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adamantiumdragonfly · 4 years

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Lady Blood || Part Three

Lady Blood: An Agent of War collection

Agent Enyo was a legend. A woman whose hands were always bloody and eyes filled with shadows. The reaper of the Western Front, she carried her reputation with her across the ocean to the alleys and speakeasies of Chicago. For who could fight a king of crime but a goddess herself?

But before she was a legend before she had a name, she was just Miriam Goldschmidt: a German girl far from home, trying to keep her tattered family from unraveling. The Great War brewing in Europe had pulled on the threads and challenged Miriam's loyalty: to the land of her birth or the London streets she now walked?

From London to Cairo then to the Western Front in the wreckage of Belgium, Miriam proves her allegiance, fulfilling the deep thirst for recognition but being a good soldier and a good agent required sacrifice.

As the war leaves its marks on Europe and it's victims, Miriam has to make peace with the choice she made and the family she tore apart for that name and that seat in the pantheon.

She was a god but at what cost?

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London, England.

August, 1914

London hadn't been home for more than four years. Miriam still had memories of Leipzig, the gardens, the house she had grown up in. She and Ezriel had taken their first steps there, she had taken Sadie by the hand and walked the streets. Britain was where they lived but she still thought of Germany as home.

Britain had taken things from her. No native tongue, only English. No father, only an empty chair and the bills that were stacked on the kitchen table. No mother, only a shell of a woman who left Miriam with two younger sisters and a house to care for. She couldn't be Miriam as she wanted to be, instead she had to put on the front. The front of Miriam Goldschmidt who was undeniably German but trying her best to be British. Miriam Goldschmidt who was trying her very best to keep her family together.

"Mim!" Sadie's voice always broke the silence of their home, the kind of quiet that hung heavier than the lingering smell of death. Left in this home alone, with only her mother's empty face, Miriam was always happy to see her sister's bright one. They were supposed to be with Mrs. Vette down the road while she tried to get their mother to eat something.

August was always a hard month, the three year anniversary of David Goldschmidt's death just around the corner. Sarah didn't handle the reminder well and Miriam knew she would have to struggle through another four weeks of silence and refusing food before they turned the page. Once September arrived they would maybe get a smile out of her and some movement. She would eat again, at least.

"In here!" Miriam called, tucking her hair behind her ear and tossing the mail into a basket in the center of the table. She would have to sit down with Ezriel tonight and they would have to find a solution. Debts were due and with only her older brother's wage as an orderly, Miriam would have to work. But then what would happen to Sadie and Amira? Sadie was fifteen years old but Amira was eleven. They couldn't take care of their mother on their own.

Not for the first time, Miriam allowed herself a fleeting wish. That Papa was still alive. That Mama hadn't broken in half and that Miriam hadn't been left to pick up the pieces.

Sadie's boots hammered against the wooden floors, shaking the walls and rattling the few knick knacks that they had taken from home on their shelf until she slid to a stop in the kitchen. There was really no reason to yell. Their terrace house was small and everything could be heard, the walls thin enough that their neighbors were sure to hear her little sister's enthusiasm.

"Shhh," Miriam pressed a finger to her lips and darted her eyes to the back garden to glance over the wall. No head bobbed above the fence to shout at them to be quiet and she sighed with relief. She whirled around to face her sisters, both breathless and flushed from their excitement and the heat of the summer day. Only three days into August and Miriam was already dying.

"What were you thinking coming in here and shouting like that?" She scolded. In English. Always English. "Go upstairs and check on Mama."

Sarah was in the back bedroom, the coolest room of the house with the windows open for a breeze. Amira nodded and slipped out of the room, softly. Miriam watched her go, approving the girl's pace before turning back to the real problem.

Sympathy twinged in her stomach as she looked down at her younger sister. Sadie had grown up with Mama as she was, her memories of life in Leipzig fuzzy. Four years in Britain had turned her sister into a Brit, Miriam realized with a pang. The way she styled her hair the way she wore Miriam's old dress fitted as best she could by lamplight. Sadie didn't want to be German.

