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...

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 5

Too Gruesome to Run

There are mobs of lepers, blind people, the maimed and the crippled.  In addition to whiffs of burning, a close approximation to whatever brimstone smells like, the sharp stink of festering shit and stale urine hangs over these slums of gobbed and spittled pavements and knotted, sooty, noisy, honking traffic, drought, then flooding, disease then hopelessness.

            Confronted by a gruesome, thrusting, leprous stump, a nightmarishly eroded face, pleading, streaming eyes, we shake off the beggar children clinging like tenacious burrs, their filthy fingers in our pockets. The only sanctuary for meditation is a stinking latrine, the noises outside coming from the traffic of whores and soldiers and dogs fighting in the dusty street, and the grinding wheels of the carts, piled high with swaying people and baggage and dirty bedrolls and lolling children, pulled by desperate, frightened, wide-eyed, wild horses and donkeys with toast-rack ribs, the flies swarming over the sores in their hides made by the constant rubbing of the harness, all fleeing for their lives.

            We are having documentaries instead of dreams. Each night the same images: people weeping, others bleeding, eruptions of cruelty and savagery, enduring injustices and callousness, bewilderment, shame, sorrow and pointlessness.

            A man was arrested for riding a train without a ticket.  He spent the next thirty years in jail awaiting trial because his case papers had been misplaced.

            There are thousands of refugees pouring into the city in advance of the invading army. Armed squatters are stealing other people’s homes. A new and more malevolent breed of gunmen is emerging onto the streets. Hundreds of civilians are dying in the bombing raids, more than half of them women and children who are not, and can not be, criminals or terrorists or any other kind of enemy.

            Reporters speak from their hotel balconies, the smoke from the burning slums nicely framed against the clear blue sky in the background.

            “As political alternatives have been eliminated,” they say, “the difficulty of deciding has been compounded by the difficulty of living with what has already been decided. The stagnation of the state has given rise to an alienated politics which oppresses rather than liberates.”

            Thus the stage is set for an epic catastrophe. All the elements of farce and tragedy, from hubris and delusion to final calamity are in place. Officers dine at high table in their ambassador’s ruined residence, their red wine served by liveried waiters, their table graced by attractive women.

            A glad-handing politician in the face of a full-scale legitimacy crisis passes through a hostile crowd followed by a camera. People can smell his sweat.

            “This is your land. These are your houses, your meadows and gardens, your memories,” he tells them. “The nation is glorious, its people steadfast.”

            From which direction will death explode in on him? Will it be a smiling, handshaking, garlanded suicide bomber like with Rajiv? Chopped down by rifle fire from her bodyguards, like Rajiv’s mom? A cool sniper, with or without a conspiracy, as with JFK and King? Strung up in the marketplace like Najibula? Cut down in a cold rain of hot angry lead like Mr. and Mrs. Ceausescu? Bazooka-ed in exile in his Mercedes, like Somoza? Loneliness and pneumonia in a filthy, freezing, concrete cell like Liu Shao Chi?  Whichever, there’s anticipation that unpredictably, one day the crowd will turn like a pack of dogs.

            The photographs show severed heads and dismembered corpses, amid the rubble of ruined villages, each a Golgotha, a Guernica, some with dead cows and horses, most too gruesome to run, even in the back pages.


To be continued...

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 4

Luckless and Unconsidered

Smoke from the burning embassy district hangs low in the sky.  The presidential palace rises out of the mud, a gaudy display of staircases and columns and coats of arms, with its pair of bookend armoured personnel carriers parked back-to-back at the gate facing angry, stone-throwing crowds.

In front of their hovels, luckless and unconsidered, women cook rice and beans or fry bananas on smouldering twigs or dung cakes, while their babies mew and crawl and weep, their tears streaking their dusty faces.  The men rest, fat paunches over waistbands, machine guns propped to one side, stoned eyes focused on the infinity of despondence, the inherent dignity of the human person lost in a social landscape that is nothing but a heap of combustible material, littered with the usual debris; venereal disease, neglected bastards, piles of un-biodegradable trash, people reduced to despair, a few people’s privileges paid for by many other people’s work.

