some guy in lebanon

Almost 8 months in Beirut now – Eight long months. As I sit back and think – go over my current situation, I can’t help but notice the totality, and the still insignificance, of what I’ve accomplished so far… and all the people who have trusted me, who have had faith in me, and who have stood by me.

I will never be able to repay the debt I owe to those who’ve made this possible – even here, I see that truly it takes a village to raise Will Donovan. Perhaps more here than anywhere.

Who has arrived in Lebanon without family, with limited finances, with no contacts, and with a degree in Religion, and built a business from nothing? To those of you who have done so, you know how hard it is. To those who have not, perhaps you can imagine.

To those who have treated me like a brother, God Bless you. You will always have a place in my heart. I could not have done this without you.

To those in particular who have opened your homes and your hearts to me, thank you. There are no words to express my gratitude.

Lebanon… Lebanon is a country that order forgot, despite certain appearances to the contrary. And Beirut is a city that is simultaneously beautiful and ugly, easy yet impossible, open yet confounding. It is almost impossible to imagine or fathom the emotional, professional, or personal extremes one must grapple with to achieve the most remote success here – but maybe not so impossible – Like America, it is both crowded and lonely, aggravating and pleasing.

And I will return to America shortly to see old friends, family, and others, and I will fail spectacularly in my ability to vocalize some sort of approximation as to what Lebanon is, and what this country means to me.

How will I, for example, juxtapose freezing winter nights in a dirty hostel in Gemayze with waking up in my breezy Hamra apartment? Or counting the equivalent to pennies in order to eat, with five-course steak dinners in biblical Byblos? Or cutting project costs by 90% to earn clients, when two months later one project earned me a year’s equivalent at the Daily Star?

As Nick puts it, Lebanon is the kind of country where you struggle to choose where to have brunch on Sunday mornings, even as elections threaten to boil over into civil or regional war with even the slightest provocation by dozens of parties.

If someone ever takes stock of the expatriate life in Beirut and writes it down accurately and cohesively, I wonder how they’ll do it. Will they remark at the perpetual poverty of those AUB students who burn their allowances and rent money at Hamra and Gemayze bars? Will they marvel at the serene calm of Cafe Rawda (where I am currently writing this entry long-hand), even as he or she is surrounded by screaming Lebanese children and the constant babble of Hijab-ed women smoking endlessly on nargile? Will they make the reader see that that is actually the definition of serene? Or that this time affords one to do things like read, write, learn Chess, leave the cell phone and computer at home, and then walk along the corniche for an hour?

Will they appropriately describe the Beirut club scene in all its over-glorified detail, commenting on the degree to which it simultaneously rivals the best parties in the world, yet still manages to suck the soul, and the host’s wallet, dry? Will they remind the reader that the reason the parties are so great is because everybody seems to have acquiesced to the end of the world, long ago? BO18 was built on the scene of a massacre – is it an act of defiance to the abyss or is it a counterpart?

What will be written of children that we encounter who speak three languages fluently but who will struggle to find work in ten years? Or of our Lebanese friends who are caged by their passport inside a country that could explode at a moment’s notice?

Perhaps more importantly, how will they quantify the experience of living in a Mediterranean paradise that still bares striking scars of wars that most of us never saw and cannot understand?

Suffice to say, anyone who attempts to write it down will face a paradox, largely because we have become, in due time, a piece of the landscape, and therefore are not really capable of defining its periphery. No matter – that will be left to the poets, which I thank God I am not.

To be perfectly frank, I’ve lost large pieces of myself here, and those missing-portions of me have been replaced by something else entirely. I have witnessed profound unfairness, and also the gentle kindness and hospitality, of which I have already remarked. I’ve seen the consequences of spectacular failures in domestic and foreign policy, and I am unlikely to forget them easily.

I’ve learned to keep my head out of the clouds, even as I used to admire the cloudy malaise of a life lived longing for a deeper truth – But I’ve become convinced that a survivalist and an intellectual do not walk the same path – In fact, I find that they are so often tragically at odds with each other, especially when they are one and the same disaffected, but ultimately, more-worldly, individual.

I’m rambling – I admit.

And it’s not as if enough people read this blog anyways to pretend that what I write holds some consequence – But if you are reading, and you do care, let me say the following: I have not yet made up my mind.

What is Lebanon? It is an interesting question. I am not necessarily suited to answer it, but for reasons that I’ve shared here and with others, it is likely answer-less because there are so many “Lebanons” – there are as many Lebanons as there are people who have experienced it for a day, a week, a year, or a lifetime.

I myself do more than just live here – over time I chose to abide by its few rules. This had several consequences, the most important being that by learning to live by Lebanon’s few rules, I left behind a life lived by many rules. And doing so has changed me, and not in some way that might be quantified as “better” or “worse.”

