(Above: A photo a friend posted on her Facebook page hoping to feel hopeful.)
The title of this column is something I have been saying for many years now and posting on my social media platforms. I thought of it again this past week when the political Venn Diagram’s latest conflation contained Trump’s criticism of Netanyahu (someone who has alas long proved the title’s adage) and praise of Hezbollah with those on the left who in their rationalization of Hamas’s evil are implicitly doing the same thing. Thus, Trump’s theocratic white authoritarian fascistic acolytes in the GOP are crowding into the diagram’s conflated slice with the leftists, a sluice of slippery slopes and sliding moral standards.
America, a conflation of many kinds of states, geographic and existential, was let’s face it - please, let us face it - built upon slavery and founded on genocide. When Native Americans fought back in the ways they had to fight against the then modern weaponry of those taking their land they were called “savages” because those in control of the narrative thought of them as the terrorists of their time - scalping, we are told, and kidnapping and killing babies - without the archly white, overarching Narrative Voice confessing to its own genocidal confiscation of land to build this nation and the murder of Native American women and children to do so. Native Americans were walled off in basically open air prisons - much like Gaza is today - but one that they were told, as Palestinians are, over which they could have their own authority. What is it like to own a prison if it imprisons oneself? The ownership of one’s own imprisonment is a special kind of sadistic geopolitics no matter the timeframe. Terrorism fighting against genocide is the real prison for all involved. That is the world’s centuries-old narrative that knows not how to end itself unless it ends us all. The NarrativeVoice is calling from inside the room where we all must live because geography is finally as much a construct as architecture and, indeed, the very concept of home.
Yesterday at the London Film Festival I watched a double feature of One Life and The Zone of Interest. The first film, starring Anthony Hopkins, is based on the true story of a British man who saved 669 Jewish refugee children from Prague as Hitler and the Nazis advanced on Czechoslovakia and Poland. I wept for those refugee children in the film and that man’s purposeful goodness which then - more conflation - melded with my concern about the Palestinian refugee crisis from Gaza that is confronting us because of Israel’s purposeful ground invasion. The incongruity of that had a kind of origami of madness to it. I was dizzy with despondency. The second film, directed by Jonathan Glazer, is based on Martin Amis’s book of the same name which is about Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who with his wife constructed a bucolic life of order and beauty next to the death camp as the smoke stacks billowed his and his wife’s and Hitler’s evil. It is a cinematic treatise on complicity built into the care we all take in caring for our own well-ordered no-matter-what lives because the world is in the vicinity of us all in the 21st century in ways that it was not in the 20th. Social media billows its bellowing. Seeing these films back to back, I also thought about the Kragujevac massacre in which almost 2800 Serb men and boys were slaughtered by Nazi soldiers in another October back in 1941 because of the insurgent - i.e. “terrorist” - attacks that resulted in 10 German soldiers dying and 26 others being wounded. I thought also of the modern-day pogrom unleashed by Hamas against Jews and Israelis. I thought of the impulse to mirror it, to manifest a Hamas within us as a reflexive response that is a reflective one that is not reflective. Revenge is ready to take whatever form revenge wants even if it is the same but, we are told, different.
Everything taken to its extreme …
Collective punishment is a war crime.
… becomes its opposite.
Among the thousands of deaths this past week was the one of poet and Nobel laureate Louise Glück. I am at the Tate Modern on this evening that has grown cool again - like the nights of early spring. I am typing this sentence in one of its cafes after taking a photo about an hour ago of this painting below. It is from 1937 and titled “Moonlight and Lamplight.” The artists is Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981). “I was using colour to express colour - the form could take whatever form the colour wanted,” she said.
It reminded me of this poem by Glück.
THE SILVER LILY
The nights have grown cool again, like the nights
of early spring, and quiet again. Will
speech disturb you? We're
alone now; we have no reason for silence.
Can you see, over the garden—the full moon rises.
I won't see the next full moon.
In spring, when the moon rose, it meant
time was endless. Snowdrops
opened and closed, the clustered
seeds of the maples fell in pale drifts.
White over white, the moon rose over the birch tree.
And in the crook, where the tree divides,
leaves of the first daffodils, in moonlight
soft greenish-silver.
We have come too far together toward the end now
to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain
I know what the end means. And you, who've been with a man—
after the first cries,
doesn't joy, like fear, make no sound?
###
There, at the end of that poem, there, here, there, here: everything taken to its extreme becomes its opposite.
There is no reason for silence - we have no reason for it - in the hurried roar of bombs and harried cries of children and the unhurried unharried thudding Other Silence of the thousands and thousands of innocent deaths.
We are all Bedouins now, all lone pilgrims longing for something to herd other than our tribal selves. Lost, we turn to trying to herd hope and what came before it, a belief that humanity harbored hearts hungry for such a thing and not thirsty for more blood. Our thirst for that which gives us life brings us death.
In her poem “Aboriginal Landscape,” Glück writes of visiting a cemetery and visiting the graves of her mother and father and taking the train back to the city while observing a conductor smoking a cigarette:
“Do not forget me, I cried, when at last I reached him.
Madam, he said, pointing to the tracks,
surely you realize this is the end, the tracks do not go further.
His words were harsh, and yet his eyes were kind;
this encouraged me to press my case harder.
But they go back, I said, and I remarked
their sturdiness, as though they had many such returns ahead of them.
You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confront
much sorrow and disappointment.
He gazed at me with increasing frankness.
I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.”
###
Bedouins. Refugees. Czech girls. Serb boys. Israeli ravers ecstatic with music. Hamas hordes frenzied with vengeance. Tribes fraught with the fright they cause in others not in their own. Hatreds rampant. The purposeful rampage of soldiers. Terrorism. Genocide. Scalps. Beheaded babies. Hostages. Homes destroyed. Countries built on confiscation. Open air prisons. Open air festivals. Joy. Fear. The silent roar. Back is forth. The tracks we are on. Glück. Höss. Us. Them. Colour. Revenge. Form.
Everything taken to its extreme becomes its opposite.
Everything: opposite.
Everyone is right and everyone is wrong.
For me, this is an entirely new thought: "Native Americans were walled off in basically open air prisons - much like Gaza is today - but one that they were told, as Palestinians are, over which they could have their own authority." Not a happy one, but new.
(And if, at the film festival, you see Errol Morris, say hello from me.)