1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail." Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999 Werner Herzog
Saturday, 23 August 2014
Tuesday, 19 August 2014
porta alchemica
There are six sigils on the jambs, each with its phrase.
Saturn/Lead: “When in your house black crows give birth to white doves, then will you be called wise.”
Jupiter/Tin: “The diameter of the sphere, the tau in the circle, and the cross of the globe bring no joy to the blind.”
Mars/Iron: “He who can burn with water and wash with fire makes a heaven of earth and a precious earth of heaven.”
Venus/Bronze: “If you make the earth fly upside down, with its wings you may convert torrential waters to stone.”
Mercury: “When azoth and fire whiten Latona, Diana comes unclothed.”
Antimony: “Our dead son lives, returns from the fire a king, and enjoys occult conjugation.”
On the base, Vitriol: “It is an occult work of true wisdom to open the earth, so that it may generate salvation for the people.”
Saturn/Lead: “When in your house black crows give birth to white doves, then will you be called wise.”
Jupiter/Tin: “The diameter of the sphere, the tau in the circle, and the cross of the globe bring no joy to the blind.”
Mars/Iron: “He who can burn with water and wash with fire makes a heaven of earth and a precious earth of heaven.”
Venus/Bronze: “If you make the earth fly upside down, with its wings you may convert torrential waters to stone.”
Mercury: “When azoth and fire whiten Latona, Diana comes unclothed.”
Antimony: “Our dead son lives, returns from the fire a king, and enjoys occult conjugation.”
On the base, Vitriol: “It is an occult work of true wisdom to open the earth, so that it may generate salvation for the people.”
The overriding arc of The Sopranos as a series (and I swear to you newbies that this is not a major spoiler) is the idea of exits on a long highway. Most of the time, you're riding along the highway and not really paying attention to the scenery, but every so often, life presents you with a series of options and forces you to make a choice. Do you stay on the highway as you have been and keep heading along? Or do you exit and take a new highway or unmarked road, trying to change your route? You end up in the same place anyway, since we all die, but there are multiple routes to take there, and sometimes, the one you're on isn't the best. Every so often, The Sopranos places an exit sign in front of its characters, letting them know that this is an optimal time to change things up. And each time, they make the choice to take that exit or ignore it and blow on by.
http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/the-sopranos-from-where-to-eternitybust-out-44181
http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/the-sopranos-from-where-to-eternitybust-out-44181
Friday, 15 August 2014
Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish
As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you wage your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you wage your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).
An Old Man and a Young Man in Gaza By Heathcote Williams
A bearded old man holds a placard:
"You take my water, burn my olive trees,
Destroy my house, take my job, steal my land,
Imprison my father, kill my mother,
Bombard my country, starve us all,
Humiliate us all, but I am to blame:
I shot a rocket back."
From the Zionist Book of Psalms
A selection of ungodly chants
Are used to justify the destruction
Of a country and its inhabitants:
"We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages
Destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water"
– Eli Yishai, former Deputy Prime Minister.
Amen
"There should be no electricity in Gaza,
No gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing…
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods…
Flatten all of Gaza"
– Gilad Sharon, Ariel Sharon's son in the Jerusalem Post.
Amen
"There are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down …
Kill the Gazans without thought or mercy."
– Michael Ben-Ari, an ex-member of the Knesset.
Amen
Gaza should be "bombed so hard the population
Has to flee into Egypt"
– Israel Katz, a Minister of Transportation.
Amen
Gaza should be "wiped clean with bombs",
– Avi Dichter, a Minister of Home Front Defense.
Amen
Israeli soldiers must "learn from the Syrians
How to slaughter the enemy",
– Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef.
Amen
Here is Ze'ev Jabotinsky, admirer of Mussolini
And the godfather of Zionist terrorism,
Justifying the flattening of Arab villages in 1948
And turning their inhabitants into refugees in vast numbers
"The world has become accustomed to the idea
Of mass migrations and has become fond of them."
Jabotinsky adds, "Hitler, as odious as he is to us
Has given this idea a good name in the world."
Amen
It is ironic that Jabotinsky used Hitler
As precedent for the transfer of the inhabitants
Since forcible expulsion
Was among the charges against Adolf Eichmann –
An architect of the Nazi Holocaust
Captured in Argentina, and tried and hanged in Israel.
