Editor: Charles Bowden here is waxing philosophical and poetic, doing a very admirable effort at making some modicum of sense of the big picture. A viewpoint that can be a comfort even if as it remains an unfathomable challenge and enigma. I too grow weary of the particulars. Today I was with friends at the “pulga” or flea market, engaged in some minor business, when one of the group had to leave to give condolences to a young man who had just lost three family members in Mexico. Mother, Father, and Aunt assassinated in cold blood. The children were spared, by fate, or perhaps a cartel policy of not yet killing children in cold blood. There is very little concern by the gangs for public opinion, but murdering intentionally young children can turn even the most soulless and hardened of criminals against you.
It’s an all too common story, thousands are murdered now over a very short period of time. What was chilling to me was my reaction, also the reaction of a friend from that cartel town run by assassins…the murdered family were just more statistics, we had grown numb. It’s almost impossible to be shocked any more. I barely wrote about it. Murder has become unremarkable…The particulars are unbearable; even more so when they have become unremarkable. We have following a fine link to the bigger picture, by perhaps, the most notable writer of the border, Charles Bowden. – edgardo
The wisdom of rats
By Charles Bowden
By Charles Bowden, from “Contested Ground,” which appeared in the November/December 2009 issue of Orion. Trinity, a collaboration between Bowden and photographer Michael P. Berman, was published last October by University of Texas Press.
As a child, I could not color within the lines. Nor interest myself in children’s books. I also had trouble with categories, and this I have never outgrown. I have trouble understanding the concept of eras, I question the line in our culture that separates organic and inorganic, I talk to trees but also speak to rocks, I distrust chunks of meaning called the Ancient World, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the American Century. I falter around words like progress.
Time has also been a problem since I cannot keep the past in the past, cannot believe the present is pure and freestanding, and think the future is simply a place we imagine.
I cannot really fathom hierarchies and so I believe in evolution as a fact but not as a meaning. I understand that the man is more complex than the pigeon but I do not feel this fact nor really believe it. My first crayon drawing was of a worm thinking of a man.
