Tagged as: memories, war

Left to right: Beirut’s present, future, and past.

A story should have a begin­ning, a mid­dle, and an end… but not nec­es­sar­ily in that order.

– Jean-Luc Godard

Beirut is a city of dif­fer­ence: 9 lay­ers of his­tory lie buried under 67 square kilo­me­ters on which tiny pock­ets of art-nouveau archi­tec­ture squeeze into a mod­ern urban land­scape co-inhabited by 18 dif­fer­ent reli­gious sects in tacit peace. Built upon a shift­ing seis­mic plate, it remains volatile, caught in a fleet­ing moment, pushed for­ward by the momen­tous force of past events towards an ever-elusive future that some­how remains beyond its reach.

Today’s plan­ners and shapers sur­vey my home city Beirut as arche­ol­o­gists do its his­tor­i­cal sites, col­lect­ing arti­facts in a bas­ket, brush­ing the sand off some, dis­card­ing oth­ers, recon­struct­ing ambigu­ous forms out of incom­plete frage­ments, some­times sci­en­tif­i­cally but more often through pure spec­u­la­tion. This is a fic­ti­tious city char­ac­ter­ized not by what it is, but by what it was and what it could be.

Caught in a state of sus­pended ado­les­cence, Beirut col­lapses its many yes­ter­days, todays, and tomor­rows into a sin­gle Now.

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