A Love Letter to a Millennial Man in His Thirties

There is a beautiful photograph in today's New York Times. It is of a man seemingly in his thirties, described in the article as an Israeli "peace activist" who was killed in a raid on the Israeli side of Gaza. This man, Hayim Katsman, was a gardener in his kibbutz, worked as a mechanic, had received a Ph.D. for his writing on Zionism, DJ'd Arabic music, played bass guitar, and taught classes (my imagination goes to precarious adjunct labour and NGO workshops). His mother, Hannah Katsman, describes him in the article as "very industrious and independent."

 

 

The photograph is of Hannah and Hayim sitting at a coffee table littered with emptied bowls and cups. Both are facing the camera and behind them the vertically laid, vanilla clapboard of the coffee shop and a couple of coffee-themed framed posters convey a casual setting. This casualness is evident in the pair's continence: both wear easy but slightly weary smiles, bearing teeth but not like the flashes of merriment that are expertly cultivated for social media. The image, taken by a third person, seems to have been intended for only a few. The record of a mother eating with her son, a man eating with his mother, of two intimates who each have their own private lives. 

The image depicts a man unlikely to still be financially dependent on the woman, his mother, at least not comfortably, not fully. And she looks too self-possessed and too young for an inverse relation to have begun to supervene. They're presented equally, taking up similar space in the photograph. There's more overt design in her self-presentation -- a hat under which her grey hair wisps, rectangular-rimmed glasses, a flowy top, a playful smile -- than is apparent in his t-shirt and khaki shorts. He has the expression of someone game for taking a photograph but aware that it interrupts intimacy. I imagine their conversation as one which touched on politics, on their everyday lives, on something funny. Hayim would know how to attend to his mother's viewpoint, would have learned long ago that while there is a larger world in which he can get away with performing status privilege by way of the gender he presents, such privilege-play would not work here, not with her. 

He sits legs crossed, respectful of the shared space under the table, one elbow resting on the wood arm of his chair while the other holds his phone. There is a certain elegance to the way some men carry their phones these days, thumbs above, delicate on the screen, fingers below. I've seen similar hand gestures even in the absence of a phone, fingers more or less straight out, ready for the phone's width, only the thumb at a different angle, making space for its depth. Some men have been told from childhood that they belong to a category marked by what it had been in the past and continues to be but ought not to be. Ought not to be, except for the maintenance of a social status they recall they enjoyed as children, which is a necessity. So they have cultivated a gender ambivalence about them, in the way they lean forward a little as they walk, leaning in with the curiosity of Alice rather than the solemn determination of a 1960s banker -- in their curly hair, their short beards.

I have a similar photograph, one sent to me by another man. He is sitting across a kitchen table from his mother. Another casual setting, the flower print tablecloth interrupted by two emptied plates. She has both arms on the table, one elbow crooked at the edge while the other arm stretches towards her son's empty plate. The power balance is different here. He lives on his own but the table in the picture, and the living room in the background, are in a home that is likely still property in her name even if his inheritance has been secured. I imagine that he, too, knows to attend to his mother's words. Their conversation might have circled around his travels, his relation with his girlfriend, each of their work. 

In my picture, he is the photographer. I see his face turned back toward his phone screen which has been held up so that both mother and son will be in the image. Because he is in the foreground, I only see his head and the other arm which is outstretched along the edge of the table to balance his turn. I am looking slightly down at them, as if standing beside their table. Again, both are smiling broadly for the camera but, while her head is tilted in camera-ready welcome, both smiles express a comfortable tiredness. His eyes are soft and half open, as if he took the picture impromptu, without feeling the need to pose. I have seen him in other photographs. I know the open-mouthed, arms-outstretched stance he performs to convey excitement. I know the flash of white teeth he flourishes to establish his appeal. I have seen the sweetness of his half smile, uncertain, hopeful, cautious, before it dissolved in a calculus of rationality. 

Lauren Berlant calls it cruel optimism to hopefully desire a way of life that is still promised in liberal-capitalism, to desire such a life even as the social welfare that would make it possible has long since disappeared, if it ever existed. 

I so want to touch this Millennial man's face. I would brush the back of my hand along his cheekbone. 

I would draw my hand down and my fingers would entwine with yours as we turn to walk together. It sometimes feels to you as if there is nothing but crisis in this world. You chase away this sense by pursuing a way of life that you see as a new take on the old good life. You think you will prosper but not exploit. That the family you make will not be patriarchal. I wonder if, if only in your dreams, you have allowed yourself to sense that what you are pursuing is too modestly altered from the original, that the result of your compromise is too close to the promised yet already abased life they tried to coax you to run after. I wonder if we might make, for a moment, another life together not parallel yet alongside. An unnameable, faceless life that hops and skips beside our superscribed days.