Blackout, Amman, November, 2005

Opened the window just wide enough to see Lwebideh, Old Quarter, dark, crazily headlit, then here and there the human luminence of old kerosene lamps lighted, candles, even the Rainbow Street 'villas', the British Council; the city, a softened, closer self, I imagined bringing out those surplus Aladdins, from when was only Jabal Amman, the Citadel, hunched against night-raiders, saved for the known failure of that fad, electricity. But, opening the window, I gave the house over to a shrill, tireless pickpocket mosquito: blood-dry, the runt last of its season, surely. I'd been reading Jadara Rises Again by flashlight, the bit where Christ does in the swine, rendered in our tongue 'Gadarene' (the swine and citizens, I mean, not the demon or demons' name or names; those, Legion. The Many.) In the play the man, oddly self-possessed, speaks his own name, modestly I think clutching a tail of beard around his bare testicles - though I can't tell if that's dramatic necessity or knowing here a close cousinship of man and devil, not with this wingsound, this high whee in the dark (the worst thing, worse than tinder-piles of bites, the nagging groove of itch, like a lip catching your fingers.) Sometimes, behind the stove, he's like a violin badly tuning somewhere in a highrise, the pure C-sharp of exhaustion; sometimes so close I clap my ears, stumble the house slashing the walls with my torch's small bore to pin him down. Thinking, here, bug, coequaled here, friend, is a prime example: one of us Legion, one Fire-Eyed Prophet; one to hurtle seaward, one to lay his hands soul-weary then upon the waiting cross; one whistling in the dark, one yet as lost.