Untitled (October 22nd, 2023)
The last two weeks living in Israel has been somewhat terrifying, especially the first few days of the war, when the whole thing hatched open with an air raid siren at early, early dawn. Since the dust has settled (for us innocent students in Jerusalem, at least—dust is still, and with even more voracity, being kicked up across the country) however, the initial terror that I felt has been supplanted by an equal quantity of anxiety and poisonous anticipation, maybe in about a sixty-forty mixture (give or take a couple of mishaps and beakers shattering in the laboratory, and some unexpected products as a result).
Most of that, I hold, has been from news outlets, and my friends here, who have started to resemble newspaper salesmen more and more, taking it upon themselves to print, package, and hawk the unfiltered headlines to me free of charge (just my luck!?) (?!)…(?) I don’t know why here in Jerusalem we expect headlines to save us, as if we were drowning in a horrible, empty void, and the next news article from [insert shapeless, nameless news station here] were going to serve as buoyant as a flotation device. Or rather I should ask what they hope (or I hope—I’ve been almost as subject to this torture as anyone else) for it to grant them. If Thoreau said, speaking “critically” as it were, that he had “never received more than one or two letters in [his] life that were worth the postage" and that he had "never read any memorable news in a newspaper,” then certainly there is no hope for me yet...
Most, if not all of the headlines (even this word I hesitate to say, for it catches in my throat now like a ball of phlegm) that masquerade as news merely update us on the numbers of the freshly deceased. One hundred today is supposed to evoke in us the sorrow of one hundred lives, all at once, and the saddest part is that we are almost able to accomplish this terrible fear, until the next headline (it arises slowly in my throat, the word, swallow it back down…) asks of us to double, or suddenly quintuple, the number, and we find ourselves trying to make the Christ-ean… Christ-ian? (Herculean is what I want the word to sound like here, but Jesus-ean is what I want it to mean) effort to absorb the suffering of all of Israel and Gaza. Then, in the most twisted turn of all fates (turning turns, fated fates), the numbers turn out to be completely fabricated.
It’s this kind of mental Olympics that requires my constant attention, and even when I disengage from it, it weasels its way into my sense of experience (again weasel isn’t the best word here, but rather the news and suffering and hate in the world is so ubiquitous that it doesn’t need to weasel its way anywhere) against my will, or without even my slightest perception of its presence, until at the end of the day I feel utterly drained, and am not quite sure why, only to do a little digging and find that there is hate scattered around every corner of my mind like a fine coating of dust (much like the fine layer of dust that, since the first day I moved into this apartment, and most likely before then, has coated the tile floors, and slowly creeps around at night to accumulate in spidery clusters that, upon the opening and closing of doors and drawers, are gusted by the breezes off the ground up into the air like little jumping crickets).
It’s so ubiquitous, and at this point has build up in such a sticky, thick layer, that any actual suffering (that is to say my own, not those flimsy, hesitant emotion-things I cough up and swallow) is almost unbearable. I stepped on a snail yesterday while walking up the walkway to my apartment (walking the walkway, stepping the steps) and smashed his shell to bits and pieces. I immediately and instinctually apologized—“oop, sorry!”—in the way that I normally do, until I looked down at the absolute mess I had made (for the both of us, that is). The poor snail’s shell was fractured down the middle, like an egg that had been rapped against the side of a frying pan. His gelatinous body writhed with what I could only imagine to be (and at this estimation my girlfriend exclaimed—“snails aren’t conscious!”—to which I should have asked her, maybe, which of god’s creatures are and aren’t conscious. Please list them in order, beginning with aardvark…) the most excruciating pain and shame imaginable—the snail, along with the hermit crab, and the other shelled creatures, and maybe marsupials, are the only creatures that can have their house and life destroyed with a single fell swoop of a plastic sandal.
The snail was alive still, only soon to be dead—I decided to (or rather, because I could hardly bear to stand and watch any longer, nor could I bear to leave the crime scene) hasten the death process I had begun not a moment before. I picked up the nearest heavy object (an odd judging process, if you meditate on it for a moment—one seldom ponders his surroundings, and even more seldom does he evaluate each object individually, asking himself, is this one heavy enough to crush swiftly, to snuff out completely the life force of a snail?), which ended up being a large cinderblock, and dropped it from about waist height on top of the snail. Still it moved after I checked again (although perhaps it were the physiologic and involuntary spasms that squids and octopuses have, dripping in soy sauce and brine, between the ends of a pair of chopsticks, and implicated nothing more about my guilt in the matter) and so I went about mashing the snail into the concrete with the block, like one would with a mortar and pestle.
And something about the whole episode disturbed me even more than the start of the war and the atrocities that had been committed. Though one could say it was because I was the perpetrator, it felt (at first experientially, and then later, from my comfort behind the page, the ink) more so like the overflowing of my sorrows—my circle of empathy I had perhaps extended too large, or perhaps, to try out another simple metaphor, the space into which I had made myself had filled up with the pain of my country (ancestral, religious, yes; literal, spiritual, no). I hath runneth over.
More than half, perhaps ninety-nine percent of that space has been for the last two months or so, occupied with the grave I had dug in my backyard, and the sorrow I had filled it with that one hot (frozen still in my memory, however) day. I'll refrain from writing any more about Jojo’s dying day for the sanctity of the world, and for her peace—I fear if I begin to speak about that day, or to be more precise, the few hours surrounding her death, the universe, and everything good in it, may start to come apart at the seams, and what’s behind slip through, something no doubt slimy and unwelcome.
So how then, do things, memories, headlines (cough-up, re-swallow) stack upon each other in this “space?” How can I even suggest such a place and then claim that it’s full, or even still, bursting at its “seams?” Where in it is the snail I shattered and then pulverized? Please point it out to me. Is it above, next to Jojo’s gravestone? Or is it blinking in bright colors on top of newsfeeds perhaps, right below the countless murdered?
And yet suddenly it all becomes recognizable, tangible, all at once, whether we know where these things are stored or not. But they’ve all completely blended together in this hidden space, as if when we put away memories for safe keeping, they dematerialize, and become miscible with each other (soluble, bonded, as inseparable as azeotropes) only to reemerge as something else entirely. Perhaps then the terror I felt after having crushed the snail was instead my terror for the state of the world right now; the lamentation I uttered for its severed shell being instead for my dear Jojo.