a memoir of the 54 days before the bomb by Seanie Blue
Super typical of me that I would find myself working on three different projects at the same time while living in Hollywood and commuting to NYC. A torturous plane ride left me shaken at LAX and I resolved to quit the city of angels; a bad accident is coming there, whether on the runway, or by mudslide or earthquake or tsunami or boredom, and I don't want to be around for it. I resolved as well to compress all my activities into the most efficient production mode possible. What could I cut from my plate, and what should I keep?
Scuba Diving in Beirut was originally a story about the future of Beirut, and I'd tentatively put it into a larger project called God Died in Hiroshima. A massive bomb will detonate in Tel Aviv or Haifa in my lifetime, if I live another twenty years, since the technology will allow it and there are people who will press the triggers, no problem. But the residents of Beirut are already living under a bomb, not so much represented by the armaments of Israel but by their own shortcomings. The second-class stature of women, for example, more advanced in Beirut than anywhere in the region but still a sick joke for somebody like me. The second project was tentatively titled "Anxious Moment," and was meant to be an abstract pastiche of suicide, ecocide and homocide, a story about a killer who cannot understand whom he is meant to kill or spare, and wanders between assignments in a murky fog of intent. The third project was titled "Playtime" and telescoped my own interests about serial killing onto a series of femme fatales who feel extremely guilty about their work. Photography figured prominently in all three projects.
In choosing among the three for priority, I found myself accepting that none should live on its own at the expense of the other two, and that all three needed to be glued together by me and my odd personality. Sandie Black insisted that whatever I do needed to include my singular views of sexuality, entertainment and murder: "You're better off creating something about you creating something because nobody will believe the way you live." The other benefit from a combination would be that the three projects would transform from incomplete efforts to a single, overstuffed graphic book. The trick was to properly combine the three elements into a single continuous piece, and not let the reader or viewer be aware of any separation into three distinct parts. So a fourth binding aspect needed to be invented.
This fourth dimension would be my schedule and fears. How I live on the edge of perpetual panic about being dead and yet manage to ceaselessly look for more insights into being a human being. I cannot give up being curious, even as I know its cost is my time and existence. There is somebody with a secret in the Gobi Desert, and I must find her and write down what she tells me.
Proceed, how?
The most arresting aspect of my variousn intents the last few years has been the recurring presence of Lebanon and some mystical connection to my childhood. I would lift the beginning from my return to Beirut:
What was I looking for there? Apart from the almost unbelievable tension in the streets?
My character is on a quest backwards, into childhood, and this starts with his nanny? A German-speaking girl from outside Munich who ignited all of his sexual life and therefore a considerable part of his imagination and curiosity. When I got back to the Imperial City from my first trip to Beirut, the border officials saw the Lebanese visa and asked what my business was there, to which I said: "I went to find my nanny." The official looks up, straight into my eyes, smiles, and and says: "Did you find her?" I say that indeed I did, and he hands me back my passport and says "Welcome home, Son," even though he is perhaps a half dozen years my senior.
