Shape of a day
I time travelled in the last 24 hours. Yesterday a friend took me for a walk on the streets of Beirut. I always find walking in a city a small way to try and get to know its pace, its energy, what it makes time for, and where some of its lines might be. The first night I arrived, the moon was full, and I have never seen it quite as large, as yellow, and as clear as that night. It rose over the hills framing the horizon, dotted with lights from buildings far away like fairy lights. So even though my body weighed weary, a walk was needed. Moonshine on skin. I found small cafes with men drinking coffee in groups, a shisha coal motorbike parked nearby, dark shop fronts, brightly lit petrol stations, young men in full military uniform carrying M16s, red and white steel barricades on the road, a trendy shopping mall, broken buildings, crosses from churches outlined with neon lights, grafitti-ed walls, a tv crew shooting a man in a suit in front of a makeshift backdrop that was leaning ungraciously against a greek-inspired statue who somehow still managed to summon dignity, big restaurants with lots of young people drinking coffee and beer and smoking shishas..
I tried to do a scent walk, having learnt this recently from Z. Recording a scent walk for her. And the city was a porous wall of exhaust fumes and dust, like a thin curtain. Which contained unexpected clear bright pockets of heady jasmine and another flower that I do not know the name of. And then the sharp knife of urea, or decaying rubbish - I'm not sure which, they are still having a garbage crisis (although, their streets where I was at seemed a lot cleaner than a normal day in Uptown, which makes me think about states of perpetual crisis where crisis becomes the backdrop of the ordinary - like military personnel walking about, fully armed in the streets). And then the smell of leaves, lightening the air, and more lingering than the perfume of flowers.
Last night's walk unpeeled another layer of this city for me. Which is rhythm. We walked along a street named after a tree that lined its pavements. Pavements are a rare thing in Beyrouth (spelled according to road signs). Cars hang out of them. Because there are no car parks. Because everything is privatised. From water and electricity (where you pay twice to get a subpar service, which results in a perpetual hum of water tanks delivering private water to apartments and of massive generators squashed between buildings with entrails of cables pulled into homes, spewing carcinogenics), all the way to beach fronts. On the walk, she was decoding street graffiti to me. One read: “The barbed wires you put around the pigeon rocks are a shame to the city. The barbed wires are a betrayal of Lebanon.” Street graffiti and art is everywhere in this city. And they are beautiful. They crawl across abandoned flats like amoebas. Line walls and wooden boards as murals conversing next to each other, on top of each other. They pay homage to singers, poets, famous and unknown. Sometimes they are painted on, sometimes sprayed on, sometimes carefully printed and pasted on. Sometimes they are framed by arabic calligraphy reminding me of Yati's artwork from a decade ago. Sometimes they are commissioned. Sometimes they are pleasure. Sometimes they are rebellion.
So we walked across this street, and all the shops were closed. Shuttered down. There were two to three bars still holding up. But it was a long street that did not feel loved by night life. It was quiet, and dark. About 5 years ago, it was one of the most busy street in Lebanon at night. Elbow to elbow with bars and people edging for space with cars on the sidewalks. She tells me that the people in Beirut gets easily bored. There is an impatience for something new. And now the something new is a street away, and that street is the present past. The compulsion for reinvention. And capitalism doing what it does best to feed this on, with banks linked to politicians and the 3%. Something else I found out, while another friend drives like a gangster across the suddenly more uniformed lines of ambient yellow lights in the downtown area - a company called Solidere bought up most of the area during or just after the civil war, only to kick everyone out and replace centuries-old buildings with contemporary hulks that are aesthetically pretty interesting, but also, ethically nauseating (all bar one hotel that still stands grimly with a massive banner on its face saying “Stop Solidere”, seemingly in perpetuity).
So there is something of an impatience in the city. Old buildings that was up one week ago, is now almost entirely rubble. Multi-million dollar apartments wearing the latest thing in architecture (open spaces, queer angles, light, air, balconies, walls of plants) stare haughtily down on a row of shops (where only 3 are open), and wait for their disappearance. I saw on one wall barricading the clean from the messy, four weather-worn wooden birdhouses built by a carpenter across the street. It was tender. And also unpeeled another layer for me, which is persistence. And stubborn persistence blooms everywhere like wildflowers.
She points out shops to me that has been there forever. And my neck ached from looking up and trying to decipher the pattern in the buildings. They are so random. Every shape is perfect, but different. They face each other, away from each other, give sidelong looks at each other. Iron wrought balconies, gently rounded balconies, handsome hard angled balconies, postmodern puzzle-pieced balconies, 70s-styled balconies, stone-carved plaster-cast balconies - all in one breath. Both friends at different times recounted stories that happened in each significant building - this is where the restaurant owner shot the Israeli soldier with his sniper (and is now a Nike store), this is my favourite old house since I was a child (and I hope will be here next week), this used to be where the Meem office was (and did not have any bars in the area then), these series of steps leading upwards used to lead people to olive trees where the hill was an expansive olive grove (and now holds apartments and shophouses crowded together).
