prayer, by faiz ahmed faiz

Come, let us also raise our hands to pray
We who have forgotten the protocols of prayer
We who don't remember anything
No God, no idol, nothing except the burning pain of love

Come, let us pray
that the beloved called Life may pour
tomorrow's sweetness in the poison of today
Lighten the burden of the days and nights
on the eyelashes of those
who don't have the strength anymore to bear it

Brighten with a candle, any candle
The nights of those whose eyes have lost the power
to sustain the glance of morning's bright face
Bring to light a path, any path
Before the eyes of those whose feet haven't the support
of any kind of road

For those whose dogma has been to talk the path
of untruth, of hypocrisy: let them be vouchsafed
the strength of denial and intrepid search for truth
Let those whose heads await the executioner's sword
be granted the puissant grace to wrench and spurn
the murderer's hand

The buried secret of love, which is like a fever in the spirit
Let's confess to it today and obliterate the burning pain
The True Word, which throbs in the heart like a thorn
Let us say it today
and take away the stab of the pain

the sudden death of a child

I came across this article today at my desk, an excerpt from a memoir by a man whose two-year-old daughter was killed in a freak accident. I had to fight myself from getting choked up, because I'm at work and that is not a good look. The author's description of being in the hospital resonated so, so very hard. God damn it.

grandfather's golf cart

Last night I was overcome briefly by a memory of being at Liz's, the day after Christmas, talking in the kitchen with Andrew or Katie or Uncle Larry. At some point we became aware the the house had quieted down, and then that the cause of this peace was the absence of the little cousins. Where had they gone? And then I looked out through the French doors into the backyard and saw Jack placidly driving grandfather's old golf cart back and forth, with seemingly the entire roster of Peale cousins piled on and laughing gleefully. Jack wasn't smiling but his face looked relaxed and peaceful. I have no idea where he'd gotten the idea to do that, let alone the keys to the cart. Jack never learned how to drive and I'm pretty sure that's the only time I saw him behind the wheel of anything off a go-kart track.

Not sure what happened after that. I suppose he stopped driving the cart, the kids came back inside, and he did, too. Uncomfortably slotting himself back in with the Allen-Peales, probably heading back out for a cigarette at the earliest opportunity. But in the moment on the lawn feeling happy and comfortable

The image of him on the golf cart is one I cherish, for its incongruity, for the joy on the faces of our cousins, for the way it reminds me of Jack's mischievousness. 

dreaming about jack

The last two nights, I dreamed about Jack. First two in a while. On Wednesday, I walked into a laundromat to do my laundry, looked over to my left, and there he was, casually looking at his phone on an orange plastic chair. He was about his 19-year-old self, thin and with his boyish short blond mop. He looked up and we made eye contact. I was stunned, unable to say anything. He started, but then composed himself quickly. I guess he realized the jig was up. He explained that he'd faked the suicide to try to get away from some problem, I can't remember the specifics of his explanation. I was flabbergasted and confused, unsure whether to be furious or elated.

Last night, I was at home when we got a call that he'd tried to kill Maura L before killing himself. I was in the process of writing her a long letter, apologizing on Jack's behalf, when I woke up.

Wonder why the back-to-back dreams. While I was making breakfast this morning, the old guilt about not listening right away to his raps on Soundcloud or watching his videos washed up to the surface. I miss him.

life is short

Two Three friends died suddenly in the last two weeks. The first was a newer friend, a young Islamabadi woman who was funny and keen. She was a passenger in a single-car crash a mile or so from our house. Apparently the driver had looked at her phone to change the song, lost control, and gone off the road into a water-filled ditch. The driver and two of the passengers drowned, two other passengers survived. It happened while SRB and I were in Lahore a couple of weeks ago and we drove past the spot on the way home. We stopped and got out and it was strange to see the newly-broken branches on the shrubs that she crashed through.

The second was an older friend, someone from C@P, who died last week. We hadn't been in touch a few years. I found out via a post on the C@P Facebook page. Linc forwarded me a message from another friend explaining that the friend who died had gone to the hospital for breathing difficulty, been diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia, spent a week in the hospital and been discharged. Then when the problems resurfaced they went back to the hospital and were diagnosed with cancer and TB. Three massive heart attacks followed and that was it.

The third was a childhood buddy and baseball teammate who drowned when his kayak flipped in some rapids. A gentle, sweet kid. I used to look up to his dad, too, who seemed like a cool guy. He (the dad) worked at the Textile Museum in DC. We'd been out of touch for many years.

Jack dying last year was a worse blow by orders of magnitude. There is no comparison. But still, it's terrible to feel such a sudden loss of people you care about, even if only a little or mostly in memory.

One of the things it's made me think a lot about is fear. I talk a big game sometimes about not being afraid in situations where I have no control. Turbulence, for example, doesn't much bother me because (1) plane crashes are exceptionally rare, while turbulence is common; and (2) by boarding I've ceded power over my life to the pilot and to the plane itself. The lack of control is freeing, in a way: if we go down we go down so what's the point in stressing about it? When others are scared during turbulence I genuinely feel okay about it.

