moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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(and my Wish List)

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May Day plus One  
Mother's Birthday.
Anniversary at work. Went into work after doctor's appointment at lunchtime, where I felt sick and weak and had to lie down. Still didn't feel that good, but plugged on with a bit of trying to set up changed stuff following merger of company. My immediate boss had taken the day off for a long weekend, so I couldn't talk about leave & such. I guess they weren't expecting me — I said I'd try to get in, but couldn't say for sure, and had missed Special Merger Event recently with similar message — so there was no particular celebration for the anniversary.

Decided that sickness & such was probably due to lack of proper food combining badly with chemotherapy drugs, so ate food I'd planned on saving for dinner. Also bought ‘karmically correct’ chicken dinner with roast veggies from Roaming Bird near Coles in Pyrmont. Then friends invited me to their place for dinner, so although I was still shaky, ended up well-nourished and watched good Fellini film called “Intervista”.

Labels: anniversaries, memories, mourning

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 10:55 pm

 
Room 101 ‘The Worst Thing‘  
I've recently read a couple of mentions of one's own personal ‘Room 101' — the worst torture of yourself you can imagine — and how you shouldn't ever reveal it. I've been building up courage to ask or discuss a point about that, which also ties in with earlier points about how torture affects the victim.

What if some of the worst things you were afraid of did happen, but not as torture? Several bouts of different diseases: surgery, drugs, painful & difficult treatments & rehabilitation over a few short years, leaving permanent deformities & ongoing disabilities. Some of the treatment is close to torture, tho' done with all care & good intent.
Overlapping with those, deaths & other very painful family difficulties.
Resulting from these & medical stuff, some large & complex financial problems.

On hearing the diagnosis of my most recent serious disease, I was almost disappointed that it wasn't a probably-terminal recurrence of a previous one. I could have ‘settled my affairs‘ & enjoyed what time I had left. But it was new, and I had to face many months of new pain & struggle.

So far, I've physically survived — less a few important bodily bits — but rather than feeling ‘refined by fire‘ or strengthened, or learning deep spiritual lessons, etc, etc, etc, I feel broken: weak, distractable, fearful, often depressed, less able to do now what I could do before in almost every way. One friend likened it to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Some places I've been on the Internet are more comforting than the ‘inspirational‘ stories I see around in the media, where various people overcome their suffering to run a marathon, or something of that sort, and say that the disease or accident was ‘the best thing that's happened‘ to them because of the good things they've learnt. There I read of people dealing with their problems, or suffering through them, but not usually praising them.

Labels: medical, memories, torture

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 4:21 pm

 
Old Rush  
I've been remembering the classic old Aussie ABC TV Series Rush (imdb) set in the Victorian Goldfields during our gold rush, with the very catchy George Dreyfus theme music (MP3 excerpt) quoting folk tunes, and the incredibly swoonable-at brooding, mysterious Sgt McKellar (next step after Captain Scarlet, see below). You can actually now get DVDs not of the original series – curses — but of a more recent revoiced parody called The Olden Days, by the comedy group D-Generation, part of their The Late Show.

A friend entertained me while I was sick last year by (among other things) showing me episodes from his DVD box set of the UFO series. Not too bad at all. We only saw some of the Gerry Anderson series in Oz. My fave was Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (poster) with its unseen villains — how can you have a schoolgirl crush on a puppet? People are strange.

The gullwing door cars, like the series, distinctly pre-date the 1980s Delorean, e.g. the Mercedes Benz 300L (some here) is from the 1950s.

Labels: cars, memories, music, tv

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 6:29 pm

 
9/11 Returns: Stari Most at Mostar  
I'm wondering if it is simple coincidence that this 1993 outrage against a physical symbol happened over 8th & 9th November (see my other posts on The Other 9/11, Kristallnacht). I can't currently find the excerpt I thought I'd quoted before of this piece. For the record, here is the whole article, from another websource.

