I used to scoff at peop
le who blamed faulty fax machines, modems and printers on the astrological phenomenon of Mercury going retrograde.
Then I went to work in a busy and hi-tech open plan media office. Each time Mercury went retrograde, communications crashed or colided or stalled. The printer ran out of toner. The photocopier machines crackled with static. Software systems crashed, connecions short-circuited, emails were suddenly infected with viruses. I became a firm believer in staying home and taking a three-day silent sabbatical with the cell phone switched off whenever Mercury went retrograde.
It’s that time of the year again. I clicked on Reply when I meant to Forward and emailed a chance acquaintance some torridly revealing details about myself. Cringe factor 10. The Internet went down for six hours just as I was about to post edited text to a website. Emails bounced back and forth, full of references to the Mail Daemon. I sat down to watch a TV programme on Lebanese food and the film jittered and then stopped. My cell phone gave a low electronic sigh and went silent.
The surface media setbacks and electronic snarls are only one symptom of the feeling I have that I am missing something, not getting the point. An auditory fog that seems to prevent me from hearing the deeper language of my own life. I may not be listening closely enough to what friends are saying, my dreams may be going unnoted. What do I not want to look at here and now?
I’ve been in a place like this before, blinking and unable to focus, not making sense of the obvious.
Outside in the hot back garden, the olive trees are shivering in the breeze, throwing down small leafy shadows. Olives are the most tranquil of trees, grey and silver Mediterranean beauties. It is so hot that the cerise pelargoniums against the garage wall have died, along with small sage bushes and a lone stalky fennel. The garden swims in a haze of black light and the glare of stone. An hour to salute Mithras, were I so inclined.
I think about the noonday devils of Catholic theology, ‘those who wander through the world for the ruin of souls’, and I go back to wondering about the evil described in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, looking at an SS officer complicit in the evil of history. A man who is not ‘evil’ himself, not a monstrous sociopath, but a gifted and ironic character who is capable of inhumane behaviour, of participating in horrendous crimes against humankind. The astute reviewer Leland de la Durnadtaye puts it best, and as I read his summing up and think of my home country Zimbabwe wracked with cholera and the carnage of Rwanda, a long history of miscommunication and flawed understandings of power and cruelty come to mind.
‘ “The kindly ones” are better known by a less gentle name—the Furies, the Greek gods responsible for the punishment of blood guilt, especially concerning family members. The title thus weaves together the novel’s central themes: the story of incest and matricide that recalls the fate of Orestes, the Furies of memory who still visit the aging Aue, and, finally, the idea of euphemism itself. Like the Greeks, like all our human brothers and sisters, we try to name and thereby domesticate those elements in our past and present with which we cannot come to grips. We might look at a given time and place—be it Nazi Germany or today’s Congo —and say to ourselves that we would act differently, and then close the book. But The Kindly Ones reminds us that, like the narrator, we, too, have our Furies, name them how we will.’
In the post-modern industrial societies of the West, people forget what cruelty and terror look like, they think of evil as a metaphor to be reframed or trivialised. In other places, the horror is amongst us and too close at hand to be overlooked.
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