Before, after, and yet somehow clinging on in the throes
This pen writes smoothly today, but lately it has been blotchy and feeding the ink haphazardly. I must learn more about my grandfather’s pen in order to take care of it properly. Perhaps this weekend I’ll go to the pen shop on Clerkenwell Road. In the pictures of it online it has a gloriously ancient façade and its collections of pens and diaries mark dedication to the cause, so to speak. Yes, I think I will go.
Last night’s sleep was an unbelievable struggle to induce. The four pm coffee at Tufnell Tavern jittered my last diary entry right off its damn tracks. I had to quit when it became too difficult to bring the nib to the page in any reliable kind of way. But the caffeine continued scattering my thoughts well after I had put writing aside. Then, later that evening, as we approached the final hours of the countdown to Trump’s threatened annihilation of Iranian civilization, I was taken with a churning dread feeling in the mid-gut which touched off the jitters again. Eventually I surrendered to some inane TV show – beautiful people doing terrible things to themselves in some plentiful cityscape, you know the sort of thing – until I knocked myself into the dreamless sleep of the burnt out. I shall never know what raced through my mind in those hours of dormancy but I awoke again with my mind pedaling at full speed. It was the same road ablaze but somehow I was much further along than where sleep had left it off.
I know that I do not yet have the interior strength and stamina to write in the throes of it all: Trump’s pledge to annihilate the Iranian civilization, circling the drain of the countdown, the media coverage so totalizing but with not a single gesture towards these brave Iranians chaining together on their local bridges and chanting and dancing outside their powerplants, all of it in the face of death. This pure human gesture of fending for one’s home in the face of imperial terror brings tears to my eyes, at once salty and fiercely burning, in much the same way as when learning of the Palestinians’ long march of return to northern Gaza in the intermittent ‘ceasefire’ early last year. That too went largely unreported.
Across the street an elderly Muslim man supports his wife beneath the arm to keep her from the unstable curbside as she ambles along wearily and prods and leans on her walking stick. Truthfully I do not know where to put this grief which overflows, but for all its abundance knows nothing in a blinkingly stupid sort of way. I feel culpable for having nothing left but to advertise it here in these superficial and awkward sentences. How dare I contemplate the hurt being done to these Iranians whom I forbid myself to know. It is unbearable to me. And this incessant emoting is juvenile. But I sense in my impotence some total devastating structure at work. Well this is how it feels to be unable to think and write about what is nearest and most urgent to us all. I will not forget this feeling.
As I slept, the deadline passed. I must confess that I awoke keenly aware of this fact. But somehow it felt important to dwell in this space of unknowing and have my sense of dread engrained into every fibre of my being in the hope that I shall never forget the gravity of it. I suspect that when I do check the news, I will find that the White House has extended the deadline as per Trump’s modus operandi. Something precious will be lost in coming to learn the facts of the outcome, whether death or another go-round the mad circus. And for some reason far exceeding my own worldly concerns, I remain here scribbling just to cling to that something a bit longer. But my hand aches and I cannot write further because it is all so unsayable. God (of whatever kind) protect the Iranians. And please strip my sentiment of all confections and enter only its true kernel in the universal till.