From: Andras Riedlmayer <riedlmay@fas.harvard.edu>

[O]n 9 November 1993, the Old Bridge (Stari Most)
in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, was destroyed by artillery of the Croatian
Army (HV) and Bosnian-Croat paramilitary forces (HVO), under the command
of Gen. Slobodan Praljak, a former Croatian Deputy Minister of Defense
dispatched from Zagreb. Eyewitnesses report that the barrel of a tank or
heavy artillery piece was aimed through the window of a ruined house on
the crest of Stotina hill, at the foot of Mount Hum on the west bank of
the Neretva River. A sustained barrage of shells fired on 8-9 November
1993 eventually succeeded in blasting away the stonework supporting
the 436-year-old bridge, which residents had vainly tried to protect
with mattresses and old automobile tyres. The ancient bridge collapsed
into the river, as HVO soldiers celebrated with a fusillade of gunshots.

DESTRUCTION OF OLD BRIDGE SEEN FROM TWO ANGLES: http://sense-agency.com/en/stream.php?sta=3&pid=9676&kat=3

Distruzione del ponte di Mostar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiO_UqAV0Ng, from bottegasarajevo on YouTube

UNESCO has termed the destruction of the Old Bridge an "act of barbarism."
At a June 2002 ceremony marking the laying of the first stone in the
reconstruction of the historic 27-meter soaring arch over the Neretva
River, Italian President Carlo Azeglio Campi was equally blunt, saying,
"The destruction of the bridge was an insult for human culture."

The New Republic
December 13, 1993

FALLING DOWN
A Mostar bridge elegy
By Slavenka Drakulic

    I have three photos of Mostar in front of me. One is a postcard, a sepia-colored photo printed on poor, cardboardlike paper. It is dated September 1953, when my father sent it to us on his first visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the center of the photo is the Old Bridge — all postcards of Mostar have that bridge on them, of course — and a part of the old city. "I think of you as I walk over this beautiful bridge," he wrote to my mother and me in Rijeka, Croatia. I can imagine him walking there on a warm autumn day. Coming to the middle, to the place where young boys used to jump into the river to prove their courage, he must have leaned over the stone railing and looked into the Neretva below, quick and silent as a snake. He must have stopped there, overwhelmed by the elegance of the stone construction. When his hands touched the bridge, he must have felt its smoothness and warmth, as if he had touched skin instead of stone. It was as if the bridge had a life of its own, a soul given to it by the people who had crossed it in its almost 400 years of existence. It was erected in 1566 during the Turkish Empire and, the story goes, the stones were stuck together with mortar that had been mixed with the whites of eggs.
Serbs and Turks, Croats and Jews, Greeks and Albanians, Austrians and Hungarians, Catholics, Orthodox, Bogumils and Muslims — all had stopped at the same spot, rested on the same stone. I was 4 when he wrote that postcard, and I know that he was certain that one day I would see and
touch the Mostar bridge, too.

    My father was wrong. I did not make it. I foolishly thought the bridge would be there forever. So, I never went to Mostar, never walked from one bank of the river to the other. The bridge that saw so many wars, survived so many years, no longer exists. It collapsed in a second on November 9. All I have to remember it by are these three photos: before, during and after. And I wonder what my father, dead for years now, would have said if he had seen this other photo, the last before the bridge was destroyed. Would he recognize it, ragged and pitiful as an old beggar, with a makeshift wooden roof, black automobile tires and sandbags piled in a futile effort to protect it from the occasional shelling that had started with the war?


    When the bridge collapsed, it was Tuesday morning. A pleasant, sunny day, much like the one when my father visited Mostar. The town is only about seventy miles from the Adriatic sea, so winter comes rather late. The bridge had been shelled since Monday afternoon. People who saw it say its collapse did not last long: at 10:30 a.m. the bridge just fell. As I look at the second picture, I try to imagine the sound of the Old Bridge falling down. A bridge like that doesn't just disappear; its collapse must have sounded like a swift, powerful earthquake, the kind that people in Mostar have never heard before. Or maybe it sounded like an old tree splitting in two — a hollow crack followed by a long silence. Whatever the sound, the river swallowed it in a single morsel. A while later, it was as if the bridge had never existed.


    The third photo of Mostar is one I cut out of a newspaper and carry around with me. It is in color and, paradoxically, the most beautiful of the three that I have. The sun shines over the rooftops of the old city, painting the stone houses white. The slightly swollen river, a rich, deep green, rubs along its banks like a lazy, satiated animal. Absent from this beauty, however, is the bridge. There's the beginning of its long stone arch, but if that portion were only ten feet shorter, there would be no trace of the structure at all. Only the sheer logic of the place, a feeling that a bridge belongs there, over the river, between two halves of a medieval town, tells us that something is missing. It's
been a little more than two weeks, and I'm still surprised when I look at the photo. When I remember what is no longer there, I feel a spasm in my stomach, a knot in my throat. I feel death lurking in its absence.


