One runs sometimes…
Just runs
To no particular place
To no particular time
One just runs sometimes…
Breathless and panting
Unable to move without stiffness or pain
One runs sometimes…
Away?
Away from what?
From who?
From where?
One just runs sometimes and,
Time runs alongside…
Watched the sun raise its light through the trees this morning…the angels are here and God painted the morning….
(my thoughts this fine June 23, 2012 morning at 5am)
Greeted by helicopters
They walked into the city
Palms waved in the wind
Silent allusions to what once was
A reminder of what might have been
A reminder of what has been
Greeted by the drums
Greeted by the hysterical, angry shouts and cries
They walked into the city
Palms bowed to the wind
Sunlight beating its hard and gentle wings
Against the poetry of memory
Greeted by tear gas, fumes and smoke
Hails of rubber bullets stomped on their memory
They walked into the city
Palms raised their branches and took the smoke
Shelter-providing sheathes torn to shreds
But standing still to protect
Those who walked into the city
Greeted by hope
Greeted by promise
They met their death and did not regret.
(by me, Ian Whitney Palm Sunday, April 1, 2012, Cairo, Egypt)
Greeted by helicopters
They walked into the city
Palms waved in the wind
Silent allusions to what once was
A reminder of what might have been
A reminder of what has been
Greeted by the drums
Greeted by the hysterical, angry shouts and cries
They walked into the city
Palms bowed to the wind
Sunlight beating its hard and gentle wings
Against the poetry of memory
Greeted by tear gas, fumes and smoke
Hails of rubber bullets stomped on their memory
They walked into the city
Palms raised their branches and took the smoke
Shelter-providing sheathes torn to shreds
But standing still to protect
Those who walked into the city
Greeted by hope
Greeted by promise
They met their death and did not regret.
(by me, Ian Whitney Palm Sunday, April 1, 2012, Cairo, Egypt)
It begins somewhere
That sob that catches in the throat and stops the air
From
Moving
It begins somewhere
The grief
Not the simple sadness
Not the poignant madness
The great grief
It begins somewhere
Moving through the being
Like a rage of oceans within oceans
It rises within
Does not subside, does not submit
The great grief
It begins somewhere
Where the truth of loss
So great, so deep
So silent
Lifting mountains
And shaking them in fury
White Desert,Egypt 1997 Photo by Ian Whitney
White Desert,Egypt 1997 Photo by Ian Whitney
And the horses cried
Their limbs raised high against the rising wall of flames
It was the season of the storms of fire
Ravaging a land screaming for water
And the horse cried
As the rain pelted their coats
Their manes flying out through the air
Declaring their freedom
The horses cried
They broke the walls
They broke the fences
They found the green grass
And cooled their raging fears
And the horses cried
Why?
And who could hear?
Who could bear witness to their triumph?
Who knew what they had done?
Who would tell the stories…
When all had fallen silent beneath
The raging storms of fire and the torrential peace of rain….?
Who would know what had happened?
And, the horses cried…
An Easter Message:
There are holy places here in Egypt, Roberta. You should know that.
In the suburb where I live, there is a church on the Nile about ten or twenty minutes distant, on the other side of this small town. The Holy Family is supposed to have stopped there and hidden from the Roman soldiers. I have been there, I have seen it. And, I have looked out across the river from the church’s terrace and been told the story of their escape. It is a real place and the people here believe the story…there seems no reason to doubt it.
There is also a monastery for the followers of St. Antony, in the Red Sea. It was restored by the organization I worked for over a decade ago, to its amazing 14th century glory. It has a spring. The monk who coordinated with us, took us there. Protected by white rocks, sand and with places to sit for tourists – it was the end of the twentieth century – in a cave-like environment, a tiny oasis in the sand, the spring rose pure into a small well, a dark blue against the smoothened concave walls of rock. I tasted the water, the Muslim staff did as well under the guidance of the Coptic priest. I felt its life as the water ran through my veins, pure, cleansing and refreshing. It was holy, truly holy water in a sea of sand. It was a place where the aging sage, Antony, found solace and stayed.
So, it is real, Roberta. There are holy places. Jesus of Nazareth walked through these sands, washed the feet of others, and healed, giving hope…the most needed thing in a desert place – the hope of shelter, of shade, comfort and water…
As you worship this Easter, please remember that it is real, the holiness, the love, the immense love that a man found in the desert and shared with the living beings of this planet…”They know not what they do”… and, he forgave.
