When you come for me
pause at the common threshold
but don’t wait
as I don’t. Give me
at least that confidence
and watch me race far
ahead.
*
There will be others crying
in my place
your eyes will be dry
and in that desert
you will always drown.
*
I won’t say goodbye.
I didn’t know you long.
It may be you weren’t
worth the acquaintance
or that we each
came here too soon
when the only thing
we cannot cheat
is time.
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“The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp” (Totality and Infinity, p. 124)
I see things, use them, manipulate them, take hold of them to suit my own ends. There is that relation. When the face of an Other—my sister, lover, a ‘stranger’—appears, and I see her, and realize the horizons of unknowability behind the light of her eyes, there is another, very different relation. In the quote above, Levinas is pointing to the experience of what happens to that kind of relation (with those things and objects) when it is illumined, perhaps, or brought into the presence of that new relation with the profound alterity of the Other. Is there a contradiction in something that “still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp”? Is it a simultaneous movement, and hence of the nature of paradox (and Levinas allows them, in other contexts, eg. the Infinite in the finite, Levinas 1985: 92), or is it a movement of transition? The resistance and ‘turning-into’ at issue in the passage from Totality and Infinity (hereafter T&I) above, are the necessary themes of that conjunction, or friction, between the totalizing project of the Same, and the transcendent one of the Face-to-Face. It is what happens in the friction that we are concerned to elucidate, in that space wherein the sensible and ethical worlds mingle in proximity.
I. The sensible (world and its objects)
Within the territory of the Same, sensibility, and that which is sensible, is that experience of the world grounded in a self-sufficient enjoyment of given objects, elements, materials, nourishments. It “does not belong to the order of thought but to that of sentiment…the affectivity wherein the egoism of the I pulsates. One does not know, one lives sensible qualities …” (135, my italics.) Levinas stresses an ‘unquestionedness’ in the sensible; there is an absence of doubt, search, questioning, com-prehension, resistance, to the I who sets about enjoying the sensible world. The sensible and enjoyment are intimately bound, the former “the mode” (ibid.) of the latter. The result, for the I, is: contentment (135-136). It is a joy of the sensately biological, ‘pigs in mud’ perhaps, “essentially naïve” (ibid.), Levinas reminds us. (Naïve to what order of experience, we will discover later.)
An important proviso here is that in which sensibility counters thought: “the objects of the world, which for thought lie in the void, for sensibility…spread forth on a horizon which entirely hides that void” (135). Can we read a duality in this? At the least sensibility seems to preclude the representational conditions of thought (and not “rational thought” alone, ibid.). This distinction (here also supported by reference to Descartes and Kant) will be important in a later understanding of the Face, in whose epiphany not only possession but also thought/representation is transcended. One may wonder here how the I-who-enjoys, engrossed in this enjoyment, yet experiences a complete suspension of the moment of representation to which his status as human agent will otherwise tend him. As I bring food to my mouth, I still perceive and represent it as such: it’s not just inchoate stuff alone, though it is that too.
The question is: does sensibility mean that it remain ‘stuff’ only? Levinas maintains: “The sensibility is…to be described not as a moment of representation, but as the instance of enjoyment” (136). Sensibility is the quality that is present to experience prior to knowing it; it is “not of the order of experience” (137) and my enjoyment of sensible objects is not grounded in an understanding of them—however limited or extensive it could be—but “it is they that ground me” (ibid.) insofar as I am present to the enjoyment of them. Levinas is asserting a primal relation, using the exemplary metaphor of the earth itself as ground upon whose steadfastness, or givenness, we do not question. I simply “stand in the world which precedes me as an absolute of an unrepresentable antiquity” (ibid.). Sensibility is a primordial given, before thought, beyond reason and prior to the elaborations of labour. Its consummation, once I am ‘standing’, “immanent in the world” (138), occurs through the act of possession
II. Possession (by my powers of grasping)
Levinas has already described the sensible and “its order of enjoyment” (137) as naïve; that is, there is by definition in it an ignorance of something beyond its “self-sufficient” (138) bounds; it is “the very narrowness of life” (ibid.). In what sense? To begin with, possession is grounded in the body and its “sense-datum” (136). “Vision opens upon perspective…and describes a traversable distance, invites the hand to movement and to contact…The forms of objects call for the hand and the grasp” (191). But what is of prior importance is from where sensible objects derive, such that they may, or may not, be grasped. Levinas describes the element, and the objects of sensibility, as coming from “nowhere” (141), and that despite its consummation “Enjoyment, as interiorisation, runs up against the very strangeness of the earth” (142).
