فقدَ السرد،
ففَقد قلبه الإيقاع
السعادة ليست حدثاً لحظياً؛ ليست صورة على إنستغرام أو مقطع فيديو على «تيك توك»، السعادة لها ذيل طويل يمتد إلى الماضي. إنها مثل الشَّفَق؛ تلك الحُمْرة التي تُرى في الأفق بُعَيْد المغيب.
Lost in Narratives
Community without communication gives way to communication without community..
Lost in Narratives
Community without communication gives way to communication without community..
26.08.2024
The text is a true story told through a philosophical-literary lens. The author has rearranged the events and placed them in a framework that doesn't change the overall meaning. The text wouldn't have been possible without the influence of Byung-Chul Han, in particular his works The Crisis of Narration and The Palliative Society, as well as Walter Benjamin's The Storyteller, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, as well as other names mentioned in their respective contexts.
This morning he came back from the cardiologist with discouraging news. His heart had lost its rhythm. Normally, the heart works in a regular rhythm: the atria contract, followed by the ventricles, in a barely perceptible sequence. If this harmony is disturbed, daily life becomes a living hell. For reasons unknown to the doctors, his right ventricle has begun to contract prematurely, causing tremors that shake his whole body. Not just once or twice a day, or even ten times, but 14,000 times — as if two little puppies were constantly fighting in his chest, shaking him, rattling him and jolting him mercilessly.
It all began 15 years ago. On a perfectly normal night, when he was trying to sleep after a long day of hard work and constant stress, his heart began to pound. He had experienced this before. It lasted a few seconds to a few minutes and then subsided. But this time the palpitations felt different — they were stronger, more intense and did not stop. What makes matters worse is the brain’s automatic but unhelpful response. It goes into a fight or flight state because it wrongly assumes that death is imminent and sends signals to the sympathetic nervous system, which “empathizes" with the body's needs, to activate the adrenal glands. This lead to a release of adrenaline, which further accelerate heartbeat. Fortunately, the heart is automatically programmed by the parasympathetic nervous system to limit the acceleration of the heartbeat to a certain maximum, otherwise the brain, in its stupidity, would have permanently damaged the heart. He spent three nights in intensive care that day.
People are often unaware that a heart beats in their chest, but every single jolt reminded him how fragile the thread of life is and how easily it can snap. His heart jolts when he is happy and it jolts when he is sad. It jolts when he laughs and it jolts when he cries. It jolts when he is hungry and it jolts when he is full. It jolts when he runs, and it jolts when he rests; as if it were a shadow that constantly reminds him that a single moment would be enough to end it all.
When he arrived home, the dog was already waiting for him at the door. Leo wagged his tail in all directions, wriggling back and forth, reminding him that it was almost eleven o' clock and that he was now entitled to his breakfast and his belated morning walk. Luckily, dogs don’t worry as much about illness as humans do.
He carelessly placed his rucksack on the dark green, velvet wingback chair. He had never sat in this imposing piece of furniture before. Despite its great history, he wanted to get rid of it. It was in the same style as Queen Anne Stuart's. It had been Winston Churchill’s favorite chair when he was planning his next battle against Adolf Hitler. Charles Dickens wrote most of his novels in a similar chair, and Sigmund Freud sat in such a chair during his long therapy sessions with patients, where he needed a comfortable chair to reconstruct the patient's lost narrative.
The palpitations intensified, so he sat down on the couch opposite and tried to catch his breath. He could not shake the thought: had he also lost the narrative? According to Freud, psychological pain and disorders are symptoms of a blockage in the patient's history, a barrier that prevents him from continuing his story. The first step towards healing is to remove this blockage. When the patient begins to narrate his story freely and to put his unspoken fears into words, into language, when he tells his life in fragmented scenes — scattered blockages in a distorted narrative — psychoanalysis intervenes. It collects the contradictory information, weighs it up and organizes it into a comprehensible narrative. The patient then finds his life again in a coherent story that, like a river, washes the pain into the garbage dump. Oh, if only someone — someone like Freud — could emerge from nowhere and rearrange the displaced scenes of his life, as his heart had done, and put every stray memory and every lingering fear in its rightful place. Someone who could remove the obstacles that prevented life from flowing.
