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
Atrocities. http://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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