Undeterred, the former chief rabbi,
Mordechai Elyahu, has urged Israel,
Its army and its government
To "employ the Nazi choice"
Against the Palestinians.
To carry out a series of carpet bombings
Of Palestinian population centres in Gaza;
He urges the "indiscriminate killing of civilians".
On religious grounds.
Amen
The Chabad Lubavitch Rabbi Schneerson,
A self proclaimed Messiah
Whose followers await his return from the dead,
(As if the Rabbi hadn't preached
Enough when alive by his making the claim
That his religion heralded a new Master Race) –
Has a devoted and powerful acolyte, Rabbi Manis Friedman,
Who declares that the "only way to fight a moral war"
Is to "destroy the Arabs' holy sites" and "to kill them."
To "kill men, women and children", and to eliminate anyone
Who stands in the way of a Greater Israel.
Friedman embraces Israel's ruthless colonizing power
With an Old Testament ferocity –
With what Christopher Hitchens has called,
"The root of religious evil" –
Whereby the Torah can be misused
To mow down men in a mosque
With an automatic rifle,
And such vengeful triumphs
Given a country's blessing:
Streets in Israeli cities
Are routinely named after armed cuckoos –
Murderous Israeli heroes
Who've evicted indigenous birds
From the Palestinian nest,
And then killed them.
The Head of Israeli's National Defense College,
Professor Arnon Sofer,
Outlines his country's Defense strategy:
"If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.
All day, every day."
Amen
Colonel Yoav Gal, an Israeli Air Force pilot,
Tells Israel's Army Radio
"I believe that it [Operation Cast Lead]
Should have been even stronger! Dresden! Dresden!
The extermination of a city!
Not even a stone will be thrown at us. Because we're Jews.
I want the Arabs of Gaza to flee to Egypt.
This is what I want. I want to destroy the city."
Amen
Ethnic cleansing is Israel's origin
Not peace:
Netanyahu tells students at Bar Ilan University,
"Israel should have exploited the repression
Of the demonstrations in China,
When world attention focused on that country,
To carry out mass expulsions
Among the Arabs of the territories."
"The Palestinians are like crocodiles,
The more you give them meat, they want more"
Says Ehud Barak, when Prime Minister of Israel.
Despondently, the philosopher Martin Buber
Once told a New York audience,
"When we followers of the prophetic Judaism
Returned to Palestine...the majority of Jewish people
Preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us."
Enflamed when Palestinians fight back
With increasing desperation
And despite overwhelming odds
To try to regain their ancestral land,
Israelis chant "Death to the Arabs"
"A Jew is a brother, an Arab is a bastard".
In front of their Arab neighbours,
A song is sung by settlers at Purim
Praising Baruch Goldstein's massacre
Of 29 Palestinians at prayer during Ramadan:
"Dr. Goldstein, there is none other like you in the world.
Dr. Goldstein, we all love you… he aimed at terrorists' heads,
Squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets,
And shot, and shot."
At this settler hero's funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin
Famously claimed that even one million Arabs
Are "not worth a Jewish fingernail".
Goldstein's mass murder created suicide bombers –
Some two hundred amongst ten million Palestinians –
Which led to Israel's land-grabbing apartheid wall.
The Israeli lawmaker, Ayelet Shaked, calls
For the genocide of Palestinians on Facebook
And she advocates "the slaughter of Palestinian mothers
Who give birth to 'little snakes,'"
"The entire Palestinian people is the enemy."
She urges their complete destruction,
"Including its elderly and its women."
The new media are used to demonize the innocent
And to host persistent irrationalities:
A Jerusalem city councillor in charge of municipal security, Aryeh King, publicly advocates the murder
And the mutilation of non-Jews:
"I am calling out to all the Pinchases that are here …
Every one of us has a mission …
The Rebbe, who is here with us, expects us to commit acts of Pinchas."
Pinchas (Phineas in English) in the Torah was so incensed
By interracial (Jewish-Midianite) sex
That he took a sword and plunged it through both bodies
Of a couple in the middle of their lovemaking.
