What follows is not a journey for the hopeful. The path that winds its way through these words is without light or promise. Do not walk it if you seek such things. Only darkness and despair lies ahead.
There was the idea of a country once, built on a grand expectation. The dream bubbled boiling hot. But the temperature has slowly dropped. And the magical liquid has cooled; first to numb, and then to freeze over completely. Today there are cracks in the ice as it fractures and break apart.
What warmth there was has gone. With it went trust and, perhaps more importantly, the benefit of doubt. Intention, however noble or virtuous, has been tainted from first principles; poisoned by decades of deceit and self-interest.
The grand expectation now is one of disappointment and decline. We look into the future and see only a shadowy realm. It is no different from looking back into the past, an equally opaque window, that eats up whatever is put through it, and spits back some wretched truth.
There are a few who try to thaw such things out of their stasis; who try to revive ideas and people from their icy sleep. They cannot. It is simply too cold. It is winter now. A deep, dark winter.
We live in between these two worlds, the past and the future, in a Twilight Zone of sorts. We dare not look back, but the past has us in its gaze. It is imperative we look forward, but the future seems indistinguishable from what lies behind. We are trapped in a frozen wasteland, pulled in both directions, unable to move.
And angry. So angry. A violently cold, biting anger. Like liquid nitrogen that burns just as a white-hot ember might. It leaves no charcoal dust in its wake, however. Instead, it freezes solid whatever it engulfs. And then, after a time, a sledgehammer is applied to what remains — to a being or institution that seems almost life-like in every detail. Only frozen marble and dead. And it shatters into a thousand pieces.
There are many ice statues now. Ideas and organisations, people and principles, all rendered inert. We look on them, an impression of the real thing. A reminder of the dream. Others walk the corridors of the ice castles, fiddling with mechanisms that do not work and savaging anything still intact from production lines that produce only frost. There are a few who try to thaw such things out of their stasis; who try to revive ideas and people from their icy sleep. They cannot. It is simply too cold. It is winter now. A deep, dark winter.
There are others, typically those who wield power, who have satisfied themselves with the pretence. Surrounded by the cold and the dead, like a mother nurturing a stillborn child, it helps to pretend they are alive: to talk to them as if they might respond; and to give unto them bold undertakings, as if they might take up the challenge. The dead look on, bewilderment permanently etched onto their faces.
We move slower in the cold. The machinery of the state slowly locks. We build fires now only to make it through the night. Our focus, which once stretched far out towards the horizon and beyond, is now narrow and immediate. We see clearly only those things right before our eyes. It is a miserable view.
In the background a soothing voice echoes across the snow bowl: "Worry not," it says, "this nightmare will soon pass. It is but a season, and spring is always just a few months away."
This winter, however, has plans of its own. It does not wish to relinquish its hold and, it reckons, if it can reduce the temperature enough it might never have to. It could be an endless winter, endured because of the promise of a spring that never arrives.
There are other voices too that echo in the night. They are not soothing but sent by winter itself. Its emissaries whisper in a dreadful rage, "Destroy. Shatter the illusion. Break all these false gods. Only then will the pain stop. Only then will the sun return. And when it does, it will blaze forever."
The vengeful whispers have their devotees.
Few can remember how and why the great cold was ushered in. That it would come at all was perhaps inevitable. As everything slowed, as people gradually became sculptures, it dawned on a few that for some considerable time, it had been getting colder. There had been warnings, to be sure. But the grand expectation of old worked against them. It nullified any fear, replacing caution with optimism and besides, back then one could still see through that window into tomorrow.
A glass cabinet made of ice watches on from Olympus, issuing decrees that speak of fire and warmth. They say you can throw a kettle of boiling water into the air in Siberia and snow, not water, will fall to the ground. Certainly that is all that reaches those who look up to Olympus from the valleys below.
Most destructive of all is compassion, empathy and sympathy. By the time they reach the valley, they are ice shards that cut, hard and sharp. They pierce, they don’t comfort. It is doubtful they were ever anything but frozen. Most likely replicas of the real thing; its true form long since forgotten. Instead, arrogance, contempt and self-regard — the coldest of emotions — were merely poured into a mould and the resultant weapon tossed from on high with a callous disregard.
But the greatest trick winter ever pulled was not the way it slowly drained the life out of all comers. It was clever. It promised those who embraced it the sweet relief of surrender. Of their critical facilities and the pain they experienced.
"It will only hurt so much, and then a great numbness will take hold. Then nothing. There might remain some flickering residual memory of something else. But you can always draw comfort from the cold because it is a shared despair. It will be all-consuming. And all will finally be equal. An unrelenting, absolute equality. Like death itself."
And so there were many who opened their doors to winter, who welcomed in the cold, and opened their hearts to the numbing effect of the totalising destruction it brought with it.
In the corners, people mutter: "What is to be done?" One could bargain with the winter winds, negotiate some hideaway where, in exchange for its general command, life can carry on in slow motion. But few believe that spring is a real possibility anymore. It is a psychological placebo now, administered subconsciously, but never brought to front of mind and properly considered, thus never to be actually realised.
It would be too much of a risk, a great unknown, to relinquish the numbness. Feeling nothing is a kind of pain, to be sure, but it is not pain itself, raw and intense. There is some way to go before we reach absolute zero. Before everything stops moving completely. The quicker it gets here the better. The sooner every last memory is frozen out of mind and soul the greater the relief will be. A ghost-like museum, filled with dead reminders of a dream no one can recall.
What a relief it will be, for once and for all, to let go completely of the responsibility that comes with any vision of the future. To close that window totally and finally, and to live forever in the wasteland. Frozen, but equal.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and government at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
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