Sensibilities
The only thing that brute force and armed tyranny cannot defeat is the intellect and the soul. Even if they kill and destroy many of us the word will live, the thought will live, the creative energy of the Revolution will live. How can they defeat the light of the mind and the might of the soul? We are a multitude. Our numbers are greater than they will ever count. And we shall multiply and outlive the darkness. And there will be freedom. And there will be justice and the rule of the law will dominate. January 8
Beware of image making and the image makers
The problem with the image makers on the social media is that they end by making themselves and the people whom they are promoting slaves to the image. Image makers have only two colours, black and white, at their disposal and with this limited palette they try to draw a portrait for life. Such images are misleading to all specially to the people whose images are distributed on the social media. Life is much richer, much deeper, much more glorious, a lot more heart rending and tragic, a lot more brimming with multiplicity and complexity than in their dull limited uniform images. The process of image making does not tell the whole truth, manipulates the truth and confines itself to the selective. The worst that can happen is that the image becomes the prison within which the soul of the person with the made image is imprisoned. 7 Jan.
At the end of the road
What we find at the end of the road is ourselves and all that makes this self, the earth that bore us and the dreams that have sustained us and all those who have cherished us.
All people whoever they are will be what they make of themselves. There is nothing static in being human: either walk forward and evolve or stagnate. The Arabs came to the verge of extinction many times, including the Syrians when they believed their prophets of doom belittling them and telling them they were failures, thus parodying the theories of a hostile and suspicious world. Alisar Iram
At the end of the road the Syrians will find themselves and perhaps discover them for the first time
Abolish all pain
I went to see 12 years of slavery and I wish I hadn’t. It was too evocative, too reminiscent of the enslavement of a whole nation. Simply, it became unbearable to me to watch the film because every lash on the bare flesh reminded me of thousands, millions of lashes on the bodies and minds of the Syrians. It is the ruthless cruelty of man to man. it took the abolitionists years and indefatigable efforts to eventually prevail and convince countries to put an end to slavery. I t made me reflect and compare for what is the Syrian revolution but an abolitionist movement in many of its aspects. There are many forms to enslavement but withholding freedom for any reason is the main attribute of slavery.
There was pain throughout the movie as bodies and souls were broken in the name of property and ownership. Chaining human beings, incarcerating them then breaking them, demolishing all their human rights, even the most basic of them, is a momentous act because it takes away their humanity from them and reduces them to animals except that animals do not have emotional and mental awareness, I say it reluctantly. 28 Jan.
-Nobody has the right to stretch human beings beyond their endurance, inflicting terrible pain. Pain makes people lose their souls so that they become irresponsible for their actions. Stretching people on wheels of fire, physically, mentally or emotionally is to unleash with the physical or emotional lashes that which our efforts cannot control or stop. 28 Jan
-We cannot hide, erase from our memories, silence, dim or change the essence of beautiful and splendid truths. They will manifest themselves whether we want or not in all the great things we do, in all the meaningful things we say, in all the remarkable things we write. 28 Jan
Injustice
Feeling subjected to injustice consumes those who feel it, shredding their minds and souls. It consumes one’s courage, faith and hope. Most of all it destroys that innocent thing that dwells in light and beauty in us for innocence is the child in us, the freshness of our beings. We have a nation consumed by injustice, a nation which has lost its innocence because pain unravels the souls. How easy for the personal to blend with impersonal, the public with the private. So that when we cry we do not know whether we are crying for ourselves or for all those others whom injustice has withered into shadows. I cry for them; they cry for me. I do not whose tears it is. 28 Jan
Iconoclasm (the breaking down of icons)
There will be no freedom in the Arab world as long as clinging to the worship of the one leader, the immortal leader, the forever leader, the infallible leader lives in the Arab psyche. It is because our people are undergoing a second infancy of the spirit and the intellect in their masses and as individuals no matter how sophisticated they are that they put all faith, hope and will in the figure of the worshiped figure. Adulation and idealization overcome reason and the faculty of judgement. Does the idea of the one God inspire the tendency hunger for the one leader? Perhaps the Arab Spring even in its possible failure will help them to come out of age, to reach a kind of maturity they have never known before, social, political and intellectual. The road to freedom begins with iconoclasm, even on the personal private level. When we get rid of our idols, health becomes a feature of our beings. the public and the private. No human being can achieve all perfection, no human being can become the universal all enlightened man. We must drill this into our consciousness ans conscienceless so as not to revert to the worship of idols, surrendering our will, self possession and freedom.. 29 Jan.
