A meandering melee

Is this a good time to start this? Well, I can't see why not. The meaningless hours of the night are the traditional time for evil meanderings, and as far as I am from my home at Logic Beach the strands of thought and process still slot into place as though I stood in those timeless wastes. I, the only variable, the reading head that slides down the tape of time, that beholds the passage and the patterns. My free will may be an illusion, but time is utterly real. That which happens has happened - it falls to me to chronicle it. I am the talking man. I may not be the best of men, nor an arrow to the far shore, but I am one of you and I speak.

Shall I tell you the tale of your life? It is probably similar enough to mine in theme if not in substance. I give you the man, more beset with questions than answers, surrounded by the sweating, gaping beasts who bustle in the market place and exchange parasites and diseases with the same hand they clutch and dispense the coin that sings the song of their existence. Favoured of the metropolis, of the class neither rich nor poor enough in the coin of the realm to need to desire what it can bring nor be constrained by what it does. A creeping dissatisfaction, a malaise is the curse of these people as they witness the growing strength, numbers and banality of the rich, the desolation of the poor and the mean, miserable shortsightedness of their peers. But wedged in a comfortable existence between the rottenness carried out in the name of Mammon both above and below them, clinging to a luxurious existence just below the sun-baked surface of the machine, who can blame them? They change jobs sixteen times in a life, their freedom is a curse as they race against the gun to stay skilled and worth something to somebody, everybody, and all this time horrific things are done in their name by a government they elect to preserve this nameless terror of a life. In the name of a mindless security we term peace, and a miserable ease for the slight majority, the boot comes down hard on all kinds of necks, wavering just on the horizon, a moral quagmire for those with eyes that see. Shortsightedness is their only defense - they cling to their home loans and stock options and think not of what is committed in their names and with their consent. Somebody once said that in a democracy the people get the government they deserve. This is wrong. We have a government of the Grek, for the Grek. What we deserve is a government that will harvest us for our meat.

But we have heard all this before. Our theme is the growing dissatisfaction with this way of life, an alienation born of strange questions broached in the late hours of the morning. This is a common enough theme. It boarded my bus in huge numbers every time I pulled up near a university campus. But perhaps there is something different about us? Perhaps a scarring, or an unusual efficacy of the kidneys? Or perhaps I delude myself. Perhaps the Grek will welcome us with gummy smiles and open arms. They have with me, I have done no wrong in any eyes but my own, for they do not see through the bone surrounding my brain. I am utterly part of the machine I fear, and though I have moved far from the metropolis and the roar and shriek of the cash registers, I am still bound tight to Mammon, just as we all are. The machine is in us, and at best we may choose self sacrifice, to turn our backs on what we are and walk alone into the desert. But the song of the freight train is in my heart. The largest instrument man has ever constructed, the thousand-part chorus of tortured metal played on strings three thousand kilometres long, the quintessential sound of progress and the bones of Western civilisation itself. It is a song sung to the heavens night after night, and the song is me. If I do not participate in civilisation, I must pick at its edges and swarm down its alleyways and eat out of its bins. No matter how far I stray from it, I feed on its fundamental, inhuman song. As such my fate is tied inextricably to that of the Greks. Is this true of you as well? I ask because I don’t know and want to understand.

Failing to value the comforts of the middle but lacking the means of the upper and the desperation and fatality of the poor, we are bereft of meaning. Most of what we are is fed to us from birth, a formula of tinned music sung by disembodied voices from a far away land, similar but terribly alien to who we are. We flock to one another and take solace in company of those that are similar to us in some way. We define ourselves by our similarities to our flock and change ourselves to emphasise this condition. Did something go wrong somewhere along the way? The tale of my youth was one of uncoordination. Something was wrong with my ear and my brain. I couldn't fit in, so I read a lot of books instead and sank into my own skull. I became isolated, forgot my name and was lost. I learned to pity the man who is found first by anyone other than himself. Who knows what kind of mindless fiend I could be. Could I be my bastard older brother, a worthless killer who changed armies because there wasn't enough killing going on in this one?

But this is all a song that has been sung before by people with a better ear for meter and pitch. My mind is better attuned to the dark places, and casting no light myself I suppose I illuminate no new truths and merely stumble on ones unearthed by earlier explorers on the same trail. My senses are attuned to the darkness, and therefore I see little of what passes in the light. Another theme that twists and yawns across my spans and chasms – a constant feeling of isolation. As the eternal pilot of this unruly meat, I wonder what I am missing in not sharing in the commonly understood and shared forces that appear to drive others. But what drives me is deep and unnamable, and although I seek to master it I do not seek to understand it or have it understood. But I echo. If I have depth, am I not thereby hollow?

Do we share this song? The lonely echo, the roar of the metal god, the yawning silence of the dark and empty places? When the sun is shining on the bustling market place, we stand there motionless, eclipsed, uncertain and fundamentally alone.

Are we all locked in our own skulls? Are we bound up in the same recurring themes, endlessly repeated and reiterated? Or is it just me?

Either way, the walls of Rome fell a long time ago. I still remember the moment when I realised that we weren't the descendants of the ancients - we were the vicious hairy bastards who pushed them over. Vile barbarians playing at civilisation, pathetic monsters donning the ill-fitting trappings of a far older people. The history of Western Europe isn't that of the Romans, as the various lies dug up during the Renaissance would have us believe. It is merely the history of the Germans, a long and repetitive tale of murder and outrageous feats of drinking. And after only fifteen hundred years, look how serenely we wear the trappings of peace and civilisation! Behold our mighty structures and the plumbing therein. But stare not too long lest the murderous heart of the German be spotted. It is this that has allowed us to strive for excellence in the art of killing over the centuries. Lurk not too long in the dark alleyways either. We are conflicted - trapped in our furs and fineries, telling ourselves that we are civilised because we can now kill by remote control at such a distance that the blood no longer splatters our tunics. Nor does it despoil our marketplace. But we are a people that knows nothing more than killing, that aches to wring the life from his neighbour, to take what he owns - to kill and kill and kill and kill and when it is no longer feasible to kill any more to turn on our own selves with the same murderous glee. See how we scourge ourselves of our murderous past with the guilt that we allow to filter through in carefully measured doses through the dirty glass of the TV screen! See the darkies suffering, convince yourself of your humanity by allowing yourself a moment of self indulgent guilt, then commence to kill - automatic, unseen, but killing none the less. A civilisation that floats on the blood of slaves is no less terrible because the slaves and the blood are kept well out of sight.

This is not something I feel particularly outraged by. I, after all, am a product of this way of life, and I am comfortable as I sit close by the edge of the tracks, letting hundreds of tonnes of steel rip past inches from my face, singing my song to me in words I cannot even form. But should this civilisation begin to teeter, as all civilisations do eventually, and begin its headlong topple, I shall not expend myself on a mad quest to prop it up. I will fall with it and with a song on my lips join the peoples of the dust.