Hope amid exhaustion

I feel a strain in my knees. I bend them tightly in my sleep and feel the ache of the tension they cultivate during the day. The same goes for my sense of hope.

About a decade ago, it seemed that everyone I knew was obsessed with a nag to recapitulate something or other in one word, to name new stores, start-ups, publications, novels, songs; to propel entities and ideas and pack them in a single word. That new mass habit made me weary and seeped into my consciousness to ask me in the way teen magazines ask their readers to name their favorite virtue or their darkest nightmare in a single word. The question that would always pop up in my head would be about Cairo — what is Cairo? Describe Cairo in one word. The answer kept coming back unchanged: suicidal. My hometown always seemed like it welcomed danger, spontaneity and a familiar chaos. Prior to the last seven years when I thought “suicidal”, I imagined endless resurrections, but the political reality of Egypt’s life in those past seven years has been gestating a different image in my mind. I now think of it as a remorseless suicidal beast. After the clarity and chaos of 2011 came the effacement of 2013. Cairo became dangerous, as in a dark dystopia that takes away from the power of its people on a daily basis: taking away money, culture, public space, transportation, water, electricity, in the manner of a descending ceiling; the sky keeps falling.

It has become a habit for my mind to search for hope in immediate surroundings because at a distance it seems alive — threatened and mediated, but there. Hope shook the streets of Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Algeria, Chile and many other places that mobilize beyond national forms. It is somewhere in words, in books, online, on t-shirts and graffiti, in the echoes of chants that brought life to my senses in 2011.

I feel a weight.
I am tired.
I am exhausted.

“Here is Edward Bear, coming down the stairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.”
— A. A. Milne from Winnie the Pooh and Some Bees, 1990.

With fervor I look through my books searching for hope so I can add more quotes to my notebook and in that exercise I have not excluded my children’s books. I read to them with a mental marker to locate hope. On my desk a few months ago, I found an essay by Gilles Deleuze in a collection titled “Essays: Critical and Clinical.” A friend had recommended the book a few years back. “The Exhausted” is the last essay in the collection. I am exhausted, it is all I can think about. Deleuze tells me that there’s a difference between being tired and being exhausted and he takes Samuel Beckett’s works to demonstrate. I am in the text looking for hope. Looking for a way out, carrying a burden that is a mix between tiredness and exhaustion which Deleuze contends are two separate things, but I am both in the manner of an ongoing swirl within a whirlwind.

“The tired person can no longer realize but the exhausted person can no longer possibilize.” (page 152 in the 1997 translation by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco.)

To realize is a matter of perception, as he goes on to explain, but possible-izing is a matter of exhausting the possible. I am left with this statement in two cages of different magnitude questioning my perception and my ability to possiblize. In his words, “realization of the possible always proceeds through exclusion...”¹ and that is what my generation sifts through as it is surrounded by accusatory claims and numerous failures. Possibilizing doodles of a democratic future, where notions of a new sense of home-ness prevails and conversation is an ongoing political current for change towards a dignified life that respects everyone and makes those in government accountable; that was the idea. It is what costs us the most, going by trial and exclusion. There was a longing for a trial and error and we, or I, felt that time was the map and its progression was abundant. We must have all the time in the world, how else can we keep trying? What is a conclusion without trial anyhow? A fascism of some sort.

Those who are tired live with a possibility of a resurrection after a certain amount of rest — therein lies the promise of an awakening to realize further, whereas in exhaustion, one lives with and through it for it “becomes a mode of operation,” an uninterrupted shadow, making the exhausted subject “without preferences and any learned signification.” But that doesn’t negate the possibility of a search. I have seen friends and friends of friends reach a wall, as if we were all out of ideas but not without preferences or learned signification, nor at any point was there an absence of a search. But on some days, most days, we seemed to go on with poor taste buds, as Deleuze put it “Yet one does not fall into the undifferentiated ...".² True to the last item on Deleuze’s list we have been feeling as if “active, but for nothing."³ Without breaks, this activity, this motion of covering the trails of possible routes; we move, almost for the sake of motion, for the sake of affirming the state of exhaustion that takes over.

