Loathsome furniture and objects in use

Everyday objects in the zone of interest, plus a bridge

There is something unnerving about standing under a bridge, like peering up at the underside of a huge insect.

I am thinking about the presence of structures, furniture, tools. How things facilitate in a way that seems ordinary, the general work and movement of our days. I won't say more on the bridge above, as I am writing a piece on it for a journal - I can link to it later. But thoughts on the bridge (with which I have a personal link) have made think back to the strange reaction I had to the zone of interest - already widely talked about online as a brilliant, brutal film on the spaces around the holocaust, how it was maintained and the daily life of those who without much passion or self insight, it seems, brought about that time unfathomable mass death.

It was the furniture, the rooms, the tools, that made this film so sickening to me. I understand that rightly the soundscapes of screams, shots, industrial noises of the machinery of death set alongside the seemingly blissful days of the Hoss family have been highlighted as one of the strongest ways of bringing into focus the dissonance of unbearable cruelty, but while watching, it was for me those heavy tables and chairs and wardrobes, furniture I have seen through my travels on the continent and even in my grandparents home, that heightened the disturbance. Everything was new, the best quality, and deeply resonating cursedness. I still don't quite know why. I understand why the fur coat, stolen from a woman in the camps, would discomfort - skins, ripped away, the inherent violence, the matter of fact way it is tried on, like one might with a potential purchase at a vintage shop. But why did the vanity table make me feel so ill? It is a side note of experience in the glare of this brilliant, awful film. So little happens but so much and the light ricochets off the furniture of the past which is still in effect, and we are participants on a voyeurism of banality - you see , I have not grasped it in any deep way, but i will continue to let it more within.

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A bridge was built, utterly functional. I know one man who worked on it. He is dead now. The bridge does not lead me into the past, but its presence resonates with the brutalities of the now. And how attention fades, and how it endures. Palestine is something I find hard to speak of. The power of my capacities are so insufficient. That is why I do not speak of it. Also a sense that if I tried, it would only serve as an attempt to balm myself against helplessness. This is not to say I do not admire those who do find ways to take a public stand. I think donations and political pressure are the very minimum we can do, and that there are others giving all that they have, their very being, to resist destruction. But what can I do, not only to witness the horror. To invite the beauty of a living culture that is at threat too, into the heart (if such a thing has any worth, I do not know, perhaps only to myself?)

I want to think of Palestinian people doing everything things. Reading a book. Taking a photograph on their phone of some friends, a nice looking cake. Checking the price of something in a supermarket. Waiting for a bus. Objects and tools and infrastructure being used for their unafflicted purpose.

I fear a pile of shoes, I fear remembrance.

But ultimately my fears are unimportant. I send money and blessings (whatever they might amount to)

Humanity, little objects passed between our hands. A bowl of strawberries, a graffitied bridge, I love you, I cannot say how much.