Little Stories, Big Picture Illustrating with words, describing with photographs.

Gold

Gold is the power of the history of the city. It has a golden age, a golden glow, and golden bodies. Gold is why people come, gold is why people return, gold is why Beirut exists. Its golden memories give the city its life. These memories are so pervasive and so convincing and so obscuring that everyone—everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest man—can recall the glory days as if they had lived them. Foreigners too recall their own glory days—the line of taxis waiting outside the Commodore, where correspondents would drink Black Label and wait for disaster to strike. The specter of Beirut’s formerly high caliber of war continues to lure journalists to this day.

They call the 1960s the "golden years," which fits. Photos from back then are sepia. The storytellers say that old Beirut imported more gold and jewels than any other foreign product. Its people tell stories of scents and sounds, carnal stories that fit our empty spaces like tailored puzzle pieces, tuned to our deepest and guiltiest wants.

We all know personally the qualities of the city’s modern gold: it’s the baking warm glow of the sandstone of the French Embassy, peeking distantly through the flowers bubbling over its walls. It is the glint of sunlight on the Mediterranean Sea and of excavated Corinthian columns. It is also the golden glow of burning phosphorous, the golden glow of whiskey, the golden glow of wealth and celebrity temporarily gracing its shores, the golden glow of stately homes and beautiful streets and distant mountains.

But its color has always just been a façade; it’s always been dirty. When the next war comes, the storytellers will look back at these years, our years, through the golden lens of optimism and see only the north side of Corniche al Mazraa, see only the 6 pm glow of the setting Mediterranean sun and hear only the soft, belly-shaking conversation of harmless men sitting on vegetable crates in Hamra’s endearingly dirty streets. They won’t remember the mountains of trash pushing into the sea, they will forget the unpleasantness south of the city. They’ll forget the bandanaed gangs of bored unemployed boys zooming around on their mopeds and causing occasional death. We’ll forget all that, too, because those too uneducated to write down bad memories will be the first to be killed or deadened, leaving this weighty task to the privileged few whose understanding of the city evolved from the commanding view from their twentieth story balcony gleaming shiny white tile from the sweat of seven Filipina maids.

Like a phosphorescent flare streaking down from heaven during an Israeli attack, Beirut glows gold. It is bedecked with gold like its women are with jewelry, like its buildings are with pockmarks, like its beaches are with trash.

So when all of what we know is gone, they will remember the golden time. They will remember themselves and how their hopes and dreams were right, and they will remember that everyone else fucked everything up because they just didn’t realize that it should have been done this way, and it will go on again and again.

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