Pausing for a Smoke

I’d been riding in the first of a four-truck convoy full of soldiers down the Pan American Highway out of the capital in the dry January heat. We’d left at dawn, headed for Morazan to confront the forces of the insurrection. I’d been snapping off-to-war shots for a story, joshing and jostling with the macho teenagers in the back of the truck, trying to make sure that their rifles pointed skyward and not inadvertently at me, laughing at their jokes as they passed around water bottles and surreptitious joints, when we turned off onto a dusty track and stopped so that everyone could take a leak by the side of the road.

I leaped down and peed with everybody else but when the smokes were passed around and everyone lit up, I declined, “no quiero, gracias,” and took in a big whiff of the dried-out pine and tamarind that was hanging in the dusty air amid the hibiscus blossoms and the bougainvillea and the shiny, green banana leaves, and told myself it’d been almost six months and I was clean. And while I could see the satisfaction it produced for those teenage boys sucking on those fags, I reminded myself of the misery I’d gone through to get this far, and that it’d been worth it, and that it wouldn’t be worth it to have to go through it all again.

For some reason the first truck set off without me and I climbed into the second, with its identical cargo of armed adolescents. We hadn’t gone very far, grinding along the rutted roadway in low gear, slapped by overhanging branches, jolted and bruised, when the first truck hit an anti-tank mine buried in the dust and instantly disintegrated in a spectacular ball of flame and noise that cut every living one of those boys into seared and singed chunks about the size of a Sunday roast, and sent a splattering of blood and pieces over us like a brief, warm hail storm.

In the contemplative sadness that follows sudden, cosmic fear, in the stunned, stupefied, ear-ringing deafness of the aftermath, I watched mesmerized as the boy beside me slowly and meticulously extracted a knitting needle-sized splinter of human bone which was embedded an inch in his forearm like an arrow, and then, sucking at the oozing wound, offered me a Winston from the red and white pack he fished out of the baggy pocket on the thigh of his camouflage fatigues. I accepted, and was immediately hooked again.

World View

Looking into Saudi Arabia from Oman.

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…

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

Iran

The tendency toward a relatively long survival after menopause in the life cycle of the sapiens female is thought by anthropologists to be an evolutionary adaptation allowing more resources to be allocated to the nurture and protection of the young, who are born helpless and take many years to reach maturity.

Nicaragua

The acquisition of language early in its evolutionary history, also an evolutionary adaptation, allows Homo sapiens to pass both practical skills and cultural information across time and to accumulate such skills and information down the generations.

To be continued..

Ruins of Ephesus

This tiny fragment of marble (8cm) has a story to tell.

Our story takes place in Ephesus, located on the eastern Mediterranean coast in present day Turkey. Ephesus was a Greek city-state of classic antiquity, home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, namely, the Temple of Artemis, a many-breasted fertility goddess. It boasted the second largest library in the ancient world after Alexandria.

The façade of the ancient library still greets visitors today. As do the remains of the public baths across the street, featuring an outer courtyard latrine surrounded by marble benches, under which water ran to flush away the waste. Musicians are said to have performed on a platform under a colonnade in the centre of the courtyard to entertain the people as they went about their business, (so to speak).

You guessed it. This fragment was once part of that very toilet seat.

There’s more:

Also to be seen in Ephesus is the House of the Virgin Mary, both a Christian and Muslim shrine. It is believed by many of both faiths that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was taken to this small stone house by St. John and lived there until her Assumption into heaven.

This is clearly the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. Why else would the current Pope say, on his very first foreign trip, undertaken to Turkey, on November 29, 2008:

"From here in Ephesus, a city blessed by the presence of Mary Most Holy, who we know is loved and venerated also by Muslims, let us lift up to the Lord a special prayer for peace between peoples."

It is my contention that this fragment may well be a priceless holy relic.

After all, what can the Virgin have done with her time between the Ascension and her own Assumption? I suspect she must have availed herself of the wondrous library. And when nature called, she must have slipped across to the public toilet, where this fragment of marble, attached as it was to the rest of the seat at the time, almost certainly must have come into contact with the immaculate backside.

Ephesus dwindled and was eventually abandoned in the 15th century as its port silted up and its trade access failed.

The World in Black and White

Bozhou County, Anhui Province, China

Harvest time: Good as it gets.

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.

Digital Faces & Postmodern Social Landscapes

The Kiss

Manipulated photography, nothing more, nothing less... more to come.

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?

World View

Observing the observer, mine clearance, Afghanistan.

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...

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

Japan

The sapiens' powerful brain perceives the external world through a variety of senses tuned to the spectrum of vibrations and chemical signals coming from the environment. Each individual is influenced by their own unique experiences, leading to subjective views of existence and the passage of time.

Homo sapiens are said to possess consciousness, self-awareness, and a mind, which correspond roughly to the mental processes of thought.

Spain

Although the sapiens brain is the most complex in the animal kingdom in terms of both structure and cognitive ability, most of these abilities are known in a more primitive form among other species. Modern anthropology has tended to support Darwin's idea that differences in mind between sapiens and the other great apes, for example, great as they are, are differences in degree and not of kind.

To be continued...

Ruins of Tikal

Tikal, located in present day Guatemala, one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya, reached its peak about 900CE, only to be abandoned within a century due to over-exploitation, deforestation and erosion, exacerbated by climate change.

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.

That Particular Fish

I remember once you leaned forward and brought your lips close to my ear. I could hear the wind and my own heart beat. In the twilight an owl flew by on silent wings. Birds were singing.

You pronounced the word love.

It had taken four thousand million years of evolution to produce those lips and that word. The muscle movements required to produce that single word are more intricately choreographed than any dance. Every tiny muscle fiber must contract at exactly the right moment in total coordination with all the others. Electrical impulses flash along neural pathways. Somewhere in your brain there is circuitry that stores the patterns of those movements.

“Love,” you had said. It was almost a whisper.

The sound radiated outwards, conveyed by vibrations in the air, propagating across the space between us, funneling deep into my inner ear, where it excited a tiny system of bones and membranes. Electrical impulses traveled to my brain where a network of nerve cells, which had also taken four thousand million years to evolve, distinguished the bird song from the wind and the sound of my heart beat from the significance of the moment, while the owl flew by on silent wings.

If that particular fish had not come out on to the land; if the meteor had not destroyed the dinosaurs, this could never have happened.