One silly detail that never fails to bring tears to my eyes in the constant flow of pictures that the modern world bring to us from the Gaza massacres, are murdered children draped in their children's clothings.
Although I never cared for toyish decorations on tots' outfits, when these adorn a blood-soaked garment that itself drapes the corpse of a child, this awakes in me some unquenchable despair and sorrows that other pictures no longer draw out from my dried-out soul, following the sad but maybe necessary fact that one gets used, and resolved, to everything. Well, not to this. A most incongruous mix of childhood and eternity, a grotesque mélange of innocence and crime, a blend of what should become and what is too late, the merging of humanity with inhumanity.
The first time I saw such an image of dead children, murdered as collateral victims, I got hypnotized by the horror of finding myself an accomplice of humanity committing a crime against itself. It pushed me to write something, as if to expiate: Ô malheureux mortels! Ô terre déplorable!
I am not a very good writer so the exact feeling is not fully captured and got lost even to myself. I, today, merely remember the shock at the time, but am no longer quite sure about its exact nature. I remember it was strong, and new. At this time, it was not usual to see our contemporaries, our "allies", what's more, murder children. Reading my self of over twelve years ago, I see I was attributing the horror to the criminals rather than to the circumstances of their crime. Although this self psychoanalysis was probably correct, I believe there is something I forgot to record.
Nowadays, similar images, in profusion, no longer affect me the way they did back then. It is not that I am indifferent, but I am not shaken anymore. Indeed, we grow up to get accustomed to everything: pain in every part of the body, losing sight, tinnitus, loss of smell, of taste... Barjavel was saying that with age, the brain gets sharper but the desire to use it diminishes in greater proportion. So everything is going.
But some things lingers more than others. Although the rage or anger is gone, it has been replaced by desilusion rather than by apathy. At such times, I was realizing the great hypocrisy of our "democracies" and that what we were explained was good, was actually evil, and vice versa. Such an awakening is deeply unsettling. This feeling is gone. It got replaced by something else. I also got used to this something else.
But I now realize there is this something that seems to linger more, that I certainly felt then, and can still feel now. It is not that anger or outrage or exasperation, which got replaced by frustration, indignation and resentment. What seems to be more steady, is the weeping of the soul, the crying of the spirit, something beyond me.
In my childhood, I could cry at everything. At a dried leave in autumn, at the mere memory of the sloshing of a row of tall trees at dusk spotted the day before, at the time I was spending, alone, waiting for the bus to bring me back home from the lycée in very hot Saturdays (we had school on Saturday mornings back then), when I had spent too much time on my own and everybody was already gone. I was crying at the stillness of space and time with me stuck or forgotten in one of its corners, crying, as the rest of humanity was keeping on. Oh the solitude. I used to cry at the titles of books, such as Bernanos' Les grands cimetières sous la lune, which can still make me cry, because it confronts you, in one sentence, to all that is lonesome and sad, and Bernanos could capture such insights.
I could cry at everything. And was doing so.
Frédéric Dard, in one of my favourite's texts of his—Je le Jure—relates the precious advice he got from Léon Charlaix (en):
Lorsque tu as des chagrins il faut te hâter de pleurer, car la peine ne se conserve pas. Il m’a expliqué pourquoi, dans la vie, il ne fallait pas avoir honte de ses larmes. Qu’il fallait au contraire pleurer beaucoup et généreusement. Ce n’était
pas chez lui une hygiène, mais un acte de foi en l’homme.
I do believe this, I believe that crying is an act of faith in humankind. From Dard, and like him, I awoke at this advice from Charlaix and did my bit of crying. Unlike Dard and Charlaix, I cry alone, and try to repress or hide it, if not. Elena often asked me this: Are you crying? I had to pretend my eyes were aching. The right one does, it helped me save face more than once.
But then you age, and you stop crying. Or it does not come easy, not from a leaf, a landscape or a memory. You have to cry as you would pray: with concentration, efforts, dedication. Who has time for this? So I stopped crying.
I stopped crying consciously. I did not stop spontaneously. And although murdered children don't affect me the way they used to, although the rage is gone, I believe this lament of the soul—which I did not see or overlooked when looking at the little Afghan victims—was and is still there. Along with the fury, was the holy embrace of our condition. Which you seal with tears.
And although murdered children don't revolt me anymore—and I feel sorry for that, and whomever is not guilty of this too can throw me all their stones—I can still cry from the depth of my heart at children when I remember who they are. And, it's a silly detail, but their clothings seems to be a clue big enough that even me takes notice.
This silly detail can bring me closer to those who are so far away on their path to sacrifice, on their Via Crucis, so far in sight in the horror, that we almost do not see them anymore although we see pictures of their martyrdom. This silly detail, a drawing of a polar bear, of a Disney character, of anything that has no connection to blood and death can awake me suddenly and make me realize, maybe along the subconscious lines of: they were probably giggling at the decoration, this was surely their favourite tee-shirt, they were playing with the character left on their clothes in a world where they were otherwise left alone. Sometimes, it seems to be the only way to indeed attract the attention of people, in the most sordid way
.
They were children as our children are, those children which do not know hunger, the pain of losing their loved ones, brothers, sisters, mother, or this primeval fear under the noise and heat of military onslaught.
It is a silly detail. But one that can bring me back to the path of redemption, of communion, of realization of what we are and what we do, in a world where there is no time and in a society where there is no room left for humanity.
I think this can also be because I would normally despise such goofy drawings and juvenile fetish, especially if they smell of marketing. But how can you despise something when it covers the sepulture that became holy? It suddenly becomes a sacred garment. I believe this sudden grip to reality is because this makes a violent metaphor for what we are doing: mixing what is puerile and immature with what is holy and transcendent.