Pyrrhic Company in the Circle of the Messiah

Pyrrhic Company in the Circle of the Messiah— Part One

 

"We warm ourselves by burning memoirs and floorboards…
History boils the kettle to make our tea".

Table legs fall to a burning december—
upturned and broken—rendered to song
of the taken muezzin, by the rivers of ember
we lay down to weep, to circle we enter
her red seeded throat, red seeds to re-member
by the board of our feasting that light won't be long. 
As the table legs burn in this turning-a-tender,
upturned and broken, surrender her song. 

 ‘The Baal Shem Tov was asked why the Amidah, the central prayer of the daily service, begins with "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob." Isn't that redundant? Why not just say "God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob"? The Baal Shem Tov answered: "The God of Jacob was not the God of Issac, and the God of Isaac was not the God of Abraham.’

A few weeks back, in her Uncivil Savant, Caroline Ross wrote in an open letter on Tending the Heart of the resting place offered in that iron bed of Procrustes by the bargain of certainty. She touched on both the lure of such a sleep and, ultimately, a clarity regarding the inability to lay down on such a frame and remain intact.  Iron, being as it must, conforms the animal to its measurements either by excision of its blade or the stretching of its rack. One fit for all. Her post was more than just a refusal. It was also a promise to stay awake through the night next to one’s own thirst for mystery.  

Against the chill under those stars facing any would-be companions unable she offered the modest embrace of the ragged shawl. She had me there. In the Twelve Wild Geese, the story of bogdown and aster, each brother brought back to company and person is brought back by such clothing, a fabric knitted in silence by the feminine-come-looking. Both iron and cloth offer shelter in a time of need and both have some relation to tradition. The chasm between them has to do with the gap between mourning and necromancy.

The Gypsy siguiriya begins with a dreadful cry, a cry that divides the landscape into two perfect hemispheres. It is the cry of dead generations, a poignant elegy for vanished centuries, the evocation of love filled with pathos beneath other winds and other moons…

This from a 1922 lecture given by Lorca in Granada. He continues:

…But do not believe that the siguiriya and its variants are simply songs transplanted from east to west. No. ‘It is more a matter of grafting…, or rather, of coincident sources, which were not revealed at one specific moment, but represent the accumulated effect of the historical and secular events that unfolded in our peninsula’, and thus it is that the songs peculiar to Andalusia, though essentially akin to those of peoples geographically remote from us, possess their own intimate and unmistakable character of the land.”

I am drawn to this talk of graft, of the peculiar drinking from the “intimate and unmistakable” character of a ground that holds you by your roots in its grip. But between the devil of colonization and the deep blue sea of amnesia, homeland for the exiled and the runaway can be hard to come by. And what becomes of the form and function of the channels, xylem to phloem, that would carry the waters to heart what world there is turns upside down, where those awake with the thirst must, as the poet Paul Celan underlined in his Meridian speech, be mindful of dates, where those who would pray by paying attention must walk on their heads. 

Now to turn Celan’s phrase, one who walks on her head has the sky beneath herself as an abyss. But this morning it occurs to me that she also has the earth as a heaven.  With gravity paying no heed to our dates and our attentions, maybe the one recompense for all that has been lost is that the natural tendency of our weight to descend now draws us all close this heaven, (ready or not) as the long disregard of its denizens and wonders enters the age of consequence. This is a heaven ready to recieve our prayers.

Ian McGhilchirst recently pointed out in a lecture how resilient the mind is at reorienting the senses after catastrophe. Poles tilted, compass undone, vision resets itself to the new upright and adjusts to whatever horizon it must. And so we go on at world’s end, with everything upturned but pretending to walk upon a mere thing, rather than a watching heaven, a type of senselessness we have been building on for some time that pretends the North is Up and Up is ours .

According to midrash, the only one of the five human senses not diminished after the shattering of Eden was our sense of smell. Scent, long since neglected by humanity in favor of sight, is well-known for its ties to memory and longing, the two libations of hope. The poet Quintana named hope a green-painted Vulture. This is a season that understands him on that. The gentle hush of denial and the cooing rocking back to sleep of a childish culture are the lullabies of war and extraction. But the pigment isn’t the bird.  Beneath the veneer of wish and claim is a way of being intimate with endings circling around the same syllable, something of real feather, winged not by denial but by an open-eyed taking in of the loss and limit as sustenance, down into our middle.  

