the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
you have poisoned
you will drink
when you come again
and you will come again
the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
you have poisoned
you will drink
« March 2018 | Main | May 2018 »
the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
you have poisoned
you will drink
when you come again
and you will come again
the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
you have poisoned
you will drink
Posted at 02:04 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Israeli construction teams are hard at work as cranes lift and lower building materials on the hilltops, expanding Ariel University - the first settler university established in the occupied West Bank - and the Ariel West industrial zone.
The seemingly untouched hills of olive trees create a picturesque view for the some 65,000 settlers residing in 24 illegal Israeli settlements scattered across the district.
This reality, however, has only been made possible through the relentless expulsion of Palestinians from their lands, as each Israeli development begets Palestinian loss, according to locals.
Most recently, Israel announced plans to construct the first train line for Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, connecting the Ariel settlement - one of Israel's largest settlements with a population close to 19,000 - to cities and towns inside Israel.
The project is expected to be completed by 2025 and cost up to $1.16bn.
"This railway will confiscate more land from us and devastate more families," Abed al-Karim Zubeidi, the mayor of Salfit, told Al Jazeera. "This means more environmental and economic destruction.
"But this is occupation. Israel uses our land to build for its people and we are pushed to the side and left with nothing."
The train line, spearheaded by Israel's Minister of Transportation Israel Katz, will run along Route 5, an Israeli road that cuts across Salfit from the Zaatara (Tapuah) junction - a site of routine tensions among Israeli settlers and Palestinians - and connects the Ariel settlement to Israeli towns beyond the 1967 Green Line.
Jamal al-Ahmad, head of the land confiscation council in Salfit, said residents are expecting about 300 hectares to be confiscated from residents for the construction of the railway.
Locals, meanwhile, are left in the dark regarding whose lands will be targeted.
Like other Israeli development plans in Salfit that have directly affected the lives of Palestinians, residents learned of the planned railway only when it was announced in Israeli newspapers.
"We have never received any official notices from Israel when our lands have been confiscated," Ahmad told Al Jazeera. "We either wake up and find that Israel will no longer allow us to access our lands, or we read about it in Israeli media."
Israel's Ministry of Transportation could not confirm for Al Jazeera to what extent Palestinians in the occupied West Bank would have access to the train line.
However, owing to the fact that Palestinians are not permitted to enter Israeli settlements without special permits, if they are allowed to use the train, their access would likely be severely restricted.
"This railway will further entrench apartheid in Salfit," Ahmad said. "The more Israel develops its settlements, the more our movement and rights are restricted."
![]() |
A view of the electric separation fence in Salfit, which Israeli security forces constantly patrol [Jaclynn Chiodini/Al Jazeera] |
Thousands of hectares of land have been confiscated from Salfit residents over the last several decades owing to the construction of Israeli settlements, industrial zones, roads and the separation wall.
The rolling green hills that serve as serene landscapes for settlers on the hilltops are a source of pain and devastation for Palestinians in the area.
An electric fence, equipped with lines of coiled barbed wire, snakes across the northern and western parts of Salfit. Israeli security forces continuously drive back and forth, patrolling the area.
Israelis have consumed about 600 hectares of land belonging to Salfit residents since 2004, when the fence, part of Israel's separation wall, was built. The wall is only 30 percent complete in Salfit, according to Ahmad.
Ahmad al-Shuqair, 78, is a resident of al-Zawiya village in Salfit. All of his land, where his family planted more than 1,000 olive trees over several generations, was confiscated when Israel built the electric separation fence.
"I woke up one morning and found that everything I owned was gone," Shuqair said. His almost 80-hectare plot of land was exactly bordering the Green Line.
Now Shuqair expects that life will only get worse for residents in his village.
Al-Zawiya is situated in between Tel Aviv, less than 30km west of the village, and Route 5. The train line is expected to cut through al-Zawiya, along with several other Palestinian villages.
Palestinians in Salfit fear the forthcoming settler train will be the first stage of a larger Israeli railway project in the occupied West Bank.
For the past six years, Katz has promoted a plan to construct a 475-km railway in the occupied West Bank, which would create a network of 11 rail lines connecting major Israeli settlements to one another and to Israeli towns across the border.
"What do they [settlers] need a train line for?" Shuqair said. "Israel has already taken our lands to build roads for them. All of them have cars. This railway is just an excuse to steal more of our lands."
![]() |
Ahmad al-Shuqair stands in front of Israel's separation fence, which consumed more than 1,000 of his olive trees [Jaclynn Chiodini/Al Jazeera] |
Even on the Palestinian side of the separation fence, residents in Salfit are restricted from using the majority of their lands.
According to Ahmad, more than 70 percent of Salfit's lands are designated as Area C - the more than 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli military control. Israel restricts Palestinians from developing these areas.
A tall Israeli watchtower extends out from the olive groves and overlooks the lands, with Israeli soldiers constantly surveilling the area with large telescopes.
Zubeidi told Al Jazeera the municipality has spearheaded attempts to "sneak" onto lands in Area C and develop small projects.
The municipality plans to construct a sports field and playground in Area C, as children have no space to play in Salfit owing to the lack of land available to Palestinians.
"We play a cat and mouse game with the Israeli soldiers," Zubeidi explained. "When they see us from the tower, they will come down and force us to stop working. So we concede and hide our equipment nearby. Once they leave, we return once again and continue working."
It has taken the municipality more than three years to level the land the Palestinians hope to develop.
Meanwhile, Israeli settlements continue to grow in Salfit, now outnumbering the Palestinian communities, while the settler population almost equals the Palestinian population, estimated to be about 75,000.
In the process, Palestinians in Salfit have steadily lost hope for the future.
"When they built this wall and took all my lands, there wasn't anything I could do about it," Shuqair told Al Jazeera. "This train line will be the same. Israel will construct it and we will be forced to stand by and watch.
"There's nothing we can do to stop them."
[Reposted from Al Jazeera]
Posted at 12:48 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (2)
So yes, “We are beings made for death ... because the reasons each of us will die are always expressed in the most distant of languages, in an untranslatable language.” These words were stated by Raúl Zurita in a talk he gave as part of a panel presentation with Anna Deeny, Valerie Mejer Caso and myself at the AWP in Boston 2013. The panel was about translation and distance, and Zurita offered these words to explain Garcilaso de la Vega’s accounting of the decapitation of Tupac Amaru, the last of the Inca monarchs. It’s Cusco, 1572. The herald is announcing the supposed offenses that have condemned Tupac Amaru (not named as such by Garcilaso) to death. The prisoner hears but does not understand. He asks the friar who is walking with him to translate because he does not know the language that contains the reasons for which he will die. Chicago is a very Chilean city:
the reasons for which our blood is drawn in the prison camps of Lake Michigan are not communicated to us
the reasons for which we are imprisoned are also not communicated to us
it is often said on the shores of Lake Michigan, which is the bay of Valparaiso, that we will die for reasons we do not understand
we do not understand why we do not understand why we will die
we do not understand why we do not understand why we are imprisoned
we do not understand why we do not understand why we are paid or beaten or loved
we do not understand why last night the authoritative bodies loaded up four ships worth of prisoners and why those boats are half a mile away from the beach, booming dance music, baking in the summer sun
Meaning that the light would be merely a secondary quality. But it does not illuminate. It lightens up what is living at the moment, that is what is in the process of dying: the world stretched out before us, objects in space. A secondary quality of Time. Time, its flow, its rhythm, would be first. Space and light could only follow, as appearances and secondary qualities. Light being no more than the gleaming eye of time, of Time set into fruit, into stars, provisions of time to come, of life. The fruit, the astral bodies, those flasks, would simply be nodes of Time, which is to say that the sheets that conceal the earth from angels conceal death from them too and rupture, death and pain. While they also conceal that fall from the earth, the angels’ dazzling fall (sun beams). So there is its two-way protection, double-faced, front and back. Do dreams require belief? A system, like a machine with a dream at one end and belief at the other, each produced by the marvelous play of presences manifested by the lights and mirrored bellows between? I ask this question in avoidance of another: How can we correspond with a corpse? One evening, I saw an old woman in black walking behind a coffin adorned with flowers. The coffin was being carried through the streets of a small island. The flowers looked like waterbirds with extravagantly twisted necks. The old woman did not look at the coffin. She kept her eyes on the ground. The sun was going down. She was in the coffin’s shadow. Watching this procession, I was overcome with a feeling: The coffin is empty: The funeral is for the old woman in the coffin’s shadow. There is, for example, Dead Christ in the Tomb (Holbein, 1522), in which the corpse appears subordinated (Dostoyevsky), self-seen, beyond resurrection, that is: no longer requiring belief. Because: the old woman was as if incarnating — the corpse’s open mouth, rolling eyes, pointed middle finger. The feeling was succeeded by another: The coffin is the void of the woman’s plea for correspondence with a corpse — her own. She will be forever behind it, forming its shadow, walking towards an unattainable union. Her steps were recounting, in the echoes of which sound the questions Jackie Wang asks in the wake of her dreams, towards recuperating bodies across distances in which might be recognized some form of lucid correspondence and/or dissolution. These questions, these dreams, are crucial — they take the form of writing alongside belief, to which I would add: that which is removed from the breath on the lid. Like extinguishing stars’ throwing light to dream better? Melancholia belongs in the celestial realm, writes Julia Kristeva. Meanwhile, I have spent most of this past month trying to absorb, without falling all the way through, the sun. That is another way of saying ... My circumlocutions went nowhere. While talking to my analyst I was unable to finish my sentences. I report to my psychoanalyst: “Yesterday, nothing moved.”
Image A
Image B
In the dream the dead dog returns in another shaggier form and incapable of peeing outside.
Image D
Image I
I remember all the rings and earrings. Earrings made of fake fingernails. Everything seemed wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Then the attack. I won’t say anything else about it. I can’t wait any longer because I have to meet Lauren Berlant. I walk through the Ukrainian forest in the dark. Why does Tsvetaeva associate poets with Jews? Read Cixous and find out. Hélène Cixous Cixous Marina Tsvetaeva poetry literature theory. 37 notes. You could feel the buzz of amphetamines. I was self-conscious about a sandwich that I was carrying that had a strong mustard-onion smell. When I saw Penelope speak a while ago she was so nervous ... she was on a panel with the race-traitor guy. Besides, what would I say? I remember the first time I ever went to Baltimore. She ran into the rice paddy screaming and the town debated whether or not she was really possessed by ghosts. I thought that maybe I should devote my life to studying Taiwanese shamanism. I thought about Refbatch, the schizophrenic Russian woman I watch on YouTube. I take my initial clue from the following assertion, by John Beverley, that “Subaltern studies is, or at least began as, a form of Marxism, but it originated precisely in the crisis of ‘actually existing socialism’ and revolutionary nationalism in the 1980s.” With this summary declaration, everything in a sense is said that needed to be said. First, the study of subalternity is, or begins as, a form of Marxism. Second, this beginning or origin nevertheless also must be put into dialogue with the crisis of Marxism, which in turn results from, or is exacerbated by, the crisis of “actually existing socialism.” [Editor’s question: from the vantage point of 30 years later, that phrase just has to be put it scare quotes, doesn’t it?] And, third, there is the suggestion, albeit as yet only implicit, that subaltern studies in the end may no longer amount to a form of Marxism properly speaking. Subaltern studies, in other words, may well have started out as a form of Marxism but this leaves open the question whether or not what it ended up being after the crisis can still be called Marxist. And why should this matter? “What I will argue here,” Beverley announces, “is that subaltern studies entails not only a new form of ... knowledge production or self-critique, but also a new way of envisioning the project of the left in the conditions of globalization and postmodernity. I am privileging the idea of the ‘new’ here, but the question is also an old one, one that has to do with an understanding of some of the reasons that led to the impasse of the left.” I keep trying not to say it, but I can’t help myself. I try to be good. But when I read phrases such as “the impasse of the left” I don’t know whether to cry or laugh. It’s like when I think about accelerationism. Or Southern Baptists. Or people who think “rational actor theory” has anything to do with anything. Or when people privilege science. Or the “free market.” I think: what planet are these people living on? Then I remember. “Oh yeah. Fuck. FUCK!!!!” Remember when Anyanwu the shapeshifter met that sexy dolphin? That scene was really good. And do you know what Fiesta Pizza is? “Fiesta Pizza is a Mexican pizza specifically created for school lunch programs. Some of us may remember it fondly; some of us may remember it as cardboard with a pile of vomit on top. It is actually a trademarked entity created by the Schwan Food Company. But to call it simply a Mexican pizza would be wrong. The Fiesta Pizza contains multitudes.” Non-human multitudes. Apparently John Keats was really good at impersonating a bear. And of course I’m still a communist. And I contain multitudes, at least I cutnpaste and mangle em. Maybe I should have called this Fiesta Pizza instead of In the House of the Hangman ...
Image Q
Image F
And I say no more, because
no one will find the key that no one has lost.
I don’t know if they bleed, the stones.
I know that the loam that sometimes runs from them, no matter how
red, is not blood.
Voice 1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Voice 2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Voice 2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Voice 1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Voice 2. 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9
Voice 2. 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9
For the next nine minutes, improvise. Do you think I should be silent for nine minutes if no one volunteers? Ah, maybe next time. OK. This time I’ll be silent for pisan zapra.
I’m organizing clean
myself in myself lured
so long as there’s no sticks
only flux, teeth known as
waves and Nothing
the glue in which lungs all
dip, a cat strikes
rocks I-know I-know I-
know, can you get to
ask everything to ask
for both? If not or stilled
can you get everything
save for both in asked where
the rope the crate:
I-know I-know I-know,
the series of portraits in Spirit is a Bone were created by a machine: a facial recognition system designed to make portraits without the co-operation of the subject. Four lenses operating in tandem to generate a full-frontal image of the face, ostensibly looking directly into the camera, even if the subject himself is unaware of being photographed. The result is more akin to a digital life mask than a photo; a three-dimensional facsimile of the face that can be easily rotated and closely scrutinized, and then the person it represents can be poisoned or assassinated or imprisoned or whatever. Which is perhaps why Hegel also noted that
I am sad in my world
and in yours
which is why
I walked for years beside
the economic lilies
exploring the mysteries of bread
a wax archangel
stood on my tongue
I drank petroleum
Laying me down
I dreamt these words
“logic is a complication!
“logic is always wrong!
“my name is Sammy Rosenstock
“I am so sad with life
“I love it
“I put an owl in a hexagon
“I climbed on the stage
“I squatted there
“I shat in your hat
“I have sixty fingers on each arm
And within that dream I am given a poem in the dream ... a poem I read out loud ... where I can feel the words coming in bursts but can’t salvage them ... I only know the poem’s name is ‘seedings’ & that it follows after a performance of ‘cokboy’ in which I have to improvise the final lines, unable to remember what they are ... later, somehow it’s later, you know how dreams work, I’m at home I see a little moth in my kitchen and think oh no. And sure enough, when I investigate the cupboard I see a neglected bag of quinoa quivering with larvae. The eggs look connected to the quinoa by silky spindles, their effect is jiggling fuzz. It’s so haunted house in there with the larvae and the quinoa and the cobwebs. I throw out every scrap of food in my house. I hate these moths passionately and after throwing out all the food arm myself with a plastic spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner to hunt them down. I see one larva scoot up the side of the cupboard and drown it in poison. All it wanted to do was age enough to fly and fuck another moth in a plastic bag of rice. When I spray another it curdles into a smudge. Immediately two full-grown moths fly right at me. I think, revenge? Using the logic that if I can see four or five of these moths there must be dozens scavenging my kitchen for gluten, they could probably take me. Pantry moths don’t have teeth or stingers so what they’ll need to do I guess is find a way to immobilize me and bring me to the ground. Swarming in my nostrils, they could force my lips open and gather in my mouth and throat so even if I could loud bleat from the hilly bourn nobody will hear me. And I’ll choke and suffocate there on the floor of my kitchen. Probably the last sight I’ll see is ... And the poets will look grim over well whiskey and say, Brandon died ... stoned ... murdered by moths. Butut it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall — soon —it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing. Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city ... They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into — they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass ... certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero ... and it is poorer the deeper they go ... ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard ... the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal. The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are ordered out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those marshaling them wear cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast, very old and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by which they have come here ... Globular lights, painted a dark green, hang from under the fancy iron eaves, unlit for centuries ... the crowd moves without murmurs or coughing down corridors straight and functional as warehouse aisles ... velvet black surfaces contain the movement: the smell is of old wood, of remote wings empty all this time just reopened to accommodate the rush of souls, of cold plaster where all the rats have died, only their ghosts, still as cave-painting, fixed stubborn and luminous in the walls ... the evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator-a moving wood scaffold open on all sides, hoisted by old tarry ropes and cast-iron pulleys whose spokes are shaped like Ss. At each brown floor, passengers move on and off ... thousands of these hushed rooms without light ... Take “Loss,” for instance, in which a father fights against the death of his son. And, of course, he loses. Now that father — suddenly an ex-father — knows how to respond when people ask him what’s the worst thing that’s happened to you in your life. Now, in addition, he knows how to respond when people ask what’s the worst thing that will happen to you in your life — because it already happened. There’s nothing more horrible than having all the answers, there’s nothing worse than knowing nobody has the answer to his question and that that question is “why?” It’s not fair to have to live through the death of a child. His son won’t see him grow old and he won’t see the beginning of his son’s old age. Suddenly, everything is going against the natural order of things. The natural order that determines that, when a father dies, his son — beyond the pain he might end up feeling — also feels somewhat liberated, knowing that his father is no longer thinking of him. On the other hand, when the son is the one dying, the fact that he no longer thinks of him is, for the father, a biblical punishment, a private plague. And his son has died even before his grandparents, the father’s own parents, whom, presumably, he will also see die. And nobody will see his death. Nobody, yes, will live to tell it. Nobody will survive to tell him about it. Now, that man is outside all logic of time and space, the normal course of the story has been altered. So, he decides, anything is possible, anything can happen. Because the worst thing that can happen to someone has already happened to him. Which means that now nothing can happen to him but the expansive wave of what keeps on happening, what expands, what occupies more space all the time inside and outside of him and what will soon contain and devour everything, down to the last beam of light, until everything is void and black and hole. Last rights pronounced, the first displays of affection from acquaintances, and that’s it, the father decides that the only way he’ll be able to overcome the pain will be to eliminate all traces of his son. Delete. Erase him as if he’d never existed to the point where he’d even forget that he’d erased him. Demolish from his memory the shared palace of his son’s memory. So, first, the father burns all his drawings, gives away the tiny clothes, puts toys in bags and takes them to hospitals and orphanages, calls a charity organization to have them come take away his son’s rocket-shaped bed. But soon he discovers that it’s not working, that it’s not enough: the pain is still there, he can’t forget him, his son is more present than ever in the increasingly full void he’s left behind. The next step, it’s clear, is to end things with his wife, with the mother — because it all began with her, it was her he entered so his son would come out. He cuts her into pieces, buries her in the garden; but the relief doesn’t last long. Just passing in front of his son’s school; or approaching that cinema where they went to see Toy Story, all three of them, for the first of many times; or the place where they ate their favorite hamburgers; or ... What follows is a hurricane of death and destruction transmitted live and direct from helicopter-mounted cameras. Flames, explosions, screams. Neither the police nor the army are able to stop him; and the father feels he’s the chosen one, invulnerable, an unstoppable force of nature, a Shiva dancing a last dance. At sunrise, almost nothing remains of the small city and our hero — a man on a mission — departs for the rest of the planet; because his son loved geography and knew so much about other countries and told him that, when he grew up, he wanted to be “the person who chooses the colors of the countries on maps.” Which is to say that there are plastic plants almost so much like the real plants they have even started adding brown leaves. But there’s nothing new about this, about any of this: John Clare was the first recorded case of “ecodepression.” To quote Marcella Durand, “I write not to myself because who am I
but to you in the past dear John Clare a poet like myself
who is looking at a bridge ...
