4 February 2024

If unknowing lives on top of you, and forgetting below, then to forget is to fall into knowing, or what once was known. A Swedish artist makes miniature replicas of old Tokyo, adding on air-conditioning units and pipes, “weathering” them with paint, making the old old again from scratch. An old woman on a plane told me she survived the fire bombing of Tokyo; she remembered holding to her mother’s back as she ran. Labor not as productivity but as its antithesis, until the atom bomb dome gets lovingly refurbished to remain destroyed. The production of destruction boosts the economy, while a homeless man lays tape between his two shopping carts, “private property” scrawled across it. Behind the sling of tape, an odd tarp barely holds itself up over discarded cans and papers. He (if it is he) is nowhere to be seen; hence the tape. Nearby, a bearded man with a large growth on his left cheek reads an old paperback. Says it’s difficult. I recognize it only as a thriller. Goodreads installed on the sidewalk outside of Walgreen’s. He turns down a bag of toiletries. The woman at the acupuncturist's front desk had told me not to be afraid of them.

Gaza flattened is a miniature, constructed of the labor of bomb and airplane builders, the skill of pilots, the brilliance of computers. Perhaps our Swede can remake Gaza as it is now, concrete slabs broken on other concrete slabs, a boy crushed beneath the ruin. He added urinal and toilet paper to his Tokyo; those have been excised from Gaza, along with hospitals and schools. One is undertone of the other, the cloud of forgetting not yet vaporized, still knowing itself as suffering. The gardens outside Auschwitz are in the movies, if not the news. A film most effective for its sound, marking what cannot be seen (except ash). Artificial volcano, fueled not by earth but by bodies. I remember my horror when my mother, whose found Nazi spoon stayed in our cutlery drawer, explained to me that lampshades were made of human flesh. She described the liberation of Dachau, but in plain language. Plain language is to pray by; she needed a fugue more baroque and discordant. I still parse her words for the horror she felt (and she did) failing to feel their pulse.

What is your local anesthesia? One friend reads Jewish theology, another goes to the ocean. To see them is not to imagine their sound tracks, their sense of another’s suffering in the sound of machines. We’re told the bombing is a form of restraint. The explosions look good on television in the night.

Note: the opening is based on The Cloud of Unknowing. The movie is The Zone of 

Interest.