There may be something to this: "Two things can seize a whole crowd at once, and neither of them is grief."
Los Madres Buscadoras having been roaring for justice for their missing sons and daughters and they are shouting at the world cup too. The contrast between the grieving mothers and the cheers for a goal is striking.
*Also, but unrelated to the quote, some dunk fans from Polanco tried to use one of the Los Madres Buscadoras banners as an umbrella while calling them bad mothers. I know this is a singular incident, but it is symbolic of the world cup from my point of view.
This has transported me to a tragic night in the Hollow Crown ( BBC UK adaptation of Shakespeare's War of the Roses series). The simultaneous nocturnal scenes switched rapidly between queen Margaret's cries of passion, and the muffled calls for help of victims at the hands of assassins. Her seducer was the perpetrator ( he hired the killers in a bid for power). I know it's an entirely different plot, and portrays a loosely factual fiction. However the observer's simultaneous emotions are similarly hard to name as a combination . Bitter sweet is too mild.
You have written an essay with many layers to peel and see, here a death of a girl (or a man, we don't ever know), unannounced, unaware of, rippled through the consciousness of the crowd, us. This undertoned evokes an emptiness that we hardly notice daily. And this is the feeling I have sometimes I have in Mexico. Death slips by your side so quietly, you don't notice. One time I was putting a car in storage, and the receptionist read out the terms and conditions: "No body inside the car", as if we said, "no battery left unattended inside the car". Or a neighbor asked if I remembered the music band played there the other night, I said yes, and she said, oh, their bodies were found in a well yesterday. Death often surges and takes over your nonchalant moment in Mexico, while the passion of living is so adorable and overwhelming.
Dammit, Grant David. You dragged me through this experience you had in a way that forced me to feel the impact of the noise before you reduced it to these sentences:
“And standing there I think I finally understood that my capacity to witness had never been the broken thing. The noise was.
I could give this gross green nothing the attention I could not give a human being, because this time the world had gone quiet enough to let me.”
It’s not like I didn’t know it’s the noise that’s disintegrating our humanity.
But the way you drag the reader through your sentences does a masterful job of prepping the mind to take in your summary and the beetle scene.
Students who come work with you this fall at NYU are going to be so fucking lucky. Give ‘em hell.
There may be something to this: "Two things can seize a whole crowd at once, and neither of them is grief."
Los Madres Buscadoras having been roaring for justice for their missing sons and daughters and they are shouting at the world cup too. The contrast between the grieving mothers and the cheers for a goal is striking.
*Also, but unrelated to the quote, some dunk fans from Polanco tried to use one of the Los Madres Buscadoras banners as an umbrella while calling them bad mothers. I know this is a singular incident, but it is symbolic of the world cup from my point of view.
This has transported me to a tragic night in the Hollow Crown ( BBC UK adaptation of Shakespeare's War of the Roses series). The simultaneous nocturnal scenes switched rapidly between queen Margaret's cries of passion, and the muffled calls for help of victims at the hands of assassins. Her seducer was the perpetrator ( he hired the killers in a bid for power). I know it's an entirely different plot, and portrays a loosely factual fiction. However the observer's simultaneous emotions are similarly hard to name as a combination . Bitter sweet is too mild.
You have written an essay with many layers to peel and see, here a death of a girl (or a man, we don't ever know), unannounced, unaware of, rippled through the consciousness of the crowd, us. This undertoned evokes an emptiness that we hardly notice daily. And this is the feeling I have sometimes I have in Mexico. Death slips by your side so quietly, you don't notice. One time I was putting a car in storage, and the receptionist read out the terms and conditions: "No body inside the car", as if we said, "no battery left unattended inside the car". Or a neighbor asked if I remembered the music band played there the other night, I said yes, and she said, oh, their bodies were found in a well yesterday. Death often surges and takes over your nonchalant moment in Mexico, while the passion of living is so adorable and overwhelming.
Dammit, Grant David. You dragged me through this experience you had in a way that forced me to feel the impact of the noise before you reduced it to these sentences:
“And standing there I think I finally understood that my capacity to witness had never been the broken thing. The noise was.
I could give this gross green nothing the attention I could not give a human being, because this time the world had gone quiet enough to let me.”
It’s not like I didn’t know it’s the noise that’s disintegrating our humanity.
But the way you drag the reader through your sentences does a masterful job of prepping the mind to take in your summary and the beetle scene.
Students who come work with you this fall at NYU are going to be so fucking lucky. Give ‘em hell.
this was all so very poetic