Five Years

'And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
And I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there
Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you're beautiful,...'

---Ziggy.

Hope. Change. We can do it. Unless you're Palestinian. Get thee back to the ghetto. Pathetic.

~~~

A certain social fabric somehow exists.
---Bagehot.

Through all these years of mass murder, expulsions, evil, greediness, hunger, pettiness, hatred, human beings have somehow pulled through. Something humane and decent has survived. We still talk of us, still dream of the stars, and feel at ease with the late sun on our backs, imagining the world is okay, that it makes some kind of sense, the way it is, just right now.

What endures, what remains? Not the music, or even the old buildings (since one can overlook them, forget them). Character, a 'chance predominance'...your race, your face. It's hard to say for some, but the Palestinians are a people.  There, said it! Wasn't so hard after all. After all these years, you looked and you found Faith under the left nipple. It was there all the time. It was that simple, that obvious, like the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus that no-one talks to.

Was talking with R (no, not you, R) and he said: there's a student who gets right down to the core, the essence of what's being said and puts to one side all the trappings, the paraphernalia, the side-shows, the trailers and enticements. The icy truth under a cold heaven. And yet, and yet, how we wanted the warmth of ambiguity, the human unknowingness that resists explanation. Maybe if two bodies met, they'd be okay with all the darkness between them.