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SWOLLEN FIG.
PALESTINE AND THE ABSENT IMAGE
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“Je suis une bête que je ne connais pas.”
—Agnès Varda

…a hollowing that wails us into the opaque, translating the inanimate into shimmer…we are torn open, tear open, we are the tearing…this irresolute intimacy or remembrance…Through what distances do I hold onto myself? how far is the inside? how far is the outside? …a darkness before your birth and a darkness after you expire… lay me bare, baring, bearing. stung, stunned… speech silences with you… I have myself in my mouth and I do not know who that is…
    As I am jotting this down she grabs me by the arm and takes me down the hall, by the kitchen, by the gallery and down the stairs, drinks in hand, we had just met...The sound of porcelain and barking as we make our way into the garden, people arriving, a man methodically arranging white plastic chairs into rows. “There’s a performance tonight,” she says in a broken breath as we make our way towards the Fig tree, “a singer,…here!” We sit between its leaves,…look at each other in a strange warmth., look around…a looking that feels like a hum, like an enveloping quietude. “I remember her,” she says after a pause…“dig her out like dirt from under my nails you know?… the sound of it.” Her tone shifts…“wait for her [as] a moon dipped in milk. [If] she arrives late, wait for her. If she arrives early, wait for her. Do not frighten the birds in her braided hair. Wait for her so that she may breathe this air, so strange to her heart. [Take] her to the balcony to watch the moon drowning in milk. [Wait], and polish the night for her ring by ring. Wait for her until Night speaks to you thus: There is no one alive but the two of you. So take her gently to the death you so desire, and wait.”1
    Did you write that? “No,” she says, “that’s the man in the picture over there, the poet, Darwish, or, according to the law, a present-absent alien. Uncanny right? He died in Texas.” I turn to look and feel something squash against my leg, a fig. I pick it up, move it between my fingers, fleshy, milky, latex-like; press it against my teeth as it drips under my nails. She stares at me…“I heard somewhere that nails are hardened skin and teeth enameled bones;” I bite, thinking: she is a landscape between your fingers you cannot grasp. She gets closer: “Did you know that the fig flower remains unseen until the fruit is cut open? …You have become invisible like the fig flower, yet you blush inside”... As if caught I think of Rilke: “who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts and the scenery is falling apart, [or] gone inside oneself for hours meeting no one?”
    And I suddenly slip into all the forms she took inside me. I remember her and my mouth fills with feathers. I sink into those feathers as a soft heat paints me white. I love her, I’ve always loved her, and I dream of her, half woman, half man. “You need to move,” says the man with the white chairs… I snap back from a nowhere that seems fuller somehow, swollen. “We need to put some chairs!” he insists. We move and see the singer arrive... timid, voluptuous, touching her nails shyly… the sound of the crowd as it hushes itself down. She takes the stage in a green dress and turned eyes, but when her lips part its like shards... volatile, soft, disarming us into an invisible that swells up. And then a blast. A nothing. A piercing nothing. Ripped grass held in mid air by something, fingers, wails, dirt…weightless, soaked in a grayness that compresses itself around us like a scab, like a loudness that is silent…Something dashes by me, where is she?... where is she? … I bite dirt… Is this her between my teeth?…wait… wait for me

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WAR COMES HOME
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“Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.” ―Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume I, Swann’s Way & Within a Budding Grove.

The silence was strong, birds chirping everywhere. Everyone knew about it, its phantoms still join us at the dinner table. Screams, gunshots, forest barks. They razed down the site’s infrastructure and planted trees to erase what had happened. A darkness in plain daylight. They forbade us to use the words “corpse” or “victim,” the dead were stuff, figuren. The flames were of every imaginable color, red, green, purple, blue. There was a chest with two handles some distance away. We had to crush the unburnt bones and put them there. It was very fine that powdered bone. We then had to put the powder into sacks, and when there were enough sacks, we had to take them to the bridge and drop them into the river, the current carried them off.

    …. The fleeing figure is coming this way, the agonizing person is about to unleash force, the man on the ground will suddenly jolt back to life or appear behind the door. War comes home, bringing back fear, shame, anger and a proficiency in firearms. What happens when the hero returns home, homeless, split between ordinary life and the frontline?

The Frontline: Afghanistan

Summer of 2009. A new counter-insurgency strategy operation is launched. US Marines of Echo Company 2nd Battalion 8th Regiment get dropped deep behind enemy lines. The goal, as described by the leading commander, is to seize control of the population, to get “closer to the people.” But make no mistake, he says, we are experts in the application of violence. When you move, move with a purpose, with an aggression intent on finishing the enemy. Your conscience and your honor should be clear. Your measure is not found on how much time you have on this earth, but on what you do with the time that you have. Echo Company is going to change history, starting tomorrow morning. The world is watching, and the world will know.
    “This is just America carrying a big stick,” says former Marine and Iraq War Veteran Mark B. “Who convinced you that who you fear doesn’t look like you? We would all be staged. Spent most of the time training in Kuwait just like we would have done in any desert in California. Sometimes I’d shave my face three times a day so the gas mask would fit. And then there were a lot of dead bodies around me, all very fresh. We would go to the cities we had just destroyed and that was difficult to see. We didn’t find the weapons. We didn’t find the resistance. If we could convince the kids that we were good, that us being there was a good thing, that we were liberators…How is this good for the kids? This violence that we unleashed had a just cause, and it was the liberation of a people. I wanted to hold on to that. Our munitions killed the entirety of her family. She looked at me and asked me why; she was speaking directly to me and I couldn’t answer.”