The dimension of “nothingness” (ibid.) from which the element, as ground and birth of other things, comes forth (eg. the heat of the sun, fruit on a tree, an ocean wave—they are givens of nature), is nonetheless unassimilable by the purely enjoying self, and hence the ‘separation from-‘ that obtains in the interiorized self in enjoyment: “the element we enjoy issues in the nothingness which separates” (ibid.). These elemental things are present but “without my being able to possess the source” (141). We will see, on the other hand, that “what we will describe under the name of face” (142) presents itself precisely as a personal existent, in the way a sensible object can not. Levinas makes this clear in that “the separation accomplished as enjoyment, that is, as interiority, becomes a consciousness of objects” (139) which is again exactly what the Face will be unable to become.
III. The face and its epiphany
Where objects and elements and “things have a form, are seen in the light” (140), “the face has no form added to it, but does not present itself as the formless, as matter that lacks and calls for form…the face signifies itself” (ibid.) This is significant in that it implies the face is its own representation, stripped of the conditions of being or even not being that obtain in the world of objects. The face as matter is object, but the face as ethical exigency defies and transcends itself as matter. (It might be simplistic to read an analogy of the human condition in the face, even if it presents the same dilemma: religion insists we are not merely material organisms, we are also the souls that defy that kind of existence.)
In a later text (1985: 85) Levinas questions whether there can be a phenomenology of the face, since the former describes what appears, and the face is, as we will see, more than its appearance. In the same way looking at the face can’t be interpreted phenomenologically, as “the look is knowledge, perception” (ibid.). He suggests, alternately, that “access to the face is straightaway ethical” (ibid.). which thereby grounds its being in something that doesn’t obtain in the sensible world. It is “meaning all by itself” (op. cit. 86).
Levinas is saying that the face, in and of itself, defies entirely the tendency of the Same, of assimilation, of the objectifying enjoyment of the sensible, at the same time that it is “a moral summons” (T&I, 196). The discovery of the Face is something absolutely other, it “alone introduces a dimension of transcendence, and leads us to a relation totally different from experience in the sensible sense of the term, relative and egoist” (193). This dimension is “the idea of infinity…concretely produced in the form of a relation with the face…What is produced here is not a reasoning, but the epiphany that occurs as a face” (196). Because the idea of infinity “exceeds my powers” Levinas nominates it as “experience par excellence” (ibid.), significant here because the face alone is the domain of its accessibility.
We have seen how, in the sensible world, possession and enjoyment presuppose the separation of self and object. And in the interiorized psychism, which is the fruit of the separation of the Same, the act of possession is primary. Within this “order” there is congruence within the self-seeking I: for food, shelter, pleasure, comfort, contentment, joy. That is, the self does not question its own desires or actions.
In the encounter with the face this dynamic of the Same is seen as wholly subjected to scandal. The same separation is impossible and the position of the I radically challenged in terms of the boundaries of the sensible to which it has become habituated. Possession, of the very nature of the Same, is impossible in the novel relation with the Other: “The face is present in its refusal to be contained…it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched—for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content” (194). If there is resistance in the Other to possession, it is also a challenge to the breach of separation implicit in the interiorized-I. Perhaps what could be described as the virtue of separation is that “egoism, enjoyment, sensibility, and the whole dimension of interiority—the articulations of separation—are necessary for the idea of infinity, the relation with the Other which opens forth from the separated and finite being” (148, my italics).
The contrast, then, between acts of possession, and the relation with the face, is not oppositional at all; Levinas is more sensitively describing states which generate, give birth, to another. The rupture of being essayed here, that resistance lying between interiority and the attraction to the infinite, is not insurmountable. It is an ingenuous resistance, born only out of innocence, not opposition. The offering of the face, its expression—“it has a positive structure: ethical” (107)—challenges the exercise of my powers-to-possess at its root, initiates the openness of ‘something else’, like a question mark—“?” The reconciling bridge, perhaps, to a new relation, is born out of that very quality of the face that is sensible.
