Women in Black Today

For a change, after the long and quite short-lived evening (and partly morning) I spent with Rashid I had to find myself facing the world of human-dwellers and citizens, that "City" for so long already betrayed and misused, in many different names. I walked back home entirely drunk in the pleasures of empathy, as though that phenomenal empty space in between my body and my "Geist" suddenly dissipated and both could touch one another as I transformed the energy of the world by my motion and as such imitated God even a little bit.

In the summer days (which are many!) I love the earliest mornings, the fresh morningness that feeds little tiny slices of inspiration dripping from ballons and otherwordly-things that the pink-fingered Aurora was given by her father Zeus to entertain herself. I almost floated through the streaming pleasures of the cold morning and embraced the most serious contemptuousness in the lonely man of faith. My travailing and echoeing through the late-hours and the thoughts of other people, the images of places still unknown and poetry that no one cares to memorize and recite aloud no more. The God led me hearthwards and bequested to me some sleep of pleasure and disregard. One of those mornings when the newspaper doesn't bother with coming, and your foremost love story seems to turn into the Archimedean point of your whole life.

Then later on escaping that sinful boredom that Kierkegaard preaches me about all the time, and without entertaining much Hegelian recollection but altogether lacking the inner drive to utter my prayers after such a colorfully violent and yearning-full nightliness I was still striving for disengaging from. The sun didn't come to me with the smells of the Levant, such as those I see in the mildly nervous streets of the Arab markets in the Old City. It didn't have either the venomous and manly eau of that man who totally forgot me, nor the sweet and almost swift smell of warmth that emanated from R., it was simply a day-less morning.

On my way back just reaching for Terra Sancta College (of course I'd be gladly more interested in writing about Christian places than synagogues and that kind of anachronistic stuff) I saw them. Obviously it wasn't the first time, and for a time I used to be among the earliest attendants to our weekly silent protest against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. I didn't feel this "compulsory" sympathy for the people in the left, and I truely educated myself to love all kind of "kratos", and not necessarily the one of the "demos". Respect in which I remained so terribly faithful to the Polis. I also had a gut feeling that they had a right claim, even though I found them so morally unqualified to make the claims themselves. I couldn't help the mixed feeling of pity and empathy, one all too human. But somehow else I felt that I was also being loyal to Lessing. "In the same sense that these things are all true is the same sense in which they are all in a sense false" (Augustine).

I often questioned (since my early days in the left) whether I really had the moral right to stand up for those particular human rights that I'm collaborating in violating in many different ways. The fact that I don't hold a gun doesn't exempt me from my responsibility. I dwelled in the anti-world for long enough, in the world of celebrities, to know a thing or two about them. And we do defile human rights on a daily basis, our own even. This is a little bit of melodrama though.

Issue at stake is, being there holding a poster calling for the end of the occupation made me understand (and not for the first time) that it's not a problem of ideology or religion, it's not a problem of land or water, it's not a problem of anything but the Human Condition. That same condition the world is working so hard to escape while it sinks beneath its shadow. There's no singled-out answer for the Israeli conflict, it's really impossible to know what really goes on here in this sea of entrophy, in these marred waters. If such a thing as the truth existed here, it fled. Fled with the Palestinians, or perhaps with the Templars or the Armenians or whoever else spent a few nights in a hotel, loved an Israeli man for a day and then boarded on a plane. They took it away, and I can't blame them. Because once the truth of anything shall be given to the Israelis or the Palestinians they'll turn licentious. Only God can live the truth, if there's one.

In this lake of metaphysical tantra and mavericks it's really difficult not to suffocate from the newspapers, and even worse from regular people. We've obliterated the world to such a far off removed distant cloud that we can no longer recover the world, we can only remember it and at that with stenuous difficulties. How can you ever judge anything downhere in this earthly world which isn't rooted on the earth? How can you even dare to be a thinker before recovering the world?

It boils down to the fact that utmost we can do is to follow our guts feeling, always a good thing. Problem is when you try to save the world from estrangement with your gut feeling as an only chariot and warrior. In that sense it's tragic to realize no possible political stance is available for us here. Not for the just or for the open-minded, not for the pacifists and not for the world-haters, not for the fundamentalists and not for the secularists. We're lost the world two-fold in a sea of cheap novels and porn movies.

Our political opinions in this country are just the most homeless form of despair. Attempting to take a stance because no possibility is at all viable, but as long as we can't unearthen the source of life rooted in that mystery that surrounds anything alive and everything human.... we don't have any answers. It's all a sick comedy, and the war turns basically sexual and the press into soap operas. From Heidegger: We can only save the world through dwelling, which is in German cognate with the word for building.

...We need to find it first....

You should have been there this afternoon... the Police had to defend the protesters whereas right-wingers protested across the street glorifying the army and calling the women in black "totalitarian". People shouted curses from the cars and even twice the police had to intervene. Christians and foreigners teaming up with liberal Jews while young women called the Jews to realize they don't have any other country. Insults came and went, and there was a bitter sense of madness to it all. It wasn't a protest and it wasn't a Friday afternoon. It was a carnival, a bacanal. Everything about it was demagogic, feminist, sexual and banal. Even the fliers, even the intentions. Most of all the intentions.