YES BLOG

Jet-lag

I lie in the bath at the hotel at 5:00 am, jet-lagged, having awoken from my own nightmares. I had read in the papers in the hotel lobby the day before that techniques now used in interrogation in Iraq were developed by the British in Northern Ireland (the hooding, stress positions and so on). The Geneva Convention is now considered ‘irrelevant’; torture has become acceptable in the ‘war on terror’.  We are acting like barbarians in the name of civilization.  (That’s why in YES, ‘She’ says at one point “The things they have done have not been in my name.  I don’t feel pride. I feel a deepening shame.”)

As I soak in the bath, letting in more hot water now and then, different kinds of war start to converge in my groggy mind.  There is the conflict in the Middle East, there is Mexican history, the complexities of which I am starting to absorb, and then there is my relatively trivial small private battle with criticism of my work, for the potential encounters with the critic are becoming a minor preoccupation. If a bad review can remain for so long in my consciousness, how must it be to live with the trauma of war? It’s unbearable to think of the foundations of suffering and bitterness which are being laid now in the Middle East for future generations, given that the scars from the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages have not yet healed. 

Later I do some press interviews on the roof of the hotel. The questions are mostly about love.

Comment on this post