The occasion of this post is to concretize words, to embody them in a March against the unjust rape laws of Lebanon.

While many marvel at the title of this blog, Non Serviam, and it’s subtitle, The Ominous Sanctity; this post will offer the most direct explanation yet.

Non Serviam [I Will Not Serve] is a shout out against any organizing structure which oppresses in the name of an invented tradition. This ominous sanctity is a threat to the age-old constructions which govern our society. Among these are the biopolitical laws which encroach upon our bodies, our sex, our mind, and our being. Non Serviam is a slogan expressing the necessity of being free; the necessity of being informed; and the necessity of always re-evaluating idea, values, and morals.

It is with such thoughts in mind that I endorse and join the march against Lebanon’s backwards rape laws on January 14 at 12pm from Ministry of Interior in Sanayeh to Parliament in Downtown. 

When the biopolitical structure of patriarchy infringes upon the basic rights of any member of society, the private becomes the political and the political becomes the private. We should no longer consider rape as done by one individual upon another. Rape is a highly regulated practice, seminal to the bulwark of patriarchy. Rape emerges as an institutional practice by which women are kept in fear of men. If the laws which govern acts of rape are lenient and ineffective, then these same laws regulate the way the populace thinks. No person is safe under such laws.

To women, that they may live lives of dignity, equality, respect, and safety.

Below is Nasawiya’s demo,  Here is the link to the Facebook event with all the demands of the demo.

We, the women who reside in Lebanon, excuse ourselves from playing the decorative role that has been imposed on us.

We take to the streets today to say that we are aware and knowledgeable about the methodical war that state and society have waged on our bodies and our safety through their political parties and leaders.

From now on, we will not accept empty promises that are heaped upon us every time we call for our rights.

We will not give in to patience. We will not bite our wounds and postpone the battles of today to tomorrow.

Our voices will be louder than the bickering between your parties and your sporadic yet connected wars.

We call on Parliament to:

1. Pass the draft law for Protection from Domestic Violence as it has been written and with no delay.

2. Intensify punitive measures against rapists and those who attempt rape, amending the respective law.

3. Treat verbal harassment as physical harassment, especially in the work place, making it a crime subject to judicial penalties.

4. Deal with complaints related to sexual violence with rigor and consistency. We call on the Interior Ministry and the Municipalities to also apply those measures. The three bodies should work to make our streets and neighborhoods safe, especially during the night-time, by ensuring proper street-lighting, and permitting us to carry tools of self-defense, like taser guns and pepper spray.

We extend this invitation to all women and girls who have been exposed to rape or attempted rape or harassment in all its forms, to all so-called ‘housewives‘ that have been subjected to beating and verbal abuse, to all those employees, teachers, activists, workers and union leaders who experience sexual abuse time and time again, and to all those who feel the injustice and lack of equality.
We call on you to join us on the streets on the 14th of January 2012.
We begin the march at 12:00 PM from the Interior Ministry near the Sanayeh Garden, and move toward Parliament at Nejmeh Square.

We women no longer possess anything but solidarity with one another. We must stand shoulder to shoulder and unite. What lies before us is the last of our battles: the defense of our rights, bodies and security.

We have nothing to lose but our chains. The time is now.

Hegel has never made it simple to face anything; but  he’s made death simpler.

It has been seven years since I immersed myself in the sea. And now, for lack of a suitable animal, I kill time beneath the storm, swimming.

Mammoth waves wash over me before hitting the shore sucking in and displacing smack needles. “A year’s end”; a phrase marks the self-reflexiveness of a text as it consciously probes its temporal mortal immortal letters. Hang me up as you hung up poems on the black stone, immortalize me with the spoken violence of lacerating lips.

It has been seven years since I swam. And tonight amidst the storm, I couldn’t have wished for a better moment to reunite with the Mediterranean.

From a distance, the vast shoreline appears like a spectrum of edifying monuments, a lit up architectonic system organizing all the movement under and within it. But even from a distance, a vile hue strikes—club lightning or an explosion—cracking the sky and shattering the architectural structures which give this country in front of me an illusion of cohesion.

I feel like a stranger in my boyfriend’s parent’s bedroom, sneaking through a crack in their closet door, coolly observing their secrets, trying to avoid their eyes. I’m not ready for the guilt. They watch a warm coloured Lebanese film, shot like a long video clip.

Religious allusion is spewed like mercury as the film starts, and constantly throughout, the mercurial allusion jumps around, leaps, resisting fixity and stasis, until the final scenes, in which the allusion is aborted. A group of women trod the arid earth clad in black; they are mourning and do so with charming, choreographed movement, almost distancing the sorrow from the event through an aesthetic appeal, and confirming Nietzsche, “As aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us.”

The theatre-of-a-room is silent. My boyfriend sneaks a hand across my crotch and I almost let out a sigh ending my dissatisfaction, but then someone dies.

I longed to swim tonight because it had been becoming more and more apparent to me that I am immanently part of a world, and what is a better way of celebration than to be like water among water.

I am a monkey eating a banana while looking you in the face and laughing.

The film is set in a village trying to be isolated from the world. If isolation eclipses the socio-historical and political “real” of the war, it nevertheless allows for a greater representation of the social (and gendered) dynamics of the society depicted. On the forefront of this village-society is the league of women; the village is comprised of wives/mothers, men, and teenage boys. Ergo, the women’s alliance is an imperative if they are to successfully guard against the dangers of the war.

Strict academic writing bores me. I have no patience for convoluted arguments. Why race away from the abyss? From vertigo? The vertiginous abyss is the finish line.

I think back on the dry ambivalence which tints me. This ambivalence made me tacitly answer antithetically to the same question, without synthesis.

Something nibbles at my feet. I’m being swayed by these moments under heavy rain and the joy of being stung and eaten.

