at charles de gaulle
lumps of nothingness going down tautt. it hurts every time I swallow.
it's been like this for the past few days and I appreciate the degree to which, all of a sudden, this state has become a baseline state; when has my head not hurt? my nose not stuffy? my throat coughhhhy? my body flushed? I am worried for my body, and at the same time I am strangely curious about how everything looks at this point, like: what is traveling when sick? when energy levels diminish rapidly? when points of rest are grasped like little oases in a desert?
well; it's like everything fades a little bit; recedes into the background. we go to petra, and I look at these beautiful stone structures and the architecture that seems to emerge from these stone walls, as if they were always there, latent underneath the surface, just starting to press through. metaphors for archeologyy, maybe, some sort ooof idealized 'heritage' already innate and existing. what a discovery this must have beeen. and so I bring my self out, like I can feel myself dragging myself out into the present, trying to be here in the now, trying to enjoy. for moments I am here; for moments I am not; and I waver inbetween thinking about the grandeur of this scene and the clip-clop of my donkey on these stone steps, and of thinking about the physicality of my breath, the muscles firing in my legs, all of these things that combine to create this kind of experience.
--
today walking through CDG I think about the profession of an architect and what it means to design something that is meant to house bodies; what it means to have a body, then to make something that exists way beyond the scale of the body. does this require a suspension of physicality and of self, perhaps, a sort of bourgeois existence where the mores of physical day-to-day existence are already solved an the only questions are thus cerebral? or would it be possible to have an architect who puts on leead shoes to simulate the wweighted hobble of a grandmother's walk, fully and throughly participates bodily in the elements of one's own future creation?
but - does the study of medicine require that the student be sick? certainly not.
===
so here I am, heading home.
what have I learned, I ask myself. and I do not know. what has happened? what did I see? I could do a sundry list, simple bulletpoints that claim to illustrate something, anything:
kids selling toy-kalashinkovs in the street, people calling out 'welcome, how are you', kids in the small village of deir ghassanah being excited, welcoming, and friendly; figs and more ripe figs given to me by children; the cattle-herding chaos and indignity of qalandia checkpoint, watching people with the correct documents being turned back, over and over again; smears of paint thrown at israeli checkpoints; god-knows-how-old bullet holes in the walls of jerusalem's zion gate, hundreds of muslims praying outside of damascus gate because they were refused entry, an unmarked jeep with civilian-dressed men holding assault rifles speeding by, israeli soldiers/civilians casually walking with assault rifles, the smoldering anger of palestinians against this injustice, a young boy who wants to "take back his country", sweets given to me for free, an incessant sense of curiosity and warmth, a music performance from a music organization founded by a rock-throwing former refugee, an architect's offhand remark about being shot in the knee and having been in prison, posters about martyred/imprisoned palestinian men, a young man's solo room with photos of arafat, hussein, and hitler all alike; pflp logos spraypainted on walls here and there; piles of rubble from construction or maybe from something else; a post-iftar/breakfast-dinner performance in the midst of ancient roman ruins; ahmed, the student at bierzeit university who is busy working at eiffel sweets; adhan prayers ringing across the valley each evening; dry, warm, violet sunsets;
above this all I repeated to myself that this is living here. did I say something like that before? I feel things living, and stretching, flexible and adaptable. people breathing and changing. the elasticity of existence.
--
so what have I learned? good question. who knows. that life is elastic. that people adapt. that conflicts that run deep are hard. that people become angry when people are killed, threatened, imprisoned, controlled, exiled. that people become angry when people are killed, threatened, captured, bombed. that religion and land and sanctity and holiness are strong axioms, the strongest of them all. that even if the israel/palestine issue is less of a religious one and more of a nationalistic one (which it is) then land and livelihood and dignity and security are also strong, strong, strong axioms.
what is that phrase? berger - against axioms we agree to disagree. we fall to our knees and accept the clash of axioms as opinions, neither judgeable until another axiom is adapted as an internal criterion; there is no neutral third party; all viewing is imbrication, participation.
