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.