-----Original Message-----
From: Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sunday, August 07, 2005 9:27 PM
Subject: Re: Not exactly Hiroshima but about unhealed wounds
I'd be a lot happier with the use of _Shoah_ if _al-nakba_ were used as
freely in the appropriate context.
For all I know, Dominic, you may; so that is not directed at you. The usage
is there and people use it. I prefer not to
For myself, for what it's worth, I try to use something clumsy and not
necessarily quite what I said before like German death camps or world war 2
death camps. I want the word death there though that leaves out a lot too. I
want recognition of that enforced death left open to all the races who died.
I am uneasy with the appropriation that sometimes obtains.
I'm with you on
>not only a sense of personal
littleness and irrelevance, although goodness knows that would be
enough, but also a feeling that something quite different is called
for.
though I often feel that something quite different is called for, in all
sorts of circumstances, as if there's a lot of space one could go into if we
could just see the way; & I have in a poem an image of a pin man on a page
imagining a room in which that page is turned trying to see out into the
room
there seems almost a mixing of categories in writing about something of the
order of Hiroshima, quite apart from one's own little and irrelevance, but
that one comes to face not so much what is unimaginable as what one would
not wish to admit one could imagine - my awareness that I too could have
dropped that bomb - and a wish and hope that there is something alien in the
perpetrators. Which there is not.
The potential is there. The consensus and federation of different elements
from which we form _I_ can become the destroyer. Though we change or have
the capacity for change, it is usually much less than the original wide
potential, as we lose the capacity to make many sounds not found in the
languages we end up speaking, find it harder to learn new languages, find it
harder to learn anything, and eventually end up not changing, not saying
anything new, only plagiarising our repertoire of stories.
But if anyone might grow into a murderer in a particular sense of
circumstances, then we are all to some extent potential murderers
And I am not saying it is all nurture. There is choice. Nature, however, is
more malleable and corruptible than is sometimes allowed
And yet I feel that something quite other than nature / nurture is called
for
Your saying _something quite different_ sparks a recognition in me that I
often feel that anyway
something is happening here and i dont know what it is
it's so much easier to say what it is not and to say what is not needed
L
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