Then with a medieval fervor, Rabbi Noam Perel
Advocates scalping Arabs
By removing their genitalia –
A blood sacrifice to a mad mind-set
Of mystical thuggery.
Two Israeli girls hold up a banner
"Hating Arabs is not racism, it's values!"
Placing the Hebrew word for "Arabs", ARAVIM,
Into Twitter reveals young Israelis desiring
That Arabs die or be tortured to death.
The US House of Representatives
Votes unanimously to reaffirm its full support for Israel.
US jets duly declare war on Arab children
Whose futures they disintegrate.
In the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis,
Eight members of the Al Haj family
Are killed, including five children.
Five children killed in Gaza
Four Arab children, fishermens' children
First cousins from the Bakr family, aged nine to eleven,
Playing football on the Gaza beach in July, 2014,
Are shot dead by an Israeli gunboat.
Dead boy in the sand
A 12-year-old boy loses 18 members of his family in an air raid
From US planes including his father, a schoolteacher,
A photograph of Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh
Shows his shoulders slumped against a car.
It's the moment that he's discovered
That his father is amongst the dead.
Grieving boy
Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh, aged 12, loses 18 members of his own family
Later Abdul Rahman would say,
"They think we are worth nothing. They are killers,
They have no humanity,
And one day I will avenge my father."
Israel receives more aid from the US
Than the whole of the continent of Africa
Whilst the US population remains docile.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
Says that Israel must "go all the way" in Gaza.
Comfortably seated on camp chairs and sofas
Some fifty Israelis gather to eat popcorn
And watch from a Sderot hilltop
As bombs rain down from US-supplied F-16s.
They clap and applaud each deadly blast
From 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs.
Israelis cheer Gaza bombardment
Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot to watch the bombardment of Gaza.
"We are here to see Israel destroy Hamas," Eli Chone,
A 22-year-old American tells Allan Sørensen,
Of Kristeligt Dagblad, pointing to a dot of light in the sky.
"It is a fighter who is about to dive. This means that it is about to shoot."
The conquerors' fans draw up their chairs;
Swigging on beers as they tend their barbecue
And watch Gaza burn from their vantage-point
In Sderot (once the Palestinian village of Najd).
One says, "this is our entertainment."
Someone points out that Hamas
(Rather than it having been elected)
Is "a death-cult" and Palestinians "enjoy martyrdom"
So "we're doing the Arabs a favour."
A lurid cocktail of triumphalist hatred,
Mixed with smoke from burning flesh,
Blinds them to Palestine's righteous yearning
For self-determination,
Their right in international law;
Their right to be unencumbered by occupation;
To be free from being Israel's penal colony;
Free from being stateless in a brutalized Bantustan –
A colonized people who are jeered at and decried
For their minimal attempts to fight back.
Later that night a bomb would land on a Gaza care home
Filled with elderly patients who cannot move
And with children who are already disabled;
Both are bombed in their wheelchairs or in their beds.
The Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva
The world's largest religious-Zionist youth organization,
Urges on his Facebook page that the IDF,
The Israeli Defense Force be transformed
Into an army of avengers,
"Which will not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins"
Palestinian boy kidnapped and murdered
A young man in Shuafat, Jerusalem,
Muhammad Abu-Khdeir,
A 16-year old boy with a knowing, elfin smile
Is pulled into a car
And kidnapped in East Jerusalem
While waiting to go into the mosque.
He is tied and beaten;
He has gasoline poured into his mouth
And he is burned alive.
His body is found in the Jerusalem Forest;
Battered in the head
And with soot deposits in the lungs
Suggesting he's still breathing
When set on fire.
Ninety per cent of his body is burned.
Another victim of Israel's slow motion genocide –
A holocaust which, this time,
Is being financed and uncritically supported
By 'the good guys',
By the internationally 'great and the good',
By the craven chorus of the compliant
Who ritually pipe up to defend
Israel's right to defend itself –
To defend the indefensible,
And to supply the money
The weapons, and the excuses
To enable it to do so.
On Friday July 2014
The Israeli Defence Force
Invades Gaza by land.
An Israeli soldier posts a selfie
Of himself having black camouflage paint
Applied to his face.
He tweets, "From the Field: Our soldiers preparing to enter Gaza.
