This is a retrospective post. Film through the convoluted return to light- the eye and the brain, the meter and mechanism, the x-ray bag the luggage hold, the train the lab, the developer and scan, the disk the hard drive the applications, the wordpress web architecture, and the php back and forth across the pond to the server.

The post title I wrote whilst in Beirut. It’s hard to recapture the wonder I found again when I came across these places on the edge of west Beirut. So here are some of the photos. There will be a gallery up on one of the pages to your right, it might even be soon. The crumbling lived in, the worn out used still used, these tend to fascinate. Also, hollowness, containers, the insides out. Occupation.

So disassociated till now the text and the image, here is provisional integration #1.

This I suppose will be the last one from Beirut. Tying up loose ends would be good punctuation, but as with all travel, it’s hard to be conclusive, especially when you start to leave before the cab leaves for the airport, the plane takes off, you wait in Larnaca transit, dreading- that’s a strong word perhaps- return to the cold grid of London; and there’s always a tension between losing a sense of where you’re going back to, and the knowledge that even if you’ve changed, maybe, nothing dramatic will be different in the world you’ve left behind, and really you’re making more loose ends than were there before. Apologies to Chelmsley Wood from before, I’ve never been there, so I have no right to compare the place with Staines, where i got dropped once hitching to London, staying one stop too far on the M40.

I woke up the other morning thinking this kind of writing was suited to the way one carries on conversations mentally, day to day, with no focus or outlet. Being somewhere different, I find myself trying to work things out, make connections, in short, to know it better link what you see to what it’s ‘like’, what it ‘is’. A friend lives in Forn el Chebeck, a bit to the South of Achrafiye. She was telling me about the sky at night, some times the Metropolitan Hotel lights would change colour, that there were spotlights from the ground between there and the montains, like the ones you used to see over the Centre Ville when she first came here. Were they from a disco? she asked a Lebanese friend. Yes, it’s a kind of disco, said her friend, referring sardonially to an Islamic party’s occupation of that part of town.

Sometimes the sky muddies up over the mountains, and the desert wind brings clouds of dust which coat the cars in dirty raindrop patterns. There was a man on a nearby roof who would at 8pm every night come out to fire rounds off into the sky, though you can no longer hear him do so. After the recent murders in a religious school in Jerusalem, tracer bullets lit up the sky with their congratulation, from the neighbouring area. The night time noises would change periodically, and she learned there were new exploding tracers to watch and listen to crossing the heavens. Sometimes too, a shooting star.

The stars I have seen, the rest is heresay, though entirely trustworthy. I was introduced to some people the other day, in a very nice flat with book-lined walls and a distinctly cultured air. The guy asked me if I could feel the tension, referring to the ongoing political crisis here. I tried to answer as best I could, and thought about it a bit, trying to see what he meant. I’ve read about it, people have spoken about it, there are politial posters everywhere, graffiti tags of confessional demarcation, everywhere there are police and security guards and soldiers and the centre of town is occupied by Hizbollah. Feel it as such though, not in the way he clearly did; I’ve also been quite busy having a very good time, and photographing silver polishers, shirtmakers, broken down funfairs and beach clubs, eating really good food, walking home late, exchanging pleasantaries with a succession of guards and cops and soldiers, trying to get cab drivers to help my stumble up the Arabic one to ten, looking for lighters that LED project Hariri and Nasrallah. There were a couple of soldiers guarding an unsociable hour on Friday, night, and as we strolled past them- Bon soir! Bonjour!, they were listening to Celine Dion sing ‘…and I know that your heart will go ooooon…’ huddled together over a mobile phone near a Cedar stencilled guard box, naturally attended by Kalshnikovs.

Feel the tension, over a Long Island ice tea in Torino Express at 2am on a Tuesday morning (though now Gemmayze closes early, a protest by bar premises owners wanting to put up rents, disguised as a protest by residents sick of the traffic and shitty house music all night all hours… so I heard)? Not as such. I tell him my first day’s confusion of the building site with the memorial of the murdered man- see the first post below, thinking about the distinctions between evidence and experience, and he says that guy was my friend, Samir Kassir, journalist and intellectual.

A young guy walked with me – the long, if not quite wrong way round – when I was going to Raouche to swim in the Long Beach Club, quite a place incidentally, pictures to follow, and in a mournful monotone in English told quite a few things about himself, and life here, and we parted on the Corniche after he’s said how sad it was for him to look at the sun going down over the sea. He felt at these moments as if the souls of his dead were floating in the air around him.

I’m going to the beach club places now, for a swim, meet a friend. Some food and the sun go down.