In a post on the Ayelet haShahar a few weeks back I mentioned how there remains among the Wise some debate on exactly Who was exiled from the Garden, the G-d or the human. The angel guarding the gate may be a euphemism for a loss of sense, or at least a babel-like confusion in our art of echolocation. Exile, on this scale, may be as much about apprehension as distance. The mind of the vulture is unique among birds in its adaptation toward the power of scent. It is a being able to find a dead mouse under leaf debris in dense forest from the sky above. The haversack of the pearl diver, the gentle strong¹ who inherit the earth (or is it heaven), will be filled in the ruins. It would be well served by such a nose.

II.

When the cities lie at the monsters feet,
there remains the mountains…
Robinson Jeffers

From exile in the Occident my people would often place a marker on the eastern wall of their home called a Mizrah. It was a marking to draw the imagination and the attention toward Jerusalem, the epicenter of loss, where their ancestral mystery, the Holy of Holies, once stood, and the place for many of them from where the messiah was yet to come. 

In his poetics of seventy terms from the Torah, These Words, Alden Solovy observes that “each of the cardinal directions has a set of three biblical names.” One based in celestial navigation, one the contours of the land, and one orientated to the topography of the living body. To name East we are given Mizrach, Kedem, and Panim. Mizrach is rooted in shining. It navigates by the rising sun. Kedem, the most used in the Torah and etymologically rooted in that which is before, is where they say G-d planted the garden from which humanity proceeds. The third term, the embodied, is panim. It is a looking faceward, a navigating by countenance.

So there is East and there is East. In the wreckage of the means that have settled and resettled the holy cities these last centuries, in the wake of the will to grasp and squeeze tight some recoverable before, there are certain Easts that recede as they call. Every murder, no matter its underwriting text, unstacks a stone until there remains not even one upon another.  Without you, Rafiqa, say that Jerusalem isn’t. When the city lies at the monster’s feet and praises its boot print, whether in Hebrew or Arabic, what direction is a countenance that can blessed without shame?

To navigate by such need, to find East in the face of the Other(s)  when no stone remains atop another, is to knit the shawl against this night in holy silence, to sound things out from the flagless ground of the border language, lament. Only lament, with its distance from both revelation and the certain (Scholem) has a soil structure that “prevents the immanence of meaning from closing upon our heads” (Lipszyc). The work song of such ones is a siddur at world’s end, stitched from fabric that once served other intents. It will be both/and. It will be halflit and still becoming. It will be feral.

I say feral with intention. It feels closer to this time and place than the claim of  still-knowing-home in the word wild. The feral knows better the loss of receptors. The edge where person touches place is jagged and unmet in many of the places along the line. It is a going into the dark between the trees unprepared and without the blessing of symbiosis because you simply stayed too long in a way that is done for. It is a going out that doesn't find the narrow way of life (few do they say) but where that thinning way finds you.  What it lacks in consumptive expanse, they say, it makes up for in the closeness of the friends one finds. I suspect the relation between the feral and wild is less species to species than it is instar to imago. Maybe feral is to wild as dissolution is to wing. In any case such music as these ones can raise will be full of acknowledgement of every Truth-broken thing—heart to bone to the vows of G-d themselves. It will be music run through the sluice of silence that would sift out from its language any surety unable to pass through the aortic arch of the neighbors (human or other), no matter the stability it offers in exchange for the surrender of companions.  

Is this a shrinking back from the particular just moments past longing after graft? Not at all. In The Matter of things, Ian Mcghilchrist suggests that only with solid obstruction can flow bring forth eddy, it’s “most extraordinary richness of design”, a process he sees as “the perfect image of multiplicity emerging from unity through resistance.” This blessing of the point of inhibition rings with what Chesterton called in the Ethics of Elfland the doctrine of conditional joy. “You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire if you do not say the word cow; or You may live happily ever after with the King’s daughter if you do not show her an onion.” Now, my currency of place doesn’t traffic in precious gems and metals as much as stone hearth and hemlock beams, and I am not sure that Chesterton and I are on the same side of the chasm regarding tradition, but I suspect with him that it may indeed be madness to complain that we cannot enter paradise by five doors at once. Mother-wit may run true when it suggests that “all the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden.”² It is a thing that is wed to the idea that this heaven beneath our feet is good (very good it is said) but not without, at an elemental level, also a terrible need. More on this later.

