Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 01:45:22 -0500 (EST)
Subject: of Love 




    The only expression: naked cruelty. Since the roads had been cut
    off and the telephone was silent, deprived of contact with the rest of
    the world, for the first time in my life, I felt myself become
    Palestinian and hate Israel.

	Fours Hours at Chatila
		Jean Genet
______________________________________________________


The page that was blank to begin with is now crossed from top to
bottom with tiny black characters - letters, words, commas, exclamation
marks - and it's because of them the page is said to be legible. But
a kind of uneasiness, a feeling close to nausea, an irresolution that
stays my hand - these make me wonder:do these black marks add up to
reality? The white of the paper is an artifice that's replaced the
translucency of parchement and the ochre surface of clay tablets; but the
ochre and the translucency and the whiteness may all possess more reality
than the signs that mar them.
 Was the Palestinian revolution really written on the void, an artifice
superimposed on nothingness, and is the white page, and every little
blank space between the words, more real than the black characters
themselves? Reading between the lines is a level art;reading
between the words a precipitous one. If the reality of time spent
among - not with - the Palestinians resided anywhere, it would
survive between all the words that lay claim to give an account
of it.




--Prisoner of Love
		-- Jean Genet