Once upon a time, a woman I met at a friend’s said something along the lines of “monotony kills.” She later explained that a life that doesn’t respond to change and carries you along everywhere is a sure way to some form of death. She didn’t specify the type of monotony, because monotony can come in different guises. A happy, lazy, flexible monotony is somewhat pleasurable, as Mohamed Naeem described in his essay “In Egypt, Nothing has Changed — but Perhaps Everything Has.” But what of a painful monotony? Perhaps the element of pain doesn’t make it a monotony after all? Perhaps pain changes the process and the outcome — perhaps it is able to disrupt the ongoing set on a seemingly endlessly functioning “conveyor belt”, per Deleuze’s description.

Egypt has become a place where the state is out to bring to a finish any announcement of a conversation that strives for a future of possibilities different from the one so far outlined. Without announcement, there is silence. Maybe it’s the silence that paints a pronounced “for nothing” face to our painful exhaustion? “... (I)t is all very well to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps."⁴ He contends that "possible worlds" are "revocable" “depending on the silences they create."⁵ In an imposed silence before one "considers the silence one keeps," oppression is at its most brutal in one’s reception of it. It is perhaps a loss for words where sometimes “the voice dries up the possible."⁶ A moment of painful congruence of the factors around us extends into a neurotic boredom — a tiredness without resurrection, an exhaustion: where the image of the present, the most actual form of contact between a person and what surrounds them, is a form of insomnia where one’s eyes are “wide open⁷” and therefore more in tune with and connected to what’s happening.

Perhaps silence offers a potent sense of observation and offers a clarity of what the present means and how to be in it. This observation, Deleuze contends, takes us a distance away from the familiar and routine pathways of reason and opens a form of perception that in some ways outgrows an “imagination sullied by memories."⁸ Perhaps this crossover is accessible to the silent observer, “active for nothing” — perhaps even more so for the observer of lesser power?

I read inspiring posts by friends and my ideas continue to be active for nothing. I remember after Alaa Abd El Fattah’s release from a five-year prison sentence, he appeared in a video interview with Mada Masr. He mentioned a fact that never falters but one that perhaps for sentimental, emotional or temporary arrested intelligence, we find it hard to let go of: that our old ways that have failed will continue to fail and hence our ideas and imagination opt for new “permutations.” Isn’t that the stuff of hope? Uttering the failure of an idea is a permutation in and of itself. Alaa Abdel Fattah was imprisoned again a few months later.

Hope renewed anew is, as I have come to learn, not something shiny or happy necessarily, but it is ongoing and part of exhaustion. I think again of Mohamed Naeem’s wanderings about the state’s fear of a return to the normalcy of a familiar, everyday and somewhat good life: where there is a return to the bleachers, to a somewhat free cinema and television, to a reliance on the anonymous access to public space — to a margin of “joy” where hope commonly dwells. But in the scenario at hand there is an imposed silence that seems to surround us, save for a fidgeting against power, stifled or otherwise, in what seems to be the only disturbance that is becoming a part of a new and barren sense of normalcy. The difference, perhaps, between the two normalcies is that the former accommodates a sweet laziness and the latter is fertile ground for an urgency that recreates neurosis, exhaustion and a hope that feels different than what we are used to.

