La Tragedia Repetida

"O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trotten deeper in the mud"

Siegfried Sassoon, a highly decorated British "hero" of the First World War wrote these lines. He was tested for a psychological disorder because of his war criticism.

I realised that I was dead the moment that I did not hear the shot. For years I had told myself that as long as one can hear a shot being fired one is safe. Bullets exceed the speed of sound. They reach you without warning. Or rather, they arrive before their warning does. Thus when I did not hear it, I knew, knew with uncertain conviction that I was dead. The comfort lasted only as long as the thought.

It happened soon after we had passed the man sitting in the shade, the first casualty on this sunny and misty morning of madness, a man sitting in his own blood and urine.

We had gone to bed the previous evening, in an abandoned building, filled with fear and affected bravado and woke up, unwarranted and sudden in fearful chaos, a chaos superimposed on a calm realism, of colourful sunrise and gentle breeze, fractured by a gunpowder thirst that cannot go away.

Three men sent out last night to find a safe passage had failed to return by this morning. Sporadic shots became regular and intense with the approach of a misty, surreal morning without a sunrise. I cursed.

Farewell at last I said to these streets of pain. Violence ventured back and forth and frequent collective punishment measures quickly turned this into a place seething with anger against the occupation and the relentless bombardment.

In trying to put an end to history, we seem to have provoked another round of it - more vicious, more enduring, and more traumatic than before.

Danger, especially mortal danger, always seems to happen in the big spaces where we are not. We do not need to fear danger; we only have to fear it happening in that small space where we are.

The first death sitting in his blood and urine. La tragedia repetida.

A military officer armed with an umbrella, walking with calm purpose as slow people pass me by.

The true enemy do not always wear armbands, and strut, and command great rallies, but are impeccable gentlemen, who sell out their souls to a rampant power behind a smokescreen of propaganda that appropriate noble concepts such as "democracy", "freedom" and "human rights" and "our way of life" and "our values".

Is it that we don't actually want to win a new world? It can't be that, can it?

What truly is logic? Who decides upon reason? My quest has taken me through the physical, the metaphysical and even the delusional. It is terrible and mighty, and as an offspring of this delusion you wonder what you should do. For isn't it a part and parcel of its teachings that everything has a price and that there is always a time of reckoning?

You look around to find out what others are doing about it. They are doing what you are doing; wondering what to do. Knowing then that I am dead, from the shot that I had not heard, I sat down, heavily, with a sigh, knowing then that I am dead, no longer wondering what to do. Having done it all and having done nothing at all.

Coming Home!

I’m home! I’m home!

I am so excited! I’m home!

I can talk, talk to all and sundry! The loneliness of being so far away for too long is gone!

I can hold my little daughter! I hug and hug her! I’m home! Her touch, her smell, holding her so close! I’m home!

I feel alive and well, energetic in spite of the long journey to get here. The journey, normally so long and tiring, is but a vague and fussy notion that it must have happened; I have hardly any recollection of it.

Thus I decide to go for a run and without further ado I am running down the familiar road.

Now it was suddenly dark. How sensible would it be to run in the dark? I decide to turn around, but had been away for so long that it suddenly dawned on me that I may not recognise my house. I run along, very much alive but now a little concerned. Nothing looked familiar. A thick mat of fallen leaves washed around my feet. A policeman came past.

“Hello. Hello.” He says, familiar, friendly, home. Feeling safe now, and more confident, I decide to continue my run. My legs felt light, feathery; strong. No longer concerned with finding my home I run, turn right, then, after a while, right again.

On my right an abandoned building, a huge open space, a car wash and a workshop, offers the opportunity to take a shortcut. Yet the short, steep hill straight ahead seems inviting so I carry on. There is an intersection that I had never seen before, yet is familiar. It is now also light again.

There are a number of people standing around here, speaking a strange language but safely I run past all of them, back onto the road and down the hill.

This part of town is all dense buildings; a labyrinth of narrow alleys winding through it. It is also dark again.

