By Mohamed Ismail Amara

May I offer you shelter under my umbrella, fine sir, as you appear to be a stranger
in this desolate land of ours? I believe we have a common destination. You are headed to
the train station, right?

Let us walk together. A queer weather, you might notice. A swift, soft breeze that
caresses your skin after a day of scorching sun. Hither, the sun teaches discipline. Through
its eloquent yet not very gentle rays, it speaks to us as we navigate our way from one beech
tree to another. Let us walk into the gates of the old Souk and smell the humid scent of the
damp ramparts. The water droplets will sneak their way out of the feeble mass of gravel
and sand to tell us a story. In the faint voice of an aging city and in harmony with the
whistling wind, tenderly writing notes in our ears as a virtuoso, the choristers of life chant
the anthem of a lost city.

This way, sir. The road is forged with error and distrust, the pavement with fear and
sorrow. It’s a wonder this ragged mess has yet to collapse. It is no longer a virtuous land.
Many a vehicle tarnished this once-sainted road, and many a foot stomped the
kaleidoscopic pavement, rendering it lifeless and colorless.

Unaware of the howls of the creatures slumbering within, they swept through the
city, leaving massacre and distortion behind.

I apologize if I am tainting your perspective with my bleak portrayal of the city. I
am neither a cynic nor a painter of doom. I am a priest of solitude.

This land, my fellow passenger, is in a terminal-stage cancer of solitude. A disease
that has festered in its already frail body since the jasmines of hope, innocently intended to
guide it to prosperity, have turned into poison ivy.

Fascinating, isn’t it? To be submerged in an eternal state of chagrin so seldom
interrupted by a passing cloud of jubilation. Look at the buildings, for instance, and try to
perceive the patterns that connect this anarchic haphazardness. Take a good look and search
for details, comrade, for in details lies the story. Don’t be like the hollow tourists of
Jerusalem, mindless cogs standing in oblivion on the façade of the battlefields. They see
nothing in the city but meaningless rocks and hear nothing but the shutters of their cameras.

We indeed seek glory without and within, portraying our incapacity for
transcendence in things that outlive and outrank us. We desperately attempt to immortalize
our ephemeral existence by transferring our essence into objects or beings. Some create
books and poems, while others develop fairies and deities, and the layman bears children.
Let us walk down the stairs. We are getting nearer to the station. Do not worry. Don’t be
hasty, cherished creature, for that is the opium of the modern masses. We sprint through life
like rabid dogs escaping the pound, until we find out there is no pound; we are the pound.
The oppression of techno-wizardry enchants us. A tyranny that we, without prompting,
inflicted on ourselves. Have we lost the capacity for thought, my dear friend? Has our
pursuit of transcendence driven us farther into the lambs of slaughter that we most fear?
Has our axiom of existence, that is, our cogito, been rendered meaningless and obsolete?

A plague that traverses all borders of mind and spirit like a vicious crow eating off
the flesh of these indolent, lethargic creatures. Look around you and see a lost wanderer.

They are all around, yet we feel so alone. There are such wide screens and dazzling
lights, yet it feels so dark. I have once heard this anecdote that I must recount in your
presence if you oblige. It is said that Dom Pérignom, the creator of the Champagne, called
on his companion following his first sip. “Come quick,” he said, “I’m tasting the stars.” The
sky is full of stars, my dear companion; we just no longer have the eyes to see them.

A refined version of the jungle, or organized society, is a tragic comedy that
bestows on our feeble collective a state of intersubjective illusion. An illusion that
transcended the borders of fiction, transitioning into a somewhat dystopian reality, fiddling
with the wires of our mental engines as a puppeteer swiftly pulls the strings of his obedient
marionettes. Ôhumanity, an amateur play, a Shakespearian disaster. Grand schemes and
master plans, elegant words, and eloquent rhetoric. Ô the fortune of the Plebeians, how I
envy their blissful ignorance, comrade. The burden of conscience torments me;
it bereaves me of life’s simplest joys. How much I would have longed to be Kafka’s
cockroach or Dostoevsky’s insect. To each, their misery, and mine is one I can not escape,
for it is forged in thought as in spirit.

Follow my lead, for we have approached our destination. Forgive the filthy disposition
of the entrance; it is meant to repel unwelcome visitors. It is intended to distinguish the
explorer from the tourist, the seeker of the truth from the colonizer. This place has known many
of the latter. They came from all lands and races, each promising salvation yet delivering doom.
Read the meditations on the murals, for they will elucidate their grievances better than my
garrulous nature ever will. You see nothing, you say?

