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13.6.12
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4.6.12
Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 6
Habeas Corpus
A crowded bus with its suspension askew
rattles by on its way to the factory, the air inside rank with sweat and
cigarette smoke and garlic‑ginger farts.
Faces peer out through the fogged and dirty windows, each lost in solitude,
reflecting perhaps on fickle generosity, or with anticipation for pungent,
steaming dumplings dipped in vinegar for lunch, or the exuberant madness of the
New Year's pyrotechnics, or sad little sister's second husband, who beats her
when he drinks.
Transcendence
is no longer possible outside the privacy of the mind. Privacy is no longer possible outside of
dreams. The process of experiencing
aliveness has been anaesthetized.
Sensation is numb. Uniqueness is
anomaly. Solitude and a sense that all
is fate, anxiety, joy that lacks laughter, sorrow that lacks tears, depression,
pain, despair and cruelty; these are the themes. Every anonymous death has left a lingering
echo.
The
neat lines dividing the periods of history are but an illusion. There are ox ghosts afoot on the remote,
dusty, yellow earth. Mythical monsters
incarnate, their fangs and lips are bloody from having gorged on children. Spiritual culture is as bleak as an endless
sea of dry grass that undulates and ripples under a perpetual wind that howls
to the horizon in all directions. People
are adrift in a void of ignorance with nothing left to believe in. Humiliation and degradation are the constant
and inescapable facts of existence.
In
the absence of either rules or common sense, individual functionaries have been
reduced to doing only what is expected by those above them in the highly
centralized structure, to whom it has become absolutely clear that political
power flows from the barrel of a gun.
Social justice is subject to the semi‑coherent whims of aging strongmen,
who are hooked to infusions of rhinoceros horn and ginseng and little brown
balls of opium, and herbal medicines that taste like a dank basement, enhanced
by doses of calcium and crushed pearls, arsenic, saffron and musk, and
applications of lion and bear fat, castor oil and carbolic acid, mustard oil
and oil of cloves and a diet including turtle eggs and the testicles of goats,
to abet the rape of illiterate village girls with pretty faces.
In
excess of thirty million people starved to death. The half‑completed, then
abandoned, blocks of inadequately conceived industrial enterprises covered with
soot and coal dust remain as a legacy.
The grotesque chunks of frozen masonry are like a fantasy of the post‑nuclear
landscape. Mighty rivers spring to life
in the high mountains, only to reach the sea, covered in a black, oily scum,
putrid with sewage and tossing up green, orange, yellow, frothy, chemical foam.
In
the grey deep‑freeze of a spiritual winter, old slogans and empty rhetoric
recycle endlessly in the editorials. The
evening news announcer begins his broadcast by addressing his audience as
"comrade viewers." The current
ideological task, says the television, is to convince the youth that communism
is superior to capitalism. There is only
one right idea. Superiors will dictate
and inferiors will do what they are told.
Those who brought habeas corpus cases on behalf of people who had
disappeared have all themselves disappeared.
To be continued...
To be continued...
1.6.12
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