"Saturday I awoke conflicted. For I realized, autobiographically speaking, that there remained one vast area of self-experience as yet unexplored and unexplained, viz. sky as a medium of annihilation. Warfare is a fact of life for all the creeping creatures that creep upon the earth (as the book of Genesis calls them on the 6th day) and warfare is mostly a history of death-bringing stuff flying through the air—bullets, bombs, bows and arrows, Big Berthas, B-52s, poison darts, poison gas, portable nukes, cannonballs, curses, lethal drones. My first instinct was to fashion all this into a fast-paced crime novel. Certainly there were crimes.

But it proved impossible to condense that long evildoing into a simple algebra of cause and effect. Crime fiction is very condensed. And its impact on the reader derives from giving a face to the algebraic components—the victim, the criminal, the detective, the good, the bad. Warfare has grown increasingly faceless throughout its history. Surely Hektor and Akhilles looked into each other's eyes on the battlefield, but in 1092 Pope Urban II found it necessary to outlaw the crossbow as being inglorious due to its distance from death, and by the 21st century a soldier in Nevada can push a button and have five people in Pakistan burst into flame. Without the face, no ethics: this is an old idea. But also, without the face, no function for me, nothing to write about. No one can make sentences using only verbs. No one can tell a story without believing in the reality of others.

Yet I didn't, I don't, expect all you creeping creatures that creep upon the earth to stop wanting warfare anytime soon. And I didn't, I don't, expect me to stop delivering the hysterical valentines of your desire through my beautiful blue air.
 
That's just who we are." 

-Anne Carson

@evedefy
IG: @du_feuilles
https://linktr.ee/evedefy

Distant Signals 067: Eve Defy

Received transmissions from the outer reaches of an exquisite corpse universe

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