The whole nation stands behind us"
Another tweets: "We have hit Hamas hard,
And we will continue to hit Hamas hard."
Tzipi Livni, Israel's Justice Minister,
Says she backs the invasion "wholeheartedly".
And expresses "love and confidence in our soldiers strength".
Israel's soldiers' strength is misused
To produce genocide as well as a scorched policy
Whereby 800,000 olive trees in Occupied Palestine
Are destroyed to drive Palestinian farmers from their land.
King Herod revisits his massacre of the Innocents,
But this time round he has the mainstream media
On his side: his spin doctors have them swallowing
His party line that toddlers are terrorists if they're Arab,
And Herod has journalists fired who don't please him.
"Expel the Palestinians, and populate Gaza with Jews",
Urges the Knesset's deputy speaker, Moshe Feiglin,
"Israel must attack Gaza even more mercilessly"
To expel the population "with maximum force".
The deputy speaker of Israel's parliament, the Knesset,
Promotes war crimes as a state sanctioned tactic:
After "softening" the targets with firepower
He recommends the IDF "conquer the entire Gaza."
He is emboldened by the US's blank cheques,
And in their support of Israel's heroism
In attacking a defenceless population,
Few see fit to mention that Israel's
First victim in its ground invasion of Gaza
Is a five-month-old baby killed
By an Israeli tank in southern Rafah
On July 17, 2014 – almost as if King Herod
Has returned to rule his zombie state.
The "most moral army in the world"
Is reportedly targeting women and children,
And even animals.
A doctor speaking to Al Jazeera says that the Israeli army
"Is shooting at anything moving in Shujaiyah"
And consequently the streets of East Gaza are strewn
With dead bodies and severed limbs.
A Norwegian doctor in Shifa hospital, Mads Gilbert,
Is overwhelmed by the ground invasion:
By the carloads of those "maimed, torn apart, and bleeding; Shivering, and dying - all sorts of injured Palestinians,
All ages, all civilians, all innocent."
"The heroes in the ambulances," he continues,
"And in all of Gaza's hospitals
Are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue
And inhuman workloads – they care, they triage,
And they try to understand the incomprehensible chaos
Of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing,
Not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!"
With these words Dr Gilbert addresses himself
to the President of the United States.
Predictably there's no response.
Palestinian baby wounded
Israel's vision of itself was once
As a "light unto the nations".
It has no need of the fearful hatred,
Fuelling its bombs and its bullets,
Unless it wishes to fade away –
Putting out the light that might enable it
To see the stranger as a friend.
"You take my water, burn my olive trees,
Destroy my house, take my job, steal my land,
Imprison my father, kill my mother,
Bombard my country, starve us all,
Humiliate us all, but I am to blame:
I shot a rocket back."
From the Zionist Book of Psalms
A selection of ungodly chants
Are used to justify the destruction
Of a country and its inhabitants:
"We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages
Destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water"
– Eli Yishai, former Deputy Prime Minister.
Amen
"There should be no electricity in Gaza,
No gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing…
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods…
Flatten all of Gaza"
– Gilad Sharon, Ariel Sharon's son in the Jerusalem Post.
Amen
"There are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down …
Kill the Gazans without thought or mercy."
– Michael Ben-Ari, an ex-member of the Knesset.
Amen
Gaza should be "bombed so hard the population
Has to flee into Egypt"
– Israel Katz, a Minister of Transportation.
Amen
Gaza should be "wiped clean with bombs",
– Avi Dichter, a Minister of Home Front Defense.
Amen
Israeli soldiers must "learn from the Syrians
How to slaughter the enemy",
– Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef.
Amen
Here is Ze'ev Jabotinsky, admirer of Mussolini
And the godfather of Zionist terrorism,
Justifying the flattening of Arab villages in 1948
And turning their inhabitants into refugees in vast numbers
"The world has become accustomed to the idea
Of mass migrations and has become fond of them."
Jabotinsky adds, "Hitler, as odious as he is to us
Has given this idea a good name in the world."
Amen
It is ironic that Jabotinsky used Hitler
As precedent for the transfer of the inhabitants
Since forcible expulsion
Was among the charges against Adolf Eichmann –
An architect of the Nazi Holocaust
Captured in Argentina, and tried and hanged in Israel.