And what of our bodies? Bodies in captivity, oppressed bodies? For Beckett, as Deleuze informs me, “... exhaustion (exhaustivity) does not occur without a certain physiological exhaustion ..."⁹ It is somewhat gratifying for the body to be exhausted as a result of mobility (to join other bodies in protest as in Lina Attalah’s longing in “Hearing a Revolution through a Closed Window” [in Arabic]). Less gratifying physical exhaustion happens in the frantic mobility to avoid the other, as Deleuze tells us later when he animates the Quad to which we will come back. Bodily fatigue also comes with the ongoing static pressure of captivity, confinement and oppression, in response to a certain monotony, as seemingly uneventful as in a “sitting position” where body and burden lay their weights without solace.¹⁰ Able to be without the body, in a more complete sense, the dream of the insomniac is “fabricated,” “scissed” from the body that is almost depleted but remains present at a “sitting position”, in a trance that does not stand in the way of carrying on everyday life at a familiar rhythm. Perhaps in exhaustion, against the wishes of those who wear us out, our will is not diminished; we become less colorful and so does the sense of our hope, but in exhaustion we continue to observe, to see in “silence, an ordinary silence, where the voices seem to have died out."¹¹ Then, we can know that the images of moments past, the icons we so hoped we would not surpass, the fears and the terror we once understood, all have dissipated, are somewhere else, are no longer now where the past is not present. We doubt. We move.

“There is no real going back.”
— Frodo in J R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King

The Quad is a limited space where four subjects move about to exhaust all combinations of movement within the bounds of four equal sides consciously avoiding bumping into one another at the center, which represents the sole point of any mutual crossings or, as Deleuze puts it, “the only possibility of an event."¹² In reading the description of the Quad, I find myself an imagined fly on the wall of a prison cell that houses political prisoners. Within the Quad, the guards strip away any bedding that a prisoner sleeps on, diminish the presence of objects where the setup yearns to resemble outer space, to convince the captive(s) that it is all “for nothing” because they are surrounded by nothingness and as a consequence an exhaustion keeps simmering, ticking in confinement, sullied by reason and memories within the limits of concrete walls, keeping away what’s happening where even sleep becomes a form of insomnia, where at some point the clarity of the image, the present, becomes an evolution which fill one’s feet with the gravity. That is my hope: that in the exhaustion of oppression, there’s a frantic search, even if it’s for that which is “formless and unformulated."¹³ And perhaps that is the state’s biggest fear: that prisons, small and large, are not graves of hope, and that the multiplicity of sites and subjects is in itself a census of the many possible ways of its presence.

I imagine an obsession that takes over the motion in the Quad. Is it a trance that keeps the exhausted going? Aren’t they weary of their singular routes? After all, “the possibility of an event"¹⁴ cannot be annihilated, but it can be avoided by depontetializing the space.

I imagine the Quad without concrete walls. I see its setting in the outdoors: I see it as the Square, al-Midan under surveillance, shiny and new, with newly installed iron gates as in February 2014; turning the square into a place you walk around or drive through, but one where you cannot linger; placing a grand monument at its center as a repellent erected to make one feel small and out of place. And what of a giant flag pole in the middle of Tahrir Square that one cannot climb or approach, not even to throw away a withered, dusty flag, out of flattery in the absence of the wind dangling with the weight of dirt and humidity? Or later for it to be turned into an uprooted temple where symbols of a ruling power overshadow all else. Away from the square, I transport the Quad to a university campus, to a factory. I imagine the activity it incubates in the cubicles in an office space, in a metro station, in a classroom, a yoga studio, in “any-space-whatever” where “what matters is no longer the any-space-whatever but the mental image to which it leads."¹⁵ In 2014, random comments and jokes on social media circulated an image of Egyptians as a nation taken hostage. I imagine the Quad as a slot where hostages of sorts are kept, where settings once familiar and connected to certain meanings become appropriated and pose as something else. Words and images that were synonymous with hope at a certain point shift. Like Midan al-Tahrir, that has been shifted to become property of the fashionings of tyranny, for tyranny can be made to look shiny and of-the-moment, unlike hope. Hope is something different now. Hope exists without solace in a lifetime it seems, or so we’ve learned.

Deleuze then takes the conversation and sets it in another space. He picks another of Beckett’s spatial maps to elaborate more on exhaustion and the potential of human contact amid particular sets of motions and choices.

