Sonora

I have been having the strangest feeling recently. Something I can’t quite put my finger on, I can only loosely describe as a feeling of impending doom. Not for me personally, but for humanity generally. I have finished 2666 by Roberto Bolano, and I am going to read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy soon. They are (very) broadly similar, set in the same place, dealing with a vague, systematic anonymous violence, out in the desert on the US/Mexico border (both within the Sonoran desert specifically).

There is something incredibly dark about there as a place. The hundreds of women murdered in Ciudad Juarez. The drug wars between the cartels and the Mexican government. Go further back in history, the frontier, and the massacres of Native Americans, mass scalping. Go further back, the conquistadors and the conquering of Central America, and the Aztecs and human sacrifice. It is almost as if something terrible and malevolent exists in the air and the soil.

I thought about this when I read reviews of The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke, (which recently won the Palm D’Or). It is a film set in a small German village in the years just before WW1. The village becomes plagued by small acts of horrific and inexplicable violence. I have not seen it, but it struck a chord with me, with the idea of violence woven into the very fabric of existence, systematic and anonymous. The film is meant to foreshadow what was to come for Germany. Part of the Roberto Bolano book was set in Germany as well.

It seems to me that the most important artists, the ones who are saying really saying something important, at the very cutting edge, all seem to be saying the same thing. That something terrible is coming, just like in the years before the World Wars in the 20^th century. It is in the air of the world we live in right now, and evident in every action. Things have been set in motion that we as a society/species cannot turn away from.

But, to lighten this up, I will say, that it is amazing that civilization even exists at all. I will quote G.K Chesterton, who said it better than I could, who remarks that detective stories...

“Keep in some sense before the mind that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions ... it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglers and the footpads are merely placid old conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. [The police romance] is based on the fact that morality is the most daring of conspiracies.”