My boyfriend has his hands inside my pants; he is watching the film with his parents through the crack in the closet. At the same time, I’m looking at the city, at the village, at the whole country. It doesn’t matter. There is no beauty in the dissonance of the metropolis or in the arid rural landscape. And to our surprise, chaos and disorder are furthered by Maldoror making “a pact with prostitution in order to sow disorder among families”. Even the world’s mythical oldest profession, however, fails to disorient. His parents laugh but then gasp in horror.

The ambivalence of love between sexuality and neurotic behaviour; between the desire for terror and the desire to defile beauty. What speechless wonderment washes away the ambivalence as I release myself in the closeted sea, amongst dirty clothes and waste, my boyfriend rubbing himself on my back, passion serving as a prelude to physical union; or who knows, physical fusion serving as a prelude to passion, the fervour of love, the violence of a storm, of lips moving apart and closing in, tightening in on each other to prevent the slaughtering laughter which would expose us—pause—silence—contemplation—and so what if we’re exposed? Beware of the (s)laughter.

Mahmoud Darwish starts a poem by saying, “I want from love only the beginning.” I never could understand his masochistic desire. As I stepped in the water after taking my clothes off, rekindling my love for the sea, the yellow road lights reflected on my legs, the hairs like those of a cat in alerting fright. Although the road to love is a path to blissful happiness, before I can enjoy happiness, I walk towards the water, my toes touching its chilled surface, and I suffer from its frigid agitation.

My boyfriend’s mother vocalizes sounds of disapproval at the film’s abrupt change from comedy to tragedy. The world’s oldest profession fails to distract, and the terror of War pays a nonchalant visit in the form of a bullet in the back of a mother’s son. She decides to hide her son’s death like an abortion long in the making. The mother becomes the reciprocal of the Virgin Mary. The aborted body is invisibly put in a room, protected from the world, as if in a womb. The room, however, is empty, cloistered from the world; the windows are shut, the door is locked: The room is an empty womb, figuring abortion. And I reach climax.

The sky becomes calm. I swim now below a huge, pure sky and I laugh, water enters my mouth and chokes me with saline reality. Something stings me next to the knee and I feel frail. We stumble out of the wooden doors of the closet, welcomed by shock and gaping dry mouths. My boyfriend’s parents are so startled by my (s)laughter, they disregard my gaiety and look straight at their poor helpless son, his hand covered with my semen.

And is it worth an abortion? To come out of the closet? To swim back to the shore? Nothing is more religious than abortion: the wastage of ultimate excess in a formless formation. Freedom from form, from the prison-tomb of architectonic systems, from the police function of sperm management, from the cosmo-illogical shoddy bunk-hole of binary patriarchy.

The metropolis will crumble if we feel a gist of freedom. It is no wonder that parks are few: “The workers must stay away from these too clean groves…they could easily become seriously angry and question why they earn so little when these rascals steal so much”. The words of Emilé Zola ring true.

I am not in the tradition of giving out answers, not even to the questions that I ask. But there is a force which propels me to be without ambivalence, compels me to utter a scant revelation: given the space of a shoreline and the sea, I see nothing stopping us from aborting on behalf of mothers the progenies of phallic architectonic monuments. The crack can be seen from a distance, widened through the (s)laughter of beautiful, violent Medusa.

“Learn to swim…” [Ænema.Tool]

“Every animal is in the world like water in water.” [Georges Bataille]

“And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written…Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great –that is for ‘great men’; and it’s ‘silly’. Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty –so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time….” [Hélène Cixous.The Laugh of the Medusa]

“Humanism (capitalist patriarchy) is the same thing as our imprisonment. Trapped in the maze, treading the same weary round. Round and round in the garbage. Round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round (God is a scratched record), even when we think we are progressing, knowing more. Round and round, missing the sacred, until it drives you completely into your mind. But at least we die. Personalism is a trap because to believe that some of what one was holding onto will be taken care of by another being is irreligion. It is not our devotion that matters, but surrender. There is no end to the loss that lies down river. If only we can give up. ‘Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown’ [V 119].” [Nick Land]

[P.S. A subtle interpretation of Where Do We Go Now is passed on here. My own.But you can share it.]

“What’s wrong Zoos?” his friend Naji, who was watching the road that lay clad in the rubble of war, asked him, startled by his friend’s sudden movement.

“Mashi,” Youssef shrugged it off. “For how long have the bombs been going off?”

“Ever since you fell asleep. Weird how you just woke up, one of them must have been closer. Failed to notice that though.”

“I didn’t wake up from a bomb explosion. Just a nightmare. I was reading a book, and then someone had told me that I’d stop at a certain sentence. I saw the words in front of me so clearly, and I reached that sentence, and I couldn’t go on anymore no matter how much I tried.”

“What was the sentence?”

“I read, ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy’, and then the sentence was, ‘By a name I know not how to tell thee who I am.’ Romeo and Juliette.”

Naji’s laughter invited Youssef’s own. A cacophony of laughter, bombs and inaudible death cries merged in the night as bullets decorated the sky like satellites symbolizing progress and the conquering of an ever-widening space. But the bullets travelled down again like postcards from space, crumbling the progress of latitude with an Icarian meltdown.

“Sleep, you need the energy for tomorrow.”

The black sun rose from behind Mount Lebanon, drenching the populace with a virulent passion to waste itself: a passion for mutual annihilation. The cats, dogs and vermin hid beneath scattered broken rocks, destroyed cars and in the sewage system which had flooded on the streets.

“Yalla, wake up, yalla,” Naji pushed and shoved Youssef, “You should move. There’s no time.”

Youssef woke up again with a headache. The sun’s rays tore through his eye lids, into his crania and hit his frontal lobe with searing energy.

“Is everything ready?” Youssef sighed.

“Yes. Of course. Here you go,” Naji gave Youssef car keys and a package. “Stay off the main roads, but you’ll have to pass through two checkpoints.” He gave him two IDs, one with the name Joseph Harb on it, and the other with the name Youssef Harb. “Don’t worry, though. Everything should be fine.”

“Yeah I’ll try not to worry. Any news from the other side?” His teeth felt rough and raw.

