Progress they said

And I laughed so hard

Credit: Jonathan Foster

1.

He didn’t speak about the war. He said nothing. Not ever. But in his eyes came a despair I’d never seen elsewhere. He shrank when the memories came, sat in his chair and became a small bird shivering, his feathers drenched. His refusal to speak said more than he could ever articulate.

He drove an ambulance. That much I knew. In France somewhere. That I knew too. There were stories about the front, and horrors left unsaid, but the stories were all secondhand and unreliable, but from his lips, nothing.

Some wits made comments about ambulance drivers having it easy. He didn’t say anything to those comments. His mouth never moved. Not even a smirk or a grimace.

He wouldn’t watch anything to do with war either. And war was everywhere too, history channels and documentary channels and educational channels and entertainment channels. Men and women and children filing along on country roads with carts and cows and sullen shoulders and filthy faces with no where to go but away from where they’d been. Burnt out tanks and shelled farm houses. Very young men crammed onto small trucks pushing against the flow of the human river. Spitfires flying low over grey seas and napalm exploding in the rearview of Huey helicopters and billowing black smoke rising from desert ruins.

He wouldn’t engage with ancient war either. The never ending documentaries on the Romans or Greeks or Persians or Mayans or Assyrians, with their oh so eager presenters talking about genocides as if they weren’t actual humans in actual villages going about their actual daily lives, as if all the years sanitised them somehow, as if all the horror wasn’t still going this very day. These jolly experts firing crossbow bolts into ballistic gel, wide-eyed in awe at the incredible damage the Roman Army could inflict upon human flesh.

His silence and reticence scared me more than all of these channels with their war-lusting and marvelling at all the butchery. It wasn’t just that he struggled with the memories, it was also that he struggled with the reasons. It was the incomprehensible stupidity of it all that shattered him into shards of confusion. He couldn’t accept the witlessness, the senselessness, the irrationality.

But worse still he couldn’t face the inevitability of it all. The cyclical certainty that people will be stomped into a societal sized meat grinders and demolished for no better reason than it’s built into the social system. He felt ashamed to be a human being and I could see it in his despairing face whenever anyone spoke of war, which was more and more often these days.

2.

Men and women in tailored suits. The Devil wears a tailored suit. No doubt about it. Men and women in tailored suits telling of troop deployments and military build ups. Astonishing figures to be spent on armaments. Astonishing cuts to everything else. Serious business for grownups. Realpolitik. Not for the feint hearted. Peace is a delicate trembling façade behind which stands the metallic meat-grinding reality of the War machine. Be thankful. Peace is merely decorative, an ornamental conceit for women and children to shelter under. War is Life. Let’s live a little.

3.

They told me about their religion. They called it Progress. I laughed so hard. They said they were constantly developing as they travelled through time towards a more advanced condition. They showed me all their stuff, their inventory and supply chain management systems that built iPhones and jet skis and they showed me how they sold billions of “servings” of coca-cola. There was a time, they said when they couldn’t even serve a million cokes! My face was hurting I laughed so hard.

I pointed at history and the cyclical behaviours and the wars and the empire building and they said yes, yes, but look at those ancients with their swords and sandals, we’ve got AI enhanced drones and Gore-Tex boots, which is not at all the same. I laughed so much I started almost choking.

I pointed at the Earth and they said yes, yes, they knew all that, but look they said and they showed me their tiny little rocket ships that would take them to strange new worlds to seek out new life and new civilisations. They said they would travel across galaxies to save the human race. I broke a rib I laughed so much.

I pointed at the humans being killed right now, today and they smiled and said, not those humans. I stopped laughing. I hadn’t realised they were being serious.

4.

She put down her pen and stopped writing for a moment. She broke from her writing because the thought had risen in her mind that even though she didn’t like the smell of lamb roasting, she did like the smell of lamb grilling under an open flame and she smiled.

She thought about her one outfit in which she felt mature and almost sensual. One day, she thought, I will be wearing my outfit, and I’ll be sitting at a table drinking tea, and he will be laughing and I’ll be smiling and the smell of grilled lamb will be almost intoxicating as we wait for our meal to finally arrive. One day, she thought, that will happen.

She thought too of how she loved the sun and the ocean and the way the sand sank beneath her weight as the warm sea came lapping in foamy lightness around her ankles.

She could hear her father humming absently as he stirred sugar into his tea, and she was sure she was the only one who noticed and took pleasure in this tiny idiosyncrasy. But she wasn’t. Her sister too secretly felt a warmth at their father’s tuneless humming. And their mother sighed with unbidden pleasure as the humming broke the calm and the teaspoon dinked and clinked against her husband’s teacup.

She picked up her pen and continued writing in her book:

We imagine ourselves existing in the present, but it’s the past that lives and breathes through us. Our bodies push at the envelope of time, stretching forward but never quite breaking through that impossible barrier.

I can hear intimate whispers reaching from the deep past, like a harmonious symphony surging straight from the soul, clipping along like wild horses, carrying all the mood and temperament and spirit forward through time.

But the future is silence. I hear not a whisper. Maybe no ghost can pass through the tyranny of the present?

Neither the dead nor the living call back from the deep dark terrain that is yet to unfold. The voices cease. I hear nothing, not a whisper, not even from an hour forth.

Are they there? Are they waiting on us?

Then she put down her pen and listened and could no longer hear her fathers tuneless humming, only a shrieking, like the piercing screaming sound of progress coming at her in the shape of a small rocket. She didn’t have an iPhone or a jet ski or drink coca-cola. So. That was that.

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