Undeterred, the former chief rabbi,
Mordechai Elyahu, has urged Israel,
Its army and its government
To "employ the Nazi choice"
Against the Palestinians.
To carry out a series of carpet bombings
Of Palestinian population centres in Gaza;
He urges the "indiscriminate killing of civilians".
On religious grounds.
Amen
The Chabad Lubavitch Rabbi Schneerson,
A self proclaimed Messiah
Whose followers await his return from the dead,
(As if the Rabbi hadn't preached
Enough when alive by his making the claim
That his religion heralded a new Master Race) –
Has a devoted and powerful acolyte, Rabbi Manis Friedman,
Who declares that the "only way to fight a moral war"
Is to "destroy the Arabs' holy sites" and "to kill them."
To "kill men, women and children", and to eliminate anyone
Who stands in the way of a Greater Israel.
Friedman embraces Israel's ruthless colonizing power
With an Old Testament ferocity –
With what Christopher Hitchens has called,
"The root of religious evil" –
Whereby the Torah can be misused
To mow down men in a mosque
With an automatic rifle,
And such vengeful triumphs
Given a country's blessing:
Streets in Israeli cities
Are routinely named after armed cuckoos –
Murderous Israeli heroes
Who've evicted indigenous birds
From the Palestinian nest,
And then killed them.
The Head of Israeli's National Defense College,
Professor Arnon Sofer,
Outlines his country's Defense strategy:
"If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.
All day, every day."
Amen
Colonel Yoav Gal, an Israeli Air Force pilot,
Tells Israel's Army Radio
"I believe that it [Operation Cast Lead]
Should have been even stronger! Dresden! Dresden!
The extermination of a city!
Not even a stone will be thrown at us. Because we're Jews.
I want the Arabs of Gaza to flee to Egypt.
This is what I want. I want to destroy the city."
Amen
Ethnic cleansing is Israel's origin
Not peace:
Netanyahu tells students at Bar Ilan University,
"Israel should have exploited the repression
Of the demonstrations in China,
When world attention focused on that country,
To carry out mass expulsions
Among the Arabs of the territories."
"The Palestinians are like crocodiles,
The more you give them meat, they want more"
Says Ehud Barak, when Prime Minister of Israel.
Despondently, the philosopher Martin Buber
Once told a New York audience,
"When we followers of the prophetic Judaism
Returned to Palestine...the majority of Jewish people
Preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us."
Enflamed when Palestinians fight back
With increasing desperation
And despite overwhelming odds
To try to regain their ancestral land,
Israelis chant "Death to the Arabs"
"A Jew is a brother, an Arab is a bastard".
In front of their Arab neighbours,
A song is sung by settlers at Purim
Praising Baruch Goldstein's massacre
Of 29 Palestinians at prayer during Ramadan:
"Dr. Goldstein, there is none other like you in the world.
Dr. Goldstein, we all love you… he aimed at terrorists' heads,
Squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets,
And shot, and shot."
At this settler hero's funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin
Famously claimed that even one million Arabs
Are "not worth a Jewish fingernail".
Goldstein's mass murder created suicide bombers –
Some two hundred amongst ten million Palestinians –
Which led to Israel's land-grabbing apartheid wall.
The Israeli lawmaker, Ayelet Shaked, calls
For the genocide of Palestinians on Facebook
And she advocates "the slaughter of Palestinian mothers
Who give birth to 'little snakes,'"
"The entire Palestinian people is the enemy."
She urges their complete destruction,
"Including its elderly and its women."
The new media are used to demonize the innocent
And to host persistent irrationalities:
A Jerusalem city councillor in charge of municipal security, Aryeh King, publicly advocates the murder
And the mutilation of non-Jews:
"I am calling out to all the Pinchases that are here …
Every one of us has a mission …
The Rebbe, who is here with us, expects us to commit acts of Pinchas."
Pinchas (Phineas in English) in the Torah was so incensed
By interracial (Jewish-Midianite) sex
That he took a sword and plunged it through both bodies
Of a couple in the middle of their lovemaking.
Then with a medieval fervor, Rabbi Noam Perel
Advocates scalping Arabs
By removing their genitalia –
A blood sacrifice to a mad mind-set
Of mystical thuggery.
