After the explosion

While I was waiting to see Star Wars on the IMAX at the National Media Museum in Bradford over Christmas, I popped into the gallery to see the current exhibition - Revelations: Experiments In Photography.

There was some great ultra-high-speed photography featuring the familiar bullet going through apple sort of thing. And there were some more unusual things too.

One that caught my eye was a vase of flowers exploding. The artist had dipped the flowers in liquid nitrogen to make them brittle, then put a small explosive charge in the centre.

The display was an ultra-slow-motion video of the explosion. It lasted about 5 minutes...

And it was utterly captivating. For me I think that was because there was one stem in the middle that seemed to remain intact. Everything else was flying apart into a million pieces. But in the middle of the carnage there was one stem standing. And it had a single small white flower.

One white flower at the centre of the storm. When everything else had gone, it was still there.

I don't know if that was planned by the artist, or just the way it worked out, but I sat there for the whole 5 minutes watching that flower. Wondering if it would crumble, finally. But it didn't.

At some point, I'm not ashamed to say, I started to cry.

I remembered the part in Little Man Tate where the teacher asks Fred why he thinks Van Gogh painted a single white iris in a bed of blue ones. He replies "because he was lonely".

In those few minutes, watching that exploding vase of flowers, with one still standing, I felt the loneliest I have ever felt in my whole life. Ever.

And yet. Once the video finished. I returned to the world and felt fine again.