Terry Field, our Englishman who divides his time between France and Florida, has penned a lamentation, a cry of the heart despairing of the gulf that separates cultures and religions, a separation akin to death itself.  - Glenn N. Holliman

A little note concerning death

by Terry Field

The last few days have been almost unendurable.

My dear wife and I have been distraught; as have vast numbers, in the face of the Manchester abomination. We have been the remote witnesses of the death of so many, courtesy of the television.

                    Fina and Terry on happier days.

I hold the images of my sweet grandchildren close, and would wrap them in safety, were it possible.

In much earlier times, the rhythm of life was less disturbed by such sadness; people simply had no idea of what happened ‘over the horizon’.  For most, life was local, and the human condition was experienced much more personally, more immediately; proximate to the action.

Now we live with concepts.

Ideas concerning the values, opinions, beliefs, and actions of those whose lives are, in reality, remote and disconnected from that which we experience personally. To live in the unconnected and exotically varied world, we are required, in order to make any sense at all of things, to comprehend not only what alien cultures believe, but why they believe what they believe.

Yet this is, in reality, quite impossible.

I can no more understand the mind of a Hindu, a Shia or Sunni Muslim, a Suffi, a Sikh, a Jayne, or a Zen Buddhist than I can the mind of Moley my cat.  That is not to elevate the intellectual performance of Moley, nor is it in any way intended to denigrate the world views of those faiths I have mentioned.

Rather, I simply state that access to the kaleidoscope of the human experience is essentially unavailable.

Foreign minds are unknowable, despite the pretense of government and media claiming otherwise.

I am left, as are most people I would suspect – scratching our heads with incomprehension.

This degree of non-understanding is itself akin to the experience of death; and is as disturbing.

When confronted with the death of a known person – a friend, a relative, a work colleague, the reality of the utterly and irretrievably changed state of the person leaves one in a state of complete isolation. To regard a dead friend, a dead relative is, for me, the thing most able to instill a sense of utter loneliness and a feeling of being without connection.

Without understanding, and without hope.

I have felt all this during this week. Not solely by regarding the faces of the beautiful young, now smashed and mutilated dead children and accompanying parents.

My personal sense of desperate loneliness comes from understanding the killer’s life, mind, feelings, beliefs, motivations are utterly unknowable.

The fact of the killing is another dread reality. But there are two, distinct horrors here. The mind of the killer – or killers – and the act of murdering those beautiful people

There is the real problem for us all.

Within our society, large numbers of people co-exist (maybe not even that now) whose world is, quite simply, completely unknowable by the naïve and settled ‘original’ population.

However much our national media tells us the holders of these imported world views – let us not call them ‘religious beliefs’ – are really just like us.  We are lectured after these periodic killings that we must all ‘stand together’. Many shout their acceptance of this artifice, but most, I suspect, simply do not believe it.

 In our heart of hearts, we only recognize the unrecognizable.

In a dark room, when face with the silence of ourselves, we simply know we share our island with unfathomable strangers.

Most incomers are willing and able to connect to a degree required for some measure of mutual comprehension, or at the least of benign mutual respect.  

That is not a universal experience however, and it is a pernicious untruth to assert that it is. Islam, and its followers, Muslims, are notable for their relatively isolated and economically unsuccessful condition in England.

The degree of isolation, either self-imposed, or now the result of a strong mutual disregard, that Muslims experience of the wider society, and of course in vice versa, is now so chronic, so severe, so crippling of potential for future contentment, that the actions and statements of government in the light of the litany of offenses is not simply dishonest, it is in itself destabilizing.

This makes for a living social death. We are mutually non-comprehending. We are mutually isolated, and mutually traumatized by the knowledge of the unfathomable ‘otherness’ of the opposite – and now, in reality opposing – group.

I repeat, this alone is a sort of death – in – life.

Nothing can come from it, save the putrefaction of relationships.

To the extent that a young fellow can pack a nail and bolt bomb into a haversack (I assume) take it to the foyer of a children’s concert, and blast himself and those children and parents around him to pulp.

At this point the British government is a failure. It asserts the absurd; it acts ex post and lashes out at those conveniently in its path. Whilst allowing the re-importation of trained murderers from the Middle East into the social space.

Just as Mrs. May acted on perverse instinct to introduce a lunatic measure to deal with home – treated dementia sufferers during the election campaign, so she acts as an automaton in the face of a reality she simply refuses to accept.

The multi-cultural experiment in France and Britain is a failure.

In France, after Bataclan, after the Riviera horror, the government made it very clear that the attempts to work with Islam in France had all ended in failure and this was the last attempt whereby the State would accept the integrity of a joint social progress in tandem with the followers of the religion.

It was made – in public – very clear that should this last attempt end in failure, then there would be no further attempt at co-existence. Failure this time would not mean the freedom of action of the religion and its followers could or would not be guaranteed full future liberty.

Tolerance and delusion now is done in France. That is patent. Integration, mutual normal life, and complete acceptance and respect by each ‘community’ of the life of the other – with a minimization of perverse and mannered difference – is now mandatory in France.

In France, nobody any longer lies about the fantastical unreality of the ‘Islamist’

(a non-existent creature) as compared to the ‘Muslim’. No such excuse for alienated killers is any longer tolerable. The lies are swept away, as they must be, in the light of the dreadful slaughters.

England has not yet accepted this.

Why?

In part, fear of the consequences that would need to be embraced, but, rather shamefully, in part, a sort of arrogant ‘exceptionalism’ – the nonsense idea that Britain is super-tolerant, super-integrated, super-sophisticated, superior to all others.

When this damaging fantasy is abandoned, when the dreadful reality is accepted by those who count, then progress can be made.

Until that happens, the unedifying spectacle of a posturing, essentially dishonest government manipulating both truth and peoples in the light of both forms of death will continue to offend.

Britain has acted irrationally over Europe.

European political elites consider Britain to be no longer either stable or politically rational.

I would apply this criticism to the posture on Islam in Britain.

Dreadful days. - Terry Field