Rest in Peace, Matthew Perry

And other things

I have just arrived at the coffee shop I used to spend mornings at before I moved out of this neighborhood. The coffee shop is a wine bar now. Tonight, a Sunday, it’s quiet. The windows are translucent with condensation and I’m not sure I’ll recognize my friend through them before she opens the door. Walking here the lights in every dimple of the streets flickered on and off with the movement of passing cars, my own motion and changing perspective. A small, wide tree had huge leaves, some green and some yellow, all very similar shades of those two tones, which seemed weird but was maybe the dimness, the sky the shallow blue-grey of city light against cloud cover.

On my phone everyone has something to share. On Instagram I learn that a friend from high school is playing a show in Spain and the tiny restaurant I love near the A train has been open seven years today. A screenshot of the ceasefiretoday.com homepage appears on several stories. A lot of people seem to have had an emotional attachment to Matthew Perry of FRIENDS. Rest in peace. I never watched the show but when I was like ten I thought when I grew up I would positively sparkle with humor and intrigue, and somehow FRIENDS, or being a person who watched FRIENDS, was a major factor in this vision. The videos of the Palestinian children talking about what they’d do if Gaza were free make me cry. An old bachelor star is having movie night with his three blonde children and one blonde wife. Clare is walking past a house with ghosts in the windows. There are protests. There are trees.

There are many ways in which social media is bad for your health, and seeing the wrong opinions of people I know or don’t know at all makes me lose my mind at least once a day, but throughout the escalating crisis in Palestine over the last several weeks, I’ve actually found Instagram, in particular, to be an apt representation of the clumsy humanity we are struggling to locate or demand or argue over or celebrate. My favorite is seeing one person post several different stories (who even pays attention to anything else anymore) that range in content from Halloween costumes to infographics about how to contact Congress to demand a ceasefire.

Initially I think these abrupt transitions, from the war happening not here to the comparative frivolity of friends and cocktails and seasons happening here, seemed too sharp, inappropriate. But of course there is always an atrocity being committed on innocent people by the unrelenting hand of empire. To act as though our lives have stopped because one in particular has increased in horror and media attention, is to disregard the wide-ranging violences the US sponsors and inspires across the world.

And also there is the fact that there are always many things happening at once. How one thing does not disappear another. How a new thing does not replace the previous thing. How much repeats, is ongoing. I’ve said this all before.

In a conversation between Kate Briggs and Tracy K. Smith, Briggs describes translation as not the art of replacement—a layering on top of an original text which eventually conceals it—but rather a “setting alongside.” “It’s something that exists and still permanently exists, and here is something new that exists.”

To set alongside is to resist the violence of erasure. To believe, rather, in simultaneity and multiplicity.

I’ve been interested lately in the ways in which art and literature have been employed in this moment—the poems posted online, the film recommendations I’ve seen floating around, the novels celebrated or denied celebrating. We seek art to process grief; to understand an inconceivable, unforgiveable world; to witness the humanness of aestheticism and candor.

I was thinking about the ways in which art reflects the urgency of right now, not only directly (art for, by, or about Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle) but also peripherally. There is of course great value in seeking out art that reckons explicitly with the history and reality of a political moment, which is a moment in the life of the human beings affected by it. And also I’ve found that even the work that seems far removed from Israel and Palestine (a book, for example, written by a translator about a single day in the life of a mother and her newborn) becomes about the conflict tangentially and broadens my understanding, or my capacity for it.

I believe in a free Palestine. I believe we are witnessing an apartheid, sponsored by our tax dollars. I believe it is necessary and vital to express solidarity with the people of Gaza, who have been living under Israeli occupation for years, who keep their windows open to prevent the glass from shattering by the force of near or distant bombs. I believe, as Arielle Angel writes in Jewish Currents, that “the violence of apartheid and colonialism begets more violence.” That we “cannot cross until we carry each other … This time it’s all of us or none” (Aurora Levins Morales). I do not pretend to be an expert in geopolitics, and I have so much to learn, about this particular atrocity and others, but I don’t believe it is as complicated as western media insists it is. The Palestinian Health Ministry has identified over 7,000 people killed by Israeli bombardment, a number over which President Joe Biden recently expressed skepticism.

Now in the wine bar someone is talking about a fancy party and someone is talking about feeling manipulated. There is a woman on the other side of the room who looks, in the orangey light, like an actress on a show I used to watch about teenage pregnancy. I’ve locked myself out of the apartment and am not sure when Dylan will be home from work. I could be out all night. By necessity. My stomach hurts.

This are just ideas, alongsidedness just a phrase, a theory. A way to understand the images that appear and appear, which we control with our thumbs, we who are safe and free and trivial, we in our intact states, our unbombed homes. Isn’t this always the problem with writing.

When Clare shows up, we discuss the difference between theory and praxis. How difficult it is, actually, to express the solidarity, and kindness, one intends hypothetically, in actual conversation, to an actual other person. And how essential. “You don’t exempt yourself from suffering by pledging not to create more. Rather, you take intentional responsibility for the suffering that is already there, because there’s plenty of it,” writes Charlotte Shane.

We discuss the values of intellectualism versus experience, of objectivity versus subjectivity, and of history versus urgency in times of crisis. We discuss what it means to be free and autonomous when we are endlessly connected, in varying relations with other people, and we wonder if it is possible to love as a woman without orienting yourself to the needs of an other, and we consider that this too—this clinging to independence, this fear of self-effacement—is a response to patriarchy. We discuss a story Clare heard about a man with a tattoo of Rosie the Riveter on one pec and the planes hitting the Twin Towers on the other.

I am relieved when Dylan texts me saying that he was cut early and is headed home. I didn’t really want to stay out all night; I have to be at the restaurant in the morning to start making bread.

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Further reading: “No Human Being Can Exist” by Saree Makdisi in N+1!!