spatiotemporalcookiez:
Violence in Syria has gone beyond the fathomable and the comprehensible a long time ago. I don’t know how else to explain how one can watch YouTube videos of beheadings, of people ripping out and eating each others’ hearts, of piles of pierced-charred-disemboweled corpses without entirely collapsing and feeling the ground retreat under one’s feet.
And by “beyond the fathomable and comprehensible” I mean that either we’re sick fucks and voyeurs and have a revolting fetishistic relation with the images that are coming out of there, or we’re so beyond fucked up that those images become nothing but empty signifiers and we are unable to even conceive of their implications
because it’s one thing to know about the kind of violence that is out there
but to look at it directly and then be able to fluidly move from it to something else that is completely banale, without it even causing any sort of rupture in the motion of our days, of our thoughts, of our bodies
that terrifies me