that is perhaps why (have I talked about this again?) the phrase 'justice' is perhaps the most sinister of all; also unhelpful and sinister phrases are: 'love', 'justice', 'right', and so on. justice presupposes a pre-existing criterion; the question of justice is the application of a morality that defines quality/justness/rightness. when you have a situation in which the systems of moralities themselves are clashing against each other, perhaps you are in the space of pre-justice, which is itself a political space. ranciere: politics is not agreeing whether something is white or not; politics is an initial agreement onto what the word white means in the first place.
even 'peace' is subject to this; there is a 'peace' perhaps more grounded in a bodily reality; the reality of skin-not-being-broken, blood-not-being-shed. but then just after that: is an exile without bloodshed 'peaceful'? is a theoretical occupation that happens to generate higher levels of living 'peaceful'?
and then inevitably: the thing meant by the word "peace" will have to be this messy dirty earthy thing, always, an active haggling between pros and cons, gives and takes. never an abstract shining absolute. I'll take five of that for seven of this; let's trade, barter, calculate difference, a quarter fraction of this, a pinch of that, subtract this, here we go. never anything exact or absolute or clean-cut; never a single solution or answer; perhaps just a series of messy messy messy resolutions that will leave each side wondering if it was the right thing.
jerusalem, tel aviv
what is it like, looking at photos of people you vaguely remember? trying to find young faces in their visages.
-
there is so much here and I know not what to write.
let's see.
-
I go to Jerusalem and I couchsurf at S's house and I meet her groups of friends. I talk. I meet her friend Y, who is firmly warm and studies literature and spent a little while in israeli prisons because he didn't want to go to the military. we talk.
I sleep on her balcony, one of the most comfortable nights I've had in a while, and I wake up to the sun in my eyes. shimshon (samson) the cat rubs his face against my hand, and again it hits me how physically hard animals can be, how solid their existence are, how rooted in the fleshy and bodily they are. they are beings, beings.
while petting shimshon I talk with S in a strangely low whisper about this and that. it's quiet out, it's the shabbat, and nothing is open. israel and palestine. she thinks about it every day, she says seriously, and I believe her. by the way her hand moves in the air I can tell that she's recalling countless conversations she must have had before. she is conscious and careful and I listen to her tease out these dilemmas, and I feel myself bringing these emotions into myself, trying to see what she does, what her friend Y does. it is important for me to do that. it is important for me to wander the streets and the closed-down market, an ultimate sunday morning in new york, sunday morning summer morning -- except here it's saturday, the shabbat, everything winding down, and I feel the city exhale, exhale, exhale.
-
in tel aviv I wander off with J to look at the city's protests. he's here to talk to some people. we get off a sherut taxi (#4) and walk onto rothschild boulevard and suddenly here it is, rows of tents. here is the critical mass that has made the news. we see people congregating, and we walk towards the northern end.
and then suddenly, we are in this. this is supposedly a silent protest but it has gained momentum and a voice. it is 9pm, and the sky is dark but there are torches lit, candles lit, people walking, showing support for the victims in southern israel (of the recent attack) but most importantly protesting against the israeli government's economic/civic policies. small vocal groups speak out about israel/palestine political issues, but there are small points of friction between these groups and other people, a little yelling, a little anger. one of the hundreds of houses we pass by has signs hanging outside on their balcony that disagree with the protest. someone comes out onto the balcony and yells out the crowd. people boo; immediately a chant forms, apparently something along the lines of: "come down here, your country needs you!"
the protest must be at least ten thousand people at least, maybe fifty thousand people or a hundred thousand people. I realize that I do not know how to gauge large amounts of people. I imagine that this information is written in a police handbook somewhere, something about the 'predictable density of people' and 'average area occupancy' condensing beings into a single formula with a memorizable constant: people = area * density constant, and this mystical constant being some innocuous number like 5.6. somewhere a riot or a protest happens, and the policeman looks at a space and does math in his head. five point six times, five point six times. people are counted. this is where it happens. to engage in this counting mechanism is to position one's self within a specific attitude already, already.
