"What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality. This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn't look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place. Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a mean who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. "He sees too deep and too much", and what he sees is essentially chaos. For the bourgeois, the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his preoccupation with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois' complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense that the truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no hope for an ultimate restoration of order. Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told. ... The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos. He may have no reason to believe that chaos is positive, the germ of life (in the Kabbala, chaos—tohu bohu—is simply a state in which order is latent; the egg is the "chaos" of the bird); in spite of this, truth must be told, chaos must be faced"
"All men should possess a 'visionary faculty'. Men do not, because they live wrongly. They live too tensely, under too much strain, 'getting and spending'. But this loss of the visionary faculty is not entirely man's fault, it is partly the fault of the world he lives in, that demands that men should spend a certain amount of their time 'getting and spending' to stay alive. …The visionary faculty comes naturally to all men. When they are relaxed enough, every leaf of every tree in the world, every speck of dust, is a separate world capable of producing infinite pleasure. If these fail to do so, it is man's own fault for wasting his time and energy on trivialities. The ideal is the contemplative poet, the 'sage', who cares about having only enough money and food to keep him alive, and never takes thought for the morrow."
Colin Wilson, The Outsider.
Why were we there? Why was the truth vanishing away from him the closer he came?
The voice was clear: You can have your memories back. And then in his head a curious conversation. What if I don't want them all back, what if I only want the happy ones. The entity, fed now by millions of people and millions of computers but nonetheless still itself, did a search. Not many happy memories to choose from, it reported; the brilliant sunshine on the cliffs as they ran and ran, forever boys; finding a new Famous Five in the public library. You didn't enjoy your life very much, it commented, and as he came into consciousness he kept repeating it, guilty, guilty.
The sadhus sat on the bridge deep in the Himalayas. All of them were smoking hashish, your mother's worst nightmare of a hippy. The kids sneer, as if they're lunatics. An entire era was swept away in psychedelic baubles. He wanted to speak to someone, he wanted to be friends, he wanted to be in love with life; and around him the colours had not changed, the grey steel of the hospital everywhere. In darkness and in hell. He could never be convinced that everything was true.
The ways were warped. Old cars pulled up under sunlit trees. The flat lake of Narribeen, the stinking sea weed on the water's edge, the pointless deaths on foreign fields, none of it mattered as he struggled to wake. You can have all your memories back. What is the pact; the devil's pact? What do I have to surrender? Fighting. In all the small creases, absolved, free of guilt, you can have your memories back. He found the woman in the sitting room, curled as always in a loungechair.
Each day, in the days that had passed since their first conversation, she had looked at him, smiled sadly and said: not today. This time, when he sat in the lounge chair next to her, she held his hands and looked into his eyes. How are you feeling? she asked. "I think I'm alright," he said. "Insane collapses of the mind. I don't know where I am half the time. I have the strangest thoughts."
"It's all normal," she said.
"Normal for what?" he asked.
The world's been completely taken over, she said, as if it was a perectly ordinary thing to say, not raising her tone, as if she was thinking of something else.
"You're trying to disguise your thoughts," he said.
She looked at him startled, instantly realising he wasn't ready yet. Perhaps, at this rate, he would never be ready.
She wanted to scream at him, jolt him awake. It's now or never. You've got to come back, you've just got to come back. But every time she pushed him he got worse, vaguer, more hopeless, physically uncoordinated, hapless, a kind but stupid look on his face. She was getting all the same messages and images; you can have all your memories back, a rural village where they could be happy and free. And together. It was a tempting offer, if it was real. Trust no one was an old axiom well suited to the present circumstance. She had no idea where to turn.
Outside there was the same stretch of flat open land she had encountered before. Then the pine trees. She could walk out anytime and conect up with her old life, as she had done before. Go back to the same office, do the same chores. In a tortured realm surely there would be a simple way out, a simple solution. You can have all your memories back. No thanks, she thought, visually slamming a door in her head. Once, once, you could have been everything. Once, once, you were young and fine and strong, and could have helped me. Once you would have known exactly what to do.
She looked at David's pallid face and greying hair; pity, hope. He dribbled, not realising it. What he heck had they done this time? Maybe they, ultimately it, had done a compelte brain swipe this time; one from which it was impossible to come back. She held his cold fingers and looked arond the ward to see if anyone was watching. Inappropriate flat mates. Flashes of their life together; their various lives together.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/how-many-is-too-many/2008/04/28/1209234761964.html
WITH the loss of a fifth soldier in Afghanistan, the public is right to ask whether the strategic value to Australia of this war is worth the sacrifice of such young lives.
The death of the commando, Lance Corporal Jason Marks, 27, is tragic. That he was fighting to give Afghans the chance of a better life, free from Taliban oppression, is not to be understated.
But there must be compelling reasons of national interest before sending soldiers into battle, and pretty soon Australians will be asking whether they still exist.
It is hard to sustain the argument that Australia's national security is tied up with Afghanistan, when the centre of gravity of global terrorism has shifted next door to Pakistan.
In addition the Government's own military advisers are telling it the prospects for victory in Afghanistan are dim. The lack of improvement in security since the coalition forces entered the country in 2001 was underscored at the weekend with the attempted assassination of the President, Hamid Karzai, when militants got within 100 metres of dignitaries.
Some defence analysts, like the Australian National University's Hugh White, believe even with good strategic reasons for being in a war, it is hard to justify putting forces in harm's way unless a government thinks it is going to achieve the objective it sets itself.
And he says: "I don't think anybody believes things are getting better in Afghanistan or expects things are going to get better."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/brace-for-more-deaths-in-afghan-war-pm/2008/04/28/1209234762199.html
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has warned Australians to prepare for more casualties in Afghanistan following the death of an Australian soldier, saying the year ahead will be "difficult, dangerous and bloody".
On Sunday evening, Lance Corporal Jason Marks, aged 27 and the father of two small children, became the fifth Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan since operations began in 2002. Four other Australian commandos were wounded, bringing the total number hurt to 36.
The names of the wounded have not been released and Australian Defence Force chief Angus Houston said their wounds were not life-threatening.
Lance Corporal Marks' wife, Cassandra, issued a statement yesterday saying he was a devoted father and a loving husband who had always wanted to join the army.
The soldier was killed when a company of about 100 Australian commandos was sent to deal with a force of Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan, 25 kilometres south of the Australians' base at Tarin Kowt.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/he-lived-his-dream/2008/04/28/1209234761901.html
FROM the age of 12, Jason Marks knew he wanted to be a soldier. It was a journey that took him from his school days in North Queensland to graduation as a commando in Sydney to the mountains of Oruzgan province, Afghanistan.
The 27-year-old father of two was proud of serving his country, his wife Cassandra said yesterday, after he became the fifth Australian soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. Four other Australian soldiers were wounded in the same battle with Taliban fighters, and the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, warned the nation to expect a "dangerous and bloody" season of fighting in the months ahead.
Mrs Marks said: "Jason was a devoted father to our two beautiful children and a loving husband to me.
"All Jason ever wanted to do was join the army. He was the type of man who knew what he wanted. Even from the age of 12, all Jason ever wanted to be was a soldier. Becoming a commando was a dream of Jason's. He was proud of who he was and proud of what he did."
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