Cheetah's Worth Words

Buffaloes peacefully grazing in the fields. Kids on their bicycles racing each other on their way to school. Marine uniforms. Farmers at work since sunset, ordering rice paddies, cleaning and digging out new sprouts, carrying on their never-tiring backs huge loads of either firewood or tools, bags of rice, gallons of oil or branches and branches of fresh tea leaves.

From my train window, this all scenery is like a garden of Eden, green landscapes of moving forms, quiet living beings carrying out their day as they did the day before and as they probably will the next. Some passengers are still asleep but despite the early hour – it’s half past five only – most of us are wide awake, taking in the passing world as morning coffee: sipping slowly the peacefulness, the bright colours of an Asian sunrise. The orange-red of the first sunlight over the green of the rice-fields littered hills of eastern Thailand.

The doors are wide open and some are already sitting there on the train steps, smoking home-made cigarettes, chatting away the last of the way. Beds are being unmade, turning back into their seat-like form for the day to come. Only two hours left and we’re in Laos. Same green hills there I heard. Hemingway wrote about the African ones. Much greener, much more widespread, green hills of South-East Asia. So green they blind you, so fresh and alive with vegetation and wildlife and people and emotion they make you smile. With that our our faces, we got off the train and hitched a ride to the Laotian border 100 km East. Goodbye green hills of Siam, hello green hills of Laos!

I was born in 1981. The very same year in Saô Paulo, Queen was setting a new world record: 130 000 spectators at a single concert. The next year, ‘The Wall’ was on the screens for the first time and got everyone stunned – lyrics and artwork they’ll remember all their lives. 1983: ‘Every Breath You Take’, The Police marked some points. At the same period, The Who separated, leaving behind worldwide widowers. 1985: time for The Clash to say goodbye, name one person who can’t name one of their songs. The same year, Queen beat their own record: 325 000 at a concert, again in Brazil (Rio). At the same time, The Cure got ‘Close To Me’ to the top of the charts. 1986: ‘It’s A Kind Of Magic’, no comment. 1989: to everyone’s surprise, The Who gt back together for a new album. November 1989: global mourning: Freddie Mercury dies of HIV, admitting finally on his deathbed the true nature of the disease.

In 1994, I was 13, driving my bicycle around Provence, when I heard from the first time of a great show: the MTV Unplugged Led Zeppelin appearance. One year later, they entered the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame and Museum. 1998 France’s World Title infootball for some, ‘A Stranger Among Us’ for some others: a documetary on the life of Nick Drake made by the BBC and welcomed by most of the critiques as a unique view of this songwriter and wonderful singer.

2000. New century, new millenium. Brand new artists coming out of the British Isles. The Streets, hip-hop revelation, gets his first LP out: ‘Has It Come To This’. Raw lyrics, cacthy rythms and cockney accent: loved it, still does today, 4 albums later. 2002: I’m studying English Litterature and Civilisation here in Bordeaux and learn of the death of Joe Strummer, singer of The Clash. 2002-2003, after 42 years of existence, The Rolling Stones go around the globe for their ‘Stones Licks Tour’. 2005: at the London Live 8, Pink Floyd get back together for a series of concerts. Last album of The Rolling Stones: ‘A Bigger Bang’. 2006: I’m in Laos with my girl when I hear about the death of Syd Barrett (bass player and songwriter of Pink Floyd. 2007: this time I’m in Namibia amidst lions and elephants when The Police get back together. 2008: at the Beijing Olympics, Jimmy Page plays at the closing ceremony. 2009: 39 years after their separation, their complete discography gets out in a brand new remastered set. The fans and critiques are unanimous.

How come such small islands as the UK can provide world music with so many great artists?

