tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post8254820189155280368..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: In the Harvest Season: Vassilis Zambaras: Stopping by a Grove of Ancient Olive Trees Near Twilight, I Think Myself FortunateUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-41347354046332948222015-10-17T19:27:49.967-07:002015-10-17T19:27:49.967-07:00Many thanks, Duncan and Sandra.
Duncan, thanks fo...Many thanks, Duncan and Sandra.<br /><br />Duncan, thanks for the word about the Van Gogh. The image of the bloodied, bewildered Quaker human rights monitor, who had come out from London to attempt to help and participate in and protect the critical olive harvest in nonviolent fashion, and ended up being stoned half to death by those destructive alien life forms -- evidently hatched just up the valley, from the same illegal dwelling complex whence had issued, a few months before, the beaming maniacal burner of the babe -- seemed to call out to the twisted agony of the paint. <br /><br />Curiously, I found those video images of the violation of the harvest in some ways even more troubling than the horrifying images of the soldiers and settlers emptying their weapon clips into frail inert Palestinian children twisting on pavements (after one of three murders of children in Hebron in Friday, this one of a young boy by an armed settler, a video emerged showing soldiers on the scene planting a knife into the shadows beside the body... and shortly after that, military arrived to "detain" the observer who'd shot the video).<br /><br />I mean, it's once again a good thing, for these murderers, that the "world" is, as ever, resolutely looking away.<br /><br />What's hardly news, on the other hand, or I should say also, is the olive tree. <br /><br />Olea europaea has coexisted with human civilization in the Mediterranean Basin as far back as the beginnings of "history" -- its oil considered sacred, its branch variously a symbol of abundance, glory, peace, wisdom, fertility, purity, power. Individual olive trees in the groves around the Mediterranean are known to live hundreds, even, as is claimed in some places, thousands of years. The tree grows wrinkled and gnarly with age. It is as old as history.<br /><br />For me the twilight sadness of the mood cast by Vassilis' poem is reflected in the gnarliness of the ancient olive tree, but this dusk also secures, the familiarity of the landscape and the cultural understanding contained in a few words by a poet who is far too modest in suggesting any day on which he writes a poem might be wasted, for in his poems he never wastes a word. Ageing with grace and dignity, the gnarly elder, in this known precinct, will carry on, guardian of the grove. I don't feel it's a sad poem, but a wise one.<br /><br />I was struck by the cultural distance between the respectful local knowledge shown by this poet of Meligalas in the Peloponnesus and the illegal settlers' violent desecration of the land and landscape and cultural and agricultural production of the ancient Mediterranean Basin, as represented by the events this week during the season of the olive harvest in the West Bank, to be observed in the posted video links.<br /><br />No poem exists outside history. It was hard, after seeing olive groves nearing harvest destroyed, and feeling the loss of their destruction, not to see a kind of bad harvesting also in the photo from Aleppo by Baraa Al-Halabi, a great young photographer who records the current tragedy of war in another place where the cultivation of the olive tree goes very far back -- to Persia and Mesopotamia...<br /><br />Baraa Al-Halabi and Vassilis Zambaras are artists from whom I take instruction, in my ancient gnarly decrepitude.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-76025001040396935232015-10-17T03:25:18.822-07:002015-10-17T03:25:18.822-07:00Van Gogh's inflamed paint takes on tragic forc...Van Gogh's inflamed paint takes on tragic force when seen alongside the images and clips. The poem's trees vessels of memory - human, historical. <br /><br />I can't bear the plain thuggishness of it all. Until the settlements are gone there can be no talk of peace.Mose23https://www.blogger.com/profile/01100756913131511440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-72734603098908645132015-10-16T21:21:44.290-07:002015-10-16T21:21:44.290-07:00Settlers set fire to fields and vandalized olive t...<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8jjt_SH4-c&feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">Settlers set fire to fields and vandalized olive trees in the vicinity of soldiers who did not prevent the attack (video): video via B'Tselem, 8 October 2015</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjVXUQw-Z_Y&sns=fb" rel="nofollow">Shocking footage of extremists stoning Pal farmer's car. Farmer & volunteer also attacked, fields arsoned @YeshDin: video via Rabbi 4 Human Rights @rhreng, 14 October 2015</a>TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.com