Two Israeli girls hold up a banner
"Hating Arabs is not racism, it's values!"
Placing the Hebrew word for "Arabs", ARAVIM,
Into Twitter reveals young Israelis desiring
That Arabs die or be tortured to death.
The US House of Representatives
Votes unanimously to reaffirm its full support for Israel.
US jets duly declare war on Arab children
Whose futures they disintegrate.
In the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis,
Eight members of the Al Haj family
Are killed, including five children.
Five children killed in Gaza
Four Arab children, fishermens' children
First cousins from the Bakr family, aged nine to eleven,
Playing football on the Gaza beach in July, 2014,
Are shot dead by an Israeli gunboat.
Dead boy in the sand
A 12-year-old boy loses 18 members of his family in an air raid
From US planes including his father, a schoolteacher,
A photograph of Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh
Shows his shoulders slumped against a car.
It's the moment that he's discovered
That his father is amongst the dead.
Grieving boy
Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh, aged 12, loses 18 members of his own family
Later Abdul Rahman would say,
"They think we are worth nothing. They are killers,
They have no humanity,
And one day I will avenge my father."
Israel receives more aid from the US
Than the whole of the continent of Africa
Whilst the US population remains docile.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
Says that Israel must "go all the way" in Gaza.
Comfortably seated on camp chairs and sofas
Some fifty Israelis gather to eat popcorn
And watch from a Sderot hilltop
As bombs rain down from US-supplied F-16s.
They clap and applaud each deadly blast
From 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs.
Israelis cheer Gaza bombardment
Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot to watch the bombardment of Gaza.
"We are here to see Israel destroy Hamas," Eli Chone,
A 22-year-old American tells Allan Sørensen,
Of Kristeligt Dagblad, pointing to a dot of light in the sky.
"It is a fighter who is about to dive. This means that it is about to shoot."
The conquerors' fans draw up their chairs;
Swigging on beers as they tend their barbecue
And watch Gaza burn from their vantage-point
In Sderot (once the Palestinian village of Najd).
One says, "this is our entertainment."
Someone points out that Hamas
(Rather than it having been elected)
Is "a death-cult" and Palestinians "enjoy martyrdom"
So "we're doing the Arabs a favour."
A lurid cocktail of triumphalist hatred,
Mixed with smoke from burning flesh,
Blinds them to Palestine's righteous yearning
For self-determination,
Their right in international law;
Their right to be unencumbered by occupation;
To be free from being Israel's penal colony;
Free from being stateless in a brutalized Bantustan –
A colonized people who are jeered at and decried
For their minimal attempts to fight back.
Later that night a bomb would land on a Gaza care home
Filled with elderly patients who cannot move
And with children who are already disabled;
Both are bombed in their wheelchairs or in their beds.
The Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva
The world's largest religious-Zionist youth organization,
Urges on his Facebook page that the IDF,
The Israeli Defense Force be transformed
Into an army of avengers,
"Which will not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins"
Palestinian boy kidnapped and murdered
A young man in Shuafat, Jerusalem,
Muhammad Abu-Khdeir,
A 16-year old boy with a knowing, elfin smile
Is pulled into a car
And kidnapped in East Jerusalem
While waiting to go into the mosque.
He is tied and beaten;
He has gasoline poured into his mouth
And he is burned alive.
His body is found in the Jerusalem Forest;
Battered in the head
And with soot deposits in the lungs
Suggesting he's still breathing
When set on fire.
Ninety per cent of his body is burned.
Another victim of Israel's slow motion genocide –
A holocaust which, this time,
Is being financed and uncritically supported
By 'the good guys',
By the internationally 'great and the good',
By the craven chorus of the compliant
Who ritually pipe up to defend
Israel's right to defend itself –
To defend the indefensible,
And to supply the money
The weapons, and the excuses
To enable it to do so.
On Friday July 2014
The Israeli Defence Force
Invades Gaza by land.
An Israeli soldier posts a selfie
Of himself having black camouflage paint
Applied to his face.
He tweets, "From the Field: Our soldiers preparing to enter Gaza.
The whole nation stands behind us"
Another tweets: "We have hit Hamas hard,
And we will continue to hit Hamas hard."
