Irony, Ambiguity and the State of the World
The problem is that some
people do not believe in the reality of a world-wide terrorist threat connected
not through some conspiratorial cabal but in terms of a shared ideology of
religious fanaticism, hatred and envy of the west, and a misplaced fear of what is termed variously colonialism
and imperialism, as though they were the same thing.
We
live in a world that revels in hate,
An
atmosphere of terror, fear and shock.
We
look around and think: Too late
To
close the windows, shut the lock.
But these so-called moral
panics have been around a long time, sometimes connected with the Catholic Church
or one of its agencies, such as the Jesuits, or a parodic oppo0nent group, such
as the Free Masons, Illuminati or Theosophists.
From the late nineteenth century Europe was plagued by Anarchists and
Nihilists, as well as Communists and various versions of Nationalism and
Irredentism, many of which led to wars, civil wars, ethnic cleansing and
wide-spread massacres.
Who
is our enemy today,
Some
anarchist in black attire,
A
nihilist whose bomb will slay
A
king, archduke, mayor or sire?
When ancient city-states
and small kingdoms sent out groups of merchants and craftsmen to start new
places to live and work, or to take up residence in strategic and already
established towns and regions, these were colonies, extra-territorial entities,
more or less tolerated by their hosts.
Some of the empires developed in the Renaissance were built on trading
posts, entrepots and enclaves of
“national” protection. Other empires
found themselves inheriting sovereignty over the people in whose lands they
found themselves sometimes forced to assume control by conquest, or defeating
existing power-bases in order to ensure themselves of raw materials, access
routes to other regions, and extracting slave labour for use elsewhere in their
world-empires. Rivalry among great
empires led to further efforts to gain advantageous balances of power. Through expansion and conquest, as well as
dynastic intrigue, led to internal colonization of Europe, as in the Czarist,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, not all based on any concept of racial or
religious domination.
Tomorrow
a commie and after that
A
fanatical Mahdi, survivalist
Gone
mad, or anyone in downturned hat,
In
any corner shop: he has a list
And
we are on it, near the top.
I
therefore no longer travel
To
Brussels or Paris or Rome, don’t stop
To
check the time, I let time unravel.
It is all very personal,
too, when the nature of security and safety change into fear and apprehension.
Whatever happens is compared with previous experience, and the warnings given
by my elders: Beware of the Cossacks!
Don’t speak to strangers on the street!
Keep your head down low! Never
reveal your name or address! Be ready,
if necessary, to turn your face to the wall and say the final prayer: if you
can’t run and hide. Old customs I had put aside and do not grant intellectual
assent to nonetheless give comfort in times of crisis.
If
anyone walks on this side of the street,
I
cross over quickly, and then I dart
Into
any open café and seat
Myself
facing the wall.
There
is a way of looking at the world, at history and at the self in the world and in
history that keeps changing as the world changes and as history changes, even
if it never feels as though the self has changed from what it was almost a
century ago. There is a comfort in
watching old memories from the silent days, of cinema not because the stories
are better or worse, than the nonsense purveyed today, but by the background,
inadvertent details, the clothes, the streets, the proximity of nature. And by the absence of so much that is today
disturbing and intrusive, and which, the old films show are totally unnecessary
to happiness and meaningfulness in life.
Even in the knowledge that their days and nights were filled with fears
of forbidding, their prospects clouded by dangers everywhere, since they were other
fears and dangers than our own.
A part
Of me cowers, a part of me leers,
A part of me laughs at my irrational acts,
But nevertheless I love these fears,
Like everyone else.
Compromise, temporize, and all sorts of other means of
fudging whether for strategic reasons or simply out of laziness are rife, but
mostly people fool themselves, trivialize the dangers they are in, and try to
dream that all is well with the world, that Pippa will always pass; but just as
their secret islands in the sea, hidden enclaves in the mountains, and blind
spots in our awareness of who we are, so there are pages we never turn over and
and exits we forget to take along this long journey we call life.
We make pacts
With
the devil, they say, when we give
In
to panic and imagine the world
Beset
by terrorist foes: we live
Imaginary
lives, like curled
Beasts
in a burrow deep below
The
ground, gradually blind
And
deaf, insensible, with no
Connections
left in heart or mind
To
anything real.
That
is why, as the argument veers from objectivity to the inner depths of my being, but figure out a means of working
in the dark corners of the world, pretending to myself and others that shadows
are substantial, and yet there has always been a protocol of duplicity. Dichotomies ansd exclusion Zones always
harbour doubleness or multi-layered countercurrents: what the enemy rants at
reveals what we deny, and how we overlook the obvious that impinges on ouir
freedom leaves a pattern of tracks and traces, distortions and uncomfortable
anomalies we hold now to be our wisest thoughts.
But what else can
I
do, except create a dream that is more
Unreal
of peaceful times, when man
And
woman lie down together sure
Of
everything good, while Nature and God
Twirl
around us in a ballet of love,
Soft
and fuzzy, warm as blood
In
its pulses, hand in glove.
Nothing is so disconcerting as a sense of completeness
that really does not convince.
As
though it were nothing, all this death
And
suffering by fanatical fear and hate,
And
all one had to do was catch his breath
And
sing a threnody in silence.
Who
marries whom, the conduct of the lessons in elementary school, the games played
by adolescents, the balls and fetes celebrated, the interior monologues of men
and women too ashamed to consult with their elders, this kind of subjectivity
and informal behaviour constitute the research we carry out, and hope will
yield an understanding of the hatreds that impose themselves on everything we
dream to attain.
State
And
nation, all unreal, alone or united,
What
can otherwise be said, than this:
The
only values we abhor—benighted
Nationalism
and pompous emptiness.
Secret languages,
forgotten scripts, and indecipherable codes undermine all the old certainties
of nature and of history. Just so the
unexamined mind and the literal texts of
experience. Therefore, no matter what
the outcome anticipated, the ending is never the same.