Do not be sorry that you made me your Fayza (why do you always use the 'ph' for 'f'?). There are few things that I'd want to be more, when the writing is this gorgeous... Yes, this is another e-mail where I’ll gush about the beauty of your writing, not disregarding the content, but perhaps sidetracking it. Because this is what I believe in, this e-mail. I don't know if it is objectively the most beautiful thing you've written; I've thought that repeatedly over the years, and every time, perhaps because I'd forgotten the distinct impressions of the one before, I think this is the one. But this, this is why I read, why I write, and sometimes, when I'm at a loss for a reason (as I often am), why I live. This is what I mean when I say I believe in humanity; I don't believe in all of humanity--not in the humanity of tyranny or cruelty, neither that of the powerful nor the weak. But I believe in this, this fragility of what it is to be human, this sensitivity to life, to the ethereality of feelings that doesn't detract from them, but only makes them more precious. This is why I started that blog, "Dear Theo," that no one reads, because I wanted the world to know. But the world is oblivious--although not all of it; you have read Ghassan Kanafani's letters to Ghada el-Samman. So, yes, I am overwhelmed by the urge to post your e-mail up, as it is, to tell the world about Jaddeh, and Nayla, and Yasmine, and Beirut, even if no one listening. But this time I will ask for your permission. I can wait till you've left KSA. And I can never post it, if you wish. I haven't been reading much--I read snippets these days. But this is what I look for when I read, these pieces of Calvino, and the best of poetry. This is why I read poetry, in search of this, often not finding it. I am so lucky to have it in my brother...
I will call. I don't know if you were referring to Ammo Imad's death; I forgot if I told that I haven't called yet, but that's what I took it to be. This week the son of a guy who used to work with us got run over by a car and died. And have you seen that memorial page for Charles Chikhani on Facebook? They have a photomontage with Sting's "Fragile" playing that, despite the insipidness of the first few guitar strings, gets to you. Mom said that's why she was happy you were away... And then we were watching this sweet sad little movie called "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont" (that made me realize, again, I wasn't at Teta's death--none of it!). And I was watching an episode of one of my favorite British sitcoms, called "My Family", this week, and it was about the father preparing his will and such. Wojtek was lying on the couch across the room, and it hit me, if I die he might sorta know what music to play for me, but he definitely won't know what poetry to read... (You know how I'd want my favorite music and poetry, not the sad, harsh and dark Qur'an…) First I thought, well, Katy would know the poetry, and Obeida and Roland would know the music. (I might not be giving Wojtek enough credit, but he assumes the nonchalance about these matters that he earns.) But then I realized, you would know it all: what to play, what to read. Perhaps not to the great detail with which others in my life would know it, but you have the best overall view of my life, somehow. It is funny to think how our life fragments into little pieces that no one person owns, but are like a puzzle with different pieces in different people's hands. We can never be whole again, once we're gone, but we do persist, in bits and pieces, in the people who knew us...
I love you; you are a treasure, for seeing the treasures in other people. Just remember that, as trite as it may sound, we do own the love we harbor for other people. And even if that is all we have, we have forever a piece of them in us. And yes, I once doubted the words of a wise woman who said, "My heart is big enough for everybody". But it’s true, they are deep cavernous spaces, those things, and like black holes they can fit the world. There will be more, and there will be someone to see the treasure in you, for seeing the treasure in other people…
On that note I'll end. I have to get back to that insipid banal reality of mine called work. Later on, when I am done worrying about this, and about studying for my exam, I can daydream again, these days about Chile and Patagonia, Neruda and Allende, and that gorgeous hotel at the end of the world…
Miss you tons,
io
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Loving Beirut
We were getting close to the airport when it occurred to me that I needed to SMS that person. I SMSed you.
I will not say that all of my life it was, but let’s say that it is part of me to fix my gaze onto one person when twirling, like does a ballerine, so as not to feel dizzy. For a while that person was Yasmine, and it seems like until I find an other, I will fix my gaze onto you. Over and over again, my head will return to look to your direction.
You will be the person whom I will SMS when leaving Lebanon, and when going to the operation room, and as I venture into my first day of work. I guess that you will also be the person to whom I will first type on my first night in Geddé, until Yasmine comes along.
Funny, just now I noticed the name of the café which Nayla and I and the three co-workers were at on this first night: Vertigo.
I entered my hotel room with a feeling of need to prayer. I remembered that Amto complained that Loula, the Ethiopian girl whom she hired as a maid for the month in which Ihab and his wife came to visit, took too much time praying in the morning. Amto said that Loula started her day off with a full hour-and-a-half of prayer, every morning. I tried to defend Loula but not vehemently, but since then really liked Loula. I already liked Loula because she wore glasses and a demure attitude, but the fact that she prayed to God that much every day, I do not know. I did not used to like people who prayed too much, but maybe because she was black, or maybe because it made sense then that she wore glasses and a demure attitude, or maybe because I felt that there was no real reason for Loula to flaunt her faith and so her prayers must have been sincere.