Tzipi Livni, Israel's Justice Minister,
Says she backs the invasion "wholeheartedly".
And expresses "love and confidence in our soldiers strength".
Israel's soldiers' strength is misused
To produce genocide as well as a scorched policy
Whereby 800,000 olive trees in Occupied Palestine
Are destroyed to drive Palestinian farmers from their land.
King Herod revisits his massacre of the Innocents,
But this time round he has the mainstream media
On his side: his spin doctors have them swallowing
His party line that toddlers are terrorists if they're Arab,
And Herod has journalists fired who don't please him.
"Expel the Palestinians, and populate Gaza with Jews",
Urges the Knesset's deputy speaker, Moshe Feiglin,
"Israel must attack Gaza even more mercilessly"
To expel the population "with maximum force".
The deputy speaker of Israel's parliament, the Knesset,
Promotes war crimes as a state sanctioned tactic:
After "softening" the targets with firepower
He recommends the IDF "conquer the entire Gaza."
He is emboldened by the US's blank cheques,
And in their support of Israel's heroism
In attacking a defenceless population,
Few see fit to mention that Israel's
First victim in its ground invasion of Gaza
Is a five-month-old baby killed
By an Israeli tank in southern Rafah
On July 17, 2014 – almost as if King Herod
Has returned to rule his zombie state.
The "most moral army in the world"
Is reportedly targeting women and children,
And even animals.
A doctor speaking to Al Jazeera says that the Israeli army
"Is shooting at anything moving in Shujaiyah"
And consequently the streets of East Gaza are strewn
With dead bodies and severed limbs.
A Norwegian doctor in Shifa hospital, Mads Gilbert,
Is overwhelmed by the ground invasion:
By the carloads of those "maimed, torn apart, and bleeding; Shivering, and dying - all sorts of injured Palestinians,
All ages, all civilians, all innocent."
"The heroes in the ambulances," he continues,
"And in all of Gaza's hospitals
Are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue
And inhuman workloads – they care, they triage,
And they try to understand the incomprehensible chaos
Of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing,
Not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!"
With these words Dr Gilbert addresses himself
to the President of the United States.
Predictably there's no response.
Palestinian baby wounded
Israel's vision of itself was once
As a "light unto the nations".
It has no need of the fearful hatred,
Fuelling its bombs and its bullets,
Unless it wishes to fade away –
Putting out the light that might enable it
To see the stranger as a friend.
Letter From Managua 1 by Margaret Randall.
All you want to do is murder us, those who have survived
your several dress rehearsals
It’s not that serious yet, most of us don’t meet
your person-level: neither robust nor blue-eyed nor promising
according to your current IQ
or the Rorschach that defines your sense of life.
Forgive us if we don’t agree
With your definition of the N-Bomb
the binary chemical solution or the Salvadorean solution
as an adequate pain-killer. We’re sufficiently underdeveloped
to want to deal with our pain in our own primitive way.
Forgive us too if we can’t fully answer
your questions about our society, define it
as marxist-lenist or social-democrat, agreeable pluralist
or sufficiently free enterprise.
If we insist on the crudity of exploring our own creative process
loving our homeland with the passion
50,000 sisters and brothers root in our throats.
Excuse us, please, we’re always forgetting
we were supposed to ask permission to defend our truth
and distribute our laughter as we see fit.
Don’t bother yourselves trying to understand
our teaching our soldiers poetry along with defense combat
self respect and how to write their names in ink instead of blood,
When our grandparents scraped their living from this land
you sent your Marines. Later you provided us
with “one of our own”: bought and paid for
by your American Way of Life.
He had a brother and a son, a grandson
and infinite pockets.
We said goodbye more than once
but you trained a legion of our brothers
bought them off and kept them in shape
(to keep us in shape)
and the shape they kept us in was increasingly pine-boxed
and horizontal. Here it was a crime
to be young, and you reminded us daily
of that crime
committed by so many, and so often.
But we kept forgetting, we fought and came up from under
your undying friend and his protective Guard.
We fought and won, we buried
our sisters and brothers (few were blond
or met your standards for personhood)
and we began the long pain, the silent joy, the impossible
made possible by our history of eyes and hands.
