May – September, 2004

In June, Marwa responded to a Desiree i/m. There are mockingbirds in the Bronx, Marwa i/m’d back.

It’s been a long time…hello…mockingbirds?

Kept awake last night, 3rd in a row, by car alarm. Today, heard it again with chirps. Saw gray bird on oak tree singing car alarm cycle. People stopped to watch/listen. Then it flew away.

Mockingbird?

Somebody majoring in ornithology.

You still on campus?

Boyfriend and I working in Dem HQ. Gotta hold back the night.

Keep the faith.

JB says re religion: it’s Folk, Gimmes, and Mimes.

?

FOLK are just superstitious, opiate of the people/no atheists in foxholes; GIMMES, God loves them, God just lives to save their sorry asses so they get to kick everyone else’s; MIMES, bleeding hearts & happy martyrs.

3 things people talk about : things, other people, ideas. I think the Universe is made of whole cloth.

Shreds and patches. Or Julia Sets, repetitive iteration of the same

Sound and fury signifying nothing? Nah, warp and woof, cruel & kind, down threads and up, weaving whole cloth.

Cartesian coordinates. Cloth sags, rips, rots.

Calling all tailors! Also better loom repairs/ new designs.

Metaphor is useless. Action is the cornerstone of better government.

They’re laying the cornerstone for the Freedom Tower on July 4th. 20 tons of Adirondack granite chock full of garnets.

I’ll be working in Slick Willie’s Harlem office starting next month.

Wow.

I’m i.m’ing a friend there now, Marwa lied.

So I’ll let you go..

Marwa reddened out of guilt and relief.

On June 29th, the Cassini spacecraft was after seven years fast closing in on its destination to become the first robotic visitor to orbit Saturn and its family of 31 known moons. Cassini was named for Jean Dominique Cassini, director of the Paris Observatory in the 17th century, who discovered several of Saturn’s moons and the first gaps in Saturn’s distinctive rings. In Cassini’s first four years, the robot spacecraft was expected to execute 157 maneuvers to change course for 45 close encounters with Titan, the object of greatest scientific curiosity because it was like “going back to Earth four billion years ago.”

Marwa thought about dimensions in which parallel lines might intersect. She emailed Desiree over the 4th of July weekend with no mention of Democratic headquarters or the former President’s Harlem office. Instead, she wrote about ROMEO & JULIET and a poem of Louise Gluck’s recently published in the NYTimes in recognition of the start of summer.

I dreamt my lady came and found me dead — / Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think!–” James-Beekmans and I finally saw the DiCaprio R & J and out of all the noise, that’s what I heard. Did you see the new Gluck poem? She doesn’t have much faith in love.

Desiree i/m’d: Gluck poem? Persephone myth revisited? I saw it: “A replica of earth/ except there was love here.”

Marwa replied: “Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night/the beloved body, compass, polestar,/to hear the quiet breathing that says/I am alive, that means also/you are alive, because you hear me,/you are here with me. And when one turns,/the other turns –/That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness,/looking at the world he had/ constructed for Persephone./…He dreams, he wonders what to call this place./… He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you/ but he thinks/ this is a lie, so he says in the end/you’re dead, nothing can hurt you/which seems to him/a more promising beginning,more true.”

My girlfriend is a Red Sox fanatic.

James-Beekmans is a Yankee, Marwa i.m’d back.

See Jeter fly into the stands, make that catch? Thought he’d lose teeth!

We were there. Perks of politics.

Again wow. I said the stupidest thing last night during the game when Bess said how great NY water tastes (something positive about NY for my mother’s benefit). I said, “I drinks the water, I roots the team.” But really I hope Boston finally wins it this year.

I’ll trade October for November. Gotta run. Check your email.

Desiree found: A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.”

She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be a Democrat!”

“I am,” the man replied. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve been no help to me.”

The man smiled and responded, “You must be a Republican.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the man,” you don‘t know where you are or where you’re going. You’ve risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it’s my fault.”

At the end of July, Marwa and James-Beekmans weren’t present in any official capacity on the floor at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, but they made themselves useful as go-fers. Marwa and James-Beekmans changed places with Marcus, staying in his apartment in Cambridge while he was at his parents’ in NYC.

“Nice,” James-Beekmans said when he saw Marcus’s apartment.

Marwa adjusted the thermostat to cool the rooms and then made hot coffee in an elaborate machine. James-Beekmans had turned on a flatscreen TV over the fireplace mantel, images from the Convention dominating the news. Marwa brought him a cup.

