(no title)

perched as it were on the heart of the district, the megaphones blared forth waves after waves of exhortations, absorbing all attention, reddening all ears; with such a barbaric manner it made a symbolic gesture of authority; it does much worse than merely verifying its territory: it claims it. the air was apocalyptic, totalitarian, the speaker emphasizes his words with such thunderous intonation as if afraid he would be waylaid at any second by the last trumpet, as if preparing a troop for a battle with verbal abuses impossible to be disputed, so warlike it was, so didactic, delirious, with the frenzied ardour of a fanatic, like the halfwit Caliph that he was, so inexhaustible, so loud, so, so unbearably loud a volume indeed that it seems set to prick the very ear of the night itself, so loud as if it wants to convert every single entity in the vicinity by its dictums, even dead cats, even dead mosquitoes, even dead inanimate things; and with this callous, deafening noise called by men piety it preaches empty articles after empty articles of woebegone faith, of moralities that only crocodiles and donkeys could level with, and every so often the speaker, as if realizing the looseness of his own speech, backs it profusely with recitals of Koran (which is to say, this is final: this is indisputable: i’ve got a sovereign reference sent straight from above: hence all of you, stop what you are doing and hear me!!) while in reality, every word of it is a contradiction, a moral stupefaction (and i don’t need to reach Khatam to realize this.)
i felt as if i was surrounded by some murderous primitive clan on the heart of a river, so backward the whole affair was; i felt as if transported to the days of pogrom, in which i was the witch in hiding, waiting to be carried to the burning stakes by the sectarian crowds; oh if only i am a witch! if only i know magic! i’ll send their megaphones to the northpole, to the atlantic, let them preach their things to all their liking there to the salivating polar bears! the animals need enlightenment better than us. (or better still, to the deserts; and let the birdbrained camels and the dead Bedouins hear ya preach. for was it not from there you sprang? and hence where you truly belong? and wasn’t the main motive that made your prophet summoned the whole thing was to reform that particular chaotic period and to straighten out that particular chaotic clan? (can’t you see how incongruous you become the moment you step out of the desert? can’t you see that no ears outside your continent could actually understand the point of your blabbers?) and to claim to stand for eternity for what is truthfully momentary! to claim to have experienced a divine transcendence for what is in reality a monomaniac’s delirium! and can’t you see that what you are now preaching and fighting and yearning and yearning for is some long lost god, the god that you have yourself abandoned and buried amid the torching stupor of the desert? o funny, funny, o humanity…..)

—but i’ve been flattering you too much by making this look personal. oh you’ll have to wait a million years for that! all i ask is for you not to be so loud; every people have their own business, have they not? and so i’ll tolerate yours if you tolerate mine. but you would rather, with the brutal, belicose nature so inherent in your lots from the days of yore, violate my private sphere. by robbing the night of its sweet silence, you’re consequently robbing me of my only recourse to sanity, o my peace of mind! and i’m too much of a reactionary to be content with sighing. never, never if i could choose my abode, will i have it anywhere near you blasted megaphones—and wouldn’t it be heaven.