The Other is thus not alien, while it is still sensible. The “permanent openness” (198) of the face continues to ensure its availability to sensibility. (It cannot be ‘closed off’ in some way, given life, except perhaps in coma, or deep sleep, though these can’t be willed by the interior-I). While this compromised sensibility in the face eludes possession (I can’t ‘take hold’ of it in the form of successful appropriation I can of truly sensible things), it I still vulnerable to annihilation. Murder may bluntly destroy that sensibility of the face in its dimension as sensible matter, without being able to similarly destroy that “non-neutralisable” (ibid.) quality of the infinite that is given in the face. Even in sensibly appropriating things for my own usage, I was still only making myself guardian of their independence, which they couldn’t contest. The face, however, “not of this world” (ibid.), can never be denied its independence through any means. It is immune to appropriation. (Perhaps only the extents of love map the limits of proximity to possible appropriation.)
Yet, as rendered in the sensible matter of the face, this assertion of infinity may seemingly be silenced in material annihilation. The resistance of the face, however, is of a qualitatively different power: that of transcendence. It is not ‘real’, but ethical. Transcendence is its own recommendation; though it may “paralyse” (199) powers of possession by virtue of its infinite capacity to resist, it is exactly not matching that power with an equal type. Its resistance is ethical, and so beyond resistance. Interiority, in sensibility, must enter into this different relation. It can attempt negation, and kill, without ever knowing by its own conditions what has been killed beyond this flesh. It will, can, never know. To rise to experience is to enter into ethical relation. In this relation, sensibility is indeed overwhelmed, cannot be grasped. It is instead imbued with the grace in the epiphany of the Other: not only, as here, the first exigency of philosophy, but prior to everything, to being even, that by which man knows him and herself as man.
References:
Levinas, Emmanuel – (1985) Ethics and Infinity trans. R. Cohen, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh.
(1998)
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Poem, written 2001 (Indian Himalaya), published in CHA: An Asian Literary Journal #27, April 11, 2015: http://www.asiancha.com/content/view/2015/489/)
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I pulled away. Adam
from his clay and there
in the earth a little piece
of afterbirth. Windy trees
flailed and no-one took the
measure of this seedy miracle.
Only a woman, from the fields,
who came running womb agape,
the bright air shuddering as she
tasted a little on her tongue. Fill
this up again, she said, and make a
spermy sea. Then, start swimming.
How could I fail her
and how could I begin.
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Boyhood is a good film, but it is not a great one, as a near-unanimous critical response would have it. The reason why it is not great is because it is critically unaware of the stakes it presents its viewer, and its own depiction of twelve years of American society post 9/11: it shows some, but doesn’t really say. For some that could be its strength; for others, its weakness. Its central protagonist, shown in the opening shot as a six-year old cherub staring at an almost cloudless blue sky, is also an Everyman, a fairly colourless and characterless cipher who for the remainder of the film watches, and only minimally participates in what he observes.
What is genuinely novel in Boyhood is the opportunity to observe twelve years of the real aging of its core cast, especially its younger players, condensed into under three hours of film time. This is not real time but a kind of human time-lapse narrative, which offers intriguing windows for the interplay between the speeded aging of fictional people who are hyper-real in that filmic aging, and an observer’s awareness of mortality exaggerated in that: of how life is both oneirically timeless and intensely brief, so much packed into so little, and how by the time we leave the cinema Boyhood’s main protagonist Mason will already be in college, and doing…what? That is what I want to focus on here: the content, if not the formal interest, of the film.
Mason is repeatedly confronted, then threatened—by stereotyped junior-school bullies, and by a formulaic series of Dysfunctional American White Males: from educated but tyrannical pillars of society, to seemingly solid-headed Iraq-veteran salt of the land patriots, to other teenage jock buddies commandeering sexual bravado with non-existent ring-in whores, to the earnest but overbearing pep-talking photography instructor – and in which alcohol serves as an explicit or less-so currency of male definition for all of them. Yet through-out this roll-call of assault on his nascent identity as a growing individual that the film makes literally explicit in its 12-year time-lapse spacing of Mason’s (and actor Ellar Coltrane’s) life in just under three edited hours, he almost fails to respond with anything but casual indifference to any of these threats, as if they are not real. Mason is not a part of the dramatic content of the film; he is rather, if anyone, proxy for the film-maker himself, with doubtless much of Linklater’s own teenage aesthetic interest in an artsy photography that could well morph (in real life) into a life as a successful film-maker.