III.

Back in November I listened to a discussion over here where I learned from Katharine Bubel that Ivan Illich, the half-Yid rogue priest probably best known for his book deschooling society, commended those at world’s end, to leave hold of the Promethean conditioning, and return via the Epimethean way to Gaia/Pandora, who he suggested was still to be found in the cave at Delphi.  I like this Illich very much. He sketches loosely a directive tuned to the past that knows regret. And Company. Flush with ochre, curve,  and the other-than-human, its  East is panim. It seeks face(s) elsewhere than the mirror. Illich recovers an Epimethean turn that, like Shekinah in the Abrahamic strata, had its countenance buried between the lines of the Hesods and the Deuteronomists. His is a telling that swims against the grain of the story as it sits. This is not Epimetheus the excuse maker, giver of a naked lack in need of saving by technique. Illich’s Epimetheus is an honorable mutineer, standing with Pandora and against Promethean hubris. Epimetheus as species traitor in that he refused the hierarchy of personhood, daring to forget about man in a season of gift giving.

The sacred cave that Illich sends us toward is the Matronit herself, the all-giving Mother who keeps our dreams against the ones who fabricate our plans. It’s interesting that in such caves, when man is depicted at all, humanity is often diminished next to the breathtaking fullness of the Others. It is as if those technicians of the sacred, reading the same engravings (on different surfaces) as the Ari who gave us the story of Tzimtzum, knew that a type of withdrawal, a relative of ruin, was the price of admission to a sustaining company, for animals as well as for Elohim.

Sometimes you are born into a world’s end. It is a thing that happens. ³

In such times even the morning air leans toward dusk.  The eyesight of the Epimethean, being more rod than cone, excels in that low light. The taste of cobalt vespering on the tongue suits her as she knows she must make do without certain colors, certainty chief among them.  She fills her basket in the peripherals, remembers the dead, and tends toward listening a bit longer to what moves through the throat of the bird before discerning its name.

Sometimes you are born into a world’s end. It is a thing that is happening.

In such times, it is best to name your totem wisely. Epimetheus, they say, had touched in some way that thread running through the clades, the threading of gifts into being that is creation itself. Interestingly, as cozied up to the beginning as his story was, his own daughter Pyrrha would be among the only survivors of a world’s end. On the other side of the abyss and maybe in search of Siddur, it is easy to imagine Pyrrha remembering what she had been taught of creation, how natality is fed on flotsam, how (against the rumors of ex nihil) anyone reading page or strata closely could see that, on this side of the face of the deep at least, everything is midrash upon midrash, all the way down. Her father’s eyes five fathoms down and in need of pearl, I don’t know the names of the  sephirot that she would have written on the scroll, placed in the clasp and nailed to the doorpost of a new beginning but surely they would have been few static things among the holy.  

We are told by the kabbalists that by word worlds are created and by word they are upheld. This is an invitation, to the senses and the body as well as the mind, to go down to sea in the skerry of our tongue and do the work of chasing after this unmanned language in great waters. When lately I let loose the oars in their locks and let my mind wander over the dark of the glass looking for the pontil scar of Hashem it is Pakicetus that I name up. Pakicetus, the long-nosed Ypresian ungulate gone to wolf and then gone to sea; web-footed and following her hunger to the between places, she must have noticed, as each wade welcomed her farther out, that she was more not not Whale with each exhale, until one day, as her breath left the blowhole, she found herself dreaming about what grass used to feel like under toe and longing into fields of unending breach.

Descendant of Pyrrha/Chava, like my mothers before me, I touch my hand to lips and then to that story of Revelation, Whale or Word, now hung on the doorpost of my mind, housed as it is in a primate skull that too once dreamed toward blowhole in its first year, until its tectonic plates were taught suture, til the dreams below were bound tight, at wrist and forehead, to the illusion of the fixity of species and the Holy.  I put my hands in the wound, in the empty socket where once there was a wolf’s hip, and speak the blessing over Fluke. Was it Yaakov’s Angel who worked on this sea-change as well or is the sea-change itself the Angel?  

