Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

When they killed my daughter they killed my fear. I have no fear. I can do anything now. Judeh will, one day, live in peace, it has to happen. Sometimes it feels like we’re trying to draw water from the ocean with a spoon.

In Palestine we say ignorance is a terrible acquaintance. We do not talk to the Israelis. We are not allowed to talk to them—the Palestinians don’t want it and the Israelis don’t want

we are not voiceless, no matter how much silence there is. We need to learn how to share this land, otherwise we will be sharing it in our graves. And we know it’s not possible to clap with one hand. We will, eventually, make a sound, trust me, it has to happen. Darwish said: It is time for you to be gone.

The pools, the crevices, the fissures, the brooks, the streams, the aquifers, the rivulets, the wadis, the creeks, the channels, the canals, the runnels, the brooks, the rills, the puddles, the wells, the spouts, the springs, the sluices, the ponds, the lakes, the dams, the pipes, the drains, the cisterns, the lagoons, the marshes, the surf, the tide, the living seas, the dead seas, the rain itself: water here is everything.

Parts of the Atacama desert in Chile have never had any recorded rainfall. It is one of the driest places on earth, but the local farmers have learned to

harvest water from the air by suspending large nets to catch cloud banks rolling in from the Pacific coast. When the fog touches the tall nets, it forms drops of moisture. The water rolls down along the plastic strands and moves through small gutters, collecting at the bottom of the net, where the trickle is funneled into a pipe that leads to a cistern. All across the landscape, high metal poles hold the dark nets against the pale sky. The fog is captured early in the morning before the sun burns the clouds off. Out of nothing, something.

The farmers call the nets fog catchers.

Because of irrigation schemes and dams along the length of the Jordan, the river runs at about ten percent of its natural strength. A large part of the flow is made up of sewage. In summertime, without the effluent and the saline discharge, there would be hardly any river at all. The trickle barely makes it to the Dead Sea which, as a result, drops up to three feet every year.

So that, from above—from the view of a pilot, say, or a bird—the dry, cracked land around the shore looks like a shattered windshield.

The custom of substituting the word G-d for God is based on the traditional practice in Jewish law of revering God’s Hebrew name. The name most often used in the Hebrew Bible is the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, considered too sacred to be uttered aloud, and frequently anglicized as Yahweh or Jehovah. The other names of God that, once written, cannot be erased are El, Eloah, Elohim, Elohai, El Shaddai and Tzevaot. In prayers the pronunciation Adonai is used, and in discussion it is usually said as HaShem, meaning The Name.

In Islam there are ninety-nine names for God—ʾasmāʾu llāhi l-ḥusnā, meaning the Beautiful Names of Allah.

Satyagraha: the revelation of truth and the confrontation of injustice through nonviolent means.

Abir, from the ancient Arabic, fragrance of the flower.

the ethic of reciprocity: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.

Chromesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which sounds automatically evoke the experience of a color. For those with the condition, music is seen as much as it is heard. A high-pitched sound suggests brightness. A low-pitched sound suggests something of a darker tone. The first recorded instance of chromesthesia comes from the English philosopher John Locke, who, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wrote about a blind man. When asked what the color scarlet was, the blind man replied that it was akin to the sound of a trumpet.

Flower of my imagination, I guarded her in my heart.

Using laser-powered microphones, scientists in Germany determined that plants and trees release gases when they perceive themselves to be under attack. These gases, in turn, produce sound waves that register on a level inaudible to anything but the most sensitive machines. The scientists, at the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn, suggested that flowers emit a whine when their leaves are cut, and that trees can warn each other of approaching swarms of insects, and that

the scent of fresh-cut grass comes from a secretion system within the grass blades. The team built on previous research findings that neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin can be found in plants, though there was no evidence of neurons or synapses within their sensory systems.

In the jargon of radio operators in the Israeli army, a flower is someone who has been seriously wounded in battle.

In a 1940 essay G. H. Hardy wrote: The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

At a conference in Greece, Bassam told the audience that they had to understand that the olive tree was everything to the Palestinian mind. Uprooting an ancient tree, he said to them, was tantamount to smashing a precious artifact in a museum. Take a Cézanne and put your fist through it. Allow a Brâncuși to melt under tremendous heat. Lift a Grecian urn and poke it full of holes.

His father had operated an olive press in a barn on the edge of the village of Sa’ir, near the cave where Bassam grew up. Inside, a white horse circled around and around by the light of an oil lamp. The horse—blindfolded so as not to grow dizzy—turned the wooden beam, causing a circular stone to grind against another stone, crushing the olives, releasing the oil. What Bassam couldn’t understand, as a child, was how the horse could keep circling all day without falling down, exhausted. It wasn’t until he was six years old that he realized that there were three identical white horses rotating through. Two years later, an electric press was introduced and the horses were put out into the stony field where they spent the rest of their days moving, still, in endless circles.

The Greek word clepsydra, given to ancient water clocks, comes from the amalgamation of the Greek words for water and to steal.

In the West Bank an arrangement was made by Mekorot, the Israeli national water company, to make the price for settlers as cheap as possible. Palestinians paid up to four times the price. Privately the water executives called the deal the Swimming Pool Clause.

Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, by Nurit Peled-Elhanan (I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., London, New York, 2012). Introduction: A Jewish Ethnocracy in the Middle East. 1: The Representation of Palestinians in Israeli School Books. 2: The Geography of Hostility and Inclusion: A Multimodal Analysis. 3: Layout as Carrier of Meaning: Explicit and Implicit Messages Transmitted Through Layout. 4: Processes of Legitimation in Reports about Massacres. ISBN #: 978 1 78076 505 1. Reprinted 2013, 2015.

Mekorot: meaning the sources.

