In memory of the 3rd anniversary of the start of the Iraq War II the pic of ‘The Falling Man’ from 9/11.
“He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down.”
For me this counter-intuively is an image of freedom, not death.
The Lithuanian author Czelaw Milosz famously asserted that “when a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed”. Counter-intuitively speaking then, when a family is dies, something is born. When my family ‘died’ it forced me to free myself from my safe upbringing. As the famous educationalist Paulo Freire once wrote “Liberation is like a childbirth and a painful one”. I even ‘did’ author a website about this in 1999, with the help of my father who did a great entry page design, to try and explain the process to myself and others – a forerunner to this blog. That site was called m-power. I was reminded of that time recently when HM Revenue and Customs came calling for tax owed from that period, when I travelled to Montreal to write the text for the site (but more of Montreal another time I’m sure).