Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
entitled “Death by Falling,” Heim compared his memory of the accident to
other accounts of near-death experiences. in all these cases, the senses were
unusually acute; thinking was intense and accelerated; judgment was “ob-
jective.” This response had nothing to do with “personal qualities,” Heim
argued. it was universal at such moments. Yet it could not be a “reflex,” for
it was fully conscious: “on the basis and in consequence of a complicated
series of thoughts—clear in all its parts, although very rapid, but entirely
consciously conducted. . . . A reflection such as appears on its own with ab-
solute necessity when the human mind is maximally excited by terror, at the
moment of the most extreme stimulation.” Heim's state of mind while in
free fall confirmed this seeming paradox: “Objective observation, thought,
and subjective feeling took place simultaneously.”
49
The fall occurred seven
years before Heim penned his instructions to swiss citizens for the observa-
tion of earthquakes.
At stake in representations of the mental effects of earthquakes was the
basic question of the “reliability of witnessing.”
50
These scientifically trained
observers denied that their own capacity for clearheaded observation in the
midst of catastrophe was the result of training and habit. They experienced
it, rather, as a primal instinct—in Cannon's terms, as the “wisdom of the
body.” Erwin Baelz even went on to speculate that his “emotional paralysis”
during the earthquake represented a form of “possession,” and he called for
“psychic research” to clarify the phenomenon.
51
James, Baelz, and Heim
each framed the perception of disaster in terms of a preconscious synchro-
nization of body, mind, and cosmos.
52
Sensitive Instruments
such cold-blooded representations of disaster have come to exemplify a
modernist aesthetic ideal. Even as human observers were dropping out of
seismology, literary writers began to claim that they were nothing more nor
less than seismographs:
Like a seismograph his sensitive nerves had already registered the underground
shocks, while others were still entirely deaf to them.
53
—Carl Georg Heise on Aby Warburg (1947)
Both are very sensitive seismographs, who quake in their foundations when they
receive waves and must transmit them.
54
—Warburg on Burckhardt and Nietzsche (1927)