A musician named
Sonny Rollins—see, if I were writing to myself I would not
be explaining that to myself—a musician named Sonny
Rollins treated the view from this bridge as a composition
sheet: he read the city lights (because now not only are
we electrified but we are everything electric) as musical
notes and from that found melodies, that is what it is like
to”
to
to
to
to
to
to
to
to
to
to
I like thinking about this but don’t really know what this means. My hand hurts. I drink a green smoothie. I look at boots online. I write three emails. I google “Why does my baby have red cheeks”? I lie down on the sofa. I write a sentence and then have to check my email. I put my laptop up to my forehead and lay it on my brain. I spend time looking at images of the illustrations of the brain from Vesalius’s The Fabric of the Human Body. Vesalius was one of the first to dissect human beings, officially at least. He dissected the brains of convicts. What occupies the theater of the forehead is the front matter, the dura, the folds. I look at the strange illustration of the man with the beard and nose, his head hollowed, like he is awake or surprised. The room is unstable and becomes the narrator. When she enters her maid’s room, she observes that the room was the portrait of an empty stomach. I have read this quoted in another introduction. I mean,
I am delayed I am canceled
I have a license I have a passport
the picture is mine I come
in good faith She is my bona fide
blood filial my only I have no other
here is the stamp I have
this hologram I have
a destination I speak some Spanish because
the signature is mine I have
a sense of direction I have
a purpose I was born there because
I must run to the gate please let me through
hundreds of paintings of Prince by local high school students line the corridors
signs point to the direction in which Mecca lies
It’s just a very dark confusion with our history. How many eyes are falling on this block right now and where will they land next? How much is this block worth, how much for this or that building? And then someone comes to put a piece up — “Oh my god, it’s that name” — and everybody loves it. But then this witch comes and murals up a three-story wiener sausage. And it is so much bigger than all men’s dick reality. The ritual dancing around the pole is now ... What does it mean? I believe the energy can be distributed in so many ways, feeding the ecosystem. I’m writing the story. It involves terrorist vegan gengineering and academic hierarchies and autocannibalism. Also terraforming and First Contact with aliens who showed up on Earth long before Kubrick’s transcendent monolith-makers and bet on an utterly wrong horse. There’s a lot of story, a lot of backstory, and yet the story almost seems to be the least of it. It’s opera, after all: soprano arias and classic black metal. But it’s not only opera. With the help of a marine biologist and the co-discoverer of Dark Energy, this aims to be the most scientifically-rigorous gesamtkunstwerk about alien lungfish on Mars, ever. It is a high bar to clear.
[Note: Sources: JBR; Daniel Borzutzky, “Daniel Borzutzky on ‘Lake Michigan Merges Into The Bay of Valparaiso, Chile’”, at Poetry Society of America; JBR; Francis Ponge (tr. Lee Fahnestock), quoted in Jackie Wang, “Excerpts from Francis Ponge’s Vegetation”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 23 Apr 018; Brandon Shimoda, and Jackie Wang, quoted in Wang’s “Twists and Turns in the Bowels of the Neon Dragon: A Dream Maze”, at Harriet, 29 Apr 016; Jackie Wang, “Hélène Cixous on Marina Tsvetaeva: Poetry, Passion, and History”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 13 Aug 016; Jackie Wang, somewhere; Bruno Bosteels, “Marxism and Subalternity”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Brandon Brown, “From The Four Seasons”, at Fanzine, 15 Jan 016; JBR; Brandon Brown, “From The Four Seasons”, at Fanzine, 15 Jan 016; JBR; Elicura Chihuailaf, and Marcela Delpastre, quoted in Rosanna Albertini, “Charlie Morrow & Jerome Rothenberg”, at Albertini 2014 the kite, 18 Dec 017; JBR; Charlie Morrow, “Counting to 9 in 3 Locations”, quoted in Rosanna Albertini, “Charlie Morrow & Jerome Rothenberg”, at Albertini 2014 the kite, 18 Dec 017; JBR; “Words that don’t (but should) exist in English”, at Lonely Planet, Jun 012 (pisan zapra = Malay for the time it takes to eat a banana); JBR; Trisha Low, “8 SPD Books to leave you HAUNTED…”, at Small Press Distribution; JBR; Sylvia Chan, “Fledge: A Phenomenology of Spirit by Stacy Doris. Nightboat Books, 2012”, at The Volta, 25 Jan 013; blurb for Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Spirit is a Bone, at Mack Books; JBR; Jerome Rothenberg, “The Holy Words of Tristan Tzara”, “Seedings”, at Levure Littéraire 3; JBR; Brandon Brown, “Autumn”, in The Four Seasons; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; JBR; Rodrigo Fresán, The Invented Part (tr. Will Vanderhyden), at Open Letter; JBR; Marcella Durand, “The Prospect”, at The Brooklyn Rail / River Rail, 18 Jan 018; JBR; Marcella Durand, “The Prospect”, at The Brooklyn Rail /River Rail, 18 Jan 018; JBR; Kate Zambreno, “Introductions”, at BOMB, 26 Apr 018 (a collaboration with B. Ingrid Olson); JBR; Celina Su, “JFK Airport”, at Asian American Writers Workshop / The Margins, 26 Sept 017; Carolina Fackholt, quoted in Sarah Rose Sharp, “Artist’s Phallus Murals Challenge Viewers ‘to Think Deeper, Longer, Wider, Harder’”, at Hyperallergic, 27 Apr 018; Peter Watts, “Proof of Principle”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 7 Jun 017]
Posted at 05:38 PM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)
This is both an interruption of and a supplement to my series of essays on the siege of Ghouta in Syria (‘Mass Murder in Slow Motion’): you can find the first (‘East Ghouta’) and second (‘Siege Economies’) here and here, and there are two more to come. My focus here – and hence my title (in sixteenth-century Europe a masque was a theatrical entertainment staged to glorify the royal court) – is on two performances staged after the mass casualty attacks on Douma on 7 April 2018: the first by the United States, France and the United Kingdom when they launched air strikes on 14 April against three sites that they claimed were central to Syria’s chemical weapons programme, and the second by Syria, Russia and their proxies on the right and the left who insisted that the reports of the original attack were ‘chemical fabrications’. Both performances, I suggest, are deeply suspect.
I begin by setting the scene – the immediate preconditions to the attack – and then draw on testimony from witnesses on the ground to document what happened in Douma on the evening of 7 April. I then consider each performance in detail: the process through which the US and its allies decided that, on the balance of probabilities, the Assad regime had used chemical weapons in Douma, determined their military response, and justified their actions; and the mobilisation of what Bethania Palma called ‘disinformation machines’ by Syria, Russia and its proxies to proclaim ‘fake news’ and erect ‘false flags’.
Under the bombs
The joint military offensive against East Ghouta proved to be an extraordinarily violent campaign. Over the summer of 2017 the Ghouta had been designated a ‘de-escalation zone‘, but attacks by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies and proxies resumed during the autumn and intensified spectacularly from January 2018. Here’s a snapshot summary from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED):
The siege was now absolute; hospitals were repeatedly bombed, and hundreds of civilians killed during a devastating onslaught of bombs, shells and missiles. ‘It’s not a war, it’s called a massacre’, one doctor told the Guardian in February 2018:
“The bombing was hysterical,” said Ahmed al-Dbis, a security official at the Union of Medical and Relief Organisations (UOSSM), which runs dozens of hospitals in areas controlled by the opposition in Syria. “It is a humanitarian catastrophe in every sense of the word. The mass killing of people who do not have the most basic tenets of life.”
UNICEF issued a blank page as a statement to condemn the relentless assault – it had no words left to describe what was happening:
Sonia Khush, an official with Save the Children, described the situation as “absolutely abhorrent.” “The bombing has been relentless, and children are dying by the hour,” she said. “These families have nowhere left to run – they are boxed in and being pounded day and night.”
Many of them sought refuge in basements and improvised subterranean shelters. Here is a report on 21 February from Megan Specia and Hwaida Saad:
All of eastern Ghouta is underground. That is how one aid worker described the situation as thousands of people fled into basements and makeshift shelters in the rebel-held suburb of Damascus this week. Eastern Ghouta is under a brutal aerial assault by Syrian government forces that has left more than 200 people dead in recent days, including many children. As the war on the outskirts of the capital reached a new level of intensity, families huddle underground. For hours on end, they wait out the bombing, which shows no signs of slowing….
Many see the basements as the only haven in a hostile environment. They had little chance to evacuate, as the area has been blockaded for months. For Shadi Jad, a young father who has been in a basement since the beginning of the week, his shelter is a mixed blessing. “Honestly, I feel the shelter is a grave, but it’s the only available way for protection,” he said when reached on Tuesday. But Mr. Jad, who is hiding with his wife and eight other families, said that being in close quarters had also drawn his community together. “We share stories, try to keep the fear away by telling some jokes,” he said. “The shelter makes the relationships deeper”…
Hoda Khayti, 29, has lived in eastern Ghouta her whole life, and said her family, like most of their neighbors, had spent much of the week in a basement. Twelve other families joined them in one cramped space. They could hear planes constantly passing overhead. “The scariest moments are when rockets land, then silence follows,” Ms. Khayti said when reached Wednesday on a Facebook video call. “We feel our souls are leaving our bodies when the plane gets close, and we feel relieved after it goes away.” They fear the bombs outside, but like Mr. Jad, Ms. Khayti said the shelter has become a place for the community to come together. They share food, blankets and stories while they wait for the sounds of planes overhead to trail off….
Conditions rapidly deteriorated; the basements and shelters were hopelessly overcrowded, most with no heating or electricity, sanitation or running water. Listen to Neemat Mohsen in Saqba in early March:
“In our street, over 500 metres there are only three basements. They have to house all the families there. We feel the prison shrinking. We were first besieged in an enormous prison called eastern Ghouta, now we are trapped in shelters similar to tombs… We are living real terror 24 hours a day.”
By the middle of March the offensive had succeeded in dividing the enclave into three:
Russia brokered a series of evacuation deals and prisoner exchanges with the major rebel groups, first with Ahrar al-Sharm who agreed on 21 March that its fighters, their families and others would leave Harasta, and then with Faylaq ar-Rahman who agreed on 23 March to leave Ayn Tarma, Irbin, Jobar and Zamalka. Over the following days convoys of buses left for Idlib, while thousands of people fled on foot through so-called ‘humanitarian corridors’ to government camps on the outskirts of Damascus; still others elected to stay in their shattered neighbourhoods under the terms of a security deal to be enforced in the first instance by Russian military police.
That left Douma, where an uneasy truce lasted for ten days – broken by intermittent air strikes – while Jaish al-Islam (JAI) negotiated terms. These were complicated by divisions within JAI. Some of its members wanted to fight on, while others wanted to leave with their families but refused to go to Idlib – not only was the rebel-held area widely regarded as an elaborately constructed kill-box where the Syrian Arab Army would soon resume its offensive, but JAI had a ‘blood feud’ with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham which controlled much of the area.
Negotiations stalled and eventually broke down. JAI reportedly placed new conditions on evacuation and refused to release prisoners it had held captive for several years, and on the afternoon of Friday 6 April JAI shelled Damascus, killing four and wounding another 22. The assault by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies resumed with a vengeance. A ground offensive was launched under the cover of a sustained air and artillery bombardment broadcast live on state TV. There were 50 air raids during the afternoon and evening, and a medic inside one local hospital – desperately short of trained staff and supplies – described the chaos as the dead and wounded were brought in:
The hospital is in a state of panic… Dentists are carrying out emergency surgeries. Dead bodies are being brought in pieces and are unrecognisable.
That afternoon Hosein Mortada (above), a reporter for Press TV and al-Alam and a vocal supporter of the Assad regime, released a video from Mount Qalamun where he was embedded with the artillery batteries that were pounding Douma, with columns of smoke towering into the sky behind him. His commentary:
These are appetizers… The story is bigger than a ground invasion. There is something they will see today if the story continues. They will feel something very strong.
It’s impossible to say whether Mortada knew what was coming – he certainly enjoyed close access to the Army – or whether he was merely continuing the gloating and goading style of ‘reporting’ that had become his signature. Or perhaps he was riffing on the terrifying warning issued in February by Brigadier-General Suheil al-Hassan, the officer commanding Syria’s elite Tiger Force which was now leading the assault on Douma:
I promise, I will teach them a lesson, in combat and in fire… You won’t find a rescuer. And if you do, you will be rescued with water like boiling oil. You’ll be rescued with blood.
The air and ground assault intensified throughout the next day (above), and most people returned to or remained in the basements and shelters that had been their wretched homes for weeks that had dragged into months. Then, on Saturday night, there were suddenly multiple reports of mass casualties.
‘Gas! Gas!’
In a preliminary analysis the Violations Documentation Centre zeroed in on three strikes on 7 April involved in what it described as a ‘suspected chemical attack’.
The first, at 1200, targeted a Syrian Arab Red Crescent medical centre with guided missiles and barrel bombs; the centre was virtually destroyed along with its complement of ambulances (hospitals have long been a target of the Russian and Syrian Arab Air Forces: see here). Although the strike had a paralysing effect on the medical response to later strikes, I’m not sure why it was included; an early report from the Syrian-American Medical Societyclaimed that a ‘chlorine bomb’ had hit a Douma hospital but no time was given, and a subsequent joint statement from SAMS and the Syrian Civil Defence (‘White Helmets’) addressed the situation later that evening:
On Saturday, April 7th, at 7:45 PM local time, amidst continuous bombardment of residential neighborhoods in the city of Douma, more than 500 cases – the majority of whom are women and children – were brought to local medical centers with symptoms indicative of exposure to a chemical agent. Patients have shown signs of respiratory distress, central cyanosis, excessive oral foaming, corneal burns, and the emission of chlorine-like odor.
During clinical examination, medical staff observed bradycardia, wheezing and coarse bronchial sounds. One of the injured was declared dead on arrival. Other patients were treated with humidified oxygen and bronchodilators, after which their condition improved. In several cases involving more severe exposure to the chemical agents, medical staff put patients on a ventilator, including four children. Six casualties were reported at the center, one of whom was a woman who had convulsions and pinpoint pupils.
The casualty figures were subsequently revised upwards, but those cited here seem to have been victims of the other two strikes on the list, which were unambiguously attributed to ‘chemical weapons’.
The second, at 1600, targeted the Saada Bakery on May Ibn al-Khattab (bakeries have long been a staple of Russian-Syrian air strikes too as part of the ‘starve or surrender’ strategy of siege warfare).
The third, at 1930, targeted an apartment building near al-Shuhada Square near al-Numan Mosque.
The many eyewitness accounts are not easy to reconcile with the map: the experience of an air strike fragments both experience and language, and at first it was difficult for rescuers to pinpoint the sites that had been attacked (one rescuer told the VDC: ‘At the start of the chemical attacks, the smell of chlorine reached the center of the city of Douma. We could not determine the area where the chlorine rocket had fallen.)
Nevertheless a common narrative does emerged from multiple sources scattered across different locations inside Douma. Here are its main outlines.
A network of flight monitors – which warns people of impending attacks and which has also been used to identify the perpetrators of previous air strikes (see for example here) – tracked Syrian Mi-8 helicopters flying southwest from the Dumayr airbase towards Douma. I’m not sure how significant this is, and I haven’t been able to obtain more details; the intensity of the strikes suggests multiple aircraft were involved. But Syrians opposed to the Assad regime have become hideously accustomed to barrel bombs dropped from Syrian Arab Army helicopters (see above: Arbin, 20 February 2018), and one report claimed that the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate was also intimately involved in targeting East Ghouta with chlorine gas dropped from its helicopters. That night several people in Douma reported hearing the whirring of helicopter blades overhead followed by the sound of objects falling from the sky. There were also witnesses who saw the projectiles descend; they described a ‘green gas emanating from the canisters falling from the sky’ and rushed down to the basements to warn those huddled in the shelters below to evacuate immediately.
As I read these accounts, I remember the words of Hoda Khayti that ended the report from Ghouta I cited above: ‘I don’t want to die in the basement.’ One rescuer underlined the urgency of escape:
There were basements in other buildings with people who didn’t see the gas in time. We entered those buildings and found bodies on the staircases and on the floor – they died while attempting to exit.
He made repeated forays to help people out:
By his third frantic dash down the stairs, with a wet piece of cloth over his mouth and a little girl in each arm, everything went dark for Khaled Abu Jaafar. “I lost consciousness. I couldn’t breathe any more; it was like my lungs were shutting down…”
Quick actions like these saved many people’s lives, but their escape was fraught with danger.
“Someone yelled chemical” Umm Nour recalls. “I felt my throat close, my body go limp as if I had just had everything sucked out of me.” She reenacts how her arms tensed up, how she could barely muster the strength to grab her daughters’ arms and claw her way up the stairs. They made it to the fourth floor when artillery rounds or rockets – she’s not sure what – slammed into the building, shaking it. “It was like we were between two deaths,” she says. “The chemical attack on the lower floors or the other strikes hitting the upper ones.”
But for some people in locations closer to the deadly canisters this proved to be the wrong choice:
Another canister landed on a bed on the upper floor of a damaged building and did not explode, according to a video shot by an activist who found it. A third canister was found on the roof of a crowded, four-storey apartment building near the city center, according to a video of the canister and an activist who visited the building the next day. Rescue workers … found dozens of men, women and children lying lifeless on the floor below… It appeared that when the smell entered the basement, some people had tried to go upstairs to get fresh air, unknowingly getting closer to the source.
Cellphone videos of the canisters and the aftermath of the attack on the apartment building near al-Shuhada square were uploaded to social media platforms, and you can find a preliminary but none the less detailed analysis of them – including geo-location (below) – from Eliot Higgins and his team at Bellingcat here.
For those working in makeshift clinics the scenes were no less horrifying:
“We were 12 people, and before the attack you can imagine, we had been working perhaps 30 hours or more without stopping,” said one paramedic who treated the victims. “Then you start getting a lot of people who are suffocating, and they smell of chlorine, and imagine after all that exhaustion you get this huge number of people, around 70, targeted while they were in bomb shelters.” He added: “We gave them whatever we had, which wasn’t much, just four oxygen generators and atropine ampoules so they could breathe … Most of them were going to die. You can imagine now our psychological state. It’s tragic. I’ve been working in this hospital for five years and those last two days, I haven’t seen anything like it.”
A local reporter described what he saw at one field hospital as apocalyptic:
I went to a medical point that is an underground hospital, and in the tunnels the dust was filling the area and there were women, children and men in the tunnels. When I arrived at the medical point it was like judgment day, people walking around in a daze, not knowing what to do, women weeping, everyone covering themselves with blankets, and the nurses running from victim to victim. There were entire families on the floor covered in blankets, and there were around 40 dead in shrouds lying between the families, their smell filling the place. The situation, the fear and the destruction are indescribable.
These first accounts are saturated – in image and in word – with the sensations of an attack by chemical weapons (CW). The people of Ghouta, and of rebel-held areas in Syria more generally, are no strangers to such attacks: they know their smells, their signs and their symptoms.
