Nothing comes more naturally to men than murder. A Palestinian woman approaches the camera, clutching her grandson’s hand and a white flag; she is shot dead. A man collapses on a street beside his son’s dying body. He crouches, screams. The passive voice is no help; it confers anonymity of name only. It’s the rhetorical strategy of steam, wreathing incident with mist. We gaze into a well at the Holocaust Museum to see video not permitted to children. We look into the well of a steam vent, our faces warming to the task. “A well of living waters” can’t be ruined with your coins; they glint upward like my daughter’s eyes, markers not of material but of illumination. My writing becomes more spiritual as the world becomes less so. Look between the sidewalk seams for what’s green; if it’s a weed, eat it.
Their guide started throwing lava rocks away from small piles, resembling altars. Tourists regard evidence of belief as a license to imitate; perhaps they recognize what’s holy in the lava fields where an eruption created a sculpture garden of buried trees. Abandonment is creation, Weil writes; here we note that what we can’t see (the tree) is beautiful (in its lava cloak). I felt something pass between my eyes and hers on the airplane before I left her and her friend at the E gates for her flight back. Glint of coin, otherwise hidden.
To reach the end of words goes beyond reaching the end of sentence or phrase. It suggests the impossibility of sentences, composed of words. There might be an essay in that group of photographs: tarp to cover a motorcycle, shadow resembling a gargoyle, black leaves on a fence in the sun. But the essay lacks opening or end, is only stream. Something about the way the literal becomes metaphorical, or how a name (Tortilla) becomes an object to be eaten (tortilla). So much in that capital letter.
My parents’ letters to me, found in a rusty file cabinet, moved me not for what they said, but for the shapes of their letters. Random sections of my mother’s neat cursive became photographs; they made no sense that wasn’t asemic. More of her in the imprint of blue ballpoint pen, less of her in complete words. Or: for her to have written sheer wisdom in the midst of anxiety seems to me ironic. Anxiety the scrambler; wisdom the thresher. I only described places, she said to me, not my feelings. Mutual anxieties built a wall that travels the country on a large truck to honor the dead. Moving Vietnam Memorial looking ominously like a Trump convoy, flags and motorcycles going by. Same signs, what context.
Note, first sentence by Simone Weil.
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