Nurit got hate mail at the university. Some of it arrived on notes neatly folded in tiny phylactery boxes. Others were messages on her answering machine. The worst of it called her a Jewrab, a traitor, a whore, a mother of refuseniks. She kept the mail in an untidy stack on the shelf behind her office desk. She read it once and only once.

She wanted to write back and say that her grandfather was a signatory of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, that her father had fought as a general in the Six-Day War, that her husband had fought in three of Israel’s wars, that her sons had made their own decisions about military service, that her own daughter could have served too if she had been given a chance, which she wasn’t, through no fault of her own, or maybe if the truth be told it was the fault of the Israeli government leaders who were the actual murderers, and while these things did not necessarily make her proud—in fact she felt sure that her daughter might have refused service or would, at the very least, have joined a medical unit—they had occurred in the unfolding of her country’s history, a future for which she no longer held out much hope, though once when young she had dreamed she could be part of a vast mosaic, Jew Christian Muslim Atheist Other Buddhist, call it what you will, a country that would be complicated, nuanced, democratic, visionary, a place where the idea of hate letters, like those which continued to arrive on her desk, would be anathema to the patriotic imagination, the idea of patriotism applying not necessarily to a country or a nation, but to a state of being which could only rightfully be called human, although she was prepared

to acknowledge, given history in general, but especially that of the modern Israeli state, that the desire itself had almost become preposterous, and yet the only way to fight against the inanity was to speak out against it in the vain hope that one might be heard, most especially at learning institutions where minds were still pliable and the poison had not, or at least not yet, penetrated the consciousness.

Her classes at Hebrew University were among the most popular, filling up seconds after registration. They were also the most reviled, especially amongst those who did not attend.

The military bow evolved to incorporate several natural materials—wood, animal horn, tendons, sinews and glue—into the powerful composite bow. The skeleton was not made from a single block of wood but combined

pieces of different trees with varying degrees of pliability to maximize draw distance and strength. The back of the bow was covered with bands of sinews. The belly of the bow was reinforced with sections of animal horn. The composite bows had an effective range of around four hundred yards. For the first time in history it was possible to surprise the enemy and attack from beyond the range of retaliation.

The arrow was composed of three parts. The arrowhead was made of the hardest available material—metal, bone or flint. The slender body was harvested from wood or reed. The tail, designed to keep the arrow in straight flight, was made from the feathers of eagles, vultures, kites or sea fowl.

The feathers were known as the messengers of death.

On his deathbed Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov asked the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church if he was responsible for the deaths of those who had been shot as a result of the design of his AK-47. Kalashnikov was worried about his legacy: he had wanted to be remembered as a poet, not a gunmaker. The patriarch wrote back to say that the Church’s position was well known and if a weapon was used in defense of the Motherland, the Church would support its creators and those who used it.

The piercing cry of the zaghareet is made during weddings and other celebrations, to honor the living and the dead. The sound is created by darting the tongue to both sides of the mouth in rapid succession while an undulating noise is let out from the throat—eleleleleleelelel. The women cover their mouths with their hands and close their eyes while they catch the sound. The zaghareet lasts approximately the length of one whole breath, although a series of ululations can be pulled together into an ongoing song or keen.

The zaghareet was famously captured by the filmmaker David Lean in Lawrence of Arabia when the veiled women in black on the clifftop call to the men in the valley below as they head out to battle.

The sound bomb—also known as the flash grenade or stun bomb or flash bomb or long-range acoustic device—is considered another means of riot control: when thrown into a crowd the tiny canister makes a huge boom.

The Israeli army also uses sound bombs to disable water wells deemed illegal in the West Bank: when they drop a bomb to the bottom, the noise waves are powerful enough to crack the well’s sleeve from top to bottom.

Rami underlined a passage in Edward Said’s collection of essays Culture and Imperialism, where the Palestinian critic wrote: Survival, in fact, is about the connection between things.

The humiliation ramped up on all sides. It was a slow strangulation, an endless repetition of defeat. Everyone knew just how rotten the system was. He was integral to it himself. Locked in the puzzle.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

From the Greek, apeiron: to be boundless, to be endless. Alongside the Indo-European root of per: to try, to risk.

As a whole, an apeirogon approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line. One can finally arrive at any point within the whole. Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible, even the seemingly impossible. At the same time, one can arrive anywhere within an apeirogon and the entirety of the shape is complicit in the journey, even that which has not yet been imagined.

Maimonides, the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, said that the process of repentance included three stages: confession, regret, and a vow not to repeat the misdeed.

In the Qur’an, God is variously called Al-Ghafoor, Al-Afuw, Al-Tawwab, Al-Haleem, Ar-Rahman and Ar-Rahim: the Most Forgiving, the Pardoner, the Clement, the Forbearing, the Most Merciful and the Most Compassionate.

In the ninth century the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi wrote The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. It was the first book to introduce the concept of algebra to European scholars. Al-Khwarizmi developed a unifying theory which allowed rational and irrational numbers to be treated as algebraic objects. It focused on moving quantities from one side of an equation to the other in order to maintain balance.

The word algebra comes from the Arabic al-jabr, suggesting the repair of broken bones.

Traditional bonesetters rely on the touch of their hands. Most of the time they can tell within seconds whether a bone is fractured or broken. The most difficult bone to figure out by touch alone is the femur, the strongest bone in the body, deeply set in the thigh. A rubber bullet in the front of the thigh is more likely to break the bone than one from behind. A gas canister with a downward trajectory—shot from a rooftop, say, or a helicopter—will probably fracture the bone, though one shot from a low angle close to the ground might break it in two.

The bullet caught Abir in the back of the head, smashing her skull in a radial manner, so that one of the splinters shot inwards and penetrated her brain.