Quitting War
Reading and listening recommendations this month
Meant to get this out last week, but better late than never.
I’ve been reading Peter Beinart’s “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” and Ariana Reines’ “Wave of Blood” for the past couple weeks, and I highly recommend both, and reading them alongside each other. Two accounts from Jewish writers reckoning with the war in Gaza: the former meticulously argued and presented; the latter meticulously inhabited, introspected.
From Reines (one of the few poets I have continued to read everything from since I first encountered her almost two decades ago):
My aim had been to avoid memoir, but I need to describe some of the entanglement through which this effort – this book – arose.
It’s a chronicle on some level of (my) pain, and an attempt to disambiguate one family’s suffering from the story of a whole people; to reckon out the limits of “personal healing” where it makes an X with “State violence.” With war.
To write that one has always been against war is essentially meaningless at this point, but I’m a poet and it does bear writing such a sentence and explaining it.
A kind of inner condescension to a feminine yearning in me that war must come to an end, that is has never worked, and that both the Empire and the Resistance are viciously cruel and depraved when it comes to women and children, who, “we” always purport to be protecting.
It’s been war my whole life.”1
Meanwhile they’ve been building concentration camps here with folksy names.
Once you build them, the thing is, they must get used.
I’ve also been re-reading Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga, which is one of my favorite reading experiences of all time, and speaks with a kind of planetary clarity to the current war-horror-moment (as well as to parenting through it – a fact which I had forgotten, and now hits different). I hadn’t realized that they had started releasing new issues again and so am excited to jump back in.
And, finally, I’ve been listening lots to Haim’s new album, I Quit, which has been doing for me the thing I love when albums do: helping me feel more clearly.
I really like the idea that love songs, particularly break up songs – addressed as they are to a lover we long for, must get over – are also, somewhere underneath, expressions of the time we live in. In other words: all love songs are “Love Songs To Capitalism” (or something like that – I had a short-lived Tumblr devoted to this, years ago.)
Before Katy Perry went into space, I made this, which is still one of my favorite things I’ve ever made:
It’s worth mentioning, maybe, that the father of the three Haim sisters served in the IDF.2
If you’ll permit me a fantasy – along the lines of the A Night Time Smoke subplot within Saga, which some of you may recognize – I believe that I Quit, on the surface a break-up album, is actually an album about giving up the horror-violence that is the war in Gaza, and the freedom that might be on the other side of that.
On “A Million Years”:
Have I been here before?
Maybe it was a million years ago
And I'd stop every war
Even if it takes a million years
And how long has the sun been here?
Has it been a million years?
I feel the same as the day I met you
A million years ago
And on “Down to be wrong”:
I bet you wish it could be easy
To change my mind
I bet you wish it could be easy
But it's not this time
Oh, did you think it would keep me busy
Holding the line?
Oh, I didn't think it would be so easy
'Til I left it behind
From one more book I’m reading – Adam Phillips’ “On Giving Up”:
“We give up, or give something up, when we believe we can no longer go on as we are. And so a giving up is always some kind of critical moment, however tempted we are to minimize it. But giving up as a prelude, a precondition for something else to happen, a form of anticipation, a kind of courage, is a sign of the death of a desire; and by the same token it can make room for other desires. Giving up, in other words, is an attempt to make a different future.”
The freedom of belonging wherever we are, of giving up what no longer serves us.
Call me a sucker for the classic rock stylings of my youth, but I find Danielle’s solo and outro just immensely moving here (there are two or three solos on this album that are all timers for me, including on “All Over Me,” whose video is – permit me again this fantasy – the antithesis of the ascendant techno-fascist death-cult: fun and playful and sexy, with women powerful and in the lead, everyone’s bodies celebrated and celebrating each other, alive with aliveness…).
A kind of inner [non]condescension to feminine yearning.
Phillips quoting Kafka: “From a certain point there is no turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
The solo on “Down to be wrong” says: there is no turning back. I am letting go of what no longer serves me (us).
There is a future.
I’m taken back to another great album from my lifetime: 2003’s Give Up by the Postal Service. Coincidentally or not, that album was also released a year and a half into another horrific war in the Middle East, the “War on Terror,” which defined my coming of age and early adulthood.
Amidst so much forced – and branded – hope in my lifetime: what virtue might there be, in this horrific moment, in giving up? What might be on the other side of it?
Not “I believe that we will win” – a chant that feels hard to access, in the moment – but, to borrow another break-up lyric off I Quit:
“You think you’re going to die but you’re not going to die.”
Though, of course – if you are Palestinian and in Gaza, or undocumented and in a concentration camp here – you might.
I mean, we all will.
Only, then: “I believe in what we are struggling for.”
I’ll end with a poem of mine from years and years ago, and a poem (you may know it) by the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer3. Take care everyone.
3.5 lines responding to climate change Adjectives and verbs do their silent work Which is a boogie, if it works. Before, I thought change would be measured by clarity of despair. The poem is ending
“IF I MUST DIE” BY REFAAT ALAREER If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself— sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale
Ariana Reines, Wave of Blood.
And not for the purposes of “canceling”/not-canceling – I’m much more interested in changing power relations than in assigning virtue or blame to individuals (state actors excluded). Every U.S. tax payer, myself included, is complicit in this thing – there is little escaping it.
That said, I am interested in acts of extraordinary, individual courage – like Israeli teens burning their draft papers.