There are ways of hearing without listening. There are ways of reading without knowing. There are ways of allowing your heart to grow cold because you have learned to stop seeing. You look behind you and see the bridges youve burned, or are about to burn. Before you, a crowd gathers. Automatons with stone hearts and eyes mirroring only themselves. The collective silence becomes increasingly hard to justify. Or explain. You try, desperately, to reorient yourself, to see past the fog, to set sanitys parameters, to predict the trajectory of your life. You write, frantically, manically, trying to purge your thoughts in a bid to clear your head. Nouns, adjectives, verbs, indulgent metaphors – all regurgitate themselves on paper. Between long runs and caffeine-induced highs, you know you must decide before the momentum slows. There are things you just cant un-know... or un-see. But the questions remain. Must you choose between much-loved friends? Is your fate one of perpetual tension: to be forever trapped between two poles that are pining after essentially the same things? Or is your destiny to watch: to wait and see among the ranks of the hapless victims of Time, to watch in agony as all sides in this Faustian play hit brick walls time and time again? You know now the ship youve left is steering the wrong way, but the future is uncertain. The fleet sails at half-mast. But where are the gangplanks and farsighted captains wise enough - and humble enough - to bring all crews to bear on the real Enemy? Is there no room for dialogue? For solidarity? For truth? Over the horizon, the Spectacle lives on, the farce plays itself out, the patricians cheer - and so do their slaves, who see no other future better than this. Vultures feast on the corpses of men. In the papers, Truth is the shrinking space between the lies. In the courts, Justice is the exception, not the rule. In the social networks, society agonizes over a 60-year-old artists decision to marry a 16-year-old girl, without once drawing the connections between the objectification of young women – and the moral decline of a society where petty criminals are shot dead, genocidal generals walk free, and kleptocrat politicians (and their relatives) contest the next elections. In sacred halls where freedom of thought exists only in the textbooks, educators make love with murderers and thieves, and the thieves keep on stealing, and the murderers keep on murdering, as though all that mattered were the bottom-line, as though the Future didnt matter, as though they had no children of their own to worry about, as though Mammon were the only God, as though even the right to Hope now has its own price tag. Everywhere there is compromise, capitulation, betrayal, hate, fear. A failure to recognise just what is at stake. A refusal to keep the lamps lit (we have kept them under our beds, and we are fast sleep). Disunity where there should be solidarity, in the face of a Darkness that threatens the Dawn. Everywhere light recedes ever further into the abyss and silence descends like a cloak over all. Perhaps there is no way out of this. Perhaps There is No Alternative. Perhaps this is as good as it gets. It is five minutes before midnight and we are trapped in a stagnant twilight, caught in the dragnet of mutual pride (or indifference, or despair). Over the horizon, Rome burns and the Emperor plays his fiddle. Souls are sold for a song. The gladiator has laid down his sword. (How do we reconcile ourselves to History?)
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 04:57:04 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015