I look at these candle-torches that these people are carrying; they are made out of wax that tapers down to a handle, with an inner core wick. they burn brightly. they are stable. I imagine the industry for these; the industry for protest candles, bullhorns, and other materials. from where do these come from?
but not to trivialize the protest -- it was impressive, and enormous, and the entire crowd culminated into a single rally where the entire crowd sat down on grass to hear the leaders speak. declarative, polite, forceful. all I could hope for was that the sense of change and movement I was feeling would be able to coalesce into organizational change, operational change.
-
in ramallah I wonder. the day after coming back from tel aviv and jerusalem, a jeep passes me with four guys sitting in it; in the back seat a guy sits sticking the muzzle of a kalashnikov out the window. I am not sure how to evaluate this because I don't think that was the PA or the police and the car wasn't even marked as fatah/hamas/etc, so I shrug and move on. and this is emblematic: I am not sure how to evaluate things. I am not sure how to evaluate things.
the hardest part is this inability, not only the lack of a solid criterion but even the lack of knowledge of what constitutes a solid criterion. what is this? what does this mean? how has this changed? how was this place like ten years ago? is that why these things are like that?
in any case, I am here. I am living here. 'here' seeps into me like raindrops disappearing on a dirt road after a drought. I am sticky, loaded, I feel like an inhabitant.
and most days I think: what it would be like to live here? these skies? one is chopping onions, or putting something on the stove to boil. I think about that. one is putting something on the stove to boil, and the sun is setting, and the kitchen window is open and the breeze comes through, and suddenly one hears the call to prayer ring across the valley, and one smiles, because it is evening, and the skies are deep fuschia and violet with many many layers. olive trees dot the hills in the distance.
here we are
sunday late afternoon. precious moments of peace.
eat into this day as if it were a peach, cold or warm, dripping, overripe, almost bruised. textured, tender, needed.
one long sentence, 12:30am
oh my god, I'm excited, I just realized, I'm excited, it is 12:26am and I am still at the Clocktower, where it feels like home, the rooftop feels like home, this space feels like home, but I'm excited, for future and for school, to jog tomorrow morning, and there is new music coming out from the internet through the wires into my computer out of my speakers, and all of a sudden (and I don't know exactly why myself) I can't help but dance and laugh to myself and swivel myself in my chair after everyone's gone, gone home, it's just me up late, empty hallways and locked rooms, a beautiful roof, lingering auras, fingers on the keyboard, and I can't help but do a little jig with my feet and dream about sleeping here, maybe on the roof, dream about waking up in the morning to a tribeca sunrise, wash my face in the sink, do some stretches, sit and smile contentedly like a cat and wait for people to come home.
blessedness
I go for a bike ride, and then a jog, and then a bike ride, and then I go to work, and after work I go to bhqfu and spit my mind into words, and then I peruse the streets oh-so-briefly with a friend, and then I go home to curry and a communal meal, and I talk and laugh and this all feels quite comfortable, actually, and then I work and work and try to do work more amidst this impromptu party
and then all of a sudden a comment instigates me and I am standing up talking about the exploding galaxy commune and genesis p-orridge where the axiomatic bases of things are pulled out from underneath you, and then porn informing sex and post-pornographic architecture, and external objects as locators of the internal identity (ala lacan's mirror stage where the infant finds a coherence in the image of himself that he sees) and then from this turns to algorithms of aesthetics (catenary curves generated from hanging strings), and here is this banter about unboxed box-wine as louise bourgeoise-like catheter-like party favors, and my mind is a loft and afire and adrift and we are drunk and others are high but we're all still very lucid and sharp, feeling like a dart, converging to a point, and here we are juggling buildings in the air, tossing concepts like dice, here we are chewing on these things, us all, you and me and B, P, B, T, A, G, K, M, S, R, P, A, G, B, and we talk and there is something hanging in the air and we can pull it down and make worlds of it, buildings of it, video games and architecture, projects coming together,
and amidst all of this is this growing excitement, this inner fervor, not only at what-is-to-come but what-is-now, the knowledge that I could build, use my hands, dip my hands into a dirty muck of mud and come out ecstatic and energetic. earlier today I had 40-year old rum, wonderful courtesy of R, and it was amazing, fantastic, smelled like maple syrup. earlier today I also had tea that was so very old, and it had the scent of soap somewhere in the upper-left quadrant of my tongue after it had steeped for twenty minutes, but I tried it anyways, decades-old tea from an estate sale, and so these things will happen, and I am so grateful for that, tongues twisted in history, steeped in what-has-been.
and so I come upstairs to sleep and it starts raining, and I hear a million tiny pinpricks on the roof, pitter-patters of small creatures. I am blessed, I think to myself. and start to sleep.
