Issue #44: August 22nd - 28th, 2003
(Short Holiday Edition)
Friends of the Heroes...Who are these people?
Friends of the Heroes... who are these people?
Yes, the Friends of the Heroes seems to me to be an honourable league to join. I can make tea, dish out moral support, hold coats and feed any number of pets. I can even tell the stories.
By Matilda Mother
The tale of the hero's friend
Did you ever hear the story about John and Paul just before the Beatles imploded? On late night in the studio, with the tension crushing all creative collaboration, John Lennon suddenly took off his glasses and said, "Paul, it's only me, it's only John."
By Matilda Mother
It is not good to travel alone.
The central processing unit. Center of the universe. Memory flourishes and chokes here. Reality is skewn and discovered here. The mind is a holy place.
By Matt Groesbeck
+++Back to top+++ Back to current issue+++
Friends of the Heroes...Who are these people?
I get an image in my head of a woman suddenly finding herself with an armful of clothes, hearing her bosom buddy call out, 'Ain't I a woman?', and thinking, 'Oh No! Sojourner! You're going to get us lynched!' Or someone walking over to where Mary Seacole is sitting, and touching her arm saying, "Mary, don't let it get to you. No, it isn't fair, just because Florrie white... and middle class... But I know you're a heroine and all those people you saved know you are a heroine. You just wait on the history books to catch up."
I imagine FotH to be a coalition made up of the people who promised to feed the goldfish and keep an eye on the house, while their pals set up camps outside nuclear reactors.
That's good, I can join these people. It's better for my health than the glorious, fame-filled alternative, because these will be the people who survived to tell the tales. That's important too. Ulla Roder might have heroically put one people-bombing-bound Tornado out of commission, but it was her friends who ensured we all know about it. The tales could well act as an inspiration for a gang of people destroying another dozen bombers; or give pause to those who are neither heroes nor know any.
Yes, the Friends of the Heroes seems to me to be an honourable league to join. I can make tea, dish out moral support, hold coats and feed any number of pets. I can even tell the stories.
Matilda Mother
(more by this author)
+++Back to top+++ Back to current issue+++
The tale of the hero's friend
I watched Sally change, some spark of personality deep inside her caught and enflamed the whole. For years our conversations were about soap operas and reality shows; speculation about celebrities; football; school, then work; gossip about friends; and mutual support amid the highs and lows of dating. We knew each other's minds so well. A single glance exchanged across a crowded pub could render us both in laughter's collapse. No words needed, we could supply for ourselves the other's one-liner.
At the time, I suppose the transformation occurred slowly; gradually enough for me to miss its opening beats. I didn't spot it quickly enough to either nip it in the bud before it got out of hand, or else to join her on this personal journey, as I had every other since we were kids. If I had, I think I could have burst the bubble of pressure building inside her and brought her back to ground.
She was still there, my Sally, trapped inside herself. I glimpsed her occasionally behind her eyes or in a gesture, as she faced me across the No Man's Land which had grown up between us. But, of course, by then our higher selves could only stare mutely at each other, while our history was the sole reason we struggled to converse, lacking a common language.
Did you ever hear the story about John and Paul just before the Beatles imploded? On late night in the studio, with the tension crushing all creative collaboration, John Lennon suddenly took off his glasses and said, "Paul, it's only me, it's only John." As their eyes met, Paul remembered that before fame and wives, they had been friends - working class scutters haunting Merseyside streets with dreams. A teenage John winked at a teenage Paul through adult eyes; and the walls came tumbling down.
I don't know if that story is true, but swop the names and relocate them to my kitchen table; there you have the precious moments which kept Sally and I not giving up on each other. She had in her heart the secrets of my youth and I hers; all the years of closeness which no latecomer could ever match.
Did I say that the change was gradual? In retrospect, it feels like it happened overnight. I'd return from making a cuppa to gind her watching the news as if she cared what the politicians were saying. I'd be chatting on the 'phone to someone, look across and there would be Sally, her face a mask of horror, her eyes flashing with tears. The deep soul fury would be palpable aroundher as she read 'Time' or 'New Internationalist' or the Amnesty magazine, or any of a dozen other publications churned out by those sort of people. Sally seemed to carry piles of the things around in her handbag.
Yes, I resented it. Life is hard enough without having to hear about a four-year-old child tortured to force information from his Dad. I have the sort of mind which adds the details and I couldn't bear it. But more than that, I had lost my best friends to photographs of mass graves, and I missed her.
After The Row, our friendship survived by imposing boundaries on it for the first time ever. I hated that too and I blamed Sally for its necessity. It wasn't a friendship. It was the remains of a friendship placed in statis until we were both calmer, so not to damage it anymore.
Those boundaries stilled my tongue on the day that she came to tell me that she was going abroad. Just for a couple of months. She told me the details with a rare gentleness, as if she feared for my sensibilities, but I could almost see the iron rod of resolve underneath it.