Flies are buzzing around his head. The heat is unbearable. Drought after drought, the passed years have taken a huge toll on the land and its inhabitants. His swollen belly is suspect. His eyes are wide open, crying for help. Humanitarians go around, handing out rice and water supplies. His grand-parents died last week, his younger sister two month ago. His father lost all of his cattle to the desert. He’s 12 and weighs 15Kgs. He’s tall and slim. Not slim. Thin, paper-thin shape of sadness. Black skin turned grey by the dust, pure white teeth. Barefoot, topless, shredded shorts around his bony waist.

Africa is dying.

Glued to her couch, a full table of junk food in front of her, she dozes in front of the screen. Taking in TV shows as some would swallow down pill after pill of Valium. Not even trying to understand the meaning of what she’s watching. Channel after channel, she swaps between emotion shows and TV series, news reports and weather forecasts.

The remote in her hand is like an extra set of fingers. She doenst’ even look down at the buttons anymore. She works part-time in a diner, her husband goes to the factory every night. She knows the program by heart and could dvise you on anything on the two hundred channels she gets from her satellite dish.

Cut-off from the real world, she sips her flat-screen 40 inch TV like some cool drink on a hot summer day. A quick hello to the kids when they get back from school, a call to the pizza delivery for dinner, a few micro-waved hamburgers for lunch. She knows how to cook though – she sometimes see it on the Cooking Channel number 12. Remote controlled from her couch by too much choice, too much nonsense and too much channels. Free to fall asleep, free to forget everything her parents once told her.

A car parked by the side of the road. No one around. The snowing has stopped a few hours ago. Heavy clouds passing by with great speed. The trees, heavy with snow, stir in the wind like giant snowmen. The road is gravel, far from the main track, no other tire tracks than his. His footsteps deep in the white powder, leading into the woods.

A shadow a few hundred meters away, walking slowly, purposely inward. The car keys are on the ignition, the windows shut but the doors aren’t locked. he doesn’t see his car now, he left it behind. Better to walk. His backpack on, the rifle in his right hand. It’s November 23rd, 6am, Wisconsin, USA. The man is alone in the wilderness, he left behind his friends and family for a week. Hunting, camping, living in the wild for a while was all he came out here looking for.

Thoreau had seen it coming: men belong into the woods, with nature all around them, wildlife, plants, the weather to cope with, the world to understand and meditate upon. The man takes a small shovel from his backpack and starts digging into the ground. It isn’t frozen yet and after half an hour he’s got a square space without snow where to set up his tent for a couple of days. The river is not too far, he can hear birds chirping and knocking on the tree trunks, the wind blowing and the huge pine trees creaking above him.

The smile on his face, no one is here to see it.

They’ve been fighting for as long as anyone recalls. The matter in question isn’t known to anyone anymore. The books are different, the motives are similar. They wear traditional outfits on both sides. They have the same belief: that them only are allowed to stay there, to worship in those walls. Jerusalem is still the center of attraction. Like in the Crusades, pilgrims and soldiers are walking to the ancient city to pray, live, build houses of God. They say their God is the one, supreme and omnipotent. They prepare the land, they build colonies, moving the locals out by force. The others try to respond, use every way they know of. Violence is one of them. Suicide bombings, stone throwing, kidnapping and ransoming. Power is in the balance like religion is in their hearts. They think they’re doing the greater good, whatever damages it may costs.

Jews and Muslims are fighting over a piece of desert. Some have always been hunted and despised through history, the other ones have had a strong hand on the entire region for dozens of centuries. One day the most powerful countries decided it was enough and gave Jews a piece of land next to the Mediterranean Sea. Jerusalem was to stay open and free to everyone to settle. But people started thinking that the land was too small, that colonies were necessary outside Israel. Thus began the colonisation of Arab soil. And the anger on each side grew more intense with every construction site, every brick and every wall. But Israel had help from the US, Europe, Russia. Palestinians on the other hand had the whole Arab world with them. For more than sixty years now it’s been like a second cold war all over again, with kids dying, entire families bombed off in their living-rooms, tanks quashing entire neighbourhoods. People are dying on both sides. Media is covering the wreckage of the Middle-East but other countries try not to get involved, interests on each side being tense and complicated. Arabs own most of the world’s oil, Israelis have contacts in almost any major city of the globe. History would dictate us to support the cause of the Jews, but on the other hand look at how they treat Palestinians that are just trying to protect land they’ve inherited from their forefathers. Seeing the big rich houses move towards them, crushing their vineyards or olive fields. Young people throw rocks at the construction workers, weak ones get enrolled and end up making themselves martyr of a religion they don’t totally understand. Fanatism preaches on both sides, religion once again spoiling what could have been a beautiful country, a haven for the forsaken and the lost.