My camera bag’s falling apart, and I was walking about Gemmayze, East of the centre, kind of the bar district since Downtown’s off limits to that kind of thing, when I saw a little shop with a wrinkled old man inside and a sign on the glass shopfront saying simply ’shirt’ then presumably the same in Arabic above it. I asked the man, in French and English, then with signs, if he could fix my bag.

He said no, but I then enquired as best I could about the price of a shirt. He pointed me to the cloth samples on the bench, had me sit down, and, signing wait, which here is fingers togetheer back of the hand facing down, like Italian ‘what?’ I think. I was intent on finding a cloth when he came back with a woman from a shop nearby who would translate. His Arabic was not extensive as he was Armenian, but spoke no English or French, she explained after cordially introducing herself. 60,000 which is $40 or about 20 GBP, no pound sign here my dears. That seemed ok, so I found a dark blue one, was struggling to tell the truth, but we agreed, and he measured me. There was a bit of discussion between her and the the shirtmaker, over the length of the shirt-to-be. We all agreed the one I had on was too short- hey, they don’t do bespoke in the Shakespeare Hospice shop Henley-in-Arden- but she thought the new length he wanted to make it would be too long, and she tried, and eventually succeed, to stop him from hustling a couple of extra centimeters onto the tape measure before he wrote down the result. She witnessed the receipt, took half as deposit, running across the road to change the 50,000 note at a garage, and then he started to speak his half toothed Arabic to her with some emphasis. He wanted to take me to where his friend would fix my bag, and would charge me nothing for it. She said goodbye Dan, he rooted in a drawer of his sewing machine bureau for a key, and then led me, almost up the middle of the road against the tide of beeping taxis, and a soldier with an AK47 driving a pick-up with an old merc hitched to the back, beeping of course, and asking the old guy for directions, perhaps, at the same time.

The place was closed. We stood there for a moment, thanking in a variety of languages and gestures, and he flapped his arms in the lowering sun, friendly, apologetic, bemused, and we parted. The shirt I pick up tomorrow.

A Lebanese guy also reading, sitting too in the departures Cafe Ritazza, asked if I had a visa, and I said yes while thinking no, and started to get nervous. But the card and stamp was all it was, Elena’s address and a curt wave of the hand from the official at the desk. She picked me up and we went for a walk on the Corniche, seafront promenade, and caught up. Groups of people out smoking shishas and drinking coffee, sweet smoke and charcoal in the air, and men fishing with tiny lights on the end of enormous rods, families ranged round on benches and plastic chairs, and a group of rollerbladers speeding over a ramp. A low driven BMW, loud on the euro-techno, squeals by, the passenger’s index finger pointing to the night sky in time to the music.Just walked around Ashrafiye, Christian E. Beirut today, read in a park, took photos of decapitated statues there, had a kind of pizza sandwich with herby meat sauce, lemon juice and chilli, whose name I cannot remember, frustrating as the guy repeated it to me over and again, for $1, 1500 lebanese pounds. A bomb went off nearby in March last year, killing a politician. There’s a block completely destroyed, and great stones on the opposite pavement. Walking down past it the first time I wondered what had happened there. Passing back up the street later, I crept into the space through an old doorway, up a pile of rubble, past a black low passage with a strange hum coming from it, and photographed the trees, a twisted branch, a coathanger tangled in branches, and stepped carefully, the air carrying a scent of dried shit. 

I stopped to ask a man about it sat outside a carpenter’s shop- as usual I start to talk to people in the business of repair- and he said it had been knocked down to make way for a huge tower sometime soon. He showed me round his shop, all the handmade cabinets and clothes horses, and tools and band saw and belt sander, the fresh strips of inlay and veneer. His father had started to work there in 1940. They would clear it soon, too, to make way for another tower, perhaps two. One son an interior designer about to join his wife in Canada, another in IT in Switzerland, and his daughter finishing a marketing degree in a private university here. When the shop went, he’d stop working. Though he liked his work, he no longer needed to contine. His phone rang and I shook his hand as he spoke into it in Arabic, and walked on up the street.Two posters of a bearded kindly-looking man on a wall, Arabic writing, one a pencil portrait, the other from a photo, with writing in a different script torn from the bottom of one of the several copies pasted there. I stopped to take a photo- gotta scratch the itch- and a car park guy smiling comes over and points to a small olive tree ouside Supermarche Achariyfe just across the road. Bomb there- he says, miming explosion with his hands and pointing to the posters. In French he tells me this was where the man was killed in March 2007. That tree and the plaques and inscription were his memorial, but beyond that, to me certainly, lacking Arabic, and knowing little of the place or the man, there was no physical evidence of violence, so I had confused the yellow mud and wilderness of the empty block down the way, and the blocks of concrete strewn on the pavement, with the site of the blast. So it goes