“None. Which is why you need to go and come back quickly.”

Youssef wore a brown shirt, tainted by the diesel oil fuel stains of two days earlier.

“May God be with you,” Naji said.

Youssef looked cynically at his friend as he entered the worn out yellow Beatle, “which God would that be?” The engine started and he rode with Lady Luck. Naji saw him drive off, taking a right turn and escaping his view.

The engine rotated in a frenzy rumbling. Youssef drove cautiously and wearily. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly; his right foot trembled as it stepped on the gas and brakes pedals. He passed by bullet-riddled buildings knowing that in them and beneath them, people were hiding, smothered by the ruins of the city as orphans mothered by strangers’ hands, promising imminent respite, but in front of him loomed the first checkpoint. Men in civilian clothing stood by the road; Kalashnikovs strapped like instruments, bullet-belts ornamented their waist. He slowed down, and easily stopped, facing a gunman outside the window on his left, two on his right, and another in front of him.

“ID”, the gunman on his left voiced his illocution.

Youssef reached to one of the IDs to his right, beneath the handbrake and gave it to him. The metal of the Kalashnikov clanked against the bullet-belt. The gunman scanned the ID, intermittently looking back at Youssef. The gunmen to his right raked the inside of the Beatle with their eyes.

“What are you going there to do?” One of the gunmen to his right asked.

“I’m visiting the family. There’s a birthday.”

He was given the ID back and the gunman in front of him moved out of the way.

He stepped on the gas and continued as if the name he revealed had cast him into exile, but even worse, his name lasted for a duration, a duration of great anxiety, making the name cling to his being until the next checkpoint. Beyond borders, people die without names, but they also die because of their name, because they cannot separate themselves from their name. The war was in part a war of names, and not of people themselves. It was a war of a symbolic order, dictating laws of what should be and what cannot be.

He saw the next checkpoint and changed the ID beneath the handbrake. The same arrangement of gunmen stood in front of him, dressed slightly differently.

Inside borders, names were learned by heart and written in blood. Names were a constant separation from the others as well as from selves.

He eased down again at the border, the gunmen on his left saw his face and cringed.

“Get out,” he ordered. His voice was stern.

Two gunmen opened the side door of the yellow Beatle and started rummaging through it. Their hands went beneath and through seats. They opened the trunk, grabbed everything they could grip and threw it on the soiled ground, examining what lay on the ground as they laughed like drunken madmen.

“Where are you going?” one of the gunmen asked Youssef.

Youssef became flustered, and with a shivering voiced uttered “birthday.”

“Your ID. Give it to me.” The gunman ordered his left hang gripping his Kalashnikov, a finger on the trigger.

“Beneath the handbrake,” Youssef’s eyes remained static on the ground.

“Why are you looking on the ground? Do you like the ground? Do you want to kiss the ground? Yalla, kiss it. Do it.” The gunman pressed Youssef’s head with the sole of his boot.

It wasn’t long before the two gunmen searching the Beatle found the package, a white box.

“What’s this? Are you trying to kill us? Kill our brothers you scum?” shouted one of them.

“No no, it’s a birthday cake.” Youssef pleaded.

“Get on the ground.” They shouted together, gathering around him.

Youssef’s body went down where his eyes were gazing. He felt bodies search him, hands entering his pockets, fingers pressing on his skin. A hand grasped his wallet, after which his body was left on the ground, as if already a corpse.

“What’s this?” A gunman found his other ID. “Joseph. Youssef. Which one is it?” He looked at each of the IDs with a cringe. A kick caused Youssef to groan in pain.

Youssef knew it was too late. He was now displaced and no amount of words could save him. His existence was wavering between two names, discrediting him from any truth. Credence was lost.

The dance of names was an inevitable rendezvous with death. The two IDs were thrown on the ground like a palimpsest from a stolen library, perhaps surviving, perhaps forever lost; but nonetheless, with one name, one script too many. Youssef’s body was dragged towards the unknown from where snails emerge with cryptic and enigmatic shells, sliding on the dew of rain as moving mausoleums of bodies hidden and beings undone.

“REGARDE, toi qui est si fier et avare, mon corps était jadis beau et maintenant il n’est que nourriture pour les vers.” (“See, you who are so proud and avaricious, my body was once beautiful, but now is food for worms.”) [The Triptych of the Braque Family, Rogier van der Weyden.]

“I thought of death, which I imagined to be similar to that walk without an object (but the walk, in death, takes this path without reason—‘forever’)” [Georges Bataille Oeuvres Completes, III 286].

He stumbled out of the elevator, the proximity-sensitive light lit after he opened the door. The bright light disturbed him. His keys shook as he took them out of his pocket, his tight jeans becoming tighter as spilt champagne made it shrivel with sparkling wetness. The key shackled through the keyhole, almost majestically, at the first attempt. He opened the door and managed to close it without the slightest noise, only the ordinary rub of metal upon metal, and the latch bolt resting in place.

A bright blue light came from the television screen in the living room, some sounds of inarticulate dialogue greeted him, and unusually, his father’s snoring fled him. He approached the living room and saw his father resting upright on the velvet red couch wearing his boxers and his undershirt. He made his way to the kitchen and drank water which seemed to cleanse his throat after a long night of mixed cocktails and sweet shots. He had to drink the glass of water in sporadic sips, his breath failing him every other second.

He sighed at the site of a bed topped with a mountain of things, clothes, and books and marvelled at the prospect of not having to live throughout work-filled days when people aimed to live with no will to hate nor to love nor to laugh, but to understand the random crash of particles around them. He always yearned for the sacred nature of night when people in dark alleys are faceless and nameless, having no past and no future, their outer covering no longer serving as a pathetic sheath hiding death in macabre irony, but simply to contain a flux of energy; a naked dance of death welcoming the process of a being-corpse.

