Falls the Shadow

It's all been said before. New days dawn and the choice remains the same. History shows it, look around you and you can see it: the future will bring no change. Humanity, History, Progress - we've heard those words so often but these bloody times persist. For the child to become a man how many mistakes, dreams, illusions? And finally that awful decision, that declaration of war. We are not new men, the end of a logical sentence, the righteous judges of our fathers' wrongs. We are old men, prehistoric men, children saddled with adulthood waiting to be falsely tried by those to come, those who can know no more, those whose blind turn will come. Old tricks relearnt, a new pack of cards complete with kings, jokers, low numbers. Humanity follows no straight line - it doodles.

  'So what?' I hear. That mankind follows no route, strives for no goal, what does it matter? Cultures come and go, we learn, forget, rediscover - does it need to make sense?

  I sit down on a low wall in the shade of a block of flats. Here on the edge of town the housing estates hum in the hazy heat. It is quiet; the thousand tiny sounds mere scratches on the surface of a deeper silence, and the light and shade and geometrical shapes make everything appear intensely clear cut. I run back over my thoughts and feel them shouted down by a million 'buts'. I imagine Paco's reaction, that of Loli or Pablo or Antonio. I imagine my own given a different day, another mood, a new start.

  From behind the wall that runs round the modern church (a cross of girders) a boy appears. He shouts over his shoulder 'Go away, it's mine, I found it!' and a younger boy comes into view, keeping his distance but obviously following. The elder boy has something in his hand that fascinates him. 'Piss off' he yells to the younger one who quickly makes off, though he stops after about fifty metres and looks back, not daring to move closer, yet unwilling to go off alone. It's an insect, a large green cricket I think, and it's injured somewhere. The boy stretches its wings and sees that they seem to be in tact, so he hurls the cricket into the air. Hopelessly the wings flap, the insect draws a peak and falls to the ground. 'It flies!' screams the boy in delight and picks it up again. Once more the frenzied flight, the insect's frantic movements only slightly halting its fall, stalling its descent. Ants patrol the hard ground, sparrows sit on ledges and watch, and eventually the boy will tire of his new game. Another victim.

  And having witnessed that, having felt death, or the hot blood of violence, seen the beggars outside the holy churches, soldiers flirting beside camouflaged trucks, old people fall in the street as the children laugh, I can feel it all clash inside me, a terrible cacophony of ideals and contrasts. Out past the town the mountains rise in asymmetrical beauty, but focussing we see the death struggle fought daily under its cruel shade - ants, lizards, birds of prey. A river runs out of those dry hills, splashing the rocks as if in sympathy, cascading down to the sea. But look closer and see the side pools where the brown water festers and collects rubbish. Or come in summer when there is no river at all, only a dusty track like a sad memory. My high spirits the other day with Paco, and this afternoon this chaos, this mental cul-de-sac.

  Later I found Pablo and we went for a walk on the hills towards the back of town where the university buildings are. These are mostly 'modern' constructions, with flights of steps leading up to huge doors, hardly a curve in sight, with a symmetrical self-importance that is common in Halls of Learning. During the day the students swarm up and down those lofty steps, but at this time of night it is a place for stray cats and patrol cars. We sat down on a stone bench and watched the twilight come and go, the town below us like a boat anchored in the bay, the sea as always stretched out before us, vast and tireless, tipped up a little to touch the evening sky, reassuring and soothing. The first stars appeared and we had a short debate about their names - Pablo knows about as much star language as I do - a couple of constellations and the names of a few famous points of light: Pole, Dog, North. Pablo argued that the Pole Star was the same as the North Star. Maybe. Or perhaps we were looking at satellites or planets. It had been so long since I'd stared up at them in such detail, so many nights drowned in neon, that I felt like a novice. Yet I know a lot about it all, really. Light years and black holes had been diagrammatically explained to me on the T.V., I had once been given evidence for the Big Bang theory (something was always unconvincing about that one), and, of course, the adolescent notion of infinity lay up there too. These are vast topics, and it takes a big head to grasp such concepts as inverse infinity (into your cells and atoms and quarks and on ...). Or perhaps it's just a string of beads and it all rounds off quite nicely in the end. Theories like maggots in my mind and the cynic, sharp-tongued and insolent, asking if it really matters, if Shakespeare's chain of being ever held him back. So we are equal in our ignorance and are only sure of that, I'm thinking, when Pablo calls a halt. He smiles and lights a cigarette and tells me not to spend too much time up there with the celestial bodies. Here is where our lives are set. The sun has disappeared totally now and all its train of light, and as if a mask has fallen off the face of the sky the stars are uncovered in their millions. The campus sleeps.

  Theologians live up here; you can catch glimpses of them every now and then at lighted windows, or pacing the quiet avenues of the faculty's grounds. Up here, away from the noise and meaty smells of the town, isolated, wrapped up in their academic pursuits, solid in their belief. And Pablo would ask them if this belief did not necessarily deny other possibilities, if an honest man could really worship the sun without accepting that the night must come, that unseen, beyond the brightness of the nearest star, the others also shone. A man cannot know why things can never end but do, why life is a miracle but cheap, why death is so far away and so inevitable. He must believe. Perhaps because his ignorance offends or depresses him, maybe just to keep his mind at rest so that he can concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. The pity, the shame, is that what a man believes is too often what is nearest to hand. Strange that something as important and eternal as creed should be so casually acquired. Unacceptable that musing should leap to dogma, ignorance be ritualised and preached to children. Belief is a lie, it is self-deceit. It assumes an order of things then sets out to prove it to be true. So naturally it self-justifies, can be seen to be the right answer by its followers.

  Because faith in love, or God, or the individual, or humanity is self-fulfilling, a common denominator that cannot be proven, simply trusted. Still it doesn't matter a euro if Loli's taught herself how to read the Tarot cards, or that Paco believes it's fish eat fish, or that Pablo hasn't any real idea, because there is no church of Loli, no Paco nation, no movement formed by Pablo. Quite simply we know we don't know.

  Pins and needles soon bring you back to earth. We look at each other and begin to laugh. Why do we get involved in these conversations if they only ever lead us to zero again? I can feel the blood return to my numb leg, tingling pleasantly along towards the toes. I look up and the sky has resumed its flatness, is a lid again. I think we'll go and get drunk now, not raving mad, but pissed, sweaty, lustful, possibly have a bit of a hop in a smoke filled basement. Round and round and round we go.