Let me read it to you. “Date Obolum Belli Sario ”, give a farthing to Belisarius, a dear
fellow of mine. Allow me to further trouble your ease with this story of the fallen land, for it is
essential to ride this train. It is your boarding pass if you will.

Ben Franklin’s satire sure does perfectly describe the state of this humble abode.
But, please observe its worthless disposition, paralyzed as an aging empire. Having exhausted
all of its defenses, it now solely relies on its gruesome allure to keep its enemies at bay.

Read the letters on its cut-off limbs. “Hope”, “Empathy”, “Love”, “Gratitude”.
Naive fiddlestick!

What bewilders me most when I look at that satirical artwork, dear friend, is the face
of the general. Look at it carefully, and you will come across a rather peculiar remark.
It is not sad. Its traits do not forego any signs of sorrow or remorse. On the contrary, they deliver
a much more frightening feeling, in my opinion. Indifference, with a hint of sardonicism, is
what it conveys. It almost mocks its adversaries, depriving them of the sweet joy of victory.
“I have lived through many woes, suffered so many losses that I have become numb.
No joys of the heavens nor damnation of the abyss can alter my disposition.” Why did it not
resort to the most accessible escape, that is, suicide, you might ask? You are very
mistaken, I would say, for suicide demands courage. It requires hope and energy. In simple
terms, comrade, one needs to be alive for one to be able to commit suicide.

Do not bemoan its plight or attempt to assist it. This land does not seek salvation,
for you cannot save what is already ruined. Now let us enter the station. The train departs
in no time.

There is our ride, that rose-colored wagon that says, “Train to Nowhere.” Be careful,
for the wagon changes colors at every station. Pray take the seat by the window. I do not
want it. I am only here to guide you through the scenery.

Listen to our vehicle as it whistles off, declaring its departure from nowhere to
nowhere, out of the blue and into its depth. Whistles are commonly a warning to all the
passengers of a once-crowded station of the going away of their only ride out of the abyss. But
the abyss is isolated and bereaved now, its fires burning low, its demons fading into meaninglessness
and alienation. What is the purpose of an abyss if its damned are indifferent to punishment
and retribution? What is torture if the criminal is numb and deprived of the sweet joy of pain?
Oh, here come the rail squeals, choking the hard metals and forcing a cry of agony. Look
out the window! Yes, right there! A tiny three-year-old creature grasps its cherished meal of
spaghetti and meatballs. “You can figure out the menu of the day from his shirt.” He gazes attentively
at the old TV set, with tomato sauce sparsely tainting every inch of his garments.”The cute little
thing of the house,” they called him. His articulately pronounced expressions and attempts
to join adult conversations were ignored with an air of parental admiration that further reiterated
a recurring idea in his evolving mind. No one took him seriously, and he did not like that.

Associating age with mental capacity and consciousness is a concept that has long
bewildered me. A phenomenon devoid of meaning for what correlation exists between the
continuous and inevitable passing of time and the growth of one’s ability to generate
meaning out of life’s recurring patterns, especially in the case of the modern human.
What exactly about this mundane, humdrum, routine misery makes us believe that
we are growing?

We are stuck in an infinite loop, my dear fellow, that starts and restarts in suffering,
a vicious cycle that lures us in with an enchanting cloak of delight only to take us inside the
monstrous great fish. And we are no Jonah, comrade, and we have no prophecy nor salvation.
Unaware of the meaning and incognizant of the purpose of our absurdist reality, that kid
had dreams. He created stories and fantasies of imaginary realms, desperate to escape
the limiting, bordered existence of his frustrating human corporeality.

As the boy grew more cognizant of himself and his surroundings, he developed
an insatiable thirst for knowledge and inadvertently caught the reading flu, a vile disease.
He read everything he could get his hands on. He could not bear the frustration of saying,
“I do not know.” He knew that he did not have the gift of looks or the natural charm that
would guarantee him a swift integration into his social entourage from a ripe age. His
alternative to seducing attention from his friends and family was to have an answer for
everything. He was, alas, oblivious to the magnetic void of reading. The more he read,
the more he disassociated himself from reality and all of its aspects. Why would he try to
make hateful, hypocritical connections if he could always resort to his novels’ noble,
loving characters?  His characters never laid upon his soft nature a barrage of prejudices
or a hail of stereotypes. He never lied to them or explained why he did not like loud voices
and passive-aggressive grins.