He emptied a large tin of meat, carrots and pasta with broth into one bowl and poured water into another. Leo spun around in circles, jumping with excitement at the sight of the hearty meal. Dogs don’t taste their food, they don’t enjoy it — they devour it. If they could, they would gobble it all down in a single bite. A few hundred, maybe even thousands of years with plenty of food has not been enough to neutralize their primal instinct — the instinct to survive. This instinct still drives them to consume as much food as possible, as quickly as possible, for the next meal may not be available, even if the shelf is full of cans.
His relationship with the little Maltese dog is not particularly good. He had given the dog to his eldest daughter for her thirteenth birthday after much deliberation. Since then, she has enjoyed his company without taking responsibility for his care. Fathers often carry the burden. Leo goes out three times a day at set times, regardless of Berlin’s unpredictable weather— - rain, wind or snow. His silky, long, pure white hair needs constant care: a weekly bath and a trim every two to three months at most. He is also a mischievous dog with a dominant personality. He regards the females in the neighborhood as his own, and woe betide any male dog, regardless of size, who dares to approach one of them in his presence. He attacks with the ferocity of a lion, even though he is neutered.
As he watched Leo devour his meal with a primal instinct that knew no emotion, he thought about their relationship and how circumstances had woven their fates together. It was neither love nor hate that bound them, but an arrangement to satisfy his daily needs. He himself was now trapped in a similar arrangement with life, governed by obligations rather than feelings. It was a relationship without a “narrative”, an “accidental”, contingent connection without a story, whose value extended only to the moment it occupied.
Leo finished his meal and looked at him gratefully, even with a smile — yes, dogs smile — and then hurried to the door, restless and anxious. His own life had been just as turbulent; he had always searched for peace but had never found it. He put the dog on the lead and set off for his late morning walk, as he did every day. This was not by choice, but by an unspoken agreement between him and Leo: new paths brought new scents of unknown dogs, potential enemies and hidden dangers. So it was safer to stay with the familiar. All his life he had lived on the edge of the abyss, consumed by the suspense of what would happen next, fueled by the adrenaline coursing through his veins. Perhaps it was this constant adrenaline rush that had led to his arrhythmia. He had never had the opportunity to talk to his doctor about it in detail.
They attached a Holter monitor to his chest to record cardiac arrhythmias over 48 hours. The device collects a huge amount of data about the heart as it works while resting, sleeping, working, walking, running, eating, shopping and even having sex. Data upon data, and then the doctor spends two or three minutes with the patient, nothing more. He is just a number — the seventh patient today, the tenth or perhaps the eighteenth. The doctor told him: “We will wait a few more months and put the device back in. If the rhythm has not improved, we will have to isolate the ectopic foci that are causing the arrhythmia by performing an ablation.”
The heart has always been controlled by two nodes: the sinoatrial node and the atrioventricular node, which regulate its movement by sending electrical signals at a specific rhythm. The problem arises when ectopic foci in the heart muscle — abnormal sites— - begin to emit confusing electrical signals, leading to arrhythmias, and the heart loses its rhythm and balance. He is convinced: “When life gets out of balance, the heart also gets out of rhythm.”
Leo rejoiced in the walk for which he had almost given up hope. He ran and jumped, sniffing here and there, particularly attracted by the scent of urine, which fascinated him more than anything else. It was a unique distinguishing feature, his distinguishing feature. From the smell of urine, Leo could tell the sex, age and health of other dogs; the dog could tell what the other dogs had eaten and gage their mood — whether they were excited or angry, or whether a female dog was in heat and ready to mate. He remembered a moment with his girlfriend, who had once closed her eyes, tilted her face slightly forward as if to summon him, and said, “I will never forget the smell between your thighs.” He smiled at the thought that her memory of him was more vivid than his actual presence.
All his life he had never understood why these women fell in love with him. He was not handsome. His face was oval, with a broad chin, a narrow forehead that somehow widened with age, small, sharp eyes under thick, arched eyebrows and a prominent nose with a drooping tip. His thin lips had a hint of darkness, and their corners curved downwards when he smiled. Even his smile betrayed a certain sadness, not to mention his gaunt body and hunched back. The only thing that stood out about him was his fair skin. It glowed, perhaps because he was constantly sweating — his body was a sweat-inducing machine. He was one of those people who, once you get to know them, you can’t remain neutral; you either like them or you hate them. He had an aura.
He never made a confession of love to a woman. He preferred to build a story with them first — a narrative. He created events that he carefully linked together and then patiently and persistently led the story to its climax. The plan didn’t always work, but when it did, they came to him, expressed their feelings and desired him.