But part of the grief I feel in the aftermath of these deaths is imagining of the panic and pain they felt at the end, and my heart aches for them. The first and third friends drowned. For the first, that means she was still alive when the car hit the water. I hope she was knocked out by the impact, because the thought of being awake, trapped, and pulled under water is almost unbearable. For the second, it's hard to imagine that he wasn't conscious, fiercely trying to right himself or get out of trouble until it was too late. And I hope the friend who died in the hospital was unconscious when his heart failed. But even if so, it must have been bewildering and terrifying to suddenly be in the hospital and sicker than most anyone expects to be in their mid-30s. Cancer? TB? Fuck.

2018 review - work

*Wrote this back in January but didn't publish it before for some reason. Maybe I thought it was unfinished.*

In 2018, we submitted 23 proposals valued at $95.5 million. That's nearly two per month, and for much of the year I was the only dedicated business development person on staff. That is a lot of ad hoc team formation, coordination, and management, not to mention the writing, consultations, design workshops led, Of those we won four, valued at $7.4 million, and lost five, valued at $9.4 million. The remaining 16 proposals, worth $78.7 million, are pending. That doesn't include the stuff we submitted the year before that we're still waiting on, or the $80+ million worth of potential projects we're negotiating with a few different donors. And, you know, all the other things I'm responsible for: communications, monitoring and evaluation, gender, stakeholder engagement (which includes the odious task of planning visits for big muckity-mucks).

I try to keep a pretty modest view of my own competencies. On the plus side, I'm a good writer and editor. I'm personable and confident and I can run a meeting or chip in usefully to someone else's. I'm committed to inclusion and justice in the office and in our work, moreso perhaps than many of my colleagues. But I'm not super well organized, prone to procrastination, a well-liked but uncertain and probably too-passive manager (although I think I've improved a lot over the last two years), and at least slightly out of my depth on a couple of the key things my department is responsible for: monitoring and evaluation (about which I know the basics but am not super strong) and communications (about which I barely know even the basics, apart from being able to write well). Occasionally my procrastination and dislike of certain tasks means things slide that shouldn't. When we're not winning money, that negative stuff really sticks out and it's hard not to question or feel bad even about the parts of my job I think I'm good at.

So it's kind of nice to look back and realize that what I perceive as a lack of success last year isn't due to a lack of hard work or productivity. We really did bust our butts. 

the silk roads

Extremely well-written and exhaustively reported history of the region running from modern Turkey and Egypt to western China, and from the Central Asian steppe to the Persian Gulf. The first half of the book is told at a breathtaking pace: Richard I merits barely two sentences in a chapter about the early Crusades. And it is told really from the perspective of the people who lived and traveled around the "Silk Roads" region. The Vikings are relevant only because they were big traders of slaves from Europe into Persian and Arab markets. Even Rome is an afterthought. Much more important

Frankopan slows down as he gets into the rise of Europe over the last 500 years, and gets progressively slower as the tale gets more recent. The last 200-odd pages are dedicated to the period from World War I to the present. And oddly, for a book that sets out to be a corrective to Eurocentric narratives that look "at the past from the perspective of the winners of recent history," the perspective of the second half of the book is decidedly Eurocentric. Sure, various European countries took turns becoming the dominant power during that stretch. But it's disappointing that we're not told that story from the perspective of, say, the Levantine traders who partnered with Venice and Genoa, or the Persian bureaucrats who signed away the country's oil wealth to Britain and the Persian businessmen.

Partly that must be because records from recent centuries are so much richer than those from longer ago. And partly it may be because the organizing principle of history in Frankopan's telling is the trade of luxury goods (and, recently, bulk commodities like wheat and oil). As Europe became the world's main consumer and eventually trader of those goods, maybe it's inevitable that Frankopan would start to speak with their voice. Still, it's a bit of a let-down. I bet the Persians kept keeping records.

The last couple of chapters rehashed events I'm already pretty familiar with: US and British fuckery in this part of the world, the Cold War, and then 9/11 and its fallout. Still, there were some nuggets in there that I didn't know or had forgotten, such as Dick Cheney's personal role in selling nuclear technology to Iran in the 1970s. And Frankopan is a lively enough writer that I didn't mind racing through that bit.

On the whole, it's an impressive historical survey of a crucial part of the world. Easy four stars.

patricia lockwood

I came across this piece by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books, "The Communal Mind," and it is blowing my little mind. I've not finished it yet because it's long and I'm at work, but holy crap. I was vaguely aware of her poetry and online presence -- the title of her collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is hard to forget -- but now I'm dying to read more of it. This prose poetry, whatever it is, in the LRB piece, is about the experience of living a life that's connected inextricably to the internet. I think a lot about my own compulsive clicking and scrolling, worry about it in a vague way, occasionally make efforts to reduce screen time. I am, luckily, not a terribly compulsive person, so I don't think I have it as bad as some. But no one has ever crystallized the experience of living online like this, at least not that I've read.

A sample:

The next morning your eyes were gritty and your tongue even less pink, and the people who filtered past you at your job were less real than the vivid scroll of the board dedicated to the discussion of candida overgrowth, which didn’t even exist.

Why were her lungs so shallow after three or four hours of it, and her pulse like a rabbit’s, its whole body full of the thought what’s there, what’s next, what is that wind? And blood, do I smell blood?

Was there even a gloaming any more, or had the computers eaten it?
And had there always been this many mystery blobs washing up on seashores, or was it new?

A picture of a species of tree frog that had recently been discovered. Scientists speculated that the reason it had never before been seen was because, quote, ‘It is covered with warts and it wants to be left alone.’

me
me
unbelievably me
it me