As I walked into the room and felt like praying, I remembered Loula and remembered you and thought that Loula was also a ballerine, but one who fixed her gaze up as she twirled yet again.
When we were in Vertigo, I accidentally called Nayla Yasmine and that shocked me because I thought that I was over that by now. The intensity of the pain was more shocking than the awkwardness of the situation, though; for the millisecond in which I called Nayla Yasmine, I had felt the same feeling of warmth and being at home that I used to feel when I would call Yasmine. It had to be another Yasmine for me to understand that I no longer called Yasmine by her name, it had to be another Yasmine for me to realise how much I enjoyed the real Yasmine, that home is also that name we utter. I had to bump into a fake Yasmine to understand why in the beginning he was the word.
‘Quand on s’arrête un peu au bord de son enfance,
On commence croire des façons
Qu’on avait oublié.’*
[*"When one stops a little at the edge of their childhood,
One believes in ways that one had forgotten"]
I guess that I am under the influence of Ghassan Canaphani, whose love letters to Ghada Assammaanne I have just finished reading. Once, he came to Ghada angry and gave her a letter directed hypothetically to his sister Phayza, but which really was about Ghada.
And I am sorry that I made you my Phayza, but I guess that the words give themselves to the person to whom they are directed as much as to the person whom they talk about.
I shall add that because I give you the credit of being the recipient of my gazes as I twirl, I will try to tell you about more than Yasmine, and less than you.
Geddé is disappointing. I had heard before that it was the most open-minded (if having a mind) of the Saudi cities, and I may say that I was not disappointed on that point, namely because I did not set my hopes too high. In Vertigo there was a table of two women only, and they were both veiled but chicly (no that is not an oxymoron). Furthermore, there was a table next to us which had a man and two ladies I think, and both were also chicly veiled if I am not mistaken. Another table had an unveiled Saudi lady, and Nayla walks around unveiled. All Arab women (have not seen any non-Arab women so far) in Geddé walk around wearing a black abéeyé above their brighter clothes, but the public unveiling frankly impressed me.
I add that Nayla noted as we left Vertigo that the actual Starbucks logo was starting to be used in Geddé, rather than the one developed so as not to arouse men. Someone in the Saudi government (I guess) read the two branches around the girl in the actual logo as her two legs, open and foreshortened, and so the logo used in Saudi Arabia replaces the girl by an enlargement of her crown surrounded by a couple of stars. Probably in Riyadh they are still far from using the actual logo, but that impressed me in Geddé.
I now remember deciding, as I saw Geddé from the aeroplane, that if any hope, any counter-movement, any real resistance and-or opposition could sweep the Saudi nightmare away, it would come from that city by the sea.
Having said that, I tell you that the disappointment was mainly aesthetic, as in I expected Geddé, like I do all Saudi cities, to be beautiful and literally rich. I heard that Riyadh is something like that, but that certainly does not apply to Geddé. Naturally not a poor city, it is not a rich city, or at least not one rich enough to hide its poverty. It has all that a city needs to function well, but it does not have it beautifully. It does not have beautification. Roundabouts are not ornamented with statues for the king for example or a giant dellé like the one that used to be there in Abou Dhabi, beautifully lit. Wide roads, well-lit, and lots of palm trees planted in rows and columns, but those do not hide the piece de théâtre going underneath (like do the beauty and richness of Riyadh with its own play). People walk around and are dark and ugly and poorly clothed. Probably not natives, but peu importe.
I thought about Nayla growing up here and it just did not make sense. I thought about the girl whom I knew and fell in love with during first year, and she was tall and had dark, long hair. She spoke perfect English with a deep voice and was very intelligent and attentive. She did bodybuilding and loved music, and what made me love her was (I might have told you this before) the time we had our acquaintance party; they took us outside for a ‘group photo’ and threw buckets of water and turned hoses onto us instead. We were all running away and I was so proud of myself that I only got one side of my trousers wet when I saw a tall figure standing where we were, not having left the place, twirling around herself to the water (and not fixing her gaze).
I know that Nayla was in a prestigious English school and read Gabriel García Marquez, but in the Nayla that I loved were things that could not have possibly grown in the air-conditioned classrooms and compounds. I do not know where she got them from and I can imagine how painful it must have been for her to find them in her, sitting there every morning and staring at her vacantly.
‘What did you do with them?’