In the distance, the Protestant Church of Hope in Berlin-Pankow came into view. He passed it three times a day on his way back from Leo’s walks — a dog he neither loved nor hated. It wasn’t the dog’s fault. He had lost the ability to love a long time ago. He remembered a few lines from the poet Charles Baudelaire:
My dear chap, you know my fear of horses and carriages. Just now, as I raced across the street, stomping in the mud to get through that chaos in motion where death gallops at you from all sides at once, my halo slipped off my head and onto the filthy ground. I’m afraid I didn’t have the sang-froid to pick it up –let’s just say I deemed it less disagreeable to lose my insignia than to have my bones broken. And then I said to myself, look for the silver lining. I can now walk around incognito, doing whatever nasty things I like, indulging my vices just as lesser mortals do. And here I am, just like you, as you see!
He repeated the line over and over in his head, “My halo has slipped off my head,” while Leo sniffed “Mimi,” a white female dog like him, but with a fuller and more confident body. Leo had known her for years, and yet every time he tried to sniff her genitals to identify her scent and be sure it was really her and no one else. But Mimi refused and moved away. A long time ago, they had played, danced and jumped around together. The vet had told him that Leo was suffering and needed to be neutered before he became aggressive. He had hesitated. He wanted Leo to experience sex at least once to keep a fond memory. But the vet had warned him and the operation was carried out. Leo tried to sniff Mimi again, but she pulled away and moved on. It seemed that he was no longer interesting enough. Leo didn’t care; he continued on his way, sniffing and carefully choosing places to urinate, sending his messages, status and mood— - maybe even something like a three-dimensional picture of the meal he had just eaten — just like we humans do on social media. The difference is that dogs communicate, tell their stories and show their moods through and in nature, whereas we humans have done away with stories, killed narrative and its possibilities, then invented digital media and decided it is now the best means of communication.
He rarely used social media because he thought it was a place full of noise. For years he had distanced himself from people and rarely found common ground for conversation. But it wasn’t always like that. In his childhood, he lived in a small village in the far north-east of Syria, in the plains of the majestic Tur-Abdin Mountains, which cover a vast area in Turkey and lie on the border with Syria. Alexander the Great passed through this region with his army on his way to fight Darius in the Battle of Gaugamela, a battle that went down in history as one of Alexander's greatest victories. The Persian and Roman empires fought each other here for centuries. Timur passed through here on his way to Ankara after sacking Baghdad. And thousands of years before them all, cities such as Tell Halaf, Tell Arbid, Shagar Bazar, Tell Brak and Urkesh emerged, flourished, expanded and finally disappeared. In this region, you could hardly lift a stone without uncovering a story underneath. The spring rains and river floods brought ancient coins, seals and other artifacts to the surface of the rich, red soil where plants, insects and animals thrived — and most importantly, people.
There was no hustle and bustle in the village. People listened more than they spoke. At the front of the village, where all the houses faced south towards the sun, there was a guest house made of mud bricks with a large staircase that ran about two meters above the ground and led to a single large room that was at least 20 meters long, 10 meters wide and 5 meters high — perhaps even higher. It was the crown jewel of the village. As soon as you climbed the stairs and entered through the large wooden door, you knew you were here to listen, not to speak. The guesthouse housed those who had traveled from afar, those who had been affected by misfortune and were looking for a solution, others who had caused or encountered problems and were looking for a way out, and those who had been burned by the fire of love and saw no other way than to elope with their lover after their family had refused to marry them off. It was also a haven for those seeking a livelihood, wanderers, storytellers, poets, singers and even dancers. “It was a magical world with stories that defied all logic,” he said slowly and loud enough to be heard.
Even his early adolescent sexual desire needed no explanation. It was enough that he found himself alone with a girl on one of the narrow country roads leading to the village, which stretched over five broad hills and four valleys, one of which contained a flowing river. Whatever happened next, it happened in silence, perhaps with a few sighs. There was no need for conversation, persuasion or preamble. She did not need any of that. He didn’t need profound wisdom, a love poem or to flex his muscles on Facebook. He didn’t need to follow her Instagram account, shower her with likes or send her that fake yellow smiley hugging a red heart. She didn’t need to take a selfie with pinched lips, droopy eyes and Instagram bum. And she did not need to suddenly jump in front of a TikTok camera to make her breasts jiggle. He didn’t need any of that. They both knew that fate had led them to this moment, and all they had to do was surrender to the power of the moment. Suddenly, a thought by the Hungarian writer Péter Nádas came to mind, which puzzled him: “You get the feeling that life here does not consist of personal experiences … but of a deep keeping of silence.” Yes, they didn’t need to talk.
