Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 4/24/05: Retrograde

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

A Mars Retrograde is what my mystic friend called it. Those weeks when everyone’s life goes to hell at once.

There are times when the work doesn’t just pile up, it blows through like a dust storm, in great spastics drifts that cover rooms in mountains of snowy white paper, then sweep away again, leaving silence. Sometimes when this happens you feel like you’re the only one beneath the wheel, other times everyone around you seems to be running from some calamity of their own. Whether this is attributable to the stars or just bad luck is anyone’s guess. But I’m warming to the idea. The word “retrograde” is what does it, really. ”Going backwards.” That’s the feeling you get, isn’t it, when life overwhelms you a little bit – the sense that you are going against the grain, challenging your destiny and making an enemy of your own future. The sense that things are not supposed to be this way.

If the astrologers are right, and the malign forces in the world are due to the influence of Mars and Saturn, wouldn’t it suggest a wonderful option for disposing of Earth’s vast nuclear stockpiles? Launch them all at those celestial rogues, in careful volleys calculated to knock the offenders out of their orbits and send them winging off into deep space, to work their malevolent mojo on some other race of sentient beings with delusions of science.

Astrology, my mystic friend swears, truly originated in the Middle East, among Arabic people. Modern astrology is a Western Perversion.

Everyone should have a mystic friend to tell them these things.

I recently read a charming dispatch from Quatar in which a sheik explained that that other horrid western perversion, oral sex, arose from the disgusting Occidental practice of removing one’s clothes while fucking. Which ties back nicely to my theory that the whole “radical Islam” thing that’s getting everyone so steamed is really just an iteration of basic biological desire in male animals to kill anyone who’s getting laid more than thay are.

Spring is finally here, and Amman has started to get hot, bit it won’t bake for another month or so. Now, it’s just sticky, warm and overcast like south Texas before a summer storm, except the rain never comes and the nights are stuffy, damp and barely cooler than the days.

I take refuge from the heat in the battered little English school where I work. You know you’re in the third word when the first thing schools advertise are their air-conditioners. They turn them up full blast as soon as the temperature gets above 50, and freeze the students to their seats like popsicles. No wonder they don’t learn anything.

Sooner or later, every ex-pat faces this moment. The local English school, purgatory for all who flee America. They’re pretty much the same, the third-world over; the tiny worn-out rooms with erasable marker stains on the wall, and slats over the windows, and a faint tracery of Arabic graffiti on the dingy white paint. They pick up teachers like strip joints pick up new girls; luring in the transitioning or temporarily lost. Itinerant students, broke journalists, stranded backpackers, all get shanghaied in to fill the school’s extravagant promise of “native English-speaking instructors.”

Just like a strip joint, it’s decent money, but never really worth it. The danger lies in staying there too long.

It seems the world is full of dead ends. Little traps laid for the unwary. We try to plot our lives between these, like boats dodging the rocks on a deep and unpredictable river. Which is perhaps ironic, because it implies that, as pragmatic or scientific or jaded as we may be, we still believe, in some way, in destiny. We believe there is a way life is supposed to work out, and a million ways it isn’t. That if we stay on the path, avoiding the wolves and pitfalls, that we will somehow get somewhere, or accomplish something, if not as individuals, then at least we contribute to the progress of a nation, or a species, or science.

And when we get off the path, we’re moving backwards. Mars, retrograde.

This kind of hidden theism gives me nosebleeds. (That, or I have a brain tumor. News to follow.) I had to go back to America recently; just for a few days, to take care of some business, and for me it was like going backwards in time. I had awakened from a dream, into a world where people lived in accordance with rules I had forgotten. They had places to go, and ways to get there. Magical realism, redux.

But, of course, then I had to wonder, which world was real, and which wasn’t?

Am I at a dead end, in a city where millions are born, live their entire lives and die? Is it a risk I’m taking, when I go to another spot on a globe where people are growing up and getting jobs and getting sick and dying? One by one, the lines that moored my to the world I grew up in, the world where things are supposed to work out, are snapping.

Strange things happen to people when they stop believing in the river, and the boat, and the harbor at the end under white cliffs. I mean, really stop believing, and see that there is no harbor, no cliffs or rocks, just open water in every direction, and all the things you took for hills and valleys just ripples that appear for a second and vanish back again into the dark sea.

I lived my life in a fantasy, and now I’m struggling to wake up, like the sleeper who feels the incubus’ weight on his chest, and strains to move, but can’t.

- Nicholas Seeley, 4/24/05

Posted by rjt at April 26, 2005 03:32 PM