Walls

People are very good at building walls – we have to be, to survive. Not physical walls (though we are pretty good at building those too), but mental walls, barriers to keep things separated in our minds.

We need to be able to separate things, to put one thing in this box here, another thing in that box there. We know that truth is this thing, fiction another. We know that we might need to be one person in work, but another one at home. Our immediate family is a self-contained unit, our friends another. We need to be aware of all of these things, because some people know some aspects of our lives, others don’t.

We build walls to keep the nasty world at bay. We convince ourselves that our lives are lived in a different world to the one we see on the news or hear about in the papers. We need to if we are to stay sane and not submit to an endless pit of despair.

Sure, we tell ourselves, there are people out there killing, stealing & beating up strangers; people at war or terrorised by it. There are people who maim & torture, people who are cruel, vicious and unpleasant, whose actions serve no purpose but to cause pain and bring to themselves some semblance of satisfaction at another’s suffering. But they are not our people. They don’t exist here. They are not in our world.

Until they are.

Until then, we are blind to them, ignore them. We cannot see them, because they live in a netherworld that is so alien to us that they might as well be invisible. We convince ourselves that we would be able to recognise them if we could see them; that we don’t see them because they aren’t there.

Until they are, and we realise belatedly that they’ve been there all the time.

Walls: they protect us from the demons that live outside, but they are useless if the demons have been inside all along.

And then, when the walls have been broken down, it changes everything. You can’t trust yourself to trust anyone else. You question it all, you realise that the fabric of society is so fragile, so completely diaphanous, that it can be ripped asunder with a breath.

The amateur anthropologist in me wonders if that ability to build these walls, along with the ability to communicate and socialise, is one of the main reasons why humanity has achieved so much. It allows us to isolate one thing, work on it, make it better, and step by step we create a world in our own image. One with lots of walls.

Because walls – we build them all the time.

Martin………..

PS. Here is the plug for the upcoming anthology! It may seem unconnected, but there is a (very) tenuous link between this post and one of my stories in the anthology “A Seeming Glass“. Buy it when it comes out to find out what the link is!! And enjoy lots of other great stories from the other Random Writers.