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zorathenneThis post will be put behind a cut, because the nature of the content..
Just isn't pretty..
(my little 'disclaimer': Now, all of you should know me well enough to know I would never do anything like this out of spite of a person's creed/race/belief/religion/preference/etc.. If you don't, then I strongly suggest you unfriend me right here and now before reading any further. I do this because above all else, I am curious, and I want to learn. But even with all that, you as my friends have every right to let me know when you feel I have crossed any lines and/or made you feel uncomfortable ~ all I ask is that you let me know. I do value your views/opinions/beliefs.)
First, the site I stumbled upon:
Musarium ~ Without Sanctuary
This site has to do with lynchings, featuring photographs and descriptions from the book Without Sanctuary by Hilton Als and James Allen, with postcards of lynchings in America.
The part below is copied and pasted from the site:
::by James Allen
I am a picker. It is my living and my avocation. I search out items that some people don't want or need and then sell them to others who do. Children are natural pickers. I was. I played at it when I collected bees in jars that were dusting blossoms in the orange groves surrounding my family's home, or when I was wandering along swampy lakesides and hidden banana groves and found caches of stolen liquor or mossy old canoes.
My father would bring home bulging canvas sacks stenciled with bank names, bags of copper pennies or weighty half dollars and we kids would sit around the mounds of coins as if around a camp fire and shout bingo sounds when we found an S penny or silver fifty cent piece. At fourteen years of age, I used those coins to run away, searching for the lush drifting continent that existed only in my mind, where the people spoke in cryptic tongues, and feasted on honey and sling-shotted gem-feathered birds, sleeping at ease under open skies. I never found that place, but the police found me and shipped me back home. Picking, I guess, is a kind of extenuation of that search.
Once, unthinkably near to our house, in a deep, waxy green grove, I followed a path to the mildewed shack of an unshaven, alcoholic hermit. He made fantastic drip paintings on a portable turntable that splattered pure liquid color outwards like sun rays. Years later a taxicab pulled up to the curb in front of our house and rolled the old man out on to the street like a duffle bag of dirty laundry. He lay still, good as dead. This was my first grappling with the concurrence of beauty and pain, art and the hidden.
Mothers don't counsel their sons to be pickers. No adult aspires to be called a picker. In the South it is a pejorative term. He is thought to be a salvage man, lowly and ignorant, living hand to mouth, maybe a thief that doubles back at night and steals what couldn't be bought outright for pennies. I have tried hard to bring some dignity to the work, traveling countless roads in my home state, acquiring things that I thought were telling - handmade furniture and slave-made pots and pieced quilt tops and carved walking sticks. Many people who sell me things are burdened with their possessions, or ready for the old folks home or pining for the grave. Some are reluctant sellers, some eager. Some are as kind and gentle and welcoming as any notion of home, some are mean and bitter and half crazy from life and isolation. In America everything is for sale, even a national shame. Till I came upon a postcard of a lynching, postcards seemed trivial to me, the way second hand, misshapen Rubbermaid products might seem now. Ironically, the pursuit of these images has brought to me a great sense of purpose and personal satisfaction.
Studying these photos has engendered in me a caution of whites, of the majority, of the young, of religion, of the accepted. Perhaps a certain circumspection concerning these things was already in me, but surely not as actively as after the first sight of a brittle postcard of Leo Frank dead in an oak tree. It wasn't the corpse that bewildered me as much as the canine-thin faces of the pack, lingering in the woods, circling after the kill. Hundreds of flea markets later a trader pulled me aside and in conspiratorial tones offered me a second card, this one of Laura Nelson, caught so pitiful and tattered and beyond retrieving - like a child's paper kite snagged on a utility wire. The sight of Laura layered a pall of grief over all my fears.
I believe the photographer was more than a perceptive spectator at lynchings. The photographic art played as significant a role in the ritual as torture or souvenir grabbing - a sort of two-dimensional biblical swine, a receptacle for a collective sinful self. Lust propelled their commercial reproduction and distribution, facilitating the endless replay of anguish. Even dead, the victims were without sanctuary.