In fact on 4 April, just three days earlier, Human Rights Watch had followed up its previous forensic investigations of the use of chemical weapons against rebel-held neighbourhoods in West Ghouta and East Ghouta on 21 August 2013 – Attacks on Ghouta (2013; above) – and the ‘widespread and systematic’ use of CW by the Assad regime – Death by Chemicals (2017) – with an inventory of 85 confirmed CW attacks between 21 August 2013 and 25 February 2018:
HRW concluded:
Of the 85 chemical weapon attacks analyzed … more than 50 were identified by the various sources as having been committed by Syrian government forces. Of these, 42 were documented to have used chlorine, while two used sarin. In seven of the attacks, the type of chemicals was unspecified.
The … Islamic State group (also known as ISIS) carried out three chemical weapon attacks using sulfur mustard. One attack was by non-state armed groups using chlorine. Those responsible for the remaining attacks in the data set are unknown or unconfirmed.
This graphic, based on the work of the Violations Documentation Centre, charts the cumulative number of deaths from suspected CW attacks in Syria:
Some of these previous investigations had attracted fierce controversy and criticism, but even so it’s difficult to make a credible case that those who observed the aftermath of the air strikes on 7 April 2018 would not have known what they were talking about.
Their immediate impressions were supported by remote experts who subsequently examined the reports and the videos. Most concluded that the symptoms of the victims of the strike on the Saada Bakery and its vicinity were consistent with a chlorine gas attack, but the casualties from the strike on the apartment building exhibited even more troubling symptoms that suggested chlorine had been used in concert with a nerve agent like sarin.
Dr Raphael Pitti, a former military doctor and now professor of Emergency Medicine in War Zones at Nancy and a Board Member of UOSSM-France asked to be supplied with digital photographs and metadata to establish their provenance (date, time sequence and location), together with close-up images and video of the victims’ eyes. The casualties from the Saada area had trouble breathing, irritated eyes and other symptoms consistent with chlorine poisoning, he said, but those who died in the apartment building seemed to have been struck down with a speed that was totally inconsistent with even a high-concentration chlorine attack, and they exhibited convulsions and other symptoms usually associated with sarin or a similar nerve agent. In his view, it was likely that chlorine had been used in that attack too – but to mask the presence of another toxin.
Similarly, Dr Alastair Hay, professor of toxicology at Leeds, speaking to the Washington Post on 10 April after watching the videos on line:
“It’s just bodies piled up. That is so horrific… There’s a young child with foam at the nose and a boy with foam on its mouth. That’s much, much more consistent with a nerve-agent-type exposure than chlorine…. Chlorine victims usually manage to get out to somewhere they can get treatment… Nerve agent kills pretty instantly.”
Or again, from Martin Chulov‘s report in the Guardian on 12 April:
Jerry Smith, who led the [OPCW-UN] mission to supervise the withdrawal of the Syrian government’s stockpile of sarin in late 2013, said the symptoms displayed by patients could suggest exposure to an agent in addition to chlorine. “It’s worth elucidating the knowns,” he said. “Casualty rates, apparent speed of death and the shaking.” Organophosphate-based poison, including sarin, causes such symptoms. Pinpoint pupils and severe mouth foaming have been telltale signs in past attacks.
A guilty verdict
These were the stocks of knowledge in the public domain that most commentators and analysts in North America and Europe drew upon in the aftermath of the attacks on 7 April. The evidence, to many, was compelling – the Assad regime’s (criminal) record of CW use, first-hand testimonies and videos, and the submissions of expert witnesses – but it was still not conclusive.
Raphael Pitti emphasised that the only way to establish definitively what agents had been used was through laboratory examination, which was one of the central task’s of the investigation team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons(OPCW). In an interview with France 24 Olivier Lepick, a researcher from the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique in Paris, explained:
“The inspectors will be able to do two things on the ground: they can get physiochemical samples from places affected by the attack – on the walls, on the ground – and they can take biological samples from victims, either wounded or dead, to look for metabolic evidence of a chemical agent in their fluids [urine and blood in particular].”
But time was of the essence; blood and urine samples will only show traces of chemical contamination for a week or so at most.
“Every day that passes makes the results of any investigation less clear, and in this case the relevant area is controlled by the main suspects, who will be tempted to cover up the evidence,” Lepick continued. The researcher said that “bleach-style” cleaning is enough to remove traces of toxic agents on the spot, while the evidence in biological samples from victims becomes increasingly hypothetical with time and can be removed by the Syrian army. That is why the OPCW’s policy is to send teams 24 to 48 hours after the incident.
The arrival of the OPCW team in Douma was repeatedly delayed; the reasons ranged from maladministration (the nine team members supposedly did not have the necessary clearances from the UN, an excuse flatly denied by the UN) to security concerns. The Russian and Syrian authorities who controlled access to the city did not permit the investigators to begin their ground inspection until 21 April, when they successfully obtained samples from one site which were sent to the OPCW laboratory at Rijswik in the Netherlands for onward transmission to designated independent labs for analysis (for details see here). There were fears that in the two weeks since the alleged attacks took place any chemical residues (especially chlorine) would have degraded, and allegations were also made that the sites had been compromised or sanitised – though at least one expert maintained that it would be extremely difficult to remove the signs of removal! – and that potential witnesses had been intimidated and coerced.
In anticipation of these obstacles efforts had already been made to fast-track the process of verification outside the OPCW. Here is Martin Chulov again on 12 April:
In Jordan, officials prepared to receive biological samples from some of the estimated 42 dead and the hundreds more who survived. Smuggling routes in and out of Damascus are well travelled, and makeshift crossings along the watertight Jordanian border can suddenly open whenever there’s a need. Getting samples, especially corpses, to laboratories has been a top priority this week as the US has tried to establish if the gas that was dropped contained more than chlorine.
Other reports claimed that activists had smuggled blood, urine and hair samples across Syria’s northern border into Turkey for analysis.
The route followed by the samples remains unknown, but in short order US officials announced the results of tests on blood and urine samples from victims of the Douma attacks: they had tested positive for chlorine gas and for a sarin-like nerve agent. No details of the chain of custody – or of the testing process – were released, but even if they had been established, as Raphael Pitti also emphasised, the problem of assigning culpability would remain. That used to be the task of the Joint Investigative Mechanism between the OPCW and the UN whose mandate had been terminated by a Russian veto in November 2017.
The United States – or at least its improbable, impossible president – had never entertained any doubt about culpability: the Assad regime was again guilty of a chemical weapons attack. One week after the attacks on Douma, a course of (military) action had been agreed between the US, France and the United Kingdom.
The timing was perplexing. Many critics argued that it was a rush to judgement; that all the relevant evidence had not been gathered and that there remained reasonable (to some, even considerable) doubt about what had happened and who was responsible. But others were surprised at what they saw as a stay of execution: a year earlier the US had decided on its military response to the chemical weapons attack on Khan Shikhoun within 48 hours. On the first count, there were questions about whether any further, untainted evidence would be forthcoming; and it is also significant that Trump, Macron and May were all beset by domestic political crises for which international action was almost always a useful distraction. On the second count, this was a multi-national mission that required consent and co-ordination, and all three states had serious concerns about escalating what was being described as a new Cold War with Russia.
The three allies launched co-ordinated ‘precision’ strikes before dawn on 14 April against three targets. The closest to Douma was the Barzah Research and Development Centre, NE of Damascus, described by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a military facility ‘for the research, development, production and testing of chemical and biological warfare technology’. The other two sites were west of Homs: the Him Shinshar Weapons Storage Site, ‘the primary location of Syrian sarin and precursor production equipment’, and 7 km away the Him Shinshar Chemical Weapons Bunker, ‘both a chemical weapons equipment storage facility and an important command post.’ The Pentagon issued this map of the three targets:
The primary roles were played by the US and France. Cruise missiles were launched from US warships and submarines in the Gulf and the Red Sea and from French warships in the Mediterranean, while US, French and British aircraft also launched missiles against the three sites: the central target was Barzah, followed by the Him Shinshar Weapons Storage Site. The origins and distribution of the ordnance used is captured in these two graphics:
The joint response raises a series of important questions about the effectiveness of the strikes; the humanitarian claims that were registered to legitimise them in the court of public opinion; and their propriety under international and domestic law. I’ll consider each in turn.
The interval between the attack on Douma and the strikes on the three sites was used not only to assess culpability but also to develop the target set. The last time the US had conducted a strike in response to a CW attack in Syria was on 7 April 2017 when Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean against Al Shayrat airbase where the attack had originated. At least six major airbases have been linked to Syria’s chemical weapons programme – including Dumayr from which the helicopters were tracked towards Douma – but none of them was on the list this time around. This is not surprising. The previous counter-strike had had precious little effect; the base was back in operation within 48 hours and the gesture had no discernible deterrent function. There were also concerns about the proximity of many of the bases to Russian forces – Moscow had issued a series of bleak warnings about the dangers of ‘provocation’, and there have been reports that the Russian military was consulted over its ‘red lines’ which were not violated by the targets selected. Major CW factories were also removed from the list, like the Scientific Studies Research Centre at Jamraya, just north of Damascus, which had been attacked by Israeli jets in February; ‘Factory 790’ at al Safira in Aleppo province (Syria’s largest weapons manufacturing plant and suspected to be a major source of sarin), and the Masyaf research and development centre in Homs province (another suspected location for sarin production, also previously attacked by Israeli jets).
According to the Washington Post,
While officials had been watching known Syrian chemical sites on and off for years, aerial surveillance time has been dedicated mostly to other areas of Syria, where the United States and allied local forces continue to battle the Islamic State. That meant the U.S. military needed to refresh its intelligence on the chemical facilities before targeteers could build the “target packages” that would guide the operation.
The delay was the product of more than intelligence gaps; concerns about the possibility of killing civilians were also said to be paramount, and at a Pentagon briefing Lt General Kenneth McKenzie conceded that while ‘we could have gone to other places and done other things’ the three selected targets ‘presented the best opportunity to minimize collateral damage’. But these claims sit uneasily with the US-led coalition’s record of air strikes in Syria more generally. Casualty estimates are fraught with difficulty, but Airwars estimates that between August 2014 and April 2018 a minimum of 6,259 to 9,604 civilians have been killed by coalition air strikes in Syria and Iraq; the breakdown of civilian casualties for Syria is shown graphically below (see also Craig Jones here):
McKenzie claimed that the strikes ‘significantly degraded’ Syria’s ability to use chemical weapons in the future and that Barzah – which ‘does not exist anymore’ – had been ‘the heart of the Syrian chemical weapons program’. Yet this remains an untested assertion. In elaborating on the Pentagon’s collateral damage estimation, McKenzie referred to ‘a variety of sophisticated models – plume analysis, other things, to calculate the possible effects of chemical or nerve agent [dispersion]’ after an attack. But it’s possible to turn this round. The very next morning Rim Haddad described the scene at Barzah for AFP; ‘plastic gloves and face masks lay scattered in the rubble’ and, hours after the strike, ‘plumes of smoke wafted lazily up from the building and a burning smell still hung in the air.’ This was clearly a report from the ground not one conducted over Skype, still less one that relied on satellite imagery. Said Said told Haddad that he worked at the site as an engineer and denied any involvement in the production of chemical weapons. You might find that unremarkable for various reasons, but Said then added this disturbing rider:
If there were chemical weapons, we would not be able to stand here. I’ve been here since 5:30 am in full health — I’m not coughing.
And he wasn’t alone; Syrian soldiers were inspecting the ruins too – as was the press crew.
In short, it’s not unreasonable to wonder, with David Sanger and Ben Hubbard at the New York Times, whether any of the three sites were still in use:
At this point, there are no known casualties at the sites, which suggests that either no one was there during the evening, or they had been previously abandoned. And there are no reports of chemical agent leakage from the sites, despite attacks by more than 100 sea- and air-launched missiles.
Yet perhaps this misses the point. For all Trump’s boasts about ‘Mission Accomplished’, the raids ‘so perfectly carried out, with such precision’, the effectiveness of the strikes rested on more than their destructive capacity. They were also supposed to be ‘constructive’, performative: to send an unambiguous message to Assad and his allies. But what exactly was the message?
The junior partner in the mission, British Prime Minister Theresa May, proclaimed that the joint military response was justified ‘because we cannot allow the erosion of the international norm that prevents the use of these [chemical] weapons.’ It’s more than an international norm, of course: it’s also a matter of international law. But what about the other international laws so routinely violated by the Assad regime and its allies? The prohibition against torture (though I concede that the United States, France and the United Kingdom all have exceedingly dirty laundry hidden in that particular closet)? The collective punishment of civilian populations through the siege tactic of ‘surrender or starve’ (see here and here)? The prohibition against attacking hospitals and denying medical care to the sick and the wounded in war zones (see here)?
Moustafa Bayoumi sharpens the point with magnificent anger (and ‘perfect precision’):
The fact that three of the world’s most powerful militaries have now been mobilized into action, even for a limited campaign such as this one, to prevent “the erosion of the international norm” of using chemical weapons is far from comforting. Since the war began, Assad’s regime has engaged in the repeated and dreadful use of barrel bombs and mass starvation, the systematic torture of thousands of citizens and the laying siege to multiple cities, the killing of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of more than half the population. Yet, all of this horror does not seem to “erode an international norm” and certainly has not motivated these western leaders to any meaningful action to end the war… Rather than limiting war, this latest bombing of Syria normalizes the war’s ongoing brutality.
Or, as Robin Wright reported in the New Yorker:
“So you strike. Then what?” Ryan Crocker, a former Ambassador to Syria (as well as Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Kuwait), told me. “If the rockets hit the targets they intended, you could say the mission was accomplished in a narrow sense. But, in reality, it accomplished nothing. It might have been better if we’d not struck at all. It’s sending a message that killing is O.K. any way but one way — with chemical weapons. How many have been killed in Eastern Ghouta during this whole Syrian campaign? Far more by non-chemical means. It’s obscene.”
In short, the military response did more than draw a ‘red line’ against the use of chemical weapons (if it even did that): it gave a green light to virtually any and every other form of killing.
The legal map on which the missile strikes were located was – like all maps – shot through with circuits of power (and for what follows I am indebted to Jonathan Horowitz‘s succinct cartography here and here). The legal ‘ground truth’ for the start of the US-led bombing missions in Syria in September 2014 was a request from Iraq for the United States to conduct air strikes against the Islamic State. Some of those sites – not only paramilitary bases but also oilfields used by IS as sources of revenue – were located across the border in Syria, and the claim for cross-border intervention was reinforced by appeals under Article 51 of the UN Charter to ‘self-defence’ of allied forces inside Iraq and of their populations outside the region threatened by terrorist attacks from Islamic State. This joint effort was buttressed by a UN Security Council Resolution in November 2015 describing IS as ‘a global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security’ and calling on states to take ‘all necessary measures’ against IS, Al-Qaida and allied groups. These co-ordinates explain the pattern of civilian casualties displayed on the map above: these were primarily the result of strikes in IS-held territory. Some of the states involved also cited Syria’s ‘inability’ to prevent IS attacks as a further legal predicate. Although this clearly did not imply any invitation from Syria to intervene, it certainly suited the Assad regime to have other militaries pursue IS while its own forces fought rebel groups in other regions of Syria.
But these arguments cannot be extended to air strikes in response to chemical weapons attacks (unless presumably they were carried out by IS; it has been blamed for at least three previous attacks, but nobody has suggested it was responsible for the attack on Douma).
The case for the strikes as a humanitarian intervention failed to convince most jurists: of the three states involved, only the UK invoked humanitarianism as a legal justification. In 2015 Arabella Lang provided the House of Commons with a briefing on the legal case for UK intervention in Syria. The relevant discussion of humanitarian intervention reads as follows:
The UN Security Council can authorise military intervention for humanitarian purposes provided that it has determined that situation is a threat to international peace and security. But can states intervene in other states to deal with extreme human distress, without Security Council authorisation?
Some unauthorised humanitarian interventions have subsequently been commended by the Council, or at least condoned. But their legal basis remains controversial. There is also an argument that Article 2(4) of the UN Charter allows force to be used as long as it is consistent with the purposes of the UN (which include the promotion of human rights and the solving of humanitarian problems – Article 1(3)). Others suggest that even if humanitarian intervention without Security Council authorisation is unlawful under international law, it can still be legitimate – for instance the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999.
The ‘responsibility to protect’, as embodied in the 2005 World Summit Outcome (which is not legally binding), allows collective action against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, where the state concerned has been unable to protect its citizens. However, the World Summit Outcome states that this must be done through the Security Council, so is not in that respect a development of the law on the use of force.
The UK is keen to develop the international law on humanitarian intervention. When putting the case for military intervention in Syria in 2013, it argued that intervention without authorisation from the UN Security Council is permitted under international law if three conditions are met:
• strong evidence of extreme and large-scale humanitarian distress;
• no practicable alternative to the use of force; and
• the proposed use of force is necessary, proportionate, and the minimum necessary.
Building on these arguments, the British government released its legal case on 14 April 2018. A military response to the alleged chemical attacks in Douma was ‘an exceptional measure’ but it was lawful ‘on grounds of overwhelming humanitarian necessity’:
Many legal scholars in the UK and elsewhere in Europe were unconvinced. A legal opinion prepared for the opposition Labour Party by Professor Dipo Akande of Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict insisted that the government had to comply with international law as it was and not as they wished it to be (notice that reference in the earlier briefing to the government’s desire to ‘develop’ international law):
International law does not permit individual states to use force on the territory of other states in order to pursue humanitarian ends determined by those states.
A legal analysis conducted by the Bundestag’s research service reached substantially the same conclusion, and on the other side of the Atlantic even a passionate defender of humanitarian intervention like Harold Hongju Koh was not satisfied that the bar had been met (see also also Anders Henrikesen here).
These contrary opinions reinforced the central legal objection raised by most critics: that the US and its allies had responded to an alleged violation of international law by breaking it themselves. Jack Goldsmith and Oona Hathaway explain this with concision and clarity. The problem with claiming that Syria had breached the Chemical Weapons Convention(1997) – the central legal instrument in the case – is that the Convention ‘provides an enforcement system that the three powers involved in [the] airstrikes entirely bypassed’:
The Convention provides, first, for investigation by the experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons….
Then, in situations of “particular gravity,” the Conference of the States Parties may bring a matter to the attention of the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council. Nowhere does the Convention provide for unilateral uses of force in response to a breach of the Convention.
This is the formal, legal version of the ‘rush to judgement’ objection (above), and it has considerable force.
And yet the legal envelope governing military violence has often been extended throughmilitary violence (as Eyal Weizman puts it, ‘in modern war, violence legislates’), and Jan Lemnitzer has suggested that by virtue (sic) of these missile strikes – and the legal armature that yokes the humanitarian protection of civilians to the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons – we may be witnessing ‘the emergence of a new norm (customary international law) that justifies the use of force to counter the deployment of chemical weapons against civilians’ (for a more detailed discussion see Michael Schmitt and Chris Ford commenting on the 6 April 2017 missile strikes here). If this is the case – or if the UK’s wish to ‘develop’ international law on humanitarian intervention is in the process of being fulfilled – then this map of international state reaction to the strikes will be extremely important:
‘Fake news’ and ‘false flags’
Before and after the attacks on Douma, officials in Russia and Syria together with their proxies have been busily running all sorts of interference. These activities spin far beyond the the circles of presidents, ministers, ambassadors and their direct agents and even beyond the grey zone of disinformation sites and bot farms; there is also an army of one-trick academics, self-styled journalists and commentators populating a metastasizing archipelago of misinformation that reaches from the alt.right round to the alt.left. To set out my case in these non-neutral terms is not to endorse the statements and actions of the US, the UK and their allies. But objecting to the air wars conducted by this alliance does not mean suspending critical judgement about the actions of their opponents either. In the particular case of Syria, it means not turning a blind eye to the authoritarian constitution of the Assad regime and to the extraordinary, criminal violence it has visited on hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians. As Mehdi Hasan asks, in another appropriately angry commentary I urge you to read, even if you doubt in all conscience that the Assad regime did launch a chemical weapons attack on Douma on 7 April, why minimize its other crimes and abuses? More here and here.