Benjamin’s Angelus Novus (New Angel) like Epimetheus (the right hemisphere of Adam’s mind) is rearward thinking, faced toward Eden, back toward the chain of Promethean grasps called progress. Oriented toward both regret and re-membering but aware, like Epimetheus, that we cannot return to orthodoxy as it was, or as we were, any easier than a whale can return to land. Too much has happened, too many realisations have dawned. The blowhole is open.  But that doesn’t mean that solid land can’t still word our songs, that breach can’t be born in communion with air that once moved through the leaf and limb before ground went to sea.

 I recently had a home-coming talk with Elizabeth Oldfield, a wrestling with ideas about conversions, the circle of Company and the intrusion of Yeshua.  I told her that the story of the Messiah raising the daughter of Jairus from the dead was a hearthplace in me. That aramaic phrase, talitha kum, doesn’t sound in ears when uttered, it circles in marrow. Martin Shaw suggested recently that G-d was memory. Maybe so. Something like re-membering runs through me on those words. And it is a similar businesss with the underlying whisper of the story on the whole, this G-d who comes looking, both to become animal and to find company, drinking life to the dregs and then the intrusion of death to the hilt.

But there is an approach to a doorway here, and those on the receiving end of the claims forged from the creeds hardened around that Story within that house begin to bang the tin of their cups against the iron bars of the footboard they know too well. More drumming to the beat of Jenkinson’s thought that some stories don’t survive the telling or that in any case tey don’t belong in some Heres. But is that the whole of it? It had been many years since I had spoken unguardedly with someone as comfortable with my mother-tongue as Elizabeth. Some words were said, and in them some relations raised that, as commanding as those cups against the bars, pulled on a sibling-tie about my middle. It's been some weeks of a tussle between these two frequencies, disorientated, until I heard Dougald Hine in a really helpful conversation along similar fault lines with Rebekkah Berndt on the Unfolding. Dougald told the story of crossing  a threshold into a church that, unlike the main door, was a passage through an opening not suited to kings or priests. It was named the devil’s door and it was an entrance into company drawn to the music of form eddying flow but not so much the extrapolation to the concrete and efficiency  of the dam.

 It is a both/and thing, or course, these banging cups and pulling ties. One can own all that has been done and left undone and still refuse any in-or-out un-sistering because in every seamless garment left for the centurions to cover in, some honorable mutineer in a tattered shawl has cut an opening for devil’s like us to look to an east that isn’t as static as the maps claim.

“וַיֹּ֗אמֶר רְאֵה֙ רֵ֣יחַ בְּנִ֔י כְּרֵ֣יחַ שָׂדֶ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר בֵּרְכ֖וֹ יְהֹוָֽה” (“Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of the fields that Hashem has blessed”)

They say the scent of those fields that sends Isaac into reverie is the scent of Eden itself. It was carried upon a garment of Esau’s that Rivka has instructed Jacob to wear as part of his shape-shift. It is, the story goes, the garment given to Adam by G-d while still in paradise and so eternally perfumed by those fields. Isaac touches an arm that feels like Esau but he hears a voice that sounds like Jacob. What would have maybe been an impasse is a tent flap flung open. The scent of Eden is the green fuse in the rupture between siblings that blows Jacob (like his Angel, with back turned to the future) further out from the paradise that was never his. Homecoming is never prelapsarian. It’s sonnets are 13 lines, its rhymes post-apocalyptic and way past slant.

“Without testament or, to resolve the metaphor, without tradition– which selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is–there seems to be no willed community in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change of the the world and the biological cycle of living creatures in it.” (Arendt)
 

The treasures and their worth. Here there is no homage to monarchy or to a preservable Yesterday” (Celan) but, dear Hannah, this is a wager with you that it only *seems* there is no willed community . With tradition broken it is tempting to assume all hope of graft is lost and every thing is compost and fungal. All hyphae and no tree. But it is when the authority of dead is stripped by seachange that our father’s eyes can be pried loose and brought up as pearls and, the world turned upside down, root becomes scion and a dream returns of canopy, with shade that is the match of any Under, scratching against the glass. Form that would delight in eddy but not dam its own mother (isn’t some One’s imagination every story’s womb)  must bless natality, both its dissolution (pupae to imago, the never-before Word taking flight) as much as the thread unbroken (eyespot born crying Owl, mother tongue received). All trueing in the plenum is, like turtle upon turtle, or whale upon wolf, midrash all the way down. 

