The children of Gaza and functional extinction
Gaza is probably already gone. We are merely seeing it going.
One of the saddest Authors I read is, ironically, Douglas Adams. The story where he runs with dogs that ignore him, needing him to be there so that he could be ignored, always evoked in me a profound bitterness. Love is clumsy, brutal, invisible. You need to have the sensibility of Douglas Adams to see such things. The saddest thing he wrote, in his otherwise rib-cracking style, is Last Chance to See, on animals on their way to extinction. It is a very funny book, of this style of humour that people call black humour. Vonnegut is also classified in this category, dark Sci-Fi humour. I think there is no Sci-Fi and the dark humour is also more of a metaphysical grip than jokes. Heller was writing humour. Some of his jokes were even funny. Vonnegut was munching our dried brain, like nuts through the thick mandibula of a supernatural iguana, seeing through space and time. In a still completely different style, Dieudonné viewed the problem in his «spéctacle» "Dépot de bilan", revisiting the last minutes of godly and evil figures in all their likeliness, in their actual fusion in their final moment.
An ending is always excruciating—not quite of pain, because an event that deep and irreversible also transcends you and touches something that makes actual pain irrelevant or transmuted into something else—but excruciatingly ravishing. It takes something out of you, it is like a birth but in death, a renewal but of everything except yourself, abandoned to your solitude, the last act of everything that could have been, that should have been, that might have been, that will, from now on, never be.
Most terrible maybe is this suspended limbo when what is about to disappear is still there. This is the dying who still has his eyes open in his hospital bed, even at night, this is the few last Baiji dolphins in the Yangtze, too few to perpetuate the species. This is Gaza in the last months of 2024. The terminally sick is still breathing, maybe even still smiling, the dolphin still swimming, the children still running among the rubbles, but they are all already gone. They will be in a few minutes, a few years, a few resolutions of the security council. This is terrible because it seems so easy to think that they are not dead—indeed, they are not quite yet—but the imminence, ineluctability and gravity of the turnover makes its
Just as vertigo arises from the appeal of actually jumping, the only way to avoid this irremediable loss would be to vanish oneself before the actual event, to annihilate the death of the other by one's own.
Whence the metaphysical grip.
There is a technical term for this suspended death, not quite already there but too much on its way to be circumvented either way. It is called functional extinction.
This is the state of Gaza now, along with the Northern white rhinos, the Barbary lions or the Ivory-billed woodpeckers, Gaza is extinct. Functionally extinct. It still has people awaiting to be victims, to be removed by exportation or by annihilation, it still has life, children, hopes, pain and prayers, but all this is already gone anyway, it will not get to see our tomorrow, it will never be the same or even remotely similar.
Most people not in favour of what is going on, under whatever possible rationalization they can find, certainly cope with the atrocity of their being—quoting Dard once again—less than an accomplice but more than a witness, by waiting for the nightmare to be over, for the crisis to pass and for the situation to come back, if not to normal, at least to what it was before. As if one could wait for a genocide to be over, for a crime to pass... Anyway, most people probably find consolation or an excuse in the belief this will come to an end. But it already came to an end. That of Gaza itself, and of its children, who will never be again Palestinians.