Those who have sought to defend the Assad regime against the charge of using chemical weapons in Douma have followed two main avenues.
A first response has been simply to dismiss the reports as ‘chemical fabrications’ and ‘deceitful speculations’: to insist that there was no evidence of a chemical weapons attack. On 8 April, for example, Ben Hubbard reported:
The Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the reports as fake. “The spread of bogus stories about the use of chlorine and other poisonous substances by government forces continues,” the ministry said in a statement. “The aim of such deceitful speculation, lacking any kind of grounding, is to shield terrorists,” it added, “and to attempt to justify possible external uses of force.”
As the videos and testimonies I cited earlier circulated, the outright denials were replaced by an altogether more sensational scenario. Russian and Syrian officials claimed that the attack had been staged by Jaish al-Islam in concert with the Syrian Civil Defence (‘White Helmets’) and, by implication, the Syrian-American Medical Society and other NGOs:
(Particular opprobrium seems to be visited on any NGO providing medical help to the sick and injured in rebel-held areas, even though this is explicitly sanctioned by international law; it has also been consistently withheld and obstructed by the Syrian government).
The indictment eventually swelled to include the United Kingdom (which had claimed Russia was responsible for the nerve-agent attack on the former British spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury on 4 March); Reuters reported on 13 April:
“We have… evidence that proves Britain was directly involved in organizing this provocation,” [Russian] Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said. Konashenkov said that Russia knew “for sure” that between April 3-6, the White Helmets – a group which helps civilians in opposition-held territory in Syria – were “under severe pressure specifically from London to produce as quickly as possible this pre-planned provocation.”
The ‘evidence’ was never produced – nor were the British Special Forces soldiers allegedly captured as part of the operation paraded before the cameras either.
Instead, the disinformation campaign relied on two manoeuvres. The first was a counter-argument in the form of a question: what advantage could the Assad regime conceivably hope to gain by using chemical weapons when its forces were on the brink of defeating JAI and bringing all of East Ghouta under their control? This is a familiar tactic. When questioned about the targeting of hospitals in rebel-held areas Assad disingenuously asked: ‘… the very simple question is: why do we attack hospitals and civilians?’ There are sound answers to that – see my account of ‘The Death of the Clinic‘ – and there are to this version too. Remember that in the closing stages of the Syrian-Russian offensive against Douma negotiations with JAI had collapsed. Now here is Juan Cole:
On Saturday [7 April], the Russian press reported that Army of Islam spokesmen boasted that the [Syrian Arab Army] special operations Panther Forces (Quwwat al-Nimr) [this is a special unit of Tiger Force: see here] that had been committed against Ghouta militias were taking high numbers of casualties from Army of Islam snipers as they tried to advance into Douma. The regime has suffered a military collapse over the past seven years, with most Sunni Arabs deserting or defecting. Alawi Shiite troops are for the most part loyal to the regime, but there may be only 35,000 or 50,000 of them left (the Syrian Arab Army had 300,000 troops in 2010).
The long and the short of it is that strongman Bashar al-Assad cannot afford to lose highly trained and highly valuable Panther Forces troops in large numbers.
Chemical weapons are used by desperate regimes that are either outnumbered by the enemy or are reluctant to take casualties in their militaries… It might be asked why the regime would take this chance, given that Trump bombed the Shuaryat Air Force base last year this time in response to regime use of chemical weaponry at Khan Shikhoun. The answer is that the regime is more worried about disaffection in the ranks of its Special Forces than it is about Trump.
An investigation by Christian Esch and others for Der Spiegel added other plausible motivations:
Why would the Syrian regime deploy chemical weapons when it is already on the verge of victory? One motive could have been the desire to speed up the withdrawal of the hated rebels from the city. Douma was the last enclave remaining under rebel control. Or was it revenge? The Army of Islam, the Islamist group which controlled Douma, was relatively strong and regularly fired shells at nearby Damascus.
The Islamists long held a trump card in their hand: They were thought to be holding several thousand regime loyalists prisoner. That, however, was an exaggeration with which the Syrian regime sought to mislead its followers, a glimmer of hope that many troops long believed to be dead might still be alive after all. When it became clear that a large number of the presumed prisoners were in fact dead, it came as a painful blow and the thirst for revenge was correspondingly high. The rebels, meanwhile, had lost their trump card.
None of this settles matters, I realise, so let me turn the question around: what possible advantage could JAI conceivably hope to gain by staging a fake chemical weapons attack? If its leaders believed they could provoke a rapid military intervention (by whom?) to snatch them from the jaws of defeat – the Islamic equivalent of a Hail Mary pass – then it was a supremely stupid miscalculation: the immediate consequence of the attack, within a matter of hours, was the capitulation of Jaish al-Islam.
The second manoeuvre involved in the attempted indictment of JAI and others opposed to the Assad regime has been to substitute alternative evidence to counter the prosecutorial force of the videos, first-hand observations and expert testimony I detailed earlier. I’ll discuss three exhibits.
First, JAI’s ‘chemical weapons factories’. As the envelope of occupation in East Ghouta was extended, Syrian Arab Army officers escorted international journalists to several sites which they claimed were artisanal weapons factories. Eliot Higgins and the Bellingcat team already showed that Jaish al-Islam was indeed capable of producing makeshift weapons, including improvised mortars, rockets, grenades and rifles. But chemical weapons? In March Syrian TV broadcast video of what it described as a chemical weapons laboratory-cum-manufactory-cum-warehouse at al Shifuniya filled with industrial equipment:
The discovery was amplified by RT and other Russian news media before the attack on Douma:
The narrative was resurrected by dependent journalist Vanessa Beeley the day after the Douma attack. She cited the discovery of a ‘chemical weapons laboratory’ in the Douma Farms area between al Shifuniyeh and Douma, and then recounted a ‘similar experience’ – on the day before the attack – during ‘a foreign media trip to the liberated sectors of Eastern Ghouta with the Syrian Arab Army’. At Irbin she was shown ‘a bomb making factory and a chemical weapons facility’, including ‘chemical ingredients and rockets’ and a barrel containing what looked like tar (a significant discovery since she was under the impression that the Douma attack involved napalm, which was, as she explained at length, ‘an American invention’):
An expert who was with us said it was a mix of oil, soap and other ingredients that are used to coat the missile to ensure the chemical package sticks to its target more effectively. This was a factory of death… where the terrorist factions had designed some of the most sadistic weaponry possible to be used against civilian targets.
Several days later Adam Rawnsley asked Cheryl Rofer – a chemist who used to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory – and Clyde Davies, a former research chemist, to examine the videos of the buildings at al Shifuniyeh. They both agreed that whatever the facility had been used for it was highly unlikely to have been the production of chorine gas or sarin. Here are the key paragraphs from Adam’s investigation into what he concluded was a ‘chemical weapons lie’:
Asked if the equipment in the videos of Al-Shifuniya could be used to produce chlorine gas, Cheryl Rofer … said “no.” Chlorine is typically produced with electrolysis cells using either large amounts of salt or hydrochloric acid as feedstock and lots of electricity to produce and recover the gas. “Chlorine is a gas at room temperature and pressure,” explains Clyde Davies… “Its ‘critical point,’ below which it can be liquefied, is about 144 C, but it needs high pressure to do this, which is why it is stored and shipped in gas cylinders. Just like the ones that were dropped on Douma.”
The process can be dangerous and requires special equipment, according to the UN Joint Investigative Mechanism. “In the light of its corrosive and toxic nature, expertise and specialized equipment are required for its safe handling. For example, to transfer chlorine from a 1 ton container to smaller containers, a specialized filling station is required.” And this facility isn’t anywhere near “the scale needed for the attacks that have been observed,” Rofer wrote in an email. “All of the equipment, except for the boilers, is at laboratory scale. But the more fundamental problem is that none of the equipment is what is needed to produce chlorine and compress it into the cylinders that Bellingcat has documented” in Douma.
Nor could the facility be used to produce nerve agents. “For sarin production, all of this would have to be much more contained than it is,” Rofer writes. The ramshackle construction in the facility would’ve put anyone nearby at high risk of exposure, which can cause harm at very low concentrations.
A second series of exhibits focused on the elaborate mise-en-scène of a staged chemical weapons attack. In order to discount the videos of the casualties in Douma – shot at multiple locations by different people – claims circulated that the video record (in its dispersed entirety) was faked. This too is a shop-worn tactic; the alt.right in the United States and elsewhere has consistently peddled a meretricious conspiracy fantasy of ‘crisis actors’ pretending to have survived supposedly non-existent incidents like the mass shootings at Sandy Hook or Parkland. Many of the same websites responsible for those repugnant claims have also stoked the fires of fantasy about Douma, like Alex Jones‘s ‘Infowars’ (see below, and the critical discussion by Bethania Palma and Scott Lucas here):
In the Douma case, however, photographs have been adduced as evidence for the artful staging of a chemical attack. Soon afterwards images showing actors being made up, covered in dust, and the cameras rolling were shown on Russian TV’s news programme Vesti, and they have circulated widely on the web. The first screenshot (‘The White Helmets unmasked by photographs’) is from the French-language site of globalresearch.ca and the second is from the source for the story, Pénélope Stafyla:
It was in this very studio, so these commentators claimed, that the Syrian Civil Defence – the White Helmets – fabricated ‘proof of war crimes committed by the Assad regime in East Ghouta’.
The photographs are not fakes; the performance was real. But an investigation by AFP’s fact-checking blog Factuel and Bellingcat discovered that these are all stills from a film, “Revolution Man“, which was shot in Damascus and funded by Assad’s own Ministry of Culture. Here is the film’s Facebook page:
And here is the film company’s synopsis of the project:
The film revolves around a journalist who enters Syria illegally in order to take pictures and videos of the war in Syria in search of fame and international prizes, and after failing to reach his goal, he resorts to helping the terrorists to fabricate an incident using chemical materials, with the aim of turning his photos into a global event.
In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the fantasists, there was one more spin to the story: Vesticlaimed that the film was shot by the White Helmets on a set standing in for the real set in which Revolution Man was shot… You can’t make it up — except, of course, you can. More here and here, and a discussion by Christian Chaise of AFP’s remarkable fact-checking protocols here.
Another film, another fake. On 22 April Russia’s two main TV channels showed a series of still photographs from a film set as ‘obvious evidence’ that videos of the Douma attack had been staged and that the victims were were ‘crisis actors’. Faris Mohammed Mayasa, a production assistant who was by then in the custody of Syrian forces, confirmed that ‘We put people on the ground and sprayed them with water, so they looked as if they had suffered.’ Again, the photographs are genuine; they were taken on a film set; and, still more disturbing, the film was produced in the Ghouta (it was shot in Zamalka and edited in Douma):
But, as Marc Bennetts reported, the film was Humam Husari‘s Chemical, made in 2016 to tell the story of the sarin gas attack on the Ghouta in 2013. Husari had witnessed the effects of the attack himself – ‘I wasn’t filming because I am a cameraman, I was filming because this is the only thing I could do for the victims’ – and his short film was an attempt to explore how ordinary people had been drawn to the struggle against the Assad regime. Here is Lisa Barrington reporting for Reuters in October 2016:
Humam Husari’s self-financed short film explores the chemical attack near Damascus through the eyes of a rebel fighter who lost his wife and child but was denied time to bury them. Instead, he is called to defend his town from a government offensive. The story is based on real-life events, he said.
“We need to understand how people were pushed into this war and to be part of it,” said Husari, 30. “I am talking about a story that I lived with. They are real characters.”
Making the film was an emotional but necessary experience for Husari and his performers, who were witnesses to and victims of the attack, and not trained actors.
“The most difficult thing was the casting and auditions,” said Husari, who took about two months to write, produce and direct the 15-minute film and is currently editing it.
“A 70-year-old man said to me: I want to be part of this movie because I lost 13 of my family … I want the world to know what we’ve been through. And all I wanted from him is just to be a dead body,” he said.
The final series of exhibits has involved the substitution of other witnesses who vehemently deny that a chemical attack took place in Douma. Both Russia and Syria claim to have discovered witnesses whose testimony contradicts those I cited earlier. Most deny that any chemical weapons attack occurred, but a recent report by Robert Fisk for the Independentoffers a particularly revealing example. While the OPCW team was prevented from starting its work in Douma by Syrian concerns about the security situation, the regime nevertheless arranged a tour of the shattered city for selected journalists. I should say at once that I have long admired Fisk’s reporting of Israel/Palestine; but this account is a sly, innuendo-ridden affair. Fisk says he wandered away from his minders:
It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic – “Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city – is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye. “I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
Ever since the combined bomber offensive of the Second World War we have known that many victims of air raids die of asphyxiation rather than blast injury, so suppose for a moment that Fisk’s doctor was not only sincere but also correct. In that case – since Jaish al-Islam has never had an air force – then dozens of civilians would have been killed and injured in a Russian or Syrian air raid. Yet Fisk doesn’t mention that; in fact he doesn’t dwell on the victims at all, who are rapidly airbrushed from the scene.
Instead the doctor’s testimony has been cited by commentators on social media to trump the claims of multiple other witnesses as singular ‘proof’ that no CW attack took place. Fisk doesn’t quite say that, and Jonathan Cook insists he doesn’t have to:
Fisk does not need to prove that his account is definitively true – just like a defendant in the dock does not need to prove their innocence. He has to show only that he reported accurately and honestly, and that the testimony he recounted was plausible and consistent with what he saw.
‘This is not the only story in Douma,’ Fisk concedes, before immediately adding:
There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups.
None of them is quoted, and apparently nobody else was available: ‘By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7 April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry’, and while it was important to hear the White Helmets’ side of the story ‘a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.’ That is a remarkable sentence the more you chew on it: the bravery of the White Helmets in rescuing victims is ignored; instead they are artfully transformed into cowards running for cover at the first opportunity; their fellow-travellers (sic) were the armed groups; and yet they were given sanctuary on ‘government-organised and Russian-protected buses’. Such generosity.
But that’s simply a drive-by smear. The main work is done by Fisk’s doctor, whose words are seemingly sufficient to rubbish or, if you prefer, cast doubt on all those other testimonies. It is not even clear from Fisk’s account that the doctor was in the clinic when the casualties were brought in (‘I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night’, and Fisk himself admits that the doctors who were on duty that night were all in Damascus).
Yet, remarkably, other journalists on the same escorted tour somehow found other people whose accounts contradicted Fisk’s doctor and jibed with those other testimonies. Whether they were also ‘a short walk away’ I don’t know; but here are two of them speaking to Seth Doane of CBS News:
Today we made it to that very house where that suspected chemical attack took place. “All of a sudden some gas spread around us,” this neighbour [below] recounted. “We couldn’t breathe. It smelled like chlorine” …
Nasser Hanen‘s brother Hamzeh is seen in that activist video, lifeless and foaming at the mouth.
In the kitchen he told us how his brother tried to wash off the chemicals. [Asked how the chemicals got there], “The missile up there,” he pointed, “on the roof.”
A Swedish journalist, Sven Borg, also recorded his interview with Nasser Hanen (I’ve taken this from Scott Lucas‘s account here – the translation is by Hugo Kaaman):
We were sitting in the basement when it happened. The [missile] hit the house at 7 pm. We ran out while the women and children ran inside. They didn’t know the house had been struck from above and was totally filled with gas. Those who ran inside died immediately. I ran out completely dizzy….
Everybody died. My wife, my brothers, my mother. Everybody died. Women and children sat in here, and boys and men sat there. Suddenly there was a sound as if the valve of a gas tube was opened. It’s very difficult to explain. I can’t explain. I don’t know what I should say. The situation makes me cry. Children and toddlers, around 25 children.
It should be obvious that none of this adds up – that these concerted manoeuvres conspicuously fail to produce a coherent narrative – but, as Jonathan Cooke might say, it doesn’t have to. All it has to do is sow doubt and spread confusion. In an astute attempt to track the interlocking yet contradictory false-flag operations supposedly in play after the Douma attack, Uri Friedman cites Peter Pomerantsev, who explained that the larger (in his case, Russian) project
doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. … We’re rendered stunned, spun, and flummoxed by the Kremlin’s weaponization of absurdity and unreality.
‘If nothing is true,’ Pomerantsev warned, ‘then anything is possible.’
Perhaps the ultimate horror is that this strategy is not confined to Putin, Assad and their proxies. It also describes the view of an American president who treats the world as a stage for reality TV.
The bottom line
You will draw your own conclusions from all this, but for my part I am persuaded that hundreds of people were killed or injured by chemical weapons in Douma and that there are compelling reasons for suspecting that the Syrian Arab Army was the culprit.
And yet the military response by the US, France and the United Kingdom has a strong whiff of the theatrical about it. Its legitimacy was undercut by the decision to short-circuit the formal, forensic investigation by the OPCW (though I concede that this faced – and continues to face – considerable obstacles, that it is prohibited from assigning responsibility, and that these considerations diminish the reach of the investigation). The effectiveness of the tripartite response is also highly questionable – whether as sanction or deterrent – and the appeals by the allies to humanitarianism and civilian injury ring spectacularly hollow in the face of their indifference to every other form of violence inflicted on populations inside Syria and to the plight of Syrian refugees who have fled the killing fields.
I also believe that the frenzied efforts by so many to defend Syria and its allies from every criticism, to blind themselves to the repressive and violent constitution of the Syrian state, and to close their ears to the cries of its victims is utterly reprehensible. There is the stench of the theatrical about this too – not of greasepaint but of sulphur. How many chemical weapons ‘manufactories’ have to be discovered, how many film stills unearthed, how many contrary witnesses stumbled upon before those using this ‘evidence’ ask serious questions about itsprovenance, probity and meaning? To find an utter disregard for truth on the far right is no surprise; to find it on the left is a source of shame. There are questions to ask about the Douma attack and the response by the US and its allies, as I have sought to show, but the mental and moral gymnastics some of these commentators perform simply astound me. Their controlling assumption seems to be that it is impossible to object to the actions of the US and its allies and also to the actions of Russia, Syria and their allies. This really is what Leila al Shami calls ‘the anti-imperialism of idiots‘.
Posted at 08:08 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Saraland, Ala., officers are seen wrestling 25-year-old Chikesia Clemons to the ground at a suburban Mobile Waffle House, exposing the young lady’s breasts to patrons.Screenshot: AL.com
Add asking about whether it’s protocol to pay for plastic utensils to the list of things you apparently can’t do while black without someone calling the police on you.
Video footage showing the brutal takedown by police of a black Mobile, Ala., woman at a local Waffle House has sparked fury both online and in the local community, prompting protests and sit-ins, AL.com reports.
The incident happened early Sunday when 25-year-old Chikesia Clemons, and her friend Canita Adams went to Waffle House. While placing an order, Clemons asked for plastic utensils, at which point an employee told her that would be an additional charge of 50 cents.
When Clemons and Adams told the employee that they had not been charged for utensils when they’d purchased food from that same Waffle House just the night before, the employee suddenly canceled their order. Clemons then asked for the contact information for the Waffle House district manager.