This dichotomy (better versus worse) is something of an obsession in America – and I find it reasonable by its own right, but also misguided in its aims. For the mission of tracking life on the basis of “better” versus “worse” is the trapping of “progress” and I am really very suspicious of this goal’s aims. For what sort of life, or society, can be gridded on axes of time and progress – we are not budget items to be treated or thought of as optimize-able.

Nowhere is this more true than places like Lebanon where the goal of progress has been so clearly abandoned. There is nothing here that could be objectively tracked by labels “good” and “bad” anyways. There is only us. And we are, here, surrounded by cheesy high-rises and five-star hotels, refugee camps and two-dollar cab fairs. But (like Sisyphus) we find that we are happy.

Like anywhere else, we are detainees by our own volition, and it will take more than revolutions to end that cycle of captivity – but at least here we are closer to the edge – it is easier to look back, and also to look over the precipice.

To digress, I tried to watch several American movies this week, and I had to turn them all off before the credits ever started rolling. What is it with the trite characters, the obvious storylines, the cookie-cutter personas on-screen, that we love to watch in America? How can a human being be captured in a two hour window or even a few scenes – we don’t give a few hours of dreaming the same credibility in our lives, and at least those are self-produced, self-affecting, and self-important.

How dare we then reduce our own lives to those of our on-screen counterparts – into little slices of manipulative nonsense?

How can we stomach such easily digestible and wholly inaccurate caricatures of our own lives? How can we credit such enormous self-impact to actors we don’t know – to depth-less forms that we are told to recognize as ourselves? Have we lost our minds?

And when the consequences of popular culture and hyper-reality are tabulated, what becomes of us?

By whose measure must we obey the standards of a system that is designed to program us with this qualified conformity to a quantified system of good and bad – why pay the slightest attention to a system that is so obviously corrupt and contrived and so single-minded in its purpose to produce the forced and forceful apartheid of our individual and collective reality? Who walks out of a movie theater any more aware of the obvious and immediate parallels between the ghettos of Warsaw, Gaza and Los Angeles? And who is any more likely or willing to do something about it?

It’s just embarrassing.

Lebanon has shown me the striking imbalance of the system itself – of its perpetual call to conflict, and its disgusting demand for conformity.

Indeed, the boundary of civilization is a red light at an intersection at midnight on an empty block that still demands one’s compliance to brake and signal.

Well. People don’t stop for red lights here.

For all this country’s ills, the Lebanese don’t need to watch City of God to see punishing poverty. They don’t need to watch Hostel to see torture, or Saving Private Ryan to see war. They aren’t required to watch Superbad to define the coming of age of a teen, or to see High School Musical to witness the pornographic overtones of a society gone mad.

The Lebanese dance when there is rhythm worth dancing to, cry when their homes are buried by American-made and Israeli-deployed smart bombs, and are perfectly aware of, and content with, the pornographic evidence of a society gone mad.

They are not so easily fooled by rigged elections that favor the powerful and the status quo, nor are they so lacking in awareness as to miss the fact that there are few promises in this world, and the time and place that one is born bares the most significant consequence as to whether a child will grow up to be wealthy.

They do not have adjustable rate mortgages or 0% interest credit cards, but they can get cheap loans for plastic surgery.

And they will, as far as I can tell, never stop to consider what might happen is they fail to brake (or even yield) at a red light at midnight. Or even at noon.

So to my friends and family, ignore my new-found impatience with well-formed and orderly lines at Starbucks, or Black Berry wielding captains of industry, whether they be twenty, forty or sixty.

I’ve finally realized what Ecclesiastes meant – and though I’ll embrace the vanity of the Western lifestyle both in Beirut and in America when it suits me, I will never again set myself in alignment to it. The order of our lives, I’ve learned, is nothing compared to the order of life’s unexpected impositions, and that is a fact no matter what family or time one is born into. Whether we choose to sit quietly while the world and its well-heeled and well-bred leadership flush us down the drain, or instead make the choice to recognize and reject the cost of the Americanized corporate primacy that demands near total-vanity, is up to us.

The Lebanese and those who live among them will smile as they purchase souped up BMW’s that they can’t afford, or blow a good chunk of next month’s rent on a night out, but they do so knowingly, and are aware that there are more important things than money: Family, friendship, connections, favors, wasta, and relaxing at Cafe Rawda watching the sun set. They know that a bank can repossess their car, but for the most part they’ve seen enough to know that such transient things hold little weight when compared to the value of kin and clan. And as such they reject the very basis of modern capitalism: An individual is not a credit score, and that almost nothing is under control.

Beirut is nothing more than that question, and that answer – and I cannot thank enough, or be more weary, of the paradox that I’ve discovered here – perhaps equally of importance, I’m keenly aware that this paradox is everywhere – it is unavoidable. And neither the television nor Google will ever educate us properly as to the truth of the matter.

I can only wonder at what its taught me so far, and what it holds further down the road.

Eight months in Beirut – we’ll just have to see what happens next.