Humanity sans humane

It’s time, now that vacation has arrived, to restart this early morning automatic writing thing that I used to do. It always produced interesting thoughts, and it definitely filled up my blog, even if it bored some of you to tears. At least I could say then that this blog contains the whole gamut of human emotion, especially since I can be pretty sure that frustration and anger have been induced in my readers from the beginning. Now, what about love. Pesky little bugger.

On Saturday night Chris and I were walking home from a party, we were both quite drunk, actually, a rare occurrence for us both. We were about 5 minutes from home and we passed an apartment where a heated argument seemed to be taking place. It’s hot in Europe now, and all the windows are open, allowing one to hear on the street just about everything that goes on, even, as is this case, on the second floor of a building. Something bad was going on up there, I could just tell. We started to walk away, figuring that it was a typical social disturbance. Then we heard glass breaking and woman’s voice screaming bloody murder. I said, “Should we call the police?”

Ok, people, I just have to pause here to say, if the words “should we call the police” ever come up in conversation, just call them. What if they come and end up breaking up a completely benign fight between husband and wife, all is well, and the police leave? What has one lost in such a thing? If you get the feeling that you might need to call the police, just friggin’ call them.

There was something so horribly eerie about the sounds we were hearing--screaming, yelling, even moaning. I could see a man standing in the middle of the room raising his hand into the air and then down again with some kind of shortened belt in his hand. Chris called the police, in his typical, polite telephone voice. “Tell them it’s urgent”, I said. “It sounds like someone is being beaten to death.”—not, in my estimation, an exaggeration.

The horrible time that one is forced to wait, helpless, as the police or ambulance arrive on the scene after a call, can seem, to me, unbearable. The helplessness is the part that cannot be rationalized in any way; it will not later give way to self-forgiveness or absolution. Just standing there, being forced to hear the sounds of someone, presumably helpless, being beaten, systematically, over and over, until their cries become weaker and weaker, is a sort of torture all of its own set. Frightened, I could not take my eyes away from that window, even when I really should have just plugged my ears and ran away like an innocent child, blocking out the poison of the world, running back home and crawling under the bed.

In a glorious example of Pforzheim and her police, it could not have been a very long, extended dream sequence, as I seems it could have been. It really could not have been more than 30 seconds before a squad car came screaming down the street and to the house. I was inclined to stand and watch, insanely curious to know what these horrible sounds that I had heard meant. Was someone dead? Would the ambulance bring out an unconscious wife and rush her off to the hospital? Or, would we wait and wait only to see a gurney completely covered on its way to the morgue. Thank God for Chris, he simply said “Let’s leave it to the police. They have it covered.”

It seems to me that had I seen something in particular instead of just shadows and amorphous figures, I may have been able to block it out of my mind or to somehow understand it, uncomfortably digest it, and quickly move on. But, it was the sounds, those horrible sounds that upset me all the way home, and for the remainder of the evening. How horrible sounds can be. Maybe being a musician makes them even more dramatic. But the live sounds, traveling through the air of a horrible situation just hurt me terrible. Terribly.

My commentary really is: sometimes it is so horrible to be a member of the human race. What people can do to each other is simply unfathomable to me. These sorts of things occur especially in families in heated rages, someone being beaten into submission, perhaps having embarrassed the family unit, or the father. Women getting acid thrown into their faces in Pakistan for not wanting to marry a suitor, being permanently disfigured, the “if I can’t have you, no one will.” in its most terrible form. Public rapes in town squares, punishing women for having shamed the family in some, bizarre third world way. Women being beaten into submission for speaking their minds. How can people do such ghastly things?