A quick gesture, a glance, a catching of the eye, that little something, whatever it takes to entice one in off the street, Come inside, only looking, you’ll find the best stuff upstairs.
Hooked. You know me, I can’t resist the search for a bargain and upstairs I go, and it is the same man beckoning, the one who offered to sell you back your soul and gave you his card, I have one too now of course, the script in Arabic, you say. Or is it Cyrillic, the way the man smiles is reminding me of Smerdyarkov in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov:
“His face expressed a form of extreme insolence, and at the same time – which was strange – an obvious cowardice. He looked like a man who had been submissive for a long time, but had suddenly jumped up and tried to assert himself, or, better still, like a man who wants terribly to hit you, but is terribly afraid that you are going to hit him.”
In a word – traumatised – and thereby a member of that great global number (WHO world population estimate 2010 = 4-6 billion).
You are right to remind us of the central purpose of our meetings, and the main subject of our blog pilgrimage – a Moral Tale – “Straznoya” (sp?) my new Russian friends at the ‘Listening Station’ call it, meaning I think some deeper form of spiritual questioning, complex and contradictory, for these troubled times in which we live, undertaken in the sort of extended conversations the Russians are well used to, in their tradition so to speak, for instance like the one between the two brothers in the Brothers Karamazov sat together in the tavern ‘Metropolis’, which lasts over three long chapters, to and fro, to and fro around the opening two lines of an unfinished poem –
Believe what the heart tells you
For heaven offers no pledge
– Between the two brothers; Aloysha, the more holy, the more saintly, or, if you like, the bigger fool; and Ivan, the more philosophical and intellectual, or, if you prefer, the more confused…
… and still in the tavern ‘Metropolis’, our horses tethered outside, only we are some forty years older than those two, and certainly neither of us are a Dostoyevsky, and yet still somehow of the same compromised and tainted lineage as the Karamazovs, yes, and even of that same breed too as Pinky or Perky with their “…long carnivorous mouths with plump lips… (that) sprayed saliva whenever they spoke”, extolling their pseudo-markets and twisted exchange systems for the traumatised, selling them back their souls in a flood of spit against which, being of the same people, we struggle helplessly… soul searching we are not progressing… but we are definitely moving on.
No thank you, I don’t want any of what you have got to sell today.