"Shame on you," Miriam said, turning to the pile of dishes that she had ignored. Shame on herself for not doing the work. If Miriam didn't do it, no one else would.

"I'm sorry, Mim," Sadie said, following her sister to the sink and they rolled up their sleeves together. Sadie washed, Miriam dried and Amira reappeared, promising that their mother was still asleep, lost to the world as she always was.

"Sadie, hast du Miriam gesagt, was Frau Vette gesagt hat?"

"English!" Amira's older sisters said in unison. Their eyes met and a breathless laugh escaped their mouths but Miriam's smile slid from her lips as she remembered the tensions at home. Germany wasn't in Britain's good graces which meant that they weren't in their new home's good graces. Danger. One more thing that Miriam couldn't control.

"No," Miriam said, not making Amira repeat her words in English like Sadie would have. "What did Mrs. Vette say?"

Their neighbor, Kitty Vette, was from Germany too but had been in residence in London since 1900. She had taken the Goldschmidt's under her wing and helped them find a synagogue here in London, on Dukes Place. Mrs. Vette had opened her home more times that Miriam cared to count and she trusted her with her sisters' lives.

"There was an ulti-" Amira paused. "An ultimatum with Germany. They had to leave Belgium by midnight tonight."

They were in Belgium, her countrymen, her old neighbors and friends. And her new friends, her new countrymen, her new British neighbors were on holiday today. Miriam's hands were wrinkled in the dishwater and she nodded. It would have come to this, she thought. It always would have come to this. Torn between countries, she now had to figure out which one she support in a war, should it come to that.

She slipped upstairs, after reassuring Amira and Sadie that everything would be alright. Miriam was always the one to soothe. She had been since her mother had withdrawn into the shadow of Sarah Goldschmidt three years before. Miriam had been the one to help Sadie with her corset and would do the same for Amira. Miriam had packed every lunch for Ezriel, squirreled away money and darned the socks. She had mended countless articles of clothing and she had done her best to mend the family.

Her mother's room was quiet, blessedly. The Yahzeit candle sat on the chest of drawers waiting to be lit on the sixteenth in remembrance. She was asleep, her graying brown curls lying on the white pillowcase. She looked so peaceful, almost childlike. For three years Miriam had filled in her mother's shoes. She could have resented her. She could have been angry. But she was mostly hurt.

No dreams of leaving home, no matter how far-fetched and running through the gardens in Leipzig. No fulfilling any destiny that might have waited for Miriam to chase it. Just this house, haunted by memories and three siblings who needed to be looked after.

Miriam had wanted to work but even that was impossible. Sarah, on her good days, needed constant attention and didn't like it when she was left with a neighbor, even Mrs. Vette. Miriam was chained to this damned house.

Ezriel could go where he wanted. Ezriel had a job. He had worked in offices all over London before finding the perfect placement for his high hopes of political prowess: the Imperial General staff office. He had spent hours talking about all he would do once he had finished college and once he had made a name for himself. But it was a German name and there was nothing anyone could do to hide that.

Miriam wasn't expecting her brother's return at midnight. He had been on a bank holiday, all of London shut down. No one was at an office and no one should have been working at all, let alone late into the night. But Ezriel's footsteps started down the hallway at a quarter past one in the morning and slipped into Miriam's room.

The room was shared with Amira and Sadie. The room that was hotter than hell in the August heat.

"Miri," he said, calling her by the childhood nickname. He was the only one who still called her that. Sadie had turned to "Mim" as it was "more refined". It had nothing to do with refinement, Miriam knew. It sounded more British. "I need to talk to you."

Miriam extracted herself from the sweaty pile of limbs and hair that was her shared bed with Sadie and glanced down at Amira's pallet on the floor. They were both still asleep. Like a whisper of a ghost in her nightdress, she slipped through the door and followed Ezriel out onto the landing.