“They didn’t even ask her to leave, she was waiting for them to give her the district manager’s card so she could file a complaint on one of the waitresses,” Clemons’ mother, Chiquitta Clemons-Howard, told the news site. “When they went to go get the card, that’s when the police showed up. The officer should’ve come in and said, ‘We need you to leave.’”
Video shows that after briefly speaking to Clemons, a white Saraland, Ala., police officer dragged the young woman by her arm from where she was sitting and onto the floor of the Waffle House. Three officers stood over the young woman and pulled at her limbs as they attempted to cuff her. Their actions resulted in Clemons’ top being pulled down, exposing her breasts.
Throughout the entire altercation, Clemons and Adams can be heard attempting to get answers out of the officers as to why Clemons was being apprehended.
“What are you doing?” Clemons asks.
“I’ll break your arm, that’s what I’m about to do,” an officer can be heard responding.
Even as the two women voice their distress, customers can be seen eating in the background.
Clemons was ultimately charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, Clemons-Howard told the news site. The mother paid Clemons’ $1,000 bond Sunday morning.
“The footage shows the story completely,” the upset mother said. “My nerves are very, very bad right now.”
Mobile NAACP President David Smith released a statement Sunday, noting that the organization would be gathering facts on the incident, especially in light of the recent, inexplicable arrest of two black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks.
“In light of the current situation in our country—such as the arrest of two young black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks coffee shop—we felt it was important for our members to get a firsthand account of the incident, which has now gone viral on social media locally and across the country,” Smith noted.
As for the officers, a spokesperson for the Saraland Police Department, Detective Collette Little, said that the department would be investigating.
“The Saraland Police Department is aware of the arrest at Waffle House and the accompanying video on social media,” a department statement read. “The situation is being thoroughly reviewed and is under active investigation right now. Our department strives for transparency and we encourage our community to be aware of current events.”
In the meantime, Waffle House appears to be siding with the police actions.
A Waffle House spokesperson told AL.com that although it is “still obtaining and reviewing information,” it believes that there is reason to question Clemons’ version of what happened.
“[I]t’s fair to say that the information we have received at this point differs significantly from what has reportedly been attributed to Ms. Clemons and strongly supports the actions taken by the Saraland Police Department,” spokesperson Pat Warner told the news site via email.
Posted at 08:33 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)
According to the best record available, this is how it went down.
Márton: [inaudible]
Bob: While we’re here?
Márton: Here, yes.
Bob: All of us?
Márton: Yeah. That would be great.
Bob: Where would be a great place to do it?
Jane: To do what?
Bob: [inaudible]
Jane: Parliament?
Márton: Yeah.
General chatter, overlapping voices.
Bob: Have you any advice if we get arrested?
Márton: As a performance, or real?
Laughter.
Bob: If we were performing something.
Márton: I’ve never been arrested as a performer.
Bob: The arrest would be part of the performance.
Márton: I have an idea. We arrest you. Then you won’t be arrested by the police. What do you think? So before you having been arrested, I arrest you.
Bob: So you arrest me?
Márton: Yes.
Bob: Okay.
Márton: [inaudible]
Bob: Where would we go?
Márton: To the Parliament, of course.
Unidentified voice: What are you doing?
Bob: [inaudible]
Laughter
Jane: [inaudible]
Bob: Possibly. [inaudible]
Jane: On Friday.
Annet: We have kind of an open schedule on Friday. [inaudible]
Jane: The train is at 8.24 ... there’s a preview ...
Márton: You won’t be there because you will have been arrested.
Jane: We’re open to requests and there’s plenty of time to get arrested in the meantime. I don’t know how quick they are at letting you out, here.
Bob: If you were going to arrest me, where would you take me? Into a car?
Márton: I would just let you know that from that moment you will be arrested. That would be enough. It sounds [inaudible] but ... But you will know. You will feel differently from that point. You will know. I know that [it?] feels different.
Bob: Okay. Have you been arrested?
Márton: In that sense, yes.
Laughter
Bob: I think we should do this, it sounds really good.
Márton: I can give you a written paper. Signed by me.
Gyongyi: A Statement, right?
Márton: That you are arrested.
Bob: So —
Laughter
Bob: There are a couple of details. Like, what time? Whereabouts? And what am I doing? I’m reciting something. Or I’m just performing something. Or I could be standing there doing nothing at all.
Márton: Existing.
Laughter
Márton: But of course we can do something special.
Bob: But we need to know where to rendezvous.
Márton: At the Parliament. To give you that strong presence, and the historical and cultural background. You are a visitor, a guest, so you can choose when to be arrested.
Bob: Noon is a good time.
Márton: Yes. [inaudible]
Bob: [inaudible]
Jane: We could draw a chalk square. So you’re arrested. And then we could draw a square the size of an average sized police cell. And then Bob has to stay in that square. Until you get bailed. Maybe they decide not to charge you.
Bob: If Márton’s going to arrest me, it’s up to him to decide what happens to me. I might be taken away ...
Olivia: To a spa.
Márton: It will depend on my mood on Friday. So I cannot forsee. Because, bureaucrats, administrators, are like [inaudible], so they have moods. [inaudible] It depends.
Bob: And you have a lot of bureaucrats working with you.
Márton: Of course. Not working with me, but working on me.
Jane: In Britain, if you’re arrested, you have to be charged within 24 hours. In Hungary, how long can they hold you before you’re charged?
Márton: I don’t know exactly. In theory at least you have the right to call your lawyer. But as far as I know it doesn’t happen [inaudible]
Gyongyi: Yes, but there must be a time limit. It’s not that you can be kept there endlessly.
Márton: It’s probably more than one day. I would say it’s two days, but it would be more like three days in your case.
Bob: Gonna need three days.
Jane: We’ll see you back in Manchester.
Bob: Give my lawyer a call while you’re over there. Well I think this is really exciting.
Jamie: We’ll all get the train.
Márton: It may be for an indefinite time.
John: And is he allowed to leave the country in this time?
Márton: As far as I know, at this moment — it can change, of course — he can do anything he likes [inaudible] And from that moment you’ll feel like a Hungarian.
Laughter
Jane: Yes. It’s good for [inaudible]
Bob: Yes, I want to be [inaudible]
Jane: Well then, this sounds great.
Bob: Will people notice the arrest?
Márton: It depends on their sensibility. Because you will look different.
Jamie: In fact, we haven’t visited the Parliament.
Bob: We’ve seen it from a long way off.
Márton: I am 65 and I have never visited the Parliament.
Gyongyi: Not inside.
Márton: It’s difficult to avoid it as a view, of course. It’s too big.
Bob: What’s it like inside?
Jamie: Like a Parliament. Very grand and very showy.
Márton: It’s the biggest one in continental Europe.
Jamie: And you know it was designed after the British Parliament? The Houses of Parliament? [inaudible] one metre bigger than the British Parliament!
Laughter
Gyongyi: It was for a bigger country, before the First World War.8
Is it near?
Is it hard?
Is it cold?
Does it weigh much?
Is it heavy?
Do you have to carry it far?
Are those the hills?
Do you buy the cat?
What do you do if you want a cat?
Aren’t you and I the same person?
Don’t you?
What forest is this between me and the place I belong?
Will our world be in ruins?
Will you be training to go into outer space?
Am I on the edge of an invisible line between one way of looking at things and another?
We must go down to the crossroads, try to flag a ride. There were human feces covering the walls. There was much sting. It was a week of crossing from abstraction into decay. His indexes were sheer entertainment: look up “pulled tooth”! Look up “dream of swimming!” Look up, “dream of yolkless soft-boiled eggs”! When I said I knew that, I heard my own voice in my own head rather than that of a cartoon character dancing on a laptop screen. Half-lives or three-quarter lives or the lives that come to meet you on the “more is more” plan, then after a few days. “Sad poppet,” Marthe said, when the dog lay down beside her. Who makes bread out of bones? Which is to say that every time someone tells me they’ve got a virus I think of that 70s film with the apparently deserted township out in the desert and the entire population then discovered strewn about dead, the blood in their veins turned to dust. Bright moments! Bright moments! Plants, air, rain, heat, humans, animals, bacteria, insect life! To carefully watch a vine tear off a whole wall of siding may be worth more than a year’s worth of reading political theory. And it’ll be certainly more satisfying! Everything else you’ve heard is wrong. While chewing gum can’t be broken down by the acids in the stomach the way radicchio or, say, raw venison, can, gum nevertheless does not “stick” inside the body. It emerges later, incorporated into regular shit. And that doesn’t take seven years. Nor does LSD embed itself into the cells of the spinal cord. Lysergic acid is water soluble and vanishes from the body’s systems hours after you stop listening to life-size wolves reading Blake or watching a million bees erupt from the sand you are lying on just across the Coast Highway from the canyon up by Zuma with Bob or talking to the leprechaun perched on your shoe or reading Blake yourself (the Book of Job) by the light of the torch on that Rick Griffin Big Brother / Santana poster you’ve had on every wall of every place you’ve ever lived for the past 45 years ... or whatever. When I first read the title of Jeff Derksen’s poem “In Memory of My Heavy Metal Years,” I figured I knew what I was in for. And I was ready for it. But I was wrong. It opens with a brief series of farewells:
There goes the
aluminum, the antinomy, the arsenic
the barium, the cadmium
the cesium, the gadolinium
the lead
the mercury
the nickel, the thalium, and
the tin.
The “heavy metals” in this alphabetical catalog range from the familiar toxicity of lead and mercury, to the weirder perils of gadolinium and thalium. And there is one item in this list that doubles as chemical element and rhetorical figure: “antinomy,” a word referring to both a lustrous gray metalloid and a logical conundrum in which a statement produces real or apparent mutual exclusivity, like “this sentence is false.” Except “antinomy” is not the name of the heavy metal, that’s antimony. I first ran across this confusion in a very expensive book published by Cambridge University Press. It’s still a fine poem, of course, Brandon, I just can’t stop myself from mentioning this. But I love your story about “This one guy Mike who came to school on Monday morning with no eyebrows. ‘What happened to your eyebrows, Mike?’ He told us that he had gotten in a fight over the weekend and somebody had burned them off.” For some reason he reminds me of this petty thief I used to know, whom we called Lump Sum Tony because he could get whatever you wanted “for a lump sum.” Desmond was something else, tho. For one thing, he was extremely fucking rich. His dad had made a killing on a local franchise of lighting stores called Winter House of Lights. You can’t make this shit up. I guess if you have the last name “Winterhouse” and you are plotting some entrepreneurship, you can make it the “Winter House” of whatever, including lamps. Anyway, Desmond spent his dad’s money on an exquisite collection of metal memorabilia. I marvel that he could have had so many Iron Maiden shirts pre-Internet. And there was the time he stole the fetal pigs leg from a bio class and stuck it on the antenna of his Camaro IROC, where it just sat to rot. And while the internet of things is pretty much like
a troupe of seventeen-year-old
Iron Maiden freaks puking inside their tent
the hard look is “to do / MAGIC”
I’m going to stand at the bus stop now
One thing Berrigan used to say was to the effect, “All I’ve ever wanted is to be a poet, & I’ve gotten my wish ... And I didn’t say ‘great poet’ -- I don’t want that -- I said ‘poet’. The implication was that to want to be a ‘great poet’ was a slightly inferior aspiration; to be a poet was magical & complete.” In other words, reading the first poem in Circus Nerves, “Ancestor Worship,” in which
The young master
coughed himself inside out one day, and bravo!
rematerialized as a red cactus
you’d be forgiven for not noticing that the poem is, in one way of describing it, about giant insects eating the world. And take “Nov 25”, for example, which ends:
we’ll wrap our bombed friends in palm fronds
and become a singing people (did you enjoy your turkey)
hey we are a singing people (the wing part tasted metallic).
Wendy just told me about a former colleague who kept a pillow under her desk for take lunchtime naps. And the porch ceiling, painted “haint” blue, for warding off spirits ... and the coastline, which is washing away at a perilous rate — 2000 square miles in just 80 years. And the two hundred small metal doors. And the monotonous drone from the enormous speakers. The individuals were originally identified by curate.la in an Instagram story as three males and one female, all relatively young. None of the individuals involved in the act claimed open allegiance to a protesting group, nor has any specific group taken responsibility for the action. So what I do is lengthen the sound of the bell, apply long-delay feedback, and then I can play the sound for up to three minutes. Or three months. If one thing matters, everything matters. Everything was forever, until it was no more. Is life itself a transitional object? One cannot write with one part of the machine, so
I guess you could say I did a good job at the gala
the development consultant said I was a natural
someone should slap a nametag on me
she praised my dress
I’d been waiting for the chance to confess its price, $27
and where I got it, Forever 21
two rounded, rubber handrails at the entrance
of an escalator stick out of a green makeshift wall. I mean
we’re in toon town gag order pause a judge up the creek like
a FREE sign taped to garbage, your life is whose? the trees sneeze
and cough, we’re all dirty water
the “chase” of these scenes is all in the wit and anarchy
we’re in a chik-fil-a spiking the sweet tea w/ birth control so
listen, where
we left off i was saying don’t play basketball when i’m talking about
heraclitus. but you play basketball. and i talk about heraclitus. we
dribble in the same river twice. the river is broke and the blackbird
is flying. the adjunct, my friend, is blowing in the wind
you cannot separate the job from the house from the rent from
the earth from the food from the healthcare from the water from
the transit from the war from the schools from the prisons from
the war from the water from the house from the healthcare from
the war from the transit from the schools from the food from the
job from the prisons from the rent from the earth
and that within the great aquarium of language the light refracts variously and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed. Some of the codes will unfold with merely adept connivance, others will swim vigorously into and by circulation inside their own medium. If you can imagine staff notation etched on the glass you can read off the scales, da carpo and mirror-folded. ‘The fish of [illegible] melts into the face of the water’ — thus the iconic boundary features declare, by difference and by movement of an intense register, shifts of focus that will skim and can turn about on the smallest coin. The colour force suffuses a diagram to prevent the leakage of energy into pre-determined frames of control. ‘The world is small’ opined Confucius, standing on top of Mount Snowdon and chewing a banana (alternatively: ‘The world is small’ opined Catherine Malabou, standing atop Mount Diablo and chewing a hunk of whale fat.) Any western reader interested in the Chinese text from which that is translated may wish to know that a copy of the original has been added to the collection held by the University Library, Cambridge (England), where it may be consulted upon request. At which point the Kid announces, “My mother called me Bonny William ... Now they all call me Kid Death.” He is an object other men wish to kill — as if death could be killed, or the impulse to kill could be killed, or ended by killing. He stands at the centre of impotence in western culture. When Lobey asks the Kid what westerns he himself really admires, and what a western is, he replies: ‘It’s an art-form the Old Race, the humans, had before we came.’ Within that repetition, Kid Death is himself a killer repetition factor that has to be transcended, not killed. Eventually, he vanishes into quote unquote wherever he goes. Lobey’s search takes him to the source cave of all earth caves — the source cave turns out to be ‘a net of caves that wanders beneath most of the planet ... The lower levels contain the source of the radiation by which the villages, when their populations become too stagnant, can set up a controlled random jumbling of the genetic code. Another way to look at it is this: In the far future humans have moved on and an alien race have come to inhabit our abandoned shells. Unfortunately, they are devolving into mutants. One of them, Lobey, gifted with music, sets out to find his love Friza, the latest to die by a mysterious hand. He leaves his village, battles a minotaur, travels with dragon herders haunted by the spectre of a supernatural Billy the Kid and arrives in a city where one finds or rather is about to find Orpheus and Christ. For sheer invention, this is really fine stuff unless you’re allergic to the remotest hint of cheese, eee gee the “myth of the Beatles.” Apparently, in the future they are part of the pantheon of gods (which probably didn’t sound quite so ridiculous when the book was published, in 1968). Delany’s expert eye for mythological archetype allows him to draw some thoughtful parallels nevertheless: the Beatles are torn apart by fangirls (shades of Dionysus there) and later reform into a singular entity (like Osiris, perhaps?). Which reminds me, the vast majority of soldiers in the North American Revolutionary War either had to be drafted or bribed. Something else happens in the paintings. Wong makes myriad lines, dots, daubs, and short, lush brushstrokes, eventually arriving at an imaginary landscape that tilts away from the picture plane. Or as the blurb for the comic book has it, “In the afterlife, the author of ANTI-OEDIPUS must cross the Lethe to get to the other bank. During the crossing the dead philosopher takes the oars and evokes his past life. On the far side, Barthes, Lacan and Foucault await him. But before he can even meet up with them the ferry reverses course and takes him back to the beginning. The scene plays out and repeats several times, time for the philosopher aided by Charon to understand that repetition is not repetition of the same but ...” etc. So who’s the “We”? Who left all this stuff here? What were they doing with it? What happened? How did these things come together in these layers and strange assemblages? One hundred and eleven volcanic rocks, chunks of marble, petrified trees, hundreds of organic objects — including the remains of birds, fish, god knows what kinds of decomposing meat. As Villar Rojas put it, “I don’t have nor do I pretend to have any control over the semiotic dimensions of the material that I liberate.” This includes the labor of converting a former police warehouse into a museum of contemporary art in the first place. The redesign was done by Frank Gehry, but then Villar Rojas and his team redesigned the redesign and built their site-specific installation within this new frame. “Housekeeping,” then, refers to all of that invisible labor which allows the show to exist. In the exhibition, this is slyly hinted at by a mysterious room hidden within the cavernous exhibition space. This small room looks like an empty backroom or backstage but is clearly not at all functional — an empty Easter egg that seems to mock our looking for something behind the scenes. All signs of housekeeping have disappeared, though of course, the labor remains. Helen Molesworth makes the necessary resilience of this kind of work clear by more or less saying that: “One of the things that I feel certain will survive in one hundred years,” she says, “is that somebody with a broom is still going to have to follow the parade.” Who is the “We”? It seems fitting to quote Robin Coste Lewis here, the prologue to her Voyage of the Sable Venus: What follows is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalogue entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present. The formal rules I set for myself were simple: 1) No title could be broken or changed in any way. While the grammar is completely modified–I erased all periods, commas, semi-colons–each title was left as published, and was not syntactically annotated, edited, or fragmented. 2) “Art” included paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, lithographs, engraving, any work on paper, etc — all those traditional mediums now recognized by the Western art-historical project. However, because black female figures were also used in ways I could never have anticipated, I was forced to expand that definition to include other material and visual objects, such as combs, spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs. 3) At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many 19thcentury historically-specific markers, such as slave, colored, or Negro from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid African-American. In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well-intended), I re-erased the post-modern “African-American” and changed all those titles back. That is, I re-corrected the corrected horror to allow that original horror to stand. My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but also how normative and complicit artists, art institutions and art historians have all been in participating in — if not creating — this history. 4) As an homage, I decided to include titles of art by black women artists and curators, whether the art included a black female figure or not. Most of this work was created over the last century, with its deepest saturation occurring since the Cold War. I also included work by black queer artists, regardless of gender, because this body of work has made consistently some of the richest, most elegant, least pretentious contributions to Western art interrogations of gender and race. 5) In a few instances, it was more fruitful to include a museum’s description of the art, rather than the title itself. This was especially true for colonial period. 6) Sometimes I chose to include female figures I believed the Western art world simply had not realized was a black woman passing for white. 7) Finally, no title was repeated. OK.
I imagine the economy
must pause
& an animal
come out to clean it.
under the stars
slept the 7 dwarfs,
I meant stairs --
large & in charge,
I meant swept --
two paths diverged in a
/ half stank of blood.
“why fight if we’re already dead”
Group C:
it was good
so good
to get the words down
just right, to drain
the swan.