    I've heard that people in Mostar, even adults, cried when they saw that the bridge had fallen. I believe the reports, for I have seen people who are not from Mostar cry as well. An elderly journalist. A lawyer. A singer, who wept for the first time since the war started. Not so long ago the newspapers published photos of a massacre in the Bosnian Muslim village of Stupni Do. One picture showed a middle-aged woman with a long, dark knife-cut along her throat. I don't remember anyone crying over that photo or others like it. And I ask myself: Why do I feel more pain looking at the image of the destroyed bridge than the image of the woman? Perhaps it is because I see my own mortality in the collapse of the bridge, not in the death of the woman. We expect people to die. We count on our own lives to end. The destruction of a monument to civilization is something else. The bridge, in all its beauty and grace, was built to outlive us; it was an attempt to grasp eternity. Because it was the product of both individual creativity and collective experience, it
transcended our individual destiny. A dead woman is one of us — but the bridge is all of us, forever.


    The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina is well into its second year now. You would think that nothing new could happen, that, after the concentration camps and the mass rapes, the ethnic cleansing and the slow, cold death of Sarajevo, there would be no room left for imagination. But this war seems to have neither rules nor limits. Just when you think nothing could possibly surprise, something happens — even more violent, more painful, more surprising than before.

    Finally — who did it? The Muslims are accusing the Croats, the Croats are accusing the Muslims. But does it even matter? For four centuries people needed that bridge and admired its beauty. The question is not who shelled and demolished it. The question is not even why someone did it — destruction is part of human nature. The question is: What kind of people do not need that bridge? The only answer I can come up with is this: people who do not believe in the future — theirs or their children's — do not need such a bridge. For me, this is the chilling measure of the photo of Mostar without its Old Bridge. This is why I would say that those people — whoever they might be — do not belong to this civilization, civilization built on the idea of time, civilization built on the idea of a future. Even if they rebuild the Mostar bridge and reconstruct it meticulously, they are barbarians.


    Holding the old postcard in my hand, I regret that I have not been there. My father is dead. The sepia color is washed out; the existing postcards of Mostar with the Old Bridge in the middle will probably disappear, too. My daughter will only remember a story about a beautiful stone bridge that, once upon a time, existed in a far away country shattered by a long, long war. And I myself have no memory of my own of the bridge now, when I need it the most.




Slavenka Drakulic is the author of The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (W.W. Norton).

PHOTOS of Mostar's Old Bridge (Stari Most) before the 1992-95 war,
and of its reconstruction in 2000-2004. (Click small thumbnails to reach the large-size images)

Stari Most, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina: www.archnet.org/ library/ images/ thumbnails.jsp?location_id=10722

Also see a couple of article extracts at this page: unconqueredbosnia.tripod.com/ Mostar3.html

Labels: buildings, history, memories, mourning, oral history, war

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:33 am

 
Anniversary Exchange  
(from the ABC's Foreign Correspondent guestbook)
Name: steve
Visit Time: 19:49:14 10 Sep, 2002 EST
Remarks September 11 will be a day that I will never forget. As I sat watching from relative in Melbourne I found myself crying and angry at the appaling loss of innocent life. It makes me angry when I read people justifing these attacks because of American foreign policy...

Name: Mezza
Visit Time: ? 10 Sep, 2002 EST
Dear Steve,
it is disappointing, after a whole year of repeating it, that people can't or won't understand. "Justify" is not the same as "explain".
People were asking (11/9/2002): "Why did it happen?"
Then when you say anything other than: "They are evil; they hate us because we are good.", you are accused of supporting them!
This thinking has killed millions over the last couple of thousand years (if not longer), causing untold suffering, destruction & waste as each side proclaims God or History or Righteousness is on their side. I've considered trying to shut all the dogmatic fanatic types of all ideologies/theologies into the world's largest high-security enclosure to let them beat each other to death with rocks while the people who can live together peaceably continue with their lives outside, but it seems impractical, alas.

