“ ‘Gao Zhisheng! You mother****er! Your date with death is today! Brothers! Let’s show the bastard how brutal we can get. Kill the bastard.’ A leader of the group screamed. Then, four men with electric batons started to beat my head and body with ferocity. Nothing but the noise of the beating and my moaning could be heard in the room. I was beaten so severely that my whole body began shaking uncontrollably on the floor.
The heirs of today's birthday child who once finished his masterpiece in Triest will feel a bit triste when thinking of next year as then they can't suck any more honey / money from their ancestors' genius - in January 2011 the copyright expires.
How cometh I am looking forward to January 13th? :)
I do not sleep at night nor go out by day, I am sad because the world has disappeared, nor is there food nor bank left, nor open grounds nor fields. Nor will I be enticed out of my house by any girl's invitation while this plague continues, this cloak of white feathers sticking close to dragon's scales, but tell her that I do not want my coat made white like a miller's garment. After New Year one must go wrapped in fur, and during January God makes us start the year as hermits.
Now God has whitewashed the dark earth all around till there is no undergrowth without its white garment, no coppins that's not covered with a sheet: fine flour has been milled on every stump, heavenly flour like April blossoms. A cold veil lies over the woods and the young trees, a load of chalk bows down the trees; ghostly wheaten flour which falls till a white coat of mail covers all the fields of the plain. The soil of the ploughed fields is covered with a cold grit, lying like a thick coat of tallow on the earth's skin, and a shower of frozen foam falls in fleeces big as a man's fist. Across North Wales the snow-flakes wander like a swarm of white bees. Why does God throw down this mass of feathers like the down of his own geese, till here below the drifts sway and billow over the heather like swollen bellies big as heaps of chaff and covered with ermine? The dust piles in a drift where we sang along the pleasant paths.
This garment of snow holds us in grip while it remains cementing together the hills, valleys and ditches und a steel coat fit to break the earth, fixing all into a vast monument greater than the graveyard of the sea. What a great fall lies on my country, a white wall stretching from one sea to another! Who dares fight its rude power? A leaden cloak lies on us. When will the rain come?
... are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
The two previous posts with quotations by Lichtenberg (re prejudices) and Franklin (re liberty) may be taken as an intro to this one.
They were also a reminder for me before putting my head on the pillow last night, in case I'd happen to wake up again not to forget reminding of what fellow blogger and -flannophil, Jams O'Donnell , on December 14th announced for January 23, thus tomorrow:
A gathering of photographers, professionals and amateurs, at Trafalgar Square at noon, organised to defend (y)our rights and stop the abuse of the terror laws.
More about the organisers and the(ir) very serious reasons to speak out you will find here.
So, if you, unlike myself, are living in or near London: Lift your backside and do it: Show those who are still not your leaders but nothing else but your representatives that you are fed up with their understanding of democracy, and that you are not willing to give in. Defend (y)our rights! Cure your elected - and (still) diselectable (!) - representants from their prejudice that each photographer, each human being has to be treated as a potential criminal or even terrorist. Defend your (essential) liberty!
Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