I thought about how much Beirut must have meant to her afterwards, and I thought about how fiercely Nayla lived her five years in Beirut, ‘deflowering the streets of Beirut’ one by many. How dear that city must have been to her, and that age and that time and that humidity that cannot be captured, and those nights. In Geddé I almost touched the beauty of Beirut as seen through the eyes of Nayla. I do not know.
When Nayla presented her final year project, a video-animation mapping Beirut, one of the guest-jurors told her, ‘Frankly, I felt that you do not love Beirut.’ Then, I felt so too, and now I do not know whether Nayla did not love Beirut or whether I did not love Nayla.
I will not pretend that in the core of my typing is my question of whether I love Beirut or not, and let’s say that I should not feel obliged to answer the question in the first place, intimidated by so much talk about loving Beirut. Right now, I think of the freedom that Beirut means to both Nayla and Josef, to Geddé and Berlin, and that tempts me to appreciate what I have, but I should always remember that my experience of Beirut is just as real. I should always doubt how evil my desire to grid Beirut out is.
But beyond doubt is that I loved Yasmine.
Kisses,
Ton frère
I will not say that all of my life it was, but let’s say that it is part of me to fix my gaze onto one person when twirling, like does a ballerine, so as not to feel dizzy. For a while that person was Yasmine, and it seems like until I find an other, I will fix my gaze onto you. Over and over again, my head will return to look to your direction.
You will be the person whom I will SMS when leaving Lebanon, and when going to the operation room, and as I venture into my first day of work. I guess that you will also be the person to whom I will first type on my first night in Geddé, until Yasmine comes along.
Funny, just now I noticed the name of the café which Nayla and I and the three co-workers were at on this first night: Vertigo.
I entered my hotel room with a feeling of need to prayer. I remembered that Amto complained that Loula, the Ethiopian girl whom she hired as a maid for the month in which Ihab and his wife came to visit, took too much time praying in the morning. Amto said that Loula started her day off with a full hour-and-a-half of prayer, every morning. I tried to defend Loula but not vehemently, but since then really liked Loula. I already liked Loula because she wore glasses and a demure attitude, but the fact that she prayed to God that much every day, I do not know. I did not used to like people who prayed too much, but maybe because she was black, or maybe because it made sense then that she wore glasses and a demure attitude, or maybe because I felt that there was no real reason for Loula to flaunt her faith and so her prayers must have been sincere.
As I walked into the room and felt like praying, I remembered Loula and remembered you and thought that Loula was also a ballerine, but one who fixed her gaze up as she twirled yet again.
When we were in Vertigo, I accidentally called Nayla Yasmine and that shocked me because I thought that I was over that by now. The intensity of the pain was more shocking than the awkwardness of the situation, though; for the millisecond in which I called Nayla Yasmine, I had felt the same feeling of warmth and being at home that I used to feel when I would call Yasmine. It had to be another Yasmine for me to understand that I no longer called Yasmine by her name, it had to be another Yasmine for me to realise how much I enjoyed the real Yasmine, that home is also that name we utter. I had to bump into a fake Yasmine to understand why in the beginning he was the word.
‘Quand on s’arrête un peu au bord de son enfance,
On commence croire des façons
Qu’on avait oublié.’*
[*"When one stops a little at the edge of their childhood,
One believes in ways that one had forgotten"]
I guess that I am under the influence of Ghassan Canaphani, whose love letters to Ghada Assammaanne I have just finished reading. Once, he came to Ghada angry and gave her a letter directed hypothetically to his sister Phayza, but which really was about Ghada.
And I am sorry that I made you my Phayza, but I guess that the words give themselves to the person to whom they are directed as much as to the person whom they talk about.
I shall add that because I give you the credit of being the recipient of my gazes as I twirl, I will try to tell you about more than Yasmine, and less than you.
Geddé is disappointing. I had heard before that it was the most open-minded (if having a mind) of the Saudi cities, and I may say that I was not disappointed on that point, namely because I did not set my hopes too high. In Vertigo there was a table of two women only, and they were both veiled but chicly (no that is not an oxymoron). Furthermore, there was a table next to us which had a man and two ladies I think, and both were also chicly veiled if I am not mistaken. Another table had an unveiled Saudi lady, and Nayla walks around unveiled. All Arab women (have not seen any non-Arab women so far) in Geddé walk around wearing a black abéeyé above their brighter clothes, but the public unveiling frankly impressed me.
I add that Nayla noted as we left Vertigo that the actual Starbucks logo was starting to be used in Geddé, rather than the one developed so as not to arouse men. Someone in the Saudi government (I guess) read the two branches around the girl in the actual logo as her two legs, open and foreshortened, and so the logo used in Saudi Arabia replaces the girl by an enlargement of her crown surrounded by a couple of stars. Probably in Riyadh they are still far from using the actual logo, but that impressed me in Geddé.
