Excerpt: 'A Flight Of Objects That Seemed Real' by Lital Khaikin
“There are dewdrops drying on the backs of the wasplings…”
We are intensifying presence in Eastern Europe in a project called Reassurance. Increasing presence and support of Georgia while Georgian nationals leading ISIS are declared twice dead. Year of Lazarus but no correlation.
The amplification of the Canadian military in Latvia is a reassurance to NATO’s Eastern European allies that all is well. Forces on high readiness, indefinitely on counter insurgency high density intensification of Canadian permanent home in Latvia spectrum of conflict leverage the courage which is not going to be a short term. Our guns have your backs, but of course you know no-one fights wars with weapons anymore. The ambiguation of autonomous weapon systems makes it possible for a fly on the wall to be a weaponised fly on the wall. “With great concern I have learned that the United Nation’s Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT) was refused to visit places subordinated to the Ukrainian Security Services in Mariupol and Kramatorsk.” Furthered by an appeal to the United Nations.
Magical way of being through repetition. The enhancement of forward presence. For something to exist, it has to be constantly computed, again and again. Maita-reya, the apparition of peace, that is, the immoveable. Maya, apparition, that is, illusion. You tell me about the transmutation of emotion. “You can’t live with anger.” Or the luxury of negating volatility. To civilize the intolerable. The daemonology of science. A loss of faith, lord knows, is trending. Vrubel’s Pan and the caricatures of Gogol, the drowned Medusa, утопленница, water prison, the day of witches come out of water. For a day, some air. For a day, their naked bodies strike terror into those whose eyes fall upon their skin, and not a hunger for their flesh. For a desperate, screeching day, that rises in a fury, the drowned witches’ Sabbath. Night that is corrupted by this ferocious speed. The order of madness, organising the preternatural pattern. Or, how you place your fingers into me while another man speaks about ghosts. But since we could never touch completely, a way to touch is a way to break the illusion, the unmaking of distance, closing space, a prettier thing from afar. The optimism of a birthing universe is written into variations of the twisted dreams, recurring memories that are repeating the diagrammatic walk.
Further implications of quantum trading: the value of data as particle and force, of multiplicity and synchronous occurrence. Again, naru. Transmission of information, which must be truth, as a reading of the becoming. Not that these particles exist in a void, a something-nothing, but within a matrix of entanglement. The form of liquidity demonstrates something of our progress ethics. Financial giant superstars rank the future-growth. Alchemical translations of strategic existence. The fundamental links of the universe, or, the artificial ancestral. Density. Apocalyptic time of penance for Europe. No patience for thinking. A lattice made of the blurring of margins. Interconnectedness. Everything, everything, everything. Relativity is proven in simple measurements of length. Had to wait for a German philosopher to confirm. Disjunction between birthing and optimism. More like staring into the face of a round and twisted doom. Ontological incorrectness. Another man writes, “the purpose of every culture is to allow for the convivial existence of [people] that recognize each other mutually as subjects.” The basis of human history on the turning points of Western tragedies takes the form of the third period of human history. But acknowledgement makes no punctum for the whiteface Viet Cong caricature (je suis l’etats unis), no fourth era on the back of Boko Haram or the ribs of Palmyra, replicated in plastic (no admission charged). Post-apocalyptic transfusion of the great tragedy (singular) limited to the Euromerikan consciousness into psyxologia, or occupation of philosophy where no-one is naked.
Opportunity creates open scenarios. Democracy marches under two colours, and is always white. Assurance is the protection of private investments. The value of reassurance is the militant state becoming the interiour, or maybe an even more abstract situation – where the self subsumes politics, and the existence of the state becomes an existential problem faced by the extinguishing soul. Security in the nearing consequence of mortality. Give a life, take two. Adept of exchange. Unionise for the mutual benefit of values, and, unionized, will never be defeated, and so on, rinse repeat. Investment in the future of tenure track knowledge creation tracks equal value infrastructures and the liquidity that is forming inside of me. The pursuit of equal economic exchange. Persons with any applicable or inapplicable genitals are equally encouraged to participate. Pension funds made possible by mining, by oil, by the price of genocide in the West Bank, in Nigeria, in Nagorno-Karabakh, or wherever else it’s convenient not to look. Where do the weapons come from? Unions holding stocks in Bombardier, from the primary school teacher contributing to the CPP, converting 13-14% into carpet bombs in a luxury weave over Palestine. Poppies writing a trail through the mountains of Pakistan, through Afghanistan. The old soldiers forgetting the red flowers’ nectar in their blood, direct injection. The names of Algonquin, Mohawk, emblazoned on roofs of casinos in neon plastic shells.
