We Are All The Children of Stardust

Yesterday was a sad day. I spent all of it inside
both my house and my head. I slept, and desperately
tried to memorise mathematical formulas in order
to jump through the next hoop that will be placed
before me.

In the news, the announcment that Syd Barrett died. What a life.
To have influenced so many; I wondered where did he go?
Did he know he was going? And where is he now?
Floating amongst the asteroids and comets and supernovas?

Terrorists blew up commuter trains in Mumbai, India.
Almost 200 people died and it is virtually incomprehensible
to imagine the horror and the nightmare of the scene
when you are thousands of miles away, living in another
country, another city, another place inside your head.

I do not know this world anymore and yet I thought once
I did. We cursed the Cold War, but as many have said now,
at least we knew the rules. It was an imperfect insanity,
marked by futile wars and thousands of deaths. Yet there
were perimeters, even alongside the blight of communism and
the bitter sadness of Vietnam, the heavy threat of mutually
assured destruction and Star Wars. Little did we know that
mutually assured destruction was indeed our saving grace.
The USSR did not want to be obliterated anymore than we did.
And so we lived. And down came the wall, in 1989, in Berlin,
and we all witnessed what we thought then was a glorious
moment in history. When did it end? Did it ever really begin?
Have we merely traded one set of fears for another? What
is the sum of all fears? Is this my life now, and for all the years
to come?

My heart is heavy, and I am scared. It is not as if terrorism
is new; indeed I can recall terrorist acts from my childhood in
the 1970's. But the rules of the game have changed. The USSR
disappeared and with it, some frail cobweb of connection that
held the misery and fear together. Internal wars and rebels and
grievances have turned Russia into a frightening, failing democracy.

It seems as well we can look back and fool ourselves into believing
everything was OK before September 11th. Intellectually we know
it wasn't. Europe and other continents and countries had been living
with the hideous blight of terrorism for decades. It was the shock
and scale and magnitude of the attacks on - gasp - American soil
that shook us awake from our dreams of immunity, our fantasies and
necessary illusions of safety. And we woke up, some of us literally and
figuratively, and we knew: there was never any safe place. There is
nowhere to run and hide. The boogeymen are not on the other side
of the world; they are here, they are there - they are everywhere.
None of us will probably ever forget where we were when we heard
the news - my mother woke me very early that Tuesday morning;
in time to see the Twin Towers fall, collapse into ash, dust, and vapourized
nothingness.

My mother, the queen of hyperbole, for once was not exaggerating
when she said our country was under attack. I knew, as sure as I'd
known anything in my entire existence, that the world had irrevocably
changed that beautiful Indian summer day. And then, the carefully
constructed nightmares of Afghanistan and Iraq. The mind cannot
fully fathom the grief, the agony, the lives destroyed forever by such
futile and senseless self-serving political strategies. The rules of
engagement no longer apply. The soldiers, over three years in, are going slightly
mad. They are living in a constant state of hypervigilance which
has pushed many to allegedly commit horrific crimes - rape and murder
and torture. If you are around madness long enough, you become
the madness. If you are living with monsters, one day you will
become the monster.

July 11, 2006, Mumbai, India. How many lives were destroyed on
those trains? March of 2004, Madrid. July of 2005, London. Mind
the gap. Mind the men and women who do care a whit about life;
who seem to long for death in their sick, twisted war. A war on....
what exactly? Ah, there's the rub. Tis there where the rules have
changed, and the players as well. They are everywhere now. They
are sitting in our junior colleges. They are sitting in caves in the
Middle East. They are insurgents in the deserts, hiding bewteen the
Tigris and Euphrates. They are walking amongst the businessmen
of Mumbai, and the commuters of London. My friend Catz and I
spoke today of what they want. What indeed? The Palestinians want
their homeland back. Can we blame them? The Israelis want a home
and for the world to never forget what happened to them. Yes, it
is understandable. The others - they all want something different,
and in the end, it's probably all the same. Some of them, like the
President of Iran, want the absolute annihilation of Israel. Osama
wants the annihilation of the West. al-Zarqawi didn't even discriminate
anymore - everyone and everything was a target. Men, women,
children. Christians, Jews and Muslims. He beheaded human beings
as if they were tiny ants he stepped on with glee. He is gone now,
but what does it matter in the end? A million others will take his
place. The madness has no end. It cannot be contained.

North Korea is hell-bent on obtaining nuclear technology. Kim
Jong Il taunts the world by firing off impotent missiles. Perhaps
now they will all fall and sink to the bottom of the sea, but he
knows the psychological effect it will have on the world. The board
game positions shift. We send a missile destroyer to Japan. There
doesn't seem to be any diplomacy, for how do you appease a
madman whose country and government remain a mystery?
India fires off wayward missiles; India and Pakistan live on the
precarious bit of peace gained over two long years, and now, and
now...Mumbai.

Ireland, Indonesia, England, India, Spain, Russia, America,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Italy, Scotland, Africa, the Philippines...is there
any continent or country that will not be touched by terrorism?
And the wall came down, but alas, it was not freedom that
was born, but a world unknown to us as before. The Cold War years
were a comfort zone and we didn't even know it.

I am in a way, glad I do not have children. Yes, the world has
always been a place where control is a mere illusion. My mother
was born two weeks before World War II. I was born during the
heaviest battles of the Vietnam war. But there has been a sea
change, and it is an ominous one at that. The tides have turned,
the waters are pitch black, still at some times, wildly turbulent
at others. There are no predictable tides, the man on the moon
smiles wanly down at us, as if to say, "I'm so sorry, I cannot control
any of this anymore."

We live on edge, on bizarre terror alerts, we live at the edge of
a beautiful spiral disk called the Milky Way, and we know we also
live on the edge of a steep precipice. Will we fall? How long and far
do we go with our lives before the terror starts encroaching upon
our freedoms? Last fall I insisted on riding the Tube. I would not
be undone in London by hate-filled terrorists. We road the shaky,
old rails, and it was like some kind of victory. We survived.
In New York I insist on riding the subways; a day after I arrived
in 2004 NYC was put on a high terror alert. I would not be dismayed
or discouraged. Fuck them, I said. Fuck their insanity, their threats,
their madness. It is easy to say when you still feel that invisible and
yet slightly comforting illusion; the cloak of comfort that envelops
you and tells you 'oh yes it is happening but certainly it could not
happen again, so soon.'

But it is happening. Over and over and over. And it will happen again.
And my fear, our fear, the collective fear that lives inside all of us,
whether we want to admit it or not, is that someday, one day, something
is going to happen that is going to make September 11, 2001 look
like child's play. What then? Will will even be here to contemplate
it? I never thought this would happen in my lifetime. I never thought
I'd live in a world so hopelessly caught in a tangled web of torture and terror.
There are no rules, the culprits are everywhere, hiding in the very
threads of this loosely woven fabric of madness; and they are nowhere -
they are ghosts, corpses among the corpses, voices and images on
shaky recorders and video cameras and they will never, ever be
easily be caught, killed or deterred. When death itself does not
deter a man or woman from his or her quest to kill and destroy,
what alternatives do those we seek peace have? When men are not
afraid to plow themselves into buildings in jets at 500 miles an hour....what then?

So we live with our fears, and we try to keep them at bay, and
we make macabre jokes, and we know, we finally know that
the laughing sadness that now owns our souls is not going away.

Photo: Our home, the Milky Way, in all its sad beauty.