I now remember deciding, as I saw Geddé from the aeroplane, that if any hope, any counter-movement, any real resistance and-or opposition could sweep the Saudi nightmare away, it would come from that city by the sea.
Having said that, I tell you that the disappointment was mainly aesthetic, as in I expected Geddé, like I do all Saudi cities, to be beautiful and literally rich. I heard that Riyadh is something like that, but that certainly does not apply to Geddé. Naturally not a poor city, it is not a rich city, or at least not one rich enough to hide its poverty. It has all that a city needs to function well, but it does not have it beautifully. It does not have beautification. Roundabouts are not ornamented with statues for the king for example or a giant dellé like the one that used to be there in Abou Dhabi, beautifully lit. Wide roads, well-lit, and lots of palm trees planted in rows and columns, but those do not hide the piece de théâtre going underneath (like do the beauty and richness of Riyadh with its own play). People walk around and are dark and ugly and poorly clothed. Probably not natives, but peu importe.
I thought about Nayla growing up here and it just did not make sense. I thought about the girl whom I knew and fell in love with during first year, and she was tall and had dark, long hair. She spoke perfect English with a deep voice and was very intelligent and attentive. She did bodybuilding and loved music, and what made me love her was (I might have told you this before) the time we had our acquaintance party; they took us outside for a ‘group photo’ and threw buckets of water and turned hoses onto us instead. We were all running away and I was so proud of myself that I only got one side of my trousers wet when I saw a tall figure standing where we were, not having left the place, twirling around herself to the water (and not fixing her gaze).
I know that Nayla was in a prestigious English school and read Gabriel García Marquez, but in the Nayla that I loved were things that could not have possibly grown in the air-conditioned classrooms and compounds. I do not know where she got them from and I can imagine how painful it must have been for her to find them in her, sitting there every morning and staring at her vacantly.
‘What did you do with them?’
I thought about how much Beirut must have meant to her afterwards, and I thought about how fiercely Nayla lived her five years in Beirut, ‘deflowering the streets of Beirut’ one by many. How dear that city must have been to her, and that age and that time and that humidity that cannot be captured, and those nights. In Geddé I almost touched the beauty of Beirut as seen through the eyes of Nayla. I do not know.
When Nayla presented her final year project, a video-animation mapping Beirut, one of the guest-jurors told her, ‘Frankly, I felt that you do not love Beirut.’ Then, I felt so too, and now I do not know whether Nayla did not love Beirut or whether I did not love Nayla.
I will not pretend that in the core of my typing is my question of whether I love Beirut or not, and let’s say that I should not feel obliged to answer the question in the first place, intimidated by so much talk about loving Beirut. Right now, I think of the freedom that Beirut means to both Nayla and Josef, to Geddé and Berlin, and that tempts me to appreciate what I have, but I should always remember that my experience of Beirut is just as real. I should always doubt how evil my desire to grid Beirut out is.
But beyond doubt is that I loved Yasmine.
Kisses,
Ton frère
Monday, December 04, 2006
The Other Delhis
Hey Dear,
I have just sent you an SMS wishing you a happy 29th. It is now 1:30 in Philly, and I do not know if you are still awake or have slept, but the perfect scenario would be that you are sleeping now, and that you would read my SMS first thing in the morning.
There is not much that I have to tell you on your 29th. I believe it is more logical that you do the talking because your birthday is about you after all.
Do you know that it happens only twice consecutive times every ten years that both you and I stand in the same decade? This past year was one, where I was twenty and you were twenty-eight, and this year, where I shall be twenty-one and you twenty-nine.
When I e-mailed Josef for his nineteenth birthday, he e-mailed back saying that he was excited about his nineteenth birthday because it was the first year of the rest of his life the sum of whose digits creates a two-digit number in itself. Mind-blowing, that boy. It never occurred to me when I turned nineteen.
So, what are you thinking?
I read your e-mail and somehow it benefited me. Maybe I indeed was not aware of just how much stress the mere idea of a thesis brought to me. You know that I also have the problem of always trying to please my professors and that they expect things from me, which makes it all the worse, but that I will discuss later on. For now, I want to tell you that I was really moved by what you called 'the essential dilemma of monogamy,' because I was telling Maya the other day that I am really worried about my marriage as I know that I am susceptible to treason; not that I would not love my wife, but also love all the Delhis that lie, not only under the New Delhi (to use Shorto's words), but around it and as far as Florence gets. As I was reading that part, I was thinking that a great part of my angst lies in that I am constantly aware of the lives going about elsewhere. Why am I that sensitive of the lives going about elsewhere, Achraf?
