Another Apocalypse Comes And Goes

Yesterday was the putative end of the world as far as the Mayan calendar was concerned.

Apparently, archaeologists have recently discovered evidence that quite simply what had been theorised as an end of the world scenario was simply a misinterpretation of the fact that their complex calendar had only been calculated to a specific date, and to the modern mind, this must have seemed to have been the end of all things.

Of course, I'm quite grateful for having survived yet another suggestion that the world might end. I'm not quite ready yet to cope with everything that might happen if everything we have come to take for granted should suddenly collapse.

Coincidentally, it seems, my own broadband connection seems to have failed at the moment, although the more likely explanation is that my carers disconnected it accidentally as they were tidying up the mass of cabling that surrounds my computer, conveniently placed on a table that can be slid across over my electric bed.

The bed that gives me as a disabled person so much more access to ordinary things, like water so that I can take my various medications.

For me it would be a disaster if I were to drop my bottle of water, and not be able to easily to take my pills at the regular intervals I take them during the night.

It seems a little quiet outside as the world wakes, but it seems that it is surely waking. The world has not come to a sticky end, as has been predicted so often across the centuries.

Which has of course provided Hollywood with an entire genre of film possibilities.

It was rather interesting to try to read into the programmers’ thinking as to the films shown last night on Film Four, as Knight And Day was being shown as the nine o'clock film, guaranteed to take your mind off a potential midnight calamity. And after that, as a kind of subtle joke perhaps, Final Destination.

I myself chose to watch my own favorite Hollywood apocalypse movie, Knowing. I did watch recently 2012, which was more specifically concerned with all of what we are aware of as potential calamitous occurrences happening simultaneously.

A friend that is equally interested in film as myself lent it to me to watch, just a few weeks ago. Playing up to the potential a film like this to raise blood pressure levels among the general population, I said that I might require some counseling after watching this film, and perhaps behind my joke there is something quite genuinely dangerous about our obsessiveness with potential disasters.

Because film has become such a real image of what might be happening in the world, with the development of such techniques as CGI, and I suspect we are not so easily able to distinguish the real from the imagined any more.

It might do all of us a great deal of good if we were to not watch any films or television for a short period every year, simply to allow ourselves perhaps to recognize the world around us as it is, with all of its drama and beauty.