28 January 2024

 

The Palestinian writer is suspicious of “witness,” which he sees as an outgrowth of craft, meaning poetic and legal form. I write about the helplessness of witness, if it’s imagined as watching atrocities on a screen; in what form do I inscribe such an inability to act? If I keep writing and writing without finding an exit, have I “published too much,” or tested the theory that repetition gets the words into my reader’s bones? The writer’s argument turns toward violence, mandating an explosion of old forms in favor of the “rubble couple” of re-origination. But the explosion of my paragraphs yields me little, if anything; my legal brief, set on fire, still offers nothing more than ash. My seeing, like my reading of his argument as flawed, simply doesn’t matter. Norman ended his dharma talk with an optimism that resembled duct tape stuck over a broken engine. Even a Bodhisattva can’t take in the dusty kids of Gaza, the city tombs of Ukraine. Let us parcel out our spots of time to usher us into a room where the shape of the table is not in question.

The poetry of witness is learned helplessness, no matter the form we inscribe it in. The arc a baby makes in air before it’s shot follows a beautiful geometry that hollows us out. Even a rainbow is ugly in war-time.

Just as Lennon put his A string against an amp to create feedback, so should we lean the instruments of our art against the nearest power source. But making a racket hardly suffices when Israeli citizens place their chairs neatly at a high point to watch the bombing of Gaza. No amount of “fascia flossing” will soften the muscles of that hatred. If I could shoot them, would I? But I can't, so all I do is talk into this screen’s void or voice, assuming it to have the depth a reader can lend to it. Don’t take an Uber to the court’s transcript; ride your bike into its turbulence. The transcriber shakes like a frond in a Kona storm, or a “frawn,” as the sign at Punalu`u read.

Kindness doesn’t do the work of justice, though there must be a map here somewhere to show me how one can lead to the next. We learned the triviality of kindness as children; it’s nearly too late to start again. My daughter’s boyfriend puts out his hand to support her knee as she naps. The arc of that reach appears perfect. My mother’s pilot friend saw a girl fleeing a bombing run and said he’d never drop his bombs again without seeing her face with his eyes.

 

Note: references to "Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide," by Fargo Nissim Thakhi in Protean Magazine and to Susan Howe's "rubble couple." The shape of the table was at issue in the Vietnam peace talks.