The narrative was an essential, organic part of people's lives. They lived in it without being aware of its presence, just as we live in the Milky Way. We can only imagine its form because we cannot see it as we see other galaxies. Leo, who lived on after Mimi left him, also lives by narrative — instinct; communicating through urine signs opens up possibilities for him, helps him avoid danger and keeps him alive. We humans are also located in the world through narratives that give us a place in it. In the village, stories were not told, but lived. But now we have replaced the living narrative with digital communication in social media, where, as Byung-Chul Han says, “community without communication gives way to communication without community.” Berlin has severed the thread that connected him to the village and replaced the narrative with digital noise. He had lost the guiding star that once showed him the way, perhaps forever.
Leo calmed down, which was unusual for him. Like the humans, he probably had ADHD, as his behavior suggested. But now he walked close to his owner, matching his pace and occasionally lifting his head to look at him with a sympathetic gaze. Perhaps he sensed that his owner was stressed. He asked himself: “What does Leo think of me as a person?” Nietzsche once pondered a similar question and said: “I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.” Is he really unhappy? Perhaps. Nietzsche says: “I have given a name to my pain and call it 'dog.' It is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog - and I can scold it and vent my bad mood on it. as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.”
But for Byung-Chul Han, happiness is not a momentary event, an Instagram photo or a TikTok video clip. Happiness has a long tail that reaches back into the past. It is not the child of chance, but is nourished by every part of life. It doesn’t have the shiny appearance portrayed by influencers on Instagram, but is like — the afterglow - the soft red light you see on the horizon just after sunset. And you lose your happiness when you immerse yourself in the maelstrom of reality and its ephemeral things.
On the way back, at the intersection of a street named after the writer Arnold Zweig, who sought refuge in Palestine during the Nazi regime, and Trelleborger street, he turned right, bringing the Evangelical Church of Hope with its Art Nouveau architecture closer and more imposingly into view. The tower rises some 50 meters above the ground and ends in an octagonal section, with the sacred geometric shape crowned by a dome. Above the dome is a lantern structure topped by a cross. In the tower there are three bells weighing over half a ton with the names “Faith”, “Love” and “Hope”, which ring in a solemn rhythm on Sundays. The faithful enter the church through the main portal, which is guarded by a triangle with an eye, the so-called Eye of God, and above which stand three statues: In the center is a statue of Christ protected by two angels. One of the angels was destroyed during the fierce fighting around the church in 1945 and has since been restored. On the left is a statue of Martin Luther holding the Bible and on the right is a statue of the Apostle Paul leaning his hand on a sword. He could not escape the irony that he came from the same region as the Apostle Paul, but is seen here as a stranger in this place, an outsider in the geography, while statues of the Apostle Paul are placed in the churches.
Geography was never just a place. It has always been a space in which lives intertwine. It also has its own power and resonance, because it is an idea and a memory charged with history. Geography is woven into the stories that create social cohesion, give meaning and convey values. Religions themselves are grand narratives; they are anchors for people's lives; through religion they find their place in the world.
The Church of Hope is no longer often visited today. It was once a symbol of resistance in East Berlin and had its own history. It was an important cultural and social hub, especially for youth movements and punk music that rebelled against the strict GDR regime. in 1988, the church managed to organize a concert by the West German band Die Toten Hosen by secretly letting them in under the guise of a church cultural event using forged documents in order to escape the strict grip of the Stasi security apparatus. The concert took place in the backyard of the church, where Leo often played, jumped and did his business. The number of participants was small, but the symbolism of the concert was great: it offered the young people a space in which they could gather and express themselves freely. The band made no conditions, only that there should be free, unlimited beer and that the cost of any damage caused by the youths during their “little revolution” should be covered.
He also had his own little revolution when, at the age of fifteen, he joined a secret party whose members faced arrest and torture. The “Communist Workers' Party” was an opposition group in the 1980s that aimed to overthrow the Syrian regime through a popular revolution. In reality, it was a unique party that opposed everyone. It was against dictatorial regimes, against the Soviet Union and Stalin, against China and Mao Zedong, against the Eastern European regimes and their socialist bloc, against religion, against the Nasserist nationalists, against the Communist Party of Khalid Bakdash and even against the Communist Party of Riyad al-Turk. It was against everything, but it had its own narrative. He still remembers the shiver that ran down his spine when he went to a meeting with one of his party comrades. All he knew was the time and place of the meeting. He didn’t know what the person he was meeting looked like, nor their name, address, age or even their gender. He had to go to a certain place at a certain time and wear certain identifying signs. Another person, also wearing signs, would approach him and they would exchange a secret question and answer to recognize each other. He went to these meetings as if he were meeting a lover. The “narrative” that the party members adopted bonded them and kindled the flame of camaraderie among them.
