Recovery and Reflection

It is a time of recovery, but not one of renewal, never mind rebirth. That, I anticipate, will come much later.

I have traded the nightmarish mountain covered in steaming bubonic jungle for a backwater, dilapidated office block on the outskirts of the city.

Have conditions improved? That sounds a bit of a stretch. Surely they have stopped worsening. Yet it is equally certain that I shall never be truly content, at peace, until I have that quiet space, the kind I found amidst England’s green and pleasant land, the rolling countryside unbroken save by low hedges, dotted with pastoral fauna, studded with the odd medieval structure, ancient seats of learning and understanding and wisdom, gothic spires of radiant dreams reaching out from a past Golden Age, and bubbling streams softly meandering their crystal-clear paths through verdant meadows.

But do not mistake me for a mere country bumpkin. It is space I seek, not suffocating stillness or slothful languor. Space to roam and explore and hunt and create. To uncover mysteries and experience adventure. Any intellect worth the title must perforce seek challenge and constant motion. To stop is to ossify and wither away.

To draw the analogy from the military: I seek the wide open steppe, the vast grasslands and plains ‘neath the endless blue sky. 

I seek to prosecute joyously exhilarating campaigns of manoeuvre and blitz. I seek the feint and counter-feint and lethal lightning strike, the mighty hosts thundering across the expanse of field, separating or concentrating as the battle ebbs and flows, the breathtaking speed and dynamism and sheer majesty of the mass mounted assault. I seek the war of the Mongoloid chieftains, the world conquerors, so embodied by the Great Khan of Khans Genghis, Born Temujin Son of Yesugei, Chosen of Tengri, Master of the Steppe and Lord of the World, incarnated in Fantasy as Jaghatai Khan of the V Legion Astartes, the White Scars.

I seek the chance to explore worlds unknown. To delve deep into the realms of history, ever my first interest, my great passion. There is classical Rome, with its mighty legions and intricate tensions between patrician and plebeian, optimate oligarchs and Casearian ursurpers, conspicuous conspirators and elusive demagogues, republican idealists and Machiavellian politicians. There is Middle-Age Europe, bearing the seeds of explosive expansion and transformation under its all-encompassing feudal and religious order. There is Modernity itself, a thousand dazzling revolutions rising across the intellectual, the political, the economic, the military – from the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt to the Manhattan Project and Ronald Reagan, and everything in between. And all this is just the beginning. There are many jigsaw pieces of great puzzles that need to be emplaced, many paths of causality that need to be traced, hidden meanings that call out to be uncovered by the historian’s deduction and imagination, analytical rigour and artistic intuition in harmonious conjunction.

But this is the war I faced (and still face, albeit to a lesser degree) on a daily basis – trapped in mind-numbing bureaucracy with artificial procedures and processes and protocol designed to hinder and hamstring and suffocate rather than order and structure and organise, locked into continuous combat with myopic supervisors afflicted at once with surreal delusion and imbecilic obstinacy, confronted at every turn by colleagues who are addicted to disagreement purely for no other reason than disagreement’s sake, who derive orgiastic pleasure from contradicting everything that is put before them, experiencing the act as the expression of some supposed superiority worthy of adulation, or who compulsively promote themselves, ad nauseam, ad infinitum, through hyper-opiniated, hyper-aggressive, hyper-intrusive showmanship and fraudulence. This last category, the type who long to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, deserves special mention, as it is a fascinating phenomenon of today’s office that sharpness of tongue and quickness of mind, no matter how vacuous or vapid on closer examination, is so often confused with depth of intellect and practical, applicable, sensible insight.

Not surprisingly, these colleagues tend to lack any sort of real substance, in terms of both character and intellect, since they are able to prosper without this, having in the course of ceaseless argumentation and ostentatious loquacity acquired reputations for “eloquence”, “sharpness”, and “creativity” – and reputations such as these count for more than any kind of genuine, authentic wisdom and knowledge, or even hard honest labour. There is thus very little room for voices of the latter qualities to be heard, because they are inevitably impeded by bureaucratic pseudo-logic, shut up by insensate superiors, or snuffed out by the loud noise and hot air of self-absorbed, self-promoting, self-worshiping frauds.    

And so I am caught in a war of a very different kind, far removed from my preferred battle-ground. My conflict now is one of toxicity and degradation, of brute mathematical attrition and industrialised slaughter, of constraints and containment. I am caught in a nightmarish pit of an urban meat-grinder, right in the decaying bowels of an unimaginably huge rust-covered, smog-choked, carbon-encrusted, planet-spanning industrial zone. It is a war of trenches and barricades, kill-zones and minefields, locked-down corridors of rapid-firing ordnance and weaponised chemical vapours, hemmed in by unmovable hulks of wasted concrete and metal. 

There are no open spaces to move across in this blighted, blasted wasteland, only set channels to march into and die in. It is a conflict fought by faceless millions of slaves wearing gas-masks and machine-like artillerists with maps and calculators. 

There is no movement to be found here save the plodding forward step, inch by harrowing inch, into the teeth of enemy guns and poison gas, into no-man’s land, where two opposing sides put millions of bodies up against each other and see who has the more (if any) left standing after an extended bout of mechanised carnage. It is brutal and rationalistic, reducing everything to the twin metrics of square feet of territory gained and quantity of men (or more accurately, cannon fodder) lost.

But this is an education in itself. I bide my time and learn. So that I will survive to seize the opportunity, when it comes, to break out of this slaughter-factory. And, when this is done, I will seek the wide open spaces of the steppe again, untrammelled by mind-numbing codes or loudmouthed, preening colleagues, where I shall have the freedom to explore and create as before. And then I shall experience and enjoy meaning once again.