Malinda Words: Herculaneum of the 21st Century

Herculaneum, buried under volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1973, was discovered in 1709. Pompeii, the better known Vesuvius city was discovered 39 years later and identified only in 1763. In 1750, well diggers discovered an impressive Roman villa in Herculaneum. Subsequent tunnelling operations revealed the villa’s layout and treasures, among them a library and within it charred paper scrolls. It was only then that the diggers figured out that many of the ‘rocks’ they had removed were actually carbonised books.

Technology has helped decipher much of what was written in the approximately 1,800 scrolls found in this impressive building, since named Villa of the Papyri. They contain Roman poetry and records and half the works of the Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Buried cities are being discovered all the time. Civilizations rise. They fall. They are laid to rest by eruptions, some natural and some not. They can also be footnoted and erased, by design or accident. Abandonment gives license to the elements which, unimpeded, will inter all things that carry a human signature. People move or are evicted. They get tangled in their respective diurnals. They forget. Memory dims. Elemental shrouds eventually cover the rubble of cities that have crumbled.

Now, in Herculaneum, a rocking chair has been found. Carbonised of course. There may be literary references to rocking chairs more ancient, but I have heard of none. Until this discovery, it was assumed that chairs that could rock were first made only in the 18th century. We don’t know who used the Herculaneum rocking chair. Whoever it was must have surveyed the universe of his or her concerns at relative leisure.

The rocker, if one may use the term, may have fled house and village, with or without family and friends, perhaps carrying a few precious personal items. Perhaps the rocker was one among many unfortunate individuals who just could not get away.

Today there are chairs of all kinds. People can rock, they can swivel. They can reflect on work already done and the work yet undone in the comforts afforded by such furniture. They could also be buried by calamities unexpected for there can always be landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis and of course aerial bombing which the world doesn’t seem to tire of. Until then, however, the only calamities they can swivel around their minds are those that happen to other people. Far away.

Far away, buildings are made to collapse. Poisonous gases fill the air. Libraries and universities are burned to the ground. People are made to talk of hospitals, schools, homes, lives, loved ones, hopes, dreams and imagined tomorrows in the past tense. They don’t have rocking chairs and even if they did, cannot rock the years away, for their life expectancy has to be talked of in hours, minutes and seconds; yes, not even in ‘days.’

Cities are buying buried as we rock away our lives in the relative comforts of being able to convince ourselves, ‘no, death will not arrive at this moment and probably won’t for quite some time.’ History is being buried in an avalanche of deceit. Bombardment is being trivialised as passing showers.

I do not know who in that unhappy city called Herculaneum cried during that terrible moment when Vesuvius erupted. I do not know who sobbed and if anyone could hear the sobs or see faces contorted in horror on account of the furies unleashed and the ash that rained and rained and rained. But I wonder if there were others in cities spared by the eruption and close enough to witness the horrific spectacle of the earth vomiting out its corrosive insides who, in rocking chairs, told themselves, ‘not my volcano, not my fate,’ and called for some heady brew that could stimulate philosophical reflection.

I do not blame them. The Vesuvius eruption was not the work of human beings and there was anyway very little that anyone could do apart from trying to bury out those trapped and yet still alive. In fact there’s evidence that such rescue attempts were attempted.

It is different when calamities have a human signature. It is different when genocidal processes can be stopped but are not and indeed all means are deployed to ensure that it continues.
I am not sitting in a rocking chair but there are no bombs falling from the skies above, there’s no indiscriminate gunfire directed towards me; I am not surrounded by rubble, my face and those of people around me are not covered in dust and blood. I know that no one could have stopped the eruption of Vesuvius.

But I know of a Herculaneum where people are dying and that they could all be saved, only those who can are swivelling or rocking in their preferred chairs, either ordering genocide or nodding in approval. I know of a Herculaneum where books and scrolls are being burnt; manuscripts that include poetry and records, the histories and stories of a people. I know a Herculaneum where laughter and tears are in the process of being petrified, despite which people still sing, still smile and will not stop loving, just as people in that Vesuvian town may have, 944 years ago.

I know of a 21st Century Herculaneum. Gaza.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 292nd article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

14 December 2023

Herculaneum of the 21st Century

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