by W. E. Gutman
I hear the sound of wearied behinds fidgeting in their seats.
“When it comes to bad news, the villagers react with robotic conformity. Keeping quiet being the simplest form of disinformation, they say nothing or change the subject. If pressed, they deny and abjure events that still give them nightmares. It's gossip in reverse. Endowed with a capacity for infinite permutations, this denial-by-explication of indisputable facts is a skillfully knitted filigree of extenuation, distortions and absurd rationalizations, all artfully commingled and interlaced to befuddle the curious or the inquisitive.”
Meema sighs with impatience.
“When persistent probing and insightful conjecture meet with stony silence, when doors slam shut, when friendly smiles turn to scowl, the truth, gruesome and rank, is surely lurking underfoot like a viper squeezing beneath a rock. Asking too many questions in a hamlet that pulls in its sidewalks at dusk is as perilous an endeavor as it is brazen. Attempts to shed light on an unsolved earlier murder drove this point home and forced me to make a hasty retreat back home not so very long ago. Efforts to get to the bottom of the most recent carnage were similarly thwarted.
“I said all that in a widely published commentary. I added that silence invites more brazen acts of violence, more deaths. I cautioned that, armed merely with words, journalists wage an ill-balanced war. The other side has inflexible beliefs. Or guns.
“I concluded by warning that while growing discontent over the degradation of life -- poverty, inflation, violence, human rights abuses and political apathy -- is the leading cause of unrest, a muzzled society and a cowardly press are apt to bring a country to the brink of civil disorder.
“I said much more but I don’t want to bore you. Make a long story short, my night behind bars for ‘casting aspersions on the town, vilifying the local constabulary and defaming the nation’s character,’ was instructive. As I sat on a cold, rough-hewn stone bench, inspecting the damp, graffiti-etched walls on which scurried gigantic cockroaches and hideous spiders, and gauging the strength of the massive iron door, I realized that while my body was being held captive, presumably to cleanse my slanderous soul, I didn’t for a moment feel confined. Yes, there were thick partitions between me and my fellow inmates, high battlements separating me from the multitudes of faceless people sleeping the sleep of the righteous in their own beds. And yet there was between me and my custodians a vast and impenetrable rampart they could not breech -- my freedom to think, my right to say things people don’t want to hear. If my jailers had silenced me for good, as they are wont to do in these parts with consummate skill and relish, I would pass on knowing that while idealists can be gagged, once spawned their ideas take a life of their own and, like matter, cannot be destroyed.
“Predictably, I was released the next morning and declared persona non grata when the authorities concluded that I was more of a nuisance than a threat. So I ask you now, what am I? A nuisance or a threat?”
My question was met with silence interrupted by a few discreet fits of coughing. Sometimes a cough is the synthesis of eloquence. Or prudence.
*
When a child kneads a lump of clay, what he fashions is a symbol. The result hints at an object that has no real connection to its intended meaning or reality. Traditions, to which people are entitled, but which they have no right to impose on others, are golden calves to me, ideological idols I refuse to regard as instruments of veneration. Tradition adjusts itself to the memory of what those icons represent and which, because they evoke some primeval and atavistic but blurry memory, can only be sustained through the reiteration, from generation to generation, of self-perpetuating legends and rituals.
*
“A nuisance? That’s an understatement,” Meema yelped. “A nuisance and a threat. And to think that I once offered him a glass of tea and cookies.”
“The tea was watery and the cookies were stale....”
“Never mind all that,” Yossi intervened. What are you getting at?”
“What I am getting at is that I was not born to be confined. Not by man nor by his word. I shall breathe at my own pace, as deeply or as faintly as I choose. Your traditions may be benign, including the one you insist I embrace for the common good and tranquility of the clan. My mind is made up. Accepting the leadership of the clan, symbolic and temporary as the post may be, would force me to abjure my own values. Remember, I am the black sheep of the family. You have nothing to gain by forcing your mores on me. I won’t be silenced, title or no title. It’s for that reason that I decline. Consider it an act of extraordinary charity on my part. The distance between a nuisance and a threat is minute. My decision is final.”