I didn't speak of the screaming alarm bells terrifying my instincts. I didn't try to tear through her possession to find my Sally, with whom I could impart volumes using only a meaningful glance. I could have shown her the dread iciness washing my soul. I could have met her halfway and said to her,
"Sal, please don't do this. Teach me how to write to presidents and prime ministers; let us save the world together from my kitchen instead." Where it was safe.
I did and said none of that. After Sally had made an apologetic shrug and joked, "Perhaps this will get it out of my system." I'd just nodded and touched the teacups. Forcing my expression to remain neutral was the first of a series of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I wished her luck; but, at the doorstep, it was a teenaged me who hugged the teenaged Sally tightly, as if by sheer strength of feeling, of love and respect, borne of our shared history, we could make it all better again.
It was too late to stop her by the time I checked my e-mails, two days later, to find that Sally had sent me zip files, seemingly at the eleventh hour. They contained three personal missives to me, typed at intervals over the previous months, but never sent, and a final one, typed after a hug, which proved she'd felt it too. I recognized my Sally, my oldest friend, in every word, filling in the blanks, tearing down the boundaries, trying to make me understand. I read them in a whirlpool of exhausting emotions and I wished she'd sent them at the time.
The bulk of the files though, I never read. I don't think she expected me too. They were given to me for safekeeping, the secrets of her activist self. Information, e-mails, letters, 'phone-numbers, people to contact and addresses. The few that I clicked open dizzied me - faxes sent to Third World presidents; personal e-mails telling of the torture and murder of her friends, in countries I had never heard of.
Sally's a martyr now; a heroine. Angry protestors march in their hordes through Whitehall with her picture on their banners. I've watched politicians bluster through their unease, mumbling inadequate words, as questions are raised about her in the House. She's on pamphlets, posters, the front cover of books. I heard that she had a display all to herself at the Glastonbury Festival and that some New Age band has written a song, which mentions her by name. Apparently there's a tribute of thanks to Sally spray-painted onto a wall in some far-away war-torn town.
She died saving someone who I never met; someone who never sat at my kitchen table and put the world to rights; someone who doesn't have safe inside her our memories, nor a record of my childhood hopes, dreams and ambitions stashed beside her own. Sally died saving someone whose name I couldn't even pronounce when I first heard it.
It was me who saw to the closing of her bank account and the list of other things needed to conclude a person's life. It was me who sat, for endless hours, with her mother, chain-drinking tea and trying to find words where there were none. It was me who cuddled shocked children, who was grasping fully, for the first time, a concept called death.
But time has slowly scoured away at my bitterness for having to go through all of this. Grief becomes manageable if you give it enough months to settle. I think now that I can let my pride and respect for Sally surface, without risk of feeling another immobilizing stab of her betrayal.
As I wrote my letters last night, demanding answers again from my database of officials, I felt her presense around me. Only this time, I didn't perceive it as a mocking 'see, I won in the end', but as a thank you and an ethereal hug filled with our unfettered friendship.
I'll get by, after all no-one said it was easy being friends of the heroes.
Matilda Mother
(more by this author)
+++Back to top+++ Back to current issue+++
It's not good to travel alone.
Life is a journey. We are travelers in time, distance and depth. We begin our journey here, crossing the matrices constituting known and unknown dimensions alike until we reach the confluence of understanding that is the ninety degree vertex of the mind.
We are now at the busy intersection of a crowded mind during sleep. The traffic alone, like the convoluted log-jam mess known as Boston, confounds and maims the senses. The eyes twitch. It makes us glad that this mind is not our own.
But the microneurons do their job well, make sense of the chaos, triage, organize, deduce. Tracing wispy paths pulsating into overdrive or agonal atrophy, the signal travels this way or that. Grey matter speaks the brief verse of yes or no, on or off, the organic poetry of binary language, the dialect of tissue. The signals are fast, virtually unclockable.
Chemicals flush and surge with every electrical charge. Positive thresholds fluctuate with every polarizing membrane. Hyper-polarize, re-polarize, synchronize. The mind's core control center, the thalamus, flickers like Christmas lights on some sort of tree. And it's all bathed in memory and hypothetical reality, a dream. Liquid emotion sends ripples through the cerebrospinal fluid.
It is now morning in the brain. Consciousness debuts above a circadian horizon while gradiant bars of sunlight slowly seep in through the eyelids. The body begins to hunger for data and fuel. Wheelbarrows of glucose arrive en mass more frequently, every 52 seconds. Our subject is beginning to wake in solar shades.
The mind is a delicate place. It is a holy place. All intelligence emanates from here, exudes and commands. Yonder lies the seat of power, say we. The brain. The central processing unit. Center of the universe. Memory flourishes and chokes here. Reality is skewn and discovered here. The mind is a holy place.
But it is by no means the only place. There are places to take our minds. There are places we have been. We have traveled light. We also have not. We have gone alone, but not for long. We will learn to travel together and in doing so potentiate our collective intellegence.
Matt Groesbeck
+++Back to top+++ Back to current issue+++
|