I do not invest a great deal of time in the news. I think I was about three weeks late in learning about coronavirus and someone had to tell me that Russia had invaded Ukraine.
Of Ukraine, I know precious little. Aside from about Chernobyl, about which I am relatively well versed.
I know rather more about Russia. Of course, I spent seven weeks there in 2018 and actually loved it. Loved Moscow. Loved the people. Loved the galleries and the theatre. Loved wandering about and using the metro. Loved trying to speak Russian.
Now, I was hardly ignorant about Putin. I read a load of books about oligarchs and propaganda and crime and murder and the mind-games and use of the media and so on. Oh, and about the poisoning of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, in Salisbury and about the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London. The former because of a rather good BBC drama series based on the events and the latter as I watched a play about Litvinenko at the Old Vic and subsequently read Luke Harding’s book A Very Expensive Poison, which was excellent. The play, written by Lucy Prebble, was superb – one of the best and most memorable I’ve seen.
What I feel now is terrible sadness. Now, the expected feeling is the unmitigated concern for the people of Ukraine…. This is… preposterous, what is happening. Obscene. Surreal. Yes, surreal. There are wars happening all over the world and yet it does change the way we feel about it that it is… closer? Or, horrendously, that it involves ‘Westerners’? People are dying everywhere and yet this alters the perspective and that seems wrong and yet inevitable. And the people never deserve it. Ha! Even the expected feeling has these unexpected and complicated elements. Because unless it is (or has) happened to you, yourself, it remains abstract. Numbers of people…. I can’t… My mind can’t encompass this.
Like trying to encompass the suffering in a pig barn or of a bile bear or of an albatross chick whose stomach is full of plastic. It is too alien and remote. There is empathy and yet the empathy is through a bell jar in what always really matters most is what is within one’s own little atmosphere.
But then there is also this sadness for Russian people. Millennia of dreadful leaders that turn their motherland into the world’s wicked witch. A vast and beautiful country of mystery and music is made monstrous by mammoth ambition.
This capacity for callous and self-serving cruelty. That, that it exists, breaks the heart and shatters hope.
Comentarios