During the last few weekends I have spent a good deal of time outside of Beirut. This past weekend I was with friends at an eco-lodge near Hermel in the Bekaa. Majestic, harsh, unforgiving mountain ranges. Peace, apart from the distant sounds of machine-gun fire from the Hizb'allah training camps in the hidden distance. A warming, enveloping cold. A few weekends ago, near Hammana, a different mountain range, a different non-sense: pine trees, identical and identikit villages nestling on the slopes. And last weekend (or that's at least how it seems), what is without doubt the most alluring place in Lebanon, Sannine. Isolation. Purity. Tranquility. Partly to escape from the destruction of Beirut by property speculators, and the attendant noise (so much noise) that comes with it, partly to experience cold, which is long overdue (autumn shows no signs of arriving at any point soon down here in the city by the sea), and partly just to escape from the person that I become when I'm in the city too much. There are other more important reasons, but these will suffice for now.
Coming back to the city, the domestic, to work, containing and isolating my 'dromofilia' is increasingly a struggle, a dilemma better said. I am finding fewer and fewer reasons to do so, and more and more reasons not to do so. There is only one reason why I am still here, back here. Again. Still. Yet.
"The experience which I am attempting to describe by one tentative approach after another is very precise and is immediately recognizable. But it exists at a level of perception and feeling which is probably preverbal - hence, very much, the difficulty of writing about it...By this time you are within the experience. Yet saying this implies narrative time and the essence of the experience is that it takes place outside such time. The experience does not enter into the narrative of your life..." (John Berger, Field).
Still. Yet. Again. Words which all have double-entendres of a profoundly existential variety, and which describe both a state of being and a non-state of flux. 'Still': not-yet altered, but calm; 'Yet': for-the-moment', but 'however'; 'Again': the promise of continuance, though also the ordered disorder of inertia.
'Live' and 'leave' are two words which, in English, are difficult to phonetically distinguish. I leave because I need to live; in leaving I live. To live is, often, to leave.
Berger talks, in his beautiful, poetic, metaphysical style, about the 'narrative of life.' He is right (or, at least, what he writes resonates so much with me), and sometimes this narrative, however, condenses, crystallises into just a few (dis)connected words. Still. Again. Yet. I am still in Beirut, yet, again, I'm not.
