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I experience war as a spreading absence, an encroaching void. What was once reliable and effective is now sometimes unimaginable – it simply doesn’t come to mind. The voids – the gaps – are filled with desperate, disturbing, fruitless ruminations – efforts at least not to freeze in the face of what is approaching. The attempt to think breaks off, gets interrupted when it encounters what is no longer there, in the most unexpected places. And yet I continue, frantically trying to get back on my feet, like a May beetle on the pavement, in an effort to continue a unique, invaluable, coherent, unrepeatable path.
Sometimes I sit in front of a map of unfolding military operations and look at my first home there, separated from me by the front lines – here and now. And at the same time, it is still right inside me: in the language, in culinary and religious preferences. According to my internal chronograph, it was just yesterday – fully alive, filled with sounds and smells, breathing with a distinct atmosphere. And yet “here and now” already marks 10 years gone. And then I feel this creeping absence, like a film negative from which one could once develop and witness, revive frame by frame and fill with meaning – by discussing it with a close friend, or presenting it at conferences or in local museums – but now it’s stained with circular chemical burns. Opportunities are lost; only emptiness remains. On the negative, you can no longer distinguish That from This. You want to resist. To testify. To make meaning, to call things by their names. But sometimes you just sit, and all you can do is note that you’ve gone still.
Sometimes I sit in front of a client. Some fled from war. Some became it. Some had long ago become it and are only now recognizing that and finally synchronizing with the world. None of this is new – the scale of silence is. The repression of terror in the here and now, when anxiety fills the session, when rockets are flying. Or not flying. There are no guarantee