[-empyre-] Sustenazo - Part II
Alan Sondheim
sondheim at panix.com
Thu Oct 4 03:10:06 EST 2012
I think torture has always been with us; there are signs dating well back
into prehistory, and there have been books written, for example, about the
Assyrian murals and what they depict. The Central American ball-games
weren't innocent either of course. I think it was Lorenz who postulated
that humans have gone awry with the development of tools that allow
killing at a distance, in spite of deflection behavior, but torture is
otherwise than this; it is intimate; the other's body is not only in
reach, but is _reached._ I think all of this is tangled with our primate
behaviour as ravaging generalists who began with limited food supplies and
over-the-top group solidarity, but I really don't know; I do think there
are far too many who take pleasure in torturing.
I do want to add there is other pain and suffering to consider - I'm
thinking of cancer, of the abandonment of the elderly, even of the wildly
different accounting for tragedy between, say, the eternal technophilic
optimism of Wired, and the constant reminders of world-wide extinctions,
local warfares, etc. etc. For me the accompanying images, sound-bites, and
videos of slaughter are intolerable, inconceivable; Azure filters them for
me, because they reduce me to catatonia. The suffering of the world is
overwhelming, in spite of the promise of a bright and glorious future,
etc. I don't know how to accommodate all of this, how to think of it or
through it. My work deals with the unthinkingness or abandonment of the
world, in other words - and it's something Sandy and I considered in the
pain text (which we'll send out in a day or so - would rather the
discussion continue online for now without more reading from us!).
Thanks, Alan
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