December 7th
A poem for Refaat.
Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the murder of Gazan poet and teacher Refaat Alareer, martyred with his family by an American missile in a precision strike on their apartment as they slept. Today, a year ago, is the day the news broke, or at least the day it broke for me. I didn’t know him, in any capacity, but I recognized him as belonging to some of the same anti-imperialist circles online as I have chosen to involve myself with, in my own entirely insignificant way. For this reason, the news of his death impacted me in a way that, to that point, none of the other “Israeli” crimes reported since 10/7 had – his life had touched mine, albeit only in a very small way, and it is a different kind of shock to feel this contact terminated. To put it another way, it was only when I learned of his murder that I became certain there was no possibility of things going back to the way they had been, that the world would be irrevocably changed by what was being done to Palestine, and that I would be, too. I didn’t know what to do with this certainty, or with anything else I had been feeling for the last couple months, really, so I wrote this poem. I wrote with no defined purpose or intention, except to get something, anything about what was going on in the world out onto the page. I’ve given the piece a few passes since then, reworking an awkward syllable or ambiguous phrase here and there, but the meat of it is essentially unchanged, a direct attempt at communicating what was going through my head that day, typing until the words ran out. I make a point of saying this so you’ll understand the perspective that it’s coming from: the still-early days of the war, and with an analytic framework that reflects that. At the time, for example, I still believed that no matter what happened, surely there would be a ceasefire in place well before today. Another year of such slaughter seemed unthinkable – and it was, but it has happened anyway, of course.
I don’t know if this is a good poem, or if I’m a good poet. I’d like to believe I am, in the way I would like to believe I am capable at all things I take seriously, but I’m old enough to have failed at things that were important to me, and to know that I’m still young, and, really, know almost nothing. Probably it is self-indulgent to write a poem like this, as someone whose investment in the Palestinian struggle is a matter of political principle, rather than personal necessity. Certainly it is inadequate to the moment – likely there is no way it could not be. I can say, at least, that it is as honest as I could make it, and I am putting it out into the world only in the hopes that it might give some other person some part of the language they have been looking for.
Those who read my piece two days ago, about the assassination of the mass murderer Brian Thompson (likely quite a lot of you, given how many new subscribers I’ve gained from it – if you’re one of them, thank you, the response to that piece has been like nothing I’ve experienced before), will notice some very similar themes pop up here, in an inverted form – in particular a preoccupation with the problem of political communication across history, of transmitting somehow what is gleaned from living through a particular time to those who will come after, and who will want to understand. The difference, of course, is the nature of the time in question. I find this coincidence very striking, although I’m not sure what to make of it. I imagine Mr. Alareer would have some useful insights, but he’s not around to share them.
December 7th
Scrolling the feed today I saw another teacher had been murdered. He taught English, and wrote a dissertation on John Donne. The news spread everywhere in minutes, but it won’t bring him back. Everyone knows who his killers are, but I doubt they’ll ever see justice. I hope I’m proven wrong, but I don’t expect to be. * Later, I saw a friend of mine, a writer friend, post about sitting in front of a blank page for an hour today, trying to find words that expressed how she felt, how she’s still feeling. She said she wasn’t able to. She only posted about it on a private account, where only a few of us, her friends, would see it. In times like these, it’s important to put on a brave face in public. Later, or maybe earlier, I saw some words from a stranger reposted onto my feed, saying that we haven’t earned the right to despair. After all, we’re not the ones being murdered. Our sorrow is secondhand, the sorrow of those far away, and that doesn’t come with the same privileges as a personal tragedy. Any self-pity is worthless, or worse than that, even, if it distracts us from the fight. It was like I had already been thinking: in times like these, you have a responsibility to only admit how hard it is to not despair in private venues, where only your friends will see. When you speak in public, you must speak with purpose and conviction, and make your words into a ward against the darkness – for yourself, of course, but also for your comrades, for the martyrs, just as much. For the record, though, I’ve been feeling the same way as my friend. (A line like this can only ever really be meaningful to those who already know its author – that is, know me – well enough to have a frame of reference against which to