Waiting for the Barbarians

Oh Nikita you will never know, anything about my home

I'll never know how good it feels to hold you 

Nikita I need you so

— Elton John, "Nikita"

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Dear Kate,

If this is the beginning of the end, I will always remember how it happened to me, that I was stroking a phallic TV remote, failing as expected to score myself some meaningful entertainment, when my daughter texted me a headline at the toe-end of my day: Russia Launches Attack on Ukraine.

What were you doing when you first heard about it?

I am glad before that moment I was reading Damon Galgut's 2021 Booker Prize Winner "The Promise": better memory for me, to recall a bad memory that is not mine: the fall of apartheid in South Africa.  Galgut became the third South African writer after Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee to be honored with this "ultimate prize to win in the English speaking world."  Both Gordimer and Coetzee would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I believe so will Galgut.  You heard about it here first.

As an ESL there was a time I couldn't tell why He does but not He do, and if I were to hear the same headline I heard last night nothing would surface from my shallow consciousness of human solidarity other than the wet dream that is Elton John's "Nikita."  What do I "need" Nikita for?  To answer to the embarrassing disappointment that is my "home," a democratic land of plenty, the demonic possession of having too much, living so little?

How do you remember?  What would you remember, if this is the beginning of the end?

"But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end." (J.M. Coetzee, "Waiting for the Barbarians")

Yours, Alex