A Chorus of Stones by Susan Griffin

Author:Susan Griffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504012218
Publisher: Open Road Media

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A STRANGE LIGHT

Like the membranes of all living cells, the membrane of the nerve cell decides what will enter and what will stay out, chooses between what feeds life and what is dangerous.

Under the skin, an old order begins to shift. No one sees. The first signs of change are as imperceptible as the order itself, an order which has been presumed as part of reality, part of the earth upon which one puts a foot, or the step itself, immutable, inarguable. 1893. It is as if two ships, establishing different directions, still unknown to each other, pass in the harbor. On one ship stands Second-Lieutenant Hugh Trenchard. He is just twenty years old. This is his first military assignment. As a member of the Royal Scotch Fusiliers, he is coming to India to maintain the hegemony of the British Empire. His charge is to keep the present order. On another ship, moving through the same waters, Mohandas Gandhi travels away from India and toward South Africa. But this is a circular journey, one which will traverse the mind as well as the earth. Making his way to Cape Town, Gandhi will be forced from the train when he refuses to leave a first-class seat. The seat has been forbidden to those the governing body calls colored. He will spend the night in the railway station and there make a choice, significant, as it will turn out to us all, before he continues his journey.

After learning to separate electrons from atoms, creating, thus, positive ions, scientists discover that as these ions travel at high speeds, releasing their energy to a region known as the positive electrode, a new form of energy is produced.

To sit quietly when faced with aggression may seem unnatural. But it is no more so than to advance into a rain of bullets. A soldier must be drilled over and over to habituate him to advance when his natural bodily desire is to flee. In the words of the Marine Corps Guidebook, the purpose of the drill is to instill automatic response to orders. It was Frederick the Great who first understood this. He was inspired to invent the Prussian drill by the newly emerging scientific view of the universe as a great machine. The peasants in his army were to be like cogs in the mechanism of official will. The pinnacle of this military tactic was perhaps reached in the First World War. On a single day, July 1, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, of 110,000 men ordered to emerge from the trenches and march in orderly rows toward the German lines (where machine guns fired from the ramparts) 60,000 were either killed or wounded.

In addition to providing a barrier which protects the cell, the membranes of nerve cells also conduct positive and negative electrical charges along their surfaces.

The drill, however, is just one element among many which together serve to feed a habituated obedience. Not the least among these elements is the experience of danger itself.

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