Maybe if I lived in Europe , probably if I lived in Europe , I would stop longing to another life. Not on a daily basis at least.
Yesterday, I went to Dr. Nazec for my usual wart check-up, she told me that my wart was still getting better, but that it had taken two months to get better whereas it was supposed to heal in two weeks, and decided to extract the wart from my foot. I therefore am limping now, and my ankle is hurting, but if that really heals it (unlike eleven months ago, when Khalo Ousāma extracted it from my foot on the basis that it was a corn, stitching the wound and therefore trapping whatever living remaining viruses there were back into the wound), then I would be really happy as it has been there for a year and a half now.
I limped back to AUB and waited while Mona Harb finished with the department meeting. I did not explain to you who Mona Harb was when you asked me about her that time, I just remembered. Mona Harb is an Architecture/Urban professor at the department whom I got to know through a field trip that I went to with Yasmine. Yasmine is taking a course on Dahyé, and her professor was taking the class to Dahyé on a field trip, and I just hopped in. Yasmine's professor had concomitantly brought Mona Harb to act as a guide, and it turned out that I, Mona Harb, and two guys, were the only ones who knew Dahyé, and we knew it by virtue of living there (or having had lived there and taken it as a subject of study for the PhD in France, as is Mona Harb's case). The two guys were your typical Dahyé stereotype: rowdy, built, testosterone overflow, stuck together, and spoke with that horrible accent that Dahyé guys speak with. I liked Mona Harb because she reminded me of myself, in a sense that she was iconoclastic and knew it. Your typical Dahyé intellectual. She even looked a bit like Khalto Lamia, and I decided that she knew her, but I also decided that you knew her as well.
I asked Ma some time later about her, having had known that you did not know her, and she asked me, 'What about Mona Harb?' I asked her, 'Does she know Kahlto Lamia?' And she said, 'Mona Harb bint Salma, right? I do not know about Lamia, but she is good friends with Zeina, Tante May's daughter. They were together at the Lycée and keep in touch whenever they can. They are different in character, and while Zeina is married, Mona is divorced, but they still meet each other sometimes in Europe like I and Achraf do, so, she is teaching now at the department? She did her PhD in France about the Dahyé.' I told Ma that she reminded me a lot of myself, and Ma said, 'May tells me that Salma's girls remind her of the three of you, that weirdness.'
About a month ago, I and Daniel Drennan were discussing my thesis, and I do not know how we arrived to the issue of reconstructing Southern villages, and I told him that I did not understand why everyone was making such a fuss out of applying grids in reconstruction plans, held that organicism was overrated and romanticised. Daiel told me, 'You might want to discuss that with Mona Harb.'
Mona Harb, who always smiled nicely to me whenever she saw me in the corridor, smiled to me as she told me that for the week she was completely taken, and that the two weeks that followed she would be abroad. I told her that I could wait, and yesterday was when I could finally meet her.
Between the point where Daniel told me that I might want to confer with Mona Harb and yesterday, my thesis had changed a lot, and I had forgotten what had linked my thesis to grids and Southern villages, but I decided to meet Mona Harb anyway. I wanted to know her better, and felt that whatever she would say might benefit me in some way or another. I had to wait for an hour while the department meeting dragged, and when it finally did, I found myself in her office, and her telling me to take a seat.
I sat and realised that I had to explain my thesis to her so that she would talk, so I talked. I talked about how my thesis started out as an investigation of the link between terrorism and Orientalism, and how at a certain point Daniel Drennan told me that I would want to take her opinion on gridding Southern villages, and how that related to the mindset (or the presumption of a mindset) of the people. I told her that nonetheless my thesis had evolved and discarded of a link to Orientalism, and was now about showing that terrorism is more secular than we think it is, and that is religious as face value only.
She looked and me and said, 'I did not get it, how I am involved in all of this.'
So I explained and explained. I explained that I did not agree with the current trend to go organic, and that it presumed an 'organic' mindset of the people, which reflected itself in terrorism, also a presumption because it is rooted in Orientalism and served political purposes.
Here she said that she thought that she was incapable of understanding what relationship lied between terrorism and Orientalism and what I was called the organic mindset of the Oriental people because all of those links existed nowhere outside my head, and that I was constructing them just then in order to justify myself, and so that she had no idea how she related to this, and started blabbering that if I nonetheless really insisted that she would say something about grids and function, she could tell me how Le Corbusier's grid ultimately faltered big time, and how patterns of habitation between cities and the countryside differed, and how that implied no value judgement in turn whatsoever on either of them. She spoke and spoke and spoke, making sure she did not allow me to apologise for consuming her time over nothing, concluding that she could talk about lots of other things, and that she would speak more, and would like to know whether all of that was beneficial.
