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...