The Consoling Power of Death
By Milan Djurasovic
23 October, 2013
Countercurrents.org
Collage| By Milan Djurasovic
Collage made as a response to Dick Cheney's book
How Much Land Does a Man Need is Leo Tolstoy's short story that used to provide me with considerable consolation each time I heard that yet another resource rich or geopolitically strategic piece of land was invaded and exploited on a command uttered by a handful of corporate despots. In this short story the reader meets Pahom, a diligent peasant who succumbs to greed and who loses his life in a hypnotizing, stupefying, and compassion annihilating pursuit of ‘more.'
Although Pahom already had enough means to live the rest of his days in comfort (he earned those means through hard work), he swiftly jumped at the opportunity to obtain more land than a sizable and densely populated village could sustain. He is told by generous Bashkirs that he could keep all the land he manages to walk around during daylight hours of a single day for a very low price, provided he returns to the exact spot he starts his journey from. With a few chunks of bread, a flask of water, a spade to mark the borders of his land, and a voracious heart, Pahom began his journey. Thoughts such as: “This spot is so fine, that it would be pity to lose it,” and “the further one goes, the better the land seems,” urged Pahom to wander off too far from the starting point. As he hurried back, drowsy and injured, Pahom realized that “the sun waits for no man.” He managed to return to the original spot just in time, but drained from his expedition he plummets to the ground and dies. Pahom is then buried in a grave just long enough to fit his body and the reader discovers that "six feet from his head to his heels was all that man needed".
Toys cannot replace Limbs |Collage By Milan Djurasovic
Up until a couple of weeks ago -when for the first time I saw George W. Bush's artwork- I used to compare Pahom's life and mindset to the ways of corporate despots. I used to tell myself: “Sure they have everything, but they spend every minute of their time in a never-ending hunt for more, and that is definitely not the optimal way to spend one's one and only life.” Unfortunately, Tolstoy's wisdom stopped having any soothing effect on me after I saw that a mind of a man who is responsible for shredding flesh and bones of hundreds of thousands of human beings is now occupied with painting fluffy puppies and semi-nude self portraits. His partner in crime, the former Vice President Dick Cheney, perhaps the biggest of warmongers and political criminals, is also enjoying his $90 million net worth without an iota of compunction. Furthermore, this unapologetic and heartless man gathered his partners in crime at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago to share a few knee slapping jokes about murder and torture. The only people missing at this congregation of the vile and wicked were sex offenders and cannibals who would have warmed the cold blood of the former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Former Sen. Joe Lieberman and other barbarians with a couple of rape and flesh eating jests
The reason why these hustlers have enough time to stop and smell the stolen roses is because unlike Pahom, who did all the trudging and land marking himself, other poor souls are given guns and ordered to encircle any patch of soil that the delicate hands of corporate tyrants point towards. And unlike Pahom who plummeted to the ground and died of exhaustion, whenever Dick Cheney's heart murmurs he just gets a new defibrillator as if it were a lollipop. Reassembling ones heart countless times while the rest of us are told that healthcare and education is where the budget cuts need to be made is much worse than making a smacking sound while eating a ham and cheese sandwich in front of a starved Gypsy family.
With hearts whose valves are insatiable, bottomless pits, one would be foolish to hope that these scoundrels would even for a second regret massacring thousands of innocent people. Unfortunately, one would be even more foolish to hope that the International Criminal Court's selective justice would move to indict Mr. Cheney and his friends because the ICC jail cells are reserved for Serbs and Africans who refused to obey the commands of the intimidating imperial master.
Therefore, I needed to look for a consolation and justice elsewhere, and for a while I found it in a couple of sentences of Anton Chekov's Ward No.6 . “I react to pain by weeping or shouting, to baseness with indignation, to vileness with revulsion. In my opinion that's a fact, that's what's called life. The lower the organism the less sensitive it is and the more feebly it reacts to stimuli. The higher it is, the more sensitively and energetically it responds to the external world.” This is what the ‘lunatic' Gromov says when he is told that he should ignore his abject living conditions and look for peace and serenity within himself.
“They are callus beasts,” I used to tell myself. “They are as cold and as emotionless as the drones and weapons they use to loot and kill. “All the riches in this world cannot replace keen awareness and sensitivity.” But other than a few long lasting friendships, keen awareness and sensitivity to pain, baseness, and vileness has also awarded me innumerable sleepless nights, panic attacks, and slight blocks and spasms in my speech.
The most revolting characteristic of human nature is man's willingness to delude himself, and I would be deluding myself if I said that a life devoid of awareness and sensitivity is enough of a punishment for a war criminal. Fear of death could be. In an interview to CBS' “60 Minutes,” Former Vice President Dick Cheney revealed that he feared assassination via hacking and disabling the wireless device to regulate his heartbeat . We'll never know whether the former Vice President was truly fearful or just dramatizing his woes to promote his new book, but what all of us are certain of is that regardless of how many heart replacements or what kind of medical treatment millions of dollars can afford, a six foot grave or an urn is an inevitable end for all of us, and that is the only consolation that helps me sleep at night.
This article is by Milan Djurasovic , a Bosnian American collage artist, blogger, and a book author. He currently lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia. His educational background is in psychology and history.
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