I stand in the yard in the cold watching the dog chase leaves being shed by trees entering seasonal hibernation. I’m reading my texts messages as I stand here. Listen to The Clash on shuffle. Kick her tennis ball across the yard.
Code blue issued in New Brunswick where dozens sleep on the streets or couch surf because they lack the most basic resources. Code blue, which offers shelter, but advocates call inadequate. A Band-Aid in a city building high-rise apartments.
Read the Times. Trump threatens democracy. Rails against “vermin,” proclaims they must be “rooted out.” Nazi language. Fascist language. Trump announces the “threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”
I turn up the volume. Clash sing Willi Williams’ reggae
A lotta people won't get no supper tonight
A lotta people won't get no justice tonight
The battle is gettin' hotter
In this iration, Armagideon time
Back inside, I crawl under a blanket. Sick going on five days. Head cold that has me off balance and tired. My abdominal muscles aching like I’ve done hundreds of crunches. Covid test is negative again. Small favors as the images from the BBC run together. Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. Refugees in Chad face starvation.
“No justice tonight,” Strummer sings over piano, guitar, “a lot of people going to have to stand up and fight.”
I turn off the news. Restart the music. “Janie Jones.” “Career Opportunities.” I remember standing outside the Casino in Asbury Park, May 1982, on the beach. We couldn’t get tickets. But we stood there on First Avenue beach, listening to the building shake, hoping for a snippet of music.
They played “Armagideon Time,” though I only learn that years later. Set lists posted to the Internet. Song was B-side to “London Calling.” Released almost simultaneous to Williams’ own version.
Williams’ single is a horn-driven masterpiece. A “burning roots jam punctuated by smooth organ riffing and subdued tenor crooning,” writes Fred Thomas. One of only a handful of recordings by Williams, who releases only two albums but produces hits for others. I only know the song because of The Clash, only found it when I started to write this piece.
I play the Williams version. It’s infused with a sense of religious hope. Strummer’s jam is different. An anthem. Williams, Nicholas Russell writes, offers a “deadpan, conversational delivery,” adding “a playfulness atop (the singer’s) depiction of politically-ignited apocalypse.” The Clash rev it up. Secularize it. Strummer “remov(ing) references to Jah and religious providence and replaces them with allusions to Soviet Russia and Communist China, his slurring belt typically ragged, verging on pissed, almost taunting—an anger, a restlessness opposite Williams’s comparatively relaxed performance.”
“Remember to kick it over / no one will guide you / Armagideon time.”
Higher power v. history. Faith generating a power to make change v. an anger-fueled demand. Both left wanting in the shadow of end times. The expected failure forging a sense of humility.
“A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight.”
*
I read. Haaretz. The New York Times. Edward Said. Camus. Amichai. Wieseltier. Aharon Shabtai. Darwish. Adonis: "I said: this is the way home, he said: No / you can’t pass, and aimed his bullet at me.”
The Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, arrested and released in Gaza, writes in “my grandfather and home” that their
absence turned out to be too long
thirty six years until he died
for us now it is over seventy years
That time robbed him of what he’d known, that “he forgot the numbers the people / he forgot home.”
The threat of time. Of dislocation. An old man outliving his own memory. The horrors are more than physical. Toha grabbed by Israeli troops a month into the war. As he carried his 3-year-old, fleeing to southern Gaza. Detained. Beaten. A poet under arrest as if poetry is a threat. Perhaps it is. Poetry, Shabtai told me when I interviewed him in 2004, “repairs the language, purifies the language.” A pure language is an honest language. Describes the world as it is. Purity as truth, perhaps?
I’m not looking for purity. Just truth. Understanding. I reread Kerouac and Ginsberg. Buber. Seek something not there. Something to make sense of the excess of images flooding the TV. The bombed hospitals. The posters of the missing. I incessantly watch the news, ABC, NBC, the BBC, and endless alphabet soup of information, of reporting from Israel and Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan. A repetition of narrative. Heroism. Patriotism. Violence. Death.
“Endless cycles of conflict happening in nothingness,” Ginsberg writes in “Laughing Gas. “make it impossible to grasp for the perfection / which does not exist.”
Ginsberg performed with The Clash (). “Ghetto Defendant.” “Capital Air: “I don't like Zionists acting Nazi Storm Troop / Palestine Liberation cooking Israel into Moslem soup.”
A war of rockets and guns and atrocities. And a war of narratives. Nothing certain except a certainty of mind that locks in our worst instincts. That allows us to justify the worst behavior. To kill and maim and rape and bomb. In the name of Jews. Palestinians.
“(D)on’t dare say,” writes the Israeli poet Meir Weiseltier,
that my blood permits you to justify your wrongs–
that my torn eyes support your blindness–
that my spilled guts prove it’s impossible
to talk about an arrangement with them
AP reports () a temporary ceasefire to begin in Gaza in Friday. We’re prepping the Turkey. Parade on in the other room. Parade cadence in my head. “The Call Up.” “Washington Bullets.”
A lotta people won't get no supper tonight
A lotta people won't get no justice tonight
In the woods of Lakewood. The streets of New Brunswick. New York. Gaza.
“Hey, a lotta people will be running and hiding tonight.”
Hiding. Running. Haaretz headline: “Fear and Submission Reign in the Path of Gazans Fleeing South.”
Displaced and redisplaced. Chased. A cohort of refugees. Fleeing bombs and invading troops. Half the housing units leveled. Children killed. Even the passive voice cannot temper the horror.
earth, growing fat with
the slime of corpses green & pink
that ooze like treacle, turn
into a kind of tallow
writes Jerome Rothenberg. Corpses
that are black
at evening that absorb
all light
And what is left? Can be left? Sink deep into the psychedelic reggae beat. Sink in. Drown “in this Iration, it's Armagideon.”