№ 583. Nine-Eleven

Welles Crowther

 

№ 232. Evil is Ordinary

Every Angel is terror. And yet,
ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul.
Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of the most radiant of you stood at the simple threshold,
disguised somewhat for the journey and already no longer awesome
(Like a youth, to the youth looking out curiously).
Let the Archangel now, the dangerous one, from behind the stars,
take a single step down and toward us: our own heart,
beating on high would beat us down. What are you?
(from The Second Elegy, The Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke)



Bento Box:

That image of a concert venue turned slaughterhouse on Friday, Nov. 13, in the storied capital of France, captures the random carnage that was the primary objective of the terrorists. It could only have been terrorism—the concept of asymmetrical warfare is only analytical, the framework of an anti-Western backlash mostly rhetorical. Above all, the declaration of an Islamic holy struggle is a perversion of religion.

№ 82.God of Carnage

"In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers." The New Yorker

 

All huddle in midnight vigil.
They wait for paid violence to awake.

Dark menace finally rises up
To uncoil out of the silver pages.

Then bullets litter the air.
Special effects, they think.

Fire metals pierce
Flesh, bones and fiction.

Cellphones ring unanswered
In the pockets of dead children.

Popcorn kernels litter the exodus
While Gotham reels empty after the carnage.

Pilgrims welcome the refuge outside.
Almighty Bruce redeems his masses back to reality.

Bento Box: 

"It is the implicit bargain every moviegoer makes. You buy your ticket, you go into an auditorium full of people you don't know, you look toward the front of the room, the lights go down -- and in the darkness, you are safe. The movies promise us a happy ending, a return to the familiar world we know" (When it's not 'only a movie'). 

Alas, no more of that fiction beyond the film.