an electric dream

Some Terrorists.

Everyone has to admit to their shame how stimulating terrorism is. It throws into relief feelings and belief like an electric dream. Anger at the terrorists, at the authority, pity, fear, black revenge, even blood, screaming racism and phobias of all sorts; all can be exercised under the veil of the event. You can mourn and fantasize as over a grave. It is the approach and departure of an evil lover.

I am reading Nietzsche with great sentiment. He had terrible stomach problems like me.

He hated idealism and delighted as a naughty boy in pissing on it. A dialectics of evil. Can it be just that? He loved Paris and Italy. He hated German culture which ruined wherever it went. As does ours. He loved negating and finding that the result was life and creativity to his delight. Like Blake. Imagine him at my age and condition not Marx or anyone.
In this terror incident the news reporters, especially those on the scene, could not see through their dreams and associations to what was actually going on. Naked bloody children running from shots to their heads covered in their own blood and body parts of others including those of black widows.

‘The poor children really want water. That would do nicely right now, won’t it? Look, the soldiers have water bottles. See, they all have been stripped so that the terrorists could disguise themselves in their clothes.’ Of a hundred bloody children? ‘There is another explosion and more smoke!’

Many naked bloody children are ignored; some are pushed. The smallest seem unseen altogether and scatter in all directions as the many parents ignore one another, them, the troops. One soldier cries. Another smokes. A big naked girl takes a bottle from a small one. She drinks and then gives it to a tiny boy.

‘The gymnasium is now under control and there have been ten casualties.’

This from a person watching armed parents drag corpses out from under rubble while being fired on both by terrorists and their own troops, men who in a few seconds would beat someone to death who may or may not have been a terrorist. This is just as some fool starts another fire — a parent, a trooper, a terrorist — and sets off another mine, ignites some more gas to kill one hundred more children, sucking the air from their confinements where they have hidden after someone tripped and blew themselves up scattering iron shards at knee level to adults but at stomach and head to kids. Lots of people now run into the flames or the line of fire.

The stories emerge and disappear. People do not see things. People see things not there. There are associations and images from other times and places, other places appearing like ghosts here. The story is written and rewritten. ‘A hole was blown in the wall to allow escape’ — but the wall is intact. There is a man in the window, no, the children have been lined up. But there is nothing there.

There was no plan to storm the building, but there was a plan but it wasn’t to ‘storm’. These are volunteers, citizens. No; they are an uncontrolled mob. A passionate mob. They are ghouls. Or not. They are saviours.

The terrorists are under the strict and inhuman control of a soulless leader. He is well known. Inhuman. And so he now is. But they are not controlled. They scatter. Some to the town. Some to the railway crossing. Why the railway? Escape to romance. From horror to local reality in this exotic place?

Some scatter throughout the building. Some surrender, some blow themselves up. Some defend themselves. Some trip. Bang. Some murder atrociously in the worst way they can imagine, targeting the most innocent. They go on murdering. They are attached to all murder.
But there were none here until the war against them began.
To negate the world. We will never know how many perished but we do. Some were never there. Some never will be. In every summary of figures, the addition is horrible. There are two hundred missing, three hundred. Mostly children. The buildings that were cleared now sound again like the echo of grenades. They smoke. They flame. There is shooting among the spectators. It starts up again. It is over. Now to the hospital and morgue.

‘What have these children seen? Will they ever recover?’ What they have seen is now their normal experience in school terrorism as what you have seen is now yours. And what have you seen?

And in one year or two when a colour or a sound reignites what they have seen, perhaps a body part, you will say they are mad and treat them. Or comfort them. You will wish them to see as you do. Or less. But they won’t. Just as the black widows don’t now, another explodes now, and that is all to all vision beyond the veil.

This not seeing is even as I wish to do. Not see but see with and without tears and free from, but guided by, compassion. I who have been a terrorist. But never was.

It is not a terrible beauty. But it is not this either.