I often find myself seduced by war. I see it, its representations and effects, what goes in and what comes out. The clean pristine gunmetal grey sheen, and the muddy red of blood.
The irreversible rewiring of the mind. The shakes and shutters, the silent staring eyes, hunched bodies and illusory signs. Alarm in calm, stillness in turmoil.
The weak, the proud, and the middling truth.
I’ve only ever seen what goes in, and what comes out. War is a unique sensation. There is no replication, nor recreation. Technology can not soften, nor elucidate it, because it is ancient. Like a black river it flows from the dawn of history down into its modern fleshy vessels. The river is only clear to those who drown in it.
That is its seduction. It may be unreachable, incomprehensible, but I cannot shake my belief that there is some great truth in the slow and slimy waters.
War signifies so much, because it reveals what we’d die for. I want to know. What will I die for? How will it touch me? Am I brave? Am I a coward? Am I cunning, or quick footed? Under the pure condition of life and death, when I am the snail crawling along the razor, what am I, what will I become, what is the primal natural truth that flows beneath my skin.
When my guts spill out on the jungle floor, what will they say to me?
Will I be alone? Will I see it coming? Will my death be something of nobility, or just a whimpering rat curled in the grass.
Is there a world of the forms? A heaven? The dharmic wheel or is it black as the river water? This knowledge is obscured behind the threshold.
I fear both the crossing and the answer, more than anything I fear them. I know there is horror, pain and suffering, the worst most terrible instruments of torture which have yet been devised.
And I am all too curious. There are those who are seduced by war by different means. By guilt, by lust, by ambition, I am not so different. I’m a curious mouse, I know it’s a trap, and I wonder if the bait is worth it.