( via / lanny quarles on fb )

"The weight of my body carried here was a punishment."

I very much dislike the phrase "Fight for freedom", for that makes it sound like any fighting is right. Freedom is not what you fight for, but negotiation--to negotiate the possibility of freedom. Fighting without the will to negotiate only prolongs the conflict, & aims solely at annihilation. But annihilation seldom ends conflict, because annihilation is rarely complete. It only gives birth to new conflict.

This is one important way that real-world conflict differs utterly from conflict in gaming.

What precludes negotiation is the ideology of extermination.

"I found this on one of the pews in Melverley church."

"The Birds of Ancient Battlefields Visit the Suburbs

In the nodding midday, a murder of crows.
So loud they haul you · from a lulled house
where news of war · nests in the walls.
You stare to the end · of the street where they roost
not in the maples · on mowed lawns,
carefully straighted-edged, calm, but the stripped
crown of an elm · dying of canker:
The flapping rags · of their funeral clothes.
The air-wring cries. The creature they rail at
(you think, squinting · at its backlit squat)
is a cat, hunched hard · against the havoc,
harried, But how, so improbably high,
has it ghosted there · to that grim resistance?
Your neck hairs bristle · in a thin breeze.
Your shoulders rise. Now, from the riot
of mobbed clamor, the muddying cat-shape
grows great wings. It glides away,
owl after all, soundless, awful,
a soul departing · the place of slaughter.
The din dies down. Occasional cawing.
Quiet. The carrion · far away."

--Maryann Corbett in Forgotten Ground Regained

Ferris wheel in the Prater in Vienna by night.