The International Writers Magazine:

---

Cliché Imaginations • Sagar Sanyal I don't know if the pain is unimaginable, but I am certainly unwilling to try to imagine it. So instead I write about it with a safe and detached, bored, uncreative flourish. It is painful not because I imagine it happening to a beloved or to me, but because I dare not imagine it happening to a beloved or to me. Though this unwillingness to imagine the pain of others shames me to the core, yet I refuse to imagine it.

Pain that I can thankfully only describe in negatives, as un-usual, as un-imaginable, as in-human, as not-experienced. Scenes that make this atheist pray to whatever non-existent god that I never come to know how to describe these pains in positives, as having been experienced, as having been endured.
Bodies maimed; entrails no longer in their place inside the body; bones bared; skulls crushed, brains oozing like a grey-pink oatmeal, flattened; eyes hanging out of their sockets by a nerve; twitching and convulsing bodies uncategorisably in limbo between life and death; the eyes of a human/animal staring at you without acknowledging you, expressing only a sick mix between the awe of a child experiencing a new sensation for the first time and the agonised, contorted horror of an unfathomable pain.

There are phosphorous bombs here. They create a cover of smoke and they light the sky for men with guns when they kill at night. They also melt civilian skin. My mind’s eye presents an image of skin melted into bubbled and sagging gourds, recognisable as human only with a grudging, cringing, fleeting glance, a wax human no longer sculpted and chiselled into a michelangelo - careless drips of wax now define its contours, skin so raw and red I dare not look upon it too closely - as if the breeze from my blinking lashes might set off a tired, defeated but expected moan of agony.

Plans of how to define oneself by one's future, by one's relations with close friends, kin, lovers, by one's life's work. Thinking you had all this figured out - what you needed to do to make you regret nothing on your deathbed. All these plans in disarray. Your loved ones are gone or they are among the fortunate ones who survive but they can't stand the pain of being in your presence. Your life's work is not possible anymore now that your community is a ruin of rubble and dust. There was a time that the life of the neighbourhood would express itself in street markets and playful urchins and cliques of giggling young women and suave young men going to humorous lengths to impress the girl of their fancy. Signs of life are more sombre now - a candle burning in a cracked, charred room near collapse; a four foot girl in tatters, missing an arm but still cradling her young brother with his bloated stomach, begging for alms; a middle aged man who has never before shed a tear in public bawling his eyes out in the town square, barely coherent in his grief and his rage, immersed in his wailing which he knows is an excuse, a respite from having to pick up the pieces of his shattered existence. To see the most grown-up of people reduced to childishness. Bawling because they don't know how to fix their broken lives and because crying helps them forget for a little while, helps them pretend that a mother hearing the cries will come by and fix everything. crying from sunup to sundown just so there is no occasion for thought, knowing full well that soon they will be all cried out and pellucid thought will be back to haunt, frighten and isolate. Granted these are signs of life, not of death. But still, I'd just as soon not see them ever again.

One man spoke in a voice unplaceably between defiant pride and disgusted dejected defeat: "this house might be a hovel, but it was mine. Grease from my cooking stained its kitchen walls, footsteps from my pacing wore away the rug, the laughter from my friends echoed in its heart, thoughtfully inchoate scribbles from my nephew peppered blank walls. I will not salvage those scribbles, I cannot take joy in them - their edges are charred, they remind me of a dead child shot through the head, the untidy strokes of red crayon spelling out a 'happy birthday uncle' shade matter-of-factly into red spatters of blood".

It never occurred to me before that the moans that exhaust the vocabulary of these faces do not just express tearful agony. They also express the deepest depression, worthlessness and misanthropy. Surely only the supremely strong and the supremely divine can maintain a sense of self-worth or a sense of the worth of humankind when treated as an inconsequential flea bugging a pampered poodle, like a mote of dust spoiling some grand desire for a waxed, polished, spotless vintage car. This depression does not ask for prozac. It asks for respect, for an end to vicious avarice, an end to unfeeling apathy. It asks for compassion incarnated as action, not merely as tears or as heartfelt 'fuck yous' aimed at Clinton or Bush or Blair or as snide, disapproving comments about resource wars, hegemony and imperialism.

This pain sounds cliché only in words. Its reality brands itself into the mind with the intensity of the newest, hippest non-cliché every time you look upon it. It is because this pain is cliché in words and cliché only in words that we must remind ourselves of it again and again ‘til we no longer speak of it with a bored, uncreative flourish the way we lyricise pretty sunsets or our lovers' swaying hips and until it hurts us to speak, until we are so disgusted with speech that we act.

© Sagar Sanyal - June 2006
sagar.sanyal@gmail.com

More Comment

Home

© Hackwriters 1999-2006 all rights reserved - all comments are the writers' own responsibiltiy - no liability accepted by hackwriters.com or affiliates.