These photos provoke a strong sense of denial in me, and a desire to freeze my emotions. In time, I realize that my fear of the other is fear of myself. Then these portraits, torn from other family albums, become the portraits of my own family and of myself. And the faces of the living and the faces of the dead recur in me and in my daily life. I've seen John Richards on a remote county road, rocking along in hobbyhorse strides, head low, eyes to the ground, spotting coins or rocks or roots. And I've encountered Laura Nelson in a small, sturdy woman that answered my knock on a back porch door. In her deep-set eyes I watched a silent crowd parade across a shiny steel bridge, looking down. And on Christmas Lane, just blocks from our home, another Leo, a small-framed boy with his shirttail out and skullcap off center, makes his way to Sabbath prayers. With each encounter, I can't help but think of these photos, and the march of time, and of the cold steel trigger in the human heart::
Now, I glanced through a few of the pictures and read what extra information was given on each postcard's origin/etc. And then I came across this one. I strongly suggest please not to click on this link unless you can handle seeing a hanged body.
http://www.musarium.com:16080/withoutsanctuary/main.html
I clicked the link that offered more information about the postcard and got this:
This card was purchased at a garage sale in Macon, Missouri. The seller related what he knew of the postcard's history and assured that it was a photograph of a lynching that took place in Missouri. Researchers confirm the symbolic importance of lynching sites and the conscious selection of these sites by perpetrators of extra-legal violence. The dominance of Christian symbology is resurected in the lynchers' preference for bodies of water, bridges, and landmark trees. Bodies of water are the traditional locations for baptisms; bridges symbolize the most profound rite of passage, the great "crossing over" to death; and trees are the very symbol of life and of Christ's crucifixion. The lynchers sought, in the conscious selection of these sacrificial sites and in their participation in these ritualized murders, their own salvation and passage to a safer place without sin and evil - both of which, in their minds, were physically embodied in the "offending" victim.
Any thoughts?
Just isn't pretty..
(my little 'disclaimer': Now, all of you should know me well enough to know I would never do anything like this out of spite of a person's creed/race/belief/religion/preference/etc.. If you don't, then I strongly suggest you unfriend me right here and now before reading any further. I do this because above all else, I am curious, and I want to learn. But even with all that, you as my friends have every right to let me know when you feel I have crossed any lines and/or made you feel uncomfortable ~ all I ask is that you let me know. I do value your views/opinions/beliefs.)
First, the site I stumbled upon:
Musarium ~ Without Sanctuary
This site has to do with lynchings, featuring photographs and descriptions from the book Without Sanctuary by Hilton Als and James Allen, with postcards of lynchings in America.
The part below is copied and pasted from the site:
::by James Allen
I am a picker. It is my living and my avocation. I search out items that some people don't want or need and then sell them to others who do. Children are natural pickers. I was. I played at it when I collected bees in jars that were dusting blossoms in the orange groves surrounding my family's home, or when I was wandering along swampy lakesides and hidden banana groves and found caches of stolen liquor or mossy old canoes.
My father would bring home bulging canvas sacks stenciled with bank names, bags of copper pennies or weighty half dollars and we kids would sit around the mounds of coins as if around a camp fire and shout bingo sounds when we found an S penny or silver fifty cent piece. At fourteen years of age, I used those coins to run away, searching for the lush drifting continent that existed only in my mind, where the people spoke in cryptic tongues, and feasted on honey and sling-shotted gem-feathered birds, sleeping at ease under open skies. I never found that place, but the police found me and shipped me back home. Picking, I guess, is a kind of extenuation of that search.
Once, unthinkably near to our house, in a deep, waxy green grove, I followed a path to the mildewed shack of an unshaven, alcoholic hermit. He made fantastic drip paintings on a portable turntable that splattered pure liquid color outwards like sun rays. Years later a taxicab pulled up to the curb in front of our house and rolled the old man out on to the street like a duffle bag of dirty laundry. He lay still, good as dead. This was my first grappling with the concurrence of beauty and pain, art and the hidden.
Mothers don't counsel their sons to be pickers. No adult aspires to be called a picker. In the South it is a pejorative term. He is thought to be a salvage man, lowly and ignorant, living hand to mouth, maybe a thief that doubles back at night and steals what couldn't be bought outright for pennies. I have tried hard to bring some dignity to the work, traveling countless roads in my home state, acquiring things that I thought were telling - handmade furniture and slave-made pots and pieced quilt tops and carved walking sticks. Many people who sell me things are burdened with their possessions, or ready for the old folks home or pining for the grave. Some are reluctant sellers, some eager. Some are as kind and gentle and welcoming as any notion of home, some are mean and bitter and half crazy from life and isolation. In America everything is for sale, even a national shame. Till I came upon a postcard of a lynching, postcards seemed trivial to me, the way second hand, misshapen Rubbermaid products might seem now. Ironically, the pursuit of these images has brought to me a great sense of purpose and personal satisfaction.
