"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.
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