Army (for my mother) http://www.alansondheim.org/army.jpg (Eyes wide closed) So this photograph was probably taken in the summer of 1960, after graduating highschool and on the way to Brown University in the fall; for the summer, I went to Israel for two months on a tour of sorts, not entirely, I think this is from then, Israel was 12 years old, that's all, formed out of the ashes tending towards mor ashes, more war and paranoia on all sides kibbutzim seemed the way to go and on and on and on, and we went around the country, from Eilat to far north, I think that's when Syria shot at our boat on the Galil but too far away, nothing happened, but that was the story of the day, soommething happened but nothing happened. So there was a lot of military gear on the market, bought this shirt, and I look half like an altar boy and half like an altered boy. So that was that. On the way back I wore an Isareli general's outfit that I bought, but enough of that. Now I look with horror at this image, twisted as well, I seem innocent, certainly would never never have given in to the violence against Palestine today, and that's why this is so twisted for me, what was I thinking but a sense of loose affiliation, what happened though even then and ovder the years, inconceivable! Palestine today I think is Warsaw then, there were German youths coming to Israel, again 12 years after, to try to understand what had happened in the Holcaust; they seemed frightened but determined, tragic, now it is our turn, this emblem of something that today and even then I assume now, so inconceivablye (I keep using that word0 twisted, the tragedy violating every body every belief and yet neti neti not this not that, not here, it's not here, and we can protest and Hsrael is ruled by a horror on top of all the other horrors, this horror with bombs and guns, and I would have thought, inconeivable. The image twists me around, if I had known I would have fld the country never to return (I did return twice), I would have kept going elsewhere. This sounds incredibly superficial, but living it as it were, it wasn't, couldn't have been, is not now. As if our fingers, hands, arms are cut off, we can do nothing, we are there, protest poprest protest write wtrite write and the inuman violence goes on and on, Israel in the charge of a madman, but not one, but others, a whole party of them, more on the West Bank, a human plague of violence, and I can hardly, honestly, look at this photograph at this point, the now of it burned in rubbled, burned in the bombings, an uneasy allegory of Auschwitz and other mass killings, mass graves everywhere in the world. What on earth, literally on earth, this earth, all we have, what are we up to? When will this end? What have all of us done, what do humans do, what do mammals do, what happened to the sun? the moon? the stars? the enormity of the universe's beginning? Gods drowned in the Jordan, I tried to believe then, in that time, that twist, (and the usual question, what is there to day, and what is to be done, and where are we in this world, where are any of us, where? why? when? "And if not now, when?" - ___ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
