I look out my window at the recently renovated apartment building across the street and wonder what it would look like after shelling. I picture shredded window blinds behind shattered glass. Brick veneer flayed open. The intimate furnishings of private interiors exposed.
I ride the long Q Street metro escalator to catch my train
and I imagine the residents from blocks around who would fill its platforms
with sleeping bags and pet carriers, bracing as the booms echo down the long
concrete passage.
I watch CNN every evening and listen to the correspondents
talk about the cities—who is holding them, which ones may fall--and I think of
the Illiad. Unlike its epic cousin,
the Odyssey, which is full of weird
characters and magical adventures, the Illiad
is just a relentless battle narrative, one ensanguinated page after another.
I remember a quote I often share in the lectures I give about
the origin of cities: “Any destruction of a city is equivalent to a
retrogression to chaos.” That’s from The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of
Religion, Mircea Eliade’s illumination of the two ways of being human. Chaos,
in this usage, isn’t mere mess, as in “my studio this semester is just chaos.”
Chaos here is formlessness, the nightmare of a world without reason, without any
consensual order, in this case one laid waste by one man’s mad ambition.
Since the war began a month ago, I’ve been trying to find
language to help me unpack my thoughts and make something meaningful from them.
New words are often born out of new situations, when the old ones are
insufficient, but it seems as if we’re still excavating words from the past to
digest this new horror because we can’t just keep repeating “WTF.” I learned a
new word from the Washington Post that
I previously had no need to know: irredentist,
which is someone who wants to reclaim territory they insist was once theirs. It’s
a young word, as words go, first used over a century ago in the territorial nationalism
that led us into the first World War, so it’s doubly potent.
