From "One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" By Omar El Akkad

Maybe this is all the kind of pedantic nerdery writers obsess about all the time, but I can't help but think of it now in the context of the killing fields, whose dead also belong to some other lineage. I think of the hundreds upon hundreds of pictures and videos of the mutilated, the starved, the dismembered, and I am reminded that all of this is functionally invisible to so many in the part of the world where I now live. That if it were presented to them, some would undoubtedly respond the way Barbara Bush once did when asked about
the Iraqi dead: "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" But others, I think, would recoil in a different way. Stubborn as anything, I hang on to the hope that, presented with proof of injustice, the majority human reflex is to act against it. And then I think of a line that has always stayed with me, from Marwa Helal's "poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids”: this is where the poets will interject they will say: show, don't tell but that assumes most people can see.
It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit, exclaim even, that no description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it. At the very least, one should not be able to have it both ways. One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn but then, faced with the sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing. What is this work we do? What are we good for?
The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood-only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque -what we do to one another so grotesque-that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.

from "One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" by Omar El Akkad

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