unspeakable

A certain thing happened, and it was of such a form, substance, tenor, and scale that it outstrips language. Words always sound odd -- an inappropriate vehicle of semantics -- to look at what happened. Not even music can touch its darkness and harsh texture. But we live in language and in music. So if what happened can't be spoken or composed, it can't be held in memory. It fades, and our present moves ahead in a mist of cheap amnesia.

But if we could speak of it, hence remember it, what would that mean or how would it affect anything in our present or future?

For one thing, our poetry and hours would carry implicit echoes of horror and dimensions of loss. Even our dancing and laughter would be faintly haunted by a memorial penumbra.

And we would know, with no equivocation and as if space itself were wounded, this thing:

Gaza rockets into Israel is an evil and a psychosis to make the sun shudder.