The road is potholed and wet, I am running strongly and happy. This road continues as a very narrow, winding ally. I do not I want to run along this in the dark.

An old man, with whom I am acquainted, even though I do not know his name, waves me aside.

We hug briefly and talk, he promises to come and see me at home.

Running barefoot is so much fun, I have not done that since a child.

I ran past parks, shops, buildings where I had worked at various times. Strange, familiar, comfortable feelings well up inside me, the immeasurable pleasure of being home again.

Down my own street, things are now looking familiar once more. The trees are gone and so are all the fallen leaves on the ground. I am running along comfortably, breathing well, my legs seemingly working by themselves, the pain from which my overworked joints had suffered in the past few weeks completely gone.

Slowly, slowly I started realizing other small inconsistencies as well.

Why would everybody speak such a strange language?

Why can I not remember the journey home – the flights, the intermittent waits in airport lounges?

Why is it sometimes light and sometimes dark?

Slowly I realise that soon I will wake up, wake up far, far away, wake up in a cold, wet and distant city, there to pull on my shoes yet again and run for several hours, the excruciating pain in my joints as a result of this obsessive compulsion, beating the same slow rhythm as the intolerable, lonely ache in my heart.

First Let Me Break Your Knees

“How much does ten million Dollars weigh?”

“What?”

“Ten million Dollars….”

“Well twelve billion Dollars weigh 363 tons so . . .”

“How the fuck do you know that?”

“It was in the news. The Americans had sent twelve billion Dollars to Iraq in cash, hundred Dollar notes, and it weighed 363 tons. So use that as a basis and . . .”

“No that won’t fucking work – all those itsy-bitsy pieces of paper to hold the notes together, the plastic wrappers, they all weigh something, it all adds up for twelve billion Dollars that’s a fuck of a lot of extra weight – what the fuck they sent twelve billion Dollars to Iraq for?”

“Don’t know. To change for local currency I suppose. You know imperialism cost a lot of money you know.”

“Anyway the pallets probably weigh a fucking ton as well. Can’t use it like that.”

“Well suppose a hundred Dollar bill weighs ten grams then one …”

“Where the fuck do you get that from? Ten grams! Who the fuck told you that!”

“I am just supposing, will give you some sort of ballpark . . .”

“Ballpark is no good. I don’t want to suppose, I want to know and I want to be scientific about it. It is a lot of money.”

“Well weigh it then. I have here a hundred Dollar note.”

“In a plane! I have to weigh a hundred Dollar note in a fucking plane! What do I do? Ask the stewardess for a scale? Anyway you have a Hundred dollar note or Hundred Dollar notes? I thought I saw a big fat fucking wad of notes in you wallet.”

“They are all ones.”

“So you have a hundred and something Dollars in your possession?”

“Hundred and eighteen to be exact. One hundred, thirteen ones and one five.”

“Thirteen is not a good number. Now about the ten milli  . . .”

“Yes what are you on about this ten million Dollars for?”

“Well there is this stash  . . .”

“With a security company. I know. I also get those letters. It is a scam.”

“No, no, no. This is different. I happen to know this chap. Goes to work in Africa a few years ago. To plant rice or cabbages or something. Only where he goes to work there is this real nasty fucker in charge. Turns out his project has nothing to do with rice or cabbages, but about buying guns. He arrives, this nasty fucker he puts a gun to his head and tells him how he must buy AK’s and shit. Nice little scam. Anyway this chap he lasts six months then manages to get himself on a boat and fucks off outtha there . . . “

“How much money you got?”

“Maybe twenty. And some change, maybe. Anyway he gets the shit outta there but not before hiding ten million bucks.”

“So why does he not go and fetch it . . . You only have twenty bucks? What makes you think it is still there?

“It is there alright. Scared shitless he is of the place. The nasty fuck he is no longer around, buggered of somewhere else, whole world looking for him. Complicated but irrelevant. Anyway you are the money man. You make us some cash soon. I contact my friend. He tells us where the stash is. I go and fetch it, we split it three ways and Bob’s your uncle.”

