Something has shifted in the world.
I don’t understand it yet, so I cannot write about it.
I’ve tried, honestly, but everything I type feels false, premature, and really just empty.
The only thing I’ve found which comes close to describing this sense I have is what Gordon White wrote:
“As it was with the Canadian Nazi salute, what’s happening in Gaza pauses or suspends all energy flow in one’s life, as if the archons have trapped you in a human-sized bubble of horror.”
That’s how it feels, really. And exactly as he says, because that’s also how I felt about the event in the Canadian parliament. Constriction, like the distant vistas of humanity were suddenly revealed to be merely convincing stage backdrop.
As I said, though, I don’t know what else to say about it. Not about the conflict in Palestine itself — which doesn’t need my words anyway — but the larger shift around it.
Something has changed, and will keep changing, and will eventually reveal itself to us as a thing of initially-incomprehensible horror until we find the words to define it.
There’s nothing else to say right now about it.
But I do want to know: how are you feeling? What’s it feel like in your world right now? Gordon ended his short essay with the following lines:
“So a broken heart is also a heart that is breaking open so that it becomes larger, so that it can hold more of the grief and the love and the joy and the pain of the whole cosmos. That is what it is for. That is what you are for.
That is yours to do.”
So, how is your heart breaking right now? How has it been so constricted, its borders too close-in, that the love inside it is threatening to flood out?
Please tell me. I don’t want to know (and please don’t share) an analysis of these events. Instead, I want to know about your heart.
With love,
—Rhyd
I feel all the usual feelings one would at witnessing such a thing but throughout my life I’ve seen this horror play out again and again, in what seems lately, like an ever increasing crescendo. Now I feel like I’m over it. I just see the absolute folly of it all. If war was the practice of lobotomy I think I’m at the stage where we go “you know what? This lobotomy thing we’ve been doing doesn’t seem to be working out so well.” And at that point we all just stop and never do it again because we know it’s just sheer stupidity. I’ve seen this show, I’ve heard this song. I know how it goes right to the end. I don’t feel I need to do it again. This might all sound kind of dispassionate but if you keep whacking yourself in the face with a stick and refuse to stop, after a while people are going to stop trying to convince you of the negatives of face whacking. They’ll give up and let you just whack away. That’s where I’m at. I’m just watching the face get bloodier and bloodier and I’m thinking well ... I thought you might have worked this one out by now humanity and you haven’t. I dunno? Maybe you aren’t going to make it after all.
The Azeris and the Turks eradicated Artsakh just a fortnight ago; surely it was in the air already? As in death and misery and mass murder occurring on a comparable scale? And didn’t that maw begin to open earlier, much earlier, anyway? We pick up things from the aethyrs, and I’d be the last person to deny that, but how much is our awareness triggered by what makes it into the media? Then again, I am but cataloguing peripheral reactions. There are numerous levels on which all of this is being processed. Some part of the spectator has transcended shock and entered a state of sheer morbid fascination, hypnotized by the rhythm of morbid tableaux, compassion circuts overloaded and beginning to erupt in bright cascades of blood red sparks.
And, of course, an old fault line splitting the left has just become a gaping abyss. Kinda hard not to take sides, and to do so with wild abandon, eh?