#WarCoffee

14 March 2022

Watched Winter on Fire last night. History has an inside, like the cave of the heart, or spleen. “They are 

not human beings,” human beings kept saying about other human beings. Broken things: buildings, 

noses, eyes, the voices of witnesses. History broken, like a skull. Fast forward (is that it?) A wounded 

soldier holds up his phone in bed and Zelensky peers at it. Gives the man a medal.

Bird song, until the television comes on to sirens, explosions. Not better to be there, but better to feel a part of it, to have a hand to lend, to be a witness with benefits (as it were). The screen is a part in information’s skull. You can be arrested in Russia for trading information.

You don’t fuck with Ukrainians. Bodies against tanks. Bodies against trucks. Bodies against Darth Vaders with steel wands, their magic the fracturing of bodies. They want to be more like us. Decadent, corrupt, possessed of the courage not to wear a cloth mask.

Yesterday, Lilith escaped again. Across the road, inside dense rain forest foliage, I heard pheasants being flushed this way, then that. Punctuated by barks. She came toward me; when I called, she re-entered the forest. She came back when she got thirsty.

There’s drama without plot. An explosion kind of ends development, gets too quickly to denouement, kills the syllogism. Death is not a plot, nor is it an endpoint. The street-fighting continues, a young man telling his mother on the phone that he loves her (because he’s so prompted), as a body lies 10 feet away.

Cris puts his art up again. Bad feeling about art is not the same as bad faith in art. We cannot help Ukraine, nor can we take advantage by our witnessing. We are apart from. I want to take your portrait means I am relieving you of something about yourself, whatever trace of you there is in your image. That’s why some people say no to be photographed; they might lose themselves to spectators, as if they were actors, not persons.

How do I spend my creative time, a friend asks. Very poorly. What is to be made against the vision of so much unmaking? I don’t see babushkas screaming at Russian soldiers any more, just stretchers emerging from a hospital. The journalist says his colleague was shot and left behind. He says that from his cot.

There’s a Peace Park near here, devoted to providing a safe space for aliens to land. The once-naked woman is now covered with a concrete toga. Bryant suspects that concrete has about five more years in it. Evelyn finds a buried stop sign; a buried Raelian symbol; part of a buried bird. Blue peacocks stand guard on the patch of ground. It’s been mowed, but nothing else is well kept, except perhaps the vines around the statue’s head and hand.

I’ve started reading The Memory Police again, though I hardly ever re-read. It’s about forgetting the plot, the objects that populate it. It’s about erasure. If we are mandated to forget, we also forget to care for. A stray bird means nothing. The narrator’s mother has kept some forgotten objects, like perfume, in her furniture. After their death, they are magical in resurrection. The ordinary is what becomes sacred after its objects are forgotten. A manicure in war-time is act of resistance. Let’s drink more war coffee across our twitter feeds.

Note: The Memory Police is a novel by Yoko Ogawa.