17.7.06

NOW YOU KNOW WHY THE US/ZIONIST WAR MACHINE WANTED SYRIA OUT OF HERE AND MURDERED HARIRI AND BLAMED IT ON SYRIA. NOW YOU KNOW WHY.

When the Syrians disembarked from our planet a few months ago, I took it upon myself to visit a few of their installations I was so used to walking by with my eyes cast down. One in particular which sits next door to the lovely Mrs. Amar's house (she is a widow with 27 cats, two dogs (one, a gigantic Russian breed and very kind), some fowl and one Bengali male helper) is worth noting. It is the place I realized the idea that there is more than one way of seeing things. Of course, I was convinced of this before that fateful day but I didn't really believe it myself. My senses proved otherwise. We must trust those senses. And then we turn our head or stand on a different knoll, the sun is low on the horizon casting certain shadows, or it is noon and there are none at all. So we change our minds and realize our senses can't even be trusted! Nothing is as it seems yet it is, as it is, when we are there.

I usually view Beirut proper from a southerly direction with the northern line of sight ending in a steamy metropolis, full of human activity that I somehow know is there even though I can't see it from such a great distance. Between that view and myself is the giant sandy looking tarmac of modern Phoenician departure. It is new and within it is the memory of the old, the airport in which every corner praised Hafaz Assad and where I once spent one interminable day waiting for a flight back home. Home was something far more foreign than even this place. Home was Riyadh, a dizzy semi-circular void of streets without names and people who dressed uncannily the same, day after day after day. They dressed in reference to the Bible and all the other ancient things that we sometimes abhor and sometimes revere.
To the south of course, is the south. It appears to be a straight line from the metropolis, completely 180 degrees in the other direction, a direction that I often go when seeking peace in the form of a house in a rural area with a view into modern Israel and back into a Medieval castle. I'm almost certain sometimes, that there I can see serfs burning their garbage and the jackals carrying off bones and refuse from the day into their sullied dens.

Behind me is nothing in particular, just a bunch of hills and somewhere even behind that is Syria and behind that, something else too. I don't really know and like the old cave, I only contemplate my shadow not what actually makes it.

In front of me is the sea. Always the sea, always changing.

At the deserted Syrian installation near Mrs. Amar's house however, I realize that everything is generally in a different order. Roads that aren't parallel when they are driven on become twins with roads that ought not to be paired with the others because they course by entirely different realities. The freeway with its locked-in walls where one is isolated in a steady stream of coming and going. It runs alongside a brutal and poorly kept street that harbors fruit vendors and adolescent boys standing about and looking for something to do. The tarmac is far less significant in comparison and in that view.

The southern direction from the top of that knoll, standing just on the edge of a empty foxhole (which is held together by an old tire from a car) is no longer "to the south" and is no longer straight at all. It curves around behind me there, like a lengthy arm on the shoulder of a friend or a lover's around the waist of a lover. So it is, beside me and behind me.

In this orientation, the world is quite circular and the sea, although not directly in front of me is still the sea. The sea without direction, the sea of all changes. The sea which casts no shadow on anything at all but remains forever as it is without us knowing.


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