Time is a continuous thread of memory and recognition and dream, uninterrupted. So I wondered about the city's people. I wondered about my friend and colleague. And his impatience, that is also persistence.
We walked past another mansion, whose owners could no longer even afford to keep the lights on and had to rent out most of its rooms for events, but kept its garden with old trees. I wondered how our world would be organised differently if we valued property not by its postcode or materials, but by the age of its trees. How much gentler we would be to the land we tread on. And how the art of care would supersede the craft of making (and destroying to make space for more making). How much more yielding our borders would be. And how differently we would engage with time. The time it takes to grow a tree is a lifetime. Several lifetimes.
I wrote too much. And I haven't even started on today. But I am already tired.
Fragments of sentences will have to do for now.
--
It takes a century to form an inch.
Around me are time pockets calcified.
They look like trees.
They look like forests.
They are landscapes and mountains - and remind me of the drive up with Hassan.
Hassan who brakes gently every time I pull out my phone to snap a picture from the car.
And his face breaks into a sun.
They are flowers formed into stone from water.
And rise in silence.
I am amongst at least eleven thousand years.
I search for pairs.
One needs another couple of hundred years.
One finally meets.
There is an eternal drip of water.
(and I am reminded of a story seed, and another kitchen)
I close my ears because people are so noisy.
I resist making human forms with my eyes.
Trace their shape in the air and it feels like a dance.
What they call mushrooms look like jellyfish.
Abrupt horizontal straight lines, like a fringe
and a complex filigree, tentacled - dripping.
Shoulder blades, wings, bones.
Like cake batter when it's just right,
Thick, and I am surprised
- they always seemed so pointed and fragile in my mind.
They are alive. And life follows water.
And how it is right that humans only live so short, because -
I imagine a bomb lightly exploding this landscape,
or people huddled from the burning fireflies outside,
the careless urgency of human life.
The stone platform winding across this cavern -
centuries snapped off.
The ceiling is so high and the depths so low and folded that I am unable to hold
the shape of this space in my mind. In my body.
It is a relief to weep. Water to water.
I stop to smell their skin. But the smell of my own salt obscures.
And the puffs of perfume from others invade me suddenly as they walk past.
I close my mind. And try again.
The ghost of chalk.
I see time swaying, knotting, small bulbs, thin edges of waves, shelves that holds layers of cities from a fantastic imagination.
They feel soft and hard and cold on the tips of my fingers.
Everywhere, there are ripples.
The water reminds me of water from another space - cold, smooth - skin?
and my hands were hungry for more time.
But the ride is short, and this space is not for passing through.
Not for spotting the couple, the two camels or the leaning tower of Pisa.
I hesitated to wash my hands,
but I just pee-ed, and I must.
The water from the tap is like steel.
The first cable car for people was made in Switzerland in 1912.
Before it was to send goods to castles perched
on mystery.
We rise in a metal bubble, numbered,
painted,
crossed the carpark (where is Hassan?),
the busy highway,
I can see the tops of trees,
We rise between apartments
and I see the mundane artefacts of someone's life -
chairs on the balcony, tv, vase, photos on the shelf, laundry.
Trees - the Lebanon flag has the cedar tree, its wealth.
There were a few at the top. In the Church built like a wave or the bones of a fish -
paragliders cut the sky in pairs -
The sea edged the shore in the distance.
I climb up to My Lady Peace, and in two circles I see the mosque.
The church is closed.
The souvenir shop is open.
I buy three small vials of holy water, inscribed in Arabic.
I'm surprised I can read the words Allah in this script.
Hassan wakes me by saying,
“Roman columns.”
The city is 9000 years old.
And it looks like a UNESCO heritage site.
Shops, cafes, tasteful music -
I am surrounded by hungry cats.
We wandered into an exhibition -
“Memory of Time”
There is an excavation -
850 metres above sea level, in the hills
They split rocks open and found fish -
turtles, prawns, an octopus,
prehistoric great great great grandparents of the stingray,
sharks,
small fish
- 100 million years old.
In mid-swim.
One swallowed another fish.
How did it happen?
And the sun set against the sea.
Men stand on rocks and swing their lines into the water,
It is a perfect circle of bright yellow, turning orange,
dipping into the horizon,
Dropping flames against deep blue.
It is one day.
Now knotted into words.
