symbolism 1654, “practice of representing things with symbols,” from symbol. Attested from 1892 as a movement in Fr. literature that aimed at representing ideas and emotions by indirect suggestion rather than direct expression; rejecting realism and naturalism, it attached symbolic meaning to certain objects, words, etc. Fr. symboliste was coined by poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96) in 1885.
symbol Look up symbol at Dictionary.com->

symbol c.1434, “creed, summary, religious belief,” from L.L. symbolum “creed, token, mark,” from Gk. symbolon “token, watchword” (applied c.250 by Cyprian of Carthage to the Apostles’ Creed, on the notion of the “mark” that distinguishes Christians from pagans) from syn- “together” stem of ballein “to throw.” …

… The sense evolution is from “throwing things together” to “contrasting” to “comparing” to “token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine.” …

… Hence, “outward sign” of something. The meaning “something which stands for something else” first recorded 1590 (in “Faerie Queene”). Symbolic is attested from 1680.

First: I’m struck by this notion of symbolism meaning “throwing things together” – I suppose for something to stand for something else, it must put its back up to it and project [blank], that is, project its case for standing for something else.

Second: What is sense evolution? An interesting phrase, because what of the sense remains the same and what changes?

Third: In a curious and potentially unconscious/ conscientious move, “Saudi authorities” in 2004 replaced the three jamarats, obelisk shaped targets in the Stoning of the Devil ceremony that is part of Hajj, with three walls accessible by a great multi-levelled bridge.

The expressed reason for the reconstruction is safety, and that makes perfect sense, but what I see in the wall is an enlargement of the pillars to unrepresentable proportions. To remain a jamarat (a pillar), the community of participants must fill in that which lies beyond the crop marks to its imaginable size.

Thanks to imagination, the wall can secure the well being of the masses as they reject the devil.

Yet this is not the only activity taking place. There is a projection involved in securing a safe site of projection. The act on the day is a “throwing something together”, but so too is the jamarat bridge – this passageway over and upon which the projection is made – a throwing of concrete, a throwing of people. This is the Jamarat Bridge and one can see the three pillars.

The site is being reconstructed again. 362 died in 2006 at the event, something to do with luggage getting in the way of the flow of the crowd. Apparently not everyone makes it over the bridge. According to Alexander Trevi at Pruned:

Dirk Helbing, a professor in crowd dynamics at the Dresden University of Technology, et al., will be complemented by a reorganization of the streets leading up to the bridge, and a time schedule and route assignments as determined in real time through video monitoring and on-site surveillance.

As stones are throne at these pillars/half-done, people are throne across the bridge. And this is how a community of self projection evolves, through conscientious and imaginative commitment to throwing something together. This is how the obelisk is built.

Trevi’s piece on the Bridge pointed me to something analogue to this – the 10 Mile Spiral, a great big coiled rattlesnake of a roadway near Las Vegas that conceptually give you all the pleasure of Vegas while maintaining efficient throughput.

Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch, authors of this concept in their book Tool, have, like the developers of the Bridge, decongestion and cultural facilitation as their aim.

First, it acts as a massive traffic decongestion device… by adding significant mileage to the highway in the form of a spiral. The second purpose is less infrastructural and more cultural: along the spiral you can play slots, roulette, get married, see a show, have your car washed, and ride through a tunnel of love, all without ever leaving your car. It is a compact Vegas, enjoyed at 55 miles per hour and topped off by a towering observation ramp offering views of the entire valley floor below.

The obelisk of the 10 Mile Spiral appears to be negative-space obelisk, but I don’t know if I buy that. The folks at BLDGBLOG, who introduced me to the 10 Mile Spiral, point out some scene in J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, where a character driving around in the madness of London’s motorways loathes the other drivers. The stick shifts of other drivers could quite possibly be our obelisks, but so what if I loathe everyone today and care little tomorrow? There’s nothing very together about it – I still go out driving. I like a spectacle. A mass gathering – congregating to maintaine the etymological integrity of symbol-the-verb. Motorways spin around a city, perhaps that is our obelisk (or obelisk park, since all respectable cities are filled with them.) Washington D.C. spins around the Washington Monument – there’s an obelisk that took a couple of decades to build!

