I happened to be in the hall when one of the news channels took centre stage on television. Breakfast was at the table: Slices of brown bread sleeping with cheese blankets and a soup bowl of tea gave me those come hither looks. And so I dragged a chair to the table, sat on the chair, and began to eat.
The news channel also began to eat - my attention that is. It gnawed at it with a ferocity I have never imagined electronic mediums to be capable of. It chewed my head with gruesome shots of violence and pillage in the Central African Republic. And it slurped up the saliva it had let spill with reports of how the two men who killed a British solider on a street in London were merely sentenced to age in prison.
I thought my attention had had enough of being treated like fast food but no, I realised it lapped up all of that with great relish and waited for more. It didn't have to wait long. Scenes of Ukraine and its president-at-large started to stream: Sorrow grieved for those who lost their lives during the protests while Opulence - rich and vulgar - danced within the palace the president-at-large called his home. The tryst that this incongruent set of images narrated spoke of a maddening love for spurious greed and a cavalier disregard for the people of that nation.
Into this melee of disaster stepped Syria's opera on war. Its acts did not need violins to drone about life and its misery. Nor did they need heart-wrenching screams and laments: The silence that hovered on the lips and faces of the refugees was deafening enough. The rubble and the rumble that escorted the refugees did not even try to avoid the camera. They were all part of a production: A production that had strayed from the premises of the studio it was born in and had befriended the ugliest corners of human insanity. The bond it had formed with that insanity seemed to have gone too far to be broken at all.
In the meantime, the morning breeze had started to howl over the tin roofs that clothed the balcony. And the tap had begun to drip in the bathroom: A slow rhythmic drip with a voice that beckoned anxiety - the very same anxiety that latched itself onto those in Syria, Ukraine, and the Central African Republic.
I had had enough.
I cleared the table, wiped it clean of the crumbs, and made a heap of the bowl and the plates. I needed to wash them all. So, I reached for the remote control, washed away the channel from the television, and buried the heap in the sink.
I had a whole lot of scrubbing to do. But, unlike the world, I knew I would not be scrubbing forever.
The news channel also began to eat - my attention that is. It gnawed at it with a ferocity I have never imagined electronic mediums to be capable of. It chewed my head with gruesome shots of violence and pillage in the Central African Republic. And it slurped up the saliva it had let spill with reports of how the two men who killed a British solider on a street in London were merely sentenced to age in prison.
Into this melee of disaster stepped Syria's opera on war. Its acts did not need violins to drone about life and its misery. Nor did they need heart-wrenching screams and laments: The silence that hovered on the lips and faces of the refugees was deafening enough. The rubble and the rumble that escorted the refugees did not even try to avoid the camera. They were all part of a production: A production that had strayed from the premises of the studio it was born in and had befriended the ugliest corners of human insanity. The bond it had formed with that insanity seemed to have gone too far to be broken at all.
In the meantime, the morning breeze had started to howl over the tin roofs that clothed the balcony. And the tap had begun to drip in the bathroom: A slow rhythmic drip with a voice that beckoned anxiety - the very same anxiety that latched itself onto those in Syria, Ukraine, and the Central African Republic.
I had had enough.
I cleared the table, wiped it clean of the crumbs, and made a heap of the bowl and the plates. I needed to wash them all. So, I reached for the remote control, washed away the channel from the television, and buried the heap in the sink.
I had a whole lot of scrubbing to do. But, unlike the world, I knew I would not be scrubbing forever.
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