The massacre was perverted to change the memory of future generations into an existential claim on land. The untouchability of sorrow as the legitimacy of the state as reconstructed out of the appeal to sorrow. States of ownership, bolstered by remnants of the proto-nationalists, the escapees to the house of neutrality, exploiting trauma for an economic foothold. The claim to statehood became legitimized through the oppression of the void, which was too much to bear without the designation of the edge. Bones beneath an airport, bones beneath condominiums. The exteriorization of the deep interiors. Matters for memoirs, matters of consequence. The crossing of the red sea towards a stolen land, all expenses paid in the name of cultural openness. Desires can be satisfied through the production of solutions in custom scales. A satisfying replication of memory. Memory that can’t be spoken to, but which silence kills. After Nakba. After there is an after. Which meant that to be there had to be state or material non-entropy. This was a romantic archaeology, which means because of memory, or the reality of human pain, it is not revolutionary. The radical, that is, the terrorist, is the lover. Lover has nothing. Lover cannot speak.
Truth is a matter of knowledge because truth is uncovered through specialized systems in which are people specially trained for the particular. Without which, abstraction. As in, the idea of statelessness means that it is impossible to conceive of non-being, which means that the state secures its reality inside before you can touch me. Which means, the stateless alternative is unimaginable, or divine (but don’t use words like divine). The creation of the Nation State is a solution for the discordance of the edge. Questions from people like can we have a state or can we have a state because what we really need is a state?
ועל חרבן מקדשנו And over the destruction of our Temple
עין אחת עוד דומעת; An eye still wells up with tears;
Small body broken over sand. The trace of rest. Forgotten by the body, replaced by constant anxiety. What is a stone? A holy book is rewritten. The distillation of time. Cruelty made more clear.
In New York, facing the concrete blocks of LaGuardia Place, the roof is bubbling black tar. Another man talks about a pure Zen master lineage. He shows me calligraphic confirmation. This was a requirement for poets of a certain era. The words of a sometime, truth is adopted into a holy melancholia. Names are still dangerous. He does not mention the application of meditational mastery to the initiation of birthright to soil. The bodies of youth are exiled until they have to relearn their bones, stretch skin anew over skeletons that are too familiar, and unknown. Initiation. Sepulchre. The slave throws the first stone. Carefully filing the memories of a nation. The new exports trade spiritual growth for Kibbutz tours, for cratefuls of oranges and Sabra hummus. The promised land is the new exchange of populism. An eglise of polytheistic worship of white collar exiles who grew politically correctly bored. Lions’ heads emaciated, seedless dead fruit offerings to the icons, boxed fruit from a burning Babylon. Can you hide syringes in the pits, transport pills and stethoscopes in fruit crates, fertilize farms that feed activists across the Atlantic, raised organic under the white sun of the promised land? Eat your blood oranges, warriors for liberty. New exports long to return to a home-land held in cellular memory somewhere along the line of reincarnation.
“We live a million times in different forms”, says a preacher, giving consolation to a razed village. Metathemnon. The lifting of the veil. Or the dissolution of maya. All of life is advancing up a ladder.
There were hills here before there were cities. Here, where there is no-one, you don’t have to see the others. Them, who are digging at the walls. Whose shoes are sticking to the melting pavement. Even the land is different. The hills have moved. Deserts were made. They planted trees so that their roots would claim more land. The earth was made to grow over itself in a way of self-consumption. Put to service. You can forget with convenience. The emptiness is a fury. A trail of sand. There were people who were lost here too, but they had more time to be lost. Arrival was decimation, is beginning. Today, we hear new knowledge about continuity. Knowledge can be acquired, it was said. It didn’t come with any inherent bias. So to continue with the production-excavation-discovery-forensics of truth-ontologies. These were the once-graves. But here, as in other places, we learned how to make belief in the evidence that wasn’t seen. We had to cover the mounds that rose despite themselves.