"Where were you?" Miriam hissed, the open windows on the stairs sending a breeze against her bare feet and sending a shiver down her spine. The look on her brother's face didn't help. Fear, something Ezriel didn't show, and resolve. The same resolve in his face when he had to put his dreams of university on hold for the office work after Papa's death. The same resolve that crossed the threshold of their home to face his shell of a mother and his baby sisters who had to say goodbye to childhood too soon.

"I was called in."

"Called in?" She didn't care if they shouldn't speak in German, she wanted to ask her brother if it was true that Germany was in Belgium. If it was true the ultimatum. If they would have to choose where their loyalties lay. "What do you mean called in?"

"Britain is at war with Germany." all of her fear, her confusion and even the weight she had carried for the past three years fell like scales from her shoulders. She shed some part of herself, the German part, she'd like to think, leaving a gray little ghost who stood on the landing. She tried to will life back into her limbs.

"Why did they want you?" Miriam asked. "Did they think you were going to betray them?"

If Ezriel lost his job they would sink into debt and destitution more than they already were. No one would hire them, Miriam or Ezriel, and they would starve.

"They knew I was German," Ezriel said. "They want me to change divisions and they want me to work for them."

"Work for them?"

"They think having a German on staff would give them an insight "

"What?" An insight? They wanted an insight their family, on their friends? They wanted Ezriel to betray his homeland? "You can't do that."

"I have to." Ezriel shook his head, the darkness muffling the movement and any life that had managed to warm Miriam's body fell away again at his next words. "And so do you."

"What?"

"They asked after you. They knew I had a sister."

Miriam couldn't leave Amira and Sadie. She couldn't leave Mama. She couldn't leave this house on this street that she had firmly fixed herself to with stubborn rigidity. Yes, Leipzig was her home but Britain was where her family was. Miriam couldn't let them suffer because of who they were, where they had come from and now, what they had lost. They were losing Ezriel now too.

"Did you tell them that I would?" Miriam asked. She was only sixteen. Would they really want her?

"I told them I would ask." Ezriel said. "But you don't tell these men 'no'."

No, she supposed they couldn't.

"There's a wage?" She asked. What would they have her do, really? Ferry coffee and files? This new department was sure to be office work.

"Yes," Ezriel said. "And with the two of us working..."

"A better life for the girls," Miriam finished, glancing back at the closed door where Sadie and Amira were asleep. Miriam didn't have a future, not one of any consequence but times were changing and maybe they could hope to afford some semblance of education for Sadie or even Amira. Miriam didn't have a future but she wanted her sisters to be happy, to not have to wring laundry or die rattling with a cough from pneumonia that never fully healed.

Not for her girls.

If she did work in an office, there was sure to be chances of advancement, even if it was just bookkeeping. Miriam could make her own future, through hard work, and lay the path for her sisters behind her.

For her sisters, she would turn against her country and what had been her home. For herself, she would make a name, something that everyone else in this country had.

One day, Miriam Goldschmidt wouldn't mean a tired girl who was scared and strained with nothing under control. Maybe one day, Miriam Goldschmidt would mean power and control. There was only one way she could do that.

"Alright," Miriam said. She allowed herself to speak German, one last time as a native-born. Speaking it with familiarity and loyalty. "Ich werde es tun."

#lady blood #world war one historical fiction #miriam goldschmidt carroll #agent enyo #female spy OC #historical fiction #ww1 historical fiction #pandemic project #agent of war #Lady Blood updates

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no-ns-en-si-ca-l · 6 years

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_______ is Only an Invention • Lucky Dragons

“_______ is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity,” wrote Margaret Mead.1

Invention—recognizing, making, believing—is technology, as described by Bernard Stiegler: “the pursuit of life by means other than life.”2

Alternatively, the people must reverse engineer: learn from what has already been invented; re-purpose and re-contextualize, create new possibilities for access and interaction.

Fix existing bugs, preserve difference, acknowledge unanswered questions. Begin to work backwards from the way _____ has been put to work in the world: the forms of listening, observation, and attention, the means of participation and dissent.

