"Strange, Suspended Lives"

“I just wanted to film the strange suspended life there.” Ghassan Salhab, Lebanese Film-maker

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/world/middleeast/25beirut.html?hp&ex=1153886400&en=be1c981b68a49147&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Today at work, we talked about strange, suspended lives in the North of Israel. Unreported stories of businesses buckling, people confined to basements, stringing television wires, making do. There is fear that women missing work to take care of kids aren't being compensated, that the offices of social and civil service providers are dark. A 15 yr old girl was killed today in Magher, an Arab Village in the Galil when a rocket burst into her house.

There are men in uniform, boarding busses, heading north -
or south, east and west to fill in for others sent to up there, where there are cedars we sing about in psalms.

Still, Jerusalem's rhythms pulse on as usual.

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I spent the morning at Kol Ha-Isha
clicking
printing
collating
stapling

(things a machine could do if our organization had more money)

I want to be a machine today
I don't know what to feel

Tel Aviv, Midnight

Planes dart back and forth belting off-key songs
The kind taught to indoctrinate kids
And scare them out of breaking the rules

Dash L'Aza!
Dash L'Beirut!
Dash L'Aza!
Dash L'Beirut!

Couples cling on dimpled sand in the shadow of the water
A Haredi man lights a cigarette
Some one snaps a photo and I swear the world is ending

I missed the big fireworks here
Now I watch the people watching for war

It's too late to talk to strangers
So I let myself dissolve into the organism of a world
that's achy and messy and impossible to resist