the greenish gloom

the black in the green. of the time that remains. we, who have no right to call ourselves we. questiae juris? our name erased from your lists, marked down eternally as the Muselmänner, as fate would have it.the iron in your soul, now in my blood too. after we embraced,the darkness in your heart a shadow in my eyes. and the stars, they hold your gold and precious metals as well, you say? what can we abstract from this?

in a place between that is not a place. stateless, without an identity. i have become an ikon of sorrow. not an exception, one of many, discarded, cast down, looked over, beyond your gaze. have you ever asked yourself why you are so cruel? the human heart, like the earth, is not a mine to be possessed and what riches there are, are gifts, not mine, not yours. not an abstract value in your mind. violence isn't power.

"Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

They were dying slowly -- it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now -- nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air -- and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young -- almost a boy -- but you know with them it's hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede's ship's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held -- there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck -- Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge -- an ornament -- charm -- a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas"

..mining, outside the social scheme of classic civilization. That fact proved sinister as soon as the methods and ideals of mining became the chief pattern for industrial effort throughout the Western World. Mine: blast: dump: crush: extract: exhaust-there was indeed something devilish and sinister about the whole business. Life flourishes only in an environment of the living...

does the defect arise out of the fact that every other type of primitive environment contains food, something that may immediately be translated into life-while the miner's environment alone is-salt and saccharin aside-not only completely inorganic but completely inedible?