One, little more than a girl but old, seeks and finds her naked scrap of an offspring from the ragged children with matted hair who are sitting in the dust.  She squats and attaches the child to her nipple.  After, she wipes his backside and his snotty face with the hem of her wrapped skirt and places him back in the dust.

Down the hill, wading and splashing in the delta streams, older children squeal and shout and grab at the teats of slovenly, slothful water buffalo, amid a detritus of rusted hulks and engine blocks and broken bicycles and dirty plastic bags, where only twisted flowers grow in the morning sunshine filtered through a haze of diesel exhaust. The teats are covered with a film of the black crankcase oil that slicks the surface of the river from shore to shore.  They squirt warm milk and burnt fossil hydrocarbons down their eager throats.

To be continued…

High Art and Low

Consider this music called jazz. With its social and cultural origins among the illiterate and more or less despised and dispossessed African diasporas of the southern American states: brothel pianists, nomadic cotton pickers, watchers of passing trains and steamboats, street-corner guitar players, out-casts and strumpets, it has expanded and evolved to include a cultural community that today cuts across boundaries of age, sex, economic status, vocation, ethnicity and the state. The most vital in the abundance of contemporary music, jazz has become established world-wide as the mother vernacular of urban popular music.

Globally, jazz complements each individual cultural musical tradition by offering a universality that has not become lost in vulgarity and self-reference. More importantly, the value that jazz musicians attach to innovation leads most to hold a view of composition and music history that is truly global in scope. Just as jazz was born in America in an amalgam of African and European Diasporas, it has continued the practice of absorbing different musical influences and has remained capable of absorbing new traits without sacrificing either its dignity or identity.

In a global cultural landscape in which popular music has become increasingly strident, aggressive and barren, jazz continues to exalt the simple charm of existence without much demand for reflection on the part of the listener. With the music of contemporary high culture becoming progressively rarefied, abstract and minimal, leaving room for only highly sublimated emotions, jazz, by its raw exuberance, brings an element of balance. It is at once both high art and low; the true classical music of the global, post-modern age and also its genuine folk expression; through its various fusions the living, growing, musical incarnation of the global cultural personality, its once oral traditions of generational transmission now accomplished electronically.

If jazz has any purpose, it is a way to discover, to create, and to define a missing part within human beings related to what it means to be human. In this sense, jazz could be called an existentialist art. Jazz musicians create their essence by playing jazz, as both the global classical music of post-modernity and as its folk music.

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 3

Mother Country or Fatherland?

Hard times, confusing times, no warnings, times of war.  Portents of ending.  Intimations of catastrophe.  Holocaust guilt, nuclear annihilation, the depletion of the ozone, the tigers, the whales, and the spotted owls.

Boredom, weariness, repetitiveness, kept waiting in an outer office, unrelenting crankiness, nagging falsity, insufferable predictability.  There must be more than this.  The price of oil is computed in two currencies, dollars and blood, and payments in both must be made in instalments. 

Life is a series of arrangements and adjustments within which the consequence of error is total disaster.  The only safe assumption is that what one is doing is probably wrong.  Red in tooth and claw, the world is monumentally foolish, sadistically violent, repulsively corrupt and insanely alive.  Much of it is devoid of history and any notion of collective social context.  Sweltering boredom first, and then the anxiety of impending disaster, alternate as moment to moment concerns.

There are no-go areas where it is dangerous to belong to the wrong ethnic group, where they will cut off your finger to get the ring.  There are bearded gunmen on the streets now, backed by portraits 20 feet high of Khomeini and the martyrs Beheshti and Chamran.  Ayatollah Montazeri looks scornfully from a hoarding, Hussein himself from another, the Twelfth Imam, his horses oozing blood amid the carnage on the fields of Kerbala.  At the check points they ask whether you come from a mother country or a fatherland.