--
R tells me about the significance of space in the urgency of memory. I imagine Beirut as a space that holds time and space in layers - on top of each other, jostling each other. Becoming bigger and longer. Like the stalactites and stalagmites in Jeita. Or the layers of rock in Jbeil that holds the frozen story of fish. And how it will take time, and maybe some measure of love, to get a sense of its textures. And maybe this is all spaces. Except some become mountains because of the imagined borders we construct as we walk. And mountains snatch breath.
--
Travelling across timezones in airplanes is a game of time. Chasing the sun. Chasing the moon. The screen paints a mountainous border of light and dark. I'm still aching at the same pace as snatches of breath.
--
A good read on the history of Lebanon
I tried to do a scent walk, having learnt this recently from Z. Recording a scent walk for her. And the city was a porous wall of exhaust fumes and dust, like a thin curtain. Which contained unexpected clear bright pockets of heady jasmine and another flower that I do not know the name of. And then the sharp knife of urea, or decaying rubbish - I'm not sure which, they are still having a garbage crisis (although, their streets where I was at seemed a lot cleaner than a normal day in Uptown, which makes me think about states of perpetual crisis where crisis becomes the backdrop of the ordinary - like military personnel walking about, fully armed in the streets). And then the smell of leaves, lightening the air, and more lingering than the perfume of flowers.
Last night's walk unpeeled another layer of this city for me. Which is rhythm. We walked along a street named after a tree that lined its pavements. Pavements are a rare thing in Beyrouth (spelled according to road signs). Cars hang out of them. Because there are no car parks. Because everything is privatised. From water and electricity (where you pay twice to get a subpar service, which results in a perpetual hum of water tanks delivering private water to apartments and of massive generators squashed between buildings with entrails of cables pulled into homes, spewing carcinogenics), all the way to beach fronts. On the walk, she was decoding street graffiti to me. One read: “The barbed wires you put around the pigeon rocks are a shame to the city. The barbed wires are a betrayal of Lebanon.” Street graffiti and art is everywhere in this city. And they are beautiful. They crawl across abandoned flats like amoebas. Line walls and wooden boards as murals conversing next to each other, on top of each other. They pay homage to singers, poets, famous and unknown. Sometimes they are painted on, sometimes sprayed on, sometimes carefully printed and pasted on. Sometimes they are framed by arabic calligraphy reminding me of Yati's artwork from a decade ago. Sometimes they are commissioned. Sometimes they are pleasure. Sometimes they are rebellion.
So we walked across this street, and all the shops were closed. Shuttered down. There were two to three bars still holding up. But it was a long street that did not feel loved by night life. It was quiet, and dark. About 5 years ago, it was one of the most busy street in Lebanon at night. Elbow to elbow with bars and people edging for space with cars on the sidewalks. She tells me that the people in Beirut gets easily bored. There is an impatience for something new. And now the something new is a street away, and that street is the present past. The compulsion for reinvention. And capitalism doing what it does best to feed this on, with banks linked to politicians and the 3%. Something else I found out, while another friend drives like a gangster across the suddenly more uniformed lines of ambient yellow lights in the downtown area - a company called Solidere bought up most of the area during or just after the civil war, only to kick everyone out and replace centuries-old buildings with contemporary hulks that are aesthetically pretty interesting, but also, ethically nauseating (all bar one hotel that still stands grimly with a massive banner on its face saying “Stop Solidere”, seemingly in perpetuity).
So there is something of an impatience in the city. Old buildings that was up one week ago, is now almost entirely rubble. Multi-million dollar apartments wearing the latest thing in architecture (open spaces, queer angles, light, air, balconies, walls of plants) stare haughtily down on a row of shops (where only 3 are open), and wait for their disappearance. I saw on one wall barricading the clean from the messy, four weather-worn wooden birdhouses built by a carpenter across the street. It was tender. And also unpeeled another layer for me, which is persistence. And stubborn persistence blooms everywhere like wildflowers.
She points out shops to me that has been there forever. And my neck ached from looking up and trying to decipher the pattern in the buildings. They are so random. Every shape is perfect, but different. They face each other, away from each other, give sidelong looks at each other. Iron wrought balconies, gently rounded balconies, handsome hard angled balconies, postmodern puzzle-pieced balconies, 70s-styled balconies, stone-carved plaster-cast balconies - all in one breath. Both friends at different times recounted stories that happened in each significant building - this is where the restaurant owner shot the Israeli soldier with his sniper (and is now a Nike store), this is my favourite old house since I was a child (and I hope will be here next week), this used to be where the Meem office was (and did not have any bars in the area then), these series of steps leading upwards used to lead people to olive trees where the hill was an expansive olive grove (and now holds apartments and shophouses crowded together).
Time is a continuous thread of memory and recognition and dream, uninterrupted. So I wondered about the city's people. I wondered about my friend and colleague. And his impatience, that is also persistence.