Studying these photos has engendered in me a caution of whites, of the majority, of the young, of religion, of the accepted. Perhaps a certain circumspection concerning these things was already in me, but surely not as actively as after the first sight of a brittle postcard of Leo Frank dead in an oak tree. It wasn't the corpse that bewildered me as much as the canine-thin faces of the pack, lingering in the woods, circling after the kill. Hundreds of flea markets later a trader pulled me aside and in conspiratorial tones offered me a second card, this one of Laura Nelson, caught so pitiful and tattered and beyond retrieving - like a child's paper kite snagged on a utility wire. The sight of Laura layered a pall of grief over all my fears.
I believe the photographer was more than a perceptive spectator at lynchings. The photographic art played as significant a role in the ritual as torture or souvenir grabbing - a sort of two-dimensional biblical swine, a receptacle for a collective sinful self. Lust propelled their commercial reproduction and distribution, facilitating the endless replay of anguish. Even dead, the victims were without sanctuary.
These photos provoke a strong sense of denial in me, and a desire to freeze my emotions. In time, I realize that my fear of the other is fear of myself. Then these portraits, torn from other family albums, become the portraits of my own family and of myself. And the faces of the living and the faces of the dead recur in me and in my daily life. I've seen John Richards on a remote county road, rocking along in hobbyhorse strides, head low, eyes to the ground, spotting coins or rocks or roots. And I've encountered Laura Nelson in a small, sturdy woman that answered my knock on a back porch door. In her deep-set eyes I watched a silent crowd parade across a shiny steel bridge, looking down. And on Christmas Lane, just blocks from our home, another Leo, a small-framed boy with his shirttail out and skullcap off center, makes his way to Sabbath prayers. With each encounter, I can't help but think of these photos, and the march of time, and of the cold steel trigger in the human heart::
Now, I glanced through a few of the pictures and read what extra information was given on each postcard's origin/etc. And then I came across this one. I strongly suggest please not to click on this link unless you can handle seeing a hanged body.
http://www.musarium.com:16080/withoutsanctuary/main.html
I clicked the link that offered more information about the postcard and got this:
This card was purchased at a garage sale in Macon, Missouri. The seller related what he knew of the postcard's history and assured that it was a photograph of a lynching that took place in Missouri. Researchers confirm the symbolic importance of lynching sites and the conscious selection of these sites by perpetrators of extra-legal violence. The dominance of Christian symbology is resurected in the lynchers' preference for bodies of water, bridges, and landmark trees. Bodies of water are the traditional locations for baptisms; bridges symbolize the most profound rite of passage, the great "crossing over" to death; and trees are the very symbol of life and of Christ's crucifixion. The lynchers sought, in the conscious selection of these sacrificial sites and in their participation in these ritualized murders, their own salvation and passage to a safer place without sin and evil - both of which, in their minds, were physically embodied in the "offending" victim.
Any thoughts?
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no subject
Date: 2004-08-14 04:03 pm (UTC)no true version of christianity advocated violence against another human being, especially an innocent one. our country's history of prejudiced and racist violence is deplorable.
jesus taught us to turn the other cheek, to love our enemy and our neighbor. i have always found it both arrogant and unforgiveable to twist the Bible or any other supposedly Christian beliefs to promote such hatred.
my maternal grandfather is one of the most bigoted, prejudiced people i know, and i am thankful every day that that did not continue with my mother, and that i grew up in such a diverse setting/church. {side note: our church outside philadelphia was roughly 1/3 anglo, 1/3 black & 1/3 latino, plus a few others for good measure. it's truly a remarkable thing.}
once again, i ramble... i just want you to know that as a christian i absolutely renounce anyone who uses a belief system to justify any sort of personal hatred.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-14 06:31 pm (UTC)It's not the bodies that prompt this kind of reaction, though they too diserve their own form of horror. It's the realization that there are minds out there that can inflict this kind of madness on another, and see in it salvation and the love of god. How many warps and twists and justifications, layer upon layer, have to happen to a person's mind for them to come to this conclusion? What does it say for us as humans that this justification of perversion, this need to seek out and destroy anthing different, is for the most part, commonplace? That locked tightly behind the teeth of a large majority are the words, "Yeah, I think they diserved to die, and God thinks so too"?
It's a large onion to peel. And I peel it every time I run across material like this. Reading about Brandon Tina's murder, watching WW2 footage of bulldozers shoveling emaciated Jewish corpses into a mass grave in the name of "cleansing", the hanging of innocent people as a form of sick self-benediction.
May I never get numb, and by staying raw retain a shred of humanity.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-16 04:18 pm (UTC)~sighs~