“Suit yourself. We will deliberate your fate and get back to you by sundown. Remember: There are no individuals here. You are either part of the community or you are not.”
Where had I heard that before?
FIFTEEN
So, what dreadful punishment would the elders prescribe? Would I be merely spurned and reduced to silence, like Abraham? Or would they reserve a harsher ordeal, the kind that only the bruised egos of snubbed missionaries can conjure up?
For a brief instant, spurred by anger, I considered absconding to Gehenna, never to return. Gehenna: an underworld of burning garbage and souls on fire. Raw. Inclement. Dangerous. Down-to-earth in its uncompromising complexity, in the dreariness of its relentless reality. Cruel and pitiable. Loathsome and heartbreaking. Vile and tragic. Everything about Gehenna takes me back to the primeval horrors I had chronicled a lifetime earlier, and which my impassioned reports, the millions in foreign aid, the perseverance of private organizations and the dedication and generosity of armies of volunteers had failed to eradicate.
Words survive in the impersonal, two-dimensional realm of the printed page, but they fail to bring change. Instead, they leave a wasteland of lofty rhetoric, sublime yearnings and exalted covenants that do nothing to alter human nature, chill passions, curb hatred. Some horrors are simply too shocking for words or, as deconstructionist philosophy suggests, writing is a dangerous substitute for living as it is likely to sacrifice fact in favor of personal perception.
*
Ebbing passion and waning romanticism in the presence of horror produce a different kind of desolation, one felt deeply in an inaccessible region of one’s soul. For years I thought that one way of erring on the side of justice was to side unerringly with the victims of injustice -- the vanquished, the dispersed, the humiliated, the persecuted, and the forgotten. Behind prison walls. At mass graves and hurriedly dug sepulchers. Wherever voices of dissent and cries for freedom had been hushed. Amid the anonymous bones scattered about the steaming earth. Pogroms, torture, war, genocide, ethnic cleansing. They’d all become a blur in an unceasing tempest of human agony. In-your-face prime-time images of man’s inhumanity to man don’t lie. Our world, the evening news reminds us, is a sewer in which we wade, knee-deep, in the blood of martyrs. Gathered around the dinner table, we watch them die or fade away like ghosts. “Past is prelude,” we declare with snooty condescension. We owe it to our fragile, overtaxed psyches to forget an endless stream of atrocities -- Shoah, the massacre of native Americans, Biafra, the intertribal carnage between Hutus and Tutsis, the bloodbath in Chiapas and the Guatemalan highlands, Bosnia, the 60-year-old blood-letting between Israelis and Palestinians, Iraq, Afghanistan, the wanton murder of street children.
Distance, racial differences, cultural incongruities, all help intellectualize other people’s agony. We endure it by perfunctorily purging our souls after each act of infamy. “You can’t change human nature,” we pontificate, as we partake of dessert. In a pinch, a mind-numbing sitcom will help set our minds at ease. We survive the truth by looking the other way.
The heavy capital of idealism and exuberance I had invested in unmasking vampires had by now steadily dwindled. The reason for this weariness was not a lack of energy or a diminished commitment to justice, but the cumulative effect of disappointment and disgust at people
crippled by indolence and lethargy. I had spent nearly two decades fighting their battles as if they were my own, my activism exhausted in a futile effort to agitate the popular conscience, to stiffen backbones weakened by despotism and exploitation. In so doing, I had finally hit a brick wall and the stars the impact produced in the back of my eyes showered me with an insight of blinding clarity. At long last, I understood that mine was a puny and hopeless contest against formidable foes. I realized that people don’t change, seldom rebel, not on the streets, not at the polls. A short memory and a weak character will do that to people. Neither alienation nor profound discontent will spur them to shake the political dustbin. Fearful of change, unnerved by serious reformation, they will choose to be seduced by the echo of old, hackneyed words rather than awakened and aroused by the unsettling resonance of truth.