“Sounds easy.”

“Nothing easier. But not if ten million bucks weighs seventeen fucking tons. Can hardly put seventeen tons in my overnight bag now can I?”

“I am the money man? Since when? And what are you?”

“I am the creative guy . . . the ideas man . . .”

“You have created fuck shit in your entire life. You put me on a plane with tickets you bought with borrowed . . .”

“Not really borrowed. I have no intention of giving it back.”

“OK. That’s beside the point. I find you on some fucking farm somewhere. . . what the fuck where you doing there anyway?”

“Long story. This guy he wants me to write a manual for him, on organic farming. Lures me to his place puts me on this fucking farm. Godforsaken place as you saw. I write the manual boring as shit.”

“Was he paying you?”

“Was gonna earn royalties or something. It is irrelevant. I needed a place to stay and that was important at the time. Time to get my head together. Get some ideas.”

“You genuinely believed that you were going to earn royalties from a manual on organic farming?”

“It is beside the point. Turns out this chap really wants somebody to look after the place. Dilapidated rundown piece of shit place, not a fucking lock in sight. He needs somebody to stay there take care of all his shit. Writing the fucking manual just some harebrained little scheme of his. He has many. Anyway I go fucking crazy out there. I get in touch with you. You come and save me. We now gonna do something constructive.”

“Collecting ten million bucks from some African hellhole.”

“No sarcasm, please.”

“I think that as soon as we land you take us to wherever we are staying . . .”

“Well where would that be . . . now that you mention it?”

“Sorry, I am a bit confused here. I thought you said this place is practically your home . . .”

“Practically my fucking home, not actually my fucking home. You’re the one who mentioned you have a house here.”

“Rented out, you nitwit.  Rent pays my alimony. You don’t know anybody where we can stay?”

“Know loads of people. Want to avoid all of them . . .”

“So we are using borrowed money to fly . . .”

“Not borrowed . . .”

“. . . to some godforsaken . . .”

“It’s not godforsaken it is a metropolis . . .”

“Some godforsaken fucking metropolis if you wish, with a hundred and fucking twenty eight . . .”

“. . . thirty eight and some change I think . . .”

“. . . fucking Dollars to our collective names . . .”

“Calm down. No need to get all worked up and agitate an entire fucking planeload of decent people . . .”

“. . . to embark on some harebrained little scheme to collect ten million Dollars from God knows where . . .”

“Calm down. It’s all worked out.”

“Where is this famous friend of yours anyway?”

“Don’t know exactly. He is selling orchards or something . . .”

“. . . which means he is off somewhere in some Brazilian tropical jungle . . .”

“. . . I will find him . . .”

“. . . with money that I am supposed to earn somewhere, fuck knows somehow . . . sending you of to some tropical shithole, catching all sorts of diseases most likely, looking for some dickhead, who claims to have ten mill . . .”

“. . . not a dickhead . . .”

“. . .ion Dollars stashed. . .”

“. . . quite a nice guy actually . . .”

“. . . in some godforsaken hellhole . . .”

“. . . Tulips . . .”

“. . . What?”

“He is a tulip salesman. He’ll be found in Holland or thereabouts. Somewhere in Europe.”

“OK, so we find your man. He tells you all about a stash of ten million or so in loose change that he had left laying about somewhere. You go and fetch it. We kindly split it between ourselves and . . .”

“. . . Bob’s your uncle . . . can’t think of anything easier.”

“And if ten million Dollars weigh seventeen tons?”

“Then we get some babes, three or five, whatever is necessary, gorgeous ones, distribute the stash amongst them. Also they charm us through customs and immigration. Useful to have around. Attract no attention and no suspicion.”

“Yes you arrive in some African war zone . . .”

“. . . ex-war zone . . .”

“. . . with a planeload of gorgeous babes . . .”

“. . . drooling over me . . .”

“. . . without attracting the slightest bit of attention . . . then when they come back they all promptly disappear with bags of cash, our cash. No matter we’ll go and complain to the police . . .”

