A Wine-Stained Book (Imbolc 2018)

A Wine-Stained Book (a reading)

In a conflict on which the sun never rises, battles are fought by starlight on moonless nights as unsuspecting citizens soundly sleep. Unaware or uncaring, they choose sides only slowly as each new situation pulls the heartstrings of alliances until doctrinal lines have been drawn. Unwavering, they pivot and maneuver with each faction seeking territorial advantage from the political terrain.

A proxy coalition faces off against an army of conscripted ideology whose unholy warriors see only life slaves in a kingdom of the dead. Memes and social media fan pre-existing passions and prejudices until embers glow along the edges of society. Each side undermines its own self-interest, performing opinion poll sortilege to the lowest common denominator through a series of false dilemmas and Hobson’s Choices. Eventually all but the most stolid have been assorted and arrayed toward contradictory poles that but a few years ago they would have refused to recognize.

Alienated by a common language, their right and left hands live in isolation wards where home- and hinterland are fundamental worlds away. To self-comfort, they recite internal fairy tales to relieve the anxieties and distress spun from the irreconcilable hypocrisies and inconsistencies of identity politics. Armed and armored with myths, misconceptions and misinformation, they craft an artificial irreality cast in the constant glare of a mirror chamber that transforms existential crisis into existential threat. In this political theater, the supporting actors forget they’re only lines, the audience never knows, and so the acrimony grows real. Ultra-nationalism, the aphrodisiac all rhetoricians use to seduce the young into battle.

A shadow war unfolds at the speed of plate tectonics, the boredom building day by day until one slip erupts into brief yet violent motion. As protestors and counter-protestors face off against clandestine provocateurs, a single misstep escalates into bloody conflict while police referee the sidelines. Miscalculation and misapprehension fan the open flames into full conflagration on its way to civil war. Carefully cultivated tensions spit and fume until prevailing winds shift carrying sparks that overrun the fire lines, fracturing the terrain. True and penumbral governments emerge and disappear as the fires and backfires they stoke rage beyond control. Most are bad at governing but good at coup d’etats.

To punish each collaborative province, they engage in slash-and-burn economics, exploiting every resource for prophet or personal gain. Divided yet unconquered, each faction carves out an armed, autonomous enclave. Militia compounds bloom like Balkanized alpine meadows or knots of prairie wildflowers, most brief but startling in their transformation of the landscape. Reconquista grinds down to the tactics of siege, blockade and interdiction with each leader skimming retributive tariffs for allowing anything resembling starvation level black market trade.

As geographic bachelors in desolate garrisons watch the enemy's wives and children eke out a meager subsistence, their thoughts drift home. Held hostage by boredom, apathy and ambivalence, they allow empathy to briefly overcome antipathy. In a moment’s inattention, lives end, lives begin, lives change forever as each side ruthlessly rewards only enmity and animosity in the geometry of exploitation and control.

Each clean, new widow, wiping away the dried rime of her tears, accepts her next role not as wife or mother but as a dark, avenging angel. Using the strategies of seduction, surrender and self-destruction, she exacts her revenge one unbeliever at a time, a soldier, a collaborator, a wayward child. Each victim with his own aspiring Valkyrie perched beyond his shoulder preparing to choose another sacrifice to the eternal flame.

And so we descended the spiral staircase, misstep by misstep, casualty by casualty, generation by bloody generation, until all that remained to mark our passage were the impressions transcribed into this collective record of a bygone age, carefully preserved as it passed from hand to unknown hand.

We are the inheritors of the accounts in this edition, a paragraph here, a sentence there, saddle-stitched together into something resembling an integrated whole. We, who emerged from this misty past, balance the ledger by keeping it current even as its ink fades like the dog-eared Polaroid of a distant memory.

Our words have enemies just as surely as enemies have words. We are all prophets in hindsight, our suffering inseparable from our destiny, our misery spiked with love. When no one else listens, we tell each other sweet lies in the dark as if living in a dream. But deep inside, we all remain the children of Cain. The pen may be mightier than the sword but its nib still needs to be cleared of blood.

The triumph over trauma and tragedy comes not in reliving them but in allowing them to settle into mindful forgetfulness. We all long for an ideal past misremembered, a misforged bell that we’ve forgotten cracked as we mishear its final note ringing in our ears. We are emotionally driven creatures who craft elaborate fables about being rational to lull ourselves to sleep at night. Sleep, the amnestic victory of children and the damned.

In these pages, the past shifts restlessly in its grave like a creature neither alive nor fully dead. We are the watchmen who do not sleep, the ones who feed its flame and tend its tomb so that future generations may remember.

As now are you who read this wine-stained book.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III