To be continued...

No Thanks, Just Looking

The girl they offered me, for 1,200 baht, was exquisite and just 14 years old, so they said. It was her first day on the job, and she was special, they said. But when our eyes met, the only possible form of communication, since neither one of us spoke a single word that the other understood; I could see that she was badly frightened.

The perceptive madam pointed her long red fingernail toward another girl gyrating naked on the elevated bar who looked a few years older. Perhaps I’d prefer somebody with a little more experience for the same price, she suggested.

Behind us on a flood-lit stage, a naked couple, looking bored and distracted, went through the motions of sex like a pair of trained animals. A drunken crowd of eager voyeurs milled about and cheered the more exotic positions. Blunt negotiations were taking place all around me.

When it became clear I wasn’t a customer, a group of muscular bouncers moved in and extorted 50 times the going rate for the beer I’d ordered. I swiftly found myself back in the river of degradation that flows through Patpong Road.

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 2

The Fragrance of Flowers and the Subtleties of Love

The sky is overcast with frozen industrial pollution and the air is grey and gritty with blowing coal dust. In silent, resigned determination, an endless stream of cyclists, bundled against the Manchurian blasts, pedal the socialist bike lane under portraits of their Chairman, Great Leader, Dear Leader, their heads bowed, exhaling plumes of frosty breath. Pumping up and down, their calf muscles flex rhythmically under the layers of rayon long-johns under their pathetic cotton trousers, the chill benevolence of the oxymoronic people's democratic dictatorship. Profound depression is the dominant emotion, the goal of socialism justifying whatever means, however cruel, might be necessary to achieve an upstairs and a downstairs, indoor plumbing, enough to eat, electric lights and a telephone.

The whole truth has still not been told. Beauty passes by unrecognized in the bike lane. One by one, the individual faces in the passing multitude spark a torrent of associations. Looking carefully and with some sensitivity we can perceive a mad montage pieced together from the shards of living memory.

Here's the first image: A damp and vaguely pleasant humus smell permeates a jade green landscape enchanted with bird song, the distant hilltops fading into a mist as subtle as an innuendo. And then, a sudden immensity of dirty coal lies under a banshee wind in a landscape where the brick chimneys of foundries belch smoke and soot and people are bent and misshapen, numb to blowing grit and sleet, and impervious to the fragrance of flowers and the subtleties of love.

To be continued…

Tribal Zone

It’s only an hour-long, adrenaline-pumping drive from Peshawar to Darra but in a sense it’s a journey to the distant past. The village, a mile-long muddy street lined with crude shops, sits at the foot of a mountain range about 60 kilometers from the mouth of the Khyber Pass, at the heart of what the Pakistani government calls the Tribal Zone. Pakistani law applies only on the main highway. Tribal law, whatever that might be, decides the fate of travelers who wander off the road.

Nature is not kind to Darra. In winter, biting cold winds sweep south out of Afghanistan and mix snow with the dust of the parched and rocky landscape. In summer, it bakes under a dry withering heat that regularly tops 50 degrees Celsius.

Despite this unpleasantness, Darra manages to bustle with a steady stream of visitors. Indeed, its shops are always crowded with eager bargain hunters and deal-makers. For over a century the village has been famous for two commodities: guns and drugs. Walk down the street on a typical day and you brush past a cast of characters from the darker side of human endeavor.

There are Taliban fighters with bandoleers and folding stock machine guns tucked under their arms hitching rides with Pakistani smugglers moving Japanese TVs from Kabul to Karachi. Sikh separatists used to shop here, back in the day, to settle their scores in the Indian Punjab. Agents of the CIA, the ISI and the Afghan secret service blend in perfectly with the two-bit arms and drug dealers that are drawn here from all over the Middle East and Asia with rupees and dollars to spend.

