Notes: The Tower of Babel

Primo Levi: "The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of Buna and whose top is rarely visible in the fog, was built by us. Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, teglk, and they were cemented by hate; hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel, and it is this that we call it: - Babelturm, Bobelturm; and in it we hate the insane dream of grandeur of our masters, their contempt for God and men, for us men.
...
"But today the eternal puddles, on which a rainbow veil of petroleum trembles, reflect the serene sun. Pipes, rails, boilers, still cold from the freezing of the night, are dripping with dew. The earth dug up from the pits, the piles of coal, the blocks of concrete, exhale in light vapours the humidity of the winter."

From Wikipedia: "A large construction project in the ancient world would have used pressed labour from a diverse set of conquered or subject populations, and the domain of the empires covering Babylon would have contained some non-Semitic languages, such as Hurrian, Kassite, Sumerian, and Elamite, among others."

It might be interesting to recycle this myth of the tower of Babel as a symbol for the decaying mountains of consumer waste piling up on the frontiers of our empire. Packaging and other materials from all over the world, consumed, discarded and coalescing in great mounds, on which roads are cut to facilitate load after load of dumptrucks, depositing endless debris. Towers of waste from which streams of black leachate (and amalgam of rain water and rotting waste) pour down the sides and into bodies of water clogged with plastic bags.

Panic Grass and Feverfew

From the chapter "Panic Grass and Feverfew" in John Hersey's "Hiroshima." I borrowed the title "Panic Grass and Feverfew" for a recent sculptural installation.

"Even though the wreckage had been described to her, and though she was still in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her, and there was something she noticed about it that particularly gave her the creeps. Over everything-up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks-was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and the wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb."