On the first of the last leg into Baghdad, "Cruel War". the Peter, Paul, and Mary song comes up automatically on shuffle on my cell selection as I plug in and we gain altitude out of Amman in the unmarked "Embassy Air" turbo-prop to Baghdad.
"What are we doing in this barren land", we keep asking ourselves. Why do we fling ourselves all over the world to places we can not begin to understand? Do they suck us in because we lead, because of our position in the world? Or are we the suckers?
- now it is as brown a land as is imaginable, even beyond any easy imagination, just desert flat and empty. Washed out rivers are the only features in an otherwise blank nothingness.
Or do we go unbidden to these barren spots? Is the Middle East this vortex of history - this crossroad of conquerors, like Churchill said of the Balkans, creating more history that it can absorb? Does it demand attention like the unhappy kid, or hyper child in school?
Or does he know, this old man-child of History that what matters is not all the gold, or even a quiet peace, but rather what eternal souls you can engage, to drift with you like dust and play some song of the wind in the sands of time? It is only for an old poetry, not for reason that he plays this tune.
You have to pass through formidable desert to see her, this land of history and dusty souls, this land of Babylon.
Now mud flats dried up and more desert. All is dusty now, losing all distinction, between land and sky everything is brown. How many shades of brown? White-brown, dust-brown, black-brown, as far as the eye can see. Now the last distinctions are all gone and it feels like we are the dust cloud itself. Only a brown vagueness, a twilight zone as though we have left the planet into a void of brown; a deep Space of brown without even stars to guide hangs out the window and we seem certainly lost.
Then SUDDENLY ; the mighty River, the Mother of Civilization, the Tigris herself, flows wide and muddy and violently blooms the land aGreen! And now I enter the place where it all began and now begins for me.
"What are we doing in this barren land", we keep asking ourselves. Why do we fling ourselves all over the world to places we can not begin to understand? Do they suck us in because we lead, because of our position in the world? Or are we the suckers?
- now it is as brown a land as is imaginable, even beyond any easy imagination, just desert flat and empty. Washed out rivers are the only features in an otherwise blank nothingness.
Or do we go unbidden to these barren spots? Is the Middle East this vortex of history - this crossroad of conquerors, like Churchill said of the Balkans, creating more history that it can absorb? Does it demand attention like the unhappy kid, or hyper child in school?
Or does he know, this old man-child of History that what matters is not all the gold, or even a quiet peace, but rather what eternal souls you can engage, to drift with you like dust and play some song of the wind in the sands of time? It is only for an old poetry, not for reason that he plays this tune.
You have to pass through formidable desert to see her, this land of history and dusty souls, this land of Babylon.
Now mud flats dried up and more desert. All is dusty now, losing all distinction, between land and sky everything is brown. How many shades of brown? White-brown, dust-brown, black-brown, as far as the eye can see. Now the last distinctions are all gone and it feels like we are the dust cloud itself. Only a brown vagueness, a twilight zone as though we have left the planet into a void of brown; a deep Space of brown without even stars to guide hangs out the window and we seem certainly lost.
Then SUDDENLY ; the mighty River, the Mother of Civilization, the Tigris herself, flows wide and muddy and violently blooms the land aGreen! And now I enter the place where it all began and now begins for me.
posted by Intomyown at 10:50 AM
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