lost words

i've been quiet. i'm trying to break the flow of a self-focused contemplation that is at the core of this blog. i'm seeking to move away from self. i can't divorce my self from my words, but i can try to project my contemplations further than me. solipsism is rampant. i wonder if an alternative approach is possible.

or maybe i'm just bored with my self to the point that i seek drama elsewhere.

i'm not going to write about my day, my men, or the conversations that i make, because these don't matter today.

i've developed an addiction for reading and watching news footage from the "The Arab Spring", and in particular, the conflict in Syria.

facebook is different now. Each morning I find dozens of videos taken from handheld cameras in unknown Syrian cities; of protests, or buses passing below someone's window, or close-up footage of men bleeding and dying. these videos are not yet edited or spliced into 'news footage'. they're in arabic so i can't understand the context or the voices speaking. but i can understand screams, songs, chanting. i can hear tones of anger or hope.

this morning there was a man with blood on his chest and face, and other men screaming, holding him, praying for him. another person films him, with a shaky camera hovering above, flinching and stumbling around the scene of blood and screams, inserting another body (my body) into that space. soon, the camera is spinning around the scene, capturing every direction and all shapes and colours, and i grow dizzy. i'm unable to comprehend what i see. but i hear the cries, and i sense that my incomprehension is shared among those at the scene. i don't know what's happening, and nor do they. how can this be comprehensible?

i fall into this footage and i'm dizzy from the action that whirls around me. some decades ago, i could not be part of this dazed experience of war and loss. this reminds me that yes, this is painful and immense, and yes, this is happening. and perhaps the clean edit of a news story, or a feature film depiction, is part of the problem in how we come to narrativise war and loss, because these are constructions that do not resemble the moments found here. why should we make sense of these things? why feel like we can understand what's happening? what happens if we agree that we cannot?