BRATTLEBORO — I have friends in Paris. They are currently all right. But more darkness has come to the city of light.
I suppose it is helpful to know that the world is full of violence and deprivation and that they feed on each other. The people who seem to suffer least are the ones who cause the problem by hoarding the resources that should rightly nourish the community.
The imbalances in human communities look to me more and more like imbalances in the distribution of resources, wages, education, wealth, and then oil, and soon, water.
It is not because I am too old to fight this anymore (though I might be), but I find myself looking at the bestiality of my fellows and the long, dark history of brutality and selfishness, thinking it has always been thus.
As I tell my kids sometimes, “There will always be another asshole,” so don't obsess about the one in front of you. There will be others. More. Forever.
Instead, learn to deal.
Learn to look away; to forgive; to draw useful boundaries around your own heart and soul, family, and loved ones; extend yourself when you can and protect yourself when you have to.
Generic advice, certainly, but since we have armed these uneducated third world brutes with sophisticated first world weaponry and technology, these sort of pithy bits of sophistry carry a good deal more weight.
Perhaps, as artists (peaceful malcontents), we have all always stood outside this sort of brutality and senseless suffering.
What we have stood inside of is non-senseless suffering: the suffering of paying attention, of awareness, of accountability (even when it is not our own account).
* * *
And so, this latest round of blood letting, the newest slaughter of innocents, is perhaps not much different from the last one, or the one before that, or the one before that. These are freelance murderers now.
We have privatized war, so that makes it different in some ways. But in other ways, it is simply the horror of greed amplified by the steroids of want.
It is Dickensian. Shakespearian. Greek. Roman. Gothic. Mongol. You get the picture.
I am not in retreat; I'm not built for that. But the cost of paying attention is rising and, as it rises, I find myself wanting to look away.
Instead, I am straining to find a frame that makes it hurt less, a way of holding the experience in a way that refracts the light, rather than blocks it out.
I have not succeeded, but there is an artist's way of being a warrior, and that will be my way, when I get it figured out.
As usual, it is not the answers that are eternal, but the questions. The answers change over time and space.
The questions, it seems, do not.