Dear unknown,
You posted a picture to twitter, and I saved it to my phone, and in the time since then, I’ve spent hours looking at it, hours painting it, and now, I can’t find on the internet any trace it ever existed. Your picture is elegant and sparse. It is divided into three partitions of the visual space: in the bottom third is a table covered by wrinkled white cloth, upon which sit a cup on a saucer holding coffee and another coffee cup holding white flowers, bursting from a shock of green; in the middle third is a low wall split by three long vertical cracks; and in the upper third, moving toward the viewer through the empty space where windows once were is a catastrophic scene: crumbling, bombed out structures, rebar scraping the sky. All of it catches a specific tonal quality of light I associate with sunrise (but it could be sunset), a certain vibrancy generating on its objects shades of gray, muted purple, orange and warm pink. It is almost unbearably beautiful. Ordinary life. And obviously, it is awful. Someone still took care with the coffee, took care with the flowers, living on a knife’s edge. I couldn’t really write about it, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. So I kept sketching it and painting it, making studies and finally producing this, an unfinished picture. I find myself called into question by the care you, or perhaps someone you love, took in placing that cup on that table. I just mean: by continuing life, by insisting on a still moment of life, they or you proved it still matters to arrange beauty under unbearable conditions. It is a picture of stillness, and of bearing the unbearable. “What do you carry of them?” I carry the sense that what we are struggling toward, the solidarities we seek to secure, aim above all at the unmaking of everything that imperils this specific scene: coffee and flowers, stillness and light. We have failed you, failed to stop anything, and there are many for whom it is too late, but there is still so much life in Gaza, so there is nothing to do but continue trying.
Matt
Matthew Elia is a scholar of race, religion, and environmental politics from the United States, currently based in Basel. His first book, The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery (Yale University Press, 2024), was named a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He is currently at work on a second book, provisionally titled We Are Each Other’s Harvest: The Human Condition in an Age of Racial Ecocide.