13 December 2023

The hatred of those who harbor such feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased. Fuss with the word “harbor,” which means “to protect.” Fuss again with the word “never.” Words are tassels, Carla writes; though I don’t understand her analogy, I move toward it, as a dog to her treat. “Never” is stasis, like one interpretation of “wisdom”: unable to be altered, permanent. If impermanence is one form of wisdom, then wisdom must itself be fleeting. It shifts between sentences, slurred sounds rolling a different putty shape. I can imagine an icicle hanging from a palm frond because I remember icicles. I remember, despite my inability to see the past as a film; it’s too static for that, like a filmstrip that you can stop for a while to assimilate its square knowledge. The blocks of stone are translucent, as if knowledge were light that traveled through substance and toward a common area, covered in slate. I'm not there as I write this, but somewhere on the internet, where photos lead me back like guide dogs. A place (New Haven, say) can change emotional shape over time, and according to the weather, inward and out. There’s no ordinary evening there, just iterations. Repetition is not ordinary, or it wouldn’t be so remarkable. Last time I walked there, it looked the same, just happier.

Bryant hangs our red sheets on the line in front of a line of rain and fronds, in air and seated on the cement ground. The red is wrinkled. Red palms denote murder, war crime, disaster, but these are sheets that have been loved on (much as I dislike that young man’s metaphor!). I can use anything, sheets or wisdom, carry them away from context like blocks of stone that move in the light, like the surf that wrinkles, in the way one could surf the sheets. Red are the streets of Gaza, and to place them here feels blasphemous, as our topographies are rendered sacred by murder. Tunnels have been flooded with sea water, which leaches into the ground water. Snipers aim at poets and journalists, one way to end a narrative line.

I cannot write about Gaza; I cannot appropriate Gaza. What is your wisdom on this question?

The palm fronds are weighed down with water, like tassels slung from a graduate’s mortarboard.

What is the grammar of conflict? Is it internal, like a disagreement of number, or is it what grammar is forced to confront, having no army except in number? If I alter the structure of my sentences, can I bend conflict to reason? It’s the emotional back beat, the ungrammatical drum, that pulls the sentences into tunnels now flooded with words. Ideology is fixed affect.

The grammar of Noah Fischer's feeling bends toward identification not with himself as a young man, but toward his daughter, who might be trapped underneath the stones of Gaza. Those stones are me, he writes. I think he means in a sense both of the place and of its violence. I throw the stone that identifies me, at you whose stone looks the same but cannot be, because words. Between us, a wall that has nothing to do with mending.

Note: quotation from Dhammapada: Wisdom of the Buddha, translated by Kaviratna.