But virtually everyone in this film disdains the kind of life that Linklater has succeeded in—and that Mason may or may not himself, and the judgment that even Mason’s first real girlfriend (she looks just like a Calvins underwear model) offers up—that whatever, he is ‘weird’—echoes that larger chorus that clangs constantly through-out the entire film: that life is about getting somewhere, about progress, social mobility, success, winning, and ultimately, the conquest of the not-so-free world. (It is not for nothing that American military history is a sharp sub-theme, if lightly sketched, through-out, and that a scene of junior-school children making the pledge to state and nation is so authentically, and garishly, American in a way they cannot understand non-Americans failing to understand). The girlfriend story is anodyne and generic anyway and Mason barely seems to care when he loses her: there is nothing real life about it, either, and not a tear is shed.
The subtextual question to Mason’s twelve-year socialization through American normativity is: does he really want to become one of these kinds of Americans, who fail to witness the reality of who they are but continue to act it out, war after war, one alcoholic and abusive domestic storyline after another, more reiterations of the Manifest Tragic Destiny of American hubris writ large in family after family, melodrama film after film and foreign policy after policy? Linklater has enough natural filmic skill to simply show this repeated, and vicious, circle for what it is, and not pass didactic judgment on it. But is that really enough?
When Mason’s Dad’s new Texan parents-in-law celebrate his high-school graduation and the frankly caricatural paterfamilias pulls out a vintage shotgun as an heirloom gift, and trains the kids in using it, the bare echo of endemic gun-crime and multiple recent U.S. mass-killings by young people is very far in any kind of distance and not part of the real temporal Zeitgeist here. Mason mildly uses the gun in a bizarrely feel-good scene without a shred of what would be a normally secure irony for Linklater. (Who knows, Mason could become one of the bad guys in another, future installment, another listless campus weirdo for real (‘he always seemed normal to us’?)
The same disconnection registers strongly in Arquette’s dogged but unreflective mother Olivia who only after twelve years’ passing wonders what all the mobility, achieving and abusive white patriot men in her life were for in the end, when it all went by so quickly and she never seemed to appreciate its passing. Arquette’s all-blonde kindof smart but kindof dumb character, however ‘well acted’ is the most likeably wooden of the film, and it is difficult to see in her psychology-lecturing maturity the woman who, in another trope of repetition, is at the very end of the film again organizing herself, Mason and justifiably emotionally-benumbed (and hungover) sister, in a doggedly simple 4-steps, for yet another house-move: the biblical epic of American story-telling if it ever had one.
It is this likeable woodenness that also extends to Mason, who is, at least, more of a real watcher of life than his mother, and who engages in some typically Linklater-lite philosophizing, but who is also essentially numb to its larger reality. And it is in this sub-subtextual sense that Mason is really Linklater, who doesn’t know what kind of film he really wants to make about America post-9/11, post-Bush, post-Iraq II, but who sits on a generically accessible, aesthetically and morally bland fence that will doubtless garner still more universal praise. The 90s were ‘like, so ironic’ but it’s way too late for that now. His films are good, just like Mason is a good guy, who will make good photographs, and maybe even a good film, as he graduates out of ‘dazed and confused’ and slackerdom into ‘Austin, Texas stardom.’
But will Mason make real art? His pushy photography-class instructor would settle for that kind of all-American stardom, and Mason, just like Linklater, will have won his stars-and-stripes and remain a true patriot, of a nail-varnish wearing, slightly effete but perfectly soft-hipster sort, one who never liked football and couldn’t knock down a tenpin like even his slacker boheme dad wanted him to. That’s success, in which case he’s bought into the myth after all, and mastered it, but is it great art?
Linklater’s films are the sanitized versions of what a film-maker like Harmony Korine has delivered once or twice as a compelling because uncompromised truth about America, as some of van Sant’s own post-9/11 films sometimes succeeded in being. But if Boyhood wins an inevitable Oscar, it will be because it has succeeded in showing America its own perennially mirrored face, in an almost blameless because oblivious narcissism that rarely if ever incorporates self-reflexivity into the reflection it trades so well in.
