It is Monday morning.  I am in a hotel room in Springfield Missouri.  Unaccountably I slept well last night.  There is much to subvert a good night’s sleep, the bits and pieces of “the news” that one would rather not think about.  Often the knowledge of things I would rather not say out loud, trigger the demons that live beneath the surface.  Sometimes they rise up in the early hours of the morning 2:30 AM or so.  If I am lucky sleep returns.

I read this morning that the final battle for Mauriupol is taking place in and around a huge abandoned steel mill, the Azovstal steelworks.  The underground of the mill is networked with tunnels.  The works  cover more than 11 sq km (4.25 sq miles).  The Ukrainians have indicated they will fight to the death, and do not plan to surrender.

I think about he fuel-air munitions that are being used in the war.  Delivered by a rocket, a bubble of fuel vapor penetrates bunkers, trenches, and then ignites.  Defenders are suffocated, incinerated to death.  Also the cluster bombs are particularly lethal for a civilian population.  This amounts to bomblets that are scattered randomly through a neighborhood.  They explode at a programmed time, or explode when touched.  Such weapons are the material for nightmares.

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This song, dirge-like seems an appropriate requiem for the dead.  The lyric lines are a meditation that in life death stalks us all.  “There is no reason, the truth is plain to see,” …

War is surreal, irrational eruption of a leader’s misshapen id, ordering an army to set upon a smaller neighboring nation to satisfy his paranoia.  It is an old tale, as old as recorded history.

A Whiter Shade Of Pale

By Procol Harum

We skipped the light fandango
Turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
But the crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
The waiter brought a tray

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face, at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale

She said, “There is no reason
And the truth is plain to see”
But I wandered through my playing cards
And would not let her be
One of sixteen vestal virgins
Who were leaving for the coast
And although my eyes were open
They might just as well have been closed

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face, at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale…

Lyrics by Keith Reid, Gary Brooker, Matthew Fisher