Aloka: Sanskrit for Illumination and Light.

 

He 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  were skeletal against the sunrise. This morning there was no ice and frost on the old sash windows. A week ago they were opaque and ice formed where the needle wind found its way into the cracks. 

This morning he turned, as he usually did, 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 was 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 dress 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 Andrew of Brooklyn, probably  Williamsburg, narrow cobblestone streets and storefronts and brick tenements in rows in the shadow of the  the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge from Manhattan Island 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. Andrew had ridden his fat tire black bicycle with the wire basket strapped to the handle bars along these streets, the  beautiful backroads of Brooklyn. 

It was a neighborhood built in the eighteenth century in the time of Queen Victoria whose reign covered eighteen different U.S, presidents. Just like in Britain and Australia, these solid and handsome Victorian brick building in Hassan’s art, were for working families  building the future and wondrous Manhattan.

This morning it struck Andrew 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 a 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.  

“Arabs are not usually very good swimmers”, Andrew mused and promised himself to avoid that thought in future and  moved on quickly. 

Andrew loved Hassan and purchased at least half a dozen of his paintings. He was a fellow traveller and became like a younger brother. Hassan would come to the storefront where Andrew lived on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn, with fresh paintings and drawings under his arm and they drank tea, coffee and beer and smoked street marijuana. And then Hassan would show a painting and Andrew usually bought one, sometimes more, because he loved the paintings and he loved the story and he loved Hassan. 

It was a picture book called Hassan Everywhere, an androgynous character called Hassan on a journey from the Middle East, floating in a fantastical world, bringing peace, love and whimsy to New York City. It was Hassan’s alter ego;  as “Andrew” in this story, is my alter ego. 

Every morning Andrew woke to this painting and it was a great comfort. Andrew never heard Hassan speak a word of hatred. 

Today his homeland  is flattened and the Epstein Class plan hotels and casinos built on blood and bones and skulls on the edge of the Mediterranean.  And Israeli  settlers recruited in Brooklyn come to steal land and old stone homes of Arab ancestors  and they rip old 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 and he reached for his 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.”

Andrew 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 cardboard from Amazon boxes and junk mail to get things started. The cat watched and rubbed against his ankle as the flames took and licked and rose and he went to take a shower.  After all it was Writer’s Group today.  And then he made coffee. 

And then off course he 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 for peace.

Aloka Sanskrit for illumination and light,

and I feel better.