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…

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...

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…

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...