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A Cloud of Evil, an Eye for an Eye
All week I’ve been thinking, trying to parse recent events, horrors, tragedies, inexplicable darkness casting a pall upon the global landscape.
I’ve not been successful.
I’ve not come to conclusions.
I’ve found myself able to do little more than vacillate, an eternal back and forth, a putrid smoothie of emotion: rage, horror, crippling morosity, deep despondence, tears for those lost, killed, murdered, in Israel, in Gaza, lives uprooted, blood spilt, vengeance piqued, evil unleashed.
I’ve tried to write, but cannot summon the words, arrange the thoughts. I will keep trying, but for now my mind comes back, time and again, to a few quotes.
The first from Spalding Gray’s 1987 Swimming to Cambodia, a reflection on his experience’s in Southeast Asia while filming The Killing Fields. In it, Gray is attempting to explain, to understand, the miserable tragedies of Cambodia and US action there, the rise of Pol Pot, and the culmination of it all in a horrific genocide. He muses that, perhaps, there is “…an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia, America…”
…an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia, America…
Perhaps there is. Perhaps that explains it, an uncontrollable cloud of inky darkness that drifts aimlessly, occasionally raining down pestilence and infecting those below.
Sadly, I believe the cloud is not out there, but in here, in all of us, buried deep in the core of humanity and human nature. It’s a cloud which is hidden in some, obvious in others, and ready to spill forth with fury when provoked in the “right” ways. We would never imagine it to be there, so dark is it, so vile, yet there it is, hidden in plain sight.