“. . . we rent somebody, some huge mother fucker . . . meets them at the airport . . . easy . . .”

“. . . hire . . .”

“. . . hire what? . . .”

“You rent things, and hire people . . .”

“. . . whatever, we rent . . . hire, this huge mother fucker. . . keeps everything in check . . .”

“. . . this is getting very complicated . . .”

“You are complicating things, a very simple thing really. All I need to know is how much does ten million Dollars weigh . . .”

Good Writing

Good writing must be aimed at bad readers.


Bad readers begin to read a story without realising that the story may be aimed at the reader.

The bad reader will not give the story another thought, after finishing it.

Worse still, the bad reader may keep on thinking about the story without extracting from it any meaning.

The bad reader may resent the writer for that. The bad reader may think that that the writer knows nothing or has no imagination. The bad reader might get worked up for being insulted. There are many ways in which to be a bad reader.

Good writing gives bad readers a sense of assurance. It is possibly a false sense.

Bad writing that is then read by bad readers is not writing at all but an act of revenge.

The bad reader may believe that the writer is too lazy to write about real things.

Space Was Regarded as Empty, a Void

“But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this— we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.” W. Whewell: Bridgewater Treatise.

I ran into him again at a pub, about three weeks after I had returned from the south. He was the pilot that had flown me there, as a favour. He had to take some high level delegation somewhere and since I was making such a nuisance of myself, trying to hitch a ride southwards, it was then agreed that he would risk the forty-five minute flight to my intended destination. It was to the south that he took me, as had already been said, because apparently there was something afoot that I wanted to look into.

The intermittent flight was uneventful. We flew to a small city, dropped of a group of men wearing suits, then stood around becoming vaguely acquainted, whilst waiting for, and eventually receiving, security clearance for the last leg to a dirt airfield on the edge of a subtropical savannah. He dropped me off, and then left, not wanting to attract too much attention, not much between us but vague arrangements about when and where to come and collect me again and how this will be communicated.

I found what I was looking for, also large bands of angry young men with guns roaming about looking for trouble. Thus chastised I subtly made my way out of there, hitching surreptitious rides on a variety of trucks, trucks travelling at night with mysterious cargo. Then when reaching the coast, and relative safety, I got a ride on a boat back to the capital, there to catch my breath by hanging around my hotel and frequenting a bar or two at night.

Thus I ran into him, as had been said before, at a bar, doing pretty much the same things as I, trying to find some sort of meaning in a dark and dangerous place on the edge of civilisation.

This is the story he told me then. Be warned, here and now, that there are some inconsistencies; it is in the nature of these sorts of stories; the prevailing atmosphere, the lapses of memory all making their own contradictory contributions.

Our flight was organised at the last moment and the pilot newly employed by the company. Previously he had worked for a large organisation, that had apparently seen to the maintenance and refuelling of his aircraft. At the new company, a small, fly-by-night sort of affair, it was, and for some strange reason by all accounts still unbeknownst to him, his own responsibility to ensure the refuelling of his aeroplane.

I am not sure what the case may have been, but he had flown all of us to the south, a high-level delegation and myself, and then returned to the capital by himself.

About half an hour from the airport he had run out of fuel.

In his account several inconstancies crop up. I can recall him telling me that this sort of aeroplane does not have any fuel gauges. Subsequently I had established that this is not true. Maybe they were not working or maybe this pilot had neglected to pay attention to them. It may be that he had miscalculated the amount of fuel that he would use, taking off and landing several times, spiralling in and out of the sky to avoid being found by some ground-to-air missile or even a stray and lucky bullet from an AK-47. But not let’s waste time in speculation, be as it may, and for whatever reason, this pilot had run out of fuel.

He was about half an hour short of the airport and his first priority was to try and reach it. As he realised that this would be unlikely, he then considered landing on the main road that snaked its way along the coast.

This however was too busy and he finally opted to land on a small dirt road not more than twenty kilometres short of the airport.

