Mused Tidings

Dear Diary,

I live one block away from Hariri's palace. When I walk around the city, men with M16s check my bags for bombs and coming back from the American embassy this morning, Dr. Jeha's car was checked from all sides by a sapper. Last night we wandered for 45 minutes to a theater to see Hancock, starring WIll Smith (which was surprisingly entertaining), and we passed through a Hizbollah stronghold with a greater flag density than anything I've seen so far. Another one of those "wander in there and you'll lose your head" neighborhoods. But it was nice, got a couple of falafels for 3 bucks, the big and spicy kind, and we passed under some gorgeous mid-century European architecture. Then we passed pictures of Hariri with the Arabic word for The Truth being demanded below, and some smoked black buildingshells with shrapnel and trash jettisoned all about.

I've been thinking once more about time and movement. About how soon enough I'll be back in New York, and SNAP! back into that swing of sorts and I'll have memories but I'll be following the protocol motions of the university lifestyle I've already established and all that lays ahead will already be in the past. I was looking off my balcony off into the Mediterranean and I remembered this old proverb about how the place where the sea meets the sky is the present and the sea and the sky themselves are the past and future. The present is only a line, but is it even that? Yesterday it happened to be really foggy, so there was even less of a definite division between the two, and the "present" was just a slow mashover of clouds from below and above - that fuzzy region where memories of the past and dreams or expectations or vague hopes for the future overlap and very little active life is taking place. I look around and my roommate is the beer-drinking flag waving American frat boy who was never in a frat and who dresses and acts like a Republican but has very liberal ideals. He's the one singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and "I'm Proud to be an American (Cause at Least I Know I'm Free)" at the back of the bus and celebrating the discovery of the Beirut Hard Rock Cafe - American kitch. The thing is, you can only celebrate kitch ironically for so many weeks before it seems you are expressing your honest self to the fullest. But he can laugh and dance about eating a big American steak on the 4th of July, while I gaze off at the horizon and laugh at the absurdity of memory and stories and learning and forgetting. The movement of time and the absurd inflated self-importance of Being and all its little strings.

Romantic entanglements like poisonous vines wrap around necks (mine is still safe), and the high school graduate went out last night at 1 am to inquire about the prices of Lebanese prostitution amidst rollicking huzzahs of the pledge class of 08. I walked into my room and happy voices scream out "A Beer Bong!" The Brit has never seen one - we're making it! I retreat to the next door neighbors, the thirty year olds where the nargile (hookah) is passed around and stories involve wives and obligations (meanwhile the shouts from my room are seeping through the wall). Downstairs Bilal and I watch Gangs of New York while Zach sleeps with...anyway, I took his bed. Apparently my room was absolutely trashed last night, but it was soon after cleaned and I say no harm no foul.
But it's weird, anyway. This floating feeling of joyful pettiness. Growing up and changing, learning a language with the sole justification of "I'd like to be able to read Arabic poetry" while Soumaya pulls out her hair and thinks of her CV and Kevin, my fratamerican roommate talks about the State Department and his stories of his ex-wife from behind aviators. And I was singing a Decemberists song with the lyrics "Are your uncle was a crooked French Canadian, and he was gutshot running gin" and it occurred to me that the kid in front of me, Sami, is the soft-spoken French Canadian from Montreal of the class. And on the bus when "I'm proud to be an American" couldn't be any louder, up pops gentle little Sami with "O Canada" in English and French. MEanwhile, my professor Tarif is the type who laughs maniackly at everything he says yet his speech is peppered with proverbs from ancient scripture, French, English, and Arabic writers. Some German. Lines of beautiful, bawdy, and hilarious poetry. Amazing stories like how he is a secular Shiite who married a faithful Maronite during the height of the Civil War. Kind of a Romeo and Juliet type thing.

Still I watch the tide and a strong longing for Japan overcomes me for some reason. I want to go study aikido in a monastery. YOu know, that great preparation. For what? Fuck if I know. That life that's just around the corner...the one that begins once all the preliminaries have been addressed and your checks are all in order. That's why we learn these languages and travel and study this and that because some day in the near future...life will finally begin. But for now, it just waits softly on the horizon.
The absurdity of the idea and the profundity of the feeling are equal punches across the cheeks. Soumaya is about to burst. Zach is cracked somewhere deep in his heart and he says it's just about impossible to offend him. After what he's seen done to human beings, nothing in this comfortable world can touch him. Bilal has a fingernail clipping obsession. He says he sits in class sometimes envisioning his clippers and preparing hours in advance for when he returns to pare his fingernails, like Joyce's artistgod. Ashley is full of philosophy - 30 page papers on Marleu-ponty, Hegel, and Simone de Bouvoire. Yet when it comes to opposition of any sort, she pops and stomps out of restaurants or can't believe her ears when she hears that Riad is a Republican from CALIFORNIA! My point is not to criticize, but to smile simply at what life and the weight of importance does to the fragile social human heart.

And I've got blisters on my feet. Which is Ok, all things considered. But i think of the places I want to go and the things I want to learn and then I think of what I want to do...help the underprivileged? By simply learning things, the problems of the world will melt away! Like Mary saying "I really should study now" enough times until...suddenly!...She has all the information she needs stored away in her head.

Dr. Jeha says all the best people have left Lebanon leaving the country free to the gangsters and warlords. She says if you ever meet a Lebanese person outside of the country, he or she will be one of the more incredible/impressive people you will meet. But here...the future looks dark.
Who knows. That Tao asks if you have enough faith or patience to let the world be the way it is. Can you master life without judgments? That really is a question now isn't it.
In the meantime, I can write/speak full sentences in Arabic now and I've gained some sort of an amused bearing in this place where I can wander through it knowing where I'm going and feeling a comfortable familiarity with the way that things go. And so thats, if not comforting, at least nice.

All my love,
tcm

A fourth of July Poem:

The Melting Pot
You get whatever you want from the linebase blankspace borrowing cache - to catch as catechism can.
The dialectics of kinetic rise - enwarming enwombing lightfruit sweetlift - tonguing licktalk heats the living liftwalk and the exothermal bottom goes topwise con(e) collaborants.
Synesthesia openair view see 'um - cocked holdwise chemistry the brick batter bubble stew where individuums melt to too many twos to marry the whole - flatface concrete slapup - mechanized compression soothing out impressioned paperspace continuity.
Endgame.