Thursday Words: Easter Weekend - The Blood of a Sacrificial Lamb, The Blood of Christ, The Flesh of the Palestianians. Obeyance? Rebellion.

 

....Over the weekend I passed through a moment in which I felt so-o Italian. It was Easter so even though my friend wasn't feeling well again - it's been a nasty winter for many, me as well -  we decided to do the Italian Easter thing anyway. A little. Which in Italy means food, or more the expression of love and belonging through food and ritual: the sacrificial lamb, part of the obbligatorial foundations of... many relegions. (We're christians by culture as are likely nearly everyone else who might read this note.) 

   And pasta.

   So to make things easier for Sunday - there are several dishes to make - the day before I made pasta alla chitarra: square spaghetti made with the use of a utensil with strings that looks and sounds much like a guitar, 'chitarra'. After you've finished rolling the dough through the strings you seperate the noodles into nests, sprinkling them with flour then cover the whole with a smooth rag. 

   It was that last bit that gave me the 'Italy' feel - me with a duck kitchen apron on holding the rectangular cardboard pastry plate with fresh noodles beneath the rag, 'panno', as if a grandma prepping a Sunday meal for her family. So very Italian from the feel of the apron to the slight post-light-workout tension from first kneading then rolling the dough after a pause. There's quite a bit of love expressed through such meals and noodles. 

   Thing is, I actually didn't have much if any of those kinds of real 'nonna', grandma', food experiences. I grew up in Cleveland, my mother (and father) never made pasta noodles and my paternal Italian grandmother was far away and rather old - she passed early in my life. Yet I have memory not of experience but of culture - tricky notion that, culture - which prompted a feeling of, well, being a central Italian grandma putting away noodles for a Sunday family lunch.  It's a terribly warm feeling, belonging to memory and place and people, my ill friend this time but in the feeling... a belonging to cultural memory itself.  

    That's probably what all systems, even non-living ones, tend to: to remain. Where they-it-you, belong. And for plural systems, those with at least 3 simultaneuos sustained expressions ongoing, living systems.... you get motivation, developed, to the same. And a ton of complexity. But to have belonging, to remain, a system sort of has to develop a language to distinguish between itself and not itself.shapes.Topologies. Hierachies that determine or will determine just who or what will be sponsored in its expressive intent of remaining. And belonging.

   I'm not a grandma and am at least as much, regionally and likely genetically and maybe histonically,so to speak (epigentically,) less central Adriatic Italian than...other stuff. Like Welsh. Bavarian. Austrian. Menominee. Bald (hoho.)  But that feeling, that creation of memory and belonging is quite real and, I think, something of beauty by and large. Human. Even Christian-Adriatic-human-recent-ecc. 

   It's memory of that kind that tends to take away fear and resulting violence. And indifference. Any person who might have come to the door, then, on the day before Easter of Easter day - well, nearly any - would have become one of my....family, someone who belongs. 'Common' in, take up a chair, have a plate of pasta, given love and.... sacrifice.' We are. And we are human, all of us god's children, Jesus the sacrificial lamb for and of everyone. Ritual...is important. And inevitable, I think, defining we, where we belong, what we will do. By synchronizing systemic expression (and all that implies, physiologies included.)

   

   Other people have quite different unexperienced, culture-created memory based relatively more in fear and division. My side-your side. Look what they did to us. Possession. It makes.... stealing things a lot easier, as, say, the european migration to the Americas taking everything from the tribes living there. Or wrapping up brown skinned people in chains to forcefully migrate to ...serve, away and away. Slavery. Or... prohibiting anyone not of noble blood from wearing this color or growing that kind of facial hair. Class. Caste. Rank. 'Yessir, ours is not to reason why, ours is but... to. Do. And..... kill. (Or die.) And onward into the valley....   

 

  Bad stuff, evil stuff, horrible stuff - 'the horror, the horror' - goes on all the time. It passes if the prevailing story culture allows it or if it goes on ...in the dark, like...Dachau (one of the concentration camps constructed to facilitate the efficient murder of jews and other inconvient 'thems') as a glaring recent example-deal. 'We didn't know, not really,' many testified. And they didn't. Not really. Their story and language refused such seeing in turn refusing by suppression any possibility of feeling. Like Word suppression of Wordperfect. VHS suppressing betamax. 'In the end, there can only be one...' Ho. Ho. 

  Stories and hierarchies. Today something very...unimaginably horrible is ongoing. A genocide, the killing of infants, the stealing of a land and its resources. Mass murder. Geno-cide. It goes on joyfully, decadent, corrupt. Pleasure in the mashing apart of bodies, in exploding kids into thousands of pieces, targeting doctors and their families, aid workers, digging up cemetaries, forcing death by starvation. Funded by us, the west, perpetrated by Israel and Ashkenazi zionists internationally. The creation of tens of thousands of human  ....lambs, meat to sacfirice - the Palestianians. So.... what did we eat at Easter? Of what species was that flesh?  How can we support this? Or can we....