Status Updates From Het vlindereffect

Can I choose my dreams, so that I do not dream of the unattainable, so that I become a different person who dreams that he can tell the difference between a live man who thinks he is dead and a dead man who thinks he is alive? I am alive, and when I'm not dreaming I say: 'I didn't dream, and it did me no harm.'

Waking up is when the real arises from the imaginary in a revised version, when poetry returns safely from the heavenly realms of elevated language to an earth that doesn't resemble its poetic image.

I will make my dreams from my daily bread to avoid disappointment. For dreaming is not seeing the unseen, in the form of an object of desire, but not knowing you are dreaming. However, you have to know how to wake up.

Noticing how many of my dreams are lost, I stop myself demanding too much water from the mirage. I confess I have grown tired of long dreams that take me back to the point where they begin and I end, without us ever meeting in the morning.

It's an insect which likes your blood and can smell it from twenty miles away. There's only one way you can bargain with it to make a truce: by changing your blood type.

And when you open the book, to glory in your victory, there's no sign of the mosquito or the words. Your book is blank. The mosquito, and I don't know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is not a metaphor, an allusion or a play on words.

You turn on the light again and resist the two of them, the mosquito and the sweat, by reading. But the mosquito lands on the page you are reading, and you say happily to yourself: 'It's fallen into the trap.' And you snap the book shut: 'I've killed it ... I've killed it!'

You think you've convinced it and switch off the light and go to sleep. But having sucked most of your blood it starts humming again, threatening a new attack. And forces you into a subsidiary battle with your perspiration.

You try to kill it with one of your shoes, but it dodges you and escapes and reappears with an air of malicious satisfaction. You curse it loudly but it pays no heed. You negotiate a truce with it in a friendly voice: 'Sleep so that I can sleep!'

It only visits in darkness like al-Mutanabbi's fever. It buzzes and hums like a warplane which you don't hear until it has hit its target: your blood. You switch on the light to see it and it disappears into some secret corner of the room, then settles on the wall - safe, peaceful, as if it has surrendered.

The mosquito, and I don't know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is more destructive than slander. Not content with sucking your blood, it forces you into a fruitless battle.

And what goes on in Nero's mind as he watches the world burn? I am master of the Day of Judgement. Then he orders the camera to stop
rolling, because he doesn't want anyone to see that his fingers are on fire at the end of this long American movie!

And what goes on in Nero's mind as he watches Palestine burn? Does it delight him that his name is recorded in the roll of prophets as a prophet that no body's ever believed in before? As a prophet of killing who God entrusted with correcting the countless mistakes in the heavenly books: I too am God's mouthpiece!

And what's going on in Nero's mind as he watches Iraq burn? Does it please him that he awakens a memory in the history of the jungle that preserves his name as an enemy of Hamurabbi and Gilgamesh and Abu Nuwas: My law is the mother of all laws, the flower of eternity grows in my fields, and poetry--what does that mean?

What's going on in Nero's mind as he watches Lebanon burn? His eyes wander ecstatically and he walks like someone dancing at a wedding: This madness is my madness, I know best, so let them set light to everything beyond my control. And the children have to learn to behave themselves and stop shouting when I'm playing my tunes!

I would yearn for nothing
no yesterday passing, no tomorrow to come
and my present neither advancing nor retreating
Nothing happening to me!
If only I were a stone - I said - Oh if only I were

I see many doves in the skies of Lebanon playing with the smoke which rises from the nothingness.

In war none of us feels that he is dead if he feels pain. Death pre-empts pain, pain is the one blessing in war. It moves from quarter to quarter bringing a stay of execution. And if someone is befriended by luck he forgets his long-term plans and waits for the non-existent which already exists circling in a flight of doves.

A flight of doves scatters suddenly from a break in the smoke, shining like a gleam of heavenly peace, circling between the grey and the fragments of blue above a city of rubble and reminding us that beauty still exists and that non-existence is not making complete fools of us since it promises us, or so we like to think, a revelation of how it is different from nothingness.

The summer only rarely lends itself to verse. The summer is a prose poem which takes no interest in the eagles circling high above.

He walks because the doctors have advised him to walk, with no particular goal, to train the heart in a kind of indifference necessary for good health. Any idea that occurs to him will be purely gratuitous.

Nature is a body divesting itself of trivial adornment until the figs, grapes and pomegranates ripen and the rain awakens forgotten desires. 'If it weren't for my mysterious need for poetry, I wouldn't need anything,

The only celebration on these mountain paths is provided by the lively sparrows, who flit between sense and nonsense.

An autumnal summer on the hills is like a prose poem. The breeze is a gentle rhythm I feel but do not hear in the modest little trees, and the yellowish plants are peeling images, and eloquence provokes similes with its cunning verbs.

They are one being, distributed over different pieces of hardware, pressing electronic buttons, killing and vanishing. He sees us but we don't see him, not because he's a ghost but because he's a steel mask on an idea - he is featureless, eyeless, ageless and nameless. It is he who has chosen to have a single name: the enemy.

The casualties/martyrs don't resemble one another. Each of them has a distinctive physique and distinctive features, different eyes and a different name and age. The killers are the ones who all look the same.

I was there a month ago. I was there a year ago. I was always there as if I was never anywhere else. In 1982 the same thing happened to us as is happening now. We were besieged and killed and fought against the hell we encountered.

I enter the television, I and the beast. I know the beast is stronger than me in the struggle between aircraft and bird. But I have become addicted, perhaps more than I should have, to the heroism of the metaphor: the beast has swallowed me but has not digested me.

The last aircraft has taken off from Beirut airport and put me in front of the television to witness the rest of my death with millions of other viewers. Nothing proves that I exist when I think, as Descartes says, but rather when I am offered up in sacrifice,

I am besieged by land and air and sea and language.