The divine is something occurring at the same time as something else. They made cities of blue. Suddenly, every city was here. The whole world became here. We celebrated arrival, which was salvation, we were told. We came here for opportunity. The soil fell over our eyes. The stepping fall on earth comes without resonance. Impact is soundless for a long distance. To wait for the tumultuous fall. I saw the city burning and ran among them, the borrowers, who crept along the limestone walls looking for a place, like in the dreams that were always looking for places, and there was not enough. It was not enough to be looking. A new land would be built where there was none. This was the beginning of an obsession. The touch of metal to skin, brace, scrape thinly. So long as the blood still drops. The glass rose from the sea. The waters were warm and turbulent, and the shards scraped through. Many have fallen for her. No-one is born a warrior, it requires training and moving ceremonies. Now you can be full of courage. You believe in her, within her, become mad. One day you see that she is not she but another one, and that her face had replaced itself. You couldn’t remember her lines. There were only the new lines. Where did this new distance come from?
The blue glass city dream was the dream born in the misery of a collective misidentification. An act of repopulation. The transference of beaches and palm trees and safe sandbox playgrounds. The construction of a new tongue to erase a memory. The exodus takes names like it takes land, through an association of birthright, it’s a matter of kilometres. The new trade is of inclusively queering defense brigades, exporting fine-tuned torture techniques to the American police. A rainbow flag hangs on the inside of a tank. Boys trained on Bataille and clean uniforms. Irreconcilable. The IDF, like the American Armed Forces recruitment trailer parked in the middle of Times Square, is situated at the centre of the Israeli mentality. Defense Forces. To never start a war. To always be on the defense. Cannot afford to lose a single war. At first, it is necessary to create conditions of desperation. To establish an existential crisis of a homeland as cellular memory, as inherited, as something to claim. A constant state of crisis – necessitate the problem, necessitate fear. If you see something say something. Watch your step. Watch your bag. Look out.
What of the daughters of the New Galilee whose tears justify the blood of the daughters of Gaza? May the victims’ memory be a blessing. Their breath persists, lingers still over the trade of people who come and go in season, withering in investments and devices, having abandoned the passion of reason, disintegrating out of a body that overflows with question. Presented with life itself, what does the debt of birth nourish? When this forest was sewn, was it the work of fruits or of people, of noble flowers and laurels, or the calloused grip of the state? We were told to watch the forest move over the hills. At the foot of the desert was a mountain. At the foot of the mountain was a village. The village was levelled, the people strewn like so many seeds, castaways in their own lands looking for air, the divination of an ancient light, an apparition that spread wide. The world outside is blisteringly loud, and this particular silence, the particular knowledge of which is a great inconvenience, is a consumption over an earth made wretched, divided by the measures of suffering. The clamour of the silences forced in the name of statehood, by which names become exalted for the construction of roads that lead to the cadavers of civilization. How many colours the land has taken on as time makes its conflicts indisputable—was it really so easy to be deceived into an illusion of absence, to impart the vulgarity of poverty on the spirit in the name of fear, in favour of the meekness of words from a distance? Who denies the apathy offered by time begins again. And so was the division between a tree and a tree…
Come here, my soul. Let me bring you closer.
כל עוד שם עלי דרכים
As long as on the barren highways
שער יכת שאיה,
The humbled city gates mark,
The dewdrops are red טל אדום over the graves of children. Policy is to think of the children. Small wasplings climb over one another, out of the paper nest. The paper is old and has many holes so that the wind passes through. There are dewdrops drying on the backs of the wasplings and they are black. Their nettling stings extrude sharp metal.
כי עוד ירחמנו אל זועם;
That a wrathful God may still have mercy on us.
Have you ever played a game, of spot the sniper? The value and dignity of human life in the face of all obstacles. Birds became metal. Cutting the air. Thin lines of foam that dissipate. In descent overhead. To the soil, small parts that unmake things. Dew still rises on the ruins. For a moment, the edge to the ground disappears.
כי עוד ירחמנו אל זועם;
That a wrathful God may still have mercy on us.
“Some guy in Minneapolis doesn’t give a shit.”
A final capitulation. Dependency is a venomous milk. But now that we have each other, where do we go? Fragrance of caixa preta corpo – black box body and the persistence of heavy chemicals adapting corporeal syntax. Louveture’s cataclysm of all colours. Our consciousness is darkness. Black is all light. These are the fields, the wide brimming fields that have forgotten margins. The logic of this war that is born internally is a quiet weapon that strikes through the bones of people. Whose people? People must belong. They belong to their bones, or to the fields, that are property. People have rejected words for fields. But they are hard things. They are sharp cuts to the skin, bombs lifting out of every pore. And the lamp-man circles around the sun lighting the way.
Excerpted from A Flight Of Objects That Seemed Real by Lital Khaikin. Image: The Purple Billow, Georges Lacombe, 1896-97