More inconsistencies pepper his account at this point. With both engines down, he said that he was unable to lower the undercarriage. Apparently this can be done manually, but for some or other reason he had not, or could not, do so. To his credit, and indication of his skill as a pilot, he gently glided the aeroplane down to a small and sandy dirt road without causing any damage to it at all. Here he gave me a long and technical explanation on how this is possible; an explanation that at the time I barely understood and is now subsequently unable to repeat with even the slightest degree of accuracy.

His aeroplane skidded along the sand, eventually being brought to a halt by a small rise in the road caused by a railway line crossing the road at this point.

He came to a standstill exactly atop this railway line and lo and behold! as he looked to his left he saw a train approaching.

Jumping out of the aeroplane and removing his white shirt he waved frantically at the train to stop, something which the driver did only a few metres short of hitting this aeroplane.

The driver of this train was not impressed.

“You cannot park that thing here!” Apparently he had said, by the pilot’s account very agitated, “there is an airport down the road. Go and park it there!”

The pilot tried to explain that he had run of fuel, yet, and still by his account, the train driver remained steadfastly unimpressed.

“I have a train to drive. You must park your plane at the airport like everybody else. You cannot just park that thing anywhere you please. There are rules here.”

Now this pilot had gotten his license from a country, one of only a very few countries that apparently have this regulation, where, should you ever run out of fuel you automatically loose your license.

He was thus now unemployed and unable to practice the only occupation he knew.

It was only some years later and quite recently that I ran into him again.

He is still flying.

Apparently he had had a small amount of capital saved, and was looking around for partners to help him finance a small airline company of his own. In this way he had met a man, probably Eastern European, although he was not sure. This man had all sorts business interests, showed an interest, he thought a small airline may just compliment his activities. In the course of their discussions they usually met at the horse races.

The pilot had not up to this point shown any interest in horse racing, but following tips from the Eastern European man had started to bet small amounts of his limited funds. These horses always won.

It was therefore with a fair amount of confidence, and following the advice of this Eastern European man, that he took all of his savings and betted it on a single horse. Although running at odds of sixteen to one, he was assured that it would win. These assurances appeared to come true as the horse led by two lengths down the last hundred metres before stumbling and falling. It had to be put down later, at which time it was ascertained that its fall was in all probability caused by having been shot in the thigh with an air-rifle.

Thus it was a tip on a dead horse that caused him to accept the kind offer by this Eastern European man, to fly aeroplanes again, never asking questions about his mysterious cargo, and parking his plane all sorts of places that he is not supposed to.

The Boy in My Pocket

A very young boy is playing on the lawn.

In his pocket he has the universe.

This he had picked up a little while before.

Intrigued, he had a look at it. It was flimsy yet coherent. It had almost no substance and almost no weight. It was cold, very cold. Yet inside its blackness there were the faintest glittering of light.

“Was it reflecting this light or did the light come from inside it?” the boy wondered in a naive yet lucid small boy kind of way. It is an intelligent young boy.

Perplexed, he had put it in his pocket. It was something, that at the end of the day, he would show to his father, when he came home.

This boy is playing on the lawn. He is surrounded by his home, and trees, and the town that he lives in. Above him the sky shines bright blue. It is a sunny day.

Beyond the sky lies the universe – immeasurably vast, black and cold. It is flimsy yet coherent.

The universe is in the pocket of a very young boy, playing on the lawn.

This he had picked up a little while before.

Intrigued, he had a look at it. It was flimsy yet coherent. It had almost no substance and almost no weight. It was cold, very cold. Yet inside its blackness there were the faintest glittering of light.

Inside this universe, in the boy’s pocket, immeasurably small, there is a boy is playing on the lawn. He is surrounded by his home, and trees, and the town that he lives in. Above him the sky shines bright blue. It is a sunny day.

How many boys are there? Playing on the lawn?

A very young boy is playing on the lawn.

In his pocket he has the universe.

There is a young boy playing on the lawn. Immeasurably larger, millions of billions of trillions times larger, there is another young boy playing on the lawn.