He undressed, and looking like a miniature image of his father, he went to wake him up and lead him to bed. He stepped heavily on his ankle, so heavily every step made a low beat on the ground. The TV light was still flickering as he walked to the living room; a recycled game show was being broadcasted, with commercials interrupting every six or eight minutes. His father was still in the same position, sitting upright on a velvet red couch, his neck tilted towards the left, loose; a bag of raisins placed between his palm and his thigh. His old man’s leg, white as new A4 paper and unhairy; his old man’s chest shown from his undershirt, bumpy like ridges of sand on the seafloor.

“Baba,” he said feeling self-conscious about smelling of an array of alcohol; smelling of intoxication and, to his father, of utter and outright blasphemy. He had passed by three pubs before settling on a fourth, alcoholic indulgence reaching its apogee. And on that ride which connected bodies with a halo of joy, the will of chance took him to high plenitudes of ecstasy and unearthly plateaus, a taste of real pleasure which overrides the quotidian delights of everyday life, reaching a state where no beyond is asked for, where no beyond is imagined, becoming part of the torrent of nature, happily losing conscious self and expending uselessly like sultans, kings and caliphs. In shameless and painful expenditure, he hopped from pub to pub, and on the fourth, his eyes steadied on a person he knew who flaunted thin black dreadlocks, dark Mediterranean skin; eyes weighed heavy by dark circles, mascara and burgundy eyeliner, collar and cheek bones protruding in waifish manner from gaunt skin. Braidy was her given name and she brought him back to ground zero after an intoxicated flight to the ether.

“Baba,” he said again, poking him on his right shoulder, but his father did not move, the truth was emerging like a snail out of its shell. He had approached Braidy holding two coronas, a lemon slice trapped in each long neck.

“Here you go,” he had told her. She took the bottle from him in memory of their history and a return to the past.

“Regaghdé,” she’d said in a phony, sarcastic French accent. He smiled and, vaguely, drunkenly remembered a night in bed with Braidy, sex and her habit of having an intellectual conversation after it.

“Baba,” his tone became alert, as if it was going to wake his father up. He touched his chin, but his neck just limped to the other direction like the head of a broken stick-figure. He backed up, frightened, grappled by a moment of forced ignorance and denial; the grapes on the table fell on the ground, joined by the raisins on his father’s thigh. In that forced attempt to disconnect from the stone figure of his father in front of him, he closed his eyes and could only remembered himself and Braidy in bed together, her telling him about the irony of regaghdé.

“Regaghdé, it’s a really cool French word, a word which is a metaphor of our mortal coil. There’s a lesson in that word, regaghdé,” she stressed the ending of the word, the slanted de, as if it were an imperative order. “See, in French, if we break regarder,” she broke off the sarcasm, “we are forced to break it into re-garder, which gives us the prefix re­ and the base word garder, meaning keep. But, garder may also mean to guard, to watch over, a warning. So we have re,” she pauses, raising her eyebrows as if she’d been walking along a treasure path and is about to finally expose a treasure, “garder: the prefix re is followed by the base word garde which means guard, as if it’s a warning. And herein lies the paradox which regarder exposes in language. The prefix re which temporally signals to the past in its indication of anteriority, while also insinuating to a future in the sense of a warning. The past and the future in one word, just as we are trying to wrestle our past with our future in every present moment. Amazing isn’t it.”

And the treasure she revealed, as all treasures are, was hidden in a manifest hostile environment, violent to the whimsical currents which steer one’s life with random precision. He had marvelled at her intricate loosening of words and logic just as he cerebrated in front of his father’s corpse. He uttered the same words he had told her that night, “Yes, it is awful. But what about death? Death puts an end to the paradox, don’t you think?”

For a few seconds, he contemplated his faceless and nameless father having no future, his outer covering no longer serving as a pathetic sheath hiding death in macabre irony; a naked death welcoming the event of a being a corpse, and he waited for the worms.

“Applied to death, regarder would not contain a paradox, for looking at a dead person, a body in a coffin, is never exactly looking at something that exists in the present, but…at a present in the past.” [Francois-Xavier Gleyzon. Shakespeare’s Spiral. P,14]

Ideas inspired by the Shakespeare’s Spiral by Francois-Xavier Gleyzon.

Things that unfold, overflow, in excess. Promethean cigarettes dumped in a water bottle, filters breaking apart, loosening. Tobacco-ink staining water brown. Ink in water. The summit of chaos. Menstrual pulsations and the vibrations of female hysteria. Flood of a river produces civilizations and conspiracy theorists and their discontents. Looted scooters in impoverished cities delivering priceless gifts. Tall buildings like phallic shrines honouring the Omniphallus explode over oil reserves coating the sea, black algae. Desert and humidity, sweat from breathing pores. Humility. War; the signature expenditure of humanity. Sodomy and lust, the French revolution. Erasure of perspectives, labyrinths of consciousness piled over each other in parchment and paper. History. Michael Jackson, beyond death. Water among water through water. The universe, the rays of the blind black sun, the blindness of non-knowledge; the summit of annihilation. Plato’s nemesis; the philosopher king loses his way, happily and the republic expends itself in an orgy of sodomy, death, destruction and sacrifice, Indian fire-dancing around the horns of Satan. The vanishing insignificance of moral tales. Empty prayers at dusk and dawn. Vomit and laughter on academic books and the hypo-crises of common man’s Freudianism. Diamonds in a dream sublimated as wasteful faeces; the eye under the solar anus of the Sun.

“Man is a self-conscious Nothing.” Julius Bahnsen. [1847]

To tell you everything. Everything that is on my mind. The most burdensome demand placed on my head. Did the Gods ever tell Atlas to describe what he sees from above? Can you not be satisfied with my keeping the ceiling from crumbling?

Or do you want it to crumble because your self-consciousness is not good enough?

You became frantic when you saw the nicotine stains on my fingers; and the keyboard was clicking weirdly. And my teeth were yellow. And my toes stubbed. How about the time when I started bleeding, from my gum, from my nose. My eyes were red and I was nonchalantly still standing up, indifferent to the senseless suffering of my system.

And you asked me to tell you everything. The question is a persecution.

