At the end of time there is nothing to say, and we don't know how to say it.
"We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with the lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration."
---Thomas Merton.
Camps in the sea:
'A girl, "around 12 years old" who was"very beautiful" was taken to a room by a group of men and was "not released" from the ship she recalled.'
--The Guardian.
In former times lepers and outcasts-untouchables-were kept on the city outskirts; then it was the turn of the mad and the ostracized.
Has a history of the camp been written? Why this need for confinement, for the expulsion of the impure, the degenerate, the poor, the marginal? A space must be reserved in which, as Plenty Coups recalls, nothing happened. Time does not pass, is not allowed to pass, and memory without a present and a sense of the future to offset it becomes a terrible trap ("stuck in the past"). In Hell, too, we are told that time will not pass...
When did it begin?
Before the Camps there were the Gulags (Applebaum) and before that there were the 'reservations' on which aboriginals and Red Indians were kept separate, the only freedom afforded them was being allowed to drink themselves to death. You read somewhere that the Nazis picked up the idea from the British in the Boer war (check on sources for that). Ghettos, quarters, prisons, asylums, institutions (what does it mean to be 'institutionalized'?) all affirm some deep-rooted need to banish, control, purify, keep in order and maintain lineages.
A remarkable line from Huxley (in Themes and Variations?). The British (Anglo-Saxon?) love of straight lines, (queues), and for a clean scale of pleasure and pain, can lead to political hygiene: the damned and the saved, those on the right hand, and those on the left.
What is a 'normal population'? A question for the statisticians and the state.
What was that again about 'the ship of fools'?
What does it say about our world (I say 'our' out of politeness) that people can be left to be abused and die of starvation on ships out at sea, far from the gaze of anyone? Is that so very different from America's 'dark sites'?
There's a story of horror out there but it will soon be displaced in the headlines by pictures-yes, that's what we really want-of an exploding volcano since we can then fret about the end of days when if truth be told the end has already, in some very real sense, come without us knowing it.
The Dalai Lama: "I mentioned this problem and she [Aung Suu Kyi] told me she found some difficulties, that things were not simple but very complicated."
Strange, that. You often hear the pundits say that the Israel-Palestinian "conflict" is a difficult problem when in reality it is made difficult by the working of power and the hardness of people's hearts. Occupation-in Kashmir or Palestine-is not so difficult to understand.
"We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with the lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration."
---Thomas Merton.
Camps in the sea:
'A girl, "around 12 years old" who was"very beautiful" was taken to a room by a group of men and was "not released" from the ship she recalled.'
--The Guardian.
In former times lepers and outcasts-untouchables-were kept on the city outskirts; then it was the turn of the mad and the ostracized.
Has a history of the camp been written? Why this need for confinement, for the expulsion of the impure, the degenerate, the poor, the marginal? A space must be reserved in which, as Plenty Coups recalls, nothing happened. Time does not pass, is not allowed to pass, and memory without a present and a sense of the future to offset it becomes a terrible trap ("stuck in the past"). In Hell, too, we are told that time will not pass...
When did it begin?
Before the Camps there were the Gulags (Applebaum) and before that there were the 'reservations' on which aboriginals and Red Indians were kept separate, the only freedom afforded them was being allowed to drink themselves to death. You read somewhere that the Nazis picked up the idea from the British in the Boer war (check on sources for that). Ghettos, quarters, prisons, asylums, institutions (what does it mean to be 'institutionalized'?) all affirm some deep-rooted need to banish, control, purify, keep in order and maintain lineages.
A remarkable line from Huxley (in Themes and Variations?). The British (Anglo-Saxon?) love of straight lines, (queues), and for a clean scale of pleasure and pain, can lead to political hygiene: the damned and the saved, those on the right hand, and those on the left.
What is a 'normal population'? A question for the statisticians and the state.
What was that again about 'the ship of fools'?
What does it say about our world (I say 'our' out of politeness) that people can be left to be abused and die of starvation on ships out at sea, far from the gaze of anyone? Is that so very different from America's 'dark sites'?
There's a story of horror out there but it will soon be displaced in the headlines by pictures-yes, that's what we really want-of an exploding volcano since we can then fret about the end of days when if truth be told the end has already, in some very real sense, come without us knowing it.
The Dalai Lama: "I mentioned this problem and she [Aung Suu Kyi] told me she found some difficulties, that things were not simple but very complicated."
Strange, that. You often hear the pundits say that the Israel-Palestinian "conflict" is a difficult problem when in reality it is made difficult by the working of power and the hardness of people's hearts. Occupation-in Kashmir or Palestine-is not so difficult to understand.
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