jurisprudent
06-20-2011, 08:18 AM
A Story of The End. Words, Images and Sounds.
All characters are based on real life stories and personalities.
Lysergic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wKKeSbxGh8)voice #1
Forget it. The time is not right. It’s late, the sounds are gone, the lights are out, it’s dark. Forget it. You are Jesus’ son. The time is not right. Stay home. You can look through the window. You can stay home and watch the people pass by, watch the grass grows and gets greener, watch the rain and the clouds racing across the sky, watch it all over again and again – you will not miss anything while you lie here, on the sofa, at home. Watch the walls of the room, pale, grey, dim in the darkness. You don’t need the electricity to run down the vein of cables inside the walls, their wombs pregnant with light crystallizing into sudden lamp flashes. You know the house is alive. The house breathes. It is full of life. You can hear the voices of the walls that converse over your body on the sofa. They talk, in their low voices, secretly, hissing. That’s their hate speech. Free speech for their dumb ears. Oh God now you can pray. Pray pray pray. Pray to Lazarus. Oh Lazarus come and raise me from the death as you were raised long time ago. Pray to Paul. Oh Paul come come and show me your Damascus so that I can be blinded like you were and I will see then the basic light. Pray to Peter. Oh Peter Peter of so much doubt give me the reincarnation of faith so that I can go on past the doubts once filling the chasms of my wretched thoughts. God. Please God. I love you. I want to love and be loved. I want to exist under the sunlight and shining rays and hands that caress and lips that kiss and time that passes by in the handsome hug of lovers placed in the outer world of their pure love. God. This house I will make it your temple. I will kiss your dirty feet God I know I am nothing but the buzz of the cricket in the meantime between two dark stars colliding and crashing into the nothingness. God I will fight for you. But from my room. I cannot go outside. Outside is the deafening silence of the screaming trees, the songs of birds fierce and ready to tear me apart. Oh God. This house gives me shelter. This house protects me from the acid rain. Acid thoughts stick to the floor of my mind. I will be free and I will follow but here from this house. Bugs run across the floor. They have minds full of acidic thoughts. God thoughts are daggers and I am afraid daggers rip my sorrowful flesh and I will cry for the daggers that entertain me in my last breaths. Oh.
*
Distorted voice #1
I have always been a big fan of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, you know…Nice music. The big poster of Ian Curtis, with his hollow stare addressing a distant point (http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmgx0gtagj1ql834lo1_500.jpg) in the atmosphere (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQSpJfpVHmg), was the first thing I bought when I entered university and got to the accommodation halls. I bought it, brought it home and put it on the whitewashed walls. And turned the volume up, it was Stoogies’ Dirt (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxYXV2RrwIs), and I felt the creeps up and down my spine. I was free mate, free to experiment and have fun.
Look at me now. Two pills, morning and evening, the time is intersected by myriads of rules – you can go out only between 9 and 12; Sundays are free, but you cannot go to the village. No junk food. No resort to other pills and stuff. No stuff. No drugs, I mean. No alcohol. I am living in a castle of chastity. But I don’t care now. I don’t care. Care – imagine the state social services bound to care for people – you go and wait to be taken care of. You sit in the hospital, in the white hall, doctors pass you by, you bleed, and wait for their care, and they pass you by. Nobody really cares anymore, mate.
There was a time, mate, when people really cared. There was a time, you know, when the big shot guys, with their pockets full of gold, on their 50th birthday would go to the damn slums at the end, dark freezing end of the city and donate money for the sick and poor and built a small shiny hospital and put their own names on the tablet at the entrance and boast until their last breath that they are the overlords of mercy and care reserving a first class ticket for the train to life beyond. They hoped: St Peter will look at me, see the saintly report of my good deeds, and give me the key for the kingdom come. Alright, mates. See what goes today. Fat asses in their offices, they draw financial plans and programmes and budgets and everything and send the cheque to the damn hospital you end up in. Night. You are bleeding. You are dying. You are in the white hall and wait for care. No one cares, mate, no one.