You haven’t seen me for two years, let me remind you of that little valuable fact.

“What do you believe in?” You asked me. And I answered with impassioned clarity that I believe in nothing.

“How can you believe in nothing?”

You pressed the hot iron on my chest and forced me to give you an answer.

“My big toe,” I answered, immediately wishing I had said, “my brown, corn-filled faeces.”

Does it matter?

I know for a fact that I am not the only one who believes this, but the masses do not matter.

You took me as being insincere, cynical at best, and you looked at me, disgustingly sneering, facial muscles suddenly existing.

I held the cigarette, my first cigarette of the day—you had woken me up, remember? You had come to my house with sage sandwiches, expecting a jaunty good morning, and then you found me still in bed, not yet willing to relent to a rude awakening.

I held the first cigarette of the day, ignoring the sage sandwiches dripping oil and stinking of ideal morning routines. The first cigarette is bound to be the best. You had decided to make some tea, still believing that I cared for some. I hadn’t even brushed my teeth.

The spark will become a flame and angels will weep. A small flame trickling towards me by the power of my own suction and each drag decreasing my life-span by minutes, or maybe hours. Who knows? But even angels do not know, all real knowledge is obscure.

The future is an empty pickle jar. I’m pickled to mere energy by the holy sucking wind that finds its source in my slowly eroding lungs.

You poured tea for me and you; you started talking about what you’re planning to do after summer.

“And you?” you asked.

“Nothing in particular. Same old same old,” You took a bite from one of the sandwiches and chewed on it, hatefully. My honesty was not to your liking. You remained silent, as if you were waiting for me to give you a reason to stay.

“Don’t you have a goal?” your retort comes as a declaration of victory, but too soon, still-born.

I sucked on the fiery straw in my hand. The muscles of Atlas loosened and rebellion beat me down and overcame me with its creeping velvet. The astounding fire travelled through capillaries and arteries, opening up and transforming my cells into something other.

You saw the fire and the smoke change me; my eyes went dreamy again; it was then when you noticed the nicotine stains, my yellow teeth and my stubbed big toe.

“What’s happening to you?” You asked me.

“Selma ya Salama,” I joked around.

Atlas changed to Prometheus, and Prometheus unbound, who stole and swallowed fire, sat in front of you spiking his still cup of tea with whisky.

“Don’t you think you shouldn’t drink as much as you do?” Who can blame you for asking such a question? I once stood before you like a piece of art, a canvas in a brightly lit exhibition. My white skin was impeccable; my white teeth were radiant; and my clothes talked of money.

But you still view and read me through the impoverished lens of a spectral spectator; feeling obliged with judgement. Do you ever go to an art exhibition for pleasure.

I want you to stumble upon the shared misery that I represent. I want you to take off my winter coat and lick the scabs with your rough feline tongue. I want you to feel my liver being corroded by drug abuse. I want you to crumble your foundations upon the explosion of the sun from within me. I want you to stamp on my big toe as if its all-too-human form disturbs you. I believe in my big toe like you believe in your Nazarene; and I need it mutilated and crucified.

My body is all that I have; and I’m rich because of it. Luxury demands that I defile it through the brilliance of explosive loss.

“I began reading a book the other day which started with a sentence of grave magnitude.” I told you, your eyes sparkled at this chance for a conversation. “Its words grew like tall cypress trees from the page, only to fall on me, tying me still to the ground.” I got up and picked up a book lying on the floor at the other end of the room. I flipped through it while you munched ferociously on your sandwich, with the easiness of a lover.  I read, For ages they had been without heads. Headless they lived, and headless they died. How long they had thus flourished none of them knew. Then something began to change.

“Ages without a head and then a change. How could we not see some kind of motive in that? And then how could we not see a kind of motive in nature as a whole; in us?” my facial muscles tighten as if smelling something vile. “How could we not make ourselves conspiracy theorists and say ‘there is a goal to all of that; it’s supernatural. We just have to believe.’”  I closed the book and looked at you with murderous eyes, smirking, without a tinge of mercy or decorum. My words disturbed you more. Your left eye twitched You got up and headed for the door.

I lit another cigarette and followed you to the door, and screamed at your lovely wavy hair and your slender back, “Fuck off you stupid cunt! Go and give me no head!”

Go and give me no head, no reason. I believe in my big toe which stomps on the ground like the feet of any other mammal; dwelling in the dust and mud of our base existence.

She tantalizes me all through the night, knowing quite well that I always keep her within sight. She leaps from one lap to the next, randomly and chaotically, without restriction, but still within my sight. I can see her minimal movement and I can sense it spurring cumbersome emotions which fall down upon me like a torrent of solid hail which drains me.

Soon, every pair of male eyeballs is following her with luscious desire to conquer. By trying to tantalize me and seduce me, she has managed to attract the eyes of the whole tavern. When no more cold laps are found, she stands beside the wall, acting out an uncaring character out of a feminist novel, feigning indifference to the hungry swollen eyes that stare at her, inventing an interest in the muted television show, wishing she had a penis, and putting a straight face while trying with Sisyphean effort to avoid blushing cheeks.

Her hands are tucked inside the small pocket shafts on either hip. Her arms try to stay as wide as possible from her chest so as not to cram her tangerine breasts together. But all to no avail. Her tight dress does the job perfectly; her tangerines looking tender as they try to fight the cold, but they stiffen, as if asking the swollen eyeballs for a bit of warmth to ripen, promising juicy pulp.

A pair of eyeballs moves towards her, and she does not relent; she cannot. I will not budge, not yet; I won’t let myself become just another participant in the orgy of eyeballs that engulf her. The prostitute is surrounded by pairs of eyeballs, red and quivering. Their tentacles touch her slightly. Her hands are forced to close upon her body, squeezing her stiff tangerines. No more indifference and no more acting. She looks straight at me and pleads with her fretful eyes. She distinguishes me and makes me her messiah. In kind, I draw the line and pull her towards me with an all-forgiving magnetism. We get out of the tavern and I lead the way.

