12/3, 1229h - killing fields

there are all the usual ways of thinking about it.

maybe you choose the easiest to swallow and the most impoverished -- numbers: 20,000 dead bodies in dozens of mass graves, 25% of the population of the country killed in all, 16-hour work days in the rice fields for those spared, as many landmines as cambodian citizens.

or perhaps your mind drifts to considering the human capacity for evil, zimbardo's totipotentiality, that believing in the tabula rasa necessarily means that for every saint, there will be a sinner. cosmic balance -- evil complements rather than negates good. a fair consolation.

or anger -- except that getting stirred up over something that is so far beyond anything you've experienced or understood seems terribly inappropriate as well -- you cannot rage 2 million times as fiercely as you would against a single unjust death.

so maybe you stay silent and placid and consider, impassively, the stupa with its impossibility of skulls, the leg irons and manacles, the crunch of brittle bone underfoot. you consider how the cambodian sun whitewashes the landscape, and you allow that, too, to relieve you from feeling. you take the guide's words and parse emotion from meaning and absorb only the latter because it really is too much to think that he had friends and relatives who were brought to places like this and systematically, brutally, offed. you walk amidst the mass graves filtering words through your head and pictures through a camera lens, and maybe that makes it ok.

and what else? seeping through: deep revulsion, superstition, all the stupid baseless cultural fears of mortality, interfering with what little sympathy and sadness you can muster. hating the gift shop because you think it's exploitative and then hating the system because that exploitation is the only thing that puts food on the table of those who survived, and then maybe even hating yourself because you can't bring yourself to buy anything. all rolled up in the general feeling that you should never have come here in the first place because the killing fields should not be commemorated or memorialised, that there are certain episodes in history so ugly that, although we cannot as resposible human beings forget them, there is no acceptable way of remembering them either.