In tiny tea shops under posters of the late Gen. Zia ul Haq, pathetic addicts, fugitives from the laws of almost everywhere, peasants, beggars and warlords mix and mingle over sips of sweet green chai. There is not a single woman in sight. No one in Darra has ever seen a policeman. Everyone is armed to the teeth.

With the exception of the tea stalls, two filthy restaurants and a watermelon stand, almost every other shop spills into the street displaying an inventory of fire arms that makes Darra a one-stop gun shopping heaven.

First there’s the novelty items like pistols hidden in walking sticks and ball-point pens that fire a single .22 round when you depress the pocket clip. For more serious business choose from pistols that splatter a 12-guage shotgun shell. Rifles of every description and all periods of history hang row after row, and there are even a few long muzzle-loading rifles left over from the Crimean War.

Moving upscale, there are stubby little Tommie guns with round magazines like a prop from an Al Capone movie, racked with M-16s, automatic pistols, Uzis and every model of Kalashnikov ever made.

For customers who think big, there is also a huge selection of specialized military hardware; the kinds of things you'd need a pickup truck to carry away; mortars, grenade launchers, rockets, cannons and box after box of bullets and shells to fit each one.

In addition, almost every house is a primitive gun factory that can fabricate an astonishingly accurate copy of any weapon, using only the crudest tools, in virtually no time at all. Here and there are metal lathes, grinding wheels and electric drills running on noisy generators, but most of the work is done squatting on the ground in front of a blacksmith’s vice surrounded by a collection of files and rasps.

Of course, whatever you're planning to buy you’ve got to test. Customers regularly pop their heads out of doors and blast a few rounds off into the sky. The heavier stuff they haul around the back. There, as long as you pay for the ammunition, you can pepper the side of the mountain with ordinance for as long as you want.

The drug trade is somewhat less flamboyant but no less obvious. Furtive men puff opium in shops stacked to the ceiling with tons of pungent marijuana. Other men squat for hours in dark hovels, rolling out perfectly uniform kilogram bars of dark brown, buttery hashish; each stamped with a number and a logo. Still others sweat in the hammer-hard sun, carefully slicing the pods of poppy flowers so the sap will ooze out and dry. It is gathered into sticky bundles of opium wrapped in leaves and then in plastic for shipping. A ten thousand dollar investment at this end, it is said, to finesse the connivance, bribery and bravado required of the smuggling operation, will suck $5 million or so off the streets of New York or Amsterdam, London or Madrid.

When the sun reaches its highest point, most of the men turn in their tiny shops, as they do five times a day, and quietly facing Mecca, they renew their submission to Allah. Islam has endured this harsh environment for a thousand years. The most respected are the old, white-bearded hajis; those who've been to Mecca.

A woman here seems to have a little more esteem in the community than a good camel, but not much more. In public she peers at the world through the eye-hole of her burka, like a sleeping bag pulled over her head. Her private life is an unbroken cycle of fetching water, drying cow dung patties for fuel, cooking, and caring for children.

While the technology of their livelihood has kept pace with the changes from muzzle-loader to full automatic into the twenty-first century, the folks in Darra seem socially pretty well adjusted to life in the twelfth.

Certain Female Spiders

Chivalry is dead, but that tradition of gallantry formerly masked and to some degree mitigated the organized oppression of women and its echoes still resonate. While males monopolized political and economic power, they made their domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and postures, letting them pass through doorways and get into lifeboats first.

They set themselves up as the protectors of the weaker sex, and this cloying but useful fiction set some limits to their capacity to exploit women through sheer physical force. Although, at the same time, the counter-convention of droit de seigneur, which justified the predatory exploits of privileged males against women socially inferior to themselves, showed that at no time did men cease to regard most women as fair game.

The exploitation of women by men, far from constituting a secondary formation dependant in one way or another on the organization of production, as good Marxists are taught to think, antedates the establishment of production based on private property. Needless to say, no slur clings to Odysseus for his infidelities to Penelope, willing or unwilling, in the course of his wanderings homeward. The faithfulness required of a man to his home and his kin did not include the chastity of his body as it did in the case of his wife. The long history of rape and seduction serves as a reminder that animal strength and nothing to do with the economic system, remain the basis of masculine ascendancy, manifested in its most direct, ancient and brutal form.

