Good evening, beloved -
The particularly awful thing about writing to you at a moment like this is that there is virtually nothing meaningful to say about what has been unfolding in Israel and Gaza over the past few weeks, and that void of meaning renders all other acts of written expression oddly false and low and dishonest.
What I mean is that no words are capable of adequately expressing the horror, the grief or the rage one rightly feels at the things that have been done to human beings — to fragile, vulnerable human bodies, and to the families and communities they belong to — by the would-be genocidaires on either side of this awful conflict. And if our words fail in the face of atrocity, if it feels obscene somehow to try and reduce loss to a train of symbols on a screen, it feels still worse to write about anything else. I can't very well sit here and write to you about the books I'm reading and the films I've seen lately, can I?
I guess this is what Adorno meant about the barbarism of “writing poetry after Auschwitz.” The question to ask, though, is why we don't feel this patent incommensurability of horror with the language we have available to convey it with every day of our lives. Why is it that we accord some people, and not others, the paltry dignity of a public confession that all our words are inadequate to the circumstances of their end?
Even now I see that I'm speaking in generalities. Let me, at least, stop doing that. I grieve for each and all of those slaughtered by Hamas, whatever my feelings about the justice of their presence on the land. I grieve for the Palestinian people now suffering the unthinkable violence of Israel's revenge, most of whom you may be sure Hamas has never spoken for. I grieve for a public discourse so degraded that the simple statement it is always wrong for innocent people to be slaughtered in their homes is evidently further than a great many of us are willing to go. I grieve for our manifest inability, in the West, to grieve Palestinian people, or in any other way accord them the most basic dignity as human beings. I grieve for the dehumanizing the Palestinians are subjected to by my own people, who of all peoples should know where that sort of thing inevitably leads. I grieve for the intellectual dishonesty of everyone who conflates support for the Palestinian cause with antisemitism. And as a Jew, I cannot help but grieve the delight too many take in crying for Israel's end, because I know it's not really Zionism or the Nakba or the ongoing fact of Israeli apartheid that offend them so much as the fact that Jews continue to exist.
Those are my words. They're not, however, my feelings — not really. They're the shadows of my feelings, cast against the plane of language. There's so much more I feel and cannot say, don't know how to say, don't know if it can be said at all. It will have to do.
I wonder, though, how you feel. I wonder how you're doing, and whether you've lost anyone, or been touched by this terrible, still-unfolding nightmare in some other way. You'll let me know, won't you? Until words feel less like lies, and ashes on the lips, you have, as ever,
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 125 of Wednesday, 1 November 2023, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