Again a line from Celan:

          Once,

I heard him,
he was washing the world,
unseen, nightlong,
Real. 

Near its end, does the Messiah come to wash a world for burial ? Maybe even to wash from it the messianic itself gone mad? Here, in a wide open piece on the childlike and story, Elizabeth Oldfield speaks aloud a scrap from Yokanan’s telling about Yeshua. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. Its voicing stayed with me for weeks as a counterword to its usual context. In the image that comes up for me, as opposed to the text as I find it, darkness is as integral to that field as the spark. Shekinah is a wick burning in a room or deadfall alight, ringed in stone at the center of the clearing, or the moon waning with a world. Light as Tzimtzum. Always leaving enough dark matter for natality, those lightings that are not yet imaginable, to come. What you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

 
IV

I heard someone say recently that the worst kind of loneliness is isolation born of not being understood. It causes one to lose grasp of reality. Maybe so. I imagine it is a common state in a world convinced that the first order of business is to understand yourself and then, if any time remains, to move out from there. We finish with the task, if at all, usually late in the day and move from there to passing on what we like best from our time in the mirror. But being heard and seen, even over and over again, doesn’t often bring the medicine we need.It is no accident that in the fairy tales everything is person, rock to rooster, moon to mandrake. The whole point of the endeavor is to end the monologue, to open the lines of communication between the worlds so that something of the lost elemental companionship across beings might be remembered, and in that, we might be saved. 

In her work Seekers of the Face, an exploration of the Idra Rabba, Melila Hellner-Eshed writes that “the face is a complex filtering mechanism, an edifice of fine latticework through which the light contained within may pass outward in different ways and with varying intensity.” Interestingly, in the Idra Rabba, even G-d ( as the dualistic Ze-ir Anpin) is changed and brought into a more balanced relation with the world by looking into the face of the Other (as the undifferentiated One ‘Attiqa Qaddisha). For any light to reach us at all, so much depends on the ratio of faces to things we find within our world(s).

 And Esav ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him; and they wept. And Esav lifted up his eyes, seeing woman and children and said “Who are these with you?” Genesis 33:4-5

 In an essay by Eduardo Viverios De Castro Ghassan Hage is quoted on what he calls critical anthropology which I read simply as those peer to peer relays known to outsiders as folktale, creation narrative, or faerie story.

In the case of critical anthropology, however, we are taken outside ourselves without there being a direct causal nexus between this outside and ourselves: learning about the the cosmology of the Arrernte prior to colonization might tell us that there are ways of relating to the surrounding universe and to the flora and fauna that are radically different from the way we moderns relate to them, but in no way are we invited to see a casual relation between the the cosmology of the Arrernte and the constitution of our own. And yet, we are still invited to think that the Arrernte’s way of life does have a bearing on our lives. That there is always something in us that allows us to become Arrernte. (Hage 2009)

“Critical anthropology” [again, read here Word from the time/place before all the Others ceased speaking] he goes on to say works “through a comparative act that constantly exposes us to the possibility of being other than what we are” and opposed to our usual us-centric analysis, is “more akin to the shamanic act of inducing a haunting: indeed it encourages us to feel haunted at every moment of our lives by what we are/could be that we are not.” 

Hannah Arendt believed that, after such collapses as her world had known, any new accord between beings would be founded not on a static truth but living, unfolding meaning. The faculty we were gifted with to such new beginnings was not knowledge but judgement which, she believed, was founded upon an exemplary validity born of the interplay between each one’s own sense of taste and each one’s ability to take that sense of taste and go walking with it in another’s skin. The habit of shapeshifting as an accumulation of perspective toward a commoned sense of the whole of our shared world(s). This is, to my ear, that modest ground after the loss of past foundations that offers a place resilient enough to raise a sanctuary but never hardened enough for a scaffold.