Yet polite conventions, even when they are no more than a facade, function as an operational myth that provide women with a degree of ideological leverage in their struggle to domesticate the wildness and savagery of men. We have surrounded essentially exploitative relationships with a network of reciprocal obligations, which if nothing else, obscures the exploitation, thereby making it perhaps a little easier to bear. Nevertheless, regardless of her poise and her intellectual maturity, the fact remains that Simone was still deeply hurt by Jean-Paul’s infidelities.

Male and female are subjective assignments. A society which grants the privilege of doing or being done to, exclusively to one sex or the other, warps its children. A child of either sex has urges to penetrate, devour, and possess; to be cherished, dominated, and contained. Who can resist a detailed account of how certain female spiders eat their mates?

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 1

Each According to Their Opportunities

The air has that distinctive southern smell of coconut and blossom and stale urine and dung. It is hot, dry and inhospitable for much of the year. Truck tires and marching boots kick up a relentless, choking dust. The rest of the time the monsoon is wet and uncomfortable. There’s mud and the shit of a multitude of species underfoot, and the rivers run, with floating tree limbs and garbage, brown and swollen.

The ride from the airport into the city centre is a bit like Dante’s circles of Hell, a divine comedy that isn’t the least bit funny; a meticulously-crafted moving diorama of the failures of civilization: broken-windowed factories, boarded-up shops, slums, tenements, and a prisoner of war camp. Everything looks temporary and contingent.

Feral cats hiss at one another. Feral children prowl through garbage. Obscene at first, but shift the perspective only a little, twist the thinking to dissociate from the actual human pain that this scene conveys, and think of it as a representation of the idea of pain miraculously made manifest. Sort of like a Bosch hell-scape you can drive through.

These people were the meek who had inherited the earth, but then some mean bastard took it away from them. For centuries they’ve been yoked to this land, first as slaves, then as share croppers, their existence governed by their skin color, together with the seasonal rhythms of the rain and of planting and harvesting, their pace matched to that of their draft animals.

Human bedrock, for a thousand years they’ve lived these lives, worn these clothes, guided these ploughs, bowed their heads to oppression and bent their backs to work, been conquered and re-conquered, ruled in turn by barbarians and kings, imperialists and the faceless bureaucrats of tyrants, uninvolved, unconsidered, un-revolutionary, uneducated, passive, almost mute. Then the war came, and with it naked rule, unrestrained by law, constitution or convention, unanimous, save for the enemies of the people, every action not mandatory, forbidden.

We see a soldier kissing a small baby, its mother despondent with her head in her hands, an older woman raising her arms towards the man’s face, in the slanting lights and shadows of a setting sun, an El Greco of beseeching gesture, of supplicating eyes and hands and sorrow.

Even this is not evidence which would imply that there might be a point to anything; for example, that good triumphs over evil, or that love matters, or that there is some difference between day and night or today and tomorrow. Now, there are no mothers radiated by the beauty of their children. There are no institutions of charity. The hungry sell themselves as slaves or as mercenaries or for a fuck, each according to their opportunities.

To be continued...

Coltrane

Through the inspired craftsmanship of Japanese electronic engineering I can hear, between sharp intakes of breath, the saxophone’s long-alienated apprenticeship with ragged Philadelphia rhythm and blues, effervescent against the sparse, intellectual understatement of the trumpet. Coltrane, intertwined with Miles, on a flight of fancy spontaneously conceived and expressed at Newport in 1958, but now, over half a century later, them both dead, originating in a beam of laser light bouncing off microscopic bumps, on the underside of a plastic disc.

The Dionysian howls, wild, unrestrained sensuality, are perfectly balanced by orderly, rational, self-disciplined, Apollonian grace-notes, slipping into essential melody notes and taking precisely half their time value.