On Thursday, December 3, 1987, he was on his way home before sundown when a military intelligence Chevrolet pickup truck drove past him in the town of Amuda, where his family had moved seven years earlier to continue his studies. This happened 128 days before the Toten Hosen concert in the churchyard. A queasy feeling came over him when he noticed a masked man in the vehicle, but he pushed it aside and continued on his way until he reached his house. There he found his older brother waiting for him at the front door. His brother told him that their sister, who lived in Turkey, had sent a telegram and that they had to go to the post office immediately to pick it up.
It was a cold, cloudy day and the sun was just touching the horizon in the west. He slowly climbed the steps that led up to the post office. He could have sworn that a thousand voices were telling him not to do it. But he did it anyway. His older brother was worried enough about his sister and led him up the stairs without hesitation. They reached the empty post hall, where only one man was present, the postman, who asked his brother to wait, then he led him quietly to a back door and they went down together to a room on the first floor. The head of the town's military intelligence service was waiting for him there. The officer nodded to the postman, who left the room and closed the door behind him. The officer asked him to sit down on a chair while he himself took a seat behind a wide desk in the room. He did not speak. He asked no questions. He did not smile. He avoided looking at him, even though he was only a teenager, legally still a minor. The officer had probably received a stern reprimand from the head of military intelligence in the nearby town of Qamishli for not uncovering the “plot” this teenager was allegedly planning to overthrow President Hafez al-Assad. In the end, it was the military intelligence service in Aleppo that uncovered the “plot” and probably reprimanded the head of the department in Qamishli. In Syria, people are living in a chain of humiliation that is so great that by the time it reaches ordinary citizens, the circle of humiliation has widened to a level that the human mind can no longer comprehend.
A short time later, about ten masked agents of the military secret service entered the room, having come from Qamishli in full military regalia. They were armed with rifles, pistols and ammunition belts strapped tightly around their waists. They demanded that he come with them and led him out of the building with pistols pointed at his head. Shouting loudly, they put him in the car before passers-by on the street could notice anything. He noticed that his brother was already in the car. They had taken him along as a precaution to prevent the arrest becoming known prematurely or causing unnecessary commotion, especially as they were planning to arrest others as well. They also knew that his father was a respected figure in the region and they wanted to avoid creating tribal or political tensions in the small, predominantly Kurdish town.
He did not like his father (63), who had died in a car accident three years before his arrest. His father also suffered from heart problems. He was at the wheel of the car with four of his daughters, three of his younger sons, his wife and his sister. Nobody knows how the accident happened. There was no collision with another vehicle and the tires did not blow out. The car simply went out of control and overturned in a ditch next to the road. Everyone survived with broken bones, wounds and bruises, except his father and aunt, who both died on the same day and in the same place. Their relationship was extraordinary: neither of them could make a decision without the consent of the other. She used to say to him, “May God never test me by your absence,” and he would reply, “May God never test me by your absence.” It was fate that they died together.
for 40 years he believed that his father was domineering. His father had married four wives and fathered 23 sons and daughters, perhaps ten or more of whom did not survive infancy. In the 1950s, he owned large estates and entire villages. He had people who plowed, planted and harvested his fields. He had people to look after the cattle. When he had enemies, he had people who defended him and even sacrificed themselves for him when necessary. When he got sick, the whole world seemed to turn upside down; his wives took turns tending his bed to keep him warm. Even while he slept, one massaged his head, two others rubbed his feet and still others fanned him with hand fans in the heat until he woke up. The women adored him; a single glance from him brought a smile to their faces all night long. Many women were even convinced that he did not relieve himself like ordinary people. He was a unique storyteller; when he spoke, silence fell over his listeners and transported them — mind and body — to worlds they would never have dared to dream of. Had he not been like this, he would not have been able to cope with the crises he encountered in his large adobe guest house. From the most complicated disputes that could lead to bloodshed to the simplest problems, he solved them with his stories. Even the toughest men on the verge of committing a crime melted under his hands, twisting and turning to finally surrender. His personality had an aura.