“It looks different on TV,” he said.

“So what are we doing?” Marwa said.

James-Beekmans pulled himself up out of a fatigued slouch in a leather club chair. “Go out or order in?”

“What are we doing together?” Marwa sat down. Her khaki skirt was chafing her around the waist. She tugged at the tucked-in polo shirt and with final exasperation, pulled the shirt out altogether. “Hierarchy, politics. This.” She picked up her cup and sipped.

“Coffee? Didn’t you want to make the coffee?”

“Did it occur to you to make coffee?”

“I didn’t want any.”

“Did it occur to you that I might?”

“I sit convicted.”

“Funny. So you were doing me a favor by letting me serve you.”

“‘As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,’”James-Beekmans quoted. “‘This expresses my idea of Democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no Democracy.’”

Marwa kicked off her sandals, and put down her cup. She lay back on the couch and closed her eyes. She was quiet. James-Beekmans thought it might be a good sign when Marwa put her arm over her eyes. Maybe she would fall asleep and awaken less stressed. But when she opened her wide Egyptian eyes, she looked straight through him.

“Order out?” James-Beekmans attempted.

“It’s all bosses,” Marwa said. “Jay Gould said in 1886 about strike-breaking, ‘I can get one half of the working class to kill the other half.’”

“Hire,’ “‘the sonofabitch said, ‘I can hire one half to kill the other.’”

“Bullies,” Marwa said. “I’m not surprised when Beijing stops the presses on that novel about peasants suffering from abuse of power by local officials when the doors are totally closed at Kissinger’s Bilderberg bash for the annual economic pie-slicing, oh, excuse me, international economic policy –”

“Rankism sucks,” James-Beekmans agreed. “So what surprised you?”

“Oh, not surprised so much, as — ” Marwa rose from the couch and walked to the bay window overlooking a narrow Cambridge street. “I mean, we’re volunteers, not slaves or groupies. A woman shrieked orders directly into my ear. We’re in the same Party.”

“In, not at,” James-Beekmans said.

In the middle of the night in Marcus’s Cambridge apartment, street light penetrated the miniblinds. Marwa awakened and knew exactly where she was even before hearing James-Beekmans’s breathing beside her. One second before, she had been in a Star Wars dream, looking at Princess Leia doing her tiny hologram plea to Obi Wan Kenobi, and being Princess Leia at the same time.

I was the bully, Marwa thought. I bullied Prix. I wanted Beauty. To have It and to flatter myself. I knew what he wanted from me. I made him sacrifice his belief in Innocence for my lust for Beauty.

“What?” James-Beekmans said groggily.

“Beauty. Innocence. Star Wars,” Marwa said.

“Illusions,” James-Beekmans whispered. “Dream about me.”

“The universe is a hologram.”

“Obi-wan Kenobi, help me,” James-Beekmans groaned.

“Any fraction of a hologram contains the entire image. Information can escape from a black hole. It’s preserved. Nothing is ever lost. You can run the film backward and get back to the beginning. When you finally untie a knot, it’s notthere.” Marwa yawned loudly.

“That a good thing sounds like,” James-Beekmans put his heavy, warm arm over her waist. Beyond gravity, beyond consciousness, they drifted away.

In July ‘04, blast waves from autumn ’03 solar storms continued their ripple effect past Mars to the outer planets. One blast damaged the radiation monitor aboard the Odysseyorbiting Mars (not Opportunity rambling its surface). The Cassini spacecraft detected the front causing a similar effect when it arrived at Saturn. On Earth, some people were enraged about the Republican National Convention in NYC, where, on August 31st, 2004, Democratic protestors (of the war in Iraq, etc.) were limited to a small wire-fenced area on the West Side so distant from the delegates at Madison Square Garden that out-of-town “worms” could believe they were welcome in the Big Apple.

Marwa and James-Beekmans were among the 1806 arrested protestors who did not stay within the fenced boundary. Marwa was released without even being fingerprinted in well under the 24 hour legal custody limit, but James-Beekmans was detained for 49½ hours along with more than 200 others, like a 73 year old carpenter (“I make chairs and tables; don’t call me a furniture designer”) from Massachusetts. Police had enmeshed the protestors in orange netting, handcuffed them with plastic ties, and transported them in vans to a Hudson River pier where they were fingerprinted, photographed, and searched. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office eventually dropped all charges on all but a few of the protestors.

