Parallel Realities

This post came out of an 'assignment' I was given as part of a Thanksgiving celebration with old friends. The theme of the evening was "Parallel Realities", and I suppose it would have been impossible for me to reflect on anything but my time in Lebanon when thinking about that topic:

We all live in parallel realities. And these parallel realities all live in us, their home is in our heads and our hearts.

Towards the end of her life, when my mom was living close by, we often went for coffee and chatted about life and family. Once it occurred to me to ask her how she would describe the narrative of her life. Her life, she said, had been tripartite: her childhood and youth in a Swiss village, her 7 years in England as a member of the RAF Women's Air Corps and her time as a mother in the US. I said: each one of those seems so unforeseeable from the vantage point of anything that came before, and she answered that if someone had come up to her in the streets of the village and told her the future she wouldn't have believed a word of it. It all would have sounded, she said, like some other reality.

My mom said something else during that conversation that stuck with me. I asked her: what were the best times? And she answered, 'don't get me wrong, being a mom was a great thing. But the absolute best moments were during the war, when every moment counted, when everything was so precious that we grabbed life with both hands because we never knew if we would wake up the next morning.'

I learned a little about that feeling during the Lebanese Civil War, back in the 70s. I had a few occasions - fortunately VERY few - when I had to do things like dodge the occasional sniper or drive very fast to avoid becoming a target. In those moments life becomes almost unbearably intense, and every other type of moment - every other reality -  pales by comparison.

Then there's the kind of parallel reality that coexists within you at the same time. For a while, you hold more than one identity in multiple worlds, where things have completely different meanings. This is where I am now, after my three month stay in Lebanon. In the first weeks after my return many things in the world had a kind of special aura. That aura came from things having more than one meaning or significance, something like two copies of the same picture held slightly out of register with each other.

The feeling is hard to pin down, but a few examples might suffice to illustrate:

Here, the newspaper sits on your table, waiting to tell you who did what, and to whom. In Lebanon, the newspaper waits to announce your fate; will what happened overnight change your life forever? Destroy hope for the future? Or announce that the inevitable destruction has been put off a bit longer.

Here, a parked car is a nuisance if you were hoping to find a spot; otherwise, it's just part of the world's furniture. In Beirut - not all the time, but far, far too often - it might be the last thing you glance at before the fireball erupts.

Here, you gingerly place your child into the car seat expressly made to keep him safe from all harm. And you only do this after many days of anxious parental worry. In Beirut you might throw that child - and his older sister - in front of you on a motorbike, add their mother behind you and set off down the freeway. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the last decades of your country's life has given you the slightest indication that there is anything you can do one way or the other about life or death.

Here, a tent by the river or a tent city connotes sadness, broken lives, rootlessness. In Beirut, the woman in the black abaya and her two small children - the ones you just stumbled over in the darkened street - mean exactly the same thing. It's the scale that's different. In Beirut alone there are 500,000 like her. Her house is gone, her village flattened, her man is dead, even the money she collects isn't hers to keep. She and her children are literally adrift in a universe so broken that only god himself could fix it. Except, he made it like this in the first place.

With all this, why do I miss Beirut, and my own parallel reality? It comes down to people and place.

I miss, as I did when I first left 40 years ago, the mountains where I used to live. How NOT to miss a place that has a spot called 'Ain Baal' - the spring of Baal? The spring of Baal! That place and its name existed when the Hebrews, the Philistines and the Canaanites were fighting over Palestine. The FIRST time, not this time! When Baal and Yahweh duked it out in the holy land 'ain Baal was already committed, and firmly in one camp.

Old hills, old springs, old battles and ancient wars...there's something to be said for all that, when you think that every single thing in the built environment on this continent that doesn't come from the Native Americans has been brought in or created in the last five centuries or so. In our reality we have no concept of ancientness when compared to 'ain Baal, Sidon, Tyre, Nabatiyeh.

Then there's that incomparable parallel reality Lebanese language, which itself exists in parallel realities and reflects the prismatic makeup of the Lebanese psyche. Their thoughts bounce round within the mirrors in their heads, acquire sense and words and, invariably, tumble out something like this:

Wallahi, habibi, shu baarifni, dude, c'est la vie de chez nous...it's how we live. Fehmt keef? Haida al hayat, and I don't know what else to tell you. Bonne chance habibi!

But in the end it all comes down to people, and how they live in that parallel reality. How they fight to remake their optimism each day, how they live on adrenaline in the face of fear, how they live lives of pride and dignity under conditions that would seem unbearable to most of us.

Is life here better, and there...worse? Or is it the opposite? Does adversity build character, or does it stunt lives and crush dreams? It's self-evidently true that life is more easily lived here than there. And I'm happy and relieved to be back where things are easier. I feel lucky to be back in a place where the newspaper gets tossed aside unread and a parked car is just another nuisance. But, like with everything else, there's a cost. Hard to pin down, difficult to define, yet ever-present nonetheless.