The Opposites
With so much death and disregard to life, I have become more concerned about the inviolate right to life; with so much lying clogging the roads to clarity and reason; I have become more concerned about the truth and the nature of truth; with so much horror ant the rule of the terrible I have become more concerned about the joyous and the uplifting and with so much cruelty I have become more concerned about mercy, grace and compassion. 29 Jaqn.
Truths
-We cannot hide, erase from our memories, silence, dim or change the essence of beautiful and splendid truths. They will manifest themselves whether we want or not in all the great things we do, in all the meaningful things we say, in all the remarkable things we write
-The infantile in us sometimes reveals itself in a deplorable loyalty to that which chains us emotionally and confines us to immaturity
Men and Women
I have seen so much cruelty between men and women. Cruelty terrifies me. Some gentle, good, ethical people are capable of so much cruelty in relations with the opposite sex, so that ethics are waived aside and compassion is completely disregarded. It is a strange world and we, the human spices, are still light years away from the perfection of being. We are so uncouth, so unfinished. 28 Jan
This is the war of extremes
This is the war of extremes, extreme savagery and extreme compassion; extreme sacrilege and extreme sanctity; extreme breach of human ethics and extreme refinement of the moral imperatives; extreme overflow of love and extreme eruptions of hatred. It is as if the world is standing on the intersection of heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. Innocence is desecrated yet a yearning to restore innocence is informing the souls with visions of indestructible profundity. As death stalks and predominates, life fights back with the indestructible strength of the seed that must sprout, must push its roots deep into the good earth and rise up to to gleam in the sun. 11 Jan.
Metamorphosis
All we do as a spontaneous, instinctive, insightful aesthetic, ethical and sincere expression of ourselves and our love does not demean us, but ennoble us. How can overflowing pure love demean us? How can generosity of the spirit demean us? How can giving demean us? How can the flowering of our being into expressions of beauty demean us? Whether the others can appreciate, treasure, reciprocate, value or fully understand us is not important or that important. Somewhere in the consciousness of humanity that which is of the essence of beauty and love will blossom into never fading creative energy. 8 Jan
The time is now
Now is the time to give Syria and the Revolution all we have got. Now is the tome to rally around our dreams, our aspirations and our allegiance to freedom and democracy. It is the time of make or break, the point of no return. Let us grow larger than ourselves, brighter than ourselves, nobler than ourselves. let us absorb more, contain more and understand more. Let us open our minds wide to differences and variations in religion, beliefs, creative thinking, nation building endeavors and deep assessments, Let us celebrate the miracles of love and the gifts of compassion. The time is now to embrace Syria , to love ourselves and love the other. We have to deserve the sacrifices of the dead, the uprooted, the kidnapped, the starving and the people walking in the darkness of imprisonment and torture. The time is now. 7 Jan
On time
-Do you have the same feelings that somehow time has acquired a different structure and it is running at a strange speed, that it has somehow acquired an enigmatic new dimension, a profound added depth and intensity? What I have written a week ago seems to me to have been written ages ago, as if somebody else wrote them so that what I am reading is what another self in another time wrote. Perhaps this happens to people in times of great upheavals when time becomes fluid and intersects, bringing the past into the present into the future, while the present becomes the past. My only hope is that this disassociation in time will bring a jump into a future beyond the normal future, not a regression into a past beyond the past. 7 January
–What poets and writers do and others might not be able to do is to arrest time and order it to stillness so that they might recollect and record in an emanation of crystal clear consciousness that which is undying and overwhelming in human experience. Life drags us into the common and the ephemeral, but what we save from life and from ourselves is the very essence and secret of things. That is why art, literature, poetry and music are the only things that remain of us and are passed down to posterity because they have the power to resurrect us, or more correctly, resurrect moments of eternity. that we have stolen from the ephemeral and the vanishing. 3o Jan.
الزمن المفقود هو الزمن الذي نخشى استرجاعه لاننا نخاف اذ تذكرناه ان نتذكر اللحظة التي فقدنا فيها ارواحنا
-Time lost is the time we are afraid to recall because we fear that in remembering it, we might remember the moment we have lost our souls. 30 Jan.
The Trojans
In the Iliad, it is Hector, Priam and Cassandra and Andromache who emerge as the real heroes. They are the stuff of tragedy and immortality. Starting from Euripides, the Trojans have always been part of the conscience of humanity. 6 Jan.
Freedom
Freedom, bless us with your presence once more
Now that the people have found their courage and dignity once more , now that they have remembered that the first and the last cry is freedom, we must press ahead with fighting the one enemy we rose against whatever name he chooses. Our enemy is tyranny, our enemy is injustice, our enemy is the absence of the same law for all, our enemy is crime and murder, our enemy is the disregard to human rights, our enemy is the absence of democracy and the civil rights in deicing the future of the country, our enemy is ignorance, intolerance, reduction and exclusion in the name of the state or religion, our enemy is silencing the voices of conscience, the mind, our humanity and our compassion. No military or ideological tyranny should ever be tolerated on Syrian land ever again. 5 January
What the Syrian Revolution is doing to me?
