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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The warm shuffle of a DC crunch
Saturday, January 17, 2009
TO BE in Washington that weekend was to feel cold like you've never felt before. Dry American January cold: the cold that cracks the skin on your knuckles and stretches your face taut so that smiling hurts. The ground on the mall was frozen earth and the grass was yellow, dead, and flattened. The fountains were off and the room I was staying in was a little too cold and a little too dependent on frozen firewood from a too-bent urban tree that had been felled by the city on the sidewalk in Columbia Heights. It was cold.
But it was also warm, in a way Washington never really is. Gone were the vast spaces between the glass and steel set back impersonally from the wide Washington streets, replaced by gushing masses of people bundled and shuffling from one place to another. The heat given off was human.
And the scene on the Metro was even warmer. The last Saturday night of the Bush era was one of celebration and calm excitement. On the packed platforms, the fictional scene of ten thousand New Yorker covers played out in real life: packed, integrated, tuxedoed and glamorous; black, white, young, old, dressed to the nines in gleaming satin and fur and top hats, off to their respective parties and celebrations. The faces of the passengers told the story better than anything else - excited eye contact with friends and neighbors, knowing smiles between total strangers. The smell of starch and perfume wafted a little each time the doors opened and people exchanged, off to who knows where or to who knows what, framed by that wonderful soaring shadowy world of the capital train.
On Sunday night I went to Annapolis, where I realized finally that certain things meant to maintain the air of great estimation can fade under the scrutiny of proximity. Not to say that my respect for anything there diminished, but rather, it was brought down to Earth by increased understanding and friendship. I understood that my own perceptions had been and could be swayed by mannerisms and pageantry and that what was hiding beneath the façade was actually better, more human, less patronizing. We returned to Washington with two sailors and drank until four in the morning, stumbled around, teeth chattering, until the sun came up, demanded a roasted pig, and kept going strong until the inauguration the next day.
It was through that clear lens that I looked up through the cuttingly cold air on that Tuesday morning as Barack Obama placed his hand on that old book. "He's got to be normal too," I thought. "He's got to look out on this crowd of millions of people and think to himself, 'How on Earth am I here?'"
Everyone else seemed to be thinking the same thing, with faces most unlike the ones I saw on the Metro: they were weary, tired, crying, smiling, entranced. I think some of us were stuck in that slack-jawed moment where eyes slide out of focus, unsure if what we were seeing was real life. From his high perch I thought Obama might even see the Earth's curvature, so great was the mass of people there, sharing our heat and sharing the moment so many of us never thought would come to pass.