Ok, I will shut up. I will take my pill, take a walk round the old white building of the sanitarium and then go back to my nice room, the room where I sleep and think. I sit down and think. Thoughts are radioactive. Thinking is bad for your health. When I think I get nausea and often vomit. I can’t stand this, mate. I am ready to go to war. I am ready to beg. I am ready to play tricks with tigers and lions. But I am deadly afraid to be thinking. To think means to suffer mentally. I have tortured my body and I managed to turn it into a deadly grave. It took me years to come back on track. But, mate, thinking is worse, worse than a thousand spikes in my lungs. It brings regret. Brings memories, sorrow and sadness. It is like a root, thin like a needle, creeping inside, touching the core, absorbing solid bases and spitting acids in the brain. Then, traumatic, comatose, you start to groan and whine and beg, beg for the end. Mate, people die of bodily pain; people, mate, commit suicide of mental distress.
This is the plague. I was plague stricken, mate. I was the bubonic mannequin, you know, the body twisted and full of terror, you know. The doll played around. I was a solid person, the overwhelming I. Then I was diluted, I was liquefied and I transpired, I started to fly and fell down. I, mate, was the guy in the hospital. I was there bleeding and waiting for help and the doctors were passing by and smiling, mate, they were smiling, they got their wages for smiling to the patients and writing their damn prescriptions, they got their diplomas for their own vanity…Vanity. Vanity is Me. Care is We. The world is decomposed, mate, the end is near. There is only Me, mate, we are a bunch of Mes and no ****ing We I can grasp and kiss and hug and feel like a solid part of, mate, and this makes me cry mate and I cry every other Tuesday when I look to the calendar and see that time is passing by and everything remains the same.
But I was talking about Lou Reed. Yes, man. I am a fan. I used to sit, before the great rift, and watch Lou Reed speak to me. This is a special state of mind, mate. You sit and talk to your heroes. You call them in a hallucinogenic haze and objects appear in sudden shapes and forms, you understand they lack matter but are full of spirit. Yes, mate, spirits in our material world. So I sit and hallucinate. This is great, I dream of returning to the place I was doing that. It was in the underground.
*
Living voice #1
Name: Annabell Kerleigh
Age: 25
Previous occupation: ---
I am sitting in the wide room with only one big table and a number of plastic chairs. A man with a moustache and black beard sips a glass of water; his suit is grey, he smiles, he will be the kind one. A woman, around 45, with long blonde hair and blue, quick eyes stares at her papers and starts:
“How did you decide to apply for this position at Greenman Stoltz?”
We are at the top of the skyscraper clad in blue glass, with the big plastic letters of the international investment fund bearing the names of its two founders 200 years ago. I wonder if the two interviewers, the man in the grey suit and the blond woman, are millionaires. But certainly they are rich. I can see it. I can smell it.
“I was travelling for two years and I have just settled on the East coast. I was a painter for several months and I finished my degree in philosophy.”
“Finished? You took a gap?”
“I took four gap years. Four years ago I was at the verge of submitting my thesis…but unexpected events happened and I spent lots of time travelling afterwards.”
“Where?”
“Tibet. Bhutan. Japan. China. Pakistan. Sri Lanka. Angola. Mozambique. Morocco. Cuba. Nicaragua. Turkey…”
“Wow”, the man says. “So many diverse places.”
“Surely”, I say, “great time of experience”.
“But why did you decide to stop your degree and go to all these far and exotic places?”
“It’s a long story. It does not start with me. It begins some time ago.”
Carlos Mavroradis was the son of a Greek shipping magnate, billionaire and art lover. Himself a badly educated Oriental businessman, he had three marriages – first with the daughter of a local Greek alderman, then with another very rich heiress, and finally with a Spanish retired actress, lover of gin, vodka, sunshine and afternoon sex with male stallions while ageing Mr Mavroradis was very fond of his new prize he could boast with. Carlos was born from this wretched marriage. At the age of 10 his father died and he inherited 300 million dollars he could not get his grip over due to his mother’s guardianship. She sent him to a public school in England, among the most expensive, prestigious and rigorous ones in the world, where his class mates were sons and daughters of American and Arab petrol magnates, French and German nobility and English royal relatives. At the age of 16 Carlos broke loose, ran to France, ****ed a prostitute and raided Amsterdam coffee shops. There he was found by the agents sent to bring him back to school. Punished in solitude, he finished his first major essay, “Rebellion in consumerist societies”.