This taste is a sense for naming beauty or path that operates by calling to council “the standpoints of those who are absent”. This is a presence that requires work more suited to the shaman than the philosopher to be sure, if what is summoned is to be actually of the Other and not mere fabrication. But neither is it a simple abandonment of one’s own place in the room.  “This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question of neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor a counting of noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.” ⁴  Or where I am not not.

Arendt did not champion here some game of solitaire with hand puppets in place of the more difficult task of being at the long table with strangers, familiars, adversaries and friends. Or the many combinations there of. She was, I think, suggesting a way we might remember how to set such a table, so out of practice as we seemed to her then, and have only degraded since. It is this river I would wish to eddy into with the form of the particular East I compass after with my writing.

After the break with his brother Esav over his theft of the firtborn’s blessing, Yaakov fled from the whole into the particular. As an outlier he slept on stone. This stone, they say, was made  from twelve smaller stones taken from the altar where his father Yitzhak had lain under the raised knife of Avraham, and alone among humans, witnessed either feint or resolve in his father’s eyes. He had, let’s say, a lamb’s eye view. He also likely saw the eyes of the one caught by its antlers in the brush. Sleeping on such a stone, one might get the idea that what he inherits is a chain of violence, that to get to the holy land, someone has to die. Is it any wonder that he would flee from the horizontal, and try to hide in the vertical.

They say, after the death of the Rabbi who had removed the Aleph from his forehead, the Golem was seen still thriving in a rough camp among a humanity beyond lure of any of the false promises of civilization. His speech, too, was reduced to poetry.

Similar to the shock after the dating of the images at Chauvet, the shock at the beauty of the language was preceded by the surprise that the Golem could speak at all. Taking pity on the mind conditioned to only its own reflection, the Golem explained to his new examiners, as if to ones just waking, that the spell which was cast with the removal of the Aleph is one that induces death in the ears of the beholder rather than in the mouth of the beheld. “Masters mine, did you not see that the  lips of the cosmos continued moving without ceasing after the supposed moment of revelation in my trial?”, he had asked them. But, of course, the muting that had been birthed in the old days had to find somewhere grow up and procreate, and there was little response.

Isn't it time we met, stranger, as two strangers of one time,and of one land, the way strangers meet by a chasm?We have what is ours. . .and we have what is yours of sky.And you have what is yours. . .and what is ours of air and water.We have what we have of pebbles... and you have what you have of iron.Come, let's split the light in the force of shadow, take what you wantof the night, and leave two stars for us to bury our dead in their orbit... Mahmoud Darwish⁵

The scent of Eden doesn’t hang in the garments we receive hoping to walk us backward in our own footprints. To stare into the candle of the good-old is to hallucinate along the same line as the claims of progress. Both frankensteinian, both energizing the monstrous against the enemy they meet heading the way they have come. For the pearl diver, done with heroes and kings, that way is closed. The rooms we have walked through since then, the fluke where once there were legs, the blowhole that has opened the shell of the mind to new doorways for breath, cannot be stitched closed by any pounding of fist on chest. The scent of Eden led Yitzak to bless and release Yaakov, the supplanter, not back into what once supposedly was in order to avoid the night, but further up and further in, to the middle of the dark, through the whole of it, unto that hiptorn morning where he would finally see in the angel he gripped the face of his enemy’s face, his brother’s face, as the face of G-d and, entering that world of faces not things, surrender the stolen blessing and along with it the name of supplanter. An exchange of force for power. This is why as Yaakov presses that blessing back into Esav’s hands, he makes the claim that now yesh li kohl…I have All.

End of Part One

1. I first heard this transposition of the usual meek from David Benjamin Blower

2. Which is not to play nice with all the fucking Torquemadas that always seem to find the forbidden things in the particulars of those beyond the barbed wire of their certainties. Some Companeras need us home by midnight, others awake in a garden all night but all of them, when it comes to the witches or the witch hunters, stand with witches.

3. This is a quote from Federico Campagna that seems to be in my head on hourly basis. Like much of what’s useful in my head of late, it came to me via Dougald Hine.

4. Again with the Arendt, come on what’s with this guy…..I think its from her lectures on Kant.

5. I was introduced to this breath-taking poem by its translator Fady Joudah in his article “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation”.