Aloka: Sanskrit for Illumination and Light.

I awoke and the gray cat was curled in a bundle beside the bed and the sun had not yet risen but silver light was coming and the line of pines and skinny oaks  was skeletal against the sunrise. This morning there was no ice and frost on the old wooden sash windows. A week ago they were opaque and ice formed where the needle wind found its way into the cracks. 

This morning I turned, as I usually do, to  gaze a minute or two on Hassan Hourani’s painting, hung on the wall in a two by three foot  black frame. The painting is Hassan’s  journey from Palestine to New York. Hassan is a character in his own paintings  and in this one lays across a steel trestle bridge in a long yellow robe that conforms in color with the peeling remains of the unpainted plaster and floral wallpaper on the bedroom wall. Hassan stretches across the bridge like a cat amid crooked tenement buildings with yellow lit windows and television aerials and lamp posts and yellow light. 

It reminded me of Brooklyn, probably  Williamsburg, narrow cobblestone streets and storefronts and brick tenements in rows in the shadow of the  the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge connecting Manhattan curving over the East River heading east out into Queens and Long Island. It was wild and changing territory and Arabs and Jews and Polish and Spanish and Irish and artists and drug dealers and merchants and the Mafia and Pops Popular Clothing along the waterfront. I’d ridden my fat tire black bicycle with the wire basket strapped to the handle bars along these streets, the  beautiful backroads of Brooklyn.  

This morning it struck me that the black frame was unintentionally  appropriate because Hassan was dead. He died in the Mediterranean Sea off a beach in Gaza before the whole country was bombed back to the stone age, as they say. Hassan and his friends swam in the sea and his cousin was caught in a rip and Hassan swam out to save him but they both drowned. He was twenty-eight years old, a young Palestinian artist on the verge of fame.  

I loved Hassan and purchased at least a half dozen of his paintings when we knew each other in Brooklyn. He was a fellow traveller and became like a younger brother. Hassan came to my storefront on Vanderbilt Avenue with fresh paintings and drawings under his arm and he’d show me and we’d drink tea, coffee and beer together and smoke street marijuana. Usually I bought one, sometimes more, because I loved the paintings and I loved the story and I loved Hassan. 

He was drawing a children’s book called Hassan Everywhere, a story about an androgynous character called Hassan, from the Middle East, floating through a fantastical world bringing peace and love. It was his alter ego. Every morning I woke up to this painting on the wall and it was a great comfort. Hassan had twenty-two brothers and sisters and his father had three wives and Hassan often laughed about that. And I  never a heard him speak a word of hatred. 

Today his homeland  is flattened and the Epstein Class plan hotels and casinos on the edge of the Mediterranean, built on blood and bones and broken skulls. And Israeli  settlers recruited in the suburbs of Brooklyn come to steal land and old stone homes of the ancestors  and rip ancient olive trees from the ground and it happens on live tv and it never stops. 

So here we are, two generation beyond the Jewish Holocaust and Zionist Jews are behaving like Nazis. How is that possible, I thought and I reached for my iPhone and asked ChatGTP to define the word.

“Extreme nationalism. Superiority. Deeply racist or anti-Semitic, (a category increasingly unclear). Suppression of political ideas and opposition. Expansionist. 

It lead to World War Two.”

I climbed out of bed. The cat was now at the top of the stairs waiting to go down to watch the fire ritual and the food bowl filled again. And so it proceeded, first the fire and that didn’t take much because the wood was well seasoned and there was plenty of junk mail  and cardboard from Amazon boxes to get things started. The cat watched and rubbed against my ankle as the flames took and licked and rose and I went to take a shower.  After all it was Writer’s Group today.  

And then I made coffee and checked the dough, proofing overnight for the artisan bread baking later. And then of course I picked up the iPhone again and found this text from a friend, a retired librarian wouldn’t you know:

“Am reading Irving Stone’s book of Abigail and John Adam’s lives- such parallel times, the pre-revolution upheaval and what followed and this I just read this morning- The Adam’s family is back in Braintree, after the tumult of the Boston Massacre.  John is saying to Abigail: 

“We live in an age of ferment. 

The best we can hope for are periods of calm. 

I doubt we will ever know tranquil years. 

The yeast is all about us, 

changing the air we breathe, 

the ideas we absorb, 

the values and loyalties that are being baked up larger than life 

from the flat dough we put in the oven 

when we were young.”

Keep your good bread rising, Andrew”.  

_____

I’m so, so sad for this world.  

So I think of the monks 

and Aloka, 

the dog they adopted and brought from India 

to walk across America for peace,  

Aloka Sanskrit for illumination and light,

and I feel better.