A disservice · 8:51am Jan 26th, 2020
There are some sensations to which classifying them with words feels like a disservice.
This is through no particular fault of the words themselves - the vast majority of words are neither good or bad, they simply exist, and the words themselves are not to blame for their use. And it may not be implicitly the fault of some phrases used to describe the sensations, which make an attempt at explaining that can also be considered without fault. Possibly, not even the speaker is to blame, if the speaker is attempting simply convey their thoughts as accurately as possible.
And yet, these articulations can still feel as if they are a disservice, through a matter of simple scale. There are some sensations that are of such overwhelming force that attempting to capture them in words necessitates framing them as less than they are.
Could i attempt to moralize such an experience? I could, and such things perhaps deserved to be moralized - but to frame them in concise, moral terms requires rendering those experiences with the same intensity that one might use for far lighter fare, and the disservice comes when attempting to compare the two. Could i rationalize emotions? Perhaps - but to break them down into clinical terms saps the power from them and renders them as sterile as definitions themselves. Perhaps, even, i could attempt to recount an experience as accurately as possible - but i could never properly describe such a thing, for i know my limits, and attempting to discuss them disservices their raw impact.
And yet i try to think of them in moral contexts; i attempt to explain them; i attempt to talk about my emotions concerning them. I do these things to render them communicable - and it is only through such communication that i am able to describe what i have witnessed. For to describe such things as they have been felt is impossible.
There are no apt words to describe bearing witness to the screams of infants burnt raw, of children begging for parents, of teenagers attempting to speak valiantly in light of an all-consuming fire. No words to convey what is felt properly through the eyes - of tattered clothing darkened by black rain, of the hellish afterdetails in black in white, of sketch after sketch of melting flesh and ruptured eyeballs. No true way of describing what is felt vicariously through recounts of agonies and deaths quick and slow, of every walk of life brought together in a deterioration that consumes them and those around them.
And yet, were i not to say such things, i might someday in my vices forget what i have witnessed. I must speak of things in pale imitations and feeble recountences, for perhaps in such pale mirrors i may at least remind myself of what i have experienced.
I am neither the deliverer or the sufferer of uncountable agonies, but merely a witness. And all i can do is witness, and recount, and preserve the memories delivered to me like a torch, that i might bear the torch elsewhere and convince others to journey into the dark and bear witness themselves.
There are some horrors i cannot put into words, some things i can never properly express to others.
But I must at least preserve those horrors as i witnessed them, so that i may not forget.
On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
I only became aware of the full magnitude of this on January 26, 2020.
There is a book, a somewhat small but very heavy book, made up entirely of first-hand survivor's accounts of the strike arranged in a chronological order. It is titled simply Hiroshima.
It is well worth reading.
It is important that we do not forget that which is so terrible. Not only for those that experienced it, but so that others will remember.
I hope this doesn't mean you were just nuked.
Seriously, though, I hope you're okay.
If it had been done by a country that didn't win that war (or if it had still been done by the United States, but the United States lost the war) then the use of a nuclear weapon against civilians would certainly have been considered a war crime, and punished accordingly.
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He was in Japan.