When he became 18 he started a long legal battle against his mother who was arguing that her son was a drug addict (and he was becoming such) and his will was vitiated to the extent that he could not control himself and should not be allowed to dispose of his fortune. In the meantime Carlos spent some time in Oxford, a year at Harvard, and finally transferred to Berkeley in California where he majored social sciences with economics. His final paper was an analysis of the destruction of traditional values in Western countries in the wake of Second World War and the rise of the post-war generations of radicalism. As he was still bereft of substantial funds, he had to start earning his living, especially given the fact he was used to large and expensive life.
Carlos got offers from several investment funds in New York and started just at the time the war in Afghanistan was beginning. His first steps on Wall Street were successful but his drug addiction was growing. At university, he moved from acids to cocaine and occasionally heroin which became his basic feed when he got in the big business. Disruptions started to appear soon and Carlos went to a rehab in Nebraska, spent about a year there and when he returned to New York, he was approached by a charity raising funds for victims of Afghan war.
The chronicle moves to Carlos’ next reincarnation as a mujahedeen in Afghanistan, a member of the guerilla war force secretly supported by CIA and fighting the Russian invasion. Carlos grew a black beard, dark tan was covering his body, and he was turned to Islam religion. Wounded in his leg, he spent several months in Dhaka, Pakistan, fighting against gores and possible death. When he survived, it was late for him to return and, beguiled by the soothing and caressing touch of drugs, he continued his heroin intake to deafen the pains of his badly cured wound. Carlos managed to strike a deal with his mother and when he put his immense fortune in his control, he bought a house in Cannes and started managing his own empire of drug suppliers on his call for stuff, more and more.
At that time, as the war was almost over, he contracted to write his memories of Afghanistan guerilla movement which became a sudden bestseller and turned Carlos into international star. They were adapted into a movie and he found himself besieged by public attention. It has been always considered that he has a homosexual inclination since his childhood at the English public school. His first registered relationship with a woman, Italian bikini model, is from the time of his new found fame. But his addiction was even worse now and he had to enter a rehab in the Swiss Alps where he spent two years. During that time he wrote “Gutter”, an epic work of everything scummy flowing from the underground – homosexuality, bisexuality, sadomasochism and perversity, violence, torture, drug habits, destruction, suicide. Deep, frightening record of his experience and observations, psychological study of human mind on the verges of sanity and life. Carlos was released from the rehab in the winter of 1996 and immediately founded a charity fund aimed at helping drug addicts. His work for cleaning the streets of big international cities (New York, LA, London, Paris, Honkong) of drug delinquency earned him several special prizes and state awards. In Miami, 2000, he met a man who was sent to him by one of his old commanders in Afghanistan. He had to pass a message to Carlos: “The time comes. Soon. Your civilization will crash. We will need you. Be ready.”
Carlos had just started lecturing on psychology and social sciences in an English institute, also fathering a son from a former sport star who loved and afterwards hated him and left him, when, during the time of 2001 invasion of Western allies in Afghanistan, he tossed his work and putative family away and rushed to the East where he disappeared for more than year. He was later found in Peshavar in Pakistan, in a cheap motel, overdosed on heroin, with two scripts written over the past year – “Guerilla war in the East” and “The End of our Time”. The latter was published in USA and became a massive success among students of history and political sciences since there Carlos argued the Europe-centred civillisation is being corrupt by its own success and crumbles to give way to the current wave of economic forces – Third World States - disorderly, but expansively influential. Nobody could explain Carlos’ death and it remains a mystery to date.
Dostoyevsky has always been trying to write the story of the Great Sinner. After Carlos’ death, he was praised as a “great sinner”, a symbol of the age, and his works were collected into a book of essays and papers, which was the thing I chose for my dissertation in my final year at university.
“Did you travel alone, Miss Kerleigh?”
