12 February 2024

 

“As soon as any category of humans is placed outside the pale of those whose life has value, nothing is more natural than to kill them.” Horrors of analogy: Gaza is shaped like a football field, long and narrow. There are bombs on each, holes in the line, drones to catch the view from a stadium’s heaven. Pan away toward Paris and New York; it’s Vegas, after all. Meditation is double chance: I caught sight on my screen of a veiled woman holding the swaddled corpse of her child, a young girl beside her,  eyes too big to see through. Video shook, as if the machine that reproduced the scene was itself in shock. The planners live out of bounds, boundaries breached only by tantrums and tackles. In bounds, a kindergarten as killing field. The crime, they say, is to cross the border. They're invading our safe zone, when we gathered to watch them kettled between end zones. End zone is end time. We want to imagine there’s a clock, but it doesn’t stop.

The new queen of affect jumps up and down in her box, as her common law king bullies his coach on the field. If he were black, he’d have been kicked out. If she were a man, they wouldn’t call her a cheerleader. We care so much about her that we avert our glance from the mother outside a hospital in Gaza. If she were a man, she’d likely be dead, but it’s her child, trapped in a destroyed car, whose voice slowly diminished until only she was quiet. Once they've been harvested, the silences of a war zone denote killing fields. A man who killed for the Khmer Rouge wears eyes the size of the young girl’s. To see so much is to see nothing. What can I hope to see in their eyes, except anesthesia? The social worker was appalled that anyone would say that disassociation in a child is good.

Soldiers loot the shops for goods, destroy registers for fun. If you haven’t broken enough with your tanks, use your crow bars. Not tragic but sick joy. Take that, Yeats. Joy that hates itself afterwards. His wife asked him to bring her a souvenir from Gaza; he will bring himself back, objectified. Feel sickness wash up from the feet like a rogue tide, like flooded tunnels, like water sources unfit to drink. What washes up on us is chance, but what began it was fully intended. Three hostages were freed.

Note: First sentence by Simone Weil, quoted by Jacqueline Rose in The Plague.