letters from barabbas

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

--from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes I forget why God gave me glasses--to remind me that I can't see much ahead of me: I can't even see past my elbow when I hold my hands out. I can draw connections between the aspects of a moment. I'm good at that. Very analytical and all. And I'm learning how to see things (through those corrective lenses first), to capture an instant's subtleties with my parents' dusty Canon. It's thrilling, but, it's not really seeing. Not how I'd like to. I'm too often looking back, when I'm feeling particularly good. But mostly I'm just staring squarely at my feet. How does one see (and not just look) outside oneself? I wish I knew what was going on. Not just in my little existence, but in eternity. This moment here is pretty useless, severed from the flow of time. I hardly ever remember exactly when I took a specific picture, and all those sloppy journals seem like someone else's artifacts. What's really going on, is what I would like to know.

Epicurus said that eating alone is the life of a wolf. He thought that the whole point of life was to enjoy yourself as much as possible, but that it was pointless if you don't have a few good friends to enjoy it with. So he moved into a big house with a lot of other intellectual types to eat good food and drink good wine (in moderation, of course, for he abhorred over-indulgence) and form a whole philosophy out of it. The part about pleasure being the meaning of life is pretty much bullshit, as far as I can tell, but he's on to something with the part about the friends.

I passed a guy sitting cross-legged on the floor of an off-to-the-side hallway in Parker this morning. He was hunched over a tupperware bowl eating something that looked like sawdust, his face reflecting up at him in the shiny brown linoleum. He glanced at me as I passed the way a dog will shift a little when you get too close to his food. And I thought, "Are we animals without each other?"

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

-Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)


They've started referring to the London bombings as "7/7," presumably to mirror the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, what we now refer to euphemimstically as "9/11."

I was a senior in high school on September 11, 2001, and we turned the television on in the middle of Macroeconomics just in time to see its greatest monument collapse. In between first and second periods, my classmates and I discussed whether they might be reinstating the draft for the war that would inevitably begin the next day. I'm still ashamed that, of all the possible reactions to such a situation, I was most concerned about whether I was going to be required to do anything about it.
Over the next several weeks, the football stadium turned into a rallying point of freedom, as the crowd rose together before the kickoff to sing enthusiastically, "I'm Proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free." In the mornings, my economics teacher would educate us on the secret workings of the world using charts and formulas and specialized jargon. She once led us through a deliberation over whether defending this machine would be worth her own students' lives. She couldn't say for sure. This was the semester that I lost my faith in my country, in countries altogether.
Shit, I lost my faith in people as a species.

September 11th was so horrifying to me because thousands of individuals died for something that they personally had nothing to do with. Autonomous moral agents with distinct lives they had created for themselves were reduced to a category. Americans.
This sacrifice of individual lives for the sake of a political statement is how I choose to define terrorism.
But pay attention to the rhetoric we're using in the west to retaliate. It's the war on terror. It's the Americans (or the west or democracy or Israel or whomever) versus the Terrorists. Us and Them. We have conveniently reduced these depraved or brainwashed or tormented souls (but souls nonetheless) to a faceless group of evil that we have the duty and the right to eradicate. The irony of this reverse "terrorism" aside, fighting back with this sort of attitude seems savagely disrespectful to the victims. Terrorists are not so much bad because they kill people as they're bad because they dehumanize the individual. So in responding as a nation--singing patriotic songs at football games as we did, and now adopting a formated dating system--we are accepting the dehumanization of the individuals who died. We are right and they are wrong. And we are even embracing it: adopting it in order to dehumanize the individuals who started it.
This isn't a medicine we'd like to give them a dose of, is it? How dare they defy democracy? is absolutely the wrong question. How dare they defile humanity?

We can't handle mentioning the actual event. The tragedy is too painful, so we speak of it in terms of the date on which the event occurred. But after five more years of this will we not only refer to 9/11 and 7/7, but 5/18 and 1/22 and 12/25? Will these dates of terrorist attacks come to reflect the act of terrorism itself--individual bombings causing the deaths of individuals lumped into a political/historical/analytical anonymity?

But here's where the really terrifying part comes in, as the quote I opened with brought this whole topic to light in my mind: I can't conceive of any better way to solve the problem.

Go ahead, then. Nuke 'em all to hell.

The words I would unearth within within myself are as thick as tar. I will be fossilized in them, preserving me as a specimen for distant times and cultures. They are black and vile and will sting you at the back of your throat, composed of the decaying flesh that's falling from my back even now. You wouldn't want much to do with them, because they would be petrifyingly honest.

I'm waiting for the archaeologists to dig them up.