Javelins of light are the metaphor upon which we can understand the thing that splinters both heavenly and earthly thought—the image that dares bring something forth to break it open. Not just the heavenly story but also the earthly tone. But destruction is not just a metaphor—when things fall apart we also see, in quick succession, all the times they have done so before. I’m sensitive to the fact that, over time, many taken for granted tenets of liberal thought, originally designed to help us reason with and more deeply understand the oppression of others, have instead had the opposite effect: of training one another to individualise our own suffering, leaving us totally unprepared for the historical schisms that continue to unfold. We have been taught to reason with our pain as something that solely needs treatment, something originating outside of the soul, and in fact we have no aptitude to say what it has to do with the soul; that it has nothing to teach us about the suffering of others, mirroring (rather than challenging) the status anxiety, scarcity and commodification of the self (the self against others) which is central to consumer capitalism, the algorithm, the ego, the smooth pacifying effect of recognition in the echo chamber. To open your eyes up to war, tragedy, or devastation is to slowly become clear of its many preconditions, those ruptures you did not have words for before.

To learn something new is therefore to engage in a kind of revisionism. In recent months I came across a quote by Brit Marling while I was reflecting on my first watch through of her show The OA. I was alone in my apartment, surrounded by portable beacons of light in the shape of novelty lamps. Flies that would normally hover by the fruit basket to eventually multiply by the thousands had ventured in to the living room to swarm these lights and laptop screen, and I squished one with my thumb against the desktop near the bottom left corner where the start menu sat, preventing me from ever knowing if Microsoft’s soft femme thot AI helper ‘Stacy’ would be so to kind as to provide me with the advice I desperately needed to live my life. Finding my way into an interview of hers that felt largely retrospective, Marling said an interesting thing: that we overstate how the past influences the present, and frequently understate how the present gives us the language to interpret the past, noting that this distinction often goes on to shape the rhythms of the collective memory. Some opt for the former, not the lesser, of the two options, pretending that they had never been awakened to the choice at all. Now you have no choice but to choose between solidarity or inaction, now you are implicated in the way of things, you have entered the deep layer of the psychic field—you are in the silent room now, the one in which there are a million others. Please note, if you will, their fluoride stares. You blink, more than once, to demarcate yourself. They have the Miley Cyrus eyes. You’re running, you’re out of breath, your bust is heaving, you reach for the door in the sea of white where you once thought it hovered and you find it gone! You try to draw patterns when you could instead surrender. See how it has been demonstrated, how you have clued into the patterns?

Javelins of light come into the world as long beams of illumination, reaching down and breaking up shadowy masses the size of continents, like lightning strikes, leaving a crater in the form of a person, like a shape left behind after the body is removed, in the form of Ana Mendieta. Those who stand upright in the path of its fire have been pierced. This is how all prophecies and origin theories begin; at the end of the day the ideas dissipate—none will be spared from judgment, in this world or any others. In anime, processions of light often expand into bloom during a transformation sequence, when a character like Sailor Moon is discovering an as of yet unknown power, or adopting the uniform of an alter-ego, or else it looks like something very different: a force of sheer, unknowable violence. In ‘Paradise Lost’, the fall of Satan is staged through a sublime disturbance of celestial light; then the blinding flash at the Trinity test in The Day of the Triffids or the strange, celestial brightness in Childhood’s End, both moments when the sky itself seems to intervene in history. (A force of destruction does not need to look, always, like a tool of destruction.)

Javelins of light can look like love; they can look like the very same thing that prevents its great arrival. Everything that binds you to the world, makes living worthwhile, can go either way—the particularities of hurt, or reparation. “As an actual physical fact, a weapon is an object that goes into the body and produces pain” writes Elaine Scarry. “As a perceptual fact, it can lift pain and its attributes out of the body and make it visible.”

Javelins of light bombard the mosques; missiles made of American and Australian steel and fired by Israelis drive through the ceilings of thousand-year-old churches. In the Gaza strip, an area that remains one of the few so-called “free” areas of historical Palestine, weapons of mass, unthinkable, incinerating destruction breach areas in which only bystanders could be gathering. They fall repeatedly and smash holy places to pieces. They turn civilian bodies into debris. White phosphorus burns at 800°C, through clothing, flesh, and bone. Contaminated clothing is liable to ignite or reignite; affected items must be disposed of in a water-filled closable container that clearly identifies it as such—a hazard—in order to totally disallow any further contamination. Fragments of white phosphorus munitions continue to burn in the wound, meaning that, for those hit, fragments must be dug out with a knife, removed with forceps, never hands (even in the strongest of gloves.) The wound must then be debrided to avoid organ damage from absorption. People are ziplocked into body bags and run over to be made mere gelatine, less than even product. Those lining up for food delivered as aid are shot in the head for daring to do so. We learn that there are certain qualities, certain descriptors one must expect, conditions to be filled, before one is granted the status of ‘human’—that the thing which is often taken for granted is in fact an artificial category, of which many do not receive invitation into. Recall Jean Genet’s description of the psychic shift integral to Israel’s forming: “The Palestinians hadn’t dreamed of these people’s promised land. It was only later, and gradually, that they saw they themselves were only characters in dreams, though they still didn’t foresee the rude awakening that would take away both their lives and their living. All this prevented the Palestinians from seeming quite real.”

You look to a single instance of devastation, and it is like the window opens to reveal a few thousand years of history. We are expected to believe that critiquing all this in mildest terms is to be inflicting actual violence on the perpetrators—those who have now readily become propaganda tools for the continuation of empire, and masked executioners of reason. Those in the West largely interested in the idea of ‘progress’ become extremely creative at labelling any discussion of the genocide as ‘insensitive’ to the oppressors, and the idea of stopping a genocide, much less putting up resistance to it, is cause for alarm. The offenders turn peaceful, devout people into mere matter, and despite the talk of ‘religious war’ from those who are first to dismiss any form of introspection as missing ‘nuance’ I feel totally stupid, which I suppose is the desired effect. It is October 2023 and I think dumbly that it must end soon, for although we are separate as people, do we not share the same desire for connection and understanding which allows us to see through ambiguity and prevent such acts? A stupid thought, almost magical thinking. I feel close to losing my mind, and ashamed of that very same reaction because I do not see the exact same response in others. It is necessary to Toni Morrison’s advice to never become immune. “I think that’s a kind of failure to see so much of it that you die inside,” I hear her saying, in a video. People are sharing a lot of those now. “I want to be surprised and shocked every time.”