Surrealistic Realism
Trip Start
Nov 01, 2008
1
9
23
Trip End
Ongoing
Khost, Khowst, Afghanistan
Monday, October 26, 2009
It's in that fleeting stride on my way to dinner, alone, during the transition from day to dusk as the voice of the Moazane resonates throughout the hills calling for prayer - it's when the receding sun scores splendor on things formerly unnoticed that the three minute moment of elation returns. In the near distance with the air a little more crisp, through the rows of razor-sharp concertina wire, behind the concrete barricades and past the green-screened fences, a neighboring village to the base sounds children laughing outside - a familiar bustling of a playground anywhere. While my heart fails to entirely appreciate or comprehend this, unable to alight on an emotion that will suffice, in a single breath it feels as if surrealism is reigning supreme. In a day in which hours earlier I might have been found sheltered in a cold and unpromising bunker, watching Apache helicopters pinpoint the origins of incoming mortar rounds, perhaps after having just read another dismal tale of innocent lives lost, it's difficult to conceive of such variation.
Madness spread across a canvas without logic, revealing deeper shades of meaning for things which are beautiful yet regarded under different conditions as simple.
This real-life work of art, with it's impossible tinge of radiance concealed by sinister hues of absurd chaos is an image worth, by no means, ever losing - never overlooking whatever light darkness seeks to eclipse.