I took out my notebook and pretended to write down a couple of notes, tried to explain to her that some ideas she mentioned were interesting, and thanked her for her time.
I woke up at eight today because yesterday I slept at six. I returned home and slept. I was feeling horrible.
Waiting for a cab, I thought to myself that I should not have pretended to take notes. I should have rudely interrupted her, I thought, telling her that I did not want her to blabber just because she assumed that I was blabbering, that she was right that I was connecting things in my head, and that yeah, I was not angry at her but at myself because I came to a meeting unprepared, but that gave her no justification to blabber like she did, and that I refused that she blabber non-stop just to prove a point; her point was proven.
Then I thought that she did not deserve that I explode honestly in front of her, pretty much like everyone else.
I thought that now she must have thought that I was a pretentious moron, then I hated myself because I cared so much about what professors thought. I asked myself to stop flagellating me, and that it was Mona Harb's problem if she was a blunt bitch.
Naturally, my stereotypes blew up in my face yesterday, and naturally, I could have known better than categorise people into Dahyé people and Dahyé intellectuals. Something inside of me just repels at the idea that I am not Dahyé intellectual, and repels at the idea that Mona Harb is not, either. I can now see, however, that we are just different, to my advantage (so I decided).
If I returned one day back. Heck it, I will not return one day back.
Mona Harb, though, is not worth more than this essay. Even that is too much for her.
But you see, it also about me, about my need to hide from my uniqueness, with which I am bombarded time after time.
So much for a birthday message.
Happy Birthday!
Ton frère
I have just sent you an SMS wishing you a happy 29th. It is now 1:30 in Philly, and I do not know if you are still awake or have slept, but the perfect scenario would be that you are sleeping now, and that you would read my SMS first thing in the morning.
There is not much that I have to tell you on your 29th. I believe it is more logical that you do the talking because your birthday is about you after all.
Do you know that it happens only twice consecutive times every ten years that both you and I stand in the same decade? This past year was one, where I was twenty and you were twenty-eight, and this year, where I shall be twenty-one and you twenty-nine.
When I e-mailed Josef for his nineteenth birthday, he e-mailed back saying that he was excited about his nineteenth birthday because it was the first year of the rest of his life the sum of whose digits creates a two-digit number in itself. Mind-blowing, that boy. It never occurred to me when I turned nineteen.
So, what are you thinking?
I read your e-mail and somehow it benefited me. Maybe I indeed was not aware of just how much stress the mere idea of a thesis brought to me. You know that I also have the problem of always trying to please my professors and that they expect things from me, which makes it all the worse, but that I will discuss later on. For now, I want to tell you that I was really moved by what you called 'the essential dilemma of monogamy,' because I was telling Maya the other day that I am really worried about my marriage as I know that I am susceptible to treason; not that I would not love my wife, but also love all the Delhis that lie, not only under the New Delhi (to use Shorto's words), but around it and as far as Florence gets. As I was reading that part, I was thinking that a great part of my angst lies in that I am constantly aware of the lives going about elsewhere. Why am I that sensitive of the lives going about elsewhere, Achraf?
Maybe if I lived in Europe , probably if I lived in Europe , I would stop longing to another life. Not on a daily basis at least.
Yesterday, I went to Dr. Nazec for my usual wart check-up, she told me that my wart was still getting better, but that it had taken two months to get better whereas it was supposed to heal in two weeks, and decided to extract the wart from my foot. I therefore am limping now, and my ankle is hurting, but if that really heals it (unlike eleven months ago, when Khalo Ousāma extracted it from my foot on the basis that it was a corn, stitching the wound and therefore trapping whatever living remaining viruses there were back into the wound), then I would be really happy as it has been there for a year and a half now.
I limped back to AUB and waited while Mona Harb finished with the department meeting. I did not explain to you who Mona Harb was when you asked me about her that time, I just remembered. Mona Harb is an Architecture/Urban professor at the department whom I got to know through a field trip that I went to with Yasmine. Yasmine is taking a course on Dahyé, and her professor was taking the class to Dahyé on a field trip, and I just hopped in. Yasmine's professor had concomitantly brought Mona Harb to act as a guide, and it turned out that I, Mona Harb, and two guys, were the only ones who knew Dahyé, and we knew it by virtue of living there (or having had lived there and taken it as a subject of study for the PhD in France, as is Mona Harb's case). The two guys were your typical Dahyé stereotype: rowdy, built, testosterone overflow, stuck together, and spoke with that horrible accent that Dahyé guys speak with. I liked Mona Harb because she reminded me of myself, in a sense that she was iconoclastic and knew it. Your typical Dahyé intellectual. She even looked a bit like Khalto Lamia, and I decided that she knew her, but I also decided that you knew her as well.
