War and Rumours of War (Part 1)

(A work in progress - it's been hanging about on my pc for months, I keep tweaking it, I don't know where it's going as yet...)

I want to begin in the present, so if it seems at times too far away remember this : My present is not your present, yet here we are.

And I want to begin in a place we did once and might yet call home, a place still shaped by our basic human needs, desires, instincts, including that of intellect and the artful manipulation of culture. How basic is that? Tribal hierarchies, communal constructs of will constantly manipulated and maintained, or dismantled, abandoned, left to decay. All our marks are there in the lines and shapes of this place. You cannot yet discern them because it is still night.

But look, in the dark there is a lighted room where a girl sleeps at this and that moment and she is both light and dark to our eyes like the pulse with which she seems to sing herself a name, Alala. Perhaps when she wakes a phoneticist might, in due course, glean particles of substance in the sounds she makes. Atoms. Molecules. The grammatical building blocks of meaning, a syntax ascribed, imperfectly as ever, through the semiotic lens of our perception.

But the phoneticist has not yet started her shift, for now there is just the young doctor, the hospital chaplain, and the girl who sleeps and breathes alala to the translucent shell of screens arranged about her bed ...

Some kind of activity, you say?

Some kind of, yes. Look at the read-outs.

Ah yes. So what does it mean?

I'm not sure. That's why I called you in. Now look at the girl.

She seems peaceful enough.

That's an awful lot of activity for one sleeping girl, wouldn't you say?

On the read-out? I'll have to take your word for that.

An incredible amount. The thing is, I don't think that's her. Not just her.

Doctor you're losing me.

She's never quite there, it's as if my eyes are always trying to catch her up.

Yes, that is curious, a trick of the light perhaps ? I still don't understand why you called me here...

Neither do I... but it's almost like... I can't define it...her. I can't define her.

Have you taken a break lately?

How was the world saved?

We looked to ourselves.

What if we did more than that? What if it we, they, went further than that...

I don't follow you.

...all the way and beyond.

You've lost me.

I don't think that's... her.

Then what are we looking at?

All that's left for us to see.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. You think she's an illusion?

Not an illusion. More like an event horizon.

Doctor, I really think you should get some sleep.

...for now, Alala is a rumour barely begun.

Let us go back, and home, to the time Alala was born. Where are we?

Ah yes. In somebody else's country.

You want me to accept that? How can I ever? It's my land, my mother's and my father's and their mothers' and fathers' before that. How can you care so little?

How can you care so much?

History! Recorded, provable, rightful fact. How can you deny it? Centuries under the yoke... they spat on our heritage... trampled, denied...our language, our culture, our home...

That's your history?

The one they imposed on us when they tried to rub out ours, yes! We're nothing without it, nothing.

Some might say speak for yourself. Subjugation is a state of mind.

You can't sit on the fence on this one.

Too true. I do realise that.

So that's where you're standing?

You put the fence there.

Don't be a traitor.

I'm the one betrayed.

You betray your own blood.

And where will that lead us, that accusation, that mother of metaphors for a lucid and brutal denial of genetic parameters? To the notion of a brutal self, for a cut has been made and it is self-inflicted, the accused has chosen his mark of Cain. There is no delusion here, struggle as we might to assign a cause, no petulance or hot-headed catharsis to explain the act away. Each understands clearly the meaning of the other, each is deliberate, each cares only that their testament is this : I am not ashamed.

One conversation. Among how many? Tens of thousands perhaps, in that startled hour and that country, as the quantum dissemination of difference opens chasms in the most intimate constructs of social fabric. Doors slam on marriages, daughters perceive death over the breakfast table, gods split into shards and make dark altars of the lives of men. In a place of learning fate follows the Fool of the Tarot, steps over the edge, and ...

Wipe that stupid grin off your face, boy! Because, you, boy, have just woken up to Hell!

Sorry, Sir.

Write this down one thousand times : I am void.

I am void?

I am void!

Yes Sir!

... the flying board duster narrowly misses the boy's right ear, perhaps because he flinches, perhaps because the teacher realises, too late, that his heart is leaving with it. It hits the nose of a girl full square on the septum, she cups her hand to hold the pain but it seeps out between her fingers. The shock of it sucks the air from the room.

Oh my God.

Sir?

Oh my God.

The girl makes the noise of the incredulously wounded, the teacher clutches the heart he forgot. Blood is once again betrayed. She stumbles from her chair, putting out a hand she steadies herself on the blank page of the boy's workbook, stamping it red.

I'm sorry.

The boy cannot reply, he is watching his teacher's crash to the floor as his teacher watches him and each sees only that the other has rounded his mouth and eyes into perfect Os, as each is deafened by the shout of his own blasted heart.

Somebody screams.

The girl runs hunched and bleeding from the room.

Who will ever be ashamed? The teacher, perhaps, although if he dies now, if no-one fetches help, he may go beyond that. The boy? Not while he grows, not while he has that vast expanse of void to consume with that furious assertion of self that is rising in him. The girl then, yes, you might think so, shame follows her and floors her in the corridor but the fear of it, of being ashamed, hurries her to her feet. The child shifts in her womb.

Back in the here and now the doctor takes a last look at his patient ...

They say fortune favours the will to survive.

Amen to that.

What if they were none of them fools, yet the Fool lived in them all?

Alala, who was entire in the way of a singular notion, is beginning to unravel.