When the Emperor Charlemagne came into the country of the East Saxons and asked them whom they worshipped they replied, “Krodo is our god;” to which the Emperor replied “Krodo is all the same as Kroten-duvel!” “And he made them pay bitterly by the sword and the rope for the crime of calling God, according to their language, by a name different from that which he used; for he put many thousands of them to death, like King Olof of Norway, to show that his faith was one of meekness and mercy.
A friend of mine just came from Cambodia, he was talking in great lengths about fields of death there, heritage of khmer rouges, or Red Khmers. In a span of 20 years something like a quarter of population was wiped out. A field of death is a grave, there hundreds or thousands of people sometimes put together, by hands or with a help of bulldozer. It reminded me unexpectedly a movie I saw recently, Get Smart, in which Maxwell Smart, who is a secret agent for the US agency called CONTROL (whose nemesis organization is called KAOS - which they say like the word ‘chaos’), says: “We have to shoot and kill and destroy. We represent everything good and wholesome in the world.”
History repeats itself, otherwise it wouldn’t be called history. Continue reading ‘History repeats itself; memory never does’
Other posts by boris kislitsin
YESTERDAY IS HISTORY
TOMORROW IS MYSTERY
TODAY IS A GIFT
I put these words bold because they were written in huge golden letters on a signboard mounted on an apartment block, above it’s name on the entrance. It was a striking contrast with the rather deteriorating building, so I looked around for a picture of Jesus (what else could accompany these words and explain the reasons for putting them there?). There was none. So I penned them down on an envelope and went back home.
Here we go back months in time. My wife made a carton house for our son. As he grew, we added some things and made fine adjustments, such as a ramp and spare room for cat, and shelves for his toys, and windows from carton toilet paper rolls. It was painted few times other and fit with doors and secret places, at best times he could park inside his tricycle. As this house suffered a lot from all the sort of games played in and with it and from our cat’s claws sharpening exercises, we fixed it with tape and papermache, and painted over again. Cat and son loved this box, and often fought for it. When we moved house, we couldn’t take it with us: it was just to big, too worn out and too odd.
So we dumped it in the street by the rubbish bins. No, nobody cried. But, I felt like an iceberg losing a big chunk of ice: it seemed like this box was with us forever, growing in size as our son and cat did. Before we departed for good, I wrote around it my goodbye, some looped in circle, as a spell, words:
YESTERDAYISHISTORYTOMORROWISMYSTERYTODAYISAGIFT
After that I came back home, found and reread Mike’s memory “Garbage Can Zen”. I wanted to read more. So I headed to his blog and found there a quote from Chuang-Tzu: “The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but it does not keep.”
Cheers, Mike.
abraxus
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The fat woman is shouting about History
she launches sharp sentences
like a slice of tin.
In roofs made of silver
by lubricating skies,
the fat woman hangs smiles
on a butcher’s hook
while she puts fetuses into a pile.
She says that a knife in the flesh
hurts less than nothing in the flesh,
that the stock exchange will became moss
and sand will cover the hungry,
that from the cloned rose to the bank
there is tight wire, which crosses the dreams
of every poor child.
The fat woman
swimming between the glasses of the drunkards
with her dress made of smoke
of the infinite burning
which maintains things alive,
her voice echo of a claim
between the unheard and the unsaid,
improvised postphilosophy for a new era
the one that predicts inspired moments.
Waiting
she sticks her nail on every stalk
leaving in the corners
slit open insects
and tearing out dry landscapes
from the newspaper photos
which will run to the sea
like abandoned objects.
Silvia
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