Unpack the protocols, symbols, and systems, the structured language of treaties. Encode each process to be enacted by any group: model decision-making and conflict-resolution at different scales—between individuals, between collectivities.

If _____ is an abstraction, framing it as a technological goal gives it the capacity to be articulated, modeled, rendered. Technology records and reproduces a process in pursuit of a goal. To improvise is to improve, part of a cycle that connects available resources to planning, to performance, observation, and evaluation. Technology is knowledge engaged in the act of doing work—what we do with what’s available, how we learn, and how we pass on what we’ve learned. Technology seeks to guarantee the continuation of our shared social existence. It connects us to any time outside of our present moment, including all possibility of a future. It is the horizon of all possibilities yet to come. Technology takes shape as rules, conditions, or instructions that communicate how to do work, but the “doing,” or the implication—anticipation—that it is to be done, is what makes it complete. A message, communicated.

How do we separate technology and art? Works of art are “strange tools,” as Alva Noë puts it,3 and as such, they provide a means of seeing ourselves in relation to our techniques and practices. We use art to understand how our technologies organize us and to engage with the possibility of reorganizing ourselves. In a mode that Gilbert Simondon described as a “technical mentality,”4 anything can be broken down into its component parts, to be individually repaired or upgraded. Meanwhile, the entirety of anything changes as thresholds are crossed—speed, intensity, resistance, return to rest—being in action changes a complex thing completely.

How much of this process is life pursuing life, how much is the product of design, structure, and regulation? Consider the possibility of an accidental _____.

What is the “work” of _____? Is it the work of collectives or individuals? Of experts or amateurs? Each of us has our own knowledge of participation and dissent—we are attuned to recognize the difference between _____ and violence. The application of this knowledge, giving form to this recognition, is the beginning of a technology of _____.

Tuning, becoming attuned, is a fundamental _____ technology. Tuning foregrounds listening and observation, emphasizes self-definition, and self-care. Tuning is a technique for finding a common reference point, a place to begin. Tuning is a means of individuation (establishing difference, spaces apart, a singular voice) and group formation (whether consonant or dissonant). Tuning need not produce consensus. It is a means of negotiating where we begin and what territory we will cover—sonically or socially—in order to act “in concert” with others.

Reverse engineering, starting from what we perceive as well-tuned, is a step towards understanding the origins and mechanisms of _____-making: practices which shape our own ethical self-understanding, our sense of who we are and who we hope to become. Informed by and directed towards ideals of health, responsibility, and moral virtue, we regulate ourselves by caring for ourselves.

Consider two contrasting approaches to _____-making: positive and negative, pattern and tangle.

The pattern refers to the possibility of embodied _____, what we call positive _____. Positive _____ is the absence of both direct and indirect violence. Walk within the path of the pattern, alone or with others, just to try. Breathe deeply before entering, and with each step, remember where you are. Come to know the shape better as you turn each corner, and wind towards center. Observe thoughts inside and outside of the pattern.

The pattern is a path for processing thought. It is a place to move slowly, to enable thoughts to settle: a sieve or a filter. Positive _____ is the presence of equality, the restoration of justice, and the healing of relationships. It is how we create social systems to serve the needs of all persons. Positive _____ is not simply the absence of direct violence. It is the absence of both direct and indirect violence.

Positive _____ has many simple and many complex forms. It operates at all scales, from momentary pleasure, self-healing and well being, to the complete restructuring of all societies, the complete elimination of all violence and oppression.

Positive _____ is a state of calm alert, a position free of worry or fear, a state of readiness held comfortably in place by external structures that affirm and improve life.

Emperor Ashoka ended a long period of bloody conflict and imperial expansion by enforcing a regime of _____ throughout the empire. Stone monuments displayed his edicts of forgiveness, nonviolence, and quality of life for all beings. Carved in stone: amnesty for prisoners, an end to ___, elephant sanctuaries, forests that could not be cut down. A harmonic form of dominance, derived from imperial power.

