Tag: violence

Song After Sadness

by Katie Ford

Despair is still servant
to the violet and wild ongoings
of bone. You, remember, are 
that which must be made 
servant only to salt, only 
to the watery acre that is the body
of the beloved, only to the child
leaning forward into 
the exhibit of birches 
the forest has made of bronze light
and snow. Even as the day kneels 
forward, the oceans and strung garnets, too,
kneel, they are all kneeling, 
the city, the goat, the lime tree
and mother, the fearful doctor,
kneeling. Don’t say it’s the beautiful 
I praise. I praise the human, 
gutted and rising.

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“Although I had been primed, since childhood, for the experience of rape, when I was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground I initially had no idea what was happening. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I first experienced the assault as a highly unrealistic nightmare from which I tried to wake up.” 

—Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self

“When the inconceivable happens, one starts to doubt even the most mundane, realistic perceptions. Perhaps I’m not really here, I thought, perhaps I did die in that ravine. The line between life and death, once so clear and sustaining, now seemed carelessly drawn and easily erased. For the first several months after my attack, I led a spectral existence, not quite sure whether I had died and the world went on without me, or whether I was alive in a totally alien world. […] I felt as though I’d somehow outlived myself.”
—ibid.: 8–9

Peter Tillessen, 40 Jahre Kernspaltung (40 years of Nuclear Fission), (2012)

Press release: “40 Years of Nuclear Fission looks like an old scientific textbook that explains the origins of nuclear fission, illustrated by captivating black and white photographs of sculptural shapes. In fact the book is not an academic but personal compilation by photographer Peter Tillessen. The 40 photographs show excrements of the black-headed earthworm, which aggressively ploughs through a cemetery in Zurich. The pictures of those fragile sculptures are contrasted with parts from the detailed descriptions of nuclear fission from the original book, a text by Darwin that explains the work of earthworms and a text by the artist, who describes his childhood in the atomic age as a son of an atomic engineer. The number 40 is in this compilation no accident: Tillessen took the pictures on his –rainy– fortieth birthday for one of his best friends to pay off his debts from a bet – as he wasn’t a father of a big family (like his father) at the age of 40. That’s what he had pretended to his friend at the age of 27. The design of the book in the book accentuates the biographical fission within the big context of the atomic age: particularly the way the photographer examines the father’s book to reflect his own situation and to become aware of the earth’s fragility”

Rebecca Horn, High Noon 1991

:My machines are not washing machines. They have almost human characteristics and must change as well. They are nervous and sometimes have to stop too. (…) The tragic or melancholy aspect of the machines is important to me. “(Horn, in: Cat.No., New York 1993)