of water and combustible natural gas.

We filed out into the courtyard along with the rest of the residents for a very long wait. People had been caught in the middle of their dreams, right before the disaster and the evidence was everywhere. They were calm, sleepy but alert. They were dressed in payjamas, robes, sweaters hastily thrown on and mismatched outfits searched for in the dark.

The waiting game began...

Wanderings of a Nobody.

I´ve spent a lot of my life drifting about.

I was born here, in Santiago, Chile however I grew up in NY. Fastforward to college, and I took a scholarship to Taipei. That was my real first experience of the "other" so to speak. It was fascinating and stimulating. Smiliar to a baby´s experience, I had to learn everything again, even learn to speak all over again.

After I graduated I moved to Argentina for a while to be foreign some more. It worked. I finnished that trip up by moving next door, to Chile, a country that I was born in but knew nothing about. My Chilean passport is still the big, red, scary passport of the dictatorship, and I myself am very much an artifact of that time.

Now, the effect of all this wandering/travel on me has been a broadening of my horizions. I no longer see any rule, any constant, any one cultural norm that dominates anything. This is especially hillarious in the US, which I now often see through "other" eyes. It has a peculiar cult of self-worship and delusion that I haven´t really seen in most other places. . . All the comfortable middle-class conservative certitudes of life seem like a joke to me.

The world is made of strange pieces, which are not made necessarily to fit tougether. Nor should they, otherwise the beauty of their difference be lost.

Ramble.

Andrés Borges Aragón

Ramble.

Inside his mind he could be anything, bat, pot, emperor, king, queen or song. Even then, if not a king then a nothing, a leaf, a tambourine, a sound that floats and disappears.

From his appearance this would not be gathered, for he was ugly. Heavy and ungraceful, a gangly bulk he was, unbecoming. It was the inside mind-wheels in his head that could really fly when given a surety of freedom.

Often consisting of a boring afternoon, a wait at an office, or an interminable walk (he had no car), were the bases of his flights into the huge unknown darkness inside his mind. On these travels into the outer oorrt cloud of conscience, he could encounter the whole meanness of the universe, its cruelty, its kindness, its ultimate impartiality, but never its condescension.

For example the awesome planets spinning huge, dumb, horrible, resplendent in their ancient courses through unmeasured darkness overfilling fathoms of incomprehensible darkness, that was one vision one time.

For example, there was another of volcanoes and fire which gushed endlessly over an alien land, fire waves killing the land, consuming the slave-aliens, who were dumb towards their impartial gods. He watched unblinking.

Mind space, real space, for it is all space. The painting needs the watcher, the fire needs the wood. How many volcanoes only erupt for the islanders?

Delight and wonder can be found within his mind, crowding for space with wonders and extract. More and more they cloud the doors of his perception, overflowing until he is consumed by the dream.

His body sits stiff, eyes dull and far, watching nothing. For his mind enjoys a buffet of unthinkable, unexplainable enjoyments. Such are the ten thousand flavours of a mind open to taste everything.

Who can say that his job is not a fake? Who can say that the toilet is real?

The chair hurts his body after hours prone. He moves but still clumsy legs, arms, feet bump and hit things. Those things slide and sometimes break when they are in his way,

They make certain sounds.

Another day, night, year, age, they all pass. He is old now, outwardly. He still goes to work, and then he still goes to dream.

For Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun

This painting done by Simeon Solomon in 1866 feautures the tired image of the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, born Varius Avitus Bassianus. He was known for his various sexual pecadillos, sun worship and general ecentricity.

Reading the story of his life, I pity him. He was Emperor for 4 years during a particularly bloodthristy time in the Roman Empire. Economic, political and religious instability seemed to be everywhere, lurking on the German borders, in the heards of the Romans and in the bloody hands of the dastardly Praetorian guard. During his short reign he was ultimately unable to control the army, history, the world, or even himself. It seems to me that as time went on he focused on the one thing he could master - his body.

He was stabbed to death by his own Imperial guard on 11 March 208AD.

Hail Caesar...

The new president, while doing nothing, seems to upset everyone. Many on the left, myself included are stymied at his lack of action and seeming dithering. Everyone on the right, which itself has grown very extreme, hates him fanatically and screams in apocalyptic tones about all the evil he is to unleash on the nation.

This, of course, ignoring the many evils already unleashed by the late Bush II, who has only lately left the throne.

The neutered Senate divides itself into two, one half eternally filibustering the other. In their impotence they put forward weak ideas and strong attacks. They are useless. Among them few have any courage to think, but rather follow and attack like packs of wolves.

I fear we are entering an age of Caesars, though we are in the first few chapters of this new volume of American history...

Soon there may come new crisises, and the Senate and President, unable to disengage themselves from the poisonous game of partisan character assassination, will be unable to provide leadership. When the dollar crashes, or another war is lost, or another attack happens where then will the die fall?

Who can say.

What I can say though is that there is a vacuum of real power. Whenever the next thing happens, and it will happen, there will be no unity and no one with enough support to do anything about it. The result will be chaos, a democratic chaos.

The result of that, my friends, will be a strong man who can make a unified policy. When that happens the death of democracy will not be met with tears, but rather with cheers for the new stability it will bring.

Hail Caesar Agustus....

Windows 7

Today one of the headlines from The Economist is the following...

"An imminent Pakistani offensive in Waziristan, Windows 7 Launched, protests in Bankok.."

It is interesting that now the launch of a product is now History in the grandest sense of the word.

Where does the rabbit-hole of comodification lead?

Rubix Cubes and Jewel Quest 2

Lately two things have been consuming my time. One being a rubix cube at work and the other being Jewel Quest two during the late, borring hours of homelife.

Late last night, while playing Jewel Quest, trying to manipulate the matrix to produce 5 and 6 in a row I came to a realisation that, while obvious to everyone good at math, was totally hidden to me since I am very poor at the mentioned... That realisation was that Jewel Quest is more or less a logarythm which is interactive, and changes in and out random varables whenever you cancel a piece and as a result new jewels come into the top to fill out the matrix.

This was an interesting thing to realise becuase it made me think of all the other potential activities that I may be envolved in that are similarly live performances of a logarythm or at least of an equation where changing variables effect other changing variables.

I´m sure that none of my terminology is right in this respect, but I saw the jewel quest as a changing system that added new complications every time I cancelled or solved, I guess, exisiting factors given to me.

Anyway, the Rubix cube also presented me with an interesting idea. Let it be known again I am no good at math, but have always been interested deeply in physics.

Now, on the cube there are cells which one can switch around to put them in different positions. At first I had difficulty manipulating a block from one place, facing one way, to another facing a different way or in a different area at least. After a while I learnt how to do this, but in learning about it I realised something.

I realised that basically the switching from one side to another is tantamount to changing the dimension that that block is in, if we define the dimension of the block as being it´s relation to all the others and it´s "side". Such a change, from the perspective of the block, would be unexplainable, magical and totally imperceptable as one does it.

I am reminded of the book "flatland" where the author suggests that higher dimensions are simply not visible or understandable to those of lower dimensions. If I were to use my finger to poke into a 2 dimensional universe, the 2 dimensional creaters could only percieve the flat tip of my finger.

This is the matter of the rubix cube. The flat block, no more than the flatlander, would be able to explain the dimensional shift of his position vis a vis his past side or anything else.

In effect, when one is playing with a rubix cube, one is playing the role of a higher dimensional being manipulating a surface or the reality of a lower dimension.