Home: California

“I would rather be in Afghanistan where it’s simple!” says Sgt. Nathan Harris to his wife Ashley on finding no parking spot at Chuck E. Cheese.
    Cut to Nathan at an electronics store playing “Call of Duty®,” a warfare simulation game. Call of Duty® Advanced Warfare: A new era of combat that envisions the powerful battle grounds of the future, where both AI technology and tactic have evolved to usher in a new era of combat for the franchise. Delivering a stunning performance, Academy Award winning actor Kevin Spacey stars as Jonathan Irons, one of the most powerful men in the world, shaping this chilling vision of the future of war. Power changes everything®. Part one: An Advanced World: In this carefully researched and crafted vision of the future, Private Military Corporations (PMC's) have become the dominant armed forces for countless nations outsourcing their military needs, redrawing borders and rewriting the rules of war; and Jonathan Irons is at the center of it all. Part 2: An Advanced Soldier: where powerful exoskeletons evolve every aspect of a soldier’s battle readiness, enabling combatants to deploy with advanced lethality, and where AI bio-mechanics provide unparalleled strength, awareness, endurance, and speed. Part 3: An Advanced Arsenal: arming players with all-new equipment, technology and vehicles like hover-bikes and highly specialized drones. 

    What happens when that other world turns out to be this one? A hero at an electronics store, his face stammering as he fires at his blind spots. The US President on a nation-wide broad-cast on the other screens all around: “The people of Afghanistan have endured violence for decades. So tonight I want the Afghan people to understand: America seeks an end to this era of war and suffering.” ... Well, the Afghan people aren’t watching, mutters Nathan. 

    The outer shell of him came back but everything inside was dead, says Ashley. He sits most of the time, as if haunted, enraged, numb. He’s attending a PTSD program for veterans. War is everywhere you never wanted to be, he says, it’s pretty difficult to get someone who is mute to describe to you what it’s like not being able to speak. My mind turns into a bad neighborhood, into nowhere you want to be, and there’s no way out. I have woken up with the smell of something lurking in the air. I am aware of what normal should look like, so I act everyday, I act normal, nothing like how I feel. Sadness is what I feel, but my default feeling is aggression. I’m wherever my dad was and I don’t know where that is...find myself rejecting close ones and reaching out to strangers..I feel guilty, I can’t breathe, I love you! (he yells at a soldier passing by).
    I used to be able to distinguish between combat zone and home …I don’t feel anybody in me. I deal with silence and drinking. I am drink and rage. I watched this war movie the other night and felt this tightness grabbing at my chest. I tried to drink it off but couldn’t get it off my chest so I broke the bottle I had in my hand and sliced it. The feeling wouldn’t go away so I kept slicing. So I did that. The next morning my wife was freaking out trying to patch me back together. I returned to the unit and felt shame…I was a good soldier, I didn’t want to be singled out so I said nothing.”
    “You’ll go through withdrawals, it’s like somebody on the street you know,” says the doctor at the Veterans clinic where Nathan is being cut off his meds, “its for your own good.” Nathan’s expression slows down. Call back, call later. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. The Call of Duty is one call away. The Call of Duty is a one way call.
    “There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? [What] if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy;” In Speaking of Rage and Grief, Butler argues that ”thinking from rage does not always let us see how rage carries sorrow and covers it over. Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” Can rage disarm into grieving? she asks. Can it face grieving without recourse to annihilation? “Is rage an attempt to get rid of grief, to locate it elsewhere? Perhaps grief is imagined to end with violence, as if grief itself could be killed,” but can we bear the unbearable without burying it or re-distributing it? At the grip of rage, she says, the “I” “suddenly becomes pure action, [finally ridding itself] of passivity and injurability, finally, that is, for a passing moment.” What are the pleasures of violence? Of masking mourning by evasion or seeking ecstasy through despair? Has destruction ever stopped grieving, “what fantasy is at work here?" she asks. Grief is a yielding to the unwanted, we are "hit by waves in the middle of the day, in the midst of a task, and everything stops. [What] claims us at such moments when we are most emphatically not masters of ourselves?.” Those moments when we find ourselves exposed, revealed, reminded that “the bonds that compose us also do strand us, leave us un-composed.” Who am I without you? Its not that “I” am just “over here and you [are] over there; but [that] the “I” [is] the crossing” ...that I have not lost you within me, the one through whom I address myself. Before "ever losing, we are lost in the other, lost without the other,” but we rarely grasp this until we actually face loss. “We are from the start both done and undone by the other,” claims Butler, and “if we refuse this, we refuse passion, life and [loss]. The lived form of that refusal is destruction; the lived form of its affirmation is non violence.”