I am not that person, it is hard to understand the suffering and pain of others, but I do know that the holy places are real, and their truth cannot be denied…
May you be well cared for, understood and loved. May you also care well, understand and love…family, yes, is an elastic term…but, you are lucky, you have much family around you…
Take care, Janet
Ian Whitney
II
It was not her destiny, though. There was the knife, glinting in the sun that beat down on the head of Camus’ Mersault, a stranger in his own skin. The knife had been held, threatening the throat of the boy, the child who had not obeyed. Cruelly, the holder had moved it closer to the young boy, watching the horrified faces of the riders on the bus. Then, laughing in sadistic, derisive bitterness had withdrawn the knife and pushed the child away and to the ground. Turning to face the villagers and the tourist, he had stood up, proud, angry and dangerous. A few had turned away from this evidence of what had come from their loins, their lives. They knew his anger, they had felt the poison of his bitterness and hatred. He lifted his arm high, brandishing the knife for all to see. He was the animal they abhorred. He was the animal within themselves. He looked each one in the eye until he met the one that did not waver. The outsider, the female who stared him down. His arm lowered involuntarily. Like a snake he waited for the smell of her fear. There was none. He stood silently staring. She watched and said nothing.
The others began to be less afraid. They shifted their weight and the crowd began to move. First one, then another of the men began to slowly move forward. Someone said something and soon the animal was surrounded as they closed in….slowly. The knife dropped and arms and hands took the animal and walked him away.
The women sighed, turned away. Some picked up the baskets they had dropped. Others ran to the child on the ground. Everyone ignored the tourist that had stopped the animal in its tracks. She stood watching the men move away and the women with their saris and their veils wrapped closely around them float off, children hidden and baskets returned to their heads. She didn’t move or cry out. She simply stood as though expecting something else to happen. Soon, it was night and it was silent. She woke as if from a dream and slowly as the circulation returned to her legs, she pulled her flashlight from her belt and began to move back to the road, towards the one room cottage where she stayed.
The night beyond the torchlight was pitch black. Although she knew her way by heart, it was as though she were walking through the night sky. No wind blew, no stars or moon lightened the absoluteness of the black night. She was the void, not the space around her. She felt nothing as she moved silently forward on the bits of dirt and asphalt visible in front of her. The silence, the empty darkness held danger, she knew, but, yet it had become all too familiar, the dark danger of a night without light. Soon sounds penetrated her consciousness. The sound of footsteps approaching broke the silence of her slow movement. The man who had been chosen as her ‘guide’ called out to her. “Maim Saheb! Maim Saheb! Wait!” She stopped and waited. Smiling and laughing he joined her. “Be careful! Snakes, jee!” She smiled and laughed. He caught her arm and pointed to the pool of light in front of her. “Cobra! Don’t step” She looked down. In front of her, lay part of a yellow snake spotted with alternating rectangles and spots. Only a section was visible, the rest seemed to have been cut off and even that had been spared her eye. Her guide quickly explained that they must move off towards the middle of the road. They must not touch it, nor step over it: to do so, would mean bad luck, the bad luck that had come to a driver in Uttar Pradesh. The unfortunate driver had, on taking a sharp turn too quickly, found a snake stretched across the road before him. There was no time for him to stop, nor for the snake to make a rapid escape. The result had been what sounded like a bad case of smallpox. The man had woken up the next day covered with discolorations similar to the markings found on the snake. No matter how many pujas he made, nor his pilgrimages to the south of India to ask forgiveness from the Nagas, erased those markings. The lesson? Do not harm a naga. Do not harm a nagini. Do not harm a snake or you will be harmed, marked for life.
She had wondered about that bit of snake, just in front of her, in the road. No head, no tail, just a section. So soon after the knife-wielding incident, it had given her pause. Had it been a warning? Was it a warning to say nothing, to tell no one, to not speak or the wrath of the Nagas would hurl itself on her? There had been no reason to suppose this, but all the same, she wondered….