The Revolution created an explosion in my being, an eruption and an earthquake followed by a tidal wave. My landscape has changed forever. Fresh mountains rose and soared embracing the skies; lakes sprang into being stretching wide and deep until they became unfathomable. A sea came into my being where there was none before. Most of all love flooded my continent and I bent in humility while its sacred light baptized me in compassion, patience and endurance. As I expanded and expanded, covering this new landscape, I broke all remits, boundaries, barriers and limitations. My agony mounted reaching out to the impossible, quickly waiving aside my human limitations as the revolution multiplied its demands on me then multiplied them again. I started to do things I have never done before, I started to feel feelings I have never felt before. New skills came to me, new aesthetics overwhelmed me, cognition flooded my consciousness and opened up my subconscious. Deeper ethics governed me; I became wiser, more knowledgeable and more adept at overstepping my physical weaknesses.Does the world know or care to know what the Syrian revolution is doing the the Syrian man and woman? Jan 4
Where is the cry for freedom?
Is this what the world wants? Turn the Syrians into a nation of beggars, into a nation of starving children and the pitiful old, into lines of people waiting in the freezing cold and the scorching heat for their daily bread, into dwellers of tents and refugee camps in no man’s land. Is this what the world wants? Turn the Syrian children into urchins clad in rags, clothed in dirt, wandering ignorant, homeless, orphaned, bereft, lost? Is all that preferable to helping them stay at home, assist in the creation of a civic democratic state for them, guard them from the warlords and the hyenas of the world, stay between the super powers and their political and regional spoils.
Ultimately this is an ethical issue; our failure to develop a fairer global system to help the weaker and smaller nations and support their quest for freedom against tyranny. It means that as humans we have learnt nothing or very little from epochs of wars and Armageddons. Syria has been devoured by every major power and every war lord and every thief on this earth.Where is the pure original cry for freedom in all this din and calmour, in all this butchery and annihilation? January 2
-Negotiating with the regime is like negotiating with the Antichrist.
-There is a kind of a sick fascination with the poisonous, the sinister, the evil, the immoral in the Western media. This perhaps can explain the fascination with Bashar. Today I heard on TV that it is impossible for the poor barelegged king of Syria to know the truth because he is surrounded by a circle of flattering “courtiers” who make it impossible for the poor guy to catch a glimpse of reality… Bly me !! 25 Jan
-They like their Jack the Ripper in Western media !!!
–The hypocrisy of the Western media !!!!!!! Parading the Syrian delegation as if they were in a circus and listening patiently to their drivel? If officials would speak like this in the West, their people will lynch them (figuratively speaking). Why is it alright for murderers of their people to preach from the highest Western media pulpits to an apathetic global audience who mostly do not even know where Syria is? I call this brainwashing by consent. What a farce!!! The press should be kept out of the negotiations. Report results but not run out a contest of favorites or Bug Brother episodes. 25 Jan
-It has always been our question which we have repeating again and again, why is the regime not fighting terrorism, not fighting Al Qaeda and ISIS and instead annihilating the civilians, their cities and towns? WE do hope that the Opposition delegation will continue to raise this question in the negotiations. Is this not a meeting point between the two delegations? Kicking Qaeda affiliates out of Syria?
–Morality
The Arab individual, Muslim or not, is suffering to the schizophrenic level of claustrophobia: intellectual, religious, emotional, social and political. These factors alone ask for a revolution. Even as I child, I was able to perceive that the morality of the people around me was lacking. It does not need great intelligence to realize that we are in trouble morally, cognitively and religiously. If one relies on prohibitions and stern religious injunctions alone, one will never mature into a moral being. Religion when practiced by autocrats cancels the mind and the ability to take independent moral decisions; We acquire independent coherent morality by practicing it in freedom, by exercising free ethical will. Anything that comes from without only lacks truth and continuity. March
–Syrian Intellectuals
There are many justified complaints about the silence and lack of participation from some or many grey Syrian intellectuals. In this case, we have to forget about them and muster our resources to fill in any shortages. One of us should work as one hundred while we dedicate ourselves to writing, research, active engagement and unrelenting creative participation. It can be done, I know it can. Because some of us are doing just that. This is the time of miracles, the time of making the impossible possible. March 3, 2014
©Alisar Iram
alisariram 