What is state of readiness? state of readiness for violence? state of readiness for non-violence?

“All men are my children. What I desire for my own children, and I desire their welfare and happiness both in this world and the next, that I desire for all men. You do not understand to what extent I desire this, and if some of you do understand, you do not understand the full extent of my desire.”6

Positive _____ is self-control, self-rule: for you, it is an inward _____-keeping operation, refining your focus towards openness and compassion. Positive _____ is a state of being not grounded in specific actions. it continues forever as a process in the background of all human interactions—it is the beginning and the end of _____ful communication.

On the other side of the pattern is the the tangle. The tangle is a model of negative _____, the struggle to overcome conflict and to reduce harm. In negative _____, we take the immediate causes of suffering head-on, working together to innovate in response to problems.

The tangle is an enormous, unruly confusion. Change the structure of the tangle however you like: pulling, loosening, shifting, removing—are you compelled to untangle it, or tangle it further for the next person to find?

There is a critical urgency to untangle the tangle. This is a process that will require all people to cooperate with one another.

The tangle imagines _____-making as struggle, a form of active problem-solving: negative _____. Negative _____ is the absence of direct violence, the prevention of harm, the prevention of ___. _____ within this framework does not, by itself, erase conflict completely or permanently. Negative _____ is constant in its management of conflict. Negative _____ is the process of struggle. In the struggle to untangle the tangle, we strategize and cooperate, we develop and share innovative techniques, new ways of seeing and solving the problem.

Factions may evolve from within the struggle. Some participants see more value in tangling than in untangling—opposing affinities form in dissent. There is fine line between tangling and untangling. Fine lines can be difficult to draw—conscious tanglers are difficult to separate from conscious untanglers. Their movements are similar.

The tangle is a path between persons, a language for the recognition and mediation of conflict.

The tangle addresses itself to all of us—now that it exists, it can’t ever stop existing. If the tangle becomes untangled it may swiftly become tangled again, without our constant management and vigilance. Calm and alert.

We are complicit in solving the problem of the tangle. Whether or not we see ourselves as participants, it doesn’t matter. There is no neutral place. There is no self in isolation. The tangle addresses itself to all of us. ___ and _____ exist between collectivities, not individuals.

If we had no sovereign states, we would have no ___ (Rousseau). We would have no _____ either (Hobbes).

Law only needs precedent. One premise for the rule of international law is that all persons take part in a single community, and as such, are subject to the same common law. Rights and values, articulated and refined through history, are acquired by this community in a process of consistent reasoning. The greater the consistency, the stronger the law.

By what authority? With what permission? And who will decide?

Laws between sovereign states are, like manners, difficult to enforce. Politics must be polite, or there is no recourse but to dissociate. Failing to honor a treaty, allowing the agreement to collapse, a state loses access to the process of _____. Meaningful relationships cannot be established or repaired. Agreement becomes impossible.

The scope of this impossibility is made legible in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech, outlining one comprehensive path to _____: “Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.”7

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, another outline of the path to _____, proposes a treaty between all persons. It suggests a structure that embraces everyone, a rule of law to which all could appeal—articulating the right to have a nationality, to belong to a state, to move across borders, building _____ through structured, universal representation.

Can _____ be universal? Or is _____ specific? Can it embrace humankind or only the detached individual?

Johan Galtung wrote of imperialism, as one species in “a genus of dominance and power relationships,”8 that it splits collectivities in terms of harmony of interest, disharmony of interest, and conflict of interest. There is, first of all, a gap—through imperialism the center grows more fully than the periphery. The center is enriched and nourished, while the periphery is starved. We must ask: how to grow the periphery, how to transfer value, how to confuse, dissolve, or multiply the center? How to harmonize the whole?

