March 06

Something that isn't war
by Joanna Steinhardt
p. 3 of 3

We continued down Yafo, heading past Kikar Zion and its usual crowd of teenagers. Because of the holiday, many were dressed in cheap costumes and colorful wigs. Returning to a subject we had discussed at the bar, he said that the Western world lived at a different frequency than what he had found in the Arab world. I asked him what he meant by frequency but he appeared to be at a loss, as if it was a stupid question. “Like, what frequency is this?” I asked, as we passed some girls screaming and laughing.

“I don’t know…. 96.9…”

When we had sat down at the bar, he had told me about how he had first arrived in an Arab city for an interview at the university there. He had never expected to stay; he had just finished his doctorate and was languishing at a university in England. He was in a taxi from the airport, when in the street, he saw a man and a young boy riding on the back of a bike. The man had a rack of pita balanced his head and, he told me, it was something in the movement of the little boy’s hand, lifting a loaf of bread off the pile of pita on this wooden rack with complete naturalness that struck him as one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. Steeped in Foucault, the reporter had paid little attention to Said and he asserted that amongst the Arab masses there survived a spark of human freedom that had long since been lost – or at least mutilated or domesticated – in the Western world. He noted at one point the Palestinians in Palestine never read Said.

Strangely, he understood A. because he was not unlike him in this regard.

Walking back to Damascus Gate, I told him, simply, that living in Israel was like a waking dream. I floated through it, watching, listening, always trying to wake up, trying to see it for what it was, if it was in fact one thing at all—a thing called reality—as it was presented in countless books and newspaper articles, a thing called the Arab-Israeli Conflict, but I could never manage to see it in its entirety, only pieces here and there, reports on the internet, Arab day workers waiting outside of the Old City in the shade, walking tours of straggling Christian pilgrims in jean shorts and visors, the religious hippies in Birkenstocks with a gun in a holster and a radiant smile, some of whom I had even visited with friends out in the settlements where they live with their numerous children and barking dog, in the pure air of the hills. No matter how close I got, I couldn’t make out the reality, it always seemed unreal, like a dream. I told him this directly, handing over the contradictions as I saw them. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. The story was about two dead Palestinians, reputedly involved in one terrorist group or another, who had been found, murdered and mutilated, on a hill near the city where he lived. They bore signs of violence and torture. There were segments of their skin that had been cut off and one had bayonet wounds around his anus. He had gone to see the bodies in the mortuary. As he told me this, in a calm, heavy voice, he stopped occasionally to point to a part of his body, where skin was missing or where there had been puncture wounds. The gash in the anus, he said, was particularly horrible. These wounds, he told me, could only have been made by a bayonet, the likes of which are found among Israeli soldiers. I listened patiently, understanding that I was supposed to be shocked and affected by this monologue but instead, I was only sad. His “story” was one that I had read in an article he wrote that was published on the internet. Back when he had disappeared, I did a search for his name and found it. I knew that there was enough chaos on both sides to both assume and doubt that this act was carried out by Israeli soldiers. I had read enough disturbing reports; this one shocked and outraged me no more or less than the others. And of course there was the fact that this was the second time I was hearing it, although I couldn’t bring myself to tell him so. I also didn’t tell him that I wasn’t sure this dream I was living in was my own. I felt as if I had been born into a game not of my own making and I was forced to play myself, a role drawn by history, language, and the various ties of affection. Although the mechanisms of this coercion were not clear to me, it was clear that my role was elicited by the subtle gestures of those around me, the rhythm of fluttering eyelashes and the tiny muscles around the mouth that can spell acceptance or condemnation, the pale skin of finely woven outrage that is politely hidden from view.

By the time we said goodbye, it was three in the morning.

I didn’t hear from him. The next day, I ate lunch with my friend and two of her Israeli companions and I told them that I went on a date last night and when they asked, “Az nu, how was he?,” I replied, “Magneev.” I felt as if my mind has been pleasurably exploded by his urbane ranting and lightly trilled rs. Not in years had I had a conversation with someone who imbibed political philosophy until it disturbed his dreams, both awake and asleep. This was the Blond Taoist, in whom I sensed a deep reservoir of poetic comprehension and crystalline rage, a combination I found intensely attractive and intoxicating. As my religious observance continued to spiral into extinction, my political views took a further turn towards the left, influenced by his frank observations and recitation of his experience of life in his city in the Territories. I even started reading The Anti-Christ so I could formulate my argument over Nietzsche, epistemology, and religion that I had left aside because the topic was too irksome and frustrating, and our opinions too contrary. My friend H. came to visit and I said to her as I mopped the floor before Shabbat came in, “We really don’t even know what goes on over there, or we know but we don’t admit it. He was right to wonder, how is it that we can live here, so carefree, when that’s being done in our name?” She had no answer. I made CDs for him, mixes I thought he might like. I wrote an email, and got one in return some days later, a response laden with ambivalence towards his time “on the inside.” I wrote back, asking for details. What was it like over there? I wanted to know. As I had told him long before we met, I’m dangerously curious. I wanted to visit him in the city where he was living. But I was met with silence and I refused to write again.

