I can’t believe it’s been almost a week. Fear fucks with time, everyone has experienced it. I think it’s something to do with adrenaline or some long-forgotten instinct, some flight response that makes a second seem like a minute. Fear has the teppanyaki chef’s skill to cut time up into a blur.
We just aren’t afraid any more as a society. I mean, I’m excluding this past seven days but I honestly can’t remember the last time I was afraid; that sharp stink of fear from under your arms, the shake that creeps into your voice because your heart is beating so fucking hard you can’t help it. Things like routine, habit, creature comforts, fucking health and safety legislation. These things dull our senses; cushion us from the harsh realities of life. In a world where you can’t even stand on a foot stool at work if you want to reach a high shelf (and I do: at five foot four I’m not exactly equipped for the job of archivist) how the hell are we supposed to be able to deal with an event like last week? Talk about hobbling. If I was the type of person who believed in conspiracy theories, I’d say the government wanted it to hit us like this. I’d say they were after a sort of cull to separate the wheat from the chaff. Survival of the fittest. I’m not surprised Darwin caused the stir he did: no-one likes the truth. The truth hurts.
This concept of hurting means less and less. There is only death and not-death. There is incapacitation or function. The extremity of the situation is reflected in the black and white morality and values we seem to have shrugged on like an overcoat. Or perhaps I should say shrugged off? I can’t think sometimes: panic elbows its way through my thoughts and stands there, screaming, screaming back into my face, mocking and spooking me as I try to sift my thoughts. Still, I feel liberated by this new state of affairs. Dare I say, after only seven days, dare I say new world order?
Seven fucking days. Time certainly flies.
I think of the iconic status of certain dates in human history. 1066 – the Battle of Waterloo. Ask someone to name a historical date and they’ll say 1066. Or maybe 1666, the Great Fire of London. Some people, probably most of the population of the United States, would say 09/11. I think whoever is still out there, if they have time to think between the waiting and the screaming and the fighting and (if they’re lucky) the eating and sleeping, I think from now on they’ll say the date of a week ago this morning. Because nothing will ever be the same again. This is the new world. And it really is war.
Time to tell the story. Assess the situation, take stock, try and file my head in case the clutter irritates a pearl of crazy in there.
I was at work.
Ever felt sympathy for someone, watching them slog away at a job they clearly hate? That ain’t me. I love my job. I work at the Royal Armouries: it’s up to me to polish the cases, sweep the floors and act out the odd battle for the visitors. I once did a monologue about the real Ulrich von Lichtenstein! Yeah, you might have seen it. The exhibition was there for a few weeks and a lot of people came. It makes me feel better about the world that people still care about history and museums and that sort of thing. Sort of makes it all worthwhile. Point is, a lot of people are still inspired by the beauty of history – even thought the particular branch if history my museum deals with is a little bloodthirsty. But everyone is drawn to the relics of a life they can never understand. Everyone wonders how they would fare in a fight. People love holding weapons, looking at plans of sieges, hearing about how people used to be able to live off the land, independent of the government, independent of fucking multi-national corporations. Remember that story that a squirrel used to be able to travel the length and breadth of this island without ever touching the ground because there used to be so many trees in Britain? That fucking made my heart bleed. I remember going to see Lord of the Rings and I actually felt tears ripening under my eyelids when I saw the little hobbit village at the beginning. I know it wasn’t all roses and stuff for people back then. But I sometimes think it would have been great to live off the land and take my chances with disease, barbarians and wild animals as a sort of price to pay.
I have always accepted that life is made up of a series of balances that will always re-assert themselves if you disrupt them. Pleasure and pain, good times and hard. That’s just the universe. We live under its terms or not at all.
I suppose I should have seen this coming, claiming to be so enlightened and all.
* * *
I looked at the row of naginata on the wall. Their tapered elegance combined with the great, flat blade like a slice of eternity attracted me in the first place but now, I saw it as the ideal weapon to fight an opponent from whom it was advisable to keep a distance. I took down the one nearest to me: black lacquer with a thick, red tassel dangling from the neck of the blade like a token of good luck, or whatever you people take red to symbolise. I have never seen it as being anything other than powerfully benign.