“My name is Mélanie,” she says in a French accent, “I’m half French, half Algerian,” her lips barely parting as she talks.

We walk through a door on which a sign reads this is not an exit.

****

Five months later, we’re living together. I walk inside the apartment, the sign still hanging on its door. I put the groceries I’ve bought on the kitchen table and go to the living room. She is sitting on the couch, legs crossed, wearing loose pants and a tight beige shirt. She looks at me indifferently, still carrying her disappointment from the previous night, and then continues to read whatever it is she’s reading.

“Did you have a good day?” I ask, but her head does not move; her eyes stay fixated on the page of an odd looking pink coloured magazine. A horrible feeling of guilt drenches me with a heaviness akin to the certainty of eminent death.

“Oh, C’mon!” I desperately say, making her disappointment seem trivial. She does not relent. She never does.

I go back to the kitchen and open the new bottle of White Horse Whisky I just bought. I light a cigarette and go back to the living room holding my cup. She smells the smoke of the burning cigarette and tries to incinerate it as a whole with her fiery eyes.

“I thought we weren’t allowed to smoke indoors,” she stingily asks.

“I can break the rules,” I reply childishly knowing full well that the conversation can head in only one direction now: towards catastrophe.

She goes back to reading and I head out to the balcony, holding the tumbler glass with the smoky whisky in one hand and the burning cigarette with the other. Rain drizzles, but the air is fresh and cold, and it soothes me. I look at her from the outside and like a voyeur I gaze at her stillness, hoping desperately for a twitch, a sudden movement for my eye to capture. A couple of minutes later, I throw the incandescent cigarette butt out to the street, and take the last sip of what’s left in the tumbler glass. My eyes are still fixated on her dark brown skin, its colour unaffected by the fluorescence of the living room lights. A chilly breeze forces me to go inside.

This little piece of home spreads in front of me like an impoverished stage. A couch, a table, a TV and a weathered carpet in the middle of the living room. Rooms are demarcated by closed curtains; not even the toilet has a door. A barrier of cloth divides the house. Books are assembled over each other; no bookshelves to contain them. Between the stained white walls, our movement echoes like a broken vinyl record, stinking of a past decomposing in the silence of a womb undoing itself.

I remember the first time we sat on the couch together, almost five months ago. We had carried it together from her old apartment to mine, each of us carrying it from one end. After serious laborious lifting, we finally managed to get it inside the apartment, placing it in the then-vacant living room.

“Welcome home,” I had told her as I gave her a plastic cup with Vodka in it. We drank and slept side by side on the couch, squeezing our bodies together, like prophets (or magicians) creating room where there is none.

She sits on the couch now like a sovereign ruler sitting on her throne, as if I’m not allowed to come near it, her own private space. Like a stray cat, I wonder around the house, a lump forming in my throat like a rapidly growing cancer promising to suffocate me very soon.

Finally, she gets off the couch and goes to the kitchen. I’m in the bedroom inside and can hear her going through the plastic bags. I hear the garbage bin being open, and moments later, the lid being closed again, with force. I wait for her to leave the kitchen like a soldier waiting for the enemy to pass. I can see the couch from the room, and as I look at it to see if she has returned, she suddenly appears, looking at me, then going to the living room, sitting on the couch again, in the same position, reading the pink magazine.

I head to the kitchen and open the lid of the green garbage bin. I see the White Horse Whisky bottle and the maxi pads thrown out. I lit another cigarette to ease my frustration and prepare myself for a confrontation. I inhale and blow smoke as I tread my way slowly towards the living room. I hear the television beep. Intermittent sounds signal changing channels. When I reach the living room, I notice a Woody Allen movie on TV and I see her on her couch, but it’s no longer a formidable domain. I sit down and blow smoke in every direction possible.

“My love life is terrible. The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty,” a character in the movie says, but neither of us laugh.

“Can you stop?” she says, obviously annoyed.

“Why did you throw the whisky and the maxi pads in the garbage?” I ask, my voice as steady as it can be.

“I don’t need sources of temptation in the house,” she says nonsensically.

“How is the maxi pad a source of temptation?” I ask rhetorically, already feeling victorious.

“Why did you bring maxi pads?” she asks, as if violated.

“Because,” I’m not sure what to say, “you’ll need them?”

“No.” Her voice trembles.

“No?” I’m wondering if she’s taking the piss.

“No. I won’t need them,” she says, her lower lip shaking, her chin wrinkling, and her eyebrows coming together, curving up at the inside.

This can only mean one thing. The cancer in my throat reaches full intensity and my ability to speak is robbed. We face each other like two cowboys meeting at high noon, who have forgotten that they should engage in a shootout. Lightning flashes and glows both our faces, forcing me to blink. She looks away, trying not to cry. I just sit there trying to swallow what she just didn’t tell me. It burns through my brain like caustic acid. I put off the cigarette and come closer to her. I rub her rough elbows because I know she likes it when I do.

“This doesn’t have to be a tragedy,” I say boldly, knowing that I might be saying something she doesn’t want to hear at all.

“If you want a happy ending, you should go see a Hollywood movie.” A character on TV responds to the silence and the thunder finally comes, and with it, more rain.

****

This is the first time we go out since Mélanie’s inside job. A married couple have invited us to their new home. Mélanie, wanting to feel alive and revived, wears an off-white tent dress with an above-the-knee hemline. She covers herself with a loose, wine-coloured, thin cardigan. Her high-heels tap an autistic symphony as we walk outside of the apartment.

We get to our friends’ house located in the better part of town; central, as they say. I smoke a cigarette in the lobby before going up, savouring every tinge of nicotine before going up to the smoke-free zone.

“Don’t smoke in the elevator,” Mélanie says.

“We’re not in the elevator,” I state, matter-of-factly.

I finish my cigarette, and then we get in the elevator, travelling fifteen stories upwards. The elevator has a mosaic of a flower pot decorating its floor. A computerized feminine voice monotonously says “going up,” half a minute later, it speaks again, “Fifteenth floor.” We find our friend Ramzi waiting for us at the door.

