Shattered

The picture of Beichuan on the top of A1 of the Times today was incredibly powerful (the website image below is cropped, but you get the picture). A rescuer carrying a woman survivor (whose leg is whose? and why the mask?) in a landscape of destroyed buildings. There's no horizon and there are no vertical lines. Eventually you notice a hand and a foot on the left of another rescuer, pulling a rope which the other rescuer is gripping; he seems to be pushing against the scene we see for balance, as if he were trying to pull the others out of this scene of endless horror.
The picture is nightmarish, hellish. Its like a painting by Bosch or a German expressionist, a scene from a Japanese post-apocalyptic anime, or from 9/11. What terrible power nature has. I remember reading something while in Japan once about the consciousness that comes with living on land constantly shaken by earthquakes. Earthquakes are in a deep, deep way the most unsettling of disasters. (I suppose they are the definition of unsettling.) There's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The earth, our home and friend, seems to turn on us, an enemy, a trap.

I kept recalling this image through a stunning performance of Shostakovich's 4th symphony by the Chicago Symphony Orchester, conducted by Bernard Haitink, at Carnegie Hall tonight.