Part 1: The Scene
War flashes off and on like lightning, like a face that gets punched into blackout every forty years. Families in Lebanon don’t wait on the floral couches in their living rooms for the next bomb to explode. They continue getting ready for work, catching the bus, cooking big pots of marinated vegetables and hand-mixed lamb and beef, check under bubbling lids to test a forkful of marigold-scented rice. If schools are still open, they pack the kids up, kiss them on the tops of their heads, hope today isn’t the day. Saying: I’ll explain everything later. Not now. Don’t forget your book and your breakfast and your coat.
Part 2: The Problem
Until a shock ripples in. Whatever it is shakes the windows, rattles the cabinets, the stained wine glasses and stacks of colored bowls, turns the dog from dream into alarm. It can be anything—a bomb, wet hellish wind, intruders, an ambulance crowding your ears with red light.
How are we in catastrophe? We panic, we think inwardly and outwardly. We wonder about our neighbors briefly, then tunnel inward. How can I save myself? What is there to save? How can this be it? To think of the heart stopping. Of the muscle that has been endlessly squeezing like a fist since the moment your mother heard the whoosh of it in a small, fluorescent-lit office lying on a sheet of wax paper…
Part 3: The Home
Inside, all homes are more or less the same if they are functional and efficient enough—the central room for sitting, the bathroom, the kitchen or cooking space, and the beds. Our whole lives are set here; all the human drama, all our anguish and joy settle into these spaces like fine dust—our whole exhausting, rambunctious, tiny private lives. These rooms function as little containers where we keep and grow ourselves. Night sheds into morning, which sheds into night. We’d love to be bored and restless if we’d slow ourselves to that bliss.
In any home around the world, if it’s healthy enough, if there’s vitality in the wood, in the stairs, in the stovetop peeling with bits of dried carrot and a splash of dried soup, if there’s life in there—a hint of trash that needs to go out, dog and cat hair, a sense of urgency in the coat closet and around the windows, and a magnetic pull to the furniture—it’s safe here.
Part 4: The Family
The Lebanese family getting ready in the morning for school and work as the bombs careen again through the sky—each person a potential harbinger of death by detonation—has many sides and angles, like any family. It looks one way from one direction, but step to the side, go under and over and behind, and it’s not empty anywhere, no hollow spots or pockets. Each aspect is alive: the worried child, the overthinking mother, the fraudulently calm father.
Part 5: The Cell
But underneath it all, they are squirming with parts only the biologists and doctors among us know of—named and categorized. Apart from their own hurried lives and kitchens, spouses and children, schools and threats of terrorism and full-blown world war, scientists named the small folded organelles in our cells after themselves—like the Golgi Apparatus—a squishy amphitheater-shaped organelle in the eukaryote cell responsible for processing protein. An Austrian Empire scientist in 1910 named that microscopic part of me, of us. A part of us belongs to him like a star, like one named star among a scattered set of galaxies, all of them approximately infinite, mysterious, dangerous, and cruel.
Part 6: The Present
We sit now somewhere in the middle of panic and oblivion, a silver glint, a wink. Personal power, personal grit—that’s the new god, the new cult, the new world power. We’ll thrive in imagining what someone else must be going through, what it feels like to live in a body that is not our own. To understand similarity mixed with the unknown and to accept the difference.
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