Dear Alan
thank you for your writing, your video with these fascinating 60 year old
photos, and your expression of despair.
"That is what the world was and will be".
I tend to follow you here, it is a most distressing moment again, we have
wars now in the East
and the West/Middle East, with many powers involved, from Iran to the US to
Russia, I am sure, and the terrible mess will get worse, for all.
The "Nation" article is no consolation (thanks, though, Paul!), how could
it. I am not sure I like comparisons to 9/11 and the war that followed, it
simplifies the complex Israeli history and relations to Palestine and the
surrounding neighbors who speak of annihilating Israel though recently also
offered rapprochement. Did not some US senator or Congressman today advise
'flattening" Gaza? Bombing it out of existence?
It is also complex to read the news commentaries in the country where I
live part-time (German solidarity to Israel expressed on government level;
Muslim and Palestinian sympathizers in Berlin dancing on the streets in
jubilation!).
FAZ newspaper interviewed Isareli author Lizzie Doron (Tel Aviv), and she
said "nothing will ever be as it was before." (?).
Another author (Deborah Feldman, who wrote "Unorthodox", a novel about her
escape from an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn) was caught, unawares,
at a literary symposium, and she offered at first, hearing about the Hamas
attack, a warning - saying, "it cannot be taken in, it is too much, there
are no words to be found."
Then she suggested that this terrible crisis also has internal Israel
background contexts – Netanyahu's policies, and attack on Israeli democracy
to limit judicial independence, now combined with "security failures owed
to moving military force to the West Bank to support ultra-orthodox
settlers there, neglecting to protect secular Jews or the "less
protection-worthy folks in the South near Gaza." This of course makes one
wonder what was known by the Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet
security service, and what was allowed to happen. I have no idea. I am
distressed, like Alan, and have no musical answer, or any answer.
Johannes Birringer
On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 10:04 PM Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour <
netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
>
>
> Jerusalem Minefield 1962 and Music for Hell
>
> https://youtu.be/kYclag76v7g video (1962, 2023)
>
> I don't know you and I don't know myself. Maybe 60 years ago it
> was different. I thought I knew something which was Wittgenstein
> and I knew nothing. I knew the world was not right and I was not
> right in the world and I acted accordingly. I acted politically.
> It meant nothing. The world was all that is the case and acted
> accordingly. I witnessed. We all acted accordingly and some of
> us were remain distorted. Not just because of that knot, but the
> world, unable to act accordingly. The few images from Jerusalem
> 1962, there are a lot more but these are over and done with. So
> I do play accordingly and to this day cannot conceive horror. I
> was young when I read the medical volumes of the Nuremberg War
> Trials and never recovered. That is what the world was and will
> be. My certainty is violent. I am damaged and damage others and
> try not to damage anyone or anything and fail. You can't witness
> this and not _be,_ an existential statement. I return to it as
> false premises, false history, as if I were someone. I'm not and
> none of us are, given the world's grit. In 1962-63 I studied at
> Hebrew University. The camera was a Minox, very small. Some of
> what I photographed could not have been otherwise. Don't think
> for a moment things have changed. This is exact. This fits like
> a glove. This is perfection. The music isn't. I efface myself to
> no avail because I constantly appear, as you do and your friends
> do as well. When we're gone, most of our images will be gone as
> well. The shadows decay in some brilliant and overpowering light
> in the future. Those who are there will be blinded by its
> insufferability.
>
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