Trump was here, speaking in our living room. I managed to drown him out by shutting the door and playing loud music.
Grateful to the man for pissing on the fire before the Strip had been burned to a cinder and his weapons had killed every living soul, including the hostages. Still, it would have been nicer if this had happened a trifle sooner.
It seems to me that the number one question of the hour , in modern societies, is how to adopt a sane response when we are surrounded by madness?
Here, it’s visceral and tribal; and generally unhinged. You can sense this if you detach yourself sufficiently to be aware of how people are thinking, without being swept up in popular emotion – though if you detach yourself too much, of course, you are not aware at all. Right now there seems to be a kind of euphoria. Like my daughter saw people dancing in the streets. And the news programs, which I hear in the background when I am not shutting my door or wearing earpods, try to commodify a channel the emotions. I hear statements like, “One thing’s for sure, without the amazing performance of the army, we would not be where we are now.”
Tribal manifestations of emotion are dangerous; these directly result in phenomena like a genocide. But they are widespread among human groups, and seem difficult to escape.
And then there are situations like in the U.S., where you have two polarised sub-groups, almost hermetically sealed in, so that neither of the sides is able to hear the other.
Smart people like Thich Nhat Hanh (the Buddhist monk and peace activist, who tried not to take sides during the Vietnam war) would make statements like “you can’t have a Left, without the existence of a Right”, and whenever he thought someone was wrong about something, he would begin, “What you say is partly true…” Because truth is always relative, and whatever we say is never 100% valid, or utterly mistaken.
But, it is truly hard, in a society that is exhibiting symptoms of group psychosis, to adopt measured, sane positions. A part of you wants to scream. Though if you do, no one will hear you anyway, so it’s pointless.
An Israeli friend of mine tries to adopt a position of empathy towards all people. She is fluent in Arabic (and of course Hebew) and tries to be helpful and respectful towards everyone. She says she is not a political dissident. “If you want to genocide people, go ahead. I will not be part of it.” That’s the kind of statement she will make. Of course, she’s a bit mad too, with her own hang-ups; deeply insecure and fearful, overly assertive about her own “truths” – it’s hard to tolerate her for too long.
And in Europe I myself did not find the right measure of reaction or speaking out when confronted by the complacency of others towards the genocide happening here. My voice sounded too strident, even to me. If I had been among pro-Palestinian activists, it would have been even harder, because there are extreme levels of emotion and blindness among them too.
Started to listen to Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self (audio book), by Alexander Douglas.
(Reviews: [Scottsman](https://www.scotsman.com/news/book-review-against-identity-by-alexander-douglas-5210001) , [Our Daily Read](https://www.scotsman.com/news/book-review-against-identity-by-alexander-douglas-5210001), [The Critic](https://thecritic.co.uk/trapped-in-an-identity-crisis/) )
It bases itself on the ideas of three disparate philosophers, Chuang Tsu (fifth century BCE), Benedict Spinoza (17th century, Netherlands) and René Girard (20th century).
From Steven Poole’s review:
Philosopher Alexander Douglas’s deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity. An alt-right rabble rouser who denounces identity politics is just as wedded to his identity as a leftwing “activist” is wedded to theirs. And this, Douglas argues persuasively, explains the polarised viciousness of much present argument. People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked. The response is visceral and emotional. That’s why factchecking conspiracy theories doesn’t work. And it’s not just a social media problem; it’s far worse than that. “If you define yourself by your ethnicity or your taste in music,” Douglas argues, “then you ipso facto demarcate yourself against others who do not share in that identity. Here we have the basis for division and in
I have never studied the history of photography and am ignorant of what contemporary photographers may be saying, but reading the Wikipedia article on Pictorialism gave me some ideas.
From Wikipedia:
Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of creating an image rather than simply recording it.
There are good examples in the article itself and a Tumblr blog Ode to Pictorialism with many more.
From the 19th century till today, cameras have continued to improve and become more ubiquitous, until now they are literally in everybody’s hands all the time, while the snapping and sharing of photos has become, instantaneous, cost-free and constant. What distinguishes an image isn’t pixel-perfect fidelity, but artistic qualities.
In addition, our era is characterized by such a surfeit of visual data, measured in dozens of megapixels, that our brains struggle to find the salient points among the mass of detail. We seek respite and a dumbing-down of detail, which no doubt partly explains the popularity of manga, anima, and cinematic techniques like rotoscope. As well, of course as the bokeh and portrait modes on our camera-phones and software techniques that seek to emulate these.
The pictorialists excelled at getting rid of surplus detail, using often the bare minimum necessary to create a mood or an atmosphere. This wasn’t merely a consequence of exploiting some qualities of earlier cameras or film, but their use of deliberate darkroom techniques.
I am wondering how to apply these ideas with the equipment I have. The problem seems to be how, at the same time, to reduce the excess detail and to create a pleasing aesthetic effect.
We desperately hope that these are now the last days of the unrestrained genocidal rampage that has continued unabated for two years. Some level of violence will certainly continue, because the only thing that has really changed is that Israel has become more brazen after witnessing the world’s indifference to its acts. There is no new psychological shift towards peace. Vis-à-vis the Palestinians, there is probably even greater surety that “if we did what we did to them, they will surely want to treat us the same, if we give them half a chance”. That’s how the cycle works.
As for the rest of the world, I don’t know how long it will take, if this thing winds down, for people’s attention to move away, and for amnesia to set in. We tend to forget about crimes in which we, or our own identity groups, are complicit. It is more convenient.
On my morning walk, the first shower of the season. Found shelter at the bakery.