Subject: Re: Anniversary Exchange
On Wed, 11 Sep 2002 14:41, Alex wrote:
> I liked that response. Very Henri Barbusse.

> The guy was French. In WW1.
> In Flanders. Wrote a book about people drowning (literally) in mud.
> Wrote, EXTREMELY CLEARLY of the average soldiers hatred of the
> politicos that put them there. Wrote that he wanted to see the
> politicos "locked in a cage naked, killing each other with lumps of
> wood." This was a sentiment echoed by Erich Maria Remarque in "All
> Quiet on the Western Front" ... again lumps of wood.
>
> Remarques book is very well known because of the film, and because
> of being burnt by Hitler. Personally, I found Barbusse' book to be better.
>
> Sadly not enough people have read either book, but I found the
> vitriol in your sentiments to be particularly reminiscent of the time.
>
> I personally, would gas the whole f...ing lot of them.

On 11 Sep 2002 at 16:02, MC Pye wrote:
>> Henri Barbusse?
>> Had a quick look up of his details -- he was born 1873, so in his forties
>> during The War To End Wars. Different to many of the young idealists so cruelly disillusioned during WWI.
[Here is a translation of his most famous book, Under Fire (Le Feu). See also a few notes on the group he was involved with after the Great War, Le Clarté, and his contribution personally to the art of World War I, and as an inspiration for others, e.g. the painter Otto Dix]

>> Interesting about lumps of wood. I originally (quite a while back)
>> had image of the hardliners in Palestine/Israel being walled off in
>> a rocky/sandy quarter, where large lumps of wood are rare & rocks in glut.
>> Have since broadened to fundamentalists of all descriptions, whether
>> communist of whichever faction, Hindu, Christian, 'economic
>> rationalist', etc. Whoever puts resulting truly awful human
>> suffering & destruction of natural world lower than some ideal.
>> Some suffering is virtually unavoidable without having a
>> "With Folded Hands") (Jack Williamson story about ultimate 'Nanny State') world.
>> Why in hell make it worse?

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Amongst My First Reactions to sitting, glazed with horror & seeking a path through the pity, foreboding, terror, of the late-night 'adult themed' drama which unfolded across my television screen over the evening & early morning (here in Australia) of September 11th & 12th, 2001

The bitter ghosts of so many ruined cities now have their smoking mirror in the body of the United States. A sunny summer day is split by the hard rain of glass & rubble, a blue sky broken by smoke. How many shattered families [in other cities] will hold up faded photos, bloodied clothes and say "Do you see how it feels"?

Irony: woman interviewed on the New York street is saying 'we won't kill mothers and children' - do you think she's forgotten or she doesn't know?

But vengeance is a poison pleasure, I struggle to abjure it for the comparatively little injuries done to my land, my city, my home - that way starts the slide back down to tooth & claw; the little rolling stones down the scree slope that build into a tidal wave of rock killing & crushing. Justice is just us.

Here in small-hours Sydney the starry sky has clouded and cold rain is glazing the city. Here we are field mice in the grass while hounds attack a giant boar; our futures can be crushed in sideshow 'collateral damage'. Flicking across television — CNN, ABC, BBC, radio reports — is looking at a cracked mirror through a broken window. Heroism has happened today, a glint of gold always in the dirt & blood, a seed of hope like mountain ash that quickens in disasters - but life creates enough [disasters] without help. The maze of shadows deepens and we hope in fear that the kind & strong among us can keep their guiding lights to help us go beyond it, not back.

My friends' theories centre either on one of the USA's own anti-government /anti-corporate groups or a Middle Eastern-based one. Well organised & co-ordinated, striking some key points quickly before alerts can go out, then a follow-up to catch crowds, rescuers, &c. Very media-savvy. The recent assassination of the main Afghanistani anti-Taliban leader is now perhaps making a part of this pattern — he might have been used as a rallying point against whoever is found to be responsible.

Suspect John Hunt/John Howe/Michael Howard/John Howard's visit might end early. Hope he doesn't get ideas - never did find out if that Olympic security Act got its sunset clause despite Ric Birch's personal assurance.

Will try to sleep now, and later work once more on my fossils of human fault & foible, justice struggling to be born.

Labels: anniversaries, history, memories, politics, USA

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 12:25 am