Passive Constructions

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand
The best I can
And no one called us to the land
And no one crosses there alive
No one speaks and no one tries
No one flies around the sun.

These were the lyrics of Echoes, a song by the British Rock band, Pink Floyd. The lyrics hit my heard hard. The smooth music flowed and wrapped the scene in front of me with its striking melancholy that attracts feelings of desolation and alienation, pouring these feelings in a touching crescendo. The song was part of the video of Live at Pompeii , which documented a concert by the band in the Roman amphitheater in Pompeii . For year, throughout my route from the cafe to my house, this song and the scenes of the documentary, which explored the catastrophe of the antique city and the bodies of its residents who were mummified by unexpected volcano dust and lava with their horrified eyes, crossed arms in front of their faces that desperately tried to prevent the inevitable, and calcified statue-like figures, immediately brought to my mind religious stories about the fate of rogue nations!

The song’s lyrics and its music with the exceptional footage of the old city and its distressed residents continued to cover the scenes of the usual night return journey. The visions pictured in the film mixed with scenes of the road … streets without names and an unrelenting absurd struggle between demolition and construction, as government departments represented by localities chased unlicensed buildings that violated building codes either in height or protrusions, chasing them by demolishing the violating floors. The result is a deformed crosslinked mixture of randomly designed buildings with concrete columns and shattered concrete beams that protrude from them and are crowned with iron fences. Moths and gaps penetrate the walls of red or concrete bricks to form dilapidated rooms similar to the burrows of small animals. The struggle between demolition and reconstruction might intensify until it reaches the degree that these buildings can be inhabited before the construction is completed. Gray and featureless people crawl inside as if the inhabitants catch the infection of incompletion from the building!
I used to walk every night between these buildings, which are unevenly stacked like the irregular breaths of lung patients. Meanwhile, my mind continues to reproduce these scenes that depict the residents of these stricken buildings as if some day, they will also be excavated by someone explorers who will fig them up and picture them their burrows with their scarce furniture, mummified by bursts of concrete deposits, and penetrated by iron skewers like fossilized flesh while faces that lost all features and the burden of expression for so long… until they turned into vague statues depicting nothing.

Islam Zaher

December 2019