There’s a stillness to the last week of the Gregorian year, and especially now, a kind of heaviness as December dies. I wasn’t really expecting to write about grief this week. But there is still genocide happening in Palestine, and in Sudan. In an incomparably smaller, more quiet loss, we learned that we are being kicked out of our apartment at the end of February. Our landlords want to sell, and I guess early spring is as good a time as any for such things.
This domestic dustup has led to some further personal unraveling, and I’m left contemplating the ways in which change can happen faster than our bodies can process. My partner and I have had a rough year. It looks like at least some of the same level of hardship lies ahead.
For the past two and a half months, I have been asking myself how to go about the work of living when a settler-colonial power is killing Palestinians in the name of Jews like me. I have wept over the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism having arrived at its logical conclusion as ammunition against people speaking out about genocide.
Dangerous bills weaponizing antisemitism have now moved through congress. I want to be clear and honest: these bills make me feel less safe as a Jew. A free Palestine, from the river to the sea, is the only true path towards safety and well-being for both Jews and Palestinians. It can be hard for me to believe that my saying this as one person can make any material difference. And, I know that I am just one of many. And, I know that it is what I must say.
How to live through all this grief, both personal and collective? I try and remember to do what my somatic practitioner calls “basic shit practices”: eating, showering, drinking water. I phone my representatives and urge them to sign onto the Ceasefire Now resolution.
I write.
I’m thinking a lot about grief and creativity and the ways they interweave. Grief, as I feel it, can easily get stuck in the throat and chest. Writing helps. Not even necessarily as a guarantee of moving it through—although that can sometimes be the end result—but as a something-to-be-done. I also find myself holding onto snatches of melody and lyric, talismans that anchor me. My journal entries are punctuated with lines from Joanna Newsom (“Love is not a symptom of time / Time is just a symptom of love”).
Last week, my mom and I watched the documentary American Symphony on Netflix. It follows acclaimed musician and composer Jon Batiste and his journey towards performing with a hybrid folk/classical/jazz ensemble at Carnegie Hall. His wife, Suleika Jaouad, navigates her own resurgence of leukemia while Batiste is on the road.
I always find a particular kind of resonance in documentaries about musicians. I don’t really consider myself a musician, though I often wish I were, and these films always seem to reach right into the spot under my ribs where that desire lives. In American Symphony, Batiste touches several times on the necessity of art and creativity for processing intensities like grief and illness. Jaouad does, as well—over the course of several months of hospitalization, she, a writer by trade, finds her vision beginning to blur. As reading and writing become more difficult, she turns to painting to find a way through, rendering startlingly vivid landscapes and jungle creatures, herself at times among them. The primacy of life, juxtaposed against such suffering.
I’ve been journaling more or less daily for around five years. In 2018 or so I saw an exhibit of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals and one particular line of his has stayed with me ever since. He was especially attuned to the ways in which daily life could be digested and integrated through writing, and so he noted, “How many ova have I swallowed? Who knows what will hatch within me?”
I believe in the mystery of exchange and transmutation between my internal and external worlds. I believe that reading and watching and observing the world around me teaches me something about myself, and about that world.
Furthermore, I believe that writing can facilitate and catalyze transformation. Even if I didn’t, I’d do it anyway. The poet Eileen Myles once told me during a reading that writing was, for them, “a nervous habit.” It’s become a similar kind of autonomic process for me; a kind of record of my breathing. But transformation is possible through writing—in making thought and language into something material, we are in a sense changing the very fabric from which we are cut.
In “I Am You,” Refaat Alareer, killed by Israel on December 7, 2023, may his memory be for a blessing, wrote,
I am just you.
I am your past haunting
Your present and your future.
I strive like you did.
I fight like you did.
I resist like you resisted
And for a moment,
I’d take your tenacity
As a model,
Were you not holding
The barrel of the gun
Between my bleeding
Eyes.
I read this and I ask myself, I ask my people, how can we put our past to rest? How can we escape this cycle of genocidal violence?
As Jews, how can we understand our own freedom and liberation as bound up in Palestinian freedom and liberation? I long for the day when I can visit a free Palestine where Jews, Palestinians, and many others live together in mutual cooperation and harmony.
I understand that this may not happen while I live, but longing does not know the constraints of linear time.
With love and New Year’s blessings,
Elliott