Amused myself with some digital darkroom work on recent photos, usually converting them to monocrhrome and cropping a little. The resulting images aren’t necessarily better; just different.
Someone a little smarter than me should write about the different kinds of lies we are told. I see a kind of spectrum from Putin’s categorical “deny everything” strategy, which is a kind of admission of guilt; to Israel’s insistence of stringent abidance by international legal standards (statements like “Israel is and will remain a state governed by the rule of law, committed to upholding…” bla bla bla) which nobody believes any more; to Trump’s wild proclamations, which he knows his supporters will love but everyone else will pull out their hair; to keeping up the appearance of good governance, backed by a set of questionable facts – maybe cases like the Starmer government?, to lies based on the pretence that while you know your decisions are awful, you really have no choice, because the alternatives would be even worse – who? – maybe Macron?
Tonight in the village, two people, Neriya and Maisoon gathered some people from the community – those who were willing to venture out of their houses on a Saturday night – for a meeting of testimony from Gaza. We may have been about 20 people, including a couple of guests from outside the village.
Interestingly, one of the testimonies chosen was from a Gazan living abroad, who had lost relatives in Gaza, while another was from a Palestinian living in Israel. A third was a kind of “will” left by a Gazan mother to her son.
A common thread running through these “testimonies” was the question of preservation of memories. Gaza has mostly been flattened. Newspapers carry aerial photos of vast expanses of rubble, or of starving people living in tents (and someone pointed out that not every surviving family enjoys even the luxury of living in a tent).
What is missing from the pictures are the lifetimes of relative normalcy that people had lived up to the point that their homes – whether makeshift shanties or apartments in multi-storey blocks – had been destroyed and they had become destitute.
Like the rest of us, they had in their homes photos, memorabilia and artifacts that had recorded their lives and the memory of parents and grand parents. All of these were lost under the rubble.
There are people in our village who, since we were evacuated due to the danger of a forest fire in 2017, have kept a suitcase with their most valued possessions, naturally including photo albums, ready by the door, just in case a similar event would happen in the future and their house would burn down.
The likelihood of your home being arbitrarily bombed from the sky introduces a more existential reality. Its a situation where you feel lucky to escape with your life and the lives of some of your children.
One of the stories told about a woman who saw her son crushed like a fragile biscuit under a mass of concrete. She uttered a single cry, gathered her remaining two children with an iron grip and fled the building. No one else in the building stopped to cry or to mourn – they similarly ran.
Only outsiders have the luxury of crying or mourning. Someone among the listeners said that this felt almost like a guilty privilege. It was the friend of my daughter who lives in Berlin, an artist who decided a number of years ago that she could no longer live in this country. Here on a visit, she spoke of an experience on a train in Tel Aviv, when she happened to mention to a fellow passenger her sadness about the starving children in Gaza. Within minutes she found herself accosted and shouted at, surrounded by five men yelling at her, almost ejecting her from the train.
What the persons giving the testimonies were trying to communicate is that Gaza is more than destroyed buildings and wrecked lives. With sufficient money from the rich states in the Gulf, the entire strip could be rebuilt in a few months or years, and the survivors could be rehabilitated.
What has been lost is something more fragile and delicate, perhaps even more so than life itself. It is now preserved only in memories of sights, sounds, cooking smells, warm embraces of the departed. A whole world suddenly made insubstantial and dreamlike.
In a similar meeting we had a few months ago, one of our residents who had lost fifty of her family members in Gaza recalled happy summers spent playing with her cousins on sunny streets and on the beaches. All of that is now gone, and will never return.
Even if, due to whatever biases or prejudices have wormed their way into our brains, we feel little empathy or interest in Gazans themselves, we can look upon what has happened as a reminder of our own fragility. One of the Jewish Israeli women among the listeners said: “It isn’t just Gaza. I feel like the earth is burning under my feet.”
Human life is always tentative, and though it may sometimes seem solid, is ever fragile. This friend of my daughter, after all, lives in Berlin today, once the seat of the third Reich – a city that is today filling with Israeli emigrés. Her partner is working in a Jewish museum to preserve the memory of that earlier vanquished Jewish community of Germany.
So what are the chances of preserving our fragile memories? That was really the question I wanted to consider. Photo albums and diaries may be lost to the flames. Some Gazans hope, perhaps foolishly, that memories of Gaza will be preserved in the social media posts they are able to send out. But sometimes, the internet seems even more fragile than the old physical media we leave behind us.
The final piece of testimony was the “will” left by a Gazan mother to her son. At our evening, it was touchingly read first in Arabic by a young girl whose family had recently come to live here – she was the only child present.
In the will, the mother appeals to her son to remember her after her death, and to name his own daughter after her.
The Hebrew translation was read by a Jewish woman who visibly fought back the tears.
Names do indeed preserve memories. Many of those present at the meeting, after all, preserved in their names characters that all of us know from scriptures and legends of the past. Thanks to the care of Biblical scribes we attach singular importance to a few insignificant tribes of this land while the record of much greater contemporary civilizations have been completely forgotten or erased from the history books.
If we really want to preserve the memory of our life and times, the best way may be the least “factual” of all. It isn’t newspaper reports that will be remembered, nor even photographic evidence. It is art. We’d better make art. The Lascaux cave paintings, the Bible, the Mahabharata, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Bayeux tapestry, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the songs of bards and minstrels that throughout history have preserved the larger than life figures that inspire children today. Only art can capture the images, the sounds, the smells and tactile memory of loved ones and, through its alchemy, transform these into the symbolic values required by our imagination and consciousness.
