The World I leave Behind.

I do not remember the last time I had pen and paper on my hands, they feel strange. The paper is still soft, even after years of been in the bunker. It was miracle to find them out here in the nothingness that earth has become. Though I am tempted to leave this paper here as a sacred object of a past civilization, I fear I shall commit a crime and use it to write a thing I’ve had on my mind for quite a long time, perhaps even before the bombs and the war.

I was a student when everything started. I was a student when everything started. I was studying literature, and although I was not a top class student, I knew my stuff. I was such an naive boy back then, thinking that all the things I read in books about future societies would never come to pass. Here I am now,  ten years later I am a rebel, a survivor, a victim, someone without history, without a home to go back to.

I believe it was in the second term at my university when we had to talk about 1984 and V for Vendetta for one class in particular. We had been discussing about how Orwell presented a totalitarian system that controlled itself by creating false enemies in order to keep the people frightened. We also talked how Moore presented characters that were both heroes and villains and how no matter how good they were, everyone was corrupted. These discussion were so interesting but at the same time so unreal: We were living in such a nice society that I never thought it could go as awry as those from the books. I remember talking about torture, information control, totalitarianism, etc.

Everything changed in a minute: we were  thrown to this hell of totalitarian regimes and dystopian society. I have lived torture, I have lived corruption, and in one the last crimes I will commit in my life, I will write about it, I will write about it all: I will write about dystopia.

The nature of reality after the world ends.

I remember the bombs dropping on a country, I remember leaders declaring war, I remember the chaos, the fights, the killing. I remember how the world ended right before my eyes, and started again, now devilish, now corrupted. This is the first event that happened, the war and the violence twisted our vision of the world. We lost our sense of right and wrong. we were left disoriented, dizzy: Chaos ruled the earth and there was nothing we could do to stop it. After the war started, some radical groups started to arise, extremist. They did not preach about the end of civilization, they preached about order and unity, just as the Norse Fighters did in V for Vendetta. Soon enough, they were using people’s fears to gain control over, to make them do things, to make them follow their order. Then, a vision of a world that was not ours was imposed on us: They started to re write history, to manipulate the information, it was the ministry of truth from 1984, it was the mouth in V for Vendetta, different name, the same job. Their job is to create a fiction reality in which their discourse is the only way in which society can work, can survive, because when the world in thrown in hell, the only thing that we human can do is surviving.     

And living in this hell is hard. Not knowing what is real, what is not. Living in a constant absurdum; that concept brought me back to my readings of Waiting for Godot. In a world in which information is so controlled that past, present, and future, does not matter anymore. Just like in 1984, Winston used to change the past, the high party changes the present and directs the future. " ...And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain" (Orwell, 2001, p.35) [Old habits die hard]  . The state broke time, leaving us the people in a wicked stagnation.

You cannot know for sure whether your reality is a construct of the people in power or the real reality. Fiction became reality, fiction shaped our lives. I could not stop remembering this essay by Virginia Woolf, how was it called ? I think it was Modern Fiction, written in 1919 and published two years later (It still amaze me how I am able to remember those things after all that has happened) Her ideas resonate in my mind, in a wicked and strange way. “...the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology...” (Woolf, 1967) They have played with our psychology, they have been able to write about fear and to scare us: Their fiction became our reality because they were able to scare us with their discourse. But there’s a place far worse than the hell created by the narrative of the totalitarian system. It is called purgatory. I am going home…         

Purgatory.

 There’s a place between heaven and hell called purgatory. There, the souls of man are stuck in time, not being able to reach heaven or sink in hell. That place was imaginary until the order took the power. The place was called the pit, once you went in there, you never came back. And it was not only because rebels, oppositors, Christians, and homosexual were killed, but because, if you were able to get out, you would never be the same person that got in. 

I was thrown in this pit because  I made a mistake. I talked too much  about things that were prohibited. I was condemned, judge as a threat to the government, and casted into the pit. I will not speak of the terrible things that happened in that place, the obscure experiments that were carried out. I will talk about my epiphany, the revelation that was presented to me in my cell.

Torture, torture is what I lived, torture is what changes people in the pit. Torture breaks you into pieces. Torture wears you out, until nothing but a blank mind remain. But , is it always so? No, it is not. Sometimes, it is through torture that we can discover the principles underlying our existence, underlying our beings. They are there for all to see and for us to accept them, for them to become a shield. The government can break me, can make me go mad, but they will never change what I believe what I am. These are the conclusion I came in my time in the pit: Torture can either make you a pawn, or make you a true enemy of the totalitarian estate.

With this realisation came the memories from 1984. How the government torture Winston, they broke him apart, and they made him a part of the system, a pawn in the whole structure. But then we have V and Evey. They were tortured, V even experimented on, but they found their principles, their reason to live and fight for. And I remembered V giving Evey the reason why he had tortured her, he responded: "Because I love you, because I want to set you free" (Moore, 1989.,p.8).  For them it was the experience that freed them from the oppression of the government, and so was it for me.

In the end, is torture an act of cruelty or an act of enlightenment? It depends on you, on  yourself and on what you are made of: On your principles and if you are ready to fight for what you believe.

Why oh why, my dear Culture, Where are you now ?

After escaping the pit; I came out as a new man; everything had changed. After having been in the pit for so long, I became an outsider. Someone who does not belong to this totalitarian society.  someone that must be shot on sight. I have been on the run ever since.

I have been to wastelands, forgotten cities, ruins of a lost civilization. I have rediscovered lost libraries, with thousands of book that are becoming dust. I could not stop thinking, how many of these shadow galeries are there in the world right now? How many books that once were the basis of our society are now turning to dust? More than shadow galeries these are cemeteries, cemeteries of knowledge, of wisdom. Within these walls, our old world is buried and forgotten, just as that tombs of the people we lost in the war.

Why ? I ask, Why has culture been forgotten? I know that books are just a part of what we call culture, but just as there are cemeteries of books, there are cemeteries of movies, of paintings, of sculptures, etc. Museums were said to be public mausoleums. Now they are true mausoleums.

And I keep asking why, for I want to make sense of this world, even though I firmly believe that we are all living an total absurdum. Perhaps it is because there is no space to leisure in totalitarian governments, that there is not space for different opinions in a totalitarian system. But the more I travel, the more I believe those reasons are too simple, somewhat disappointing.

Perhaps we have to go back to the beginning. Perhaps culture is forgotten because it is the remnants of the world that was destroyed, the world that will never come back. Old culture might deviate common people from the goal of the totalitarian system: Culture deviate people from creating a perfect society, that is the goal: to create a total system. To create a culture that  represent the totalitarian system.  

It makes me sad, to think that our future generations will normalise the cruelty of this society , and will live their life glorifying the pit, glorifying the total control.

Epilogue.

There is no place in the whole world for me now. I belong to nowhere. I have now realised that I will be on the road until the end of my days, until my legs can stand the weight of my  body. I have become an artist, for I have become the monster, the enemy. Children will be told scary stories about me, about a man who reads, a man who feels, a man who lives.

I am an artist, a wizard. As I will turn to dust, I will also become a legend, a beacon of hope for those who feel trapped in the system. I do not know who will read this, as I will leave this memories where I found the paper I used to write them. I encourage, whomever reads it, to leave it where you found it for more people to read it.

The crime is committed. There is no turning back now.


********************************************************************************

References.

Moore, A. (1989). V for Vendetta. (Vol. 7). New York: DC comics. 

Orwell, G. (2001). 1984. New York: Penguin readers.

Woolf, V. (1967). Collected essays (Vol. 1). Richmond: Hogarth P.