'...and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination.'
We see the evil and violence in other people to deflect it from ourselves. But it goes unnoticed-except by the fanatics-that America's Great Wars on the Americas, or on the slanty-eyed brown people dazed by opium or centuries of laziness, has wreaked havoc, made the last century coarse with spittle and a spiked imagination.
The violence of Empire, the nation, tribe, ethnicity, father, husband...the terrified heart's love of tyranny, order. Satan is the ape of God. If evil is a falling away from the good it is also an inversion of it.
In fifteen seconds two cities are obliterated, a cloud of white ash falls silently on the playground. A medieval scholar is dragged out to explicate the nuances of just war theory while utilitarians in their bunkers cast their gaze on an impersonal future of maximal goodness. A drunken poet recaptures the moral feeling but no-one knows how all this came to pass. At precisely that moment a Japanese man reads a book on the trenches, a throwaway line about how true friendship is found at the end of suffering. But he has not time to hand this on, his thoughts and the very words of the book fused together in that hot grey flash of eternity that hounds the ghosts from their rich pickings.
In the dark continent-dark from our willed ignorance-millions are killed, cleansed, mutilated, raped, burnt and still we complain: there isn't enough caramel in the macchiato. There was something missing, the sweetness not quite right. The 'image of Man', Jonas would say. Is what, precisely? Bach through the centuries, the beast through the millennia.
Our star, wild and unknown, unprotected, sinks back into the night, hoping to avoid everyone's gaze and, like a neglected child, stay in its dark corner.
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