Passive, submissive, the masses never look back, except to reminisce about a blurry and irretrievable past. They’re too busy existing and procreating like lemmings to realize that they’re being fleeced, that they’re being led to the slaughterhouse then devoured by the very shepherds entrusted with their care. Occasionally, they give in to knee-jerk reactions, a primordial reflex now reduced to feeble tics that are promptly stilled by police truncheons and extrajudicial executions. Feeling the sting of injustice and institutionalized villainy, they will succumb to a brief and atypical act of defiance that horrifies the flock then is promptly swept under the rug of public indifference. Anticipated and tolerated by the oligarchy, these random displays of exasperation are then loudly flouted as the undesirable and expendable byproducts of a free society, instead of being recognized and deplored as the signs of grave social ills.
For lack of a cohesive voice, the souls that haunt all the Gehennas of the cosmos -- apathetic if not inert -- will continue to rely on people who know how to stir their messianic hopes of deliverance from the here-and-now but who spend their time polishing the next speech instead of cleaning up the shit, which is what they were appointed to do in the first place.
Most will be content to live with slogans instead of stirring from the stupor of their political gullibility. Egalitarianism does not work in a vacuum. It requires active participation by all. Its tender shoots will wilt so long as people continue to bask in the feeble light of a fuzzy ideology instead of becoming its mirror. A basic right of democracy, and a key responsibility, is to make leaders accountable for their words, responsible for their broken promises, punishable for their lies. I could stand on the old weather-worn bridge and lecture the people of Gehenna, fanning their resentment, stirring their wilted passions, urging them that long overdue is a paroxysm of nausea, a loud, collective spasm of revulsion at the vampires impaled at their throats. I could convince them that time has come to slam the shutters open and exclaim loud and clear: “We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore.” Not the blight and the crumbling sidewalks, not the garbage and the lung-crunching pollution, not the power outages, unregulated traffic, police corruption, influence peddling, drug-running and money laundering, not the gangs and child predators and human traffickers, not the inept and fossilized officialdom, not the Byzantine bureaucracy, lofty promises, limp excuses, words, words, words, not Ein Sof where is mirrored with unbearable realism the lunatic ambivalence of the human spirit.
But such outbursts are dramatized on celluloid in cinemas where the masses purge themselves on Saturday nights or in the bars where the national bile is habitually drowned or on TV where inanity packaged for the hoi polloi turns the brain to mush. At the polls, where the democratic process has been reduced to a thoughtless ritual, there will be no surprises. It will be business as usual. Voters will opt for the “least worst” and hope for the best. That’s the safe way out. Convictions are easily subverted by sheepish conformity. In the rush to find whom to blame for their woes, the good people of Gehenna will ultimately exorcise and exonerate their tormentors. There is comfort in “perpetuity.” It helps deaden hopeless dreams.
SIXTEEN
No. Whatever happens, I will not seek relief from one nightmare by reentering another no matter how much fodder for invective and vilification the experience might provide. My appetite for the offbeat notwithstanding, I would leave Gehenna well alone. Gehenna and its foul, sweltering air, its teeming masses of unwashed bodies, the hideous insects, the gruesome vultures, the green sludge that oozes like the River Styx under a bridge to nowhere, the helpless poor devils who toil without respite from dawn to dusk in an endless and futile transfiguration of birth and death, all the repugnant features of a dysfunctional world I had overlooked as I acted the enforcer in a pit of decadence and filth I mistook for my own exotic playground.
I learned long ago that “exoticism” is a fabrication. It doesn’t exist in the real world. It’s a myth, a collection of far flung places filled with “quaint and friendly (but inferior) natives,” facades manufactured mentally and quickly desecrated physically by misfits and drunks in search of Shangri-La, fragile would-be paradises first sullied by the sword and the cross, by colonialism and proselytism, and later scarred by land speculators and the tourist industry.
Gehenna, like all the palm tree- and hibiscus-fronded archipelagos to which I had retreated in search of Nirvana, was supposed to be foreign and exotic, not recognizable and eerily familiar.