Look at him, sinking in an empty bathtub amid the grim darkness, holding
a flashlight in his tiny hands. Through the night, he wept over the miseries of young Jane Eyre,
which quite related to his misfortunes. He smiled as Emma scolded the idiotic young
brides of England. His heart was filled with patriotism and rebellion as little Gavroche
soared over the barricades, announcing the end of tyranny. Goosebumps shriveled
his skin as he played “A la volonté du Peuple” in his mind. In his small tub, he was a general,
a leader of the rebels on the frontline of the battlefield. Perceive the passion that
shimmers from his eyes as he figures out the cases of Sherlock Holmes. In his small
mental abode, he was a king, a poet, a bandmaster, and an exceptional genius.

Alas, every morning, at precisely 7 a.m. the high-pitched voice of his mother would
transport him back to the sorrowful reality, just as the sharp whistles of the jailer would
carry the herd of jubilant prisoners back to their cells. I have always had this random
thought about the daily routine of the incarcerated. I reckon that the fraction of time given
to prisoners to wander the open-air square or backyard under the pretext of offering them
a hint of fresh air is the cruelest of punishments. Every single day, they are forced to
gobble up a fake pill of hope and freedom, only to have it swept back down their throats.

Thirsty for elusion from this arid land of confinement, they spring out of their cells,
longing for the soothing waters of freedom, only to find themselves in a mirage, a bad joke.

We are nearing the next station. Notice how everything in the wagon swiftly
changes colors. The bright, passionate pink slowly fades into a freezing dark blue,
as if announcing our arrival at the gates of hell. The frames of the external world frighten
the innocent nature of our windows, and we see only a blurry image of a teenage figure
lying in bed. Look at him and tell me, fellow passenger, for my eyes have started to fail me.
It is indeed the figure of the boy as he evolved in shape and in mind.

As the years passed, he only grew more distant and solitary, a pariah in a society
that so implicitly loathed his uncommon disposition. As the walls of his room drew closer
and the ponderings inside of his head louder, he resorted to the relief of poetry.
He frequently used this technique to sift through his mind’s screaming horrors and jot them
down in his small notebook. “You get so alone at times that it just makes sense.”
was his first encounter with the art. The masterpiece of his imaginary friend,
Charles Bukowski, threw the boy into the arena of society and its morals. The lessons
that his friends would learn from the adventures in the neighborhood, he learned from Bukowski.

Do not let this lead you to believe that the boy had an introverted nature or that
his solitude was mere imprisonment inside the walls of his room, for he was a very active
and sociable teenager. He played sports of every kind and form, made friends,
and attended social gatherings. While his material corpse was present and interactive,
charming and passionate, his mind and spirit were never there. He tried to associate
himself with the ordinary, for sometimes he felt that he was at fault, that he should
malleate his distorted being and fit into the standards of society. Whenever he attempted
to enter this rigid cell, he felt alienated, suffocated by the claustrophobia of mental
incarceration, and afraid.

Fear, such an enigmatic word, is linguistically constructed to instill a feeling of
uneasiness, restlessness, and discomfort. Fear is the sound of people approaching,
the tap of footsteps on wooden floors, curiously mimicking the march of an army on a
defenseless land. He is the defenseless land, the uncharted territory on which the colonizers
of his existence stomp and plant their flags and emblems of stereotypes and misconceptions.
Fear is small talk and greetings in the hallway. Fear is dyslexia taking over his
misconstrued sentences and senseless words soaring out of his mouth as tropical birds
flee their homelands at the sound of a gunshot. Fear is the order of things, the norms
and standards of a society so bemusing to his estranged mind. Fear is alienation,
solitude, and a lack of belonging to any group of footsteps. Fear is holy books and the
ire of deities promising the outcast eternal damnation, an abyss much more tender
than the abuse of his meaningless existence.

A strange feeling of alienation beneath and beyond. There is no haven among
humans and no refuge beneath the gods for the unwanted and unloved.

Amongst the many cuffs that his entourage started to lay on his boneless hands
was the sadist phenomenon of the calling, the vocation. “What do you want to do when
you grow up?” was constant harassment, a long-running investigation that offered him
a wide range of spots on the assembly line. What mindless, insignificant contribution
will he add to the screws of the machine as he perceives his life speeding in front of
his lagging eyes as one of the countless products packaged and labeled, strangled into
the grasp of a conveyor belt? Desperate to find his flame, his one passion, he navigated
the arts and sciences like a famished seagull scanning the seas. Nothing could
appease his ceaseless energy for more than a few days. He failed to adapt to a system
so limiting and restricting, so tailored to prey on his mercurial traits of character. He fell into
despair, persuaded that he was born unworthy, a genetic anomaly, an inherited disorder
with no perks nor purpose. What do you reckon is the root for this pandemic of thought,
this disease of purpose, fellow passenger?