Jerusalem, city of three religions, now torn down to shreds by the stubbornness of  violent religious groups, being the Hamas or Hezbollah. One day maybe these people will sit down and manage to come to a final rendition, the end of violence. These countries have suffered enough. It’s time for them to understand that to live in peace they have to live together, with tolerance and open-mindedness in their hearts. One God, only one, the Torah and the Koran are but two views of the same values, the same beliefs. “Love your neighbour and he’ll love you back”. One day maybe our children might witness such miracle in Jerusalem.

It is a common belief to think that elephants participate in pilgrimages in what is now referred to as an Elephant Cemetery. Time to ruin every one’s wild imagination: there are no such things.

The explanation is quite simple, it lies in the very being of elephants. They are born with four sets of six molar teeth, lodged at the back of each half-jaw. Growing up, they chew on these molars and they grind out, leaving a smooth surface that falls out and is then replaced by a new teeth. When they get to seventy (for the lucky ones not butchered), they run out of working teeth and wander around, looking for spots with tender grasses and weeds. Eventually, they end up in marshes or swamps or riverbeds to die there of hunger when their rotten teeth cannot chew anything, even the most tender of aquatic plants. After decades, all the elders have ended up in those kind of places. Their bodies get scavenged by wultures, lions, jackals and hyaenas and such opportunists. Their bones licked dry, their tusks taken away by park rangers to be stored somewhere in case the ivory market reopens.

Those huge white skeletons attract inevitably elephants passing nearby while looking for food. They, in hierarchical order, approach and touch the ancestors, remembering a friend, a passing stranger, a relative. Their smell is nothing compared to their memory (thsi part is no myth), and they can tell the difference between a total stranger’s carcass and some elephants they knew. Scientists have even watched  elephants covering dead relatives with branches, pulling out whole bushes from the damp ground. Some kind of early belief in an after life or just a sign of respect towards death. Who knows.

The strongest moment I ever witnessed related with elephants when we spotted a young female who had given birth the a couple of days before was staggering to stay with the group. At the back of the march, she was waiting for her almost newborn calf to catch up. The matriarch, knowing food was near and hearing us from far, had kept walking. We thought the mother and her baby would get lost (she was quite young and probably didn’t know her way to that particular waterhole yet). But then three young females from the group emerged from the nearing treeline: sisters, cousins… who cares. They helped the young elephant to walk straight, one one each side, holding him with their bellies. The last one stepped behind him and pushed him/her gently with her trunk. It helped, the five of them got back to the rest of the family and arrived together at the waterhole. Elephants. Emotion, family, solidarity. An example some could follow.

Drove to work early. That’s half past four in the morning. Clear sky. Stars and such. Absent traffic.

Looked out the building around eight. Pure snow. Cotton air. No visibility. Till eleven, like damp smoke out there. Must have been a hell of a drive for people out thee I thought. I didn’t really care. Summer is over, that’s now official. Wet and white mist, thick as a mountain of cocaine. Strange shadows on the sidewalk. Like Chinese shades over a pot of boiling water. Kept working. Glanced out once in a while. No evolution. Cars’ and trucks’ lights dimming in the fog, like aliens’ eyes in the ‘whiteness’.

Left work a 1 pm. Clear blue sky. Sunny and hot. Summer is not so far behind us it seems after all.