A man had returned to the village. He had returned from two years in prison. He was young, a child, really, barely twenty. His crime had been one of passion, yet calculated. He had found his young wife with another man in one of the cottages in the ‘resort’ in which she, the tourist, stayed. The young man had beheaded his young, helpless wife with an axe and brutally chopped her body eight times. The story was told her by another tourist, another art historian, a regular visitor to this place. She had told it first like the villagers. The woman was killed by her husband who had caught her with her lover. Told again, on another occasion, the story went that there had been no lover. The young man, the child man, had imagined a relationship existed between a tourist and the young, hapless wife. There had been nothing. She had only been washing the floors and the male tourist had been off on a motorcycle trip with his girlfriend from Germany. The child/husband saw his wife in the cottage and enraged and on drugs and the alcohol that passed for gin – it was made from a local still she had been shown, in the fields – had grabbed an axe and viciously attacked the young thing who was on her knees scrubbing the stone floor of the cottage. There had been much blood, and screaming. The boy husband had collapsed at the site of what he had done. His sentence, because it was assumed that even though there had been nothing going on, she had been doing her job as cleaning lady and the tourists were not even in the hotel, that even with all these facts on the side of the prosecution, it was assumed that because of her youthful beauty she must have somehow made the man tourist interested in her. The art historian had remarked that when she had spoken to the tourist, both he and his girlfriend had assured her that they had never even spoken with the young woman – in fact, had not even noticed her, and when shown pictures of her, had not even recognized her. She had been one of the nameless ones, the servants, the Dalits, the slaves that this once royal heir never noticed. He was in India for a lark, a change from the old stone of his country. He liked his beer and his girlfriend and they were on their way to Goa to lounge on the beach. The sentence the boy husband received was two years for willfully cutting off the head of his girl wife for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
The boy man returned from prison to this same village and, was, then, at the time of her witnessing of the knife wielder and the warning of the Nagas, serving food in the little tourist restaurant across the dirt road from the resort cottages. Perhaps she had seen him? Perhaps he had served a plate of rice and peas as she taught a few of the children whose parents had taken the subsidies from the government to send their children to school and then sent their children, instead, to the Caves to sell souvenirs. They had wanted to learn English so they could talk to the tourists and make more money. She had enjoyed the quickness in which they had picked up the vowels and the short phrases she had taught them. Upon hearing the story of the boy husband, she wondered.
Soon after that it became clear that she had seen and perhaps heard too much. The local ‘baba’ – an educated man from the south in his thirties, who had chosen the life of the sage and lived in a tiny mud room he had built himself outside the village – came to warn her of this boy husband. The ex-con had been heard to be making threats against her, and Baba suggested that she leave. The resort’s owner had suffered a heart attack and there was no one who would be able to help or defend her. She would be safer if she moved on. The convict was insane, the village would deal with him in their own way.
She had seen too much and she was not unhappy to move on. Still, she wondered. He had not been the one wielding the knife, he had not had any association with the ones who stored rifles in the many caves both known and hidden that she had seen. There seemed to be no reason, but for the fact that the art historian was known to make trouble and she had been friendly with the art historian and even shared her profession. More to the point, she had been teaching the children English…..a truly dangerous thing….and, she was the outsider, the female….
III
The sands of the Sahara rose higher and higher as her leg slipped ever more deeply into their fastness. It took a great deal of strength and exertion to pull each leg up with its load of tiny, dry earth, the remnants of life reduced almost to dust. It reminded her of her childhood, slogging through drifts of newly fallen snow as she valiantly tried to place her tiny feet and short, heavy legs in their little red, rubber boots in the footsteps of her much older and taller sister as they took the shortcut through the back to get to school before the bell rang. The difference was that her legs were a bit longer, much heavier and she was much, much older. And, she had no boots….She envied the soldiers in their knee-high coverings of thick leather. She had tried everything from Nikes to Birkenstocks, but had settled on bare feet. The shoes gathered more sand and made the effort much more difficult. It was dangerous she knew. She heard the voice of an archaeologist she knew, repeating, as if in a trance, ‘there are too many snakes…too many snakes’ and, “we had to pull a scorpion off the worker’s ear”. The woman had been documenting a tomb, mostly cleaned with little sand. A beautiful tomb they wanted to share with the tourists. She had come back, shaken and ready to allow the delays….”too many snakes, there are too many snakes”.
So, she had stopped the unbearable pain in her back and sat down on a firm hard surface she had seen from the path. The sand had almost reached her thigh and the tourists she had been walking with were happy to let her sit while they, tall and confident and healthy, went on to the tomb of a long-dead queen no one ever visited. She watched them move quickly through the desert sea and tried to stay calm. If it hadn’t been for the library with its marvelous collection of rarities and scholarly patrons from around the world, she would have left long ago. You see, a desert, flat, few dunes spread out before her until it met and blended with a yellow, dun-colored gray cloud in the distance. The blue skies were gone, the sun hidden far beyond its dirty gray veil. No dramatic National Geographic photograph of rolling, orange dunes punctuated only by a singular trail left by a lonely, isolated migrating herd of elephants. No storm threatened, just the existential angst of barrenness.
