Things You Wouldn't Believe
There’s a line in the Ridley Scott movie Bladerunner that I’ve always liked. It’s spoken by an albino android, dying poetically in the rain. ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,’ he says, before passing in stop-frame slow motion beyond the vale. Sometimes I think I’m living my life now, doing the things I do, so that I can have a line like that when I die. Sometimes I wonder if my life will only ever be in the telling, rather than in the living. Probably that’s why I write. So much just flies by, passing like scenery seen from the window of a train. Words reach out and grab handfuls of time. They weigh things down, pull them to the ground and hold them for a moment so they can be seen. Remembered. So that minute, that glance, that sorrow or wonder, that loss, that gritting of teeth is marked, traced on something more than time before it disappears like a face in the dark. And at the end, when the hand falls limp on the sheet and the rhythm trails off, there is still something left – memory? hope? – you decide. ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.’
Here in Indonesia I’ve been fighting with my heart. Arundhati Roy writes in her novel The God of Small Things: ‘And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.’
There were three waves here, one after the other, the rip of one competing with the rush of the next to see how much havoc it could smash upon the cities of men. There were bodies piled like old dolls, cars twisted and pressed into the sides of buildings, houses picked up and tossed like toy boats in a rain gutter. From villages of 6000 thousand only 600 remained, like an awful tithe left by the sea to live glass-eyed in tents. The air is full of thoughts and things to say. And all that come to me are the small things.
Here in Indonesia it is a foreign world. Shall I tell you about it? My bechuk ride through the gritty streets of Medan, choking with heat and the smell of life and the traffic with its fumes. The painted grill of this little cart welded to the frame of a thin, shuddering motorcycle, a little colour in the world. Oh, this place is not without its colour. The fruit stalls, the ripe briny reek of seafood in the sun, the lights flashing in the trees along the streets at night, everything painted and peeling and painted over. Garbage overflowing in the streams. Tin-roofed shanties on rusty nail stilts, tilting at edges of the river. Trees growing up out of sidewalks, their roots heaving up bricks like earthquakes caught in time. Brown men with walnut faces and calves knotted like arbutus limbs, pedalling bicycle taxis through rivers of honking cars, going seemingly backwards in the rush, breathing their cigarette breath in and out in puffs. Muslim schoolgirls in white headscarves stacked three-deep on Italian scooters the colour of old lemons, squint-weaving into the grimy dusk, laughing through stalled traffic.
Or maybe the adventure? The Swiss Air Force helicopter touching down, blades cutting around in the air and the dust rising. Running crouched to the door and hustled inside by the eyeless reflective efficiency of a crewman with full helmet visor and pure zippered jumpsuit functionality. Sixty seconds from touchdown to takeoff and the conclusive metallic snap of a safety harness on the bar. The next time spiralling down like a hawk in tight circles, with glimpses of dove-grey landing craft on the beaches, bluetarp cities in the hills, and tsunami mud-poking palm stumps in between. This time it’s a stick-thin woman on a stretcher and two wide-eyed relatives with never a smile between them to hold her IV bag high, copter blades thumping and stirring up the dust outside. Everyone shouting directions, the door shutting, the bumptilt lurch into the air above the steaming sea again. All the way north like this, avoiding seabirds, with the ravaged coast below on the right.
Small things.
My big things are inside, unsaid. I struggle with a heart uncompassionate, unmoved by the loss of others, eyes unable to cry. I wrap my days in business and efficiency; I clutter them with the petty contentions of the hour. I wait, saving my tears for my own private griefs. My own loss of love, my own grit-jawed faith in the God of Abraham and Isaac, the God of Job, the Giver and Taker of dreams. My own found joys, my own rediscovery of Life – these things are secret, too. Even my mealtime prayers sound like the impious mutterings of an embarrassed child, so stricken my chosen faith leaves me: ‘Whom have I in heaven but You?’
I do this from the memory – or the hope - that my heart was made to open. That the bones You have crushed once sang and will sing out again. I want to look my last before stepping through and say ‘I have seen things you would not believe.’ I want, at the end, to say the Big Things.
Here in Indonesia I’ve been fighting with my heart. Arundhati Roy writes in her novel The God of Small Things: ‘And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.’
There were three waves here, one after the other, the rip of one competing with the rush of the next to see how much havoc it could smash upon the cities of men. There were bodies piled like old dolls, cars twisted and pressed into the sides of buildings, houses picked up and tossed like toy boats in a rain gutter. From villages of 6000 thousand only 600 remained, like an awful tithe left by the sea to live glass-eyed in tents. The air is full of thoughts and things to say. And all that come to me are the small things.
Here in Indonesia it is a foreign world. Shall I tell you about it? My bechuk ride through the gritty streets of Medan, choking with heat and the smell of life and the traffic with its fumes. The painted grill of this little cart welded to the frame of a thin, shuddering motorcycle, a little colour in the world. Oh, this place is not without its colour. The fruit stalls, the ripe briny reek of seafood in the sun, the lights flashing in the trees along the streets at night, everything painted and peeling and painted over. Garbage overflowing in the streams. Tin-roofed shanties on rusty nail stilts, tilting at edges of the river. Trees growing up out of sidewalks, their roots heaving up bricks like earthquakes caught in time. Brown men with walnut faces and calves knotted like arbutus limbs, pedalling bicycle taxis through rivers of honking cars, going seemingly backwards in the rush, breathing their cigarette breath in and out in puffs. Muslim schoolgirls in white headscarves stacked three-deep on Italian scooters the colour of old lemons, squint-weaving into the grimy dusk, laughing through stalled traffic.
Or maybe the adventure? The Swiss Air Force helicopter touching down, blades cutting around in the air and the dust rising. Running crouched to the door and hustled inside by the eyeless reflective efficiency of a crewman with full helmet visor and pure zippered jumpsuit functionality. Sixty seconds from touchdown to takeoff and the conclusive metallic snap of a safety harness on the bar. The next time spiralling down like a hawk in tight circles, with glimpses of dove-grey landing craft on the beaches, bluetarp cities in the hills, and tsunami mud-poking palm stumps in between. This time it’s a stick-thin woman on a stretcher and two wide-eyed relatives with never a smile between them to hold her IV bag high, copter blades thumping and stirring up the dust outside. Everyone shouting directions, the door shutting, the bumptilt lurch into the air above the steaming sea again. All the way north like this, avoiding seabirds, with the ravaged coast below on the right.
Small things.
My big things are inside, unsaid. I struggle with a heart uncompassionate, unmoved by the loss of others, eyes unable to cry. I wrap my days in business and efficiency; I clutter them with the petty contentions of the hour. I wait, saving my tears for my own private griefs. My own loss of love, my own grit-jawed faith in the God of Abraham and Isaac, the God of Job, the Giver and Taker of dreams. My own found joys, my own rediscovery of Life – these things are secret, too. Even my mealtime prayers sound like the impious mutterings of an embarrassed child, so stricken my chosen faith leaves me: ‘Whom have I in heaven but You?’
I do this from the memory – or the hope - that my heart was made to open. That the bones You have crushed once sang and will sing out again. I want to look my last before stepping through and say ‘I have seen things you would not believe.’ I want, at the end, to say the Big Things.
posted by rjs | 4:37 PM
1 Comments:
Hello. Sometimes we can only express the big things by concentrating on the small things. The small things you mention make perfect sense to me and show that you are a sensitive, kind and thoughtful person. Good luck and take care.
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