In Golden Houses, Overlooking Gaza

Reading Tennyson in the morgue of the spirit.

I saw my first corpse up close when I was nineteen years old. My friend Rusty helped me get a nurse’s aide job in the hospital where he worked. I took it for the same reason most people get a job: I needed money. But I had also spent years feeling detached from my own body, and from the human body in general. I hoped that a workday spent lifting, dressing, feeding and washing the sick and dying would help with that.

Besides, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, so I figured there must be some benefit in it.

My first day on the job was actually my first night—working the graveyard shift in an acute diseases ward. A woman had died just as the previous shift was ending, so they left the corpse for us. The other aide told me that was a lucky break. “We’ll wash the body and take it down to the morgue,” he said, “then we’ll wait for the undertaker and help him load it into the hearse.”

I wondered how, exactly, that made us lucky. “He’ll tip us five bucks each.” By 3 am I had my five bucks.

My alienation from human physicality reflected a diseased society, one that’s grown too distant from death. Deaths in our world typically happen behind closed doors, in sterilized rooms and shadowed midnight wards. Sure, we might see a traffic fatality from time to time, as we stare from sidewalks or passing cars. Maybe we’ve been to funerals with open caskets, but those decorated cadavers aren’t corpses anymore. They’re waxwork mannequins filling the space once occupied by a corpse. That’s not death; it’s a poorly-constructed simulacrum of life, an approximated face from the uncanny valley.

The children of Gaza have seen plenty of corpses, very close. A child who’s too young to count to ten has already seen hundreds, probably thousands, of them. They’ve witnessed death in all its forms: Fast death. Slow death. Death from gunfire and from bombs. Death by fire and by smoke. Death by disease and starvation. Deaths you and I can’t even imagine.

The children of Gaza are the corpses, too, of course; they make up nearly half of the dead. In the tens of thousands—and probably much more—the children of Gaza have left a world they never had a chance to experience.

The rest of us—even the best of us—resemble the self-anesthetizing addicts in Tennyson’s poem “The Lotus Eaters,” sipping our nectar as “the bolts are hurled/far below in the valleys.” We bask in the luxury of food and shelter while

the clouds are lightly curl'd
Round ... golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

Gaza is the morgue in the American basement. It’s the dark room where our consciences lie dead and frozen. We disfigure our own souls every time we go down there, our hands out for a tip from the hand of death.

Our “bolts” are drones and rockets. This famine is made by soldiers carrying US weapons, turning away aid convoys while our government provides diplomatic cover. Our golden houses overlook the wasted land of Gaza. (We “overlook” it in both means of the word—by looking down on it from above, and by failing to take note of it as we go about our lives.)

Our “leaders” are as tongue-tied and incoherent as the worst addict. Watch the video of Pete Buttigieg here, for example. He’s supposed to be liberalism’s great communicator, but his voice and affect evoke Tennyson’s lotus eater:

His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake

Even as some politicians sidle slowly toward—maybe, someday, timidly—doing something that more closely resembles the right thing, the incoherence lingers. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, listened as her interviewer quoted a UN-backed agency which described the starvation in Gaza as a “man-made famine.” The reporter also quoted the King of Jordan as saying (correctly) that “Israel is starving Palestinians with impunity” and that is it a “war crime.”

Then the senator was asked a simple question: “Would you say that the three-month blockade by Israel of Gaza is a war crime?”

“I think is it is a shameful black mark on humanity that the world has allowed this to happen,” Shaheen answered, “and that Israel is allowing this to happen.”

No, Senator. “The world”—Earth, our home—bears no guilt for our deeds. The world includes the dead and dying children of Gaza. The only black marks on them are the ones left by American-made weapons.

The words of our politicians are waxwork faces in open coffins.

As for Israel, it—and we—are actively creating this man-made famine. To say that it (and we) are “allowing this to happen”—as if the annihilation of an entire people was mere carelessness, like leaving the fridge door open—requires a conscious and determined resistance to truth.

Politicians want to keep raising money from pro-Israel PACs and billionaires. The rest of us don’t want to upend our lives for deaths that, in the end, feel like abstractions. This, then, is the moral lethargy of our civilization:

Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil?

Meanwhile, back in that hospital all those years ago: One night I watched a dying woman, her brain ravaged by cancer, staring out the window during a thunderstorm. The trees outside the third-story ward were swaying violently. “Oh,” she said, “there’s nothing more beautiful than a storm on the sea. Just look at those waves!”

Naively, I asked Rusty if we should correct her. “No, man,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “She’s havin’ a nice cruise.” The power lines went down that night but the dying woman slept right through it.

We’re more delusional than that dying woman. We’re brain-ravaged by a terminal disease of the spirit, as strung out on our drug—indifference—as Tennyson’s Odyssean sailors are on theirs. Why make war against evil? Leave us alone. But somewhere deep inside we fear retribution. We fear justice. We’re afraid of a moment when the wires go down and the power goes out for good.

No wonder we anesthetize ourselves. No wonder our rhetoricians have grown incoherent, their ideology ever more viperous and unintelligible. Tennyson describes a

confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
... Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

That’s us.

Palestine must be saved. But the West? There’s nothing left for this hemorrhagic empire but trouble on trouble, pain on pain. As the poem says:

Let what is broken so remain.

But, for God’s sake, let’s try to save as many children as we can before we go.

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NOTES:

The poem’s actual title is “The Lotos-eaters,” but that spelling confuses modern readers.

Tennyson wrote some appallingly racist lines in some of his poems (e.g., “Locksley Hall”) but he was often able to channel the vibration of something beautiful and true—the way some broken radios will still pick up distant transmissions when the weather conditions are right. The rest is static.

I use the term “civilization” advisedly when discussing the West. I’m pretty sure you already knew that.

If you’re wondering whether I ever got over my “alienation from human physicality,” I’m happy to report that I did. That job helped immensely.

Re Democratic politicians: The tactician in me says, “I'm glad we're making some progress with them; we need to encourage this shift, however long it takes.” But my heart wants to scream and condemn their sin against humanity. I suspect that it is augury, a foreshadowing of their empire’s collapse. Thomas Jefferson, steeped in sin as he was, put it best: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

Re “eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars”: We no longer use celestial navigation, of course. Our “pilot-stars” are drones, Five Eyes satellites, and military AI. All this technological advancement has left our human eyes dimmer than ever.

LINKS:

Block the Bombs to Israel
Make Your State a Nuclear Free Zone
Call Congress: Let Aid In, Stop Forced Famine
Support UNRWA