Chapter Three ::: Innocence
“It takes a very long time to become young.” - Pablo Picasso
I have always had a strange faith in the ‘Gods’.
My faith has never really wavered in what I feel is a populated universe inside me. I see the universe outside of me just as surely as anyone else but I feel there is also an equal universe within me. A vast space filled with creation and destruction, victory and loss, gods and demons, peace and war, and hope; a strange hope that is not really based on any experience, no proof that warrants its existence and yet it’s there. Many a time have I woken and found it merely a disturbing corpse and yet the faith remains; unchanged and mysterious.
Looking at it through the eye of the skeptic I understand this ‘faith’ may well be a kind of innocence. The weight of the universe is perhaps so overwhelming that we mere humans invent hope and clench at it as a drowning man would clench at straws.
I saw hope die that day. In fact, looking back at it now, I believe I saw the universe die. I saw her universe die.
Of course I understood there and then that existence is but a mere farce; a tragic play containing no particular direction and certainly no inkling of moral meaning. To this very day, if I could, I would dearly love to spit in the face of moral meaning.
For me religion died that day. And God died with it.
Yet strangely my faith in the Gods did not die, even though I knew they did not care. Like people everywhere they too were busy with their own lives to bother too much with the triflings of beings scratching out an existence on this side of the curtain. The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and southern Benin have an intimate understanding of this when they say that their creation God (Oludumare) is distant and cold. For me all of the Gods are distant and cold. Only the pretenders seek out a personal relationship with their creation.
In the traditional Yoruba creation myth, the Orishas (spirits) became so tired of serving Oludumare that they plan a revolt; the destruction of heaven and the seizing of power. Certain Judaic Christian myths (Adam and Eve, Lucifer, etc) also play on this theme of disobedience and rebellion against a creative force too distant to give a damn and too restrictive to allow pleasure. Alas, too inhuman to understand loss.
None of this of course concerned me when I was twelve. Something much bigger and much more pressing enveloped my thoughts; the dreaded fact that I had to walk to school.
Plagued with the paralyzing fear that I had to cross that road every day, that I had to re-live that destruction every moment I walked to school and every moment I walked back out. Yet strangely, it was not only that particular road that disturbed me, every road hurt me. Walking anywhere on any road with cars whizzing past made me anxious. A car appearing suddenly or screeching its tires made my hands shake uncontrollably (sometimes they shook so much that I hid them in my pockets so nobody would see them).
The road became my nemesis.
At any moment I knew those cars were going to jump the footpath and they were going to destroy me. I knew it. Every bit of me was certain it would happen, if not that day then certainly another day or later. This of course affected my travel and restricted my activities. I avoided going out, or if I did go out, I avoided the main roads and took only the back streets where the cars were forced to move slower. Where I felt I had a better chance of surviving their sudden lunge should they suddenly be inclined to destroy me.
A typical journey that may have previously taken twenty minutes now took as much as an hour. A trip around the quieter side streets involved complicated detours and even cutting through neighbor’s yards. People became suspicious of course. One time I was stopped by the police, they wanted to see my backpack to check if I had stolen goods from any of the houses whose yards I had walked through. They asked a lot of questions and I tried to answer them the best I could.
But how could I tell them I was afraid of cars?
Arrival was always bliss. To arrive at school, the shops, anywhere without being eaten by cars always filled me with almost ecstatic relief, and yet, in the back of my mind there was always the tightening fear of the return trip home. I knew they were waiting, sometimes parked, sometimes moving, but always waiting for that perfect moment when they would feed.
And they would feed.
All machinery needs feeding. All development requires sacrifice. Just like the old Gods demanded bloody sacrifices on their altars to ensure the crops would remain fertile, so too technology demands blood and rewards with progress.
Just look at the numbers. Statistically the roads demand 1.2 million sacrifices worldwide every year, and we pay it willingly, sadly and quietly. The Gods reward nicely even if the fruits often taste bitter.
It was also at this age, when the cars were trying to eat me and the roads appeared like fiery streams leading to hell, that I met my guide.
