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Tuesday 20 October 2009

Single


.


File:Gaza children horrified.png
























The world not
the abuser, the
poor single
thing inside
the person's skin
not the
abused. And
yet, and
yet.





File:DeadGazagirlcloseday14.JPG





Sufferings of Palestinian children during Israeli attacks on Gaza, 27 Dec. 2008-19 Jan. 2009: Gaza hospital video via Al Jazeera
Gaza girl killed by Israeli forces in Israeli offensive on Gaza Strip, '08-'09, Day 14 of the offensive: photo via Al Jazeera


16 comments:

TC said...

Click on top image.

(Can the imagination fathom what those eyes may have beheld?)

Cy Mathews said...

It's the details that always get me in images like this.

Here, it's that single earing, and the yellow of her top.

They should be irrelevant, but, for me, they viscerally drive home the reality of her. A reality which now exists only in the past tense.

TC said...

Cy,

Yes, those small things are so moving, the signs of a small, bright, too brief purchase on life.

gamefaced said...

ouch.

Delia Psyche said...

Thank you for the generous reality check. It cleared--for a moment, at least--my mind of its frivolous preoccupations.

Anonymous said...

It's the 'and yet, and yet' that haunts me.

aditya said...

Heyy

It all is sad.

We celebrated Divali, here in India. A show of fireworks, which reminds me of this --


http://dippingbutterflies.blogspot.com/2009/03/show-of-fireworks.html

Something I wrote way back. Do read.

Pinkerbell said...

Yes... "and yet, and yet" - you'd have to repeat it so many millions of times over to represent all the victims of needless violence.

Thanks Tom, this is so very simple a verse, but means so much.

Anonymous said...

Human nature can be so horrible sometimes...

Elmo St. Rose said...

It seems that when Israelis kill
Arabs they are killing people but
when Moslems kill Moslems(which is
a much larger number) it's not
depicted that way.

. said...

How the girl in the top image isn't staring directly into the camera, but at the person holding it - seems to say so much. I've come back to read this a few times, very very powerful, and I hope you don't mind but I stole one 'and yet' for a part of the title of a series painted sketches. Hope that's ok?

TC said...

Leigh,

Yes, her lost gaze seems to say, Who knows what comes next and wherefrom?

About the "and yets": something tells me there are as many as we may ever need of those, surely more than enough to go around: please have as many as you want.

(Here are two from Issa: "The world of dew/is the world of dew./And yet,/And yet.")

Has there ever been anything in this world of time that was not in some way conditional and/or provisional?

Elmo St. Rose said...

The Doors of Perception
Huxley said.

For a moment in time the Grateful
Dead.....in the land of the dark
the ship of the sun is driven by
the Grateful Dead so it says in the
Egyptian Book of the Dead

"Walk me out in the morning dew
my honey
Walk me out in the morning dew
today"

A new world after a night of visions.

Tom Clark "acid or no acid, the
past is still the past"

The Grateful Dead "Roll away the dew"

Elmo St. Rose said...

and in the morning dew
the glory of the world

for those who want to see

Zephirine said...

This takes me back to the Egyptian weighing of the dead. Put this little girl on one side of the scales and - say - a barrel of oil on the other. The oil weighs so much more. Or does it? It's so much more important. Or is it? What kind of weight is it, which determines who is damned and who is saved?

TC said...

Thanks very much for your thoughts Elmo and Zeph.

These are emotional matters as well as political of course.

When the things of history are weighed up, plainly nothing is simple. But I do think the weighing is now going on, and with the limited powers of apprehension we as humans possess, there are it seems more than a few of us who see the scales balancing very precariously at the present... what do they call it, "point in time"?