The stream brings a child sitting on a hospital bed. He must
be 12, about my son’s age. A bandage hangs from his left shoulder where his arm
should be. He cries conpulsively, in a foreign language, so I can only imagine
what he is saying. His wailing reminds me of phantom pain, and the tearful words
seem to mourn the sudden amputation of his childhood, possibly performed
without anaesthetic. But then I realise that his cries may refer to a deeper
pain. Maybe the blast that took his arm also took his mum. Maybe all his family,
as many in Gaza these days.
Before this story enters into a loop, I flick it away with
my thumb, making the stream move forward. Another image stops in front of me.
Three young men on a desert road dance to Staying Alive by
Bee Gees. Their faces look very familiar to me. But it’s not easy to see their
faces. They are partially covered with helmets and their bodies are surrounded
by military gear. They don’t speak. They just dance, waving their machine guns
up and down. They walk playfully and defiantly in and out of the frame to the rhythm
of the song. Their bodies move with the robotic, white, arrogance of young men
on a stag trip. By the casual way in which they play with their guns, one could
think that they are not real. Yet the context of the video tells us that these
are indeed soldiers of the Israeli armed forces. The post praises them as
heroes who fight for the survival of a people and their dance as a
demonstration of heroic humanity.
The insidious violence of the playful soldiers contrasts
with the one of the amputated boy, yet it is the coincidence of the two that
intensifies this affective stream. It is easier to watch well-looked-after
young men like us fooling around with destructive weapons than it is to watch
boys like our children who lost everything and one arm. Yet it causes much more
outrage at various intellectual levels. Even if they are both revolting. While
the video of the little boy was placed on the water as a ‘story’ and therefore
cannot be retrieved once it goes away, the soldiers’ one is a post that lingers
on the stream. This means that we can always pull it back to show it, to check if
we didn’t dream it, to be reminded that the same image can be seen by different
people in such different ways.
What makes it all more difficult to comprehend is that these
two images were posted by two people I know and whom I met more or less at the
same time. The video of the armless boy was placed on the stream by someone whom
I have only ever spoken to through this very river, whilst the one of the dancing
soldiers comes from someone I know and worked with closely.
I get up from the riverbank. I sat here to clear my mind, watch
the stream, what floats on it, what treasure it brings to the shore, the lines
of sediment from the tides. Now I walk away heavier and in need of unloading
some of this weight. Maybe I’ll come back here later and dump some of this weight
back into the river.