But on the stones we throw in Vegas, I know something:

It is dice we throw together.

“It is only out of a community forged by the recognition of a shared danger that a common readiness for responsible action can come into being.” – Moltmann, C of G, 211)

Which is the most legitimate enemy and why? Despots, Democrats, Death, Deities or Global Warming? Any other suggestions? Is ethics dependent on the recognition of a shared danger?

Is there any Right for We to be?

No. It is simply done; an action varying in degree of violence against those who do not or will not associate.

We are not Them. But this does not mean our will to associate is against Them, although the will to associate is always against something. What We are against is something calling us nothing. What We are against defines us, though we may be against it.

Diseases are the names of the asssociations that fight it. We will be no longer when We take the right to be from the disease. Then We will be something like it was something. And it will be nothing like We are nothing. In those days afer the End, only the delight of memories of suffering will keep us together, reminiscing on the stoop under the twilight.

And night will fall again, the darker our isolation the deeper into the house of Right We will be. And in that house, which all have access to, we will clamour around the furniture, our memories the hard spots of former leisures. All will seek. But there will be some who in the darkness will despair – throwing memories at those who are all just ghosts to them. But then there will be those who will seek a hand. They will themselves not into further isolation, but unto association. In memory of those who confronted the Night before, We will emerge.

We who are emerging the house of Right, will risk in our errors to will repitition. We will repeat life under the light of day with our appeals made unto that living Hope whose being is our object.

These are not the words of a widow turned pacifist. Her lament will have war. And look who’s pronouns got the capitals in her letter.

Has Europe come to terms with the First World War? Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker argue that they have not. My observations of Italy in a recent trip confirm to me their thesis.

Over a period of ten days I did not come across one World War Two memorial, but many for the victims of World War One. I say victims, because the men depicted (many of the memorials have stylized B/W photos on them) are clean and beautiful often in close proximity to an image of a clean and beautiful, self-sacrificing Christ.

Concerning these heroes of the monuments, Audoin-Rouzeaus and Becker write:

The foundation of this myth according for Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker is in a denial of the hatred and violence, less engineered by the powers that be in any society, but that came from below – from those who sit now sanitized on monuments.

Why did men not stop fighting when their fellow combatants, often the men fighting right next to them would be physically torn apart by the enemy’s weapons into unidentifiable pieces of flesh or when the teeth and broken bones of their neighbours were the common debris to be dug out from their own flesh?

Stories of fraternizing with the enemy, exchanging gifts and playing soccer gained curious readings today that glosses over the barbarity of the common soldier, transfering blame up the chain of command when those soccer games obscures a picture of the whole – suggestings that combatants were victims wanting to play football and not “to get good at beating Germans” as Rupert Brooke put it, a combatant who found a sense of purpose in the war.

- Blaise Cendrars, a combatant in WW1.

All this puts a new spin for me on that classic Great War poster. What are you really thinking there, daddy?

Delara Darabi, currently sits on death row in Iran. She is now 20 years old, sentenced at 17. This is one of the dozens of paintings that she has been producing while in prison. Her statement:

“The paintings in front of you are not wordless images and colours, they are the painful photo realities of our life,” she writes in a stream of consciousness message pinned to the gallery wall.

“The only face I see in front of me every day is a wall. For three years, I have been defending myself with colours, forms and words. These paintings are an oath to a crime I did not commit. Unless the colours bring me back to life, I greet you who have come to view my paintings from behind that wall.”
- Guardian Unlimited

From news reports I gather that she was involved in atleast attempting to conceal information concerning the murder of her father’s cousin. Is her paintings just about the injustice of the Iranian courts or are there more universal themes concerning justice, crime, and punishment to be construed from her paintings? For there appears to be more to the wall in this painting than what her statement suggests.
You can see more of Delara Darabi’s paintings here.