I saw the blue moon on Aug. 19. It was really blue, eager to sweep away the twilight, already high when the sun hadn't fully slipped into the sea yet. The mountain peaks, stripped bare by the light without warning, flowed back into the rare shadows. Suddenly, the village was in a frenzy: A frenzy of everything and anything had suddenly taken hold of the atmosphere. Untimely shouts from the square, thunderous music, fireworks, drums, horns and primitive joy was triggered by that moon floating over the night, like “mesiku na nebi hlubokem” ("honey in the deep sky"), as in Dvorak's Rusalka.
These inconsiderate noises were perhaps a way of warding off the eye in the sky, which opens up and looks in. Was the sound meant to cover the light?
The feet came alive on their own, and you have to join in the dance, take part in the wild choreography. You have to drink and shout to music, you have to raise your arms, jump against the beat, sing off-key, release the steam, drink again and catch the wave of raw, prehistoric love that envelops the compact crowd, now a colony, a swarm, a murmuration. But what's got into us?
It is said that Lebanon, or at least part of it, is dancing while a new chasm is about to open up, perhaps swallowing it whole. Among the strangers holding your hand in this dabke, where each leg movement hits the ground as if to dig it out, there are emigrants whose flights are due at dawn and who have given up on leaving. Is it death drive or life drive? Is there any other country where we collectively live as if we were going to die tomorrow? Is this what we'd be doing — dancing until dawn, drinking until we're dizzy — if we were to die tomorrow?
We're not reasonable. If anything, the thought of dying tomorrow should spur us on. But the greater the danger, the less zeal we have for the task. Living is already a remarkable achievement. We're all survivors, and it's as if, spared by a miracle after so many mortal dangers, our mission is to howl at the moon for fake joys until they're real, to look into each other's eyes to make sure we exist.
Lebanon has become a theater without an audience — the audience is all on stage. Life is good here; it's because we pretend to play when the stakes are too high. We play at being billionaires and successful entrepreneurs, simply by pulling on a cigar on a chair stick, polo shirt floating on a paunch that dispenses with thinking, flanked by one or two desperate dolls fresh from the silicone factory.
In a country with empty (or emptied) coffers, a minister assures us that he pays for fuel in “dignity,” a currency unknown to the foreign exchange register, but which has the merit of being rare. Everything that's rare is expensive, they say. We'll settle for this sophism. By dint of living in noise, no one has heard the sound of tunnels being dug on the scale of a city, perhaps a country. Behind the noise lies an underground Lebanon, like the underworld. Instead of digging, it would have been more interesting to erect. But the moon is blue. Let's dance.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour; English version edited by Yara Malka.