Though distracted by school, I was occasionally caught off guard by the thought of the reporter’s resumed invisibility and a small wave of loss would wash over me. At first, I told myself he had gone back to silence for security reasons, but then I realized he might just be gone. Arguments, explanations, and disclosures were shelved, cancelled, and forgotten.

For a class in critical theory, I read about the how the pleasure principle—the pursuit of pleasure—is modified over time to become the reality principle, according to which the avoidance of pain becomes the main criteria for acquiring happiness. There are many different methods of achieving this necessary adaptation, writes Freud.

Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which is achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself. (p. 27)

Later, after a second trip home, I bought and read Virilio and saw the basis of many of the Blond Taoist’s ideas. It was as if his pale skin had turned truly transparent and I was able to glimpse inside him, to read the same text as he had read it years ago. Virilio wrote:

We can’t stop everything to give ourselves time for reflection. I believe it’s within the inquiry into technology that we’ll find, not a solution, but the possibility of a solution. That’s why I’m so interested in the war-machine. Holderin’s phrase: “But where danger grows, grows also that which saves,” is very important to me. I believe that within this perversion of human knowledge by the war-machine, hides it’s opposite. Thus there is work to be done within the machine itself, and in my view politics has never done anything other than put it’s hands in the bloody guts of the cadaver of war, and pull out something that could be used—something that wasn’t war…. It’s the question of death: we can’t escape it, we must face it intellectually and physically, as doctors and artists have. (p. 107)

I suspected that he had read this passage, absorbed its meaning, and let it direct the course of his life.

Months later, I was prowling through sites on Foucault for free downloads and some gossip on the matter of his boyfriend, whom he supposedly infected with AIDS without disclosing that he himself was infected. I searched in a forum and opened a message on a whim—there was some remark about the Middle East—where I discovered the reporter’s name at the bottom. The message had been written years ago, when he had a post-doc position somewhere in the States. Through ad hoc calculations, I figured it was before his girlfriend was killed. In that message was a link. I clicked on it, assuming it was an organization he had worked for and instead found a sprawling, exquisitely designed personal website where, in the background, gray on white, hung the words, stylistically looming: but where danger grows, grows also that which saves. I clicked on “live,” hoping to see a live stream of video, but instead I was sent to a branch called “Palestine.” It was his web log from inside the territories. Fascinated, I began reading about his life. There were quotes from articles and interviews he had done for his newspaper, a few with a wanted terrorist leader. These were interwoven with memories in the second person, slices of the past caught, written with painful clarity, along with scenes from today, minimalist accounts of charged encounters with women he loves, students, men on the street. It was purposefully unclear and elusive, like seeing someone’s thoughts through a gauze curtain, wafting in one direction and then another. I scrolled backward until I found the day on which we had met. In his characteristic style—detached and melancholic—he described me in smug, scathing terms. About my rambling explanation of Purim, he wrote that he couldn’t have cared less. How could I live here, he sneered, without having seen or smelt death? “I couldn’t,” he wrote. “I can’t.”

I was overwhelmed with compassion, repelled by his arrogance, and terrified by the force lurking amongst the diffuse atmosphere of revelation and esoteric knowledge. Something about him moved and disturbed me. Each post had a link for comments. I decided to write one, explaining myself, a composition which was a condensed form, more or less, of the story I’ve written here. I told my side: I told him how beautiful I thought he was with his quick, almost-clicking shoes and straight pants, and how wrong he had been. I told him that I couldn’t express how much his words at the café, in their delicacy, were like the anti-matter of Israeli reality, how I was surprised that Israel didn't fall into the Mediterranean from the force of his simple, beautiful phrase. Lastly, I told him not to think he knew anything about me that I didn’t know myself.

He wrote back not long after and surprised me again by writing, “I’m sorry,” and explained that he had been a “mood” when he wrote the entry and that he doesn’t change what he writes on principle, in order to preserve the truth of each moment. But the most confusing detail of this response, besides the chatty apologetics, was that after his initial explanation, as if by way of endearing himself to me, he included a smiley face with a laughing smile. : D

I didn’t write back.

The reporter saw more clearly than I that we stand in opposition to each other. Looking back, I find that it’s his passion for truth that frightens me most, the way he brims with hope, grief, and longing, and sees in this country an ultimate symbol, as he once wrote in an email that Jerusalem should be the one place on earth that is open to all humanity. His morals blurred fluidly into his aesthetics. “Life just too fucking beautiful,” he said.

When words are incomprehensible, the presence of someone like A., my “friend,” as he called him, makes sense to me, but the reporter, whose words I follow but whose presence I stumble to understand, eludes me as I feel his circuitous argument tightening around me like a noose around my neck. His graceful words were unforgiving in their certainty. I wondered if, given the time and space, that delicacy could also flower into spectacular cruelty. He can’t see the other side of his vision, or rather, one could say, our truth doesn’t exist in his translucent eyes.

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