judge its emotional significance – how often it is I find myself at such a loss. But I’ve written it down anyway, so it’s part of history now, the place where, very soon, no one alive will have known me at all.) * I’ve been thinking about the future. More specifically, about how I would describe this time to someone who didn’t live through it, someone not yet born. I’ve also been thinking about the past. More specifically, about how I feel when I’m watching, say, a Robert Kramer movie, something like Milestones or Ice, where I know I’m watching a fiction, a more or less composed and constructed work of art, but nonetheless, I can feel the fact of the historical moment suffusing it, the possibility and potential, the hope, the anger, the uncertainty, the sense that everything is changing, and nothing has been decided yet. Not in the movie, but in the real world, the world that created it, and that’s now long gone, distant in a way you would think would be impossible for being only a few decades past, not only within my parents’ lifetime, but being of the time when my father would have been about the same age as me, looting condemned buildings and probably smoking a lot of weed. I’ve been thinking about what it means to make art like this, a work that’s like a battery, capable of storing the charge of its era in its body, and transmitting that charge to those born decades, centuries later (Brecht’s work, I think, is capable of this, and that of Catullus; no doubt there are other examples). I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make such work today, in this particular time, this particular state of exception. It’s a task which is always possible, I think, but never easy. How can one address a reader who lives in a world that has not yet even been born, whose nature is unknowable, not least because of the undecided nature of the very moment from which the address is being made? How can one hope to find the words that will make what is happening legible to them? Every day feels endless, and yet each bleeds into the one after, and the one before. Each day brings the same horror, and each day this same horror is somehow new again. Life, here in the imperial core, feels both absolutely normal and completely transformed, permanently altered. You can feel it in the air, in the new strain in every voice trying to convince us everything is normal. Never, in my life, have I felt such moral clarity. Never has it been so clear who my enemies are, and never, on this point, have those I call friends been in such uniform agreement. It feels as though the layers of obfuscation and plausible deniability have been stripped away, and now, finally, the beast stands naked and proud before us, soaked in the blood of teachers, doctors, young children. Such was always its nature, of course, but now there is no more pretense about it; one either sees what it is that is before them and is disgusted by it, or refuses, and reveals to the world exactly the person they always were. Such revelations seem to happen every day now. How can I hope to convey, to some yet-unborn future reader, just how surreal it is, to see people who present themselves as reasonable, as sensible, as humanist, above all else, not only loudly endorsing mass murder, but making a spectacle of their offense at the fact that there are those who do not? How can I convey what it’s like for it to feel every day like another day of this would be unbearable, and then have to sit and watch as it happens anyway? I don’t know. I can tell you my mood sometimes oscillates between grief and anger with such rapidity I couldn’t honestly say exactly which I’m feeling at any given moment. Sometimes I feel so profoundly numb. Mostly, though, I feel normal, but changed – the same as I have always been, but also completely different. It might be this aspect which will be the hardest to convey to those who follow, the fact of life today which will seem the most mysterious a hundred years from now. All I can say is that it has changed something fundamental inside me to see that the world really is as I suspected, that there was no childish error in my calculations, that I was not overly critical in my assumptions, in my politics, that if anything it’s worse than I had thought – in short, that it’s all true: Moloch really does live. I know I don’t need to explain this to anyone living now, who is capable of thought and feeling. But I hope, in the future, it will have become a historical truth as strange and foreign as the centuries without the written word seem to us today. I still don’t know how to make art that can speak to those living in such a time. This poem, ultimately, should be considered nothing but a set of eternally incomplete, preparatory remarks. * There’s something Adachi says, (Adachi, who traded his camera for a gun, and went underground with the Palestinians for thirty years) about the purpose art served in another time of struggle. Grandrieux made it the title of his movie about Adachi that he made after the soldier was released from prison. It’s been on my mind a lot recently. He said: “It may be that beauty strengthened our resolve.” But I doubt Grandrieux will ever trade his camera for a gun. And I doubt I will ever trade my words. This is half of the problem today. The other half is: if we did, where would we begin?