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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Time: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow?  
Have been thinking again — dangerous, that — Chris and I were together some 6 years (after knowing each other about a year); he's been dead a bit more than 6 years now. (I'll be coming up to being 'widowed' longer than knowing him pretty soon.) He's been one of the most important things in much of my life for coming up to 13 years. It seems a long time, getting close to a quarter of my life.

And it's a quarterday — six months to Christmas is St John's Day, the traditional midsummer celebrations in Europe. Here we're just past the shortest day/longest night, heading into the depths of cold, but looking forward to light gradually incrementing.

Labels: feelings, memory, mourning, thoughts, time

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

 
For International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day 2008  
A link to its netplace, and a posting on this journal of the text of a eulogy for my late better half.
Eulogy

Thank you all -- or ‘grazie’ as Chris would say -- for gathering here today to remember Christopher's life, appreciate his achievements & mourn his loss.

We usually hear here that no man is an island, but for Chris I'd rather draw out a much older metaphor & its current reflections. There are old stories indeed of the spirits who governed human fates, spinning each life thread, interweaving it with others & finally cutting it off. “The rich tapestry of life”, “the web of life”, “it takes all kinds”, are all cliches now, but they expressed a deep & ancient truth sustaining all life & human society. In these unpoetic times perhaps the word would be “biodiversity”.

These all say that we shouldn't be seduced by the big bright eye-catching distractions -- the gorgeously coloured & figured cloth gets its strength from the hidden warp & is held together by finer inconspicuous weft threads. The grandest forest tree or flaunting flower meadow; carolling fine-plumed birds on sunlit branches; the furry cute or sleeker beasts, could not exist, would not continue, without the soil fungus & creepy-crawlies, the lowly groundcovers & understorey shrubs, the buzzing bothering insects & more modest animals.
It's obvious that glittering, fluttering, spotlit celebrities & rampant executive officers depend absolutely on their circling hierarchy of underlings. It takes longer to appreciate not just the necessary interdependence* of the underpinnings of civilization's edifice but how each is supported** by a net of barely-thought-of functions.

From his law & engineering training, from long practice with computer networks, and many, many bush & sailing experiences, Chris had a feel for the great dance of balances that creates an apparently-serene equilibrium. He contributed through his work in Canberra, at Prospect County Council/Integral Energy & the NSW Fire Brigades, outside work in GROW & through his letters, talkback & online forums, his quiet charities & personal generosities towards those grand human endeavours: to give merited respect to all the kinds & conditions of people so us humans can at least rub along together; likewise, to show respect for the non-human biosphere so we can have long-term mutual survival in Australia & beyond.

But now the shears have closed, his thread snapped; our tapestry from now weaker by the pinch of starstuff that's in a man; the sea which refuses no river has accepted it back.

So now a farewell from another second-millennium man, one who wrote plays that like life itself defy categorization, who knew man & nature, encompassing many:

Fear no more the heat o' th' sun
Nor the furious winter's rages
Thou thy worldly task hast done
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust

Thank you again.

*Example: Fire Department depends on good roads, reliable water, other suppliers, etc.
**Example: Firefighters supported by maintenance, communications, pay-roll, etc.

April 12, 2002

Labels: memorials, memory, mourning, technopeasant

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 10:32 pm

 
Failure and Persistence of Memory  
[NB: If I could make Blogger's "expandable posts" work like LJ-cuts, I'd tuck this & other long posts away. Any advice?]
Looking for something about the Gray Order of anti-Nazi liberal Catholics ..., mentioned in the Making Light thread 'Winning Hearts and Minds' (September 27, 2005, 12:19 AM:) by bellatrys

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A few weeks? months? back [see below] I posted the link on my blog to an "On This Day" from the BBC (a feature where they post what was on their broadcasts 10, 20, 50 years ago) - a lengthy diatribe against the genocidal actions of the Nazis against the Jews, by a British cabinet official, from 1942 or 43. So those who say that the Allies didn't know, or couldn't have known, are just wrong. The truth *was* out there. And around the same time I posted a lot of the leaflets of the White Rose, with background information on the membership, and how they found out about the atrocities in Poland and Russia - some of these kids were in the German Army, remember, and working as medics because that was the closest they could get to CO status - some of the guys saw things themselves, and came home on leave, or heard about them from buddies who *committed* them. They were *adamant* in their reproaches, directed towards their fellow German citizens, that only those who chose not to know as hard as they could, who made the mental choice to disregard the testimony of atrocity as "unreliable" compared to the assurances of their government that they were behaving honorably towards the Poles and Russians, who were themselves barbarians - only willful ignorance among adults was possible. (Remember that many of them were teens, had been resisting since they were *young* teens some of them, and none of them very old at all, except for the professor they recruited eventually.)