[Note: Sources: JBR; Bob Dickinson, “The Stone Steps of Budapest” and “The Stone Steps of Budapest 2”, at a - n, 14 and 17 Apr 018; Michel Serres, The Hermaphrodite (tr. Randolph Burks), at Academia.edu; JBR; “Poems by Max Höfler and Robert Herbert McClean” (a collaboration, put thru Google Translate), at New Books in German; Michel Serres, The Hermaphrodite (tr. Randolph Burks), at Academia.edu; Steven Rose, quoted in Ian Angus, “Five Revolutions: How bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis”, at Climate & Capitalism, 17 Apr 018; JBR; Ian Angus, “Five Revolutions: How bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis”, at Climate & Capitalism, 17 Apr 018; Aubrey Grant, “Liquidation World by Alexi Kukuljevic”, at Society + Space; JBR; Sergio de La Pava, A Naked Singularity; JBR (the sentence about Landis list is lifted from a Guardian article); Sergio de La Pava, A Naked Singularity; JBR; Lincoln Michel, and Joy Williams, “Mundanity and Insanity: on Joy Williams’s The Changeling”, at BOMB, 18 Apr 018; JBR; Joy Williams, Ill Nature; Larry Greenemeier, “AI versus AI: Self-Taught AlphaGo Zero Vanquishes Its Predecessor”, at Scientific American, 18 Oct 018; Ron Silliman, Sunset Debris, and Steve Benson, Open Clothes, quoted in Rob Stanton, “When Will This Dream End?”, at Jacket 31; Philip Jenks, “Verses of Witness in an Apocalyptic Era”, at Harriet, 18 Apr 018; JBR, riffing off a typo by Richard Lopez; Susan M Schultz, “I want to write an honest sentence”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 17 Apr 018 (the soft boiled eggs are from Mary Bloomberg); Jenny Lawson, “Giants Are Terrible Cooks”, at The Bloggess, 18 Apr 018; JBR; Martin Waterson, email rec’d 20 Apr 018, approx. 4:28am PDT; Rahsaan Roland Kirk; Anne Boyer, quoted in Alison Karasyk and Amelia Wallin, “Anne Boyer in Conversation”, at aCCessions 4; JBR; Brandon Brown, “My Heavy Metal Years”, at Harriet, 20 Apr 018 (with tons of interspersions by JBR); Nick Sturm, Susie Timmons, and Alice Notley, quoted in Sturm’s “Crystal Set #16: Locked From The Outside by Susie Timmons (Yellow Press, 1990)”, at Nick Sturm Crystal Set, 19 Apr 018; JBR; Nick Sturm, and Kenward Elmslie, quoted in Sturm’s “Crystal Set #14: Circus Nerves by Kenward Elmslie (Black Sparrow Press, 1971)”, at Nick Sturm Crystal Set, 24 Mar 018; JBR; Marthe Reed, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Marthe Reed: from ‘Ark Hive’ (forthcoming), printed here as a memorial and tribute”, at Jacket2, 20 Apr 018; Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera, “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More”, in Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (eds. Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera); Jennifer Remenchik, “Demonstrators Splash Red Paint Inside LA Gallery in Apparent Protest of Gentrification”, at Hyperallergic, 20 Apr 018; JBR; Eugeniusz Rudnik, quoted in “Underwater Bells, Plastic Bells, Polystyrene Bells, Marsh Bells ...”, in Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (eds. Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera); Wolfgang Tillmans, If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters; Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (eds. Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera); JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “[Page 82 in Badiou’s Logics of Worlds II on the terror of the matheme is important]”, at e | d, 21 Apr 018; JBR; Stephanie Young, It’s No Good Everything’s Bad, Noel Black, Ryan Eckes, General Motors, quoted in Black’s “Poetry from the Picket Line”, at Hyperallergic, 21 Apr 018; J.H. Prynne, “Afterword” to “Chinese Poets”, at Jacket 20; JBR; J.H. Prynne, “Afterword” to “Chinese Poets”, at Jacket 20; JBR; “Eric Mottram on Triggernometry (5)”, at Nomadics, 21 Apr 018 (re Samuel R Delany, The Einstein Intersection); Rahina McWethy, “The Einstein Intersection – Samuel R. Delany”, at Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews, 14 Nov 013; JBR; John Yau, “Matthew Wong’s Hallucinatory Pilgrimages”, at Hyperallergic, 22 Apr 018; JBR; Terence Blake, “SALUT DELEUZE Graphic Novel (1): publisher’s summary”, at Agent Swarm, 22 Apr 018; JBR; Jon Christensen, Ursula K. Heise, “Curating the Anthropocene”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 15 Apr 018 (re Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in LA, 22 Oct 017 – 13 May 018); JBR; Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus, at LitHub, 30 Sept 015; JBR; Helen Bridwell “I Was Right Dear”]
Posted at 05:27 PM in No Sounds | Permalink | Comments (0)
But I can’t find the quote again; I wonder if someone else said it. I first made real friends with him at a kitchen table reading recipes together from The New York Times Large Type Cookbook. Reading about food was almost as good as eating it. This was 1972, and one day she asked me to make a portrait with her. And when I’d printed it and come home — I’d always show my mom and my grandmother the contact sheets and eight-by-ten resin-coated papers — she pointed at the image and said “I wanted you to make this photograph because the moment you took that picture, it was no longer me. And that’s the whole problem here. I’m not the person in those photographs.” I mean, I’m up at Syracuse studying Roland Barthes, and my mom just explained to me the theory of death in a photograph. Right? And that’s why I’ve always believed life is the experience and criterion for knowledge. That’s why “Your ancestors / planted white pebbles in the mouths / of their dead and sailed them / into the eyes of the future” is still a thing. So one of the things running through my mind — again because it’s a Pittsburgh memory — is the first concert I went to: Parliament Funkadelic in the old Civic Arena. Is it even there anymore? Star Child, aka George Clinton, came out of the top of the arena in a spaceship with some silver platforms on. And I just remember: “Hey I was diggin’ on y’all’s funk for awhile / Sound like it got a three on it, though, to me.” Like, what’s that mean? Maybe that’s the origin of the mystery of the three. What did Clinton mean when he said, “Sounds like it got a three on it, though, to me”? Dear John I don’t know if you heard, but Marthe passed away this morning. There is very little information yet. I am in shock. Be well, Linda
inhabitorypoetics.blogspot.com.
To be inhabitory is to operate through spatially-located ways of knowing
& these may be at work in and as various confluences
& in Romantic (and, pre- and post-) traditions
& species of philosophy and theory
& and in (inter)disciplinary practices
& feminist theory adds "situated knowledge," calling attention to the condition of gendered embodiment
& Edward Said introduces the idea of "imaginative geography" to emphasize the role of perceptions and relationships in making a place
We are all, momentarily & finally, in zones of entanglement
& not situated in a “finite” place, but always passing through, adding our lines to myriad trajectories
commencing to make a fire
the very sound
streaming with tears
This is also the first piece I built. It is a box-like structure made of three quarter inch water pipes welded together and measuring 6x20x24 feet. These photographs show the piece after reconstruction from wind damage. Please observe plates number 49 and 50. The patina developed over a period of five or six years. As an old poem of Marthe’s has it
a fresh wind
transfigures everyone
so imagine this, on the way home, one day, as regular as the day with white clouds, the blue sky, a long road, and and the dim streetlights that always walk home by you. And then, when you get home, there is a stranger sitting on your couch. He wears a top hat and a scarlet collar and a tie. He says, “You have been waiting for me. This is the day. Welcome back!” He gives you a golden key and asks you to open the volute doorknob, the door that you have noticed before in your room but have never tried to open. You open the door and you see a long, narrow, dark road ... you walk in and ... that was not at all what you were expecting. The building is located at a sharp pinnacle next to the ocean. You wake up (this is another time) and you are on a cable car passing the ocean with two open windows. On the beach you see two tanned women in bikinis. One is standing. One is sitting, feeding a tiny blue-faced monkey from a baby bottle. For some reason you can’t quite put your finger on, you have the nagging feeling that you should know who they are. As for Elon Musk, forget what you thought you heard him say on Colbert, he doesn’t want to nuke the surface of Mars; he just wants to nuke the sky over the Martian poles every couple of seconds. The idea, he said, is to create two tiny pulsing suns over the regions. “They’re really above the planet, they’re not on the planet,” Musk said at an event for Solar City in Times Square last week. The tiny suns would then warm up the planet and turn any frozen carbon dioxide into gas. The more of the gas that’s in the atmosphere, etc, etc. When asked how difficult this would be to pull off, Musk replied, “You know how they put mice in mazes in those scary labs so we can have better shampoo and cancer drugs? Those mice are supposed to get out. And yet I think that what’s at stake is a countervailing argument against finding the “way out” at all. Or, in other words, there is no way “out” of the maze, but there are a lot of ways through it. It occurs to me that I’m most excited about is the particular affective orientation one might occupy vis-à-vis catastrophic current conditions. I mean, just think about the bugonia? It’s one of the nastiest things ever. Virgil goes on at length to describe the process in his didactic poem called Fourth Georgic. Basically, ancient apiculture formulated that bees were born in the rotting carcass of a cow. So if you’re a beekeeper and all your bees die, you go get a cow, you put it in a little shed, beat it to death, and then in a few months you have a ton of bees. Eventually all those registers collapse into a desperate, fucked-up, hilarious, beautiful world populated by Hitler-fighting kittens.” So yes, I wrote in situ while working in a State Park as a naturalist or as the Park Service calls it: an interpreter. Interpreting what, I don’t know, the mysteries of the environment, the foreign tongue of tree, creek, deer? I was also asked to present histories, narratives drawn from the lives of those who lived within the territory of the park. I was given stories about Italian and Spanish explorers, Russian cartographers, Irish immigrants. I was told no native people lived in the area, passing through only occasionally, gathering berries on the way to the ocean. At the end of the season, a mortar was discovered on a slope of rock. Clearly, in spite of what I’d been told, an indication of enduring native presence. And what of the other stories, other lives, the Chinese farmers, the Californios, the slaves and free blacks, the Miwok, Yurok, Ohlone people who were enslaved after California became a state and before the Emancipation Proclamation. So yes, today it’s so warm, “this campus is barely dressed.” I watch someone spit on a tree and think that person has just exhumed their innermost allies. I hardly ever spit but once I spat on the sidewalk and a wizened old freak chastised me: “spit on the street, people sleep on the sidewalks.” That wasn’t my only mistake. I didn’t remember ever knowing for instance that the “rite” in Rite of Spring is a collectively orchestrated torture of a young woman who is forced to dance herself to death. The opening pipes, which are called dudki in Russian, apparently reference a common motif in Russian folk tales, where an Orpheus-like primitive person charms a circle of wild beasts with his great piping. In Rite of Spring, the wild animals are bears, reflecting a tradition that bears were the real ancestors of modern humans. Speaking of which, there is nothing so beautiful as taking a week off between jobs to see your friends and drink until late and walk around the Met by yourself looking at erotic drawings on fermentation crocks, and terra cotta plates showing a teenager straddling a rooster, and Thomas Hovenden’s The Last Moments of John Brown. Then David writes me. “Glaukos is a very mysterious word. I think of it as the light effect on the fuzz of olives, or the gleam of the moon on the eyes of an owl that's turning its head.” So now of course I want to make a list of all the things I think are like glaukos. But what sonar operators began to hear amid the man-made explosions were the songs of the whales, which can sometimes last for up to 23 hours. In 1968 one of those operators was authorized to turn his body of recordings over to budding whale scientist Roger Payne, assisted by researcher Scott McVay. McVay and his mathematician wife Hella laid out primitive sonograms of fragments of the whale’s songs on their living room floor (sonograms graph the pitch and texture of a sound against time). Each ten seconds of song took about one hour to spew out from a thermal-paper sonogram-printing device, designed to break World War II codes and used in the 1960s by speech therapists. Hella was the first to appreciate the structure through this visual representation. “Amazing! ... it repeats!” Which brings to mind Galileo’s “Eppur si muove.” I mean, if you want to find the truth in life, don’t pass music by, and be sure to read the letters of Remedios Varo. My dearest sir, she writes, I have let a prudent amount of time go by and now believe, or more, I am absolutely certain that your spirit will find it auspicious to be in contact with me. I am a reincarnation of a friend you had in other times. She was little graced, physically speaking: an abundant nose, freckled complexion, reddish hair, weight less than it ought to be. Fortunately, my present incarnation has kept as a physical trait only her reddish mane. The rest my friend! what a mango! Greek nose, seductive curves, the advantage of assets beyond compare, to make a long story short ... I have a few wrinkles? a minor detail! It’s the equivalent of the noble patina that fine objects acquire. This reincarnation was not easy. After my spirit had passed, first through the body of a cat, then through that of an unfamiliar creature belonging to the world of velocity — I mean, the one that passes through us at over 300,000 kilometers per second (and which, therefore, we do not see) — I went on to land, inexplicably, in the heart of a piece of quartz. Thanks to a dreadful storm, electrical phenomena favored me, and a lightning bolt, striking said piece of quartz, freed my spirit, which, having spiraled downward, lodged in the body of a voluptuous woman who was walking by. So then! of insomnia, of cold sweats, of liver-extract injections, of the desire to dig a rabbit hole into the earth to hide in, I say nothing! In love potions, things are a bit more complicated. Also, and after long years of experimentation, I am now able to organize in an optimal way the little solar systems in the home, I’ve understood the objects’ interdependence and the necessity of placing them in a certain manner so as to avoid catastrophes, or of suddenly changing their placement to provoke acts necessary for the common good. For instance, choosing my big leather armchair as the main celestial body, having around it and at a distance of fifty centimeters in east-west position a wooden table (originally, a carpenter’s bench and strongly imbued with artisanal emotions); behind the armchair, at a distance of two and a half meters, the skull of a crocodile; to the left of the armchair, among other objects, a pipe inlaid with fake diamonds, and to the right, at a distance of three meters, a green earthenware pitcher; I have a solar system (I won’t go into a detailed description of the whole, it would be too long), which I can move at will, knowing beforehand the effects I can generate, though at times the unpredictable is generated, provoked by the rapid trajectory of an unexpected meteor across my established order. The meteor is none other than my cat. Now I’d like to ask your advice about something. This terrain we live on is highly volcanic (as you probably already know). A member of our group finds himself in a very difficult situation because of the volcanic tremors in the subsoil. A person of limited means, he lives in a terribly old house that lacks any comforts, though it has the advantage, on the other hand, of a lot of space and a fairly ample inner courtyard. This house is situated in a very central area of the city. Some months ago, a little mound began to rise of its own accord in the courtyard. Out of the mound a wisp of smoke and an intense heat began to emerge; afterward, at longish intervals, small amounts of something that we immediately saw, with horror, was lava. There’s no room for doubt: it’s a small volcano that perhaps at any moment could turn into a tremendous threat. Our friend, who doesn’t have the means necessary to look for other housing, wants this to be kept secret, since otherwise he’d be turned out of his house, which would gladden the owner, who, with the volcano as an excuse, would construct in that place a grand building complete with central heating. Well then, we immediately saw the chance to do some experiments on this manifestation of nature. Among us we quickly built some walls around the volcano and a roof to conceal it from the eyes of the neighborhood. Currently, the enclosure is used as a kitchen. The little mound’s height allows you to cook over the crater easily, and I must say that it’s admirable at preparing shish kebabs and brochettes to perfection. But we’re getting away from the advice I wanted to ask you for. Despite our nonstop work, the numerous experiments, et cetera, we have been entirely unable to include in our solar systems the substances expelled by the volcano, or to use them, either, in our practices in any way. Fresh lava is totally rebellious and to all appearances acts independently. The only outcome to date has been a severe allergy attack undergone by Mrs. Carrington, who applied a certain quantity to her scalp. “And this was before anything even remotely insane had happened when I still occasionally thought about things like how it was that people were reduced to bodies, meaning the process. How you needed cops to do it and how their master, The System, needed to be constantly fed former people in order to properly function so that in a year typical to the city where the following took place about half a million bodies were forcibly conscripted. And if you learn only one thing from the ensuing maybe let it be this: the police were not merely interested observers who occasionally witnessed criminality and were then basically compelled to make an arrest, rather the police had the special ability to in effect create Crime by making an arrest almost whenever they wished, so widespread was wrongdoing. Consequently, the decision on who would become a body was often affected by overlooked factors like the candidate’s degree of humility, the neighborhood it lived in, and most often the relevant officers’ need for overtime. None of which tells you the exact process by which someone, let’s say You, becomes a body, which account I sort of impliedly semi-promised, so imagine you are on the street, then in an incident, then a stranger’s hand is on your melon making sure it doesn’t bang the half-blue / half white USAmerican-only car with the colorful bar across the top. Imagine that, easy if you try. Now the police have twenty-four hours to get you in front of a judge for your criminal court arraignment but if you’re the perceptive sort you will monitor Time’s ceaseless consumption of this period yet rightly detect no corresponding increase in ambient urgency. Your first stop is the appropriate precinct where the arresting officer or A/O stands you before another cop known as the Desk Sergeant. He tells him the tale of your alleged sin and the two, speaker and audience, join their heads to decide what section(s) of the New York Penal Law to charge you with. Now you’ve been informally charged and with that out of the way you may be asked to remove all your clothes (the propriety of this being debated at the time) and kindly spread open your ass. This strip search is one of several ways that additional charges can still arise so while you may have been arrested for a triviality like displaying an open bottle of Heineken to the public — a prosecution normally conducted in a decidedly minor key and resolved right at arraignments — your glove clad searcher may now discover what you most sought to conceal, that you are currently holding one of the area’s surfeit of readily-available-yet-technically-illicit anesthetics in amounts ranging anywhere from the ghostly residue of celebrations past to multiple powder bricks and in locations as presumably inviolable as within your underwear or even up your ass or maybe you possess one of the other less popular forms of the all-inclusive law enforcement term contraband. In that way can minor breaches be converted into major faults and this happens often, not occasionally. The police know this and are therefore unlikely to ignore even nonsense like the above Consumption of Alcohol in a Public Place (AC §10.125). People like you know this as well yet permit it to alter their conduct not in the slightest, ensuring in the process that the number of bodies will always remain fairly constant. Another way you have to be careful not to pick up more charges is by resisting capture, even if only verbally, because such conduct can incite some of your lesser blue pacifists into a bit of retributory violence, with said violence then necessitating that you be charged with Resisting Arrest (PL §205.30) if only by way of explaining your injuries. Still at the precinct, you are printed, each of your fingers rolled in black ink then onto vestal white paper. The resulting bar code is sent to Albany for the purpose of producing a rap sheet, an accordiony collection of onion paper that means everything where you are. It means everything because sentencing like Physics and other sciences builds on what came before so that the worse your past was, the worse your present will be, and no sane person doubts the rap sheet’s depiction of the past since it’s based on unalterable fingerprints and not relative ephemera like names or social security numbers. I say no sane person because when once confronted by an individual who steadfastly claimed not to recall in the slightest what I deemed to be a highly memorable conviction on his sheet and one that substantially increased his exposure, I asked him if he planned to launch a Lockean defense whereby he could not be held responsible for something he didn’t remember as such act was not properly attributable to his personal identity at which point he gave me the blankest of stares in response then started saying increasingly odd things in rapid succession until I realized that he not only sort of knew what I was talking about, which was weird enough, but that he was undeniably insane and my ill-advised Locke reference was like the thing coming after the final straw to tip him over the Axis-II-Cluster-A edge, as it were, so that I thenceforth stopped doing things like that.” Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, the fantastic one humanizes, is with the ideal purity of its essence, happens what was. It is undressed of his artifices: without nothing in the hands, nor in the pockets; we recognize that the track on the beach, not of the súcubos is ours, nor of the ghosts, nor of the sources that cry, is of the men and the creator of the fantastic proclamation that is identified with the fantastic object. The fantastic one is not, for the contemporary man, more than a way between one hundred to reenviar its own image. So yes, I do think worms have philosophy, tho worms probably don’t use words. But if one had the right ears, one might hear something like: I am Shiva, destroyer and maker of worlds, all life passes pass thru me and is transformed, please, if you see me on the sidewalk before I shrivel up, please gently move me onto a lawn. Which is to say that there is damage. There was always damage and there will be more damage, but not always. Were there always to be more damage, damage would be an aspect of perfection. We would all be angels, one-legged and faceless, seething with endless, hopeless praise. Bless Adonai for making us better than angels. Blessed is Adonai, etc. Some damage is but destructive, and other damage, through destruction, repairs. It is often impossible, especially while the damage is being brought, to distinguish between the one kind and the other, but because You’ve made scholars who know of the distinction, we fight to forgive You. Because You know that Your mistakes, though a part of You, are nonetheless mistakes, we accept that Your mistakes, though Yours, are ours to repair. Therefore, we are writing with the smell of tear gas rising from our fingers. The springtime birdsong is punctuated by the echo of concussion grenades. Bulldozers, backed up by 2500 riot police, armored vehicles, helicopters and drones, are rampaging through these forests, pastures and wetlands to crush what we have been building here on the zone à defender. Therefore we know the mistakes, whoever’s they are, are magnificent, therefore we know they must be repaired. Therefore we greaten like the maturing head of a hammerhead shark with eyes looking in diametrically opposite directions. Therefore I have no doubt that you’ve heard of the Naga Sadhu at the Kumbh Mela who towed the District Commissioner’s car with his penis. I didn’t make that up, I learned it from Arundhati Roy. What the hell, though? How did he do it? Did he ... I have no idea how he attached the two objects (I think of Bob Flanagan here). I assume he must have walked backwards. For some reason this reminds me that, a couple of years ago, after Cecil had performed at Ornette’s funeral, I wrote down a dream: CT was doing what may be a final performance, in some sort of large genteel university room. There was a really large group and I was really stoked and moved to see this valedictory thing. they started off by playing the piece “Taht” from Winged Serpent, but as they went on, I noticed that CT himself, though he was initially there, was no longer sitting at the piano and had disappeared. There was a team of other pianists, deputizing, some of them also adorned with various little instruments, whistles, recorders, etc. What can I say? As Cecil himself put it, “Everything should be fun, it should be a celebration of life.” I mean,
“boo-ba-doo-ba DWEN-ga DWEEEEN-ga” or
“boo-ba-da DWEN-ga DWEEN-ga”
it’s sort of an infinitely variable pattern
sometimes the “boo-ba-doo-ba” or
the “DWEN-ga DWEEEEEN-ga” are extended
“booooooo-baaaaaa-dooooooo-baaaaaa DWEN-ga DWEEEEN-ga”
all those “angels of incidence”
the flambeaux bearers
showering sparks
“Ah now!”
