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The Sword 1 I couldn’t tell them they were stupid. Some maternal imperative forbade. Now if I had been told, it occurred to me later, A day will come when you too will be slow, ill-read, fearful and inept with new technology, excessive about babies, insistent, repetitive, maundering; or You must learn that reality is a narrow jagged despairing caecum, not the endless glad expansion of the self, and you must learn it desperately soon, and this is how you learn; or, in the rhythms of another class, You’re eating these people’s food, enjoying their smelly warmth, and therefore everything agrees with you and you agree with everything, I wouldn’t have agreed: I would have shaped one beautiful pure silent hate and become it, as I did anyway, but at least it would have been for an *idea. Instead it was precisely ideas and their articulation that were barred, what I felt impossible to be felt and thus not having been. Eventually I learned a modicum of diplomacy, i.e., a mutually painless sloughing off of fools; how to locate points of interest in discourses with none; the ineradicable distaste behind the gilded shuttered eyes of the compassionate Buddha. 2 In my mind he wears the familiar metallic smile that admits, forgets, and offers nothing, the head as always to one side. In my mind, but only there, he’s cornered. Looks at his watch as if to say *Art – the smile holds – *may be timeless but I have things to do*. The same things. Five terms in Congress, Defense, CEO, Vice-President, the National Energy Policy Development Group, the Project for a New American Century – these things are life. Life is resumés. And from the look of the cell where I’ve put him he can tell I have none; it is a kind of nothingness. There will be no trial, let alone torture – these things don’t happen – and history, which always ultimately governs from the center, will automatically pardon. Death is a consequence of a weak heart; but the act of power, repeated and endlessly savored, carries one over, is itself heaven. *Even as you write* – the laugh is surprisingly genial and boyish – *I am being forgotten*. 3 A philosopher who thought of signing the petition to boycott Israeli universities is *there. Under protest, as it were: the hipness, cleanness, art-walls, buzz of the place are at the expense of people deprived of (their) land and medical care, made to wait in long lines, beaten, etc. (The same could be said of any café in the West, but that makes it worse here.) And the tank-tops, flip-flops, and general tough sexiness only make the visitor hope these kids feel somehow guilty. In large part they do: they’re students at the university where he has come to talk about Values (in a New Millennium, in Crisis, etc.). He’s doing it now, at a table with local profs whose endless “ehhhhhhhhhhhhh” at every hesitation annoys him: it seems either to insist on, or refuse, closure. A Foucauldian fondly derides a self-confessed “secular Talmudist”; both strike the visitor as provincial. Outside a boy guns a van across the square and into the café. His family, spread among Gaza, Amman, and Long Beach, has money; he studied awhile, but found nothing worth his candle except the promised virgins and the prayer he shouts as he detonates. The thesis of one scattered prof abides: There are no values. There are only sides. 4 For the rare blessed, the light that we in self-defense call beautiful doesn’t hurt at evening. Seems less – as time itself is less than destiny – than love they hurtle towards, than happiness. But if the years, whether long or short, have done their common work, you stand by a high office window-wall and plot distress for those below. Inadvertently, it may be – you may wish them well, or even intend good, but what are intentions? Wanting at all costs not to dissolve in that light, nor hear its single comment. Faxes, phones, the bell that announces email drown it out; the grateful glare of ceiling tiles is brighter; and people on the pavement scatter to offices serving yours, or at worst from police and soldiers summoned at your call. Imagining you once stood beneath a castle wall with men whose methods were direct, were yours, beside you, the morbid hour merely a delay before night’s battle and triumphant day, you know the light was always there – is pain, free of the dead and seeking you again.