The bass player momentarily abandons his walking line to reinforce two drum kicks, then imitates a third immediately after hearing it. In response, the drummer plays on-beat punches that reinforce the bass player’s return to a walking pattern. One part’s subtle phrasing shift, from an even eighth-note feeling to a triplet swing feeling, resulting in a near simultaneous fleeting shift in the other part. An intensified feeling of swing in the drummer’s part leads to comparable intensification in the bass part that progresses from straight to swing patterns and, finally, to triplet figures.

Coltrane always puts an aura of excitement in the air. Elvin Jones is, of course, central to this. He creates the collage of percussive sound fragments, linked by intuition to the tune. His infectiously swinging ride cymbal implies the basic time so strongly that he doesn’t need to state it explicitly. He just throws himself into the most dangerous musical situations, somehow managing to land safely and solidly back on the beat in the following bar, never without nuance, but so powerfully, so elementally, like a force of nature.

And on top, in between, and underneath this molten rhythm, the cries that come to the mind and the viscera, the horn as an extension of the self, the totality of commitment, the excavation of emotion, is the thrust of the imperious imagination of John Coltrane.

Don’t accuse me of hyperbole. Even these words are not strong enough to describe the feelings. Listen to the resilience, the risk-taking, and the sheer ingenuity of his playing; the intense probing into things far off, unknown and mysterious.

Think about the endless hour after hour of his practising, and the hour after hour of his thinking about the wholeness of the universe and of the ways in which one could become part of that wholeness through music. Conviction, dedication, spirituality, the excitement of discovery, the revelation of greatness, a substance so rich and full of unbounded beauty and fire, a musical power so incredibly strong, that no one could have imagined that all that probing and contemplation could often, and paradoxically, lead to what at first sounds like a primal scream.

But no, hear him pushing at the edges of a familiar tune, like My Favourite Things. The aggression and fury of his style, as he mows mercilessly through rain drops on roses and kittens with whiskers and snowflakes that stay on my nose and eye lashes, could only have been brought to a halt by liver cancer.

It puts things into a larger context if you remember that he was, at the time, a junkie. He kicked heroin by using alcohol as a crutch, only to become an alcoholic. Eased out of the Davis quintet, he dried out and found God. the last ten years of his life featured an ongoing but intermittent addiction to junk food with fat and svelte sets of clothes, to cycle through the binge and health-nut phases.

Tracking the Changes

The pace of change began to pick up after the soldiers in Little Rock, after Elvis appeared in black and white from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show, (white-bread America missing the point that the point was those thrusting hips), and those changes continued and accelerated and gathered momentum as part of the rights of cultural passage from Eisenhower through the sacrificial Kennedy to Nixon, when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters displaced Dale Carnegie as the arbiters of the ethos.

We all thought the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution actually had something to do with culture, and we were vaguely in favor of that. We downed quantities of peyote and mescaline and LSD and wrestled with insight while watching the dark clouds of enlightenment hanging over angry orange sunrises through bloodshot eyes. There were black and red posters of Che in his beret, and one that said Electric Circus in day-glo letters that shone in the dark.

Beatles, Doors, topless, bottomless, Nixon, Cambodia, Kent State. Coltrane died in sixty-seven. We let a wispy-haired, blue-jeaned, cowboy-booted, Yankee draft-dodger sleep on our floor for a week that summer. He never once took off his leather jacket, even though it was hot. Experience was something that could be occupied, taken possession of, known in its moment-to-moment quality, its texture, its delight and its terror.

Were there any of us of that generation who were not skewed and exhilarated and disillusioned by the simple awareness of ourselves against the backdrop of 1968? Doctor King’s dream moved us deeply, and we felt an enthusiastic agreement when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said, with one of those distinctively Indian waggles of his head, “If we are blessed with the ability to have desires, why should we not also have the right to try and realize them?”

