With Death And Togetherness

Getting casually laughed at for wearing my djellaba, I considered the hosteller's diagnosis--my attatchment to Farid as a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome--love of your dominator (kinky, ain't it?); which if this is the case, I hope to be instilling in him Lima Syndrome (the obverse "disorder"). It occurs to me that the psychoanalytic Father and the impersonal authority for which he stands (thematized in Law, Science, Language, etc.) is the object of the SS, just as it is suggested the LS is an evolutionary sleight of hand by which babies, children, engender the love of adults. The hosteller was Chris, a smart guy who knew he was smart and that's what ruined him for me. He was a funhouse mirror, close enough and far enough to my self to make me hate him. No, I didn't hate him, but I could have with some time, recognition of more similarities between us two, and less pity (pity which would evaporate with the growing identification of our selves).

Chris, his girlfriend Kat, two anglophoniques girls working in Spain named Tasha and Sarah, two Israelis studying in Holland named Eliev and Yinon, Shane, whom I'd been calling Shaun for days without being corrected, from Ireland who had just quit his job as a corporate lawyer after biding his time and saving his pennies, and a smattering of Toronto Canadians with thick and bathetically dopey accents all had begun hanging out together and soon became enthralled by Mao. One night Tasha had a panic attack and it was unclear whether that was in fact the case or if she had food poisoning. Shane and I stayed up with her until 6 in the AM, playing Mao and listening to her taking off the dressings from the wounds of her selfhood. We could only be there for her, as ugly, pathetic, awkward and sad as it was, it was alive and worthy. After all this she seemed to vaguely attempt to insinuate herself into my bed for the night, and upon not receiving encouragement she went back to her room.

Something about the sound of horror movies being scarier than the visuals, closing my ears instead of eyes at tense moments, supports the gross generalization of vision as objective and the other senses as more emotional. There is a TV in the common room, a channel which plays American movies with Arabic subtitles 24 hours a day. If you want to be close to the fireplace, you often have to accept the TV with it.

Walking through the crowds in the narrow medina streets is like making your way down a river of people, the spaces between them, the rocks shifting positions under the currents of persons. The medina is Disney World Morocco, the spoils of imperialism and post-, while the Ville Nouvelle is New Moroccan, which is not so Moroccan save for it being Morocco. Here in the medina, all the restaurants "do Moroccan" and the markets "do the past", but it is an unsure division between the set and the auditorium's stage.

I can sometimes see my breath in my room, and steam often rises from streaming urine in the mornings. Suffice to say, it is cold. I've got something going wonky with my body and walked down to the hospital after putting it off for a week. I don't trust doctors or medicine in the States so much, so I wasn't keen on seeing the inside of a Moroccan hospital. The doctor I saw at about 9 post-meridian on New Year's Eve was likeable. We somehow got on talking about how everyone finding the grave sometime, and how this is reassuring in regards to oneself and to one's enemies. He was commenting on the gluttony and sheer rapacity of humans as he wrote me a scrip for what turned out later to be a suppository pain-killer. Seems like he's got a sense of humor, no? Just picked it up today, so soon enough I'll be finding out the poop on that. Couldn't help myself. I'm sorry.

Had a bout of mania, overwhelmed by ideas and projects. Then there is the feeling as though I'm approaching something, not on the verge, but can sense closing distance on it. I am excited, confident, anxious, panicked. I realized myself hunting for ideas and phrases and other little memes while talking to Ian, my current next door neighbor, as I listened to him talk and encouraged him to continue, captivated and then shifted my focus upon this realization and attempted to take him in whole, not just committing to search for useful things, which happens to open onto a whole new set of useful things. I need practice and my work is not theory or math, so I am trying to get hip to this.

Living life as though in a dream seems one entrance to indifference and fascination, the continual consumption of the senses, sense, and nonsense. Gluttonous being on the grounds of not needing to be gluttonous to experience glut.

An example of the Moroccan gestalt: The kids in school help each other cheat on tests. If one gets caught, he will appeal to the teacher as a human, saying "Well, it was just one question I didn't remember the answer, it's no big deal...Surely you can't say you've never cheated on anything in your life, so give me a break." And the students will laugh, and so will the teacher.

New Year's Eve Day is celebrated in Morocco by each family slaughtering a sheep in their home. Mohammed, the waiter at Restaurant Haji, one of my hangs, invited me to his home for the ritual. I waited for Mohammed in the morning, watching people walking by leading sheep so alive they could have been pets, mammals alive and real breathing muscle. Everybody who passed shook my hand, it was a holiday. Later, I would see the main avenue outside the medina filled with Moroccans shaking each others hands and talking jovially; I thought in the States that this happens mostly during blackouts and fireworks displays, and is very localized to a certain time and place (who kisses or hugs on New Year's except for during the 10 minutes to half and hour after the ball drops?), otherwise it is sponsored into a commercial event where the emphasis is shifted to individual gratification from the communal consumption of community identity. I watched people pass, clean, greet, and I waited without having to wait, no impatient stasis. Mohammed arrived and we walked to his house. I went to shake one woman's hand and she proffered (what is this that it is so natural to write "proffered", but it wouldn't come out of my mouth but once in a blue moon?) it reticently and limply. Mohammed's father gave a more willing handshake, and I didn't even bother with the woman who was turned or had turned away from me. I sat down with them and ate a bit of goat cheese, olives, pastries, and bread. We drank warmed milk with sugar. I played the child in hopes of warmer treatment. And this is perhaps one root of my agreeableness or malleability--to get others to open up and show their insides to me, which I consume and the act of which consumes me. It is the power of knowing and observing with the vulnerability of trespassing passivity and stupified awe. There were two sheep out back, and one was led around the corner of the house and pissed on the ground and its shit pellets scattered. They put out a chair for me to watch. Three men turned the other sheep on its side and held it down. One of the men cut the throat, it did not bleat. The sound of blood gurgling out in spraying pulses. A bright blue light in the eyes that was not there before or after. No joking, no thought of jokes, it was ritual. Hack the spinal cord, twist off the head, I am the spectator and the spectacle is metamorphosis, the disappearance of the life phenomenon. One man slit a hole in its back leg and, inserting a straw-like tube and blowing, inflated the headless thing into a balloon. The head was in the bucket sitting next to me, it didn't smell. They skinned the legs and hung it upside-down on an overhead hook, drawing a rope through what would be the equivalent of the human femur bones. This is when the bile came out through the neck and I realized the smell of slaughter is more the smell of bile than blood. When the men had finished skinning it, the corpse spun in mid-air like a poltergeist as the rope unwound itself. They cut it apart, taking out the organs and washing them, washingh their hands often, and washing the body. They cleaned out the intestines and washed the blood, piss, pellets, bile, and partially digested straw and grass down the drainage points. Mohammed and I went inside and he put on the television, which felt like a vacuum. There was just a great transformation enacted, a killing, and there was this stream of images and sounds from a box which played a video of Saddam Hussein being hung and Egyptian music videos and weaved our imagination with the world before us, saying, "No, that was not real. That was not you. No more than this," and we lay down in forgetfulness. I could have been anywhere in that TV room. Mohammed fell asleep and I was invited to listen to a prayer on mp3 with English subtitling while had words about Jews being evil. Then we ate. Some of the sheep was good and some was too potent and sheepy, so I tried to stick to the pieces that wouldn't make me gag without appearing to be avoiding some of the food. On our way back to the main Plaza, there were heads roasting on mattress springs laid over fires and pelts out to dry. An activity, this ritual, with death and togetherness.