Suddenly, immediately, surreal, a single foot soldier appeared. Walking confidently and surely along a solid path where no sand threatened his high, thick leather boots, the soldier kept his head bowed to the ground, watching each step and carefully ignoring her presence. They, she and the tourists, had missed this easy path. They had slogged and panted their way through the sand sea. It must have been a subject of great comic relief to the military who had, obviously, been observing the three middle-aged, overweight westerners. She could almost see the young man trying to hide his smile as she sat there ruefully rubbing her calves. She watched as he disappeared down the hill towards the small oasis of palm trees with its one, very tiny village.
She had once been to that village. It was a road that turned at a precise right angle straightening out to pass an irrigation structure still worked by water buffalo. The animals moved slowly, methodically in the afternoon sun. Surrounded by vegetation and bordered by a square of royal palms, the buffalo walked in their unending circle, brown wood, wet, dark- gray backs, white horns glistening in the field of green and gold. The image, pastoral, romantic out of time, blended with the stench of the sewage ditch and the low water canal filled with refuse as wood smoke burned the humidity and the mosquitoes away. Her mind slipped back to another field, another time, in India. The cotton had been high and ready for picking. The many holes in a similar dirt road had confused her as she had stared out through a thin row of trees at an unexpectedly large pool of water. The holes, she had been told, were made by the many pythons that roamed the area. Called ‘cobras’ by the locals, or sometimes even ‘tigers’, their long, gray bodies sometimes stretched out from the caves as the moved to darker moister areas. She wasn’t sure that she believed the holes were of their making, though. Not being a herpetologist, thank goodness, she did not have any idea. She thought they must have had something to do with posts or markings since there were so many, maybe to test the ground for stability? She really didn’t know.
Her one close encounter with a python or cobra – she never saw either its head or tail had been in the group of huts behind the field behind the cottage resort. The art historian had taken her there and had left her outside the temple building while she had inquired if the ‘god’ was there. The question and the behavior had aroused her suspicions and she was fairly sure – particularly when she remembered a story about a large snake in the cafeteria and another one that had been killed, then given a bowl of milk and afterwards had its own shrine built to it near the small tables in the ‘garden’ of the cottage resort. Her attention, however, was interrupted as a woman, about her own age, very thin and dressed in a grey shift, not a sari, emerged from a doorway. Her skin was milky white as was her hair. Staring with undisguised curiosity and apparent joy, the woman watched her. The whiteness of the skin was broken by patches of pink and the albino’s eyes. She had understood that all the residents of this little place had been brought there as children. In fact, some weeks before, an unexplained event in Cave 10, had its explanation in a ceremony where a four year old boy had been dedicated to the group. As she and the woman stared at each other in wonder and surprise, a voice from the darkness behind her, called the woman back inside. At that moment the art historian returned and beckoned her into the temple where she noted that the ‘god’ was absent.
After a brief moment to show respect and leave a donation, the two left. As she followed the art historian down the path leading away from this tiny group of huts, she heard a sudden ‘ah!’ ring out. The voices were female and just behind her. She turned and looked. Three women were standing perpendicular to her with their hands clasped in prayer and looks of joy and pleasure it would be hard to find anywhere. These women seemed in a moment of ecstasy. She followed the direction of their bows and saw a pile of bricks out of which and over which, the long, grey form of a snake had emerged and sunk back into. She stood transfixed as their ‘god’ and, obviously, that was who or what had been meant by the term, moved slowly and endlessly. The last woman turned to her and beamed her a smile of joy, delight and was it gratitude? A look she had rarely seen on anyone’s face. It had stopped her from the shout she had been about to hurl at the back of the art historian, carefully bowed and moving quickly away.
She had understood that she had been honored and by being honored had brought honor to this little family of women in gray saris and shifts.
Ian Whitney
Desert cities are made of concrete, sand, wind and hard, sharp defensive angles. They hadn’t told her that. She had seen it, felt above it, when she saw the pink cities rise out of the Thar, the Great Desert of India. No herds of camel or flocks of peacocks, tails glistening blue and gold in the late afternoon sun, could erase the waves of untold stories that flowed out over the walls that had emerged like a mirage from the dunes. Isolated, alone, a part of the dune, the desert, the fading sun and yet so different, so harshly incongruous and self-conscious with its awareness that its brutality and tragedies had no where to hide. The sun made it all visible.
The lives that had been lived there had not been lives. She knew that. She had felt it and it had stopped her from raising her camera and focusing on the crumbling edifice of invisible existences. She had felt, rather than seen, the bent forms, the hardened, wrinkled dried faces of young women and men decades older than their age. They had moved without joy, without hope as they bore their burdens. The women hurried young children through the silent streets. Here, laughter was unknown, only the pain of the stinging stones that whipped their skins raw leaving scars and lines scoring the unfortunate patches of exposure. Here, the elements showed no mercy and the forgiveness of water a dream….
