* Darker Than You Think.
Jack Williamson - 1948
Human existence is punctuated by brief flashes of happiness as incidental ephemeral; moments nirvanic old man that is willfully trying to recreate, and whose memory haunts him often sublimate the memory and haunts the mind.
But the irrepressible desire of one-way time works, and the terrible vortex can reproduce the moments never departed.
Be an inveterate old from Beirut to feel the full blow of this cruel certainty, compounded by the physical disappearance of the city progenitor of his passions and dreams, in the maze of ignorance and oblivion.
Around the beginning of the 90s' of last century that I could finally put their feet after fifteen years of forced absence, in the quaint little neighborhood located on the infamous''green line''separating the two Beirut, which housed the ancestral home of my youth.
Only those who have had similar experiences in their lives, can fully imagine the intensity of the following: Like a ship
disoriented in the middle of an unknown sea, I stood there, unable to locate; more strong reason to guess the location of my old house in the middle of these vast tracts of desert, bald and bulldozed, and whose lower external factor that would work through the indexes of encoding in my subconscious to make me remember a single easy to find, had been ruthlessly expunged.
Like Odysseus after his Odyssey, which initially did not recognize Ithaca, I would have, for many years, scoured half the globe, to find myself actually lost in the middle of my Street, on the very threshold of what was my home and my home!
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget me!
let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not remember thee, if I do the Jerusalem above my chief joy!
David - Psalm 137.
If these words more or less uncertain, a more or less legendary Psalter, on a more or less determined and an event historically undecided, found a more or less questionable descent to forward them to the present, and the gullible (and shady ...) to believe (or pretend) and give them (by reason of the fittest), sovereignty, legitimacy and unlimited support with all the consequences that followed, would it be a real man too, present and still alive, come from its humble blog is free and independent, sing any wind, the memory of the pearl of the Levant, sacrificed on the altar of darkness, deceit, fanaticism and imposture?
And lament the fate of his fellow cretins who self-destructing under the eye (and funding) of their''brothers''who wept crocodile along on their screens with a delicious little thrill morbid the bloody exploits of the Lebanese, while ruminating leaves of Khat and kneading lazily Glaouis!
Now he is often mentioned as imagery, insists to represent the Lebanese as people''highly politicized.''
By what absurd reasoning, proponents of this belief did they come to identify with the political awakening of a poor wretch devoid of any civic or social privilege and a mangy, injured, robbed, starved and lowered its rights in the most elementary, but turns out to be anyway,'''' ideological and fiercely right!
A "petit-bourgeois mind" destitute and needy, personal status inferior to that of a dog in a sophisticated society, which does not prevent religiously maintain the chains that hinder and idealize the scoundrel who operates! Between
''politicized''and''fanatical'', the distance is measured in light years ...
****
The nights are still cool at this time of year, and frequent interruptions of electricity, make the cornice of Ain-el-Mraisseh locality blacker and more deserted again, to my greatest happiness.
noise, dirt, ugliness, misery, vulgarity and bad taste spread in broad daylight, disappearing inside the black cocoon of night Beirut where I sprawled myself with happiness, like a fetus in the heart of the maternal womb.
Leaning on the railing, facing the vast black and gleaming, I let myself slowly carried away by the gentle hiss of surf that had rocked my nights distant, when the new blood was beating fast and hard in my arteries, feeding dreams and hopes, and a thirst for life that the whole world could not quench.
And I felt my ability to hear and smell tenfold in the dark like those of an old werewolf, so much so that I could have sworn they have detected an aroma of precious begonia flower I noticed more than a mile from, mixed heavy with the scents and iodine, made from algae, lichens and a prodigious natural broth culture, and who are the exhalations of the same original matrix whose memory is still preserved in the age-old secret of every cell of my old carcass ephemeral .
Beirut. Oh my Beirut.
I am a stranger in this absurd carnival.
shorten my ordeal.
Take me where you went.
Clears my shame and my despair. Take back
me in your peace and serenity.
Ibrahim Tyan.