Of course not. Days of solitude are over. People cannot entertain themselves alone anymore. Your personality is nothing but a bunch of defining social connections and contacts. You are always in the midst of a hurricane of people surrounding you. There was the three of us. Three – female and two males. We started our way down from the university campus, clearing our bank accounts, lying to our parents and relatives to get money for the journey. Then first to Manila, later Tokyo and Kyoto, Shanghai and Honking, Singapore, Burma, Dhaka. South Asian beaches, white sand, parties under the midnight moon. We wanted to taste everything. Blood from cobra served on a plate in a glass. Hallucinogenic roots in the Kampuchean jungles. Buddha worship. Brahma worship. Searching for the last dethroned king of a gone Jerusalem. With our bag packs, on our swollen feet, suntanned, with no shower and no rest, our steps wandering across the places where soldiers patrol, where fanatics gather, where saintly monks pray in golden pagodas. No direction, no point, no home, nothing but a way forward. We were hopping, we were jamming, we were having fun. We were free.
What were we doing there? Searching for the Mother’s Womb. Originality. Ultimate purity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPuFL0SY5XU&feature=related). The Spring of life and existence, untouched, unmarred, clear and tasty. We would sit on the white beaches and make love under the pale lazy sunrays. We would joke, run, swim, dive, kiss, hug, touch, exalt each other. We did not have our sexes, I was not a woman, they were not men; we were children of a golden, perfect God overlooking our quest. Dirty cities, slums, poverty, hungry eyes, bleeding mouths, we could not care less, we were passing through this corridor of images, black and grey and white without feeling, without sensing anything, like we were walking side by side with a movie reel full of close but distant and strange snapshots of a universe we did not belong to. Our homes were our back packs, our family were the schools of fish, our friends the palms and the beaches. We never got lost. We have been arrested, interrogated, stopped, released, crossing places of revolts and wars, we were shouting rebel anthems, running for cover, running for our lives. We never despaired. We were joy and life.
“Why did you put an end to your journey, Miss Kerleigh?”
Why. We got out of money. We were tired of one year wandering on the surface of the Earth. And we were humans entangled in our human stuff. Most of all - the latter one.
All characters are based on real life stories and personalities.
Lysergic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wKKeSbxGh8)voice #1
Forget it. The time is not right. It’s late, the sounds are gone, the lights are out, it’s dark. Forget it. You are Jesus’ son. The time is not right. Stay home. You can look through the window. You can stay home and watch the people pass by, watch the grass grows and gets greener, watch the rain and the clouds racing across the sky, watch it all over again and again – you will not miss anything while you lie here, on the sofa, at home. Watch the walls of the room, pale, grey, dim in the darkness. You don’t need the electricity to run down the vein of cables inside the walls, their wombs pregnant with light crystallizing into sudden lamp flashes. You know the house is alive. The house breathes. It is full of life. You can hear the voices of the walls that converse over your body on the sofa. They talk, in their low voices, secretly, hissing. That’s their hate speech. Free speech for their dumb ears. Oh God now you can pray. Pray pray pray. Pray to Lazarus. Oh Lazarus come and raise me from the death as you were raised long time ago. Pray to Paul. Oh Paul come come and show me your Damascus so that I can be blinded like you were and I will see then the basic light. Pray to Peter. Oh Peter Peter of so much doubt give me the reincarnation of faith so that I can go on past the doubts once filling the chasms of my wretched thoughts. God. Please God. I love you. I want to love and be loved. I want to exist under the sunlight and shining rays and hands that caress and lips that kiss and time that passes by in the handsome hug of lovers placed in the outer world of their pure love. God. This house I will make it your temple. I will kiss your dirty feet God I know I am nothing but the buzz of the cricket in the meantime between two dark stars colliding and crashing into the nothingness. God I will fight for you. But from my room. I cannot go outside. Outside is the deafening silence of the screaming trees, the songs of birds fierce and ready to tear me apart. Oh God. This house gives me shelter. This house protects me from the acid rain. Acid thoughts stick to the floor of my mind. I will be free and I will follow but here from this house. Bugs run across the floor. They have minds full of acidic thoughts. God thoughts are daggers and I am afraid daggers rip my sorrowful flesh and I will cry for the daggers that entertain me in my last breaths. Oh.
