By Edward Curtin
July 12, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - It’s been raining
incessantly for three days. It is a cool early
morning in the beginning of July and I have just
made a cup of coffee. Now an electrical power outage
has occurred and so I am sitting in a rocking chair
in the semi-darkness savoring my coffee and feeling
thankful that I made it in time. I have a close
relationship with coffee and the end of night and
the break of day. As for time, that is as
mysterious to me as the fact that I am sitting here
in its embrace. The electric clocks have stopped. I
think: To exist – how amazing!
More than the coffee, however, I am luxuriating
in the sound of the tumbling rain. Its beautiful
music creates a cocoon of peace within which I find
temporary joy. The joy of doing nothing, of
pursuing no purpose. Of knowing that whatever I do
it will never be enough, for me or anyone, and the
world will continue turning until time stands still,
or whatever time does or is according to those who
invented it. I will be gone and others will have
arrived and the water will flow from the skies and
the clocks will still tell people what they don’t
know – time – although they will continue to tell
it.
Humans are the telling animals.
A few weeks ago, when this area was in a
mini-drought, the local newspaper, in the typical
wisdom of such cant, had a headline that said “there
is a threat of rain later this week.” They are
experts at threats. This is the corporate media’s
purpose. Rain is a threat, joy is a threat, doing
nothing is a threat, the sun is a threat – but the
real threats they conceal. To create fear seems to
be their purpose, as they do not tell us about the
real threats. Their purpose is not to tell the
truth, but if you listen closely you can hear it.
In the middle of the night I woke up to go to the
bathroom, and outside the small bathroom window I
watched the rain engulfing the lower roof and
sluicing down the shingles in two heavy streams. I
thought how the desiccated mind of the headline
writer must be feeling now, but then I realized that
he or she was asleep, as usual. There is a moist
world and a dry one, and the corporate media is run
by arid souls who would like to make the world a
desert like their masters of war in Washington.
Then as I sit here my brief peace is roiled by
the memory of reading Tacitus, the Roman historian,
and his famous quote of Calgacus, an enemy of Rome:
These plunderers of the world [the Romans],
after exhausting the land by their devastations,
are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if
their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor;
unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only
people who behold wealth and indigence with
equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp
under false titles, they call empire; and where
they make a desert, they call it peace.
I think of former Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld on his recent deathbed. Here was a man
whose entire life was dedicated to the American
Empire. He spent all his allotted time making war
or making money from the spoils of war. He was a
desert maker, a slaughterer for the Empire. No
doubt he died very rich in gold.
I can no longer hear the rain because my mind is
filled with the loud thought of what Rumsfeld
thought as he lay dying. Was he sorry? Did he
believe in God or was his god Mars, the Roman god of
war? Did he smile a bloody smile or say he was
sorry and beg for forgiveness from all his innocent
victims? Did he see the faces of the children of
Iraq that he slaughtered? Or did he pull an
Eichmann and say, “I will leap into my grave
laughing”?
Your guess is as good as mine, but mine leans
toward the bloody smile of a life well spent in
desert making. But that is a “known unknown.”
Rolling thunder and a lightning strike in the
east jolt me back from my deaf dark thoughts. The
sound of the rain returns. The coffee tastes
great. Peace returns with the unalloyed gift of the
ravishing rain.
Yet the more I sit and listen and watch it
soundly stipple the garden and grass, the more
thoughts come to me, as my father once told me:
Thoughts think us as much as we think thoughts.
It’s what we do with our thoughts that count, he
said, and like lightning, if we don’t flash when we
are given the gift of life, when we’re gone, it will
be as if we never were, like the lightning before it
flashed.
Thomas Merton’s prophetic words from his
hermitage in the Kentucky woods in 1966 think me:
Let me say this before rain becomes a utility
that they can plan and distribute for money. By
‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand
that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate
its gratuity, who think that what has no price
has no value, that what cannot be sold is not
real, so that the only way to make something
actual is to place it on the market. The
time will come when they will sell you even your
rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am
in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its
meaninglessness.
There are moments in many lives when, if one is
lucky, they are initiated into a ritual that
sustains them throughout life. To others these
experiences can easily seem paltry and meaningless,
but to the receiver they offer a crack into deeper
dimensions of being and becoming. For me it was my
introduction to coffee during a hurricane.
My father had driven my mother, three of my
sisters, and me to Jones Beach on Long Island. This
was before people checked the weather every minute.
The sky in the southwest grew darker as we drove,
but on we went. The beach was deserted except for
some gulls and the parking lot empty. My father
parked the car close to the beach and while my
sisters and mother sat in the car, and my mother,
listening to the weather reports, issued warnings to
us, my father and I ran like wild dogs into the
heavy surf despite her admonitions that the
hurricane from the south was arriving sooner than
expected. It started to rain hard. The surf picked
up. We swam and got battered and shouted exultantly
and came out shaking with the chills. A pure white
sea gull landed on my wet head and my father
laughed. Awe-struck, I stood stock still and my
shaking stopped. In its mouth the sea gull held a
purple ribbon, which it dropped at my feet as it
flew off. I grabbed the ribbon and we jogged up to
the concession building where there was one man
working. My father ordered coffee and a hot
chocolate for me. But they had run out of hot
chocolate. So my father ordered two coffees and
filled mine with three or four sugars. I had never
sampled coffee and didn’t like the smell, but my
father said to drink it, with the sugar it will
taste good and it will warm you up. It strangely
tasted like hot chocolate. We toasted our adventure
as I drank my Proustian madeleine at
eleven-years-old.
I had put the ribbon on the counter as we drank.
When we were going back to the car, I noticed there
were words on the ribbon. They said: Rest in peace.
I have long lost the ribbon but retain its message.
So now every morning between the end of night and
the break of day, I sit with my coffee and listen.
And even when it isn’t raining, I watch the birds
emerge from their nightly rests to greet the day
with their songs. They tell me many things, and
they are all free.
This morning I am wondering if Donald Rumsfeld
ever heard them.
I suspect their message was an “unknown unknown”
for him, just like the gift of rain. He preferred
the rain of death from the skies in the form of
bombs and missiles. He was only doing his job.
He made a desert and called it peace.
Edward Curtin is an
independent writer whose work has appeared widely
over many years. His website is
edwardcurtin.com
and his new book is
Seeking Truth in a Country of
Lies
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