"This is nauseating."

I read the latest on where the oil is coming ashore, and scrolled through the comments made (primarily) by locals. Some simply vent their anger at BP, some suggest proper retribution for their mistakes, some complain about the wider problem of an "oil addiction," and some scorn hope out of hopelessness. The latter speak with cynicism, trying their best to make a joke of something of which they are terrified, but their best efforts cannot lighten the long shadow thrown by the news that only gets worse.

The estimate of the size of the spill increases, the solutions that are in place (like chemical dispersants) take harsh criticism, and all the while the oil continues to gush. One of the commenters corrected the name "spill"--"It's an unlimited oil volcano!"--to the approbation of his fellow commenters, but even that small victory of language cannot stop the disaster it so effectively describes.

Underwater, the oil was an unseen disaster. Some knew what it truly entailed--what trouble that ecosystem saw--but while the visible oil floated harmlessly on the surface, far out in the Gulf, the miles of booms and fleets of skimmers and great concrete contrivances seemed noble and maybe even hopeful. The enemy may have been burning the fields, but they had not yet breached the wall. Upon landfall, the tide of opinion has changed. The best efforts at containment now look futile, the fleets pitiful, the booms flimsy. The war seems lost.

The beginning of the Ode to Man, which starts at line 332 in Sophocles' Antigone, uses the word deinos to describe man, a word which spans two English meanings, both wonderful and terrible, best captured in the idea of "awe." (I have altered David Grene's translation, below, to make use of that instead of "wonder," as he renders it.)

"Many are those things which inspire awe,
none is more awful than man.
This it is that crosses the sea
with the south winds storming and the waves swelling
breaking around him in roaring surf.
He it is who wears away
the Earth, oldest of gods, immortal, unwearied,
as the plows wind across her from year to year
when he works her with the breed that comes from horses..."

The scariest thing about British Petroleum's oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is the way our own powers have turned on us. The finest technology history has ever seen allowed man in his greatest strength to tap the resources of the earth, not just below the soil of fertile fields, but thousands of feet below the sea, where his own meager body could never go alone. What beautiful might! But now, what we opened with our strength we cannot close again, what we created we cannot destroy.

It has been a full month since we lost control of the power we had formerly harnessed. But only when the oil washed ashore on the mainland, did the wonderful become terrible.