*
Distorted voice #1
I have always been a big fan of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, you know…Nice music. The big poster of Ian Curtis, with his hollow stare addressing a distant point (http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmgx0gtagj1ql834lo1_500.jpg) in the atmosphere (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQSpJfpVHmg), was the first thing I bought when I entered university and got to the accommodation halls. I bought it, brought it home and put it on the whitewashed walls. And turned the volume up, it was Stoogies’ Dirt (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxYXV2RrwIs), and I felt the creeps up and down my spine. I was free mate, free to experiment and have fun.
Look at me now. Two pills, morning and evening, the time is intersected by myriads of rules – you can go out only between 9 and 12; Sundays are free, but you cannot go to the village. No junk food. No resort to other pills and stuff. No stuff. No drugs, I mean. No alcohol. I am living in a castle of chastity. But I don’t care now. I don’t care. Care – imagine the state social services bound to care for people – you go and wait to be taken care of. You sit in the hospital, in the white hall, doctors pass you by, you bleed, and wait for their care, and they pass you by. Nobody really cares anymore, mate.
There was a time, mate, when people really cared. There was a time, you know, when the big shot guys, with their pockets full of gold, on their 50th birthday would go to the damn slums at the end, dark freezing end of the city and donate money for the sick and poor and built a small shiny hospital and put their own names on the tablet at the entrance and boast until their last breath that they are the overlords of mercy and care reserving a first class ticket for the train to life beyond. They hoped: St Peter will look at me, see the saintly report of my good deeds, and give me the key for the kingdom come. Alright, mates. See what goes today. Fat asses in their offices, they draw financial plans and programmes and budgets and everything and send the cheque to the damn hospital you end up in. Night. You are bleeding. You are dying. You are in the white hall and wait for care. No one cares, mate, no one.
Ok, I will shut up. I will take my pill, take a walk round the old white building of the sanitarium and then go back to my nice room, the room where I sleep and think. I sit down and think. Thoughts are radioactive. Thinking is bad for your health. When I think I get nausea and often vomit. I can’t stand this, mate. I am ready to go to war. I am ready to beg. I am ready to play tricks with tigers and lions. But I am deadly afraid to be thinking. To think means to suffer mentally. I have tortured my body and I managed to turn it into a deadly grave. It took me years to come back on track. But, mate, thinking is worse, worse than a thousand spikes in my lungs. It brings regret. Brings memories, sorrow and sadness. It is like a root, thin like a needle, creeping inside, touching the core, absorbing solid bases and spitting acids in the brain. Then, traumatic, comatose, you start to groan and whine and beg, beg for the end. Mate, people die of bodily pain; people, mate, commit suicide of mental distress.
This is the plague. I was plague stricken, mate. I was the bubonic mannequin, you know, the body twisted and full of terror, you know. The doll played around. I was a solid person, the overwhelming I. Then I was diluted, I was liquefied and I transpired, I started to fly and fell down. I, mate, was the guy in the hospital. I was there bleeding and waiting for help and the doctors were passing by and smiling, mate, they were smiling, they got their wages for smiling to the patients and writing their damn prescriptions, they got their diplomas for their own vanity…Vanity. Vanity is Me. Care is We. The world is decomposed, mate, the end is near. There is only Me, mate, we are a bunch of Mes and no ****ing We I can grasp and kiss and hug and feel like a solid part of, mate, and this makes me cry mate and I cry every other Tuesday when I look to the calendar and see that time is passing by and everything remains the same.
But I was talking about Lou Reed. Yes, man. I am a fan. I used to sit, before the great rift, and watch Lou Reed speak to me. This is a special state of mind, mate. You sit and talk to your heroes. You call them in a hallucinogenic haze and objects appear in sudden shapes and forms, you understand they lack matter but are full of spirit. Yes, mate, spirits in our material world. So I sit and hallucinate. This is great, I dream of returning to the place I was doing that. It was in the underground.