But the very pretence of revolutionary solidarity itself vanished, as the Woodstock nation mutated into Altamont amid phosphorescent parodies of pop paintings inspired by the mindless minimalismof modern art. It was the end of May, 1969, when the self-consciously and perhaps arrogantly named Art Ensemble of Chicago, having come to the conclusion that the American mid-west was exhausted of creative possibilities, left for Europe.

The beliefs that we might have clung to had been cancelled by the advances of science. We were metaphysical vagabonds, lost souls in a state of confusion. God was well and truly dead. What passed for spirituality was simply an outpouring of words and style; a mixture of pop psychology, recycled hippie philosophy, scraps of Hindu claptrap,* cultural-specific nonsense and Judeo-Christian contradictions.

*Jagganath means lord of the universe. It is one of the names of Krishna in his incarnation as Vishnu. He’s a democratic socialist. All castes are equal before him. And he crushes them, every one.

Looking at Pictures

Look at this old photograph. We sense its age from the texture of the patina on the platinum. In it, a girl reclines on a divan. She is just eight years old. Her eyes are closed. Her left arm falls limply across her stomach, her hand resting just below her waist, in the folds of a loose-fitting silky satin dress or nightgown that has come off at one shoulder, exposing the upper part of her chest, but not quite her nipple. A loose strand of hair tumbles over the other shoulder. Her legs are bare.

Like the girl, the picture itself is charmingly beautiful. Its composition is informed by the trials and errors and triumphs of five centuries of European painting. Textured fabric is set off against skin. Rich sepias contrast with ivory whites. The arms of the divan gently embrace the girl, who, we naturally assume, must be fully aware of our gaze because she is so obviously posing for the photographer.

We stare at her uncomfortably, through the disquiet of a century of now discredited but still potent, Freudian analysis, our understanding of which has come to us through the self-effacing, sardonic wit of the early Woody Allan films. At the time of course, Freudians had a field day interpreting Wonderland’s rabbit holes and tiny keys and the bit about Alice growing and shrinking.

Here’s another photograph, contemporary, high-definition, glossy, colour. She looks fourteen or so. Aside from a long blue frond that hangs over her right eye, her hair is cut brutally short into black spiky tufts that give her an angelic, yet deviant sexuality. Lips slightly parted in flashbulb surprise, she wears multiple ear rings and a discrete tattoo.

On the edge of right now, she fills her blue-jeans-with-the-knees-ripped-out like a surgical glove. Her tiny breasts beckon for gentle caresses through the t-shirt with Just Do It! printed across the front. The intermittence of skin flashing between these two articles of clothing, between t-shirt and jeans, this is the flash that seduces. Through her eyes and in the very gesture of her stance, she implores, and this impels us to purchase.

How Things Stand

The current thinking is that at the center of stars, the primordial stuff is squeezed so tightly that it fuses; becoming stuff that’s slightly less primordial and that weighs an infinitesimal bit less than the original primordial stuff. This tiny difference in mass is released as radiant energy. We sense the heat. We see the light. We feel the beat.

         Among the people who think about these things, most seem to believe that the universe will continue to expand forever. That is to say, no big crunch; that the possible future or futures stretch much farther ahead than the fourteen billion or so years of the past that have so far accumulated, notwithstanding the idea that there might be no theoretical limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, or a reactor meltdown, these being fuelled by the most plentiful element in the universe.

We can even go as far as to say that hydrogen has a single proton with one electron orbiting it.

No. But wait. We shouldn't say orbiting anymore. That would be seeing things through the frame of the outdated and discredited Rutherford model. It seems we would be much closer to the truth if we said, more or less hovering around it, or associated with it, in a fuzzy and indistinct sort of way. But even so, we can still feel an exhilarating certainty that hydrogen has one proton with an electron more or less hanging around with it.

Things were once much simpler. The trees of Eden bore both fruits and flowers in the same season. The first realization of Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, was that they were naked. They found themselves harvesting the fig tree, for its leaves, not for the figs.