It rained last night and morning, and again yesterday and the day before. There has been very little rain since winter and spring. In fact, it has been quite dry since last spring. The newspaper reports that the water level in the reservoir has risen again to 26 percent. How can I write about the crux of the matter?
Article continues after ad
*
A. sent me a voice message. I listened to it as I walked to catch the bus. Her father is still in Rafah and refuses to evacuate. She expects his building to be hit at any moment. But where can he go without being bombed? I stood on the corner, waiting for the light to change. From the tiny speaker of my phone, I could hear her voice, trembling with months of fear and grief. How can I write about the heart of the matter?
*
The gravitational pull of a black hole in this moment is at the same time a centrifugal whirlpool. All this cannot be contained in a story; there is too much debris flying everywhere. Analysis cannot explain anything. More than ever, this is a fool's game, a folly. The metaphor is vile. How can I write about the heart of the matter?
Article continues after ad
*
Yesterday, on my way home, I passed two teenage girls making out on the same bench in the same subway station, the same spot I'd seen them the day before. It was as if time had neatly folded itself back into itself. The thinner of the two was smiling with the same languid, defiant joy as the day before. It was as if she was staring right into the heart of things, as if perched on a ledge high above them and deciding that the whole thing was wrong. Wherever I was, she was somewhere else. How do I write about the heart of the matter?
*
R. informed me that Israeli soldiers had taken B.'s son from his home and imprisoned him in a concrete watchtower at the entrance to the village. The soldiers interrogated and beat him for four hours, then took him into the countryside, miles from the village, and left him alone in the dark.
Which son? I replied. H or S?
Article continues after ad
S., he replied.
I haven't seen S for 6 or 7 years. In my memory he is a squirming, grinning, giggling kid who never sits still. How can I write about the crux of the problem?
*
I texted B. What can I say? I told him I hoped S was OK, but of course he wasn't.
“Oh, it was a long night,” B replied.
Article continues after ad
How do I write about the core of the problem? He wrote it better than I could.
*
I didn't see them, but friends on the West Coast and a niece in Tennessee posted photos of the Northern Lights, a solar storm so powerful that it pushed them far south, a flare of energy erupting from a sunspot 17 times the size of Earth. Another S. texted me a photo from Washington state where the sky was tinted pink and green, with treetops visible in the corners of the frame. To our eyes it looked fainter and blurrier, he wrote. His phone camera captured it better than he could see it. How do I write about the crux of the matter?
*
It doesn't matter if you can put this into words. It's more about literally everything that exists. How do you write about the heart of the matter?
Article continues after ad
*
For months, I couldn’t finish a single novel I started. Even when I recognized a novel as good or interesting, I somehow found it boring, because I thought only Russians could write it. I’m about 600 pages into Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. At one point, Klimov, a battalion commissar, is arrested by Stalin’s police for an unspecified political crime. Perhaps it’s because he praised Trotsky years ago in front of his mistress, who passed it on to another mistress, who passed it on to yet another. Klimov is thrown into a cell where a man has just left to be executed. It’s dark, but he can feel the rabbit “made from the softness of a loaf of bread” on the table. He knows, as Grossman writes, that “the condemned man must have just put it there,” because “only the ears had time to grow old.” Imagine your last act, the product of your last breath, the last willful movement of your fingers, the rabbit’s ears. How do you write the heart of the matter? Grossman tried.
*
In the evening, after the rain has cleared, clouds cover much of the sky, a towering El Greco cloud lit at odd angles by the rays of a setting sun hiding somewhere behind the buildings. The streets and squares are full of people, but they are not the same people as a few hours ago. They are not going to work or home, they are just setting out. They feel free. It is spring, warm, the nights are long, and the air we breathe together is buzzing with tiny hopes: to eat together, to expect a kiss, to dance, to laugh with someone's hand on my lap. How do I write about the heart of the matter?
*
Last week, the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, was flooded after days of torrential rains caused the Jacuí River to overflow its banks. The water knocked out power and stopped pumps working. Much of the city was cut off, the airport was submerged, and half a million people were forced to evacuate. I was there once, some years ago. I remember walking the deserted downtown streets at night, looking for trouble, but failing. Floods in northern Afghanistan also killed hundreds and swept children away. Ron DeSantis signed a bill to remove the word “climate” from Florida law. Bird flu has killed seabirds, but now it has killed seals and sea lions, and tens of millions of sandhill cranes, pigeons, crows, farm cats, and chickens. Suddenly, a headline popped up on my phone: “Properly cooked hamburgers pose no risk from bird flu.” How do I write about the crux of the issue?
*
Mohammed El-Kurd wrote for Nakba Day, the day that marks the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948. The day usually falls within a week of Israel's Independence Day, which is no coincidence. El-Kurd wrote about jasmine growing in Gaza and its resistance, and even revolution, in the face of crushing defeat. “We have jasmine because its seeds do not need permission or a ceasefire to sprout,” he wrote.
Jasmine blooms here, too. Just up the street there is a big jasmine bush like a hedge, whose scent is so strong that you feel intoxicated when you pass by it. I pass by it almost every day. And even before I read his essay, I thought of Palestine every time I passed by it. Of the jasmine there, and how its scent sustained me when the ugliness became unbearable. It may sound exaggerated, but it is true. Jasmine and a flock of parakeets that nest in a cypress tree opposite the building where I used to live. I used to sit on the roof, smoke a cigarette, and watch them fly home. A shock of green above the dusty street, chirping as they flew. At the same time, every day, at the same time as the sun fades in the pale light of Ramallah's evening. The jasmine there is of a different kind from the kind I was used to in California. The scent is different. Of course, sharper, nose-bending sweet. How can I write about the heart of the matter?
*
Where I live now, swifts sustain me. They fly off to warmer climates every late summer and return in the spring. Every year I fear they will never return, but for now they do. They twist their bodies and dart through the sky with incredible agility, carving their shapes into something more than three-dimensional. They fly shrilly through the canyons of the city streets, chasing each other. They greedily eat any insects unfortunate enough to find them, but they are also playing, surely they can have fun. How can we get to the heart of the matter?
*
What if I'm wrong and it has no heart? What if it's just eternal, endlessly regenerating in more dimensions than we can count? The devastation, the tenderness, the earth-swallowing loss, the endless destruction, the ecstasy that fades and reappears as agony, the pain that slowly and gently subsides? How can I write to get to the heart of the matter?
*
At the Nakbaday demonstration, at exactly 5:48 p.m., we all lay down. There were at least several thousand of us. I lost count. We were all lying in the street, en masse, the asphalt digging into our hips, our spines, our ankles. At that angle, we couldn't see each other; all we could see were the feet, knees, and elbows of the people closest to us. But we could feel each other's presence, and sense that in our movement together, or in our refusal to move, we had become something more; an organism that didn't yet know itself, yet which embraced us all, and could sense not only our great grief but also this sudden, fragile strength emanating from our collective body as we all acted as one.
A few pigeons flew away, hurrying to get somewhere. Seagulls circled overhead. Higher still, a plane flew across the blue sky. The plane tree leaves trembled and laughed. Even in the biggest shopping street in the city center, the silence was almost absolute. An air raid siren blared from a sound truck. Tears welled up in the eyes of the woman next to me. The siren blared, faded, blared again, and the silence rose and fell, swelled beside it. Then, after I don't know how many minutes, a voice rang out from the loudspeaker. “Free Palestine!” a cry came and we all rose to our feet.
_______________________
This essay was originally published in Flaming Hydra.