In the last ten years before his death, the village lost its ability to remain silent and listen. His aura gradually began to fade, especially after he lost much of his property to the agrarian reforms imposed on landowners by the Syrian authorities. These reforms aimed to Arabize the Kurdish-populated region by confiscating land and allocating it to newly settled Arab communities, who were displaced from their lands along the Euphrates in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor and settled in the middle of Kurdish villages. Neither the Arabs nor the Kurds were happy about losing their land. Each wanted to exclude the other. The competition intensified, everyone against everyone else, and the grand narrative disintegrated into smaller, exclusionary and discriminatory narratives, leading to the disintegration of the community.
In fact, he too had inherited his father's passion for storytelling. Political action, in the truest sense of the word, implicitly presupposes a narrative. If an action cannot be narrated, it degenerates into a reactive and random reaction. As Hannah Arendt says:
For action and speech, which, as we saw before, belonged close together in the Greek understanding of politics, are indeed the two activities whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be told, no matter how accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation may appear to be.
The narrative had led him to the military intelligence vehicle and the weapons pointed at his head. By its very nature, narration requires “listening”, which means acknowledging the other. The situation in the secret service vehicle was the opposite of that. There was a lot of shouting. It was exclusionary.
After 6 years, 3 months and 29 days he was released from prison. He had been beaten with hands, feet and sticks while blindfolded. He was placed in the “dulab” (tire torture method) and beaten with a quadruple cable that tore the skin into pieces. They threatened him with the “German chair”, but fortunately for him they did not carry out the threat. Some suspect that the German chair was one of the diabolical ideas of Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man in the Nazi camps. After Germany's defeat in the Second World War, Brunner managed to escape and found refuge in Syria, where he became an important advisor to the Syrian secret service. In the German chair, you can feel your soul leaving your body drop by drop, while your spine threatens to break.
But the deepest loss was the loss of the narrative. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Gulf War in 1991 shattered the narrative and robbed his world of the magic it once had.
When he was released from prison, the world around him had changed. It had become a world full of countless narratives: Liberalism, neoliberalism, democratism, civil society, feminism, structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, colonialism and post-colonialism, cultural studies, tribalism, sectarianism, Islamism and so on. Narratives are not eternal; they are born, they grow and they fade, but when they are lost, everyone looks for alternatives.
The uncertainty had spread so far that he once even convinced a group of more than ten people sitting with him that he could fly. They followed him out into the courtyard to see the miraculous flight with their own eyes. He laughed so hard that day that tears ran down his face and his stomach muscles could no longer support him. Joy was not in his nature. He was more inclined towards the German philosopher Ernst Jünger - one of the most prolific and eccentric writers - who once said: “Tell me your relation to pain and I will tell you who you are!”
In the post-narrative era, there is a global phobia of pain. Pain has been gradually marginalized to the point where the ability to tolerate it has almost disappeared. It is no longer desirable; it has become algophobia, the fear of pain. In the age of Instagram and TikTok, in the age of eternal happiness, of constant success, of smooth curves and strong, chiseled muscles, in the age of firm breasts and broad, athletic shoulders, pain has become a “scandal”, a sign of weakness that must be hidden. But not for him. He embraced the pain. Even during his years in prison, which by its very nature is a place of exclusion, displacement and ostracism, he chose the forgotten corner of the prison barracks to make his bed. Exclusion within exclusion. There he could feel the raw pain. He would experience the “goosebumps” that philosopher Theodor Adorno calls “the first aesthetic image,” the kind of love that makes you fall in love with everything at once. A life that rejects pain is a boring life.
The pain still grips him when he remembers that evening. He had gotten dressed, left his house in the Jisr al-Nahhas district of Damascus, climbed down the short flight of stairs, crossed the long corridor and then the street on the other side. He raised his hand to flag down a minibus on the northern ring road and got in. During the thirty-minute ride, he rehearsed what he would say over and over again, repeating the phrases once, then twice, then a third time and once more. At the Al-Mouwasat Hospital stop, he got off the minibus and walked quietly towards the student dormitory. He didn’t hear the street noise and did not see the people making it. He showed his student ID to the security guard at the entrance, passed through the entrance and walked quietly 85 meters straight ahead, then turned right and walked quietly another 140 meters straight ahead until he reached the front of girls' building six. He climbed the stairs and told the doorman that he was a visitor and wanted to see her. Then he descended the stairs, again making sure the sentences were still fresh in his mind. The doorman told her that a visitor wanted to see her. He sat down on one of the benches opposite the building and repeated the sentences again. He kept looking at the stairs, at the people coming and going, his expression unrecognizable. He was neither happy nor sad, he was afraid, trembling. He saw her coming down the stairs and smiled when she looked at him. Fifteen muscles in her face moved to form that smile, while more than 500,000 hair muscles stood up in his body, sending a shiver down his spine. She was beautiful.