I step “outside” into a space where:
There’s a “door to the east … window to the north … the pullet to the west,” and an observer(s) to the south. Filled with motion-related fears and warnings that accompany me from childhood and early adulthood to never step into unfamiliar territory, street, or protest; I imagine all the exits surrounding the subject exist as “unfathomable voids"¹⁶ from where one is standing. That fear is best overcome collectively, but in the settings given in the essay the subject is alone. I keep waiting for his/her contemplations to manifest. I cheer at my desk for the protagonist to “run, run, run” to the unknown space offered by the pullet, to walk out of the door to the east or open the window to the north. I scream at my desk and then I take a walk.

Between a ‘depontentialized’ Quad and ‘unfathomable voids’, hope lies dormant in habit, in the slip of that willful “sway of the hips” to avoid the other, where possibly “what is buried in the earth (is) a still-active potential."¹⁷ What if there’s a tunnel under the Quad, or a map? Or another hopeful individual? Or a radio? What if the village has become vertical rather than horizontal, as Zadie Smith tells us in one of her stories in Grand Union.

To the left there’s a door, to the right there’s a closet and above is a sanctum in which the protagonist can “disappear”, where he/she sits on an “invisible stool bowed over an invisible table."¹⁸ There in the sanctum, one’s ideas can exhaust “... the joys, the movements, and the acrobatics of the life of the mind” — where oppressors long to find a climax to subjugation as in George Orwell’s 1984, where the state yearns to change your mind. Is this why states fear the release of prisoners? And why they continue to capture thoughts of dissidence, to burn and ban them — how many banned websites so far? “At least 513."

I imagine the sanctum, whose entrance provides one of four bearings, to have no walls but rather to present us with another Ghost Trio where cultivated, conditioned and real darkness reside at different ends. Perhaps in time someone contemplates the fear of darkness/possible light and the motion offered by a thought or the probabilities of an endeavor, or how we connect to the winds of “indiscernible atoms” where notions of hope and freedom inspire our thinking.

I have choked many times while in the midst of aspirational words that arrested my tongue, in their place my teeth chattered with the promise and the loss of the unattainable lyrics. More than once I stood next to friends where we are taken over by a silence — one that is not the opposite of speaking – at a concert when the band sings Negm’s words: و النصر قرب من عينيا و النصر قرب من إيدينا [So close to witnessing victory, so close to tasting it].

Instead we grind our teeth, we stomp our feet, lean against a wall, or something.

I am comforted by the absence of time in Deleuze’s essay, but do we have all the time in the world? We must. Where else would we fail and rise, in no particular order or replication, to step into the voids with the pain of fear, the pain of failure, the pain of insomnia, the pain specific to our singular being and that which belongs to our collective oppression. Deleuze offers me some comfort when he tells of the third hand — one that appears to comfort the insomniac dreamer and extends the idea of a connected-ness in one of Beckett’s ghost trios. I find solace in the collective presence of hope and remind myself that it is not confined to one place, that it is on a continuum that brings people together, which is exhaustion at this moment in time. Whether haunted by reason or by memories near and far, and in the offerings of observation, of taking it all in so as not to miss what’s happening, we keep our eyes open amid the exhaustion. Isn’t this the reason Alaa Abd El Fattah and Mahienour al-Massry are once again captives of the state along with many others like them?

The wisdom of my children’s books leaves me reassurances that befit my reading of The Exhausted and my longings for its possible meanings:

“If you want to see a whale/ you will need a window/ and an ocean/ and time for waiting/ and time for looking/ and time for wondering ‘is that a whale?’”

- Julie Fogliano, from If You Want to See a Whale

^{1 Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Essays: Critical and Clinical. (trans.) Smith, Daniel W. and Michael A. Greco. The University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, p. 153.
2 Ibid, p. 153
3 Ibid, p. 153
4 Ibid, p. 156: Deleuze quoting from Beckett’s The Unnamable
5 Ibid, p. 157
6 Ibid, p. 205
7 Ibid, p. 171
8 Ibid, p. 158
9 Ibid, p. 154
10 Ibid, p. 155
11 Ibid, p. 159
12 Ibid, p. 163
13 Ibid, p. 154
14 Ibid, p. 163
15 Ibid, p. 169
16 Ibid, p. 166
17 Ibid, p. 205
18 Ibid, p. 169}