I think this is called limit-attitude, or liminal-attitude (and yes I am borrowing that phrase of foucault's but it is mine now, only the phrase/signifier) but these moments where the self dissolves away in little rivulets? is, are, precious. yes? yes.
cloudy with a chance of meatballs
passing by ads for a movie it strikes me that the presence of food as something that conceivably rains from the sky means quite a bit, maybe. I say 'conceivably' as in that food is not like buildings or cars or tables, it's quite firmly in the realm of dogs/cats/frogs/money, things raining from the sky being already-made (not readymade) objects flying down, gold coins plopping on asphalt and wet mud alike. money is a good example of something inconceivable, inconceivable as being conceived, not-born but just-having-been-materialized. living organisms are born but the (nearly emotional) awareness of the concept of life is something that's neither gained in the knowledge of the birthing process nor in the biological processes (cell division, blastulation) that occur, the sort of emotional/perceptual distance between knowledge and awareness keeping itself afloat. perceptual distance is a good term maybe, sometimes called fetishization, spatially related to phenomenology maybe, the direct perception of space separate to the conceptual knowledge of the specific form of a space.
and if I know that (real) pork sausages come from ground pork stuffed into pork intestines, that even a relatively humane pork(ing?) process starts with birth and growth and a stunning/shooting/slaughtering and a washing of the blood away on a tiled floor for a good five minutes while someone in an apron and rubber boots waits with grim expertise for the convulsions to end -- and that then comes the butchering and the processing and maybe some washing/treating/marinating and then stuffing and then maybe some curing --- if I know of this process, without really having gone through it, I'm just only the tiniest bit closer to a knowledge of where this food comes from, and the rest is just magical appearances, might as well be growing on trees (but again life is another one of these things that holds this perceptual distance inside it, for us, for me), might as well be falling from the sky. this is the accidental luxury/event of my status as someone who lives in a country devoted to developing certain avenues of living that is devoted to this separation, this distance ('alienation of use-value').
more importantly the image I got instantly walking by this ad was of someone in a different economic/social context marveling at this movie, do they not know that meatballs don't fall from skies, or no rather yes I can guess that they don't literally think that meatballs don't fall from skies but is their relationship to food so precariously conceptual that it's possible to conceive of meatballs falling from skies, and maybe the closest analogy is for us having a movie that's about punches or kisses falling from the sky, not some magic love potion that _affects_ us but the direct object-related reifications of relationships floating down, a greasy translucent blob that sticks to you and makes you punch someone in the gut, in the face, judge I'm sorry but it fell from the sky,
and it's this perceptual distance that, on one hand, gathers up wonder and accumulates it until it precipitates into wonder and awe and excitement and the sense of travel amplified way beyond "eiffel tower" or "tower bridge" into an obsessive focusing-in onto the most miniscule of detail. the other day walking into a friend of a friend's apartment we all had this nugget (ha!) of a conversation with the doorman, enthusiastic numismatist maybe, speaking obsessively about two different companies specializing in numismatic certification. there's a certain refreshingness in obsession, the kind of fulfillment that takes an outline of a circle and fills it all the way to the center, having-thought-all-the-way-through, coming from this distance between understanding what a coin is what this guy feels about it --
and on the other hand this perceptual distance is the maker of capitalizations in the words Art, or Culture, and the corresponding repercussions are too dire to ignore, being confronted with this image to a degree that this distance is denied, truths held to be "self-evident"...
not p
what used to be a hiatus or an abeyance turned into a gap and a differentiation. to keep my eyes going and ways of looking going I've decided to take a photo each day, most probably on the iphone. goal; not to make but to generate.