We know we don’t meet your general 1982 standards
for dependent nations.
All you want to do is murder us. All we want to do is live.
your several dress rehearsals
It’s not that serious yet, most of us don’t meet
your person-level: neither robust nor blue-eyed nor promising
according to your current IQ
or the Rorschach that defines your sense of life.
Forgive us if we don’t agree
With your definition of the N-Bomb
the binary chemical solution or the Salvadorean solution
as an adequate pain-killer. We’re sufficiently underdeveloped
to want to deal with our pain in our own primitive way.
Forgive us too if we can’t fully answer
your questions about our society, define it
as marxist-lenist or social-democrat, agreeable pluralist
or sufficiently free enterprise.
If we insist on the crudity of exploring our own creative process
loving our homeland with the passion
50,000 sisters and brothers root in our throats.
Excuse us, please, we’re always forgetting
we were supposed to ask permission to defend our truth
and distribute our laughter as we see fit.
Don’t bother yourselves trying to understand
our teaching our soldiers poetry along with defense combat
self respect and how to write their names in ink instead of blood,
When our grandparents scraped their living from this land
you sent your Marines. Later you provided us
with “one of our own”: bought and paid for
by your American Way of Life.
He had a brother and a son, a grandson
and infinite pockets.
We said goodbye more than once
but you trained a legion of our brothers
bought them off and kept them in shape
(to keep us in shape)
and the shape they kept us in was increasingly pine-boxed
and horizontal. Here it was a crime
to be young, and you reminded us daily
of that crime
committed by so many, and so often.
But we kept forgetting, we fought and came up from under
your undying friend and his protective Guard.
We fought and won, we buried
our sisters and brothers (few were blond
or met your standards for personhood)
and we began the long pain, the silent joy, the impossible
made possible by our history of eyes and hands.
We know we don’t meet your general 1982 standards
for dependent nations.
All you want to do is murder us. All we want to do is live.
Tutto è Sciolto by James Joyce
A birdless heaven, sea-dusk and a star
Sad in the west;
And thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far,
Rememberest:
Her silent eyes and her soft foam-white brow
And fragrant hair,
Falling as in the silence falleth now
Dusk from the air.
Ah, why wilt thou remember these, or why,
Poor heart, repine,
If the sweet love she yielded with a sigh
Was never thine?
Sad in the west;
And thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far,
Rememberest:
Her silent eyes and her soft foam-white brow
And fragrant hair,
Falling as in the silence falleth now
Dusk from the air.
Ah, why wilt thou remember these, or why,
Poor heart, repine,
If the sweet love she yielded with a sigh
Was never thine?
Immortal Autumn by Archibald MacLeish
I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.
I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.
I praise the fall: it is the human season.
Now
No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,
But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:
There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn
Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.
Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves
And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow
We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know
The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.
It is the human season. On this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.
I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.
I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.
I praise the fall: it is the human season.
Now
No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,
But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:
There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn
Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.
Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves
And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow
We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know
The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.
It is the human season. On this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.
I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.
Wednesday, 6 August 2014
... without shame or concern for etymology
For Pynchon, 9/11 is indeed a divine retribution. A “just” punishment. One can only imagine how this sounds to nationalist, patriotic Americans. Imagine there are no heroes. Imagine America is the force of darkness and the axis of evil: ominous, irresponsible, sowing death. It takes courage, and a good amount of anger, to state this as clearly as Pynchon does, in the face of the inhuman accusation of inhumanity. The force with which Pynchon’s commentary hits the national tragedy can be measured, perhaps, by the fact, that no commentator has dealt with it in detail. And by the fact that, although he was short-listed, he has once more not received the National Book Award.
Again, why is the event a just and holy punishment? Not because the Americans have not been Puritan enough, but because they are too Puritan; because they follow a religion that they have twisted and turned into a perfect apology for a culture of entitlement and greed. As Shawn notes in a conversation with Maxine, America has been
on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs…planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no innocent dead.” […]
“You’re not going to explain that, or…”
“Course not, it’s a koan.”
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/bleeding
Monday, 4 August 2014
rubaiyat
Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour'd it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd —
'I came like Water and like Wind I go.'
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour'd it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd —
'I came like Water and like Wind I go.'
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