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“How do you get over a failure?”
“I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private. I failed with you, for example, but no one posted an online review about it, unless you did. I fail with my wife and with my son. I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.”
“So, what do I do?” she asked.
“You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”
“I don’t know if I have a better game in me than Both Sides,” Sadie said. “I don’t know if I can be that vulnerable again.”
The drive ended up taking four times as long as it usually did, but Zoe did make her flight. It was the first time Marx had ever truly been broken up with. He knew he should be devastated, but what he felt was relief. The relationship, without him noticing, had been the longest one he had ever had. He had seen no reason to end it. He had never tired of coming home to their place and finding her naked, playing some new instrument. Why end something that worked over the vague notion that he could love someone more deeply than he loved Zoe, who was by every measure fantastic? It was a strange moment in Marx’s personal development. He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet, and he considered it a sign of his own maturity that he had not thought to end things with Zoe. But his disdain for his former itinerancy had made it so he could not recognize the reasons a person should stay.
“Marx was a fantastic actor,” Sadie defended him.
“He’s better at what he’s doing now,” Watanabe-san insisted.
Sadie and Marx took a cab back to the hotel. “Do you mind what your father said?” she asked him.
“No,” Marx said. “I loved being a student actor. I was fully devoted to it, and now I’m not. I think if I’d become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”
Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.
She walked through another gate.
It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)
She walked through another gate.
What was a gate anyway?
A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn’t have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love. “Shouldn’t you wash that?” Sadie asked.
“It’s so funny you should say this, because if you were one of my students, you’d be wearing your pain like a badge of honor. This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them. I sound like I’m making fun, and I am a little, but I don’t mean to be. They’re so different from us, really. Their standards are higher; they call bullshit on so much of the sexism and racism that I, at least, just lived with. But that’s also made them kind of, well, humorless. I hate people who talk about generational differences like it’s an actual thing, and here I am, doing it. It doesn’t make sense. How alike were you to anyone we grew up with, you know?”
“If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?” Sam asked.
How do you keep on fighting when everything is lost? Ask a Palestinian. A Palestinian is someone who is wading knee-deep in rubble. Palestinian politics is always already post-apocalyptic: it is about surviving after the end of the world and, in the best case, salvaging something out of all that has been lost.
What is the relationship between Palestine and the rest of the world? In Global Palestine, John Collins argues that rather than an exception, a stubbornly irresolvable anomaly, a leftover from a colonial past that modernity has left behind, this particular country should be seen as a monad, in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term. Forces operating worldwide are crystallised inside it. They come together with extreme ferocity in the land of Palestine, which works as a kind of laboratory or ‘prophetic index’, holding clues to the future others will face. ‘Are we all becoming Palestinians?’ Collins asks; a list of global tendencies – the proliferation of walls, the rise of drone warfare, generally accelerating technologies of repression – tempts him to answer in the affirmative. He also mentions the destruction of the natural environment, or ‘the war on the milieu’. But it is Naomi Klein who has looked deepest into this particular mirror of the monad. In her recent Edward Said lecture, ‘Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World’, she suggests that the Palestinian experience of displacement and homesickness is poised for universalisation in a warming world:
The state of longing for a radically altered homeland – a home that may not even exist any longer – is something that is being rapidly, and tragically, globalised … If we don’t demand radical change we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.
The whole occupation exudes transience. One cannot spend time in the territories of 1967 without feeling every day, every minute that ‘things cannot go on like this’, with Benjamin. And yet there seems to be no end in sight. Checkpoints cannot ruin people’s lives forever, but they will certainly continue to do so tomorrow, and the day after that. It is this impossibility, this combination of the transitory and the inexorable, of ricketiness and absolute inertia, that makes life under the Zionist enterprise so torturous.
As for the fossil economy, we know for a certainty that it will end. Physical nature preordains it. And yet in the meantime, new coal-fired power-plants, oil rigs, pipelines, airports, highways, suburban shopping malls are erected over the green planet of ours. Things cannot go on like this: and they do. It is that experience, which can make a person want to blow herself up, that inspires the culture of sumud.
Let me tell you how things looked when this was truly a nature park. Before you came and spoiled it all. You could not see any new buildings, you did not hear any traffic. All you saw were deer leaping up the terraced hills, wild rabbits, foxes, jackals and carpets of flowers. Then it was a park. Preserved in more or less the same state it had been in for hundreds of years.
To which the settler retorts:
‘Nothing can remain untouched for hundreds of years. Progress is inevitable.’ (…)
‘You dug our hills for nothing.’
‘Building roads is progress, not destruction.’
How common it is, in our capitalist heartlands, to come across people with that settler mentality, those who believe in the inevitability of what they call progress, in the necessity of roads, in all the goods of the land being theirs as a matter of course: the entitled ones, the owners.
Anyone who does not feel the pangs of the wounded biosphere moves like a colonist within it. Naturally, such obliviousness and self-absorption correlate very closely with economic affluence. In the sacrifice zones of the capitalist world-economy, people carry the wounds in their bodies; in the most luxurious shopping malls, one needs a political-ecological education to see the deep stabs being inflicted, and chances are that one is quite alone in doing so. Only by tending closely to the wounds in the biosphere can one cultivate properly Palestinian sensibilities: before you came and spoiled it all. What will today’s settlers leave for posterity?