Click the Bomb or HERE to watch the video
After reading my past blog posts, I’ve realized that I talk about God a lot. So I’m going to stop now; the futility of talking about the infinite has exhausted my finite mind. As Job so astutely observed, “And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?”
Yep, I’m tired of talking about God. So here’s something new; here’s something we can do justice to by talking about:
So, I came across this fascinating video called, Facing the atomic bomb: a Nuclear veteran remembers. I never knew about the U.S. Army sending soldiers into the plume, to say it brashly. When you watch the video, you’ll see in the clip (2:02 minutes in) a contingent of soldiers going towards the plume. When I saw that I felt a bizarre feeling of astonishment and awe. I’d expect something like that from the movies, but this occurred in real life — it was utterly freaky for me!
But I don’t want to talk about the politics, the sentimentalism, or the discursive opinions on nonproliferation etc. (as Yahoo attempts to do with this obviously bias video story).
What really grabs me is what the patriotic American veteran says 2:50 minutes into the video: “It was very beautiful.” My dear reader, I kindly ask you, for the moment, to put aside prejudice spawned by opinion, disavow the inclination to judge, and look at this ghastly plume from an elevated perspective of wonderment.
Ever since grade school when I saw my first picture of an atomic explosion, I’ve always gazed at that plume with wondrous awe and amazement. I don’t believe humankind has come closer to physically touching divinity than when an atomic explosion goes BOOM. The plume is beautiful, to say it vulgarly. But I want to transcend that perspective too. I want to transcend to the perspective of the Sublime.
Philosophy has always been rich with explanation on things linguistically troublesome, like a certain emotion that is not quite sadness, not quite anger, but a concocting pool of the two — what would you call this emotion? Idk. But I bet Philosophy has an answer! Philosophy describes the indescribable!
The concept of the Sublime has a rich philosophical history. The most comprehensive and notable description of the Sublime comes from the 18th century British philosopher and conservative statesman, Edmund Burke. In his work, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke essentially argues that the Sublime and Beauty are mutually exclusive. That is, each concept stirs a certain kind of pleasure. Beauty tends to be self-explanatory. But the Sublime? Ah, what a fascinating paradox: the delight we gain from horror and ugliness!
Simply put, the Sublime explains how our imagination is awed by horror and attracted to it.
“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.” — Edmund Burke
The acts of nature are perfect examples of the Sublime. A simple example: those tornado hunters who want to capture the ecstatic experience of the tornado, irrespective to the tornado’s devastating damage to human life etc. Or even with lions and their gruesome devouring of their prey, we are nonetheless awed by their majesty. The sad story of the 24-year-old woman killed by a lion that was likely just playing with her is an example of how the might of a lion can inspire awe for one to want to work with them. This is the Sublime.
The Sublime explains what happens when I see the plume. How grotesque it is to wish to see an atomic explosion in person; but it’s true — I really want to see a plume!
Surely, the Sublime requires a considerable degree of empirical detachment and an overbearing obsession of one’s own imagination; for when one reignites his/her reason and thoroughly thinks about it all, the ramifications of an atomic explosion — the mass murder, the irrevocable catastrophe therefrom etc. — then the feelings of the Sublime transform to feelings of appalling terribleness and revulsion.
But let us go further: there is a degree of sublimity in humanity’s manipulation of nature to create the BOOM. The Sublime is pervasive in nature. It is hard to identify the Sublime in humankind’s achievements. The atomic bomb is an example of that rare instance.
So I awe at the BOOM! However, I need to grapple my reason, and always remember that humanity’s quantum game of splitting or fusing the atom, of mankind’s endeavor to be God, will devour this creature from the inside out.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” — Albert Einstein
If the splitting of the atom is like being God, we are only achieving the outer fringes of God’s work. Oh shucks, here I go bringing God into the picture again. Damn you Job!
Idk 
