As to Thales,
water was the measure of everything.
For me, Palestine is the measure of every pain.
As a student of social science,
I once placed my faith in the qualitative method.
Quantity, I thought, belonged to science and management.
to men who trusted statistics more than empathy.
But I was mistaken.
Quantity domesticated anguish
converted suffering into legible data.
My research methods was a fiasco.
How, then, does one measure pain?
I began with the naïve arithmetic
2% for Leh,
4% for Nepal,
10% for Chhattisgarh,
35% for Auschwitz.
The numbers were arbitrary,
but they reassured me that comparison was possible.
I then leaned to history
not a discipline but of time.
the Thirty Years’ War,
the Mongol conquests,
the accumulation of genocide
Each promised to exhaust the vocabulary of cruelty,
and yet, even cumulatively,
they did not equal the unending pain of Palestine.
I went to Dante’s Inferno as a final resort,
hoping the taxonomy of hell
might provide a framework for quantification.
But even there,
John, Enoch, Moses were all silent.
it was my Buraq who said-
‘it’s futile
Pain resists cartography.
it cannot be plotted without distortion.’
Exhausted I became
now I left philosophy for computation
from Aristotle to algorithms,
from compassion to calibration
I lined up tyrants like data entries
Hitler, Chengiz, Pol Pot
and tried again to quantify atrocity.
but everything collapsed
under the weight of its own ethics.
The scale refused to settle.
Numbers had become too pornographic.
If Thales saw the world’s origin in water
I saw it in blood
the world then told me
‘blood is water.’
