Placelore

What Piece of Work

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.

- Hamlet (2.2.295-302), Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

The Dark Tower

1.

On August 6th 1945 at 8.15 in the morning a nuclear-solar energy that does not belong on this earth was released some 549 meters above Hiroshima "Such was the ferocity of the blast, eerie shadows of incinerated humans were left imprinted on steps, pavements and walls.” For days, weeks, months, even years after survivors searched for those missing.

 On first reading about this occurrence some fifty years ago I felt a haunting, periodically this feeling returns.

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II

(London, June 26th 2017, 8 AM) Although knowing it would be in the vicinity of my journey, nonetheless when I stepped out of Latimer Road station something inside me beckoned to turn around and there it was directly behind, less than 100 meters away, shocking in it's stark, brutal devastation; faintly in the atmosphere you could still hear it screaming … instantly brought in witness to the offering of some primitive form of solace I said aloud to all and to no one - my God  - such brief recognition of our utter helplessness. Momentarily we were, we are, all in that tower, and it stands there now terrifyingly sacred.

Around the area there are photos of those missing, messages, flowers, prayers upon stained paper, and there also written large in black letters the word Why? To that heartfelt question there will be answers of degree from investigations, commissions, politicians but there will be no words from the silence, from the sorrow of Being. 

The aftermath of this, and such an event as this that I have witnessed more directly previously, will follow a course … but for now there is a certain shock and awe felt in that street, in that neighbourhood, not the words shock and awe as uttered vindictively by a blundering former American president, but something closer to the root of the Dark Tower. 

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III

 There are a few books, which I return to read every few years, one of them is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The title of the book is derived from the Abattoir "Schlachthof-fünf” in Dresden where Vonnegut and other Allied prisoners were incarcerated in February 1945. Throughout the book there is a recurring line: "So It goes." The words appear each time a death occurs and what they imply lies at the centre of any understanding of Vonnegut's work: fatalism, stoicism and the acceptance that nothing worthwhile will come from denying or shrinking away from difficult situations or when the worst has happened. Questioned repeatedly over the decades about whether he thought Dresden should have been bombed, Vonnegut's most meaningful response was that the city had been bombed; the question for him was how one behaved now. "If one of his aims was to provide a voice for those innocent, his method of making himself heard was both courageous and effective; he told us the hardest of truths, but in the gentlest, funniest and most amiable way he knew how."