Written by Orane Bissada
Beyond foundational, technical time, organic and symbolic rot is all that remains. In these Imperial Bedrooms, we are Less than Zero. In the words of Nishida Kitaro, “In the physical world time can be thought of as reversible; in the biological world, time is irreversible.”
This is decomposition. This structure is crumbling and decaying. I went to Old College and touched a brick, and it felt soft, spongey, and my fingers were left with a dark green film that I cannot wash away. The lawn is spattered with clear squares, and the grass under is also yellowed and rotting. It has not seen the air for more than a month because of the tents that suffocated it. I close my eyes and when I open them, there is bulbous and organic ooze that is spilling from Mathieson’s office, staining the building like lava out of a volcano until it reaches my feet.
There is tar everywhere, and my feet are stuck in it, but I don’t want to leave anyways.
My friend said something recently and it stuck with me. She said: Israel has turned my people into animals, and all I can think about now is how people who look like my mother, my cousins, my aunties, my grandmother could be stripped of their humanity because how could they not under such living conditions? Can you even call these living conditions? The term living implies life can be sustained there. But all I see is rot.
Molasses fills the lawn of Old College and people from the administration are at complete ease, navigating the thick goo of decay with grace, swivelling like snakes as their clothes get drenched and heavy. Their bodies morph and reorganise their organicity to better adapt to this system of total, complete and utter rot. In Balfour’s land, everything is less than zero and that includes Their humanity.
It's easy to sit and write and denounce and create ‘art’ from pseudo-reflections of the nature of things, but that may be a road to nowhere. Trying to sit and write, for my own ego, or maybe for the genuine (?) thought we all have that we are protesting through the vessel of our creativity (although I do not know if that is possible), trying to sit and write will not act as a preservative that will stop structures like Old College to rot in their colonialism as the moldy bricks it is made of are products from the slave trade. The cost of these seemingly pristine urban symbols is more than human lives; it is the vital energy of those who our defined as 'subject' by those who have the power to be 'objects' in our past and current system of pathological oppression. These bricks are the ones corroding and restructuring in Balfour’s office, and they infiltrate the bloodstreams of those who have the power to administrate, those like C. Harmon.
When I turn around, I cannot see anything else than tar, which starts congealing; yet it is moving and speaking. There is a world where beyond our concepts such as liberty, justice, colonialism, retribution, there is emptiness (the Heart Sutra says: form is emptiness, emptiness is form). It is the world beyond this zero, this nothingness and interconnectedness that can generate benevolent compassion and genuine love in constant cyclical relation between this ultimate One. To access this beyond-zero, though, the decay of our world needs to reach its purpose.
All these structures we have built, all these symbols that signal empires past and present, these ecosystems such as 40 George Square cannot only be renamed to lose their power. Words exist in a realm beyond us, and it is possible for a building to be both 40 George Square and David Hume Tower. No, these material proofs of our ideologies and foundational beliefs need to fulfill the purpose of their current rotting. They need to decompose and rejoin the Earth; they need start eating themselves in an act of cathartic cannibalism; anthropophagy but it’s made of metal. Once they have regained the primordial unity that comes before construction and manifestation, then they may truly be called dead and powerless. The energy that was threatening to burst from these bricks, this energy that came from the unfair price of the life and justice of the oppressed to benefit the oppressor, this energy of supreme power imbalance and absurd hierarchy, this energy may be returned to its mother and cease to haunt us all.
This is why Old College is rotting in my dreams, because everything is spilling out of this overstuffed structure and symbol, as the people within it do not mind drowning in their outdated and hateful ideals that are nestled deep within their cells and rearranges their DNA so that they do not realise how obvious their decay is.
من النهر إلى البحر ستتحرر فلسطين
Comments