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AUSCHWITZ IN A TIN
vasarely’s blue did offer a momentary serenity of vision - that clear blue line of the quest but here’s my dilemma: the soul craves landscape.
the resistance of snow against skis, the bite of the wind, the glare of the sun, the smell of ice and blinking-white sandwiched between sea and sky. it requires film rather than photo, it requires transitory, changing, the threat of snow, the shadow of cloud, the retreating day, the desolation of nightfall and the blush of dawn. it requires both humanity and recognition of its irrelevance.
and yes, it is coat my eyes with butter and tell me lies about vietnam. But not for all time. a journey by its nature has both a beginning and end. do we have to choose between the universal and the particular? to choose only the universal is immoral when pain and suffering and delight are enmeshed in the particular. but must we reject the universal?
i do not always wish to weep for the penguins, nor admire their struggle. there’s plenty of time for tears and solidarity. i’m seeking the conscious self amidst time and space, set, of course, within an arctic landscape or under a desert sky.
i do not want to see sardines/pilchards in a tin, those tidy corpses of quick silver so efficiently dispatched by industrial capitalism, that inventor of auschwitz.
but tomorrow of course I might change my mind.
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