Mason, and Linklater, come close, but they never break out of their own bubble enough to question what they observe, ponder, and float gently, pointlessly above. No bold move, artistic or otherwise, is ever made in this film. Mason at the film’s end is much as he was as a real six-year old: a child, with an uncanny ability to slip through life in an insulated bubble, despite the booze, bombs, bullets, blindness and bullshit. A lot of time-changing real-world actuality could have been written into Boyhood, one that registers the intensely critical times the film’s very temporal acceleration seems to heighten and point towards, but it floats within a level of benign dream instead. Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, Climate change, the GFC, Occupy, U.S. military escalation beyond Afghanistan, the NSA exposure, Obama’s post-romance political fallout don’t really register here despite some very minor gestures that soon disappear, much like time does – even when it is frozen, as here, in film.
This is not Real Life after all, but just the movies. It’s the same anaesthetic dream of America that Mason, Linklater, and his viewers, should know better than to keep selling, and buying into. What the film temporally zooms towards is the very realness of Now: yet the now it finally celebrates is oddly empty, and falsely transcendental. When in the final scene Mason, in another all-American empty desert-space (and assisted with a hash-cookie high) concurs with a new photogenic love interest that ‘It is the moment that seizes you’—it couldn’t be more true. Especially when you’re not really seeing it for what it is.
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poem published in CORDITE Poetry Review 49.0: Obsolete, Feb. 1, 2015:
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poem published in CORDITE Poetry Review 49.0: Obsolete, Feb 1, 2015:
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There is in South India a little man
I once met for a half-hour, one hazy
afternoon, over a decade ago. He
writes friend, how are you? every New
Year, and many another unremarkable
day, and we are both being here. I’ve
never failed to reply.
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From Tibet to India they come
pilgrims of the plateau putting
knees, hips then chest to the dirt,
cupped palms raised overhead.
Then, up again: calloused
hands, mountains etched in the eye,
this fathom-length step all the way
to the divining-place.
Or a place of reckoning, a
wager become a truth. But what
happened there? Everything, and
—nothing, though that is not much
use to the Chinese truck-drivers
who leave them robed in dust.
Nightfall, and a happy ache of
bones and their tempered symmetry
in the raising and lowering of this
bivouac of faith. Behind them,
vertical fires marking the far
horizon
a hundred pyres of flesh
and bone, lighting their way.
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It’s a disconcerting and compelling thing to watch an interview on mainstream media turn into a train-wreck before one’s eyes: the first because viewers expect (perhaps even psychologically require) a basic modicum of agreement; the second because while witnessing communicative aporia can be uncomfortable, it usually betrays a deep level of the authentic that is itself frequently suppressed in the form-fit formulas of commercial, feel-good mass media. The recent stoush on (Australian) ABC’s Lateline between interviewer Emma Alberici and Wassim Doureihi, spokesman for the Islamic organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, is an excellent case in point.
I’m not going to weigh in on the substance of the ideological fault-lines that were abundantly on evidence in this A.B.C. Lateline broadcast (Oct. 8), or adjudicate between which antagonist holds the more defensible position: those positions weren’t in fact clearly on offer in those 11 minutes of prime-time television. That first-order moral and political discussion is only background pretext to what occurred, in any case. Something more significant was on offer beneath, beside, to the margins of the predictably ideological static that is now generating headlines.
The communicative dysfunction on evidence revealed a fundamental faultline between local Islamic and non-Islamic secular self-representation that both ‘sides’ need desperately to see and hear, and even, as here, be enacted before them, before making any ostensible justifications for the shedding of more blood, either in Iraq or within Australian borders. Alberici assumed from the outset Doureihi’s personal concession to a commonly-perceived outrage at what she merely called “the tactics” of well-known ISIS strategy; to that extent Doureihi had cause to sidestep the assumption of such an automatic ‘playing by the rules’ of public discourse. This is so despite the fact that ISIS ‘tactics’ are in fact worthy of moral condemnation—few would hesitate to dispute that, as Doureihi himself categorically implied at a later point. His concern, however ill-expressed, was that there was a point of value for him in not simply submitting to the politically-correct stance epitomized by Alberici, even where, as in this case, it might well be entirely correct in its moral intuitions.