Since childhood, he had always tended to be different. He was the only one who openly rebelled against his father, while his brothers feared his father’s authority. As he grew older, he no longer saw his father as domineering. He could find no other explanation for his passion for storytelling than that he had lost hope. When you lose hope, the roadblocks in life become more frequent. The Danish writer Karen Blixen once said: “I am not a novelist, I am not even a writer; I am a storyteller.. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.” His father did indeed put his worries into the stories he told. And now he himself carries the sorrows that have accumulated over the years in prison, outside Building Six, looking at the girl he loves — the girl who puts her right hand in the back pocket of her jeans and laughs as she leans her head back and lifts her chin just enough to let the laughter flow freely. She was different.
He suggested that they go to the canteen in the dormitory. It was quieter there and a beer might give him the courage he needed. They went together. She was charming. He had met her a year ago after moving to Damascus to study English literature. When he saw her for the first time, she was a wild, untamed presence that sent a shiver down his spine. They talked at length about all sorts of things and he drank as much beer as he could until he forgot the sentences he had memorized. He didn’t know how to start. Since the beginning of their acquaintance, he had been wary of developing a deep friendship with her. It’s not easy to break the dynamic of a friendship and move safely into a romantic relationship. They sometimes met at group meetings at the college — friends, but from a distance. Eventually he pulled himself together and told her she was the woman he wanted to spend his life with. She remained silent. He said, “You won’t find anyone better than me,” and knew immediately that what he had just said was clumsy and foolish. It seemed as if she had been caught off guard; she hadn’t expected this to happen. The pain he felt was almost unbearable, but he regained his composure and said, “I don’t need an answer now, just think about it,” then he left. She fell silent.
He returned home without direction; orientation, he had lost it in the dormitory. He was tired, exhausted and yet filled with a similar feeling of peace as he had felt in his forgotten corner of the prison barracks. Either the story would end here and be complete, or it would continue from this point and open up new possibilities. Either way, he had set the wheel of life in motion. He told his roommate not to wake him in the morning, went to his room and went to sleep.
He was still under the influence of the previous day's beer and was woken by noises in the house. With difficulty he opened his eyes and saw her standing in all her grace at the foot of his bed. Tall. Beautiful. He jumped out of bed and struggled to open his eyes fully. Yes, it was her, standing there, smiling, with a gentle, reproachful look in her eyes. He didn’t know how to react. He could not think of anything else. He blurted out, “Does that mean ‘yes’?” She opened her long arms and hugged him to her chest. He pulled back a little and ran to his roommate, who had gone into the kitchen to give them some privacy, and shouted, “She said ‘yes’!”
He washed himself in the bathroom, rinsed away the remnants of sleep and returned to her sitting on the edge of the bed in the room. He closed the door and there she stood, smiling, shy, looking him straight in the eye and acknowledging his presence. He hugged her and she returned his embrace, both of them pressed against each other as if they wanted to merge into one body. He kissed her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks, her nose, her chin and then her lips, her teeth, her tongue. It wasn’t just a kiss, it was an exploration. He paused at each point, observing, touching, smelling, kissing, running his tongue over it and storing the sensations in his memory before moving on, just as Leo does on his daily walks. He wasn’t in a hurry, and neither was she.
They were experiencing life anew, a moment that made the narrative of life possible — without it, life would be bare. Only through narrative does life rise above its bare reality; it gives meaning to time, it gives it a beginning and an end. Without narrative, life becomes mere survival, it ceases to be epic. Through narrative, the world becomes a coherent system that connects events and things into a single story, no matter how trivial, absurd or random they may seem. They experienced things that made sense in their interconnectedness, not in isolation but in a rhythm.
He took her hand and led her to the empty seat in the middle of the room; he wanted her and nothing else. She was nervous, unsure of what to do. He reached for her neck notch, the little triangle that served as a window to what was happening in her chest. It rose and fell with her breath and pulsed with the quickening beat of her heart. The touch releases the tensions and blockages, restores balance and breathes new life into this primal trust.
