Looking down a time tunnel provided by foresight may not have provided her with a picture acceptable to her, then, frame of reference.
Foresight may have allowed her not to have left the apartment on Tuesday morning; not to have crossed the zigzag brickwork that patterned her mood with interlocking thoughts; not to have paused at the kerb to allow the clouds to pass in a gutter puddle.
Perhaps the myriad possibilities that conspired to lead her to this point are best read by starting on Friday's page and working backward; perhaps it is only via this reverse engineering that the present can be understood as a coherent design.
In truth it would only be possible to answer these questions from a distance that disconnects you from the red lipstick and dark kohl she uses to punctuate her face; from the taste of her breath on your lip; from the arc of her brow as she manipulates the tiny brush.
Pictures framed within minimal strips of black; mounted with care upon white apartment walls; framed as if to contain all of the energy, the life that created them; gaze out into another world where you and she are yourselves created, posed in slivers of tender motion: a Futurist composition of lives entangled.
Hindsight may now offer you the opportunity to savour the interplay between unconnected events; the subtle timing of Tuesday morning traffic lights and flapping newspaper readers – useless headlines wasting ink and paper – words to burn; the carbon dust suspended in the air that brings a grit tear to blur your vision as you descend into the day.
In reality were you not blinded until that very moment; asleep at the wheel of your desires?
And now the edge of Friday's bed is decorated with her legs (legs that connect those zigzag bricks to these parquet floors); one knee under her chin as she tends to the palette of her toenails, perfuming the room with astringent chemical triggers.
Your smile – unseen by her concentrated efforts - includes, through the apartment window, the world that goes about its business with a distinct brush-tint of added significance: people meet beneath roadside trees to exchange unheard secrets while traffic decides the current of the street.
Your feelings are extended to all that you see in a benevolent act of love.
I took the long road out to the edge
Nobody told me
It would be shorter coming back
Nobody mentioned the rows of headstones
Like footprints in the snow
Nobody told me
My spacesuit wasn’t designed
For this outdoor life
So will I set these still-lives free?
Send them home for moon and me?
And will I have the eyes to see
That seeing in itself won’t set me free?
These jigsaw pieces form the skeleton key
To oxidised locks time encrusted
Bone chests contain
Somnambulist compositions
The awful weigh of pages torn
Freehand from sentiment’s thesaurus
Oh ghosts of chrysalis husk
Why regret the winged release?
Why hold forth in waves of light
The night that holds me yet?
This rigor, this mortal skyward finger
Of a past that holds no purchase
For the fisted digits that patient tap
A Morse code catechism -
An almanac of wasted days
On wooden top crematorium
Dust from smokestack skyward sent
Messages sketched in sand
Await approaching tide
Nobody told me
It would be shorter coming back
There are no atheists in foxholes goes the aphorism.
30 odd years ago, aged 18, I stood (along with a few hundred others) at a sermon that provided us with the assurance that what we were about to do had been authorised by the highest power. I cannot remember if the chaplain actually uttered the words “God is on our side” but he did convey the message.
South Africa’s involvement in the destabilisation of Angola was, to those who knew better, an essential act in the prevention of the expansion of communism, and South Africa was a deeply Christian country (of the Orange/Lutheran variety), perfectly suited and (with US and Israeli assistance) equipped to perform the Lord's work .
Our week long soirée into Angola, complete with mass artillery bombardment, looting, murder and long term damage to the country and its inhabitants, was therefore an act of God (or at least, an act condoned by God)
At the time this only troubled me by the fact that I, being a conscript, did not want to be there.
There was, however, a significant event that occurred during that week that echoes down the years for me: during one night the Artillery battery of which I was a part found itself caught in the crossfire between a group of mercenaries and a group of Angolan soldiers.
As the red tracers streaked above our heads I prayed hard that I would not die.
There are no atheists in foxholes
In order for a man to willingly fight for his country he must firstly believe in his country.
In order for a man to be willing to die for his country he must believe that some reward will await him in the hereafter.
He must, therefore believe in a hereafter.
There are no atheists in foxholes
An atheist knows the value of his own life – finite and singular, not to be wasted or spent unwisely on causes that serve none but the powerful.
Iraq. Drugs. Islam. Terrorism. Afghanistan. The Future, North Korea. Hope. Nine years into the 21st century and the West has declared war on just about everything, and ,here in Britain at least, there is strong pressure to conform to the rituals of remembrance of those killed in war, as if war itself is inevitable and the heroic and patriotic fallen are the price we must pay.
The system applies social guilt in order to make it obligatory to wear a poppy, 2 minute silences are observed in workplaces and schools across the country – all while daily doses of dead soldiers are splashed across the pages of the press.
What is it that we are being asked to remember?
The dead soldiers?
The heroism and patriotism of those dead soldiers?
How can we honour those who died in those wars while standing beside the warmongers who continue to continue to glorify war itself?
These hollow men who tell us that the wars we are fighting are just, are for the good of those being slaughtered, for democracy, would have us believe that to die for one’s country makes us heroes; valiant and brave.
Should we not be remembering those politicians, kings and the industry that profits most from war?
Should we not, on these ceremonies of remembrance, be making personal pledges not to involve ourselves with the patriotic politics and fanatical religion of war-mongering?