How many boys are there?

Apart from the incalculable difference in scale, all these boys are identical in appearance. They look the same; they think exactly the same things at the same moment. The lawns that they are playing on look the same. The trees, their homes, and the sky they see; all look the same. Every molecule in each boy, every atom, every proton and electron are identical. It is all the same? Is it all sane?

A young boy plays on the lawn.

In his pocket he has the universe.

On a planet, revolving around a star in this universe there is a young boy playing on the lawn.

He wondered about the universe that he has in his pocket.

“Was it reflecting this light or did the light come from inside it?” the boy wondered in a naive yet lucid small boy kind of way. It is an intelligent young boy.

Apart from the incalculable difference in scale, these boys are identical in appearance.

The young boy has the universe in his pocket.

How many boys are there?

Apart from the incalculable difference in scale, there is only one boy.

Every molecule in each boy, every atom, every proton and electron are identical, in spite of the cosmic differences in scale. Therefore there can only be one boy.

There is no mystery about this, no contradiction.

There are in fact only two questions that concern us.

Why is this boy playing on the lawn?

Why is the universe in his pocket, and not everywhere as it is supposed to be?

A Bottle, a Corpse

And God made him die during the course of a hundred years and then He revived him and said: “How long have you been here?”
“A day, or part of a day,” he replied. (The Koran)