*
Living voice #1
Name: Annabell Kerleigh
Age: 25
Previous occupation: ---
I am sitting in the wide room with only one big table and a number of plastic chairs. A man with a moustache and black beard sips a glass of water; his suit is grey, he smiles, he will be the kind one. A woman, around 45, with long blonde hair and blue, quick eyes stares at her papers and starts:
“How did you decide to apply for this position at Greenman Stoltz?”
We are at the top of the skyscraper clad in blue glass, with the big plastic letters of the international investment fund bearing the names of its two founders 200 years ago. I wonder if the two interviewers, the man in the grey suit and the blond woman, are millionaires. But certainly they are rich. I can see it. I can smell it.
“I was travelling for two years and I have just settled on the East coast. I was a painter for several months and I finished my degree in philosophy.”
“Finished? You took a gap?”
“I took four gap years. Four years ago I was at the verge of submitting my thesis…but unexpected events happened and I spent lots of time travelling afterwards.”
“Where?”
“Tibet. Bhutan. Japan. China. Pakistan. Sri Lanka. Angola. Mozambique. Morocco. Cuba. Nicaragua. Turkey…”
“Wow”, the man says. “So many diverse places.”
“Surely”, I say, “great time of experience”.
“But why did you decide to stop your degree and go to all these far and exotic places?”
“It’s a long story. It does not start with me. It begins some time ago.”
Carlos Mavroradis was the son of a Greek shipping magnate, billionaire and art lover. Himself a badly educated Oriental businessman, he had three marriages – first with the daughter of a local Greek alderman, then with another very rich heiress, and finally with a Spanish retired actress, lover of gin, vodka, sunshine and afternoon sex with male stallions while ageing Mr Mavroradis was very fond of his new prize he could boast with. Carlos was born from this wretched marriage. At the age of 10 his father died and he inherited 300 million dollars he could not get his grip over due to his mother’s guardianship. She sent him to a public school in England, among the most expensive, prestigious and rigorous ones in the world, where his class mates were sons and daughters of American and Arab petrol magnates, French and German nobility and English royal relatives. At the age of 16 Carlos broke loose, ran to France, ****ed a prostitute and raided Amsterdam coffee shops. There he was found by the agents sent to bring him back to school. Punished in solitude, he finished his first major essay, “Rebellion in consumerist societies”.
When he became 18 he started a long legal battle against his mother who was arguing that her son was a drug addict (and he was becoming such) and his will was vitiated to the extent that he could not control himself and should not be allowed to dispose of his fortune. In the meantime Carlos spent some time in Oxford, a year at Harvard, and finally transferred to Berkeley in California where he majored social sciences with economics. His final paper was an analysis of the destruction of traditional values in Western countries in the wake of Second World War and the rise of the post-war generations of radicalism. As he was still bereft of substantial funds, he had to start earning his living, especially given the fact he was used to large and expensive life.
Carlos got offers from several investment funds in New York and started just at the time the war in Afghanistan was beginning. His first steps on Wall Street were successful but his drug addiction was growing. At university, he moved from acids to cocaine and occasionally heroin which became his basic feed when he got in the big business. Disruptions started to appear soon and Carlos went to a rehab in Nebraska, spent about a year there and when he returned to New York, he was approached by a charity raising funds for victims of Afghan war.
The chronicle moves to Carlos’ next reincarnation as a mujahedeen in Afghanistan, a member of the guerilla war force secretly supported by CIA and fighting the Russian invasion. Carlos grew a black beard, dark tan was covering his body, and he was turned to Islam religion. Wounded in his leg, he spent several months in Dhaka, Pakistan, fighting against gores and possible death. When he survived, it was late for him to return and, beguiled by the soothing and caressing touch of drugs, he continued his heroin intake to deafen the pains of his badly cured wound. Carlos managed to strike a deal with his mother and when he put his immense fortune in his control, he bought a house in Cannes and started managing his own empire of drug suppliers on his call for stuff, more and more.