He helped her undress, then stepped back to admire her body; then he explored its details again — every angle, every curve, every muscle. He touched, smelled, tasted and put his ear to her chest to listen to her heartbeat; the blood rushed hot in all directions. He lifted her onto the bed and kissed her neck, her chest, her armpits. She grabbed him by the hair and pressed her mouth to his, pushing the air from her chest into his and then pulling the air from his chest into hers in a steady rhythm. She kissed his body, felt him, touched him. Her hands healed, freed him from his pain. The hand that touches heals, just like the voice that tells a story. Touch creates trust and dispels fear.
None of them were afraid, at least not now. They spent the next two weeks naked in the same room, leaving it only at mealtimes. They talked, laughed, played, and he read her poems by Mahmoud Darwish and “The Prophet” by Khalil Gibran, and they took turns reciting verses from the Song of Solomon:
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.
Then they listened to the music, made love again and again and did not stop until they fell asleep.
Leo realized that the walk was coming to an end as they approached the huge arch whose rounded ends were reminiscent of a curved quotation mark that adorned the entrance to the Church of Hope. Quotation marks in language are amazing. They stand for trust when you quote someone verbatim, but also for doubt when you put a term in quotation marks and doubt its credibility. Religions are also amazing. The Church of Hope had its glamorous days, with a purple ceiling, pink walls and light gray columns in the entryway, culminating in the royal blue of the star-studded altar. The 36 angels inside the nave witnessed countless souls who came to worship to ask forgiveness for their sins, to ask for sustenance or simply to draw closer to God in search of grace before continuing on their way. The church, once filled with warmth and intimacy, was no longer what it once was.
Leo went to his favorite spot at the round end of the arch and urinated there, leaving a message for the dogs that would follow him. Dogs weren’t always dogs. It was only 20,000 years ago that humans massacred large animals on a grand scale and wiped them out. All that remained were brown bears and wolves, which found an opportunity to mate and reproduce, and thrived all over the earth until they inevitably encountered humans. Some wolves discovered that the food humans left behind was worth the effort. They began to approach humans, tried to understand them, eventually shed their identity as wolves and became domesticated dogs. They didn’t have to change much about their biological nature — 99.9% of their genes are still those of wolves. They simply learned to understand humans better and adopted their expressions. They learned from humans how to show anger, fear, pain and sadness and were able to communicate with them better than the animals that are biologically closer to humans. They became human companions. In Germany alone, there are more than 10 million dogs whose owners spend over 6 billion euros a year on food, medical care, liability insurance, accessories, training, dog sitting and registration fees.
When he came to Germany as a refugee in 2012, he found it difficult to come into contact with Germans. Leo opened the door wide for him; now he knows all the dogs in the neighborhood and their owners, who eagerly chat with him about their sweet and cute dogs. Leo has broken down the social barriers that people had erected against other people when they lost the narrative that once united them in a single story.
Today's societies are built on information. People know where you’ve been, what you’ve bought, how you’ve eaten and why you’ve traveled. People document their daily lives on social media and make their private lives public. Transparent and exposed. Societies that have become detached from the narrative have become unstable and have lost their aura. The post-narrative age is an era of detachment in which digital memory is contingent and ephemeral.
Unlike digital memory, which is based on accumulation and addition, human memory is narrative — it selects events, discards some and highlights others, and then links them together in different ways and in infinite combinations. Narrative memory thrives on gaps; it is a memory that can forget.
His love story was never complete. They broke up after four years. They loved and hated. They agreed and argued. They hugged and grew apart again; it was worth the effort. Shortly after they broke up, he moved to the United Arab Emirates for work. They didn’t meet again until chance brought them together 17 years later. The war in Syria and the harshness of life had worn her down and her life had ceased to be a narrative. When the ability to tell a story is lost, wisdom fades and life becomes a fierce struggle to find solutions to one problem after another.
Leo jumped, played and tried to get his attention. He often did this when the walk was coming to an end in order to prolong it as long as possible. A dog’s life is short; every year in a human’s life is seven years in a dog's life. But what is the point of a long life? The relationships that once had meaning, that denied the randomness and triviality of things, were crumbling before his eyes, despite his efforts. Was his existence as random as a stone, a plant or even a speck of dust? His life had gone in all directions, sometimes full of mystery and excitement, sometimes seeming like the constant ringing in his right ear that had plagued him for years.