James-Beekmans answered Marwa’s questions about the hours of confinement:

“We were only handcuffed for about three hours, but I will never use a plastic tie on a garbage bag again… I don’t know how some people managed to keep their cellphones after the searches, but they were sharing and calling parents and lawyers… The cell was too small for the 20 of us to lie down so we slept in two-hour shifts. We all stank…

There were awful voices doing great imitations of Dylan singing… The only cameras around were personal handhelds… They’ll show we didn’t resist arrest.”

James-Beekmans asked, but Marwa didn’t know why she’d been released so quickly. They had all started out near Ground Zero, under the absent shadow of the North Tower, and had been arrested as they crossed Church Street onto Fulton. Marwa also didn’t explain that August 31st was the birthday of her blood with Prix. (Mawlid al-Nabi was the birthday of the Prophet, usually occurring sometime in May or June on a lunar calendar, the 12th day of Rabi al-Awwal. In popular usage, mawlid meant the commemorative anniversary of a deceased person. In 2002, Marwa had wanted to observe a Mawlid al-Prix on August 31st instead of September 11th, but she had not been able then or the year after to imagine a suitable ceremony, certainly not at Ground Zero.) Finding herself precisely there on August 31, 2004, Marwa knew the protest walk was her Mawlid al-Prix.

Had there ever really been a time that was simple and innocent? Marwa thought not. There had only been unconsciousness, and that ignorance, they say, was bliss. Marwa thought not. Unconsciousness was even more dangerous than the most dangerous knowledge eked out over slow millennia. By the end of September, 2004, Marwa was a college junior in a classroom where another student was saying, “All history is psychology. The current retro-metrowars between fundamentalism and modernism in the Middle East — and it’s no civil dialogue in this country, either — well, if sunrise gives you a sunburn, you prefer night.”

“You think the Renaissance was sunrise?”

“You don’t?”

“Were the haters of the modern world in agreement with Lipsius’s antiquarianism?”

“Does he mean the traditionalists?” a girl to Marwa’s right whispered with a confused frown, “like Guenon?”

Instead of answering quietly, Marwa spoke aloud, “All blather about the neo-cons architecting the invasion of Iraq aside –“

“– That’s some aside!”

“Aside,” Marwa emphasized, “I’m less amazed that 16thand 17th century Western military and political rulers believedGreco-Roman antiquity offered them solutions than that they ever relied on an intellect like Lipsius–”

“–Who was totally against a state tolerating religious dissent, Ms. al-Hal,” said a recognizably anti-Moslem classmate.

“I translated Lipsius last semester, Mr. Flaherty,” Marwa replied, “and what he did was first distinguish between public and private dissent. Then he presented the views of Cyprian, Augustine, Seneca, Cicero, and Justinian, pagan and Christian, legal and oratorical texts. So Lipsius thought that all wise men, at all times and places, called for thesuppression of religious dissent. As for Guenon,” Marwa turned to the girl sitting beside her and softened her tone, “he believed the 20th century West was the final stage of a final age, that the Renaissance was not a rebirth but a death, and that science, rationality and humanism were products of delusion. The only cure was in the primordial truths that underlay all religions before modernity. Guenon hateddemocracy; he believed in a hierarchical religious elite and saw himself – of course – as one of its elect.”

The clerical professor added, “Guenon was born a French Catholic, a student of mathematics who turned to theosophy, Masonry, medieval Christianity, Hinduism, and finally, Islam. He moved to Cairo and retreated into solitude, fearing sorcery.”

An earlier voice crowed, “That’s what I said, all history ispsychology!”

The professor ignored that student and asked Marwa, “Do you know about Lipsius and the Family of Love? a strange sect of spiritual reformers in mid-16th century Europe whose members saw all formal religions as equally valuable for instilling discipline in ordinary people and as equallyirrelevant to themselves. Their inward voices gave them direct access to religious truth. They only joined organized churches out of political prudence and treated the Scriptures as allegories. But they urged the authorities to enforce religious unity on the Hydra-headed mob.”

Marwa frowned, and the professor said, “You might want to do your paper on the Family of Love, then.”

Marwa’s frown deepened. “There is no religious truth,” she said. “There is no truth in religion. Religion is the Hydra-headed mob.”

The quiet girl spoke up, “How do you know?”

Which was the first time, Marwa admitted only to herself later, that she became conscious of the ego of her own unconsciousness. And just dimly, it looked silvery gray, tasted like snow, and felt like the moments before waking up. On September 28th, 2004, The New York Times reported that the Mars rovers also had a new lease on life, having resumed limited activity after a period of unreliable radio communications, and NASA extended financing for another six months of operation, if the machines could hold out that long.