Comment on the Belmont Club "Waterworld"

(on the flooding in The Philippines, images reposted)




Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!

Yet they abide. They are not sitting there wondering when someone (read the Americans) will come to save them. They are busy living.

One thing that the Western mind might find disturbing about these images is the concept of wetlands. Swamps are always places of terror. That might be because in Jewish cosmology the first thing God did when he created the world was he drew lines. He separated light from darkness and then he separated the waters above from the waters below and finally he parted the waters and the land. When the boundaries are broken, by twilight or by flooding the result seems to violate natural law. That is frightening.