Gaith Abdul-Ahad on the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein

“…So the Americans came to my street, near what is called the National Theatre square, which is just down the road. I started following these American troops, and they all congregated in this square where the statue was standing, but also where all the media were stationed at the time, the big media, and the TV crew. So we were a small group of Iraqis and a much larger group of foreign journalists. The Iraqis were trying to topple the statue, and an hour and a half later, they hadn’t done much beyond smashing some marble tiles. That’s the moment when the Americans decide to reverse one of these huge amphibious vehicles and use the crane on the back to pull down the statue.

And of course, I cringed because anyone who reads history, you realize, this is the moment that should have been the Iraqi moment. It had to be an Iraqi moment if you want to maintain that charade of freedom of the people kind of toppling their own statue. So the Americans pulling the statue was the first cringing moment. The second moment was when the Marine who climbed up and put the big noose around the statue’s head pulled out an American flag and draped it around Saddam’s head.

At that time, I was like, “oh, no, don’t do that.” This is the moment that we’ll be playing again and again on TV cameras. That’s it. This is an American war. Since then, I came to realize that that Marine was more honest than any politician or any pundit ever because he saw the war as a conflict between his army, the United States Army, and Iraq. He didn’t see it as a war of liberation or freedom. It was his right to pull out his own flag as a person who’s been fighting all the way to Baghdad. And I think his act was honest. But of course, that sealed that intention in the eyes of many.”

from https://lithub.com/20-years-after-the-invasion-ghaith-abdul-ahad-on-iraqi-perspectives-on-the-war-and-what-western-media-missed/

David Ferry - "Your Personal God" (trans. from Horace, Epistles 11.2 lines 180-89)

Jewels, marble, ivory, paintings, beautiful Tuscan
Pottery, silver, Gaetulian robes dyed purple—
Many there are who’d love to have all of these things.
There are some who don’t care about them in the least.
Why one twin brother lives for nothing but pleasure,
And loves to fool around even more than Herod
Loves his abundant gardens of date-trees, while
The other twin brother works from morning to night
Improving his farm, ploughing and clearing the lands,
Pruning and planting, working his ass off, only
The genius knows, the personal god who knows
And controls the birth star of every person
There is in the world. Your personal god is the god
Who dies in a sense when your own breath gives out,
And yet lives on, after you die, to be
The personal god of somebody other than you;
Your personal god, whose countenance changes as
He looks at you, smiling sometimes, sometimes not.

Ben Lerner, from "10:04"

“The dazzling sun cleared his head a little, and by the time they were in a cab his sense of time had stabilized, but he was still so thoroughly suspended in the warm glow of the drugs that he experienced the sudden starting and stopping of the taxi while they inched their way east as a gentle rocking motion. He felt no pain, and only the awareness that his tongue was numb was vaguely uncomfortable, reminding him of the wounds packed with gauze. Had Liza been talking this whole time? He turned and faced her as they merged onto the F.D.R. Drive, and she looked beautiful, her arms raised to pull her light-brown hair into a ponytail; he watched her chest rise and fall as she breathed, saw the thin gold necklace she always wore against her perfect collarbone. Then without transition he was looking at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the buildings growing larger and more detailed as the taxi approached, though he was not aware of moving. Then he was aware of moving at an impossibly smooth rate, and there was the Brooklyn Bridge, cablework sparkling. Liza was cursing at the little touch-screen television in the taxi, which she couldn’t seem to turn off, and he reached out a hand to help her and experienced contact with the glass as a marvel, like encountering solidified, sensate air. Then he was smoothing her hair back and she was laughing at this uncharacteristic intimacy, something he’d done only a few times in their six years. Now the view again, and it occurred to him with the force of revelation:

I won’t remember this. This is the most beautiful view of the city I have ever seen, the most perfect experience of touch and speed, I’ve never felt so close to Liza, and I won’t remember it; the drugs will erase it. And then, glowing with the aura of imminent disappearance, it really was the most beautiful view, experience. He wanted badly to describe this situation to Liza but couldn’t: his tongue was still numb; he couldn’t even ask her to remind him of what the drugs would erase. While he was distantly aware that Liza would tease him for it later, that he was being ridiculous, he felt tears start in his eyes as they merged onto the bridge and he watched the play of late-October sunlight on the water. That he would form no memory of what he observed and could not record it in any language lent it a fullness, made it briefly identical to itself, and he was deeply moved to think this experience of presence depended upon its obliteration. Then he was in his apartment; Liza gave him a couple of pills, put him to bed, and left.”

From "I and Thou"

“The you encounters me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed.

The You encounters me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once: An action of the whole being must approach passivity, for it does away with all partial actions and thus with any sense of action, which always depends on limited exertions.

The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become; by becoming I, I say You.

All actual life is encounter.”

- M. Buber

From "Song of Myself" - Walt Whitman

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Jessica Scicchitano, from "Prepare This Place for Bed"

“….One October long ago the singsong

of trick-or-treat made me so aware of the body,

how our homes are our body, how you’re choosing another

body. Barns in my hands, bobby pins—my whole body

is a womb. Prepare this place for bed.


My mother calls and says she’s going to the Frick this weekend, as if everyone

knows what the Frick is, the cross streets, its smell of manure

the horse carriages leave behind.

I feel like my body hasn’t left that moment long ago

when my mother opened her mouth and pain flew in,

how synonymous it became to vulnerability. Waiting for this train,

I am and am not a woman, in a suit.”

Walter Kaufmann on Martin Buber's "I and Thou"

“There are many modes of I-You.

Kant told men always to treat humanity, in our person as well as that of others, as an end also and never only as a means. This is one way of setting off I-You from I-It. And when he is correctly quoted and the “also” and the “only” are not omitted, as they all too often are, one may well marvel at his moral wisdom.

Innumerable are the ways in which I treat You as a means. I ask your help, I ask for information, I may buy from you or buy what you have made, and you sometimes dispel my loneliness.

Nor do I count the ways in which You treat me as a means. You ask my help, you ask me questions, you may buy what I have written, and at times I ease your loneliness.

Even when you treat me only as a means I do not always mind. A genuine encounter can be quite exhausting, even when it is exhilarating, and I do not always want to give myself.

Even when you treat me only as a means because you want some information, I may feel delighted that I have the answer and can help.

But man’s attitudes are manifold, and there are many ways of treating others as ends also. There are many modes of I-You.

You may be polite when asking; you may show respect, affection, admiration, or one of the countless attitudes that men call love.

Or you may not ask but seek without the benefit of words. Or you may speak but not ask, possibly responding to my wordless question. We may do something together. You may write to me. You may think of writing to me. And there are other ways. There are many modes of I-You.”