If I had died that night in 1980, I would have died in fear, for a lie, begging to a God that does not exist; and for what? South Africa is no longer run by those vicious god-fearing bastards who filled our heads with the belief that our white skins make us superior, who felt no remorse in raping their black slaves after spending their Sabbath in righteous prayer, who quoted the bible in justification for all their hatred and prejudice.
If I had died in 1980, I would not have died an atheist.
In the UK Remembrance Day is also called as Poppy Day, inaugurated to mark the end of the World War 1 in 1918.
November is the month when people remember the millions of lives lost in the battle of right against wrong."
So said the Belfast Newsletter in an editorial last week, concluding that we should all "wear our poppy with pride."
The editorial spelt out what it is we should be proud of.
"Our servicemen and women are still doing their duty in far-off lands around the world...Military personnel based in Northern Ireland have just returned from the war in Afghanistan, where the battle is being fought up close and personal. They know the cost of serving their country."
And so, too, in many cases, do distraught families left behind. The question is, should we contemplate this vista with pride? Should we concur in the implicit message of the poppy that it is sweet and fitting for young men or women from Ballymena or Ballymagroarty to bleed their last by the roadside in some dusty corner of a distant land?
Is what's happening in Helmand "a battle of right against wrong"? Was the relentless pressure for displays of the poppy in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Sunday an expression of ethical idealism?
All the dead of the Afghan war should, of course, be remembered. And it should be remembered, too, that the vast majority of the fallen are Afghanis. But pride? Ought they not rather be remembered with anger? Just as we should recall the unnumbered dead of World War One not with reverence but with rage? Then, as now, young people fresh-faced from school were flung to their death like fistfuls of chaff for no cause that any working-class person had an interest in. The millions died so a tiny elite could rule the waves and rob the world.
The purpose of the poppy is to sentimentalize this slaughter, to conceal a crime against humanity under a cloak of soft emotion. It has become fashionable in the last 15 years to project World War One, and in particular the stomach-churning carnage at the Somme, as an event around which Irish Catholics and Protestants, Nationalists and Unionists, might come together in sombre unity. Did not Orange and Green stand and fight and die together? Can we not find a sense of oneness now in consecrating ourselves to that memory? Many leaders of Nationalism North and South seem increasingly to agree, and to prize their allocated places in the valedictory ensembles.
In fact, in World War One, Catholics and Protestants alike were treated like dirt and trampled into the mud. The only good reason regularly to recall these horrors is to stiffen our resolve that they must never happen again. There's a thought we could usefully unite around. But Remembrance Day and the poppy, as the Newsletter contentedly noted, is not about ending the insanity and suffering of useless war but about taking pride in past wars so as to prepare the way for the wars of the future.
The English comedian Jimmy Carr landed himself in bother last week with a joke about amputees returned from Afghanistan ensuring British success in future paralympics. Not in the best of taste, right enough. But nowhere near as insulting to the dead and maimed of Britain's imperial adventures as the splashes of crimson on the lapels of political bosses who have drunk deep on the red wine of the battlefield.
Thinking of the latest British deaths in Afghanistan, my mind turned to Peter Brierley, the Yorkshire man whose son, Shaun, died in southern Iraq in March 2003 and who, at the memorial service in St. Paul's last month, turned away from Tony Blair, telling him, "I'm not shaking your hand, you've got blood on it". And to Lance Corporal Joe Glenton from Norwich, facing court martial for refusing to return to fight in Afghanistan. And to Siegfried Sassoon, poet, captain in the Royal Welch Fusilers and winner of the Military Cross, whose "A Soldier's Declaration" in July 1917 earned him the wrath of the war-mongers and the respect of all who love life:
"I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
"I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
"I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust."
Eamonn McCann can be reached at Eamonderry@aol.com
Originally published at Counterpunch
Now to the mast
Lashed and moon-lit arrested
I tag these notches on my bones
Count the rings of petals flower fallen
She loves me
She loves me not
She…
Not in floral wrath or knotted ropes of rain
Or councils keen where never king shall reign
But through leaves of painted pages
Spines all gone now confined to cages
These ribs of steelwork hull enrole
The sheets that sail unsure on titan seas
Rivet-gunned the rope-trick to my soul
And sent your thoughts to me
To bid me lift my eyes above the waves
And sail upon the reef’s knife edge
Index link my fingers to the stars
Orion, Orion, Arcturus
Tack and turn into the biting wind
Knife the surface tension now to find
Leviathan slumbers neath my cleaving keel
And constellations reel their predictive matrices
Above the myriad minds in sleep set free
Hydrad haunts the slate roof skyline
Full moon feral the calling of her ancestral mothers
To set the world to rights
In increments of feathers
And dreams of stars and swirling galaxies of peace
Compose great symphonies in ether mist
Individual notes picked out insemiotic
And thread together necklaces for ancestral mothers
To set the world to rights
In jigsaw pieces pondered
And falling yet through floors of splintered silence
Mind meanderers spread their mattress arms
Embrace the morning rituals unthought
And wide-eyed wash away the fears of ancestral mothers
To set the world to rights
In menial tasks of civil duty