“The people must recognize the defects of the old invention, and someone must make a new one. A form of behavior becomes out of date only when something else takes its place, and, in order to invent forms of behavior which will make ___ obsolete, it is a first requirement to believe that the invention is possible.”9

1, 9 Margaret Mead, “_______ is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity,” Asia Volume XL, Issue 8 (1940): 402-405.

2 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. George Collins and Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

3 Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015).

4 Gilbert Simondon, “Technical Mentality,” trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia 07 (2009): 7-27.

5 Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer (London: Pluto Press, 2008), xxi.

6 S. Dhammika, “The Edicts of King Asoka: An English Rendering (The Wheel Publication No. 386/387),” last modified October 1994, https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/ashoka.html.

7 “8 January, 1918: President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” The Avalon Project, Accessed August 17, 2017, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp.

8 Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” Journal of Peace Research 8 (1971): 81-117.

[SCORES]

For a Group of Five:

Approach the idea of making an image as a tableaux or a demonstration: one’s body in relationship with other bodies—still or moving, vocal or silent. Audience, bystanders incorporate directly into the image as it is being formed, a blurring between spectators and actors Augusto Boal names “Spect-actors.”5 Show, analyze, transform reality.

On entering a room, three of the five group members plan and form an image. The remaining two group members act as observers. The two observers circle the image, describe what they see, discuss, decide how to modify the image until it is as stable as possible (consulting with onlookers as needed). The observers physically adjust the actions and positions of the other performers.

The observers may switch places with any of the other performers.

The observers may join the image by mimicking any of the other performers.

The observers may join the image by inserting themselves between the other performers, as intermediaries.

The observers may make an independent image in response to the first image.

All discussion and planning should be carried out in an open, audible, and transparent manner in front of the audience. If something doesn’t work, try it again in a different way. When changing positions, step into the role of observer first before rejoining the image.

Once every performer incorporates into an image, hold until it is agreed by all performers that the image is as stable as it can be. If any member of the group feels unstable, they may leave the image to become an observer. Once a stable image has been achieved, repeat the process with two new observers. With each repetition, the image takes on a new identity:

The 1st Image: Assimilation, dominance, appropriation, or theft.

The 2nd Image: Healing, liberation, addressing pain, or righting wrongs.

The 3rd Image: Positive _____; happiness, quality of Life, pleasure, clarity, and self-determination.

With each image, populations interact, languages are learned, difference is learned, harmonized, and de-harmonized. Compromises are formed, observed, witnessed, a scene is described. Roles are changed, alienated and modified, A system is formed, stepped into and out of.

For a Group of Four:

Facing apart. Performers enter and distribute themselves at equal distance from one-another, filling the space. Turning away from the center, so as to see only one or two of the others, each dancer begins rapidly repeating a single, unique action. Gradually, each dancer begins to borrow gestures from the members of the group that are visible to them, incorporating each other’s actions into a complex sequence, until all performers are moving in a unified, accumulated sequence of gestures.

Facing together. Turning towards center, and signalling from a distance, performers send gestures across the space, picking up one another’s motions and adding or stripping away emotional valences. Expressive movements become uniform and mechanical, utilitarian. Everyday actions are filled with emotional meaning, one emotional layer is stacked on another as the gesture is passed back and forth. The process continues, amplifying, reversing, and cancelling out. A feedback loop.

Four individuals become a group, learning and evolving a shared language in order to serve all members of the group. Creating sentence structures out of movement, phrases are added, remembered, and repeated, building upon each previous movement. Synchronizing and desynchronizing (socializing and de-socializing), emotional affect is separated from communicative gesture, empathy is learned, amplified, and returned.

For a Group of Three:

Form territory. Divide territory. Manage territory. Protect territory. Set limits. Draw boundaries. Help him. Assist her. Divide them. Orient us. Hide yourself. Read that sign. Sing this song. Listen closely. Announce loudly. Observe. Discuss.

