A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
- - - -
For more information
about this contest,
click here.
- - - -
Weschler's
Third Interlude.
- - - -
Beirut/Warsaw.
By Lawrence Weschler
- - - -
What to make of this disconcerting juxtaposition, last week's cover of Time magazine, laying bare the agony of Beirut under Israeli bombardment, up against the poster for Roman Polanski's film account of the improbable survival of a Warsaw Jew in an earlier city and country laid waste, in that case by the Nazis?
One might start by wondering whether the Polanski image wasn't just so powerfully iconic that it all but manhandled the art directors at Time into choosing that Beiruti image over all the others that came across their desk that day for their cover.
Or, probing a bit deeper, one might go on to consider the unfortunately congruent geographical placement of the two countries involved, and the two sets of peoples—the Poles there on the low flat plains separating the Germans and the Russians (the Nazis and the Reds), and hence the site for their perennially recurrent battles and mayhem; and then Lebanon/Palestine/Israel, that little smidge of territory where Asia and Europe and Africa abut, narrow site for endless historic contestations, trade and blood and holy gore and glory unending.
Of course, though, these two particular twinned images raise a more disquieting echo as well. For how is it, one can't help but wonder, that, given their own recent history (of all histories!), the Jews of Israel don't simply recoil at the sense of themselves as furies raining unbridled destruction down on distant cities packed to the gills with panic-stricken civilian refugees, or, conversely, how is it that they (of all people!) can't seem to empathize with the aching situation of a neighboring people crammed into sweltering and hopeless ghettos ... etc. etc. etc.
I am by no means the first to marvel, somewhat despairingly, along such lines. Nor is the Middle East, cursed as it is, the only place where such sorts of painful conjunctions have played themselves out. One need only think of the Athenians and their seemingly outclassed polis, heroic victors nevertheless over the Persian Empire at Marathon and then again at Salamis (as celebrated in Herodotus's thrilling accounts), who within a few generations, toward the end of the Peloponnesian War (as Thucydides relates, with conspicuous allusions to Herodotus), had turned themselves into a mighty empire, hellbent on conquest, lashing themselves into the presently catastrophic campaign against tiny, seemingly outclassed Syracuse. Or, more recently, of the United States itself, which was born of a mighty and inspiring war of independence against British colonialism, and which, less than 200 years later, couldn't recognize similar longings for liberty and self-determination on the part of the Vietnamese.
Thucydides seems to imply there is something cracked and flawed in the transmission of hard-won wisdom between generations. Perhaps. Several years ago I had intended to go do a piece on a family-violence clinic in Israel: the sort of place where battering husbands in moments of wrackingly cathartic transformation come to terms with the way that they only batter because they were themselves so badly battered as children. Everyone nowadays just passes over that sort of construction as if it were obvious and self-evident, when in fact one might have expected just the opposite to be the case: that a battered child, of all people, would grow up to be someone who, precisely out of his own experience, would never ever batter in his turn. We realize, of course, that it is the former rather than the latter pattern which seems to recur, but the point is that it is by no means obvious and self-evident why it does so: there is a profound and disquieting mystery at the heart of all this. I'd meant to report such a story in the middle of Israel without ever widening my focus out of the clinic itself, though the wider metaphoric implications of the reporting could not have helped but bleed through.
Somehow never did get around to doing it, though last week's cover of Time, with its Polanskian rhyme, brought the idea back to me, with a sad, sad vengeance.
- - - -
WINNERS.
- - - -
1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper
2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter
3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth
Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler
4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen
5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem
6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic
7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin
8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker
9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park
10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky
Weschler's Second Interlude
11. Love and War by Kim Wood
12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb
13. The March by Emily Marvosh
14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson
15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn
16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb
Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler
17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper
Carnival of Convergences
Weschler's Fourth Interlude
Aftersquib to the Foregoing
18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer
19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz
20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley
A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney
Another Carnival of Convergences
21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld
22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch
An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge
23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch
26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland
Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs
27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee
Carnival of Convergences No. 3
28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn
Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler
29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss
The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler
31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel
32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen
An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler
Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler
Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 4
Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler
33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva
34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia
Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler
35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling
36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch
Carnival of Convergences No. 5
Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler
37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber
38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter
Cameras, Action! From Disney World to St. Peter's Square, the Mediative Flight From the Immediate by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 6
Convergent Postscripts by Lawrence Weschler
From Da Vinci to Duchamp, by Way of Russia by Lawrence Weschler
Venus on a Vespa, Berger on My Mind by Lawrence Weschler
MORE ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT RISES
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.