My view (perhaps over-charitable to some) is that Doureihi was not maintaining such resistance out of ulterior or under-handed obfuscation, or to defend a personal (and unreasonable) ‘Islamic pride.’ He was recalcitrant simply to serve the end of breaking out of the pre-formed box of mediatised conformism. He held his stubborn ground because he, admirably, saw cause to defend a position that he believes represents a valuable truth. No-one has to agree with him, but he valued it enough to refuse to submit to the unspoken rules of public submission to the polite fiction of a specious national ‘Team Australia’ consensus. He has long-held grievances, and he wants them to be heard; he did the national viewership the honour of, frankly, not bullshitting a moderate or immoderate line in simplifying the issues he believes are ultimately at stake. In that he was entirely, ethically, appropriate: he is not required to toe a politically-correct line just be able to earn entry into a discussion that is, for him, and doubtless many others, morally obscured from the beginning. Many may not agree with the substance of his claims, but he has the right, which Alberici was unable to grant him, to recognize that perlocutionary conformity is not a sound guarantee for respectful and authentic communication.
It is much the same problem that a few months ago had Russell Brand satirizing Fox News’ Sean Hannity’s comparatively caricatural ‘interview’ of Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the Jerusalem Fund. There, Brand was right to expose the ludicrous pushover tactics of a dominant American ideology that was only repeating in mediatised terms the U.S. military pushover tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan (and beyond) that, thanks to Wikileaks and others, has become in the last decade globally transparent. There, it was hard to feel sympathy for either Hannity’s all-American bravado, or the hapless Munayyer’s impotence in being unable to put a period on a single sentence, even though, doubtless unintended, Hannity succeeded in looking like a moronic school bully and Munayyer a thoughtfully harassed innocent.
In this case, the comparatively subdued presumption of Alberici in demanding a ‘yes or no’ response from Doureihi is in principle no different—it just has the appearance of a ‘pro-Australian’ middle-class outrage at heinous acts of violence, assuming immediate corroboration. But that would not be Doureihi’s point, and rightfully so; it’s just that he wasn’t able to make it without, in a perlocutionary sense, demonstrating it for the viewer through his sheer intransigence. Yet that is, despite the emotive static, all only to his credit. If free speech is to mean anything, in Australia as elsewhere—but especially in Australia where standards of open speech have not been as entirely eroded as they have been elsewhere—it means to not come along with a concealed proviso that conversation can only begin with coercion, of however subtle a kind. Alberici, perhaps despite a better judgement, made her terms clear: “Why will you not point-blank condemn the actions of IS fighters?” Even if he agreed with her, Doureihi was not compelled to automatically concede to something that, in real terms, was not a question, but a demand. That is why, on that single point perhaps if for no other, Doureihi was right to stand his ground.
To her credit, Alberici did begin with asking Doureihi to simply state his level of support for ISIS and its practices, not to simply condemn them. But that request is, in itself, an expectation that only reflects the simplified, limited–attention span of commercial media that demands simplified take-home responses. Doureihi’s legitimate point was that simply agreeing to those simplified terms is already part of the problem, as he sees it: a legitimate concern, irrespective of his substantive claims, that demands respect. Alberici bull-dozed it, much as Hannity did Munayyer on Fox News. At this point the actual issues have been obscured, and neither is right, neither is wrong, but both are struggling to find authentic mutual respect.
To elicit moral consensus from an interlocutor is to offer them their own ground and discursive space for doing so, especially when occupying the consensually dominant position. Righteousness clouded Alberici from offering Doureihi that space, which alone demanded his recalcitrance, whose own very similar righteousness hobbled his ability to elicit it. Yet both protagonists had the virtue of self-respect, and a palpable sense of a truth worth defending, in refusing to retreat to a flat level of spurious agreement—of the kind that plagues and only superficially subdues the national discussion regarding fundamental religious, ideological and cultural dysfunction.
This was real dysfunction, for all to see, neither fabricated, denied nor downplayed. It was excellent viewing because it betrayed the truth of that dysfunction, an authentic faultline the fact of which has to soberly acknowledged by the national conversation before anything constructively genuine can come out of it. For that reason, both Alberici and Doureihi are to be praised for refusing to offer up the usual bottle-fed pap. For someone who distrusts mainstream media, it was a moment where the shiny mirrors told something truly and for that we can be, minimally, grateful.
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whispered lineage 