Coming up to Juno Beach :: my flickr files
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From The Faraway Nearby: “To what extent, in which ways, are you a cannibal, and how careful are you about who you consume? We consume each other in a thousand ways, some of them joys, some of them crimes and nightmares.” The author’s annotation: “Something that’s really important to me is to be clear that madness, criminality, forgetfulness, selfishness, cluelessness are not someone else’s attributes; the question is not who has those qualities but to what degree each of us possess them and how aware are we of that, and how gracefully and maybe compassionately do we try to work with those limits, stains, and sins that are our own, as well as other people’s. There’s such a tendency to render the world in binaries: you’re a paranoid schizophrenic and me over here I’m sane; you have a disease that makes you forget things and my memory is impeccable; you drive a car/eat meat/pay taxes and I am beyond reproach (or situated to reproach you in a left-puritan way). We’re all implicated. But as for the cannibalism, we do live off each other, from mother’s milk to blood transfusions and organ transplants to the way we are all enclosed in a world that is the result of human labor, human making, of clothes, of houses, of food, of systems. Maybe what I’m interested is the ways we consume each other that are gifts rather than thefts, that don’t involve destruction of the body or soul …” [Rebecca Solnit]
[Alive On All Channels]