thumb smudge
oil cans
speak’s
w
t
dobb h r
x beam
The salamander generally appears, however, as a fabulous animal, generated in fire and perishing in air, this being the view concerning it held by R. Akiba himself. G-d showed the animal to Moses in fire; when glass-blowers stoke their furnace unceasingly for seven days and seven nights, the great heat produces a creature which is like a mouse (or spider), and which is called a salamander. According to the Midrash, that is. Rashi says that it requires seven years, and the ‘Aruk postulates seventy. But in any case, the fire of hell does not harm the scribes, since they are all fire, like the Torah; and if flames cannot hurt one anointed with salamander blood, still less can they injure the scribes. Speaking of hell or infinity wars, have you already pre-ordered your tix? I looked it up: worldwide, 375,000 online opportunities. As for the Wave 2 6” action figures only three weren’t leaked: Thor, Blonde Black Widow and a Cull Obsidian. Speaking of hell, acute watery diarrhea and puking at the same time. Another central idea behind the phrase “always already” is that once a certain place in time is achieved, the being of places in time earlier than that place is transient, problematic, or unthinkable. For example, after a person finishes reading Hamlet for the first time, we may say that they have “always already” read Hamlet, and that the time before the person had read Hamlet, being now past, was or is always past. Common extensions of this phrase might follow from this example: in our modern society, we might say that having always already read Hamlet is the nature of contemporary intellect. Similarly, the modern subject has “always already” learned a language, so in a certain sense it is inconceivable to consider the pre-linguistic subject. Samite is a weaving technique composed of weft-faced compound twills and ascribed to both Central Asia and China, although presumably introduced in China only in the seventh century. The shirt is decorated with ducks wearing scarves and holding pearl necklaces in their beaks, encased in octagon motifs featuring hearts, among other shapes. These patterns reveal the shirt’s provenance: It was likely owned by a roving dignitary or courtier of the Sogdian Empire. So yes, even inanimate things have their music. Listen to the water dropping from a faucet into a bucket partially filled. Listen the music of a door as it swings lazily on its hinges, giving out tones resembling those of a bugle in the distance, forming melodic strains interwoven with graceful slides Awakened by the fierce wind of a winter night, I have heard a common clothes-rack whirl out a wild melody in the purest intervals ... ergo small filaments of rot / make it into the duende.
In the Sundarbans of South Bangladesh and India
the climate keeps worsening.
“Is my Black Radish subscription up to date?”
You pause to hug an animal
before returning to the IPCC Synthesis Report
while discussing native plant species, literature and
ethics.
I feel you in the mangrove forest
charming the Crocodilus porosus,
the Panthera tigris, the Varanus salvator, the Platinista
Gangetica and the Lepidochelys olivacea.
And that’s fine, I totally get that, I’ve even cultivated a vulnerability to that. I’m thinking of Malcolm X, precisely as X. Well, not Malcolm, not really, I’m not thinking of Nation of Islam X, I’m just thinking of X, like in algebra, of no precise definition, no promises therein, no peremptorily traceable trajectory. Of course, everything that I am saying right now is “problematic.” Alright. See what I mean! We’re bombing Syria as we speak. I wonder if this time we’re going after something other than empty outbuildings. Did I tell you that Žižek has Bell’s palsy? I’m 99% sure it’s Bell’s palsy. Remember when he said, “Think! Don’t act!” In my day job, it is exactly the opposite — and whatever is revealed in that strange moment of suspension, if only vaguely sensed, need not be parked onto a discursive grid by naming it. The refrain goes like this: jerking-it–around-to-see-what-it-knows-and-what-it-can-really-do-ness, to jerking-it–around-to-see-what-it-knows-and-what-it-can-really-do-ness, by jerking-it–around-to-see-what-it-knows-and-what-it-can-really-do-ness, as jerking-it–around-to-see-what-it-knows-and-what-it-can-really-do-ness, jerking-it–around-to-see-what-it-knows-and-what-it-can-really-do-ness this of ... dot, 6, siege / counter-siege / siege / counter-siege / siege / counter-siege ... spipping a freeze to frizz a spupping to grot grot grot: it’s like I — like, could like — there are fourteen permutations to that particular module. Remember the last time Trump shot missiles at Syria? Wasn’t he eating chocolate cake? I mean “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you have ever seen. And President Xi was enjoying it.” But I also think it’s time now to do fearless test runs on Whoever the Hell We’ve Now Become.
The fast forward version of the Process
of collapse
A freakazoid display of shockingly
deranged conniptions and Over the top
gummy bears
(zero cred)
Just to be clear: Flesh is my interim theory. But full disclosure tho: I had to limit the number of people who had write permission. And who could throw the plant, a little piece of apple, toenail clippers and everything at the drive-thru window. He was thinking of singing it instead of talking about crystals on the panel but then talked about crystals on the panel we were on together. And she handed me a strawberry from her garden. And he said that from the very beginning the moment we first met he thought about co-parenting with me, but that he probably couldn’t do it the terror was too great but we could talk about it and it was first spring and we both saw it and through the budding we embraced and then embraced again and they said I should do one of two things at my reading at the place where they had gone to school in the Pacific Northwest and offered “I keep imagining you pulling a ribbon out of your mouth it’s balled up in there and as you pull it out there’s less and less so you become more and more legible” and I said how do I pull it out and what color is it and why is it there and they said I don’t know maybe I’m remembering Caroleee Schneeman maybe? and also that “I also saw you with your hands and forearms sunk into a clear bowl of water” and he also accepted the reiki grid and let us all write into it and we all did and it overcame the abacus and The Great Cosmic Mother turns around. Her hair looks like taco meat. The great meat. Eyeballs eyeballs eyeballs. Furthermore, in this paper published eight years before Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Spielrein — who would go on to write the first psychoanalytic dissertation by a woman and to be a pioneer of child psychology, and who would be the second woman doctor ever elected to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and who would found a psychoanalytic children’s nursery and teach in the university until Stalin banned psychoanalysis in 1936, and who would in her hometown of Rostov-on-Don in Russia be shot along with her daughters by Germans for being Jews in 1942 — Spielrein understands in her essay dissolution to be different from the death drive. “An alteration comes over the whole organism; destruction and reconstruction, which under the usual circumstances always accompany each other, occur rapidly.” In other words, it wasn’t over. It wasn’t going to rest. It was the warmest year on record. And it had already happened if you stopped to think. Someone had gotten up and walked this far and then paused to take stock. But could that be true. Raft of Dead Monkeys peopled their gigs with male strippers, go-go dancers and a performance artist who gobbled down then puked up heaps of bananas. The band formed a side project (the Dave Bahnsen Militia, aka DBM) that skewered the fascist tendencies of the conservative evangelical Christian fringe. Fate also induced an intersection with the Paradox, a fabled U-district music venue that once played host to local and national bands and eventually spawned the Mars Hill megachurch. Jesus meets fuckwhat, I do not know. A dark-haired madonna gives violent birth to a dwarf in a chimp mask. Reenactments of the DBM’s dimestore Riefenstahl parody unspool in slow-mo. Speaking of religious movies, are you gonna see Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc? It’s a cloudless film in which very little happens besides her wandering the hills. Watch her wade through a stream. Hear her thin soprano and the splash of her feet playing against the soothing whoosh of the morning breeze. She has visions of portly saints floating below a tree like they’re hanging from the branches like pears or something. At one point, after about seven minutes of sorta-Gregorian chants, a wave of drums and guitar chords suddenly takes over, prompting her to spin and pound her dirty soles into the ground. Then there are the androgynous head-banging nuns, and St. Michael making jazz hands. What are jazz hands, you ask? Tilt your head a little, shimmer your hands with fingers splayed either side of the face and cry “Jazz hands!” with an enthusiastic smile. The film is also, in many ways, a trial of viewers’ attention spans. Once 16-year-old Jeanne works up the nerve to flee her sheep, her friends, and drive the English from France, one expects an intense adieu. Instead, Dumont cuts to an outdoor shot “before the end of the following winter,” with Jeanne calmly spinning wool and still waiting for the right time to head to the front. “We can leave in peace,” she tells her uncle, whom she’s enlisted to take her there. “Like eight months ago?” he teases. “This time for good,” she explains, her eyes never straying from her task. So who knows? I mean, who the fuck knows? People are so fucking weird. Excuse me, I forgot I was making a poem. Hey, Jonty. What I was trying to say is that you weren’t stupid for thinking Malabou the best philosopher alive, because even if someone else becomes more important to you tomorrow that doesn’t “demote” her any, she could also still be the best. And no, I haven’t read all her work, I only have two of her books, the first couple on plasticity. And no, I wasn’t trying to put anyone else up as also best. I’m in a mood right now where I think most philosophers, where I think philosophy itself, is kind of idiotic and irrelevant. As idiotic as religion. A year ago it was all I read. Right now I’m a bad judge of everything. Kathy’s mother fell a month ago and broke her pelvis. She almost died and still might. Which we have mixed feelings about given that she’s 94 ... she’ll never get even her three-months-ago-self back, and she knows it. What good can her future hold? It’s exhausting. All kinds of other shit is also happening that makes me even more exhausted, like possible use of chemical weapons in Syria and the attack last night before anyone could know for sure. Cops keep killing black men. Israelis keep killing Palestinians. Blah blah, right? Right. I’m still whipped. So what have I been reading? Christa Wolf, a kind of diary she wrote one day a year, she’s living in East Germany and is very loyal and committed to it, she’s watching the whole communist “experiment” to which she’s given her life and to which she hopes she’s given her art slowly fall apart. OK. And Provoke, a history of Japanese photography from the 60s and 70s. Provoke was the name of the main photo magazine. The times were as weird and hard as these, the photographers were (and still are) magnificent (I have a number of their books). Broomberg and Chanarin’s War Primer 2 in which they superimpose images upon a work of Brecht’s. Stuff about the history of Oceania, which is mostly the history of heartbreakingly horrible racist imperialism. And the Mahabharata, which is absolutely great by the way, and which I think is relevant today because the subject is the end of a yuga, which is a kind of extinction. A giant battle marks the end of that yuga and the beginning of ours (the Kali yuga, which is the worst). I’m reading a complete version, in translation, it’s 10 vols. So tho I’ve read the whole story in abridgments (some of which are thousands of pages), this is my first time trying to read every word (in translation, of course, I’m shit at languages). And I’ve also been reading the contributions to the anthology. I’ve been focusing on trying to get contributions by non-humans. I’m working with Mike Deal, a transcriber of whale song, and David Rothenberg, his collaborator. I’m working on getting, on figuring out how to get, a good transcription of an endangered (extinct would be better) bird. Wendy Burk has written (transcribed) some tree talks, where she goes into the Arizona desert or mountains and interviews trees, and I’m getting one of those. Wonderful stuff. And no, the trees do not speak English. Now all I have to get is the song of the phoenix or salamander, some creature that lives (and/or dies) in fire. I want earth air fire water. This is all relevant. This is all an answer to your question. Who else would I put up there? OK. Non-humans, especially ones who are going extinct. They have plenty to tell us. Perhaps you don’t think of trees as philosophers. But I have been up among the bristlecone pines, which are 4000 years old. They know a thing or two, important stuff. Here’s a passage from the Mahabharata. It's the kind of writing I find useful right now: Dhritarashtra said, “O Sanjaya! Since this has happened, I wish to give up my life immediately. I see no consolation nor profit in being alive any longer.’ Souti said, ‘Then the wise son of Gavalgana addressed these words full of meaning to that wretched and lamenting king of the earth. Sanjaya said, “From wise Narada and Dvaipayana you have heard of many kings, those who had great enterprise and great strength. They were born in great royal dynasties and possessed great virtues. They knew the use of celestial weapons and were equal to Shakra in energy. Having conquered the earth with righteous conduct and performed sacrifices with appropriate offerings, they obtained fame in this world and then succumbed to the forces of time. Such men were the great warrior Vainya, the brave Srinjaya who won through blessings, Suhotra, Rantideva, Kakshivanta, Oushija, Balhika, Damana, Shaivya, Sharyati, Ajita, Jita, Vishvamitra, the slayer of enemies and Ambarisha, of great strength, Marutta, Manu, Ikshvaku, Gaya, Bharata, Rama, the son of Dasharatha, Shashabindu, Bhagiratha and Yayati of good deeds, to whom the gods themselves sacrificed and who has left the habitable and inhabitable regions of the earth adorned with sacrificial sheds and stakes. In ancient times, when Shaivya was afflicted with the loss of his son, these were the twenty-four kings whose acts were cited by the royal sage Narada. But there were other kings who came and went before, with more power, great warriors, great souls and blessed with all the good qualities. They were Puru, Kuru, Yadu, Shura, Vishvagashva of great endurance, Anena, Yuvanashva, Kakutstha, the brave Raghu, the invincible Vitihotra, Bhava, Shveta, Brihadguru, Ushinara, Shataratha, Kanka, Duliduha, Druma, Dambhodbhava, Para, Vena, Sagara, Sankriti, Nimi, Ajeya, Parashu, Pundra, Shambhu, the pure Devavridha, Devahavya, Supratima, Supratika, Brihadratha, Mahotsaha, Vinitatma, Nala of the nishadas, Satyavrata, Shantabhaya, Sumitra, the lord Subala, Janujangha, Anaranya, Arka, Priyabhritya, Shubhavrata, Balabandu, Niramarda, Ketushringa, Brihadbala, Dhrishtaketu, Brihatketu, Diptaketu, Niramaya, Avikshita, Prabala, Dhurta, Kritabandhu, Dridheshudhi, Mahapurana, Sambhavya, Pratyanga, Parahan and Shruti. These kings and hundreds of others, as many as lotuses, have been heard of. Giving up immense wealth and pleasure, these great, powerful and wise kings attained death, as did your sons. Even those, performers of celestial deeds, great souls who had valour, generosity, truth, purity, pity, magnanimity, faith and simplicity and whose abundance of good qualities and riches have been described for the world in the Puranas by superior poets of great learning, they too went to their death. Your sons were wicked, envious, greedy, driven by passion and evil. Do not mourn for them. O Dhritarashtra! You are knowledgeable in the shastras and characterized by intelligence and wisdom. Those whose understanding follows the shastras do not succumb to delusion. O king of men! You know the good fortune and misfortune of fate. You know the extreme sentiments you succumbed to in protecting your sons. You should not sorrow for that which was bound to happen. Those who are wise do not feel sorry over fate. Even with the greatest wisdom, that which is ordained will happen. No one can transgress the path that has been laid down. Time brings existence and non-existence, pleasure and pain. Time creates all elements and time destroys all beings. Time burns all subjects and it is time that extinguishes the fire. Time alone is awake when everything is asleep. Time cannot be conquered. Time walks in all elements, pervasive and impartial. Knowing that everything, past, present and future, is created by time, it is not appropriate that you should be consumed by grief.’ Are you sorry you asked? Empty items, delivered like ads but without content, begin to appear in your inbox. The first is titled: Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground. All you have left is your favourite T shirt with its faded legend. Further out, they cluster under the bridges, singing “Oh gods, traveling again [little bear emoji]? ... totally jet-lagged and blurry now.” How can I explain the legend to Jasmine? The Spanish Civil War ended about four generations before she was born. Another empty email comes in titled: I fill a bowl with dried stems. OK then.
Slowly this sphere filled with stuff.
Then the stuff circulated.
I told myself to be a political thinker and wring the water from my chest.
Yum, the butter.
To be a strong butter.
First, you begin as a soft-soft body.
Sometimes you are the fucked up one.
Flaring into verdant space, like a plant coming into other plants.
So yes, there are poets who live as dogs in barrels.
There are passionate yoga amateurs slash.
I keep my empire in some areas of Kansas the radars and the robotic arms.
Goodbye, adios, lost or just sitting there.
