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Friday, January 3, 2014

Stones themselves "cry out"...

Drums
   “The King is working in the garden.”   “The very stones will cry out.”
...”beyond...to Karagatch...”  --Hagemann...Time-and-History in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time
I heard the drums coming down the street.
There cornadas--inert in dark sand-- deplete
burlap rings--awaiting coups de grace at
grungy walls as colored waifs collapse and fall
in the midst of a gritty, thorny and stormy thrall.

Under the bridge the Greek Maritza flooded red
for miles even in high rains degrading, they said,
the slain, the tortured, the lame and the Christian.
Turkish cowpunchers reveled in their droning drive,
freakishly commanding that none remain alive.

Black-horsed, mulish and rabid as dogs snapping
at running heels, ragged cavalry rode high slapping
at faceless rags on carts pulled by bullocks and cows.
On the horizon tall, thin towers wailed their howls
rejoicing in such red grapes filling wrathful chalices.   1/2/14
‘Twas the 23rd of June
                       …”The dead are invisible, they are not absent.” ~St. Augustine       
 Ethnic Cleansing
                       "When the great terror came/I fell dumb."   ~Nellie Sachs
        …más o menos sanos, más o menos enfermos…
“Batak is situated about thirty miles south of Tatar Bazardjik as the crow flies, high up in a spur of the Balkans that here sweeps around to the south from the main range… Mr. Disraeli was right when he wittily remarked that the Turks usually terminated their connection with people who fell into their hands in a more expeditious manner than by imprisoning them. And so they do. Mr. Disraeli was right. At the time he made that very witty remark, those young girls had been lying there many days…
..lying about were all women's apparel. These, then, were all women and girls. From my saddle I counted about a hundred skulls, not including those that were hidden beneath the others in the ghastly heap nor those that were scattered far and wide through the fields. The skulls were nearly all separated from the rest of the bones - the skeletons were nearly all headless. These women had all been beheaded. We descended into the town. Within the shattered walls of the first house we came to was a woman sitting upon a heap of rubbish rocking herself to and fro, wailing a kind of monotonous chant, half sung, half sobbed, that was not without a wild discordant melody. In her lap she held a babe, and another child sat beside her patiently and silently, and looked at us as we passed with wondering eyes.
Of all the cruel, brutal, ferocious things the Turks ever did, the massacre of Batak is among the worst! Of all the mad, foolish things they ever did, leaving these bodies to lie here rotting for three months un-buried is probably the maddest and most foolish! But this village was in an isolated, out-of-the way place, difficult of access, and they never thought Europeans would go poking their noses here, so they cynically said, “These Christians are not even worth burial, let the dogs eat them.”  ~J. A. MacGahan(1876), Bulgarian Horrors—a report- The Bulgarian Atrocitieshttp://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/related/macgahan.php
‘Twas the 23rd of June—from Tatar Bazardjik—dull peal,
Thunderous roars, rolling whispers—moaning awful seal;
Mountainous shreddings in Herzegovina-Bosnia tossed
Behind sheets of a burning village school—all lost—

Lambs bleating in ravaging packs of wolves-in-raging,
Scrupulous dark purveyors chained corroboration waging
Monstrous atrocities—unworthy of any human generis.
Mocked humane respects drowned before blackest abyss.

Globe-ality testified freely before all—‘distinguished’ kind;
Inherent neglect of a witnessed stand of  times’ walled blind.
Circling Greeks, Germans, Americans-isolated-occupied in work
Turned in whirling disgusts but awry,a-skirt away from the Turk.

MacGahan primed in courage persevered in time’s mission
Of redeeming silence before tyrannical atrocities’ inquisition.
Degraded ‘tyrades’ devouring of innocents—unholy offense—
Philippopolis—still witnesses—‘supped full of horrors’—tense. 12/1/12
Still, I feel better: now everything is public, exposed, and this is preferable to being the silent victim of concealed forces.
The ancestor syndrome: transgenerational psychotherapy and the hidden links ...
 By Anne Ancelin Schützenberger
   It is as though somewhere, one did not have the right to know and to speak about it; and at the same time, as if one did not have the right to forget, and all that had had to be know, but not said explicity, nor known that it was known and passed on: a doubly binding devilishly constraining double bind, a double Gordian knot.
    Again, we can identify a characteristic of the secret.  The Fr. psychoanalyst Guy Ausloos1 noted, as we have, that  ‘it is forbidden to know and forbidden not to know.’
…Every system depends on its ecosystem….family context and frame of reference…in the past and in the present….it is surpising to note these repetitions generation upon generation…As Lacan says…on Fechner about The Interpretation of Dreams, “Ca parle sur l’autre scene,”2  but pulling the red thread brings us further backstage.
        Conrad writes in Typhoon, “It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable goals and in undreamt-of directions.” As if an extraordinary force drove us to our destiny.”

"Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites," Judith Herman writes, "for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual[s]."

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