AM NEW, from fire having awoken

FREEDOM FROM ALPHABET CITY

DELETED
D

P/K/M_2

and you saw the fires falling
the sky crawl
walls whispering to shadows
helicopters and monitors
the names of heroes with unmarked tags
and you waited (by the window)
and you looked (thru their eyes)
and you stood, silent (speaking but not believing)

you let it pass
and now it passed you

now
you are distance
and this distance is your demise

P/K/M_1

and they sit in their rooms, empty
or worse, full of memories
what do they listen to now, except for the echoes of their feet on cement and their hands on skin
they are now only touched by isolation

X

NO MORE QUESTIONS,
JUST MARKS

?

Poetika Zaglavii

a poetics of titles

Silence is Violence

dedicated to illusion

just 5 seconds

Well look out

Well I’m sick
I’m so sick
Of a lot of people
Tryin’ to tell me
What I can and can’t do
With my life

And I’m tired
I’m so tired
Don’t want you and me
To enjoy ourselves


But hold on a second
I smell burning
And I see a change
Comin’ ‘round the bend
And I suggest to you
That it takes
Just five seconds
Just five seconds
Of decision
To realise
That the time
Is right
To start thinkin’ about
A little…
Evolution!

found film_1

dream photography/exploration of sleep

NI pardon, NI talion

NEITHER FORGIVENESS NOR RETRIBUTION

the forgetting of remembering

Most of the great men we were brought up to worship were nothing more than cynical or sly murderers. History as taught in schools and peddled by an overflowing and hagiographic literature is a model of falsehood; to borrow a fashionable term, it is negationist. It might not deny the reality of gas chambers, it might no longer erect monuments to the glory of Stalin, Mao or Hitler, but it persists in celebrating the brutish conqueror: Alexander, called the Great—whose mentor was Aristotle, it is proudly intoned—Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, the throngs of generals, slaughterers of peoples, petty tyrants of the city or the state, torturer–judges, Javerts of every ilk, conniving diplomats, rapists and killers contracted by religions and ideologies; so much high renown carved from baseness, wickedness, and abjection. I am not suggesting we should unpave the avenues of official history and pave the side alleys instead. We are not in need of a purged history, but of a knowledge that scoops out into broad daylight facts that have been obscured, generation after generation, by the unceasing stratification of prejudice. I am not calling for a tribunal of the mind to begin condemning a bunch of undesirables who have been bizarrely put up on pedestals and celebrated in the motley pantheons of official memory. I just want to see the list of their crimes, the mention of their victims, the recollection of those who confronted them added to the inventory of their unsavory eulogies. I am not suggesting that the name of Francisco Ferrer wipe out that of his murderer, Alfonso XIII, but that at the very least everything be known of both. How dare textbooks still cultivate any respect for Bonaparte, responsible for the death of millions, for Louis XIV, slaughterer of peasants and persecutor of Protestants and freethinkers? For Calvin, murderer of Jacques Gruet and Michel Servet and dictator of Geneva, whose citizens, in tribute to Sébastien Castellion, would one day resolve to destroy the emblems and signs of such an unworthy worship? While Spain has now toppled the effigies of Francoism and rescinded the street names imposed by fascism, we somehow tolerate, towering in the sky of Paris, that Sacré-Coeur whose execrable architecture glorifies the crushing of the Commune. In Belgium there are still avenues and monuments honoring King Leopold II, one of the most cynical criminals of the nineteenth century, whose “red rubber” policy—denounced by Mark Twain, by Roger Casement (who paid for this with his life), by Edward Dene Morel, and more recently by Adam Hochschild—has so far bothered nary a conscience. This is a not a call to blow up his statues or to chisel away the inscriptions that celebrate him. This is a call to Belgian and Congolese citizens to cleanse and disinfect public places of this stain, the stain of one of the worst sponsors of colonial savagery. Paradoxically, I do tend to believe that forgetting can be productive, when it comes to the perpetrators of inhumanity. A forgetting that does not eradicate remembering, that does not blue-pencil memory, that is not an enforceable judgment, but that proceeds rather from a spontaneous feeling of revulsion, like a last-minute pivot to avoid dog droppings on the sidewalk. Once they have been exposed for their inhumanity, I wish for the instigators of past brutalities to be buried in the shroud of their wrongs. Let the memory of the crime obliterate the memory of the criminal.