Horror and its reverse – 07/15/2023 – Candido Bracher

On the same day last month, three stimuli that could have gone almost unnoticed caught and held my attention.

The first was a lengthy story in the Wall Street Journal—reported in Sheet two days later—about the story of a Russian soldier who surrendered to a drone. In addition to the text, the newspaper brings the complete video, which shows the despair of the man trying to escape the small bombs dropped by the drone, which had already killed several of his companions, whose corpses lie on the floor of the useless trench through which he had climbed. moves erratically, with obvious signs of exhaustion after hours of agony.

The WSJ informs us that his name is Ruslan Anitin, he is 30 years old, has a wife and a three-year-old daughter. He was a quiet liquor merchant in the town of Idritsa, with just 5,000 inhabitants, near the border with Latvia, when he was compulsorily drafted into the war effort.

The second piece of news was the announcement of the death of Cormac McCarthy, widely recognized as one of the great contemporary writers in the English language. His books, often set in the American West and characterized by their raw and direct exposure of male-to-male violence, have often been adapted for film. The best known of these, winner of four Oscars, including best picture in 2007, is “No Country for Old Men”, directed by the Coen brothers.

It was this film that came to mind when I learned of his death. In it, a man (Llewelyn Moss) accidentally finds a large amount of money, originally intended to pay for a transaction between drug dealers that ended in murder. Unable to resist the temptation, he appropriates the money without paying much attention to the countless corpses that make up the scene.

From then on, a relentless hunt begins, which leaves no room for breathing from the beginning to the end of the film. The two main characters in the chase, in addition to Moss, are a relentless hitman with a psychopathic air and an elderly sheriff, who seems to be the only person capable, or even interested, of reflecting on the violence that surrounds them all. .

The third stimulus was a reference to the essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, by Albert Camus, made by a friend in an exchange of messages about artificial intelligence. Both he and I came across the text in high school, and I’ve reread it countless times since.

Camus opens the essay by stating that suicide is the only real philosophical problem, insofar as it contains the fundamental question: “Is life worth living?” And concludes the text with the myth of Sisyphus.

Sisyphus had been condemned by the gods to push a great round boulder up the mountain indefinitely, from where the boulder would inevitably roll back to the foothills. The gods had judged that there was no worse punishment than useless, incessant and hopeless work. This is a central aspect of the text: Sisyphus was perfectly aware of his situation and had no illusions that the rock would one day stabilize at the top of the mountain, or that he would no longer be forced to push it.

It was a coincidence that these three stories came to me, or resurfaced, on the same day. In all of them horror is present. The horror of war is so concretely represented by the soldier, completely alone, exhausted and desperate, with a faltering step, turning his gaze, now to the bodies of fallen comrades in his path, now to the sky where the murderous drone hovers, in front of which, in an extreme gesture, he folds his hands in front of his chest and begs for mercy.

The horror of the man who knows he is being pursued by an indefatigable maniac, who can ambush him at any moment, as well as the horror of the sheriff, who feels helpless, unadapted to an increasingly violent world.

Finally the horror of eternal punishment with no hope of redemption. The condemnation to a life without any perspective.

The next day, a message from my brother Eduardo, to whom I had sent the WSJ report emphasizing its shocking aspects, shed a different light on the story. He wrote: “…at the same time, I think what attracts us to this story is the fact that, through the camera of the drone and using human intelligence, two people, two enemies, were able to communicate and understand each other in a completely different way. improvised through gestures and successfully arrived at a good solution, thus saving a human life”. This view led me to look for similar counterpoints in the other two cases.

If the Russian found understanding and empathy on the part of an enemy soldier, which led him to surrender, Sisyphus would have no chance of finding them with the gods. But Camus introduces the human element in his tragedy in another way. He concludes the text by stating that it is necessary for us to be able to imagine Sisyphus happy, for “the very struggle to ascend to the summit is enough to fill a man’s heart”.

In Cormac McCarthy’s story, there is no forgiveness or conversion of the murderer; Llewelyn Moss does not escape her tragic fate. The human and, in my view, redemptive aspect of the plot appears in the last scene, when the sheriff, now retired, relates a dream to his wife:

“[meu pai e eu] it was back to the old days and we were riding at night over the mountains… it was cold and there was snow… and he passed me and went on. He didn’t say anything, just rode his horse around, wrapped in a blanket and with his head down; as he passed I saw that he was carrying fire in a horn in the old fashioned way and I could see the light shining within the horn… In my dream I knew that he would go ahead and make a fire somewhere amidst the darkness and the cold and I was sure he would be there when I arrived”.

Human beings are capable of causing situations of intense horror, but there is something in us that can also create the opposite. Our hope is always to find and feed that flame; either in others or in ourselves.