We walked past another mansion, whose owners could no longer even afford to keep the lights on and had to rent out most of its rooms for events, but kept its garden with old trees. I wondered how our world would be organised differently if we valued property not by its postcode or materials, but by the age of its trees. How much gentler we would be to the land we tread on. And how the art of care would supersede the craft of making (and destroying to make space for more making). How much more yielding our borders would be. And how differently we would engage with time. The time it takes to grow a tree is a lifetime. Several lifetimes.
I wrote too much. And I haven't even started on today. But I am already tired.
Fragments of sentences will have to do for now.
--
It takes a century to form an inch.
Around me are time pockets calcified.
They look like trees.
They look like forests.
They are landscapes and mountains - and remind me of the drive up with Hassan.
Hassan who brakes gently every time I pull out my phone to snap a picture from the car.
And his face breaks into a sun.
They are flowers formed into stone from water.
And rise in silence.
I am amongst at least eleven thousand years.
I search for pairs.
One needs another couple of hundred years.
One finally meets.
There is an eternal drip of water.
(and I am reminded of a story seed, and another kitchen)
I close my ears because people are so noisy.
I resist making human forms with my eyes.
Trace their shape in the air and it feels like a dance.
What they call mushrooms look like jellyfish.
Abrupt horizontal straight lines, like a fringe
and a complex filigree, tentacled - dripping.
Shoulder blades, wings, bones.
Like cake batter when it's just right,
Thick, and I am surprised
- they always seemed so pointed and fragile in my mind.
They are alive. And life follows water.
And how it is right that humans only live so short, because -
I imagine a bomb lightly exploding this landscape,
or people huddled from the burning fireflies outside,
the careless urgency of human life.
The stone platform winding across this cavern -
centuries snapped off.
The ceiling is so high and the depths so low and folded that I am unable to hold
the shape of this space in my mind. In my body.
It is a relief to weep. Water to water.
I stop to smell their skin. But the smell of my own salt obscures.
And the puffs of perfume from others invade me suddenly as they walk past.
I close my mind. And try again.
The ghost of chalk.
I see time swaying, knotting, small bulbs, thin edges of waves, shelves that holds layers of cities from a fantastic imagination.
They feel soft and hard and cold on the tips of my fingers.
Everywhere, there are ripples.
The water reminds me of water from another space - cold, smooth - skin?
and my hands were hungry for more time.
But the ride is short, and this space is not for passing through.
Not for spotting the couple, the two camels or the leaning tower of Pisa.
I hesitated to wash my hands,
but I just pee-ed, and I must.
The water from the tap is like steel.
The first cable car for people was made in Switzerland in 1912.
Before it was to send goods to castles perched
on mystery.
We rise in a metal bubble, numbered,
painted,
crossed the carpark (where is Hassan?),
the busy highway,
I can see the tops of trees,
We rise between apartments
and I see the mundane artefacts of someone's life -
chairs on the balcony, tv, vase, photos on the shelf, laundry.
Trees - the Lebanon flag has the cedar tree, its wealth.
There were a few at the top. In the Church built like a wave or the bones of a fish -
paragliders cut the sky in pairs -
The sea edged the shore in the distance.
I climb up to My Lady Peace, and in two circles I see the mosque.
The church is closed.
The souvenir shop is open.
I buy three small vials of holy water, inscribed in Arabic.
I'm surprised I can read the words Allah in this script.
Hassan wakes me by saying,
“Roman columns.”
The city is 9000 years old.
And it looks like a UNESCO heritage site.
Shops, cafes, tasteful music -
I am surrounded by hungry cats.
We wandered into an exhibition -
“Memory of Time”
There is an excavation -
850 metres above sea level, in the hills
They split rocks open and found fish -
turtles, prawns, an octopus,
prehistoric great great great grandparents of the stingray,
sharks,
small fish
- 100 million years old.
In mid-swim.
One swallowed another fish.
How did it happen?
And the sun set against the sea.
Men stand on rocks and swing their lines into the water,
It is a perfect circle of bright yellow, turning orange,
dipping into the horizon,
Dropping flames against deep blue.
It is one day.
Now knotted into words.
--
R tells me about the significance of space in the urgency of memory. I imagine Beirut as a space that holds time and space in layers - on top of each other, jostling each other. Becoming bigger and longer. Like the stalactites and stalagmites in Jeita. Or the layers of rock in Jbeil that holds the frozen story of fish. And how it will take time, and maybe some measure of love, to get a sense of its textures. And maybe this is all spaces. Except some become mountains because of the imagined borders we construct as we walk. And mountains snatch breath.
--
Travelling across timezones in airplanes is a game of time. Chasing the sun. Chasing the moon. The screen paints a mountainous border of light and dark. I'm still aching at the same pace as snatches of breath.
--
A good read on the history of Lebanon