"Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by [firsthand] reports but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which . . . inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors" (Hannah Arendt)
Evil: The crime against humanity
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayc1.html
Evil: The crime against humanity
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayc1.html
In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see
ReplyDeletethe people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
"suffering humanity"
They write upon the page in a
veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
"imagination of disaster"
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed
And they do only the landscape is changed
They are still ranged along the roads
plagued by legionaries
false windmills and demented roosters
They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
The scene shows fewer tumbrils
but more maimed citizens
in painted cars
and they have strange license plates
and engines
that devour America
- Lawrence Ferlingetti
This poem by Ferlingetti is fantastic! I've always loved Goya's 'The Shipwreck' - it appears to show the human condition so well - bodies in different states of being floating tenuously adrift on the immensley powerful ocean.
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