Lately I’ve been searching for a word, but I don’t know how to look it up. It’s a word that belongs to a moment, one I’ve lived over and over again in the past few months. In what follows: I aim to define it, you aim to recognize it, and we aim to name it.
The word by way of example:
There comes a moment in which I find myself sitting relatively comfortably on a swivel chair or a stool or a bike seat or not sitting at all, maybe, and all of a sudden, I feel a bomb strike. Except maybe it’s not a bomb. Maybe it’s a rubber bullet. White phosphorus perhaps. And I don’t feel it, exactly. It’s more like I’m in the afterglow. Shock, horror, tears, despair. Numbness and infinite feeling, identical somehow. (Nafs-a-shi. The same thing.) But my chair is comfortable. And for that, I am supposed to be grateful.
The word as defect:
At least, according to the laws of men and honor and other customs I ought to be grateful. For the food in my fridge. For the seatbelt in my car. For the bombs in airplane carriers leaving my country, not headed towards it. But I am not grateful. I am, as a matter of fact, rather ungrateful.
If these laws of men were mined from some ultimate, empirical Truth, then the word I’m looking for would refer to an internal defect, a roadblock on the way to gratitude. The locus of the moment I experience would be interior, something botched within my mental landscape. A hyperactive imagination. Paranoia. Some incongruent reality of my own design.
Reporting to the expert, I ask my therapist for help defining the word. She pulls out her dictionary of types and traumas and suggests that this might be a reenactment. But I’ve never been hit by a chemical weapon and if my immediate family members had died in a hospital, the cause of death surely wasn’t a bombing. At least not to my memory.
She tries again, this time digging deep into schizofrenetic readings, hurling hallucinations and plotting the borderlines of personality. But I insist the moment doesn’t come at random from somewhere on high. There’s a pattern. A real one – not a paranoid one. The moment arrives with a real bomb or bullet or battle in Palace Stein. It’s a fairytale, sure, but one I inherited from my mother’s vacuum-sealed memory, along with a few recipes and some unenthusiastic appeals to Allah.
Having traced a geographic source, what’s more a material threat, I can perhaps be relieved for my own sanity, but I cannot be grateful. Must not be grateful for the destruction of a real people, the fading of a real pulse. I must be outraged. The laws of men, therefore, cannot be True, but deeply and profoundly unjust. So the word I am looking to refers not to a defect in myself, or, at least, not in myself alone.
The word as conviction:
Suppose there’s a higher law, then, a spiritual one which finds me and you and us guilty. Me – guilty of abandoning my ground decades before I was refused the right to return. You – guilty of letting me call this place shelter. You and me, guilty of believing in the limitations of geography and the finitude of our own will. Both of us, guilty of secretly wanting to be suddenly and harshly abused by one another whenever we wave politely, obliviously in the grocery store.
If this is the case, then the word I am looking for is an awareness of a false consciousness. The pesky intervention of a cure in the purview of our collective ill-being.
To investigate further, I consult the Marxist masters and socialist gurus at the public library. They point to the phantom weapons in my hands, the piercing blades in my pocketbooks. But I dig in my pockets and where the holes have yet to grow is only lint and empty return-to-sender envelopes from non-profit after NGO after Church and Mosque and Synagogue subcommittee.
They tell me if I’m not with them I’m against us all and that material, well that’s the stuff. Your words, your ideas, hocum. Your heart? Hopeless. So what are you going to do? How will you join the fight? And I wonder how can a spiritual law sacrifice the spirit? Would it not be easier to spiritualize the body than corporealize the spirit? I don’t know. They tell me it doesn’t matter. But I’ve been down this road before, like my father, and his father before him. And probably his and his and his. Hers too, when you get down to the penultimate Eve of it all.
So what is the word for enduring a foreign violence, for rehoming the faded memories that Mercy has opted to forget if guilt is too apparent to trace? Does that moment, does this word, belong to a time before me and you and us even? Does my word befall the breath between non-being and thou shalt not kill being-itself, both cementing and upending their horrible matrimony?
I guess the word I’m looking for occurs in the singularity of a moment, one that foreshadows the multiplicitous and material chain of connection that ensnares us all in complicity. It refers to that sudden spark of connection between us in superposition to the vast expanse of geography and history – contemporary and ancient – that divides you and me in us. The word, then refers to a visceral twinge of empathy, the ghost of an unevidenced yet certain unity, which penetrates us both.
The word and time:
I know I’m searching for a word whose meaning is a moment as-it-is experienced. More precisely it is the recollection that we, and not-they, are experiencing an us. The moment began when a unit capable of both synchronous and asynchronous experience was first assembled. Call that moment a First-Together.
The baptism of our word unravels through events later than the First-Together felt over stretches of apart. These lateral events prove that a First-Together can be followed by a Then-Apart, and a Later-Together. Only when such a relay is complete can the unity of a single event taking place in (at least) three distinct movements become coherent.
This trifold singularity of the word encompasses all that remains between the First and Last Togethers. It is a liminal together which is not lost, only forgotten, in the immediacy of a Then-Apart.
In some ways, the word is the apophatic answer to the question of how one can be in two (or three or 14.3 million) places at once. The answer evasively implies that once can last as long (or longer than) seventy-five years.
The word as an is:
There are many words adjacent to unity: togetherness, oneness, transcendence, moksha. But, the word I’m trying to get at recognizes unity across the difference of the many, and so collapses difference only laterally into unity. It is unity deferred, yet also instantaneous.
The only word I’m aware of which performs such an activity is the Arabic nafs. Nafs: The Psyche. Nafs: The Spirit. Nafs: The Same. The identical identity across an ocean and an occupation of different bodies. The identity which, logically though not always pathologically, folds in oceans and occupations, too.
Nafs : belonging to myself and to my people. My people whom I don’t know personally, yet with whom I am intimately and implicitly familiar. Perhaps because our grandfathers used to exchange pleasantries alongside fruit in some Palestinian market. Or maybe our grandmothers seven times removed were first cousins. Which would probably make us in-laws somewhere down the line.
And so, from that bike seat or swivel chair or wherever, I depart, imperceptibly to a timeless garden. There lies Nafs, our warped, genealogical tree. Her trunk, situated in all points of space, is deformative for us, her innumerable branches. We grow into enough consciousness to consume our own fruits but are spared awareness of the name ‘cannibal.’ Except, of course, laterally, when we remember the collective guilt and personal psychosis of being comfortable during our selfish-immolation, their genocide. Our distal branches break and return to the peace of a trunk where first-forgetfulness has never been a curse, but has always been and will always be a vengeful merciful, together-at-last.