One had looked up…as if sensing the presence of this other future universe and the difference time would make…confusion, a brief moment that lit the eyes in recognition and then just as swiftly deadened that flicker of life in a conscious denial of its intuition.
Who had he been? Who had it been that had looked so directly at her, at the future? What had quickened his heart, moved him to straighten his spine, to peer out into the darkness of what could not be seen and, for a moment, seen what could be?
Decades later, sitting in an oasis, a modern suburb in another desert, she thought of him. She had heard his voice in the young college-educated vendor sitting in front of his wares sheltered by a canvas tent in Goa. “I will die here”. She had begged her first months in this country. She had begged in a fever to God, to the man she had loved futilely, ‘don’t let me die here!’, “I don’t want to die in Cairo”, please! And, the man of the past, the faded figure in a city long dead, the voice, the voice of the warrior forced to the humiliating business of selling cheap wares to tourists, the voice of the desert, the voice of so many gone before, had haunted her….”Please don’t let me die here….” And, the fever had subsided….
She was still there, though. The fevers were gone, but for almost 15 years she had stayed, here in the city in the sand with its memories of dreams.
The children praised the building of the cities of concrete. They saw them as ‘modern’, new worlds where the cruelty of the desert could not penetrate. Their cities rose higher and higher in their minds. Islands built in the sea, human beings erasing the existence of all other life since it was only for humans that this world, this planet, this universe, they were taught, had been made. All animals could be erased, no need for plant life, everything could be engineered. Everything could be controlled. That was the message of the Messenger. That was the message of God. It was the duty of human beings to erase the world and live in the chrome and concrete of the mind, the mind controlled by those who, by biological right, were destined to control. All others were rubbish, were part of the life, the animal world that had to be destroyed. And, until it could be, they were the servants of the humans as they, no matter how human their form, were only sub-human.
These children had never read Aldous Huxley. These children heard these messages as facts, as indisputable truths fed to them through uncles, parents, senile elders. To contradict these messages, to iterate that God had created everything, had created all and that all were equal, was blasphemy. Especially when expressed by the outsider, the female.
These children would not believe in beauty. They refused the beauty of nature. The petals of flowers blown from their moorings on slender branches were ‘rubbish’ to be swept away, discarded as now deformed and damaged. These gifts of hope, of life were begrudged their existence as long as they balanced on the trees, but when blown the children’s faces lifted lips in scorn and derision. “Flowers” were proof of the decadence of Nature. They were the symbol of life, of female life, of joy, of happiness. Therefore, they were to be destroyed as soon as their usefulness had been fulfilled.
These were the descendents of the desert. They believed the desert to be their father and, in its likeness of cruel winds and blowing sand, they nurtured their young. Vultures preyed on the defenseless, crowding on the telephone lines, the scattered trunks of dead trees, mile after mile through the center of the South Asian continent. Here, in this other desert, to which the remnants of those hardened hearts and minds had fled, they had become the vultures, waiting and watching. But, the vultures were confused. Too many had sighted the future, had seen her and others like her with their cameras, their eyes. Too many had lifted their heads to the sound of joyful, free laughter floating on gentle winds of innocence. Too many had seen the beauty of a forest in their dreams, the hope of vitality in living. Too many had smiled and found the truth of a beautiful morning. Too many had learned that concrete and chrome, black smoke and harsh words followed by whips were no answer and had never been anything but harbingers of loss and death. The vultures were confused. They found they no longer lived in deserts, but many in landscapes of autumn leaves and winter snows, springs that burst into glorious bloom and summers that moved slowly, heavily humid like the womb of a woman during ‘her time’, and…they treasured it.
They fought it, these vultures. They were of no nationality, no heritage now, and could not allow others to be of one. They were Asian, Native American, European, South American from groups, tribes, languages and traditions that spread the globe. They were vultures because they were scared. They were frightened. The desert was what they had known. Deserts of struggle, of pain, of hopeless and empty existence. They had forgotten the ancestors that had raised their hands to the stars. The elder who had told the village the stories of the flickering lamps in the sky and made the children’s voices rise in joyful laughter on the soft winds of night in Aswan. They had forgotten the modesty of the young girl bowing her head in happiness to the answer of her youthful heart or the young man, who knew it was better to be kind, to love and to laugh than to wrongly hurt and judge. They had forgotten the sound of a newborn baby after the terrifying storms of sound as the child burst upon the world. They had forgotten hope and remembered only anger and fear.
She was tired now. She had done much, thanklessly, like so many others. She had, like so many others been grateful for the moment of a real smile.
Debussy Time 