Hi. I'm back from the UAE. So, with nothing else coming to mind I'm posting this sludge. Cheers.
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I had this image of some tourists stuck in the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia doing the Thesiger trail. Walking across an expanse of sand, well not even sand anymore, as it had been beaten into yellow dust by the centuries of winds and occasional camel trots. It wouldn't be hard to get shot in the head in that kind of environment for being white or even white enough. There are many places on the Earth where your white skin will encourage others to spill your blood faster and happier than others. Places where white means foreign. I've been on the fringes of quite a few of these places, but have kept from entering them by either a decade or few or several hundred kilometres.
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When the Communists came into power those ninety years ago they sent the correct, but ill-judged kind of intellectuals to the farms and villages to let them know across the eight time zone expanse of Russia that they were now collective farmers. Dozens of them had their guts run onto mud with pitchforks. There is barely a turnip patch left in Russia which hasn't had some keen young Bolshevik gush all his blood onto it at some point.
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Recently some French tourists were shot in Medain Saleh in Saudi Arabia. It's a place Muslims say is cursed as the ruins there predate Mohammed. I heard a lot of stories when I was in Saudi of foreigners being shot in the brain. About four or so were approached at traffic lights in the two years I lived there whilst waiting for a green circle to pop up. A guy strolled up to them, pointed his rifle, and blew their brains across the passenger seat and out the other window. The last thing they saw was the face of their killer, or worse, an amber light - the colour of sand on a fifty degrees day.
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In Moscow Zoo, about ten years ago, they refurbished the lions den. This meant hacking away at the stern concrete - Russian concrete is meaner than in a lot of places - they have their own particular chemical mix, not hindered by the oppression either. Concrete mixed by oppressed people is oppressive concrete. The builders found bodies in there - around a dozen I believe. It turned out Stalin used to feed untrusted colleagues in his office to them - live. There's the man who said you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. I guess he knew more than you'd expect about mixing concrete too.
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I just got back from Dubai. It's the biggest building site I've ever seen. There must be more concrete piling into that patch of desert than the mass of the moon. They're building the tallest building in the world plus several others over a hundred floors. Dubai will have probably the five tallest buildings in the world within ten years. All this building is cancelling the desert - eradicating it, putting it to sleep. Each building like a huge bureaucrat's stamp from God - signed, sealed, built.
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In the taxi back to the airport I trailed through all this for an hour. A couple of rickety buses overtook us slowly, full of Chinese or Mongolian villagers I'd say. They all had the bewilderment of never having seen a city on their faces. Their necks made side-to-side eclipses, ducking low in the window to look at the building tops. When they bobbed lower I knew a higher one was there. That was all they wanted to know - where the top was – how far these shafts of concrete ripped into the sky.
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It's what they do on the ground which fascinates me. The physical top of the building has at its opposite the philosophical bottom. For every square metre of concrete slapped on the sand one less mind of ignorance and hate walks the desert. I saw a roll of nationalities in Dubai which makes the Olympics look racist and segregational. It's not tolerance for the sake of tolerance, being good or right. It's tolerance for the sake of building and buildings - thousands upon thousands of floors spread upwards and outwards. Enough concrete to need enough faces of a million colours and shapes to kill enough sand.
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Concrete is the future and sand is the past. And, in my honest to God, Raskolnikov-tinged thoughts, I like it.
