After April Fool

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.