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 midnight watch

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So now we're talking evil from an origin. At first I thought evil would be a lack of light, of knowing and understanding; but that is only a branch in the tree. That's fear. I used to try and live in the absence of light, literally. When I was younger I'd only use candlelight so I could play in the shadows. Somehow it made the world warmer. The soft light of a low burning candle makes the world mysterious. For awahile I lived in enigma. Now it's art deco lamps and 40 watt bulbs, but I still love a good candle, just like I love the occassional clove cigarette or a glass of port wine.

In case you haven't noticed I'm talking about the creation of a false environment--for when the candle is gone the light switch isn't far away. But then darkness and mystery means knowing because I have the power to control the darkness and so it isn't darkness pure.

When you lose a tire on highway 54 at 3:30 a.m. on a warm summer night with no moon and no lights, 'cause you're on a back road, and that road is unfamiliar, and you're all alone--that's darkness.

And you bite your fingernails 'till they hurt and you find yourself thinking why did my tire fall off. Didn't I tighten the nuts? Was it the man at the service station I was rude to? Did he loosen the nuts for me? Maybe if I'd been nicer to him...maybe if I'd been nicer to everybody, but now it's too late. It's 3:30 in the morning, it's dark, and I'm fucked.

I'm stuck in darkness. In not knowing and I'm afraid. Only I'm not so afraid because a few miles up the road is a service station and a phone. I'll be nice when I get there and everything will be alright. Should I lock the car or should I trust my fellow man? Would locking the car be in effect locking out myself? No need to leave myself vulnerable, what's needed here is some practical, rational thinking. And inside your head the cartoonist draws a lightbulb. And where there was a bleak, scary, fucked situation there is now light. So you lock the car, call your friend and the next day someone asks you what happened and you tell them. And from the person sitting across from you comes one word, "Wicked."

Yeah, evil. But why?

Those that beleive the holocaust never happened are on that dark road locking everybody's car. I've always wondered about that. In modern history the holocaust has to be the single, stand out, coup de grace to all those who refuse to believe in pure evil. But what I don't get is this. It was an event so devistating we had to make up word for it because nothing in the known language fit and there are those who still say it didn't happen.

The gas chambers were only morgues they say. Only 300,000 jews died and most of those were from allied bombing raids they say. The figure of 6,000,000 comes from an unrealistic ten year block of time and people, most of them resettled somewhere else they say. They say the allies staged the mass graves and the bulldozers. They blame it all on the Russians.

I know the truth from a man that was there. An American P.O.W., my grandfather, who saw the bodies piled two stories high laid out the lengths of three football fields and when I asked him about these arguments he fell silent. He loked out over the waterfront at the cranes flying a low arc around a group of fallen pine. He bit his nails too, and then he looked at me, almost angrily, and said, "The holocaust happened baby, it sure as shit happened."

Before then I'd heard my grandfather say shit many times, but I never heard him say "baby" quite that way. It was like he'd said it before, had to explain it to someone else. As if he carried with him the burden of knowledge. Evil. The knowledge of evil. As if we were all babies and it was his job to leave the light on at the top of the stairs.

Someone once asked me what the opposite of evil was. I said there was no opposite, not even pure good, because the pure is only waiting to fall over the edge. The pure is only evil untainted by evil, but in the back of purity lies the fear, the potiential for evil.

On the brightest blue sky day there is the potiential for the cloud, the car crash, the death, the loss of existence; and we live with this everyday. We live with the sin, the defilement, and the guilt.

How about my taboo called love. The icky feeling when one gets too close--defilement. The blaming of myself, I must have done something wrong--I feel guilty, I've sinned. But it can't be all my fault, somewhere along the line it got me, something changed me, it got my purity--sin. And so I push away from love.

Do anything you want to me but don't love me.

So we come to ritual preperation. Let's push purity over the edge via myth and ritual. Let's not wait for evil to introduce itself to purity, let's take purity and introduce it to evil.

"Evil comes to the outside of freedom as the other than itself in which freedom is taken captive."

But what happened to freedom is terror. Yeah, pure freedom is absolute terror, we'd better get some evil in here. We'd better put some German airplanes on our shelves. We'd better drive around on highways and wait for our tires to fall off. We'd better get some damn ritual preperation, hurry up, give me that myth because without it I'm in distress. Deep shit, baby.

"If myth making is an antidote to distress it is because the man of myths is already an unhappy uncounciousness for him, unity, conciliation, and reconciliation are things to be spoken of and acted out, precisely because they are not given."

Quick give me some Shaksepeare, throw me the Illiad, don't leave me hanging with these long sterile capitalist Christmases devoid of ritual. Don't let me go to sleep without reading me a bedtime story. I can't sleep without the story, 'cause I can't handlle the darkness without the preparation. Don't send me into battle without a prayer. Airline pilots before the crash and soldiers before they die cry out for their mothers. The giver of myth, the last final cry for ritual.

Do you think the holocaust was a twisted acted out live and dead all the world's a stage type ritual? Certainly not a myth but a real honest to God preparation or am I getting carried away or somehow trivializing the event because that's not what I mean at all.

I am sinply saying could it have been a ritual so great in its weight and force that we haven't yet begun to fathom it. The general public accepts it as an event in time, genocide, the holocaust, but do they really want to look further and see that that ritual was a prelude to the death of Western civilization as we know it. That's evil.

The idea that we as a people let it happen, that it could happen, that our tanks and guns didn't get there fast enough. That's evil. That's taboo.

"It sure as shit happened baby."

Defilement through war. We blame ourselves--guilt. We blame it, we blame Nazi Germany--sin. But what about smaller perludes like the Belgian Congo in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Or Nero's burning of the Christians. Nero burnt the Christians as ritual, as light for a Roman festival, a feast. But behind that he needed some scapegoats for the fir in Rome. He needed a ritual event, a little persecution, a little evil to satisfy the Roman populace and restore order, purity.

That's fucking evil.

That's as my firends would say, "Wicked."

goodnight 11.25.97