Right: Le Deluge. Some beautiful phrasing, which due to its popularity and corresponding overuse, has detracted from its beauty a bit. But the phrase and its corresponding imagery - and history - does have some prescient content, which may account a good deal for peaking usage. That and its cool and sophisticated to throw around old French sayings. But I'll go ahead and stop nitpicking.
The "deluge" part is usually what takes up the most space in the collective imagination. But I think just as interesting is the relationship between the run-up to the deluge, the deluge itself, and the aftermath of the deluge, and so on in a historical progression of interrelated parts.
The metaphorical - or literal - flood is never really a permanent end. It is a transitory - and let's be clear, significant - event that indicates the breaking apart of a given order, which allows for other orders to be ushered in. The problem with this though is the chaos and strife in the interim.
When things break apart violently and traumatically, those living and surviving through the process tend to be shaped dramatically by those experiences. And bare survival amidst violent and catastrophic upheaval tends to encourage the eventual concentration of power, and the eventual perpetuation of that concentrated power, lest the individuals within that process wish themselves and their heirs to experience the same things again.
Which, let's be clear, is not true everywhere. Chaotic and tumultuous phases of history are often responsible for some of the greatest spiritual insights, which foster peaceful and humble living, among other things. But it only takes successful power accumulation somewhere, and then it encourages all of the others around it to do the same. Those great spiritual insights do eventually find their way into encapsulation within corresponding great religions, replete with their walled kingdoms and loot-filled cathedrals, after all. It's complicated. Yes.
It is the concentration of power that eventually leads to a situation in which that power needs to be dispersed violently once again, in the "deluge." So the long-form problem is the chop: that historical relation in which a wave begets a valley which begets a wave and so on.
It is hard to get off the teeter-totter when it is constantly rocking, so you eventually just have to fall off, which makes no guarantee of where you'll end up. So you fall and others fall, and perhaps the teeter-totter falls apart altogether, and the sum of that activity contains the essence of that falling, so then another teeter-totter emerges, merrily rocking away after the momentum of that falling. On and on and on. It's as if the teeter-totter has to fall apart so completely that there is no possibility for one to emerge in quite the same way again. At least, for anything to really, totally change.