“Hello! My favourite people” a warm adulatory welcome is coupled with a clownish smile. “Come in, Come in. Christina will be here in a minute. Make yourself comfortable.”

Mélanie and I enter the house, amazed by the grandiose decor and high-art on the wall. Mélanie has a gaping mouth as we move under carved ceilings and crystal chandeliers, through mahogany doors and atop hardwood and marble floors. We finally manage to find our way to the living room where a squared glass table is bordered by couches on three of its four sides. Two of the couches are black leather, the third is red velvet. Mélanie and I sit on one of the black leather couches and Ramzi sits in front of us on the red velvet couch. White light glitters above us from yet another hung, but vastly ornamented chandelier. As soon as we sit, we hear a scream coming from somewhere in the house, obviously Christina’s voice. Ramzi looks alarmed and so are we. The three of us stand up, worried. We here sporadic tapping and then Christina shows up, hopping her way into the living room, a big smile on her face. She barely notices us as she jumps onto Ramzi, a pregnancy test in her hand.

“It’s positive,” she overwhelmingly professes to her husband and to us.

I look at Mélanie standing next to me, her hand on her stomach, trying hard to feign a smile, the glamour of the house suddenly looking unglamorous and unhomely. Mélanie looks at me, her eyes distressed. “Take me home,” her eyes tell me.

A mere hour later, we excuse ourselves and head back home. I light two cigarettes and give one to Mélanie who snatches it out of my hand. We’re silent on the way back, the only sound is that of the knocking rain on the car’s roof. We reach the building, enveloped in the misty darkness of the city. Inside the elevator, Mélanie sucks on a cigarette, blowing smoke. She looks warm and sweet; tight and deep, reminiscent of that night in the tavern.

“You look…”, I try to speak, but she interrupts me with a waving hand. She looks at me, and her eyes…This is not an exit, we read, as we enter the apartment…

Unbearable, like fingernails on a black board
You flaunt yourself in front of me and tell me,
“Check out my books if you want.”
I check you out like the exhibit you are:
A Modigliani painting lacking eyes to see.

You point towards your bookshelf on which
a collection of dust abides with your uncaring motherhood.
I look through them: novels about follies and pieces and children,
wicked laughter exudes like puss from your callous chest.
Your breaths of ice chill the room; you dim the lights.

I touch Mr. Vertigo and slide my fingers on the spine of Melancholy Whores.
You become excited and tremble in bed, moved by an unseen force
like a leaf shivering to the breeze of autumn.
The Orange Girl. Fiery strands of hair don’t escape my sight,
You undress; your impeccable skin, new, like mountaintop snow.

I remain next to the bookshelf as you relish in your parade.
Tender Buttons and The Picture of Dorian Gray;
Legs move sideways and open up like transgressive fiction:
American Psycho next to The Story of the Eye and
A small tissue separates them, The Waste Land.

You stand up, a column built out of layers of white marble
Topples sideways into the darkness and leaks pongy
coffee-concentrated piss along the way.
Farewell Waltz. Should I follow? The Moral Animal.
You laugh again, but this time absently, yet louder; it echoes in your womb.

I’m alone now, a child in a womb, and conquered by
a fear of being what these books are: dead.
Like an anal child uttering nonsense: in no inno se n inn no se ne inno sen se innosense.
Innocence. The Art of Keeping Cool and where are you to be found?
Only puss and piss comes out of you.

You come back crippled and weak, your columns
broken and dripping blood and you fall on me as if I’m your careless mason.
Frail between my arms like a boiled carrot, you look towards Hamra Noir and
caress me as you reach out to it like a frog’s tongue.
It falls and images capture us as they leap like holograms from the book.

You hold on tighter and tighter to make it right, but
coins blind your eyes and I untangle you from my body. Oedipus the King
A scene from an ancient tragedy which we’ve memorized and shall perform.
I place you on your wooden bed, naked as a lamb, and hope that
the spirit of lightness makes us laugh at tragic plays and tragic wakes.

The next morning we wake up with saline eyes and sticky bodies
wishing we had just read Bukowski.

“Why can’t we not be sober?
I just want to start this over.
Why can’t we drink forever.
I just want to start things over.” Sober

The ability to survive lies in the potential of creating a future in a lie.

I am old. I work seven days a week until the late hours of vampiric nights. I am Atlas but with sunken muscles and a blanket over my bones that hangs loosely, acid bubbles burning holes through it, tired tears seeping from it. The sky falls, long shadows dawning on sober faces and desperate gazes.

My wife Evelyn, back when I first married her, used to greet me in bed after a long day’s work. She’d tell me “my name means rebirth, so here, tonight, I kill you, and you get born again in the morning.” And that promised legend became a reality and a curse.

My wife Evelyn didn’t know that during the day I didn’t daydream about her.

My wife Evelyn never knew that I never dreamed about her, that when her hand touched me, it wasn’t her caress that I yearned for. But I was faithful, and for all that time, I held the sky above me and above her.

But such selfless blindness does not deserve a story.

My wife Evelyn, she sees a boy on the streets, through the windowpane, breaking a girl’s heart and blames the whole male sex for a heartbroken world. A boy becomes the boy.

“Leave him alone, he’s just trying to give himself meaning,” I tell her.

“Give meaning? By hurting that poor girls like her?” her eyes never leave the girl who’s stone-still on the sidewalk. As if that girl needs stares from a weathered woman with creepy eyes, glaring through a windowpane with inevitable disappointment; that old eagle-eye glare every generation gets from its elders, disappointment, awe, dismay. “If he has any sense of decency, he’ll come back to her and hold her hand, whisper in her ear, walk her home, anything. It’s not right to leave a girl like that on the street. If he has any dignity, any love, he’ll come back, just like you came back to me.” Her words, like shovels desecrating a grave in which the flesh of a corpse is yet to decompose.