The weapon was wonderfully light and flexible as a willow-stick. I swung a few experimental swipes jabs to test the firmness and precision of the movements. I was not disappointed.
I should tell you at this point that I love naginata. The wide, elegant, sweeping gestures, the absolute ballet of the budo discipline the elders themselves admit freely takes the highest degree of grace and dexterity. The fact of the matter is that I’m as stiff and featureless as a lighting rod. I haven’t a hope in hell of ever mastering the discipline. People like to be alone for certain things; crying, sleeping, bleeding etc. Me, I like to spend time alone with weapons, playing, exploring the nature of my place in space and perhaps, dare I hope, improving. Makes me sound a little strange, doesn’t it?
Anyway. Seemed like I was about to be put to the test. I prepared myself in the way I always do.
The greatest weapons masters made their own implements. There are those who say a person’s weapon is their soul and as such, should be as much a part of them as possible. It helps me enormously to think of my naginata as being an extension of my arm, as much a part of me as my left leg. If you have made your weapon, I guess you know it about as well as ever you could; its weaknesses, its strengths, its capabilities. In the same way as a parent aspires to, I suppose. It’s a pity people aren’t constant and frozen in time like blades. But they don’t rust. They sort of…settle if exposed to an unfriendly element.
The room was soundless. The polished wood floor was flawless, beautifully chestnut-tinted and smelled of lacquer and sap. The soft tread of my wrapped feet was as harmonious with the quiet as hollow bamboo tapping on a stone.
An empty sound; a pure one. I was glad of the tightness of my garments. I felt spare; I had lost a lot of weight since that day but I seemed to have been streamlined and the weapon in my hand, gripped close to the blunt end was as light as a garden cane in my practised paw.
I could hear them scratching along the corridor. The walls were only plasterboard. I could hear them scratching, uttering ugly grunts, thick with phlegm and grave dirt; gargling soil. I could trace their progress towards the corner door of the hall. I was tense as a cable, wound tight, trembling with it, no, humming and vibrating with the reserves I had summoned from deep, deep inside, for what was to be my last battle.
I was sure of that. But I never considered running. I once had a dream of an asteroid in the sky; a meteor growing and growing; imperceptible but getting closer every day. Dreams, like fear, fuck with time. It crept and crept at first, then, in the latter stages of the inevitable collision of asteroid with planet, it charged, it thundered at us. In the dream, I felt what it was to be facing imminent, inevitable death. I felt it. I believed it: therefore it was real. The reason dreams have such a unique power to fuck us up is because reality is nothing more than the sum of our sensory perceptions and the results as processed by our brains. In every important sense of the word, except for physically that is, dreams are real. And that asteroid was real. My life was forfeit to an outside force and I was terrified, frantic with fear and grief. The old cliché; I wasn’t ready to die.
Grief won out over terror. I might have run, have tried to escape but I decided that dignity and acceptance, actually, no, denial, would be the softest version of the blow that must fall. I curled up on the floor of my bedroom, minutes from the impact, and tried to go to sleep. I just didn’t want to know anything about it.
Did you ever hear such a load of bullshit in your life?
Of course I should have run. Giving up is death. Acceptance is death. As long as there is the smallest chance that you could improve your lot, as long as you are able to wring another second of pleasure, or achievement, or worthy battle from life then that is the only thing there is. That is all there is to do. To stop running is death. We fight, we live, then death comes for us, soft as a feathered wing obscuring the sun. There is no other way.
And that’s why I stood there in that practise hall, with its pristine sanctity. That’s why I waited, robed in white like a swan, trembling along every nerve, every limb like a tuning fork. The frequency was my own, I called the tune. The naginata extended my reach by seven feet. Like me, because I was trembling, it trembled; the tassel was shaking as if in eagerness, anticipation, sheer energized being.
I was a weapon. I was a weapon with a soul, a geas, a charmed spirit bound to it. We shared a fate. We shared power. And such as I had, it would find the end of its journey, well, the end of the part of it I had any say in, in the heart of my opponent. Nothing else mattered.
Since my fear did me no good, I ceased to be afraid.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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