Each performer holds a loudspeaker that plays back a list of commands. Obey each command directly on hearing it, or repeat the command immediately to other performers and audience. If repeating, address your audience directly. Mimic the tone and inflection of the commanding voice, imitate as closely as possible. If repeating, there is no need to obey. If obeying, there is no need to repeat. Move quickly, think quickly, aim for variety and unpredictability, use every command as it comes, never become stuck in one power position, swing like a pendulum between oppressor and oppressed.

Speak. Feel. Call out. Accuse. Demand. Touch. Disorient. Disguise. Dismantle. Combine. Show your hands. Draw a line. Carry across. Make a claim. Make a mark. Show your strength. End it now.

The score For a Group of Three is driven by the imbalance of power between oppressor and oppressed. Mediation and repetition are inserted into this imbalance, and the ways in which power is translated, imitated, and internalized are made clear. By mimicking the commanding voice, the performers make an attempt to “learn” the language in every nuance, “learning” structures of power in the process. Of all the groups, the group of three has the most friction, a machine that flips rapidly between command and submission. They speak loudly and out of turn. They move unpredictably.

Crumble. Break. Discard. Recover. Arrange. Separate. Distribute. Hold. Push. Bend. Spread apart. Push together. Push apart. Turn. Turn towards. Turn away. Rotate. Zoom. Adjust. Survey the land. Look at me.

For a Group of Two:

Take turns teaching each other songs invented from the legitimizing language of treaties:

recalling / confirming / desiring / resolved / determined / reaffirming

on the basis of past efforts / to forge new bonds

proposed / resolved / acknowledged / pledged

empowered / concluded / declared / agreed

animated by / contributing to / established upon

with a view to / in view of / on the basis of / in the name of / in the interest of / with the objective of

confers / commands / undertakes / proclaims

With call and response, take turns passing made up melodies back and forth. As the exchange accelerates, learn the shape of new songs just enough for texts to overlap and accumulate. As songs transform from call and response into a round, move your voice to reinforce or cancel, mask, interrupt, support, agree. Learn to listen and sing together, to make one combined text sung simultaneously—a song with no single author, drawing from multiple sources.

In a process mirroring mediation, treaty-writing, the imagined ideal of an agreement between equals, what begins in separate voices ends in agreement. Moving from call and response, to overlapping rounds, to unison.

For a Group of One:

I am the one person. Displaced, moving, unsettled. I have no home. I am out of place everywhere. When I speak, it is always in a language other than my own. I hide, or I am as visible as possible. I am obviously transparent. I walk through invisible labyrinths, and then I walk backwards to exit. I walk any path forwards and backwards. I am a mockingbird singing by myself, my song is alien even to me. I listen by singing. I learn by listening and repeating. I repeat while changing. I am learning and listening and repeating and changing while repeating, so as to learn. I am not always connected to all of you. I am sometimes connected to some of you. Some of you are sometimes connected to some of you. I migrate, I circulate, I borrow, and I displace. And here I am.

#(truth)

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cryptnus-blog · 6 years

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Could blockchain have solved the mystery of the romaine lettuce E. coli outbreak?

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/06/could-blockchain-have-solved-the-mystery-of-the-romaine-lettuce-e-coli-outbreak-3/

Could blockchain have solved the mystery of the romaine lettuce E. coli outbreak?

Blockchain is basically a democratized accounting system. Companies contribute encrypted blocks of data to a “distributed” ledger that can be monitored and verified by each farmer, packer, shipper, distributor, wholesaler and retailer of produce.

The first food-poisoning cases came to light in late March — eight patrons of fast-food restaurants in New Jersey suffered bloody diarrhea and cramps that sent them rushing to hospitals.

More than two months later, five people are dead, at least 89 others have been hospitalized, and federal authorities still don’t know where a nasty strain of E. coli bacteria latched onto romaine lettuce from Yuma, Arizona.

Their struggle to trace dozens of supply lines across 35 states, on a paper trail that often may actually be on paper, demonstrates the limits of tracing food by methods rooted in another century.

Food-safety advocates and industry insiders say it may be time to borrow the encrypted accounting platform that drives cryptocurrency: blockchain.