 U.S. Department of Defense "temporary humanitarian aid pier" in Gaza (image via defense.gov) Today: Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks and The Way to the Spring.
Issue No. 168Something Like the Weather
Ben Ehrenreich
Something Like the WeatherYesterday the Israeli military bombed a school in Gaza. I wrote that sentence earlier this month, but it is true again today and would also have been true if I had written it on any of many dozens of other days this year. Between last October and the middle of August, the Israelis bombed more than 500 schools in Gaza. Most were being used as shelters for refugees who had fled their homes to avoid being bombed elsewhere, a category of people that now includes almost the entire, considerably reduced population of Gaza. It feels quaint, stupid even, to observe that it is a war crime to bomb schools. The one bombed yesterday was north of Gaza City in the Jabalia refugee camp, which over the last year has been largely flattened by Israeli bombs. Or, more accurately, by American bombs dropped by Israeli pilots. The school I had originally been writing about was the Kafr Qasim School in the Shati refugee camp, a little to the south and west. Shati means “beach” in Arabic: the camp there was established in 1948 by refugees pushed out of Jaffa, Lod, and Beersheba who had nowhere else to go. Many of the people sheltering in these schools, in other words, were taking refuge from the refugee camps in which their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had once taken refuge. Back in 1948, al-Shati must have looked a lot like al-Mawasi, the tent camp and “humanitarian zone” on the beach just west of Khan Younis, where the Israeli military has assured Palestinians they would be safe from bombing and where they nonetheless have repeatedly bombed them. At least seven Palestinians were killed at the Kafr Qasim School, Al Jazeera reported. The coldness of that “at least” is the exact temperature of the Earth at the moment, no matter the local conditions. The temperature the day before can be deduced from the following sentence: That day, at least another 22 people, more than half of them children, died in another Israeli strike on the Zeitoon School (“olive,” it means), north of Gaza City, where thousands of people displaced by other bombings had sought shelter. Many others were wounded, some with severe burns. At least thirty, reports say. And at least eleven more were killed yesterday at the school in Jabalia. This sort of news is no longer news. American bombs and Israeli pilots are killing Arabs in a different country now, which for the moment counts as news. Otherwise real news involves poll numbers and hundreds of bottles of baby oil and pets in Ohio who are not actually being eaten. Genocide, on the other hand, is something more like weather. Despite all reports to the contrary, the Earth is cold and getting colder.
Jean Giono’s Fragments of a Paradise is not out yet but I read a review copy on my phone. The same phone informs me of the latest massacres and lets me order pizza and call my friends and family and finds songs I might like to listen to while I walk to work. Miracles never end. Giono dictated the novel in its entirety to a secretary named Alice over two and a half months in early 1944. A pacifist, he had been imprisoned by the French government a few months before the Nazi occupation began in 1940 and he would be imprisoned again when it ended in the summer of 1944. It was between those two stints of incarceration, as the planet convulsed with violence, that he composed this strange novel about a journey of discovery that is also a journey of escape. In it, a ship sails from a continent at war not in search of any safer harbor but to “sever all relations and ties with the civilized world.” The vessel is equipped for years at sea. The crew includes common sailors and scientists of sorts. They take notes and perform experiments, but the purpose of their journey is less to gather knowledge than to undo it, to abandon the sterility of reason and “the era of monstrosities” it unleashed. What is this great modern life, Giono asks, other than to “spin round and round like tops, … to get excited by political regimes that consist, most of the time, of the most despicable murderers” and to “exhaust one’s curiosity—such a fresh, enticing feeling—on puny objects offered up by the so-called progress of civilization”? They find whales dead and alive, the music of the stars, vast clouds of birds, a squid bigger than an island. Nature is not comforting or harmonious, but alien and grotesque in its beauty and enormity. They don’t seek to understand it or to tame it, but to be engulfed by its strangeness, to enter “a delirium that can enrich the longest lives and make us love even the onset of death.” I won’t be giving anything away if I tell you that the novel ends on a note of profound ambiguity. In the final pages, the ship goes adrift. It rains and rains day after day but no wind blows to fill the sails. The crew can see nothing beyond the rails of the deck. “We couldn’t care less if the sea went on forever,” one of the sailors tells the captain, not even if the rain never stopped. “What we want, more than anything, is to be able to steer.”
On Sunday, the same day that the school was bombed in al-Shati camp, we took our daughter to the beach. It had rained all morning but we needed to get out of the house and we hadn’t been to the beach all summer. We got lucky. The sky cleared just as we got off the train and walked half an hour through quiet streets and the beach was gloriously empty. It’s fall already and it had been raining for days but the water was warm. My daughter’s joy as I tossed her squirming, slippery body through the waves was large enough and explosive enough to fill all of space and time, and if I could have I would have preserved some and put it in a tiny box that I could keep in the deepest corner of my pocket. I would never need to open it—it would be enough to roll it between my fingers, to know that it was there. My partner informs me that this is an odd thing to want to do with joy. Nevertheless. We stayed in the water until I spotted a jellyfish, bluish purple and the size of a dinner plate, drifting past in the undertow. Before we left I held my daughter over the surf one last time to rinse the sand from her legs and carried her back to the blanket to towel her dry before she ran off down the beach again. I couldn’t help but notice out of the corner of my eye a man walking down to the water holding a prosthetic leg in one hand. He bent over the waves and, with great tenderness, dipped the stiff plastic foot and calf into the sea to wash the sand off while taking care to keep the black fabric straps from falling in. Then he carried it up the beach again to a woman I suppose was his wife. She sat on a plastic recliner, waiting for him to return with the prosthetic, half a pink leg protruding from beneath the plaid blanket on her lap. Later we found the jellyfish washed up in the sand, gleaming and gelatinous.
A friend lent me a copy of Cesar Aira’s Las Noches de Flores, which I don’t believe has been translated into English. “Flores” in this case refers to the Buenos Aires neighborhood where the novel is set, not to actual flowers. The novel starts out whimsical and gets sinister fast, not steadily but suddenly, though there are hints. In the aftermath of the Argentine financial crisis of 2001 and 2002, a retired couple begin delivering pizzas on foot. An adolescent boy—Jonathan, he’s called—is kidnapped and everyone in the country is stuck to their televisions, waiting for news. His fate, in the collective imagination, stands in for theirs. Then Jonathan is killed and, one evening, as the elderly couple do their delivery rounds, a creature hanging upside down from a tree branch in the dark swoops down and walks alongside them, butting in on their conversation. (They were talking about the inconsistencies of memory.) It’s half-bat and half-parrot, but they don’t seem to notice or to mind. What bugs them is its manners. It won’t stop talking and takes no hints. It dominates the conversation. They can’t keep chatting as they had before. I haven’t finished the novel yet but it feels right: a monster appears and we just keep walking, hoping it will get bored and go away.
INTELLIGENCE (REAL)Novelist and Hydra Miles Klee is at The Story with a fine essay on the NaNoWriMo scandal, explaining why text-generating AI is worse than useless as a fiction writing tool: “...those who use it will never know the rewards of choosing yourself, nor the lessons taught by inevitable mistakes.”
Order new books published by The Brick House/Flaming Hydra, exclusively at our fall fundraiser—THE AWL: THE BOOK and THE BOOK OF FLAMING HYDRA.
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