I asked Ma some time later about her, having had known that you did not know her, and she asked me, 'What about Mona Harb?' I asked her, 'Does she know Kahlto Lamia?' And she said, 'Mona Harb bint Salma, right? I do not know about Lamia, but she is good friends with Zeina, Tante May's daughter. They were together at the Lycée and keep in touch whenever they can. They are different in character, and while Zeina is married, Mona is divorced, but they still meet each other sometimes in Europe like I and Achraf do, so, she is teaching now at the department? She did her PhD in France about the Dahyé.' I told Ma that she reminded me a lot of myself, and Ma said, 'May tells me that Salma's girls remind her of the three of you, that weirdness.'
About a month ago, I and Daniel Drennan were discussing my thesis, and I do not know how we arrived to the issue of reconstructing Southern villages, and I told him that I did not understand why everyone was making such a fuss out of applying grids in reconstruction plans, held that organicism was overrated and romanticised. Daiel told me, 'You might want to discuss that with Mona Harb.'
Mona Harb, who always smiled nicely to me whenever she saw me in the corridor, smiled to me as she told me that for the week she was completely taken, and that the two weeks that followed she would be abroad. I told her that I could wait, and yesterday was when I could finally meet her.
Between the point where Daniel told me that I might want to confer with Mona Harb and yesterday, my thesis had changed a lot, and I had forgotten what had linked my thesis to grids and Southern villages, but I decided to meet Mona Harb anyway. I wanted to know her better, and felt that whatever she would say might benefit me in some way or another. I had to wait for an hour while the department meeting dragged, and when it finally did, I found myself in her office, and her telling me to take a seat.
I sat and realised that I had to explain my thesis to her so that she would talk, so I talked. I talked about how my thesis started out as an investigation of the link between terrorism and Orientalism, and how at a certain point Daniel Drennan told me that I would want to take her opinion on gridding Southern villages, and how that related to the mindset (or the presumption of a mindset) of the people. I told her that nonetheless my thesis had evolved and discarded of a link to Orientalism, and was now about showing that terrorism is more secular than we think it is, and that is religious as face value only.
She looked and me and said, 'I did not get it, how I am involved in all of this.'
So I explained and explained. I explained that I did not agree with the current trend to go organic, and that it presumed an 'organic' mindset of the people, which reflected itself in terrorism, also a presumption because it is rooted in Orientalism and served political purposes.
Here she said that she thought that she was incapable of understanding what relationship lied between terrorism and Orientalism and what I was called the organic mindset of the Oriental people because all of those links existed nowhere outside my head, and that I was constructing them just then in order to justify myself, and so that she had no idea how she related to this, and started blabbering that if I nonetheless really insisted that she would say something about grids and function, she could tell me how Le Corbusier's grid ultimately faltered big time, and how patterns of habitation between cities and the countryside differed, and how that implied no value judgement in turn whatsoever on either of them. She spoke and spoke and spoke, making sure she did not allow me to apologise for consuming her time over nothing, concluding that she could talk about lots of other things, and that she would speak more, and would like to know whether all of that was beneficial.
I took out my notebook and pretended to write down a couple of notes, tried to explain to her that some ideas she mentioned were interesting, and thanked her for her time.
I woke up at eight today because yesterday I slept at six. I returned home and slept. I was feeling horrible.
Waiting for a cab, I thought to myself that I should not have pretended to take notes. I should have rudely interrupted her, I thought, telling her that I did not want her to blabber just because she assumed that I was blabbering, that she was right that I was connecting things in my head, and that yeah, I was not angry at her but at myself because I came to a meeting unprepared, but that gave her no justification to blabber like she did, and that I refused that she blabber non-stop just to prove a point; her point was proven.
Then I thought that she did not deserve that I explode honestly in front of her, pretty much like everyone else.
I thought that now she must have thought that I was a pretentious moron, then I hated myself because I cared so much about what professors thought. I asked myself to stop flagellating me, and that it was Mona Harb's problem if she was a blunt bitch.
Naturally, my stereotypes blew up in my face yesterday, and naturally, I could have known better than categorise people into Dahyé people and Dahyé intellectuals. Something inside of me just repels at the idea that I am not Dahyé intellectual, and repels at the idea that Mona Harb is not, either. I can now see, however, that we are just different, to my advantage (so I decided).
If I returned one day back. Heck it, I will not return one day back.
Mona Harb, though, is not worth more than this essay. Even that is too much for her.
But you see, it also about me, about my need to hide from my uniqueness, with which I am bombarded time after time.
So much for a birthday message.
Happy Birthday!
