Making a Home with an Identity of Conflict

JUAN GONZALEZ: And his attachment is obviously to the Middle East. He spent so much time there. You, yourself, were born in Beirut. The conversations between you about the importance of what he was doing at this particular time and in this incredible upsurge of the Arab Spring and these popular revolts all around the Middle East, the conversations he must have had with you about the importance of his work?

NADA BAKRI: He felt very lucky that he was witnessing these uprising, that he was covering it, that he was part of this moment. He felt like, you know, this is a dream coming true for every journalist covering the Middle East. You know, after covering it for so many years—oppression and dictatorships and wars and conflicts and violence—it was finally—you know, finally, there was a—something is changing, and something positive and optimistic. He felt like it was going to take a while, but it was at least happening, you know, the change that people had for so long aspired for.

- Interview on Democracy Now!

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It all started in a filthy office garage, a shed built from cement, looking something like an old jailhouse before the invention of bars. A large, heavyset woman engulfs herself in a literal blood bath, drinking warm bodily fluids over her red-dyed dress in wolfish fashion. She’s on a diet, she says. Blood is her way out. With a few siblings and friends we fire off onto the desolate rural highway. Snow and ice feed the sky in a formidable crown of gleaming silver. The earth hibernates absolutely. As the road ices up and the snow piles impassably, I get out, finding two pistols in the trunk. They are caked in snow, perfectly, as to disguise handprints on the metal. We fire off a round as we burn the snow off the pavement on our way, speeding. On the road, blood is our subsistence. We drink of it fluidly and richly. Our decadence is spelled in animal murder. Back at our family house, my siblings gather across the yard. My feet are swollen, painful as hell as I meander ever so slightly across the rough grass and hard-packed, unleveled soil. I am almost to them, yet fading and neglectful, I traverse the domestic plain solo.

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Blood

"It is the life-giving, vital part of our physiology and it may symbolize our strengths and weaknesses and our physical and mental health. If you are currently experiencing a very difficult time in your life, you may have dreams with bloody and frightening images. Don't worry, you may be venting your fears! Some believe that when you see blood in your dream, the distressing situation in your life which is at the root of the dream has come to an end, and the worst is over."

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“Is it possible to question the natural progression of ages?

where cycles, are caused not by epidemics,

but through a revivification of our human path on this earth,

whereby some aspects of ourselves must be shed to give way

to other ways of being and living in relation to ourselves as a living host

to the experience that is this universe through the medium of earth?”

“No.

Such epidemics, as have outlasted humanity

have shifted our course

into a malformed search for objects,

a fantasy mirage of unending lust

that consumes and overtakes the only worthy pleasure

of being alive

for a scant mockery of human expression.

This is the age of the Aahtzmi.

Our enemy is…inside us.

The only way to overcome such an obstacle

and press on into a completely reversed progression of cyclic ages

is to enact compassion, through love.”

- excerpt from "Deadly Vision Part II"