... The only hard stuff was tracking down about the Gray Order, the extinct liberal Catholic youth group, which has been almost totally memoryholed and required a lot of translating of German source matter.

In short, "none so deaf as will not hear, none so blind as will not see." As ever. Why? Because knowledge requires change of belief; change of belief requires action, or change of action, or cessation of action.

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who refers to an earlier entry, which I'm excerpting here.

5th subhead of You just can't get away from it, it's like the humidity (July 26th, 2005)

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Collective Failures of Memory, Part I
The "mythtery" that is commonly taught and accepted, which is not even part of the "history is written by the victors" problem but the unacknowledged "apparently, history is written by the same people who come up with urban legends" problem, is all around us. How often have you "learned" that "they" thought the earth was flat in the middle ages, and Columbus challenged Church and State to prove his radical new idea that the world is round, after all? 100% false, apparently first concoted by Washington Irving of Headless Horseman fame, to spice up a children's textbook that he was writing over a hundred years ago. Easily debunkable, too. But who cares about textual provenance and first hand sources?

Now, here's another one you've probably all heard: nobody knew about the genocides during WWII, until after the death camps were taken by Allied troops. Recited as dogma, over and over again. Who of those who recite it has ever gone and looked at old newspapers or other contemporary records? Obviously, none. That people in Germany didn't know, couldn't have known (unless of course they were a) being rounded up, b) doing the rounding) is also frequently recited, and yet as I showed by finding the text of the White Rose's press releases not long ago, this was false.

Equally, so was the rest of it. People may have chosen not to believe it back then, the way people in America are choosing to believe that no real torture has been committed by us upon our prisoners - but the truth was out there.

BBC "On this day" - December 17, 1942
The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, has told the House of Commons about mass executions of Jews by Germans in occupied Europe…

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You just can't get away from it, it's like the humidity - Collective Failures of Memory, Part I
08:54 pm July 26th, 2005
http://bellatrys.livejournal.com/137966.html

BBC "On this day" - December 17, 1942
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/17/newsid_3547000/3547151.stm
1942: Britain condemns massacre of Jews
The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, has told the House of Commons about mass executions of Jews by Germans in occupied Europe... Four days ago, synagogues all over Britain held a day of mourning as a mark of concern for the massacre of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe …

Labels: BBC, history, memory

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 10:06 pm

 
Urbicide & thoughts on destructiveness  
While checking for a source for Slavenka Drakulic's beautiful/tragic/thoughtful piece* about the destruction of the Bridge over the Neretva River at Mostar, originally in The Observer in 1997(?)
(quoted at users.tyenet.com/kozlich/workshop.htm), I found this interview, entitled The Normalcy of War Criminals [I presume they mean 'Normality']
www.motherjones.com/ web_exclusives/ features/ news/ drakulic_qa.html
It deals with subjects my friends & I have been considering.
(I remember Clive James writing in one of his essays that he feared if he had been a German in the 1930s & 1940s, that he may have ended up being a camp guard. We nearly all have the capacity for extraordinary things, both good & bad.)

Meanwhile, another place to find some interesting discussions (apart from my favourite, Margot Kingston's Webdiary [NEW SITE webdiary.smh.com.au]) on the Sydney Morning Herald site) [UPDATE: now www.webdiary.com.au]
is on the United Kingdom's "The Independent" newspaper site:
argument.independent.co.uk
which includes one of the people who know the Middle Eastern situation, Robert Fisk, e.g. his piece on the first Anniversary of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA at One year on: A view from the Middle East - part of their general coverage of that anniversary, which is at Reflections on September 11.
Oddly, he doesn't seem to appear in their list of regular columnists or commentators, tho' if you use their "Search this site" box with his name, he obviously writes fairly regularly for them.

* A bunch of possible links:
www.un.org/ Pubs/ chronicle/ 2004/ issue3/ 0304p77.asp
www.haverford.edu/relg/ sells/ mostar/ mostar.html
A list of references to the story of the Mostar bridge
www.geocities.com/ Heartland/ 1935/ bridge.html
www.archaeology.org/ 9801/ abstracts/ bosnia.html
Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence (urbicide)
www.theage.com.au/news/ arts/ barbarians-through-the-gate/ 2006/ 03/ 23/ 1143083899330.html

Labels: history, memory, mourning, politics

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:38 pm