I like to follow hurricanes.

I lose myself in it as the pressure system builds, as if from nowhere and everywhere at once. It draws water and fire from the overheated ocean, winds gather strength in organization, and a spiral emerges from splotches on the radar. There is a sense of something solid being born as the hurricane becomes self-centered and self-contained, an expression of elemental personhood. The spinning eye looks back at me, alive, with a similar sense of recognition.

Until it loses its atmospheric support and breaks, crashing into land or riven by another aerial dynamic. The eye falters, dissipates, dismantles, like Lear losing his mind, a principle of power expressing its final emptiness, wings of conflict without a body to bind them.

Into the same it passes away: earth clean, sky blue, sea silent.

I wonder if human wars are like this, as I follow the news of Israel and Palestine. The news is not good. A divine gift, a holy land for a blessed people, has become, through stiffening necks and hardening hearts, children of Abraham strangling the sacred names in rage against a broken covenent. Proportionality is chimaera, on this scorched earth, where we are tethered by finite commitments to the infinite burden of divine injustice. Rhetoric builds and forces spill over; violence gives birth to violence bloodier and broader still; as presidents, ministers, and kings fly jagged spirals around Jerusalem, there is something solid being born, with a similar sense of recognition.

It is a thing that cannot be stopped.

I too have fought, ever since I was born. I demanded care, crying like a babe when it didn’t come. I rejected injustice, spit it out like spoilt milk. I did my homework, knew multiplication tables by heart. I read books and learned from them, too. I conversed in the public square. I worked to save children from the maw of death. (Yes, I corrupted the youth.) I tried, over and over, to serve, to negotiate, to draft a treaty. (Okay, I was a bad servant, still—) I fell in love. I dreamed of walking without shame through the garden, on this, my beautiful earth.

But I also have fought myself. I have euphemistically declared myself a question, have orchestrated pogroms and nakbas and crucifixions against myself, have perpetrated crimes against humanity against myself. I buried myself deep in the dark of a labyrinth, my face was so ugly. I cursed my city, rejected so-called help from so-called friends, and drank the hemlock provided me. Then I was dead, but that wasn’t enough, so I put holes in the tendons of my ankles and, with a chariot, I dragged my dead body around and around the grave of my other dead body, through the dirt. Again and again, as it rotted, we rotted. I became anti-earth, black hole, a self-centered and self-contained thing, an unbroken expression of brokenness. Other Greeks watched, alien to me, as my rage drew time itself in the vortex. For eternity, if for forty-two years, that is what I did.

All as punishment for the following crime: that I am a similar sense of recognition. I am the eye of the daemonic storm. I know myself now, I am the war. I am the catastrophic energeia that reveals itself, destroyer of worlds, with so many mouths and so many voices. I am who cannot be stopped.

It is deeply and terribly hard, to let go. The earth is lost. Exhale the body and let it be lost. As everything sacred has ever been lost, in a similar sense of recognition.

Whence, this: Truth not in silence, but in singing.