Some things are connected with certain experiences which appear trivial yet are so fundamental that they cannot be explained. They are too subtle to be compared to anything. There is nothing for thought or imagination to cling to. Yet they are more real than anything that we can see, taste, hear, smell or feel. Although they encompass the senses they cannot be identified with any of them.
It is difficult for me to describe exactly what happened.
There was a power failure as usual, and with nothing to do, as usual, I had spent the evening on the veranda with a bottle. Sporadic gunfire could be heard in the distance, people tended to stay at home. I had come here to this place, and at this time, simply to record events as they unfolded. Bringing with me not much more than my cameras, I had rented a small apartment in a rundown building and minded my own business for the most part in this uneventful and violent city. It was a place of dirty and deadly politics, ominous hints of a pending civil war; a place where the stability of a brutal order was giving away to the forces of freedom and progress. I was not connected to the events here, and remained steadfastly unconnected; an anarchist that did not get involved. The protagonists of the pictures I took lived their lives as candle flames- now leaping, now falling, now dying. Without fail they were starkly unheroic - losers, liars, killers, occasionally men in positions of power and trust whose bland features and innocent utterances hid seriously demented psyches, their lives but bleak parables of post-cold war desolation and despair.
The bottle came to an end and I went to bed. Endings can be exciting, promising times filled with the prospects of renewed freedom and opportunity.
The beeper sounded with anxious urgency. I sat up suddenly in my bed, startled, confused, drawn out of that prehistoric world where we fetch our dreams. Reality, which had retreated before my sudden rise, slowly started to flow back through my senses. I searched around for the switch, and, when I found it, tried to turn on the light without success. Yet this darkness was filled with colours of dazzling hue and grotesque patterns in which I could forget its darkness and focus instead on the mere idea of light.
Things can change suddenly. Life is a spectrum of interactions between many interdependent influences. Forces combine to influence our moods in such a manner as to lead to discontinuous jumps, changes of a sudden catastrophic nature.
It was two a.m. in the morning. I had been asleep for just over an hour. Exhaustion, and the effects of the bottle, threatened to overwhelm me and pin me down. The warmth, the genial and abounding goodwill exuded by the bottle such a short while ago remained now only as a sour taste in the back of my throat. Nevertheless, I got out of bed, made a phone call, then got dressed in the dark and bland bedroom and left the apartment, going down the stairs with something between a skip and a hobble, burdened by the paraphernalia of my profession.
Something had happened.
Catastrophe. The word comes from Greek tragic drama and refers to sudden twists in the plot - that unexpected point where we turn from lovers to haters, destroyers to creators, outsiders to insiders.
Catastrophe destroys. Bakunin said that we have to destroy in order to create.
A driver came to collect me and we drove through dark, abandoned, and potholed streets, strewn with rubble. My head was thick and fussy; full of that random jumble of thoughts, which we usually call a blank mind.
I thought about Bakunin, that bearded, manic Russian aristocrat, the father of Anarchism, who ran from Paris to Italy to Prussia to scream his message from the barricades and who died disillusioned in his bed. I had slowly moved away from Anarchism, not because of the way that Bakunin had written it down in his chaotic, incoherent way, but because he had written it down. Because it was written down all Anarchists felt that it was only that form of Anarchism that could be followed. Anarchism means no ruler but the Anarchists in Germany and Spain in the 1930´s were subjected to brutal subscription to specific codes of conduct and rules, treating their followers with the same brutality as would eventually be meted out to them by Communists and Fascists.
We arrived near the centre of town, an area where there was still electricity and some sort of movement at night, a thin and fragile façade of normality.
She lay in the full glare of a lone spotlight near a police control point.
There were several small groups of quiet people standing around in the early morning darkness. A battered police-van was parked nearby and three policemen were talking to a group of people. Two soldiers in full combat dress - camouflage uniforms, boots, helmets, bulletproof vests, radios, and machine guns - paced up and down; their patriotic hearts never missing a single sonorous beat. They looked alert and dangerous in spite of the fact that one of the soldiers carried his gun as a limp extension of his arm, pointing towards the ground.
A young woman, returning from work or a meeting, I think, had driven up to the control point just before curfew. Here she ran into a group of youths returning from a political gathering, or something similar. Maybe something was said, perhaps somebody did not look right, or did not have the correct attitude; whatever the case, there was a spark of violence. She was then dragged from her car, pushed around and then somebody threw a stone. That is apparently what one of the few witnesses saw. Nobody seems to have seen a thing, yet she was now dead.
She lay in the full glare of a lone spotlight near a police control point.
An act of random violence? There was no point to all of this.
What is a point?
A point is a dot, a period, a full stop. It denotes the end of sentences. It has no dimensions yet occupies space.
I moved closer, sunk to my knees and started taking photographs, making my living. It was difficult, partly because my body was so light that I had trouble keeping my feet on the ground, partly because the scene did not reflect any sort of reality that I could capture. I realised that it is only through art that many experiences can be hinted at. Artistic symbolism are not invented arbitrarily, they are spontaneous expressions breaking through the deepest regions of the human mind.
She was lying on her side. She was wearing a pretty, frivolous, flowery dress that was now pulled up over her chest. She wore fine white underwear. She looked at peace. It was almost impossible to capture her real fate on film. She looked so at peace, so carelessly asleep with her long blond hair fanned out around her head.
Fate certainly is a strange thing. Fate is like a randomly meandering coastline, which, no matter how closely you examine it, always contain finer levels of structure, and is consequently impossible to capture in any finite sort of way.
She was (and at that moment still were) an astonishingly beautiful young woman. It was almost as if one could reach out and wake her gently. Only a thin trickle of blood, half hidden by her hair, belied the truth.
I felt deeply affected by these strangely entangled elements of eroticism and tragedy.
Feeling guilty, I retreated, went to stand over by a group of foreign journalists. We only vaguely knew one another and, although we said nothing - there was nothing to be said - there was an almost supra experiential acknowledgement that we are all being touched by insanity.
There was nothing to bring us together here in this uneventful and violent city but an anonymous corpse in a nameless place.
There is some moment of insanity in every second of every day of every year throughout every century. It flashes by our lives, mostly out of sight and unmentioned, unnoticed for most of the time and scares us deeply when we confront it face to face.
I took my tobacco out of my pocket and rolled myself a cigarette. Lighting it, the pungent smell of cheap tobacco in the fresh morning air stung my eyes and nostrils.
A small group of people are standing in a circle a small way away. An ambulance is parked near the group and occasionally I can vaguely make out a snatch of uniforms moving about.