As the clock ticks to a new beginning, he stumbles, begrudgingly,
into a new second, a new state of existence rather unknown to his freezing mental abode.
It is a stark metamorphosis that tilts from an exalting ethereal being to a cockroach,
ephemerally lying on its back in a cycle of eternal suffering. He gazes at the blank ceiling,
yearning for meaning, for nirvana to elevate him from this chaotic order to harmonious chaos.

There is this quote, whose author I do not know, that keeps haunting my mind.
“A wanderer is never lost.” A peculiar way to look at things, comrade. Clever trickery of
the system. How can one be in a maze if one is not looking for a way out? The definition
becomes obsolete, irrelevant. We can never go astray if there is no correct path. Wrap your
mind around this one. To wander through life as an aimless arrow, no targets,
no dreams, no fallen hearts to pierce. One might have legitimate cause to believe that
that is the true definition of freedom. Unchained, beyond any state of matter, like ether in
a space of ethereal beauty, disillusioned and boundless, like Buddha under the tree,
a nirvana of limitless bliss. Oh, how serene our existence would be!

As we transcend the confines of our daily misery, our minds, disinfected, will flourish.
They will forsake the physical, unsatisfactory joys of life and transition into an everlasting
orgasm in our utopia.

But that would be an act of pure cowardice, my faithful companion, wouldn’t it?

To play life like Russian roulette, each round a random stare at the barrel of a gun,
at the end of which we wish to be delivered, to depart towards the unknown. With its
uncertainty and fright, the unknown is a better alternative than the state of clinical death
that governs the prolonged misery of modern humans. Euthanasia. That is what we seek,
even if we do not bear to confess it. A thought that we drown through a process
of continuous self-hypnosis. Our eyes shimmer, our chins drip with saliva as we hear the
bells of our tyrannous autocrats ring. A sound that triggers our trained, obedient minds
to be as enchanted as the pet of Pavlov’s. We run towards them like rabid rats, seeking
safe refuge from the taunting whispers that haunt us in solitude. Human beings have,
in my opinion, never been under more forceful oppression. An interesting dilemma is that,
despite this unprecedented unconscious servitude, no slave in history has ever been
more compliant with the demands of their master than humans are with their
multitude of devices.

The label of “smart devices” is not concretized in the number of tasks these
villains can execute but in their ability to pull a most clever stunt. They seduce prideful
humans by thinking they are serving them out of a free, conscious choice. Free will,
a joke that never gets old.

I apologize for my lengthy musings, comrade; it is not common to find such
a caring listener. Let me guide you through the scenery of our last station. I sincerely
hope that you enjoyed my companionship, for I certainly relished yours. The station’s forced
and unwilling transition into grey is akin to a royalist being dragged to the guillotine
by enraged rebels. This last tour is of our beloved city. This train, similar to any trait
of our existence, goes in a vicious, unending circle. It starts and restarts in suffering.

In his dark-scented room of solitude, he meditates existence, relinquishing one
last time to its ephemeral nature, its inescapable eventuality. He opens his notebook
one last time and, with a shaking hand, he writes his prophecies.

In the nest of broken dreams, we laid
Waiting for the ritual
They taught us In prose and in verse
That to be free, is to sin
That to love, is to sin
That to dream, is to sin
They cut off our wings
They drew borders of our existence
They spoke of good and evil
We learned that good is to be incarcerated by your own mind, to be blissful about your own ignorance
Evil is to doubt, for to doubt is to think, and to think is to be and being, was not our own
We grew, like the wretched of the earth
Until we hatched our eggs
And in the nest, we taught them
That to be free, is to sin
That to love, is to sin
That to dream, is to sin

As Zarathustra when he spake, the kid decides to quit his fortress and wander the
streets of the city. Yet, he did not yearn for a stage to orchestrate his play, nor for an
audience to ponder his senseless meditations. He was gambling on a random encounter,
a kindred soul to listen to his story. Such queer weather, as you see, has a name in the city.
It’s known as “عرس الذيب ” or “A Wolf’s Wedding.” It is when the scorching rays of the sun
mingle with the dripping tears of the skies. Umbrella in hand, he walks in the direction
of a lost newcomer.

“May I offer you shelter under my umbrella, fine sir, as you appear to be a stranger in this
forlorn land of ours?”