time tugs at us, in tireless waves...

I'm sitting in my classroom, listening to Victor Jara's 'Padre Nuestro', brought in by a pupil. It comes as an echo from distant times and places, from a different world... I was playing that song in 1972 in Venezuela, in the local rallies of the M.A.S. hippie, new age socialist party in Caracas. I really believed that the world could be changed for the better, and that we could help bring that about and that we didn't need to die. But he sings 'now and in the hour of our death, amen'. And that came about so soon afterwards, in such a horrible way, Jara having had his hands cut off alive, in front of a crowd, by the defenders of Western Christian Civilisation....

Thirty five years on, Chile is a different place which I still have not visited. The scars from the hideous past seem to have healed, although the things that were at the origin of those terrible acts probably have not. I am no longer young, and yet I live as if I was, just the continuation of the life I've lived seemingly forever, whilst in those old days my father could chide me remarking that 'I was older than he was'. And yet, 'I didn't know shit'. And it was true, I didn't. I didn't have a clue of how the world worked, how my fellow humans or myself functioned, how we respond to stimuli and pressure and how we behave in groups and societies and these interact with us. I was coming from the hippie ethos, the old Woodstock chanting mantras, : 'maybe if we think really hard we can stop the rain'. Today I hear a class of kids sing in a classroom far away. It may be the school choir, they're actually singing in tune. Somebody plucks a guitar nearby, hammering out a pop song. The past is long dead, but it can still give me heart-ache, a longing for what was and perhaps even more for what failed to be, both for me, for my family, my country, my continent...

Thirty five years. It is very difficult to take that in. Thirty five years ago I was of the age of some of the people I hang out with today. Spider is that age, Hemma nearly is. A bitter ex-girlfriend was saying to me that it was impossible to have true friendships with people in those age groups. that had such different backgrounds and frames of reference, because of the age gap, but of course that was also the case for me with her, because not of an age gap but an equally vast existential chasm between what she'd lived and me; there are always chasms between our make up and experience of the world, and I do have true friends in those groups. But at the same time, they cannot share that longing for something that I lived almost only by proxy but they not at all, not even as an echo of something large and tragic taking place far, far away. And now also so, so very long ago.