Ton frère
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Symmetrical Metaphysics / Constructive Sadness
Hi habibi,
I have been meaning to write to you, too, mostly about my impressions of our trip to Europe. But I was also reluctant as I get pensive, too, when it comes to the act of writing, which is perhaps why I haven't been writing much to you lately. Yes, I think there is something about the act of writing, or at least about the way we perceive it, that brings out the most morose in us. Nevertheless, I think you have your reasons outside of writing itself, as you are obviously tired and feeling guilty. I know as I am very similar to you (or you to me ;). Even though you are getting nearly enough sleep, that kind of stress that programs like yours induce tends to be cumulative. I remember my thesis year I had that general sense of vague all-encompassing yet persistent fatigue. The good news is that the ending is in sight. And please feel free to reject external projects, such as the "Woodstocking" poster, this year. I know it is very difficult for us to say no, but do learn to do so soon, for your own benefit. Prioritize!
As for the laptop, one, you certainly are unlucky. And exhausted and scatter-brained (welcome to the club!). It's unfortunate, but that's just the way we are. I know you feel like your guilt is killing you, but you'll live through it. It's unpleasant, but it's just another thing to learn to live with. Shit happens, you know, much worse shit. Like war and stuff. And when you put it in that perspective, a laptop and a camera and glasses and a car are nothing in the scheme of things. Yes, of course material things matter, that's how the world is. I am not very good with material things, and as much as I hope that you are better, it is not the end of the world if you aren't. I am not doing so bad, despite what Maya and Mom and whoever else may think. I have it pretty good, and I think you'll be just fine, too. Just don't sweat; shit happens.
Now, back to our trip... As I was telling Katy yesterday in an e-mail I never finished, these trips make me very pensive as they make me aware of all the other possibilities that life, and hence my life, could take. And I am very immature in that regard, I have finally conceded. I want my cake and eat it too, which is why I am often so sad. In other ways, I am spoiled. Nevertheless, such trips always makes me aware of life going on elsewhere, very differently, at the same time. And it's not that I don't like my life as it is, it is that I like all those other lives as well, and I wish I could live them all. But alas, as far as I know, we only get one. Which is why, as I told Katy, it always seems to me like the essential dilemma of monogamy: it's not that we don't love the person we're with, it's that we'd want to love all those other people, too. In a twisted way, it is our endless capacity to love and live that is our downfall, when it collides into our limitations.
I saw a lot of art this trip, and you were never more present with me than when I was at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. I got two postcards of Van Gogh's letters to his brother, Theo, and I will try to scan them and attach them to this e-mail. On these trips, if you want to limit your shopping, and you're not there for the sex, the only thing left seems to be the art. So, we went to so many museums that I was getting almost numb to art. And as always, some was good and some was mediocre, some was funny and some was laughable. I finally saw a Mona Hatoum installation at Pompidou, and it completely lived up to my high expectations: subtle, inspired and quite moving. I also saw another Richter there (always a pleasure to view his paintings--not the abstract ones, though), and a very excellent Nan Goldin slide show (perhaps my favorite photographer--daring, and shows life as it is, in all its messy glory--I'll try to send you some images from home later). Of course I remember my favorites most. The Mona Lisa was a let down, as were the Rembrandts and the Vermeers and the one miserable Caravaggio I saw. Picasso is as overblown as ever (he is to art what Shakespeare is to literature: the most overrated thing!). Van Gogh was more lovely than I ever remember, and the more contemporary stuff was mostly infuriating (I hate Jeff Koons! So overrated). The most relevant contemporary art form these days seems to be photography; we saw an excellent installation at the photography museum in Amsterdam that I put up a post about on LBF, as well as a great one at the modern art museum there, too.
I also read a lot about art this trip: Vanity Fair had a special issue about art (always infuriating to to learn about the politics, money and high society of the contemporary art scene), and I also bought an overpriced bilingual issue of a French art magazine called ArtPress that focused on cynicism in contemporary art (and which reminded me of why I don't want to go into academia, because it's mostly bullshit!). And since I didn't write a thing my entire trip I was starting to think that I was over my poetry phase and back to art. I was telling Katy, too, that perhaps I should merge the two, given how fascinated I am with text art (and I have several examples to send you from home). Maybe write poems really large on walls and stuff. There were these things written on the staircase walls of the modern art museum in Amsterdam, mostly senseless dichotomies, but there was one that I liked and got as a pin; it said: "Symmetrical Metaphysics / Constructive Sadness". Brilliant, isn't it?
But then yesterday I wrote a (crappy) poem, though one that moved me to tears. (Isn't it sad when we make something that moves us to tears, and yet others can see so transparently through its mediocrity?)
Well, I have written long enough; I should probably go back to pretending to work (it's so difficult to do that!).
Love you tons,
io
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