“We all feed on tragedy,” I mumble, collapsing all the vowels on each other.

“Boys these days, they’re all corrupt,” the girl on the street is still stupefied under Evelyn’s gaze. “What is she to do now?”

“At least it’s not raining,” I cynically remark.

“I would’ve made you go invite her in if she had been crying under the rain.”

“You don’t even know if she’s been crying. Anyway, how would it seem if an old grumpy-looking, pathetically wrinkled old man had approached a young girl like her and invited her to his house? People don’t appreciate the same gestures anymore. Whatever I did twenty-seven years ago, I certainly would not have done today if I were that boy and you were this girl.”

“What is that supposed to mean? Do you regret coming back to me?”

“I think after twenty-seven years, it’s irrelevant whether or not I regret it. And, remember, you came back for me.” Wrong words make the wrong bells toll; wrong words make us travel in time to that evening when she came back to me.

She had come at the right moment, but she never knew it. She thought I had always been waiting for her to come back, a true heartbroken soul. She could have survived if she had not found me, and I knew it. She left me to prove something, and she failed.

“Look,” I say, moving towards the window pane, “she is not you, and will never be you. The boy is not me and will never be me. These are different circumstances and different times. If you want to know what I think, I’ll tell you. I’ll say it straight up, because it sure is more realistic then your nostalgic projection.”

Somehow she found me walking back home; street-lights were not lit and the few cars that passed by rendered the darkness around us visible, like a momentary flash of lightning that only exacerbates the intensity of night. We both saw familiar contours. She hugged me like a child reaching out to its parent, wanting to be picked up, supported. That embrace showed a crack, a crevice. And ever since, I’ve been finding a future in this lack.

I put my hand on her shoulder and speak calmly; there’s no need for conviction in my voice. Somehow she’ll know it’s true. Somehow she’ll know that she’s lived it. “This boy here has probably left this girl for another. Another girl he may not love as he loves this one in front of us. But the other girl, he needs her. The other girl, she needs him. And that works. But we’re just observers, trying to be omniscient of what is only seen, not even heard. The distance between us and the crying girl is an immense gap. We just know our stories. I just know mine. If I keep myself in that gap between her and me, I might fade like a sigh, nostalgic, barely moving, insignificant and inconclusive.”

She looks at me barely satisfied with my possibly-heartrending words. And I hug her even though I’m not sure she wants this. I feel the lack and know that because of it, me and her, we’re more than just the sum of our parts.

I grab Evelyn’s hand and we walk together to bed. I am old, but I am sober and it will be a good night.

So good to see you once again
I thought that you were hiding from me.
And you thought that I had run away.
Chasing a trail of smoke and reason. Third eye

Rania rushes to and fro behind the bar, tending to people’s needs. A calm relaxed expression dominates her face, as if she’s put on a mask. She robotically prepares drinks and cocktails, her arms flowing like ribbons, catching bottles and glasses, her ears receiving orders, her eyes looking at the spirits in front of her, her memory reminding her of which bottle is where behind her, of what to put in what cocktail, the ratios, the ice, the shaking, the blending.

Rania is one of the people who leave reality outside the doors of this catacomb pub. Her expressionless face atop a mechanical body is an asset the manager always valued. “You’re all business and no fuck-ups,” he’d tell her at the end of the nightshift. She’d count her tips, a large sum; put it in her wallet and leave, wearing whatever she shed upon entering the bilateral fortress of (in)differentiation.

A hand suspends itself in mid-air at the end of the bar, and Rania walks towards it.

“A JD, no ice,” the man says, looking her straight in the eye. She returns the gaze with an almost callous coldness.

Someone screams “Blue Bayou” and as she pours the Jack Daniels, she starts going over the preparation procedure in her head.

Blue Bayou; a vodka cocktail. Ice. Blended. Grapefruit. Pineapple. Essential blue curacao, don’t forget the blue curacao.

The man drinking his JD watches her as she washes the blender, and starts pouring vodka, grapefruit, pineapple and blue curacao in it. She adds a full cup of ice to it and lets it blend. She waits by the blender and notices him staring at her. Yet she remains saintly calm.

“You do it with such ease. Your mouth never moves. Your eyes never flicker. You don’t stop to think.” The man says, sipping on his Jack Daniels between every sentence.

She pours the Blue Bayou mix into a margarita glass and serves it, not paying attention to the man’s words.

“Beatrice, I’ll call you,” the man speaks again when she arrives near him, “in honour of all those before me who have had this inspirational vision.”

And this time she listens as she pours vodka over the coffee liquor in the short glass. She pays attention to his words overdubbing the Toufic Farroukh song playing through the overhead speakers.

“You’re poisonous like Rappicini’s Daughter, a tricked trickster like the niece of Leonato, and I do nothing but engage in merry wars and distant gazes with you. And in this catacomb where romance and gothic tales intertwine, I move my lips in poetic allusions, and you receive them quietly, as it should be, and as you present yourself. For you are a poem, and a poem should only be read. If I ask you to speak, you become distraught, distracted. Explaining you makes you dull. Here, you are a poem, for every muse is a poem in itself. And your poet bids you adieu, with these words: I held the splendour of your eyes secretly within me, blissful Beatrice.”

He leaves a twenty dollar bill on the bar and leaves. She takes, still not showing any interest to anyone around her. Mistakes are simple, she thinks.

The end of the shift dawns, and the manager says goodbye to Rania with a smile on his face. The little candles have all melted into formless wax. She opens the door, the etched mark given no attention. A strange invisible mist settles over her as she breathes in the outside air and fumes of the city. The name Beatrice sticks in her mind now like the prick of a rose’s thorn.

But the prick of a rose gives off a faint smile, for as she picks it, the valiant dust of poets fills her nostrils with a special pollen that makes her smile. With a smile she sees her poet standing beside the traffic pole on the opposite side of the street. She walks towards him, and when she’s close enough he says, “We’re outside now. I am no longer a poet, and you are no longer a poem. Let me tend to you now. Speak to me.”