At that time, as the war was almost over, he contracted to write his memories of Afghanistan guerilla movement which became a sudden bestseller and turned Carlos into international star. They were adapted into a movie and he found himself besieged by public attention. It has been always considered that he has a homosexual inclination since his childhood at the English public school. His first registered relationship with a woman, Italian bikini model, is from the time of his new found fame. But his addiction was even worse now and he had to enter a rehab in the Swiss Alps where he spent two years. During that time he wrote “Gutter”, an epic work of everything scummy flowing from the underground – homosexuality, bisexuality, sadomasochism and perversity, violence, torture, drug habits, destruction, suicide. Deep, frightening record of his experience and observations, psychological study of human mind on the verges of sanity and life. Carlos was released from the rehab in the winter of 1996 and immediately founded a charity fund aimed at helping drug addicts. His work for cleaning the streets of big international cities (New York, LA, London, Paris, Honkong) of drug delinquency earned him several special prizes and state awards. In Miami, 2000, he met a man who was sent to him by one of his old commanders in Afghanistan. He had to pass a message to Carlos: “The time comes. Soon. Your civilization will crash. We will need you. Be ready.”
Carlos had just started lecturing on psychology and social sciences in an English institute, also fathering a son from a former sport star who loved and afterwards hated him and left him, when, during the time of 2001 invasion of Western allies in Afghanistan, he tossed his work and putative family away and rushed to the East where he disappeared for more than year. He was later found in Peshavar in Pakistan, in a cheap motel, overdosed on heroin, with two scripts written over the past year – “Guerilla war in the East” and “The End of our Time”. The latter was published in USA and became a massive success among students of history and political sciences since there Carlos argued the Europe-centred civillisation is being corrupt by its own success and crumbles to give way to the current wave of economic forces – Third World States - disorderly, but expansively influential. Nobody could explain Carlos’ death and it remains a mystery to date.
Dostoyevsky has always been trying to write the story of the Great Sinner. After Carlos’ death, he was praised as a “great sinner”, a symbol of the age, and his works were collected into a book of essays and papers, which was the thing I chose for my dissertation in my final year at university.
“Did you travel alone, Miss Kerleigh?”
Of course not. Days of solitude are over. People cannot entertain themselves alone anymore. Your personality is nothing but a bunch of defining social connections and contacts. You are always in the midst of a hurricane of people surrounding you. There was the three of us. Three – female and two males. We started our way down from the university campus, clearing our bank accounts, lying to our parents and relatives to get money for the journey. Then first to Manila, later Tokyo and Kyoto, Shanghai and Honking, Singapore, Burma, Dhaka. South Asian beaches, white sand, parties under the midnight moon. We wanted to taste everything. Blood from cobra served on a plate in a glass. Hallucinogenic roots in the Kampuchean jungles. Buddha worship. Brahma worship. Searching for the last dethroned king of a gone Jerusalem. With our bag packs, on our swollen feet, suntanned, with no shower and no rest, our steps wandering across the places where soldiers patrol, where fanatics gather, where saintly monks pray in golden pagodas. No direction, no point, no home, nothing but a way forward. We were hopping, we were jamming, we were having fun. We were free.
What were we doing there? Searching for the Mother’s Womb. Originality. Ultimate purity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPuFL0SY5XU&feature=related). The Spring of life and existence, untouched, unmarred, clear and tasty. We would sit on the white beaches and make love under the pale lazy sunrays. We would joke, run, swim, dive, kiss, hug, touch, exalt each other. We did not have our sexes, I was not a woman, they were not men; we were children of a golden, perfect God overlooking our quest. Dirty cities, slums, poverty, hungry eyes, bleeding mouths, we could not care less, we were passing through this corridor of images, black and grey and white without feeling, without sensing anything, like we were walking side by side with a movie reel full of close but distant and strange snapshots of a universe we did not belong to. Our homes were our back packs, our family were the schools of fish, our friends the palms and the beaches. We never got lost. We have been arrested, interrogated, stopped, released, crossing places of revolts and wars, we were shouting rebel anthems, running for cover, running for our lives. We never despaired. We were joy and life.
“Why did you put an end to your journey, Miss Kerleigh?”
Why. We got out of money. We were tired of one year wandering on the surface of the Earth. And we were humans entangled in our human stuff. Most of all - the latter one.