Model

Exfoliation, extraction, hydration, depuffing.

Still Life with Bottle, Carafe, Bread and Wine (1862-3), Claude Monet

On the front page of the New York Times yesterday morning, I discovered photos of black and white coral, dying under the oceans thanks to climate change. I looked closer and the coral was moving. It wasn’t coral but clouds of white and black smoke from bombs dropped on villages in southern Lebanon. “Satellite images, photos and videos show the scope of widespread demolitions.”

Demolitions. Pardon our dust. Not bombings, not exterminations, not war. “Israel Says It’s Applying Its Gaza Model in Lebanon.” Applying Its Gaza Model. Not destroying homes, flattening communities, displacing families. Casually redesigning the landscape.

The article kept reloading and bombs kept going off and the clouds of smoke kept spreading through Kfar Kila and Markaba and Taybeh and Meiss al Jabal.

***

In 1881, British lieutenants listed some of the Arabic names of the places down there, underneath the expanding smoke. Edward Henry Palmer, the Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, translated them for the Survey of Western Palestine. The results read like a poem:

• the column of the deaf man

• the land of the descendants of the little leopard

• the garden of the well-makers

• the pool of gurgling

• the pool of crumbling

• the land of little flowers

• the traveler’s tower

• the dell of the salt works

• the land fertilized by showers and producing herbiage

• the ruin of the man with the fat cattle

• the ruin of the leaden tombs

• the ruin of wholesome water

• the ruin of water becoming sweet after being brackish

• the ruin of the man who travels until morning

Palmer writes, “Some names are derived from long-since-forgotten incidents or owners whose memory has passed away.”

• the cave of the plasterers

• the prophet’s tomb

• the valley of rugged ground

• the spring of the bees

• the spring of the leeches

• the spring of the little duck

• the spring of the hanging vine

• the spring of the almond tree

• the spring of war

• the ash-colored land

• the land of hawks

An adaptive and energetic linguist and adventurer, Palmer didn’t make a lasting mark on history according to a 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry. “All his works show a great linguistic range and very versatile talent; but he left no permanent literary monument worthy of his powers.” He was murdered in Egypt at the age of 42.

• the wide white mountainside

• the space between the hilltops

• the well of the house of the old man

• the pool of the rushes

• the pool of the sand worms

• the lofty convent

• the ridge of the vineyard

• the mountain of pathless sand

This list is a eulogy. I can’t stop reading it and imagining circling hawks and the man with the fat cattle. I can’t stop picturing little ducks, wandering along the space between hilltops, past the valley of the rugged ground, drinking from the spring of the bees.

***

As I attempt to hit pause on the exploding bombs, a pop-up ad appears and I accidentally click through to a page about something called a Shark FACIAL PROGLOW and Depuffi. The five-step system, which costs $299, includes “hydro-powered technology” that exfoliates, clears pores, hydrates deeply, and depuffs, revealing “your healthiest glow” in ten minutes. The device looks like a tiny vacuum cleaner. The model in the ad has skin that shines like polished marble.

I imagine a scholar studying our civilization years from now. He discovers a strange lump of plastic in the sand, inscribed with the words:

hydro-powered technology

So he attempts to translate those words, in order to capture the culture of this place, to name what was here:

• the spring of five-step glow replenishment

• the pool of the insatiable depuffing

• the well of proprietary spa-level results

• the pathless realm between pore-clogging impurities and exhaustive exfoliation

Glow replenishment is expensive. It’s branded under the name Shark, a vacuum cleaner company. Their formulas are developed in Korean skincare labs. Under high capitalism, entire countries are encountered as specialty boutiques selling either skincare and kimchi or baguettes and perfume, anime and sushi or handbags and gelato.

Israel’s Gaza Model is expensive. It’s an exhaustive five-step exfoliation system that rids the landscape of empire-clogging impurities like schools, old people, gardens, gas stations, young women, café and gaming centers, tea kettles, pets, mosques, cookbooks, best friends, bottles of wine, bridges, bakeries, jewelry boxes.

Then comes the extraction, the hydration, and the depuffing.

“Legal experts and human rights activists say targeting civilian infrastructure or destroying it without a valid military justification constitutes a war crime… One video circulating on social media and verified by The Times showed an excavator destroying solar panels near the village of Debl in late April. The solar panels supplied the town with electricity and powered the water station, according to Lebanon’s state news agency.”

Specifics of time and place are erased. History is extracted. The landscape is now free of lurking threats from old women, board games, fig trees, sleeper sofas, teenage boys, garden hoses, diaries, and toaster ovens.

We can transform every location in the world so that it looks like everywhere else in the world — uniformly unoriginal, visibly smoother. aesthetician approved. Once the rubble is cleared away, the land can be infused with the dewy radiance of skyscrapers with rooftop pools, cocktail bars and day spas, Nike and Uniqlo and Apple and Zara and UGG. The well of Japanese boba, the valley of Korean BBQ, the spring of Five Guys Burgers and Fries, the tower of Dubai chocolate.

“’I feel like I am going to break from anger and sadness,’ said Nabil Sunbul, 67, who works in a bakery in the town of Bint Jbeil. He has now fled to Beirut with only a few belongings.”

***

Some names will be derived from long-since-forgotten incidents or owners whose memory has passed away. Some names will be told to others and remembered for a while, until they, too, break from anger and sadness. Eventually we will live without memory, without history, told what to think and how to act and what to do. In order to avoid breaking, we will relax into it, surrender to our healthiest glow. We will shine like polished marble, so bright you can’t see our features anymore. No eyes, no ears, no mouth, just brilliant light. We will be erased.

For now I live here in the land of the tall trees, the hill of gardens, next to a narrow road between villages, within earshot of a road so wide and so long that it leads to both oceans, Atlantic and Pacific. I watch a red fox cross the grass in front of my house, its long fluffy tail floating over the ground. It looks relaxed in this land of birdfeeders, this hillside of napping dogs and scampering squirrels, among the mint and the maples, where houses are filled with porcelain dishes and art books, sectional couches and down comforters, silver earrings and mandarin-scented hand lotions. This paradise can’t last.

“‘Our home was the fruit of our lives’ work,’ said Fatima Abdallah, 46, a mother of five from the town of Houla near the Israeli border, who is now staying in a tent inside a stadium in the Lebanese capital, Beirut.”

• the moonscape of white rubble and shattered concrete

• the mark where homes or businesses once stood

• the wide, gray, uninhabitable land

• the ruin of what remains of their homes and lives

• the path from contentment to hopelessness

On Saturday night, I had a glass of white wine on the back patio with my friend. We sat under lush, green Japanese maples and ate salty cashews and talked about who knows their own power and who doesn’t, who has charisma and who is overcome with doubt. We talked like we will never have to gather one small bag of belongings and start walking East or West, North or South. We talked like water never becomes brackish after being sweet and clouds of dark smoke never bloom and spread like coral growths, erasing decades of slow work and steady faith, love and connection, desire and possibility. But somewhere out there, beyond the ash-colored hills, they are laying the groundwork for a larger operation. The scope of that campaign isn’t clear, but they assure us that it will continue until every last threat is contained.

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