Looking At Cataclysms

By Paul Gray

It was a week of visual superlatives, of images both awesome and horrifying. Astronomers said they had never seen anything like the fireworks produced when comet chunks, one of them roughly as big as an alp, crashed into the planet Jupiter. International relief workers said the same thing, only they were referring to the tide of refugees streaming out of Rwanda and into overnight cities of misery, disease and death. Certainly the millions of people who watched these two cataclysms unfold through news photographs and televised images had never seen anything like them either.

The ability to "see" such events, the one taking place 477 million miles away and the other in a small, remote pocket of central Africa, is a fairly recent human acquisition. Not so very long ago, before communications satellites and attendant technologies wired the world, the news about what happened on Jupiter and along the eastern border of Zaire last week would have spread, if at all, largely by print or word of mouth.

Now such explosions have become spectator events. In theory, this rush of instantaneous sightings should be a boon to human understanding; the more we notice, the wiser we become. In practice, such cascades of images can prove deracinating. The mind is cut adrift by what the eyes provide.

For witnesses, either firsthand or at the remove of film or TV, must supply their own contexts to make sense of what they are seeing. Faced with something new in their visual experiences, they are likely to jump to questionable conclusions. After watching three comet fragments pound, at around 130,000 m.p.h., into Jupiter's dense atmosphere, Steve Maran, an understandably elated NASA astronomer, called the sight "the greatest one-two-three punch of all time." Meanwhile, Filippo Grandi, director of emergency aid for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, surveyed the unimaginable conditions around Goma, % the sleepy Zairean border town that had suddenly filled with over a million terrified Rwandans. More than a million other refugees, also without food, running water, sanitation and medical facilities, were crowding into other locations. The understandably despairing Grandi said, "We're talking about four sites that are the biggest refugee camps ever."

It is the hubris of vision to mistake the unfamiliar for the unprecedented. What happened on Jupiter was obviously massive, but comparisons are impossible. What little we know about the universe includes the fact that it is an incredibly violent place. The nighttime sky is a panoply of explosions. The pocked and cratered face of our moon -- which was also on TV last week, thanks to a triumphant moment everyone had seen 25 years ago -- bears mute witness to eons of shuddering collisions. Given what we may infer from such signs, the pummeling of Jupiter could have been a commonplace affair.

And as for those refugee camps in Zaire being the biggest ever: it would almost be a comfort to believe that, to think the earth had never before offered up such an appalling concentration of human suffering. But how can we know? J. Brian Atwood, the administrator of the Agency for International Development, said of the Rwandans late last week: "The world has never seen this many refugees." This is accurate, provided the word seen is given its full value. There may have been more refugees huddling together, somewhere, sometime, but the world did not see them.

Images can lead not only to erroneous comparisons but to misapprehensions of scale. Because of its great distance from the observers, Jupiter fit neatly within the frames of the zillions of photographs taken of it last week. Some of them seemed serenely beautiful, showing small reddish blossoms dotting the planet's darker surface. The information that one of these was a fireball larger than the earth could not be conveyed visually. It had to be explained in words, and even then the mind resisted the preposterous notion that that was what it had seen.

In absolute measurements, the Rwandan refugees filled infinitely less space than that taken up by a single explosion on Jupiter. But, paradoxically, images could not begin to convey the immensities and emormities of these settlements. The frame was too small to contain such an expanse of anguish. Photographers had to resort to visual synecdoche, hoping that a small part of the scene -- a wailing child, an emaciated mother, a pile of corpses in a freshly dug trench -- would suggest the horrors of the whole.

In an important sense, of course, the photographs did just that. They alerted the world to the plight of the Rwandans, just as the snapshots of Jupiter gave earthlings an invaluable cosmic slide show. The danger of images lies not in the information they carry but rather in our propensity to believe -- once we have seen them -- that we have seen the whole picture. The much heralded visual age is nearly upon us, and we can take justifiable pride in our new abilities to look at each other over long distances and to take close- ups of deep space. We should also remember that images do not come with built-in memories or instructions in how they should be read. If we are to understand them correctly, we must still do that work ourselves.