I had fled to increasingly remoter shores, only to find, daubed with different hues, couched in dissimilar tongues and customs, the same stinking quagmire of human misery, superstition, fear, jealousy and obstinacy against the blows of man and nature, of doleful apathy, of absurd hopes and broken dreams, of pain and despair.
I had romanticized the prosaic and the macabre, aware, as I did, that my words, however compelling, and despite the vehemence and passion with which they were voiced, would change nothing.
What happened to the optimism, the zeal, the élan that once inspirited me? Why have disgust, rancor and indifference replaced empathy? Is it age? Is it the realization that I had been screaming at the deaf and gesticulating before the blind and petitioning the dumb and the heartless? Is it the pervading squalor, the immovable structures and rampant corruption in realms so lacking in self-respect, ambition and initiative that they wallow in their own dung and keep faking a smile? Is it the terrifying thought that I had been speaking to myself? Imagine how much time, effort, passion and paper were wasted in the process, how many sounds of anger and pity and disgust and espousal and rejection I had uttered in vain.
*
The elders, the self-righteous poltroons that they are, did not summon me. They rendered their verdict and notified my parents in writing instead. Beaming, tears of joy welling in their eyes, my father and mother took turns hugging me and heaping words of cheer and relief.
“They all voted to expel you from Ein Sof.”
“Say that again.”
“You’re being sent back to Yesod. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“What!”
“Yes. Look, it’s all here,” said my father waving a piece of paper. “They said that anyone who would go to such lengths to defy tradition and jeopardize the social order by challenging it must be mad or desperate. Claiming to be erring on the side of clemency, they settled on ‘desperate’ but ventured that desperation can lead to madness. They cited ‘an intractable incompatibility with the exigencies and rigors of life in Ein Sof’ and voted unanimously to send you back to Yesod where your ‘anarchism and apostasy are tolerated or better understood.’ They added with noticeable sarcasm that entropy -- or a sudden onset of wisdom -- would eventually bring you back you to Ein Sof and deliver you into the bosom of the family.”
*
“This means that....” I held my head, fearing it might begin to spin like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. I thought I was losing my mind. “This means that....”
“Yes,” my father roared with joy, elated that I had grasped the significance of the elders’ verdict.
“So we are destined to go through yet another goodbye,” I said, w
anderlust and sadness wrestling for control of my battered emotions.
My father waved his hand. “Don’t be silly, it’s just au revoir. Unadorned. Guileless. Down to earth. Low key. Just the way you like it.”
“Yes, but....”
My mother smiled and gently placed her hand over my mouth. “There’s nothing to say, nothing to do but come to and pick up where you left off. Think of it as a fresh opportunity, the kind of pristine horizon line you’ve always chased after. No immovable mountains, just the open sea.”
“And you two?”
“Our time is up. We belong to your past. We’re living on borrowed memories. It has its comical side,” my father quipped.
“And the ‘clan’?”
“What about it?”
“Why do you put up with all the bullshit?”
My father looked elsewhere.
“You don’t understand.”
I understood perhaps better than he could ever imagine, with a keenness and sensitivity only empathy and similarity of circumstance can inspire. Like father, like son. I had taken shortcuts. Unlike my father, I had defied reason and sidestepped convention, veering away from a course I knew I was not qualified to navigate. Fearing failure, I had circumvented well trodden lanes and cut my own footpaths. I would often boast that I thrived on adventure when, in fact, it was a fear of commitment or a lack of faith in the constancy of my own objectives that catapulted me from one castle-building venture to another. Insufficiently schooled, ill-suited for commerce, undisciplined and ferociously eclectic, I would become what I am less by conscious choice than wishful thinking and naiveté, youthful immodesty and haphazardly self-created opportunities. Necessity, in my case, was the mother of invention. My father, a disciplined and scrupulously honest man, had no use for artifice. He conquered his demons far from public scrutiny. Like my mother, he accepted his lot.