Forty-Three

The young Sherpa tries to imagine his future as a career diplomat and immediately takes a step back: tight-fitting suits, cocktail parties, rented hypocrisy, the sterility of meetings, the insurmountable fence around the United Nations Security Council… Maybe not. Maybe diplomacy is not the best idea. After all, what is a country, a nation state? Or a nationality – what is that? Nobody knows any more. It happens all the time: pregnancies during wars and births that multiply over territories in conflict. Newborns poke out their heads just as the border has lost its definition. What flag flies over this forest? asks the new mother, the umbilical cord still warm beside the outcast placenta. The ambiguity of the sky responds to her with lazy generalities: some meteorological, others libertarian. But nationality is not resolved in abstractions, nor in instabilities. She must seek out another way to confer a homeland upon her infant child. How can this – all this – be fixed? There’s no fixing it, the young Sherpa would say. But the old Sherpa wouldn’t agree. There is only one way of solving it, he’d say: the production and exchange of documents. It is in bureaucracy, he would affirm, where doxa transforms into episteme.