The Place I Know
Growing up where I did, and how I did, teaches one to remain on the silent side. It teaches you to be cautious, and skeptic. To say certain things in your head a thousand times before you put them on paper, or utter them out loud. It also turns your life into a long, and painful, cycle of passive-aggressiveness. But that’s a story for another day.
I was never as outspoken and self-confident as my parents were, or wanted me to be. It might’ve been that the chronic skepticism I grew up in had found its way back to me and turned the process of formulating an opinion, one that I would be engrossed in so far as to defend it in whatever means possible, into a recursive and never ending one.
***
One of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my life was to deconstruct my own complicated relationship with the place I was born in. It has been the dominating theme for most of my postings, and most of my thoughts in the last two years. I think it’s very important to run through the intricate details of that relationship, to sort out all the rational elements from those that are irrational. It’s important to go down different roads and imagine different realities, for both of you. It’s important to contextualize that relationship and to study it from a point far up in the sky in order to see how it reflects on your other relationships, with people or with ideas, and most importantly how it reflects on your bigger relationship with life.
***
I love that place, its people were the faces I grew used to, its language taught me how to laugh, its smells were the first to evoke my feelings of nostalgia, its sea and the mountains in the distance were my first playgrounds. This love is completely disconnected from the realities of that place, and the feeling, I suppose, would’ve been just as overwhelming had I been born in any other corner of the Earth.
Love is a perfectly irrational feeling, one that evokes and manipulates all other feelings for its own satisfaction. It is inherently irrational, and utterly personal and all I can, and want to, do is to simply embrace it as it is.
The reality, however, is always different. The place I know is a disfigured plot of land with people who are crippled by all the ailments associated with poverty, greed and fear. A place that borrows images from here and there for it has no identity of itself. The place I know defines itself by monuments left of generations long gone, for it has no monuments of its own. The place I know cries out tolerance, freedom and dignity while it has none. The place I know has more prisoners than scholars and more presidents, and monarchs than statesmen. The place I know is the embodiment of hypocrisy and the embodiment of the “scandal”. The place I know is a large and long process of self-deception. The place I know is not proud, but pompous, not angry, but hateful. It reeks of irrelevance and stinks of vanity. A bleak spot, in a bleak world in an impressive universe.
***
Flowers still bloom in a sea of decadent matter, and their fragrance will distract you from all other smells when you bend down to look at them. They still feed on the mould, their pollens still fly and other flowers still bloom. But who’s to say that the scent of a rose is more eternal than a septic wound, and who’s to say that the word is really stronger than the hangman’s hands.
***
Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’,
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’,
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’,
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
Bob Dylan
October 30th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Like you, I have nothing to add…
Great piece of writing that’s all…
October 30th, 2009 at 6:56 am
I have been waiting eagerly for your next thought provoking post.
I especially liked “Love is a perfectly irrational feeling, one that evokes and manipulates all other feelings for its own satisfaction. It is inherently irrational, and utterly personal…”
October 31st, 2009 at 4:50 am
Yazan, Your post was the equivalent to a hard blow to my chest; I ouldn’t breath. The truth hurts and you have managed to deliver as naked a truth about the place we know as anyone has managed to do.