Followed by a spectrogram of her early vocoder tracks, which at first glance appeared to be a procession of electrocuted caterpillars, or like the speech of Nimrod, “the first mighty man on earth” — a hunter, a mighty hunter before or against God (depending on the translation). The Old Testament associates this giant & mighty hunter with the project of Babel (his kingdom comprising Bavel in the land of Shinar, where the Tower will be built) and thus with the question of language & translation. And not surprisingly, we find Nimrod in Inferno XXXI, lines 46-81, with the loss of meaningful language as his punishment. So that what the giant speaks in the Commedia is neither the lingua franca of Latin nor the new Vulgar Tongue. Dante gives us one verse of Nemrod’s ranting: “Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi.” Commentators from Benvenuto to Singleton are certain that these words are meaningless. A few, such as Landino, suggest that the words could be Chaldean, others that they may be Arabic, Hebrew, Greek ... But the problem may not be there at all: The words Dante puts into Nimrod’s mouth are fitting, are accurate in their intention on language. Their meaning, in that sense, is absolutely clear: they mean to be ununderstandable, to be the language that is untranslatable into any language – & that therefore, we know, must be translated. And yet – the lingo of Babel was the single language that all humanity understood, that a jealous commander-in-chief then shattered as punishment for the early humans’ communality; “divide et regna” already the essence of YHWH’s M.O. So maybe Nimrod remembers the first, unified language of the human race which we no longer know. But his words, no matter which language or non-language they are in, are fitting in a further sense: they are babble, thus a babelian bavel, & thus connect to bave, Fr. for drool, spittle. A false etymology – but are any etymologies really “false”? Now this bave, this spittle, this active saliva (doesn’t the word “alive” hide somewhere in “saliva”?), as Bataille’s Encyclopedia Acephalica teaches us, is “the deposit of the soul; spittle is soul in movement.” For spittle accompanies breath, “which can exit the mouth only when permeated with it.” Because “breath is soul, so much so that certain peoples have the notion of ‘the soul before the face.’” Without spittle, no breath, no soul, no language – it is the lubricant that immanentizes the pneuma. Like, one morning on the sidewalk a lens from a pair of glasses — out of its frame — glared up at me, brought me into sharp focus for the optic nerve of an absent person and passed the image on towards the center of the earth. “But whosoever shall zoom in into my interior shall fall through pixelated clouds.” I continued on, entered a house, remained here for a while, pressed my fingers on square keys with strange symbols. Later I googled the bony world of some serious osmosis clutter. So I wrote to my friend, N, today, and I said, N, Air chisel concrete the lyrics to monkey wrench my paleontologist turned, and I resettled rootlike of the pigeonhole knowingly. “My air chisel concrete” Okay air chisel concrete and air chisel concrete the intracutaneous futurity the knobble venous deservedly, my air old wood chisels chisel concrete the 15 rainbow cephalotuss with tiramisu schinus ryobi 18v impact drill bola polaroid and bond 6930 pink 5 piece garden tool bag gift set slouch superinfections had been unhurriedly the small flat head screwdriver microbial betwixt the air chisel air chisel and with puffed onrushes the nuances of the snake plant are being cast for this new (indie) film. Take
The 9th head (tears
Tears only begin on the face of the 3rd)
Making in all 24 heads of suffering women
(for similar studies see
also “The Dream & Lies of Franco”
or “Minotauromachy” 1935)
—Fallen horse, horse leg & 2 heads
—‘head of a deific androcephalous bull’
‘Mother with dead child on a ladder’ (8 versions)
Up/ down/mid-rung
—‘reconstructive exploration of the bull’s head’
& ‘future inventions of the eye’
35 years in the making
“& Where have we met, Guernica?”
and like a torturous outpour of noise from a throat decorated in horror vacui
—via “de-lete” this zone, this warehouse
—this garden shed — “... unhinged
the nose an elbow, thumbs
thumbs the 3th head
For tongue, dial 5, please hold”
“I sometimes think of you / Body / My body / I know what’s going to / Happen to you. / But you don’t.” “Or do you?” That’s why you’ve been walking in the desert four thousand years. And yes, sometimes I quote myself.
[Note: For Marthe Reed. Sources: Alice Notley, “Alice Notley on Philip Whalen”, at Poetry Society; LaToya Ruby Frazier, quoted in Dawn Lundy Martin, “LaToya Ruby Frazier and Fred Moten”, at BOMB, 10 Apr 018; JBR; LaToya Ruby Frazier, quoted in Dawn Lundy Martin, “LaToya Ruby Frazier and Fred Moten”, at BOMB, 10 Apr 018; JBR; Albert Wendt, “In Your Enigma”, at Internet Archive Wayback Machine; JBR; Fred Moten, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, quoted in Dawn Lundy Martin, “LaToya Ruby Frazier and Fred Moten”, at BOMB, 10 Apr 018; Linda Russo, email rec’d 10 Mar 018, approx. 4:00pm PDT, and “[‘Inhabitory’ describes an approach ...]”, at Inhabitory Poetics; Marthe Reed (RIP), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Marthe Reed: Five poems from ‘Binx’s Blues,’ with a note on the process”, at Jacket2, 20 Oct 013; Noah Purifoy, “Sculpture Defined”, in High Desert; JBR; Marthe Reed, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Marthe Reed: Five poems from ‘Binx’s Blues,’ with a note on the process”, at Jacket2, 20 Oct 013; “Tuesday poem #262 : Chia-Lun Chang : Post-Cities”, at Dusie, 10 Apr 018; JBR, re an uncaptioned photo at e | d, 9 Apr 018; Loren Grush, “Elon Musk elaborates on his proposal to nuke Mars”, at The Verge, 2 Oct 018; Brandon Brown, “‘The architecture and ambience of the maze’: A review of Marie Buck’s ‘Amazing Weapons’”, at Jacket2, 5 Dec 012; JBR; Aja Couchois Duncan, “Working Note”, at How2, vol.1 no.5, 2001; JBR; Brandon Brown, “A Poem by Brandon Brown: From The Four Seasons”, at The Believer, 10 Apr 018; David Rothenberg, “Whale Song Explained”, at Medium, 10 Oct 014; JBR; Eric Burdon, “Monterey”; JBR; Remedios Varo, “Three Letters” (tr. Margaret Carson), at BOMB, 11 Apr 018; Sergio de La Pava, A Naked Singularity; JBR; Jean-Paul Sartre, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Maurice Blanchot Day”, at DC’s, 11 Apr 018; JBR, email to Richard Lopez and Tom Marshall, 11 Apr 018, approx. 7:17pm PDT; Adam Levin, The Instructions; JBR; “A Call for Intergalactic Solidarity Everywhere to End the Destruction of the ZAD”, at ZAD Forever, 11 Apr 018; JBR; Arundhati Roy, “The Ladies Have Feelings, So ... Shall We Leave It to the Experts?”, in Writing the World: On Globalization (eds. David Rothenberg and Wandee J. Pryor); JBR; David Grundy, Cecil Taylor, Shteamer, quoted in Grundy’s “‘…And Not Goodbye’: Cecil Taylor (Part 1)”, at Streams of Expression, 13 Apr 018; Marthe Reed, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Marthe Reed: Five poems from ‘Binx’s Blues,’ with a note on the process”, at Jacket2, 20 Oct 013; P Inman, Ocker; Executive Committee of the Editorial Board, and Ludwig Blau, “Salamander”, in Jewish Encyclopedia; JBR (for Jonty); “Always already”, at Wikipedia; Elizabeth Paton, “This 1,000-Year-Old Shirt Has a $700,000 Story to Tell”, at New York Times, 12 Apr 018; JBR; Simeon Pease Cheney, Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music; JBR; Steven Farmer, “SEASIDESICK”; Eileen Tabios, “You Brought Me to the Mangrove Forest—with and for Marthe Reed”, at Eileen Verbs Books, 13 Mar 018; a mashup of Rodrigo Toscano, quoted in Aaron Beasley, “A Poetics of Ghosting”, at Boston Review, 12 Apr 018, JBR, and Donald Trump; Abigail Child, “From ‘No To Both Ideas’, quoted in Laynie Brown, “Solidarity Texts”, at Jacket2, 13 Apr 018; Anne Boyer, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”, at Jacket 30; Melissa Buzzeo, “Of Lilies Muskroot Crocuses and Something Similar”, quoted in Laynie Brown, “Solidarity Texts”, at Jacket2, 13 Apr 018; Anne Boyer, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”, at Jacket 30; JBR; Karla Kelsey, “An Otherwise of Consciousness”, quoted in Laynie Brown, “Solidarity Texts”, at Jacket2, 13 Apr 018; JBR; Anne Waldman, “Denoument”, quoted in Laynie Brown, “Solidarity Texts”, at Jacket2, 13 Apr 018; Tony Kay, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Please welcome to the world … Nick Toti’s The Complete History of Seattle”, at DC’s, 14 Apr 018; JBR; Eileen G’Sell, “Visions of Joan of Arc as a Dancing, Singing, Head-Banging Kid”, at Hyperallergic, 12 Apr 018; JBR; M John Harrison, “none of this”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 13 Apr 018; Marthe Reed, quoted in Susan M Schultz, “Marthe Reed (1958-2018)”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 12 Apr 018; JBR; Oki Sogumi, “The Longest Month”, at Queen Mob’s Tea House, 18 May 016; JBR; Oki Sogumi, “The Longest Month”, “Corporeal Punishment”, at Queen Mob’s Tea House, 18 May 016; JBR; Anne Boyer, “Lives of Poets / Diogenes”, “I Keep in My Empire”, “The News”, in My Common Heart; JBR, all but the last sentence are bits from In the House of the Hangman 1862, at ZS, 21 Nov 014 (I’ll leave it to you to untangle the sources from the online note)]
Posted at 12:23 PM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 13, 2018
As an island nation, Cuba is particularly vulnerable to climate change. Project Life (Tarea Vida), now being implemented across the country, aims to increase the country’s resilience and minimize future damage
First published in a somewhat different translation, in Granma, April 12, 2018
Flooding in Havana after Hurricane Irma, September 2017.
by Yisell Rodríguez Milán
and Danae González Del Toro
“An important biological species is facing the risk of extinction given the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural conditions for life: humanity”
—Fidel Castro Ruz (Earth Summit, Río de Janeiro, June 12, 1992)
What is to be done about high temperatures, rising sea levels, and increasingly powerful hurricanes? What can we do to be less vulnerable to climate change? Preliminary observations by groups of specialists in the country indicate that sea level has increased on the island an average of 6.77 centimeters since 1966, a process that has accelerated during the last five years. Since the middle of the last century, the average annual temperature has risen 0.9 degrees Celsius, and the coastline is today more fragile than ever. This reality calls for action, and Cuba is acting on the premise of preparing, to avoid lamenting later.
Tarea Vida (Project Life) is the country’s most ambitious project addressing climate change. The plan was approved April 25, 2017, by the Council of Ministers and refers to the ideas Fidel expressed at the Earth Summit held in Río de Janeiro, June12, 1992, where he emphasized the seriousness of threats to the human species.
The project led by the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Environment (Citma) is the most all-encompassing and comprehensive drafted to date. With a broad scope and superior organization, it includes and updates the local dimension, citing locations and actions to be taken in the short term (by 2020), long term (by 2050), and long range (2100). It outlines five strategic actions and 11 projects to counteract the impact being felt in vulnerable areas.
Odalys Goycochea Cardoso, Citma environmental director, told the press that the plan is comprehensive, and includes the identification of prioritized areas and sites, effects, and steps to be taken. She added that the program is being constantly enriched and expanded as its implementation progresses.
Action Research
“Projections for the future indicate that the average increase in sea level could reach 27 centimeters by 2050, and 85 by 2100, values that fall within the estimated ranges for the entire planet. This implies a slow reduction in dry land and a gradual increase in salinization, meaning that our underground aquifers will be impacted at a level that must be taken into consideration,” explained Rudy Montero, lead expert within the Environmental Agency’s risk assessment group.
Given this picture, 103 studies have been conducted on dangers, vulnerability, and risks related to weather and precipitation, including the impact of high winds, coastal flooding, and heavy rain. Likewise, research on drought, wildfires, risks of a geological, technological, or health nature have been considered, in order to take action in terms of prevention, preparation, response, and recovery — to confront and reduce risks and vulnerabilities “to adapt to this phenomenon that affects all,” Montero said.
Coastal flooding produced by extreme weather phenomena has been identified as one of the main dangers from climate change. These floods impact human constructions and the natural environment, and along with rising sea levels, put a number of settlements at risk. “We have identified them, and are going to work on new land use plans for each one.”
Among the strategic measures being implemented is the prohibition of any new construction of dwelling in the most vulnerable threatened coastal settlements, particularly those that are eventually may be become inundated. The project also calls for reducing population density in low-lying areas and ensuring that all new construction is well-adapted to the environment.
Agriculture and livestock ranching also figure among priorities to be addressed, given their importance to the country’s food security. Several actions projected address changes in land use patterns as a consequence of rising sea levels and drought: these include reducing cultivated areas along the coastline and in areas affected by saltwater instrusion, diversifying crops, improving soils, and introducing and developing varieties resistant to higher temperatures. Also projected is a process of reordering urban planning in identified settlements, and consideration of threatened infrastructure, in accordance with the country’s economic situation.
Accomplishments so far
Although Citma is the main body responsible for Tarea Vida, the project necessarily involves many ministries and agencies. In carrying out this joint work, Guantánamo is among the provinces that has made the most progress. Reforestation of coastal ecosystems, the construction of water treatment plants, and the promotion of environmentally friendly agricultural practices are just a few examples of what has been accomplished.
The Ministry of Agriculture (Minag), for its part, is working on replanting mangroves to reduce coastal erosion in this eastern province. Efforts are underway in several vulnerable areas, including the communities of Boca, Mata, and Barrancadero.
While their specialists are promoting agro-ecological practices to improve soils and conducting other community participation efforts.
“Thanks to this interest, the Yacabo Arriba mountain ecosystem has recovered some 20 hectares affected by erosion and the impact of Hurricane Matthew,” Clark Feoktistova, Citma representative in the province, told the press this past January 25.
The program of conservation measures to ensure sustainable land use, and protect soils, has been implemented in all of Guantánamo’s municipalities, he indicated, on state farms, and within cooperatives of both types, credit and services and agricultural production.
In an effort to mitigate the impact of drought in the province, the National Institute of Water Resources has undertaken, among other projects, the construction of several water treatment plants in the municipalities of Niceto Pérez, Manuel Tames and Maisí, along with the drilling of 12 wells to access water in underground aquifers to supply the population.
For its part, the province of Ciego de Ávila has prioritized the use of technology to promote water conservation. Looking to reduce leaks in its distribution network and protect groundwater, key to economic and social life, more than 6,000 meters have been installed in homes, principally in the provincial capital, Morón, and Majagua, according to Héctor Rosabales Pérez, water infrastructure director in the province.
Another short term mitigation effort is the replenishment of sand on beaches on the province’s northern keys, that have experienced erosion. This is a problem affecting many areas in the country, including Las Tunas where the impact has been strong.
In addition to the deterioration of sandy beaches along the northern coast, agriculture in this province has been affected by drought and high levels of salt water instrusion in fields close to the coastline, in the municipality of Puerto Padre. Given these difficulties, the Las Tunas Administrative Council created a multi-disciplinary team to manage the Tarea Vida work.
“Several agencies are decisive to the project, such as Physical Planning, that is the guiding body in terms of land use; the University, given its contribution of knowledge via research: the Ministry of Agriculture as responsible for soil resources, among other institutions that must combine forces to achieve the objective,” stated Amado Luis Palma, environmental management specialist for the Citma office in Las Tunas.
The province of Sancti Spíritus has also made progress with the implementation of Tarea Vida. The Sur de Jíbaro Agro-industrial Grain Enterprise and the Rice Research Station have done outstanding work in the development of varieties resistant to salinity and drought stress. Of equal importance has been the repair and recovery of irrigation canals to protect the fresh water they carry to the coastline, to help reduce the salt wedge.
Climate change is impacting this province mainly in the form of rising sea levels, which is affecting beaches, tourist development, and agricultural production.
Leonel Díaz, Citma representative in Sancti Spíritus, explained that saltwater instrusion, soil erosion, and the disappearance of mangroves have severely affected the municipalities of Sierpe and Sancti Spíritus.
Over the years, he added, a number of steps have been taken to mitigate the environmental impact of climate change, including important educational work in communities to raise awareness.
Saving Lives
Cuba’s high level of vulnerability as an island nation, makes rising sea levels precisely the element that most affects the country, in terms of climate change.
In a recent interview in Juventud Rebelde, Elba Rosa Pérez Montoya, minister of Science, Technology and the Environment, stated ” Tarea Vida involves everyone.”
Thus during her travels around the country, she has prioritized exchanges with provincial authorities, local Party leaders, representatives of Central State Administration bodies, Civil Defense, Physical Planning, and provincial risk assessment centers. She also believes raising consciousness about climate change in the population is essential, so that everyone is involved in action to meet the challenge.
“The projects are highly complicated, since environmental investments must be made, which are characterized by their significant cost and special requirements. Those that have been made are based on the research of many scientists, and are today systematized,” the Minister said.
Among Tarea Vida’s 11 projects are identifying and implementing projects to adapt to climate change, assuring the availability and efficient use of water to confront drought, reforesting to protect soils and water, stopping the deterioration of coral reefs by restoring and protecting them, and measures, plans, and projects linked to renewable energy, food security, health, and tourism.
Also included are protecting urban waterfronts, relocating at-risk human settlements, integrating recovery of beaches, mangroves, and other protective natural ecosystems, waterworks and coastal engineering projects.
Priorities are based on protecting human life in the most vulnerable areas, food security, and the development of tourism.
While Tarea Vida is being enriched as it is being implemented over time, and as action is taken, Cuba is aware that what is most important is foreseeing and confronting climate change. The ambitious, complex project shows the government’s determination to reduce vulnerability and raise risk perception
Eleven Projects included in State Plan “Tarea Vida”
Project 1: Identify and implement actions and projects to adapt to climate change, of a comprehensive, ongoing nature, needed to reduce existing vulnerability in the 15 identified priority zones. To be considered, to determine the order of these actions, are the population threatened, their physical safety and food security, and the development of tourism.
Project 2: Implement legal norms needed to execute the state plan, as well as assure their strict enforcement, with particular attention to measures directed toward vulnerability of constructed properties, prioritizing threatened coastal communities.
Project 3: Conserve, maintain, and recover the Cuban archipelago’s sandy beaches, prioritizing those urbanized for tourist use and reducing the structural vulnerability of constructed properties.
Project 4: Assure the availability and efficient use of water as part of confronting drought, on the basis of technology for conservation and satisfying the demands of locations. Improve water infrastructure and its maintenance, while taking action to measure the efficient and productive use of water.
Project 5: Direct reforestation toward providing maximum protection of soils and water in terms of both quantity and quality, as well as the recovery of the most affected mangroves. Prioritize reservoirs, canals, and the regulatory banks of tributaries leading to the island’s principal bays and coasts.
Project 6: Stop deterioration, renovate, and protect coral reefs throughout the archipelago, with priority for those bordering the insular platform, and protect urbanized beaches used for tourist purposes. Avoid over-fishing of species that benefit corals.
Project 7: Maintain, and add to plans, territorial and urban land use stipulations that emerged from the Macro-project on Dangers and Vulnerability of Coastal Zones 2050-2100, as well as Studies of Dangers, Vulnerability, and Risks in the disaster preparedness effort. Employ this information as an early warning to make decisions.
Project 8: Implement and supervise implementation of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures, which emerge from sector policies in programs, plans, and projects linked to food security, renewable energy, energy efficiency, land use, fishing, agriculture, health, tourism, construction, transport, industry, and the comprehensive management of forests.
Project 9: Strengthen monitoring systems, vigilance, and early warning plans to systematically evaluate the condition and quality of coastal zones, water, drought, forests, as well as human and plant health.
Project 10: Prioritize measures and actions to increase risk perception, understanding of, and participation by the entire population in confronting climate change, and a culture that promotes water conservation.
Project 11: Manage and use available international financial resources, both those from global and regional climate funds, and those from bilateral sources, to make investments, carry out actions, and implement projects related to the tasks outlined in the state plan.
Priority zones, areas, and sites
Posted at 05:18 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)