The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: thoughts while shaving in bed....

Re: thoughts while shaving in bed....
Posted by Maggie (Guest) - Tuesday, January 30 2007, 7:25:55 (CET)
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I cry everytime I read something like this. It is tragic that we have been reduced to this! To think that it was our people who civilized the world and it is the same people that are now stuck knee-deep in "you know what"!
You'd think we would get disgusted smelling this, day after day, but our people have gotten used to the smell. If they smelled a rose now, they would say YUCK! It smells "funny".

pancho wrote:
>I´m convinced that all the people of Iraq are Assyrian...as Tiglath first pointed out to me. All this fuss is due to religious bigotry, with Christian Assyrians insisting that they and only they can be real Assyrians because they have “maintained an Assyrian identity”, when all they´ve done is call everything Christian, “Assyrian”. We´re like the Irish Catholics who´re convinced Irish Protestants aren´t really Irish because their Protestant religion was brought from England by English Lords and settlers, so that each and every Irish Protestant living in Ireland today “must be” a descendant of one of those invading, usurping Englishmen and they, the Catholics, are the true indigenous people of Ireland. Everyone blithely overlooks the fact that neither the Catholic nor Protestant religion is “indigenous” to Ireland…therefore how can either be used to determine who is really Irish and who isn´t?
>
>Likewise, we believe every Muslim in Iraq is a descendant of an Arab invader and couldn´t “possibly” be an Assyrian who did the unthinkable, to us, by converting to Islam…where we converted, “naturally”, to Christianity
>
>Perhaps it´s unwise of me to say it but I always knew there was little skill or artistry in the Assyrian Monuments I made. For one thing I had to conform to original designs…any flights of fancy would have raised even more hackles than the few times I dared “create”. As it was I was roundly scolded for putting a different pair of sandals on Ashurbanipal, or a short skirt…likewise with the Hammurabi where I was hammered in Detroit for daring to show the great king in anything other than the one robe that came down to us in sculptures of Hammurabi, where he must have had hundreds of others in his closet.
>
>
>The real “art” in these projects was pulling them off, given the prevailing conditions. But not only in our community…it hardly ever happens that a sculptor decides to put a sculpture of his own choosing in a city, also of his own choosing, and then actually pulls it off. And I did it twice and damn near three times...so that too was, if not a first for others…definitely one for us. Also I mostly paid the expenses myself, except for a $25,000 grant from IBM plus another gift of $120,000 from Helen Nimrod Schwarten…something no sculptor has ever done, that I know of. Even with these two generous gifts I still had to raise an additional $300,000 for two monumental bronzes and a plaster of the Hammurabi. I managed it by using what, to a normal artist, would have been the “profits” from the sale of other sculptures, to fund the monuments. This is rare enough, if not next to unheard of, for others…nothing like it had been done by Assyrians in a long, long time…like maybe 2500 years. It was all very, shall we say, new and uncharted territory.
>
>The upshot of this is that with all these unknowns and “firsts”…and in my case specifically, since there wasn´t a precedent in our community for such things and, most important from a practical point of view: as the only Assyrian I know who was actually trying to support a wife and family by doing or making something “Assyrian”…I was “out there” about as far out on a ledge as someone can be without tumbling immediately over. And, being on that ledge for so long, the drop into the abyss constantly before me, I got tired from the strain, bleary-eyed and then frantic too. It couldn´t be helped though…it came with the territory
>
>To even venture out there, to risk so much, means you´re already a certain kind of a determined and in some measure desperate person…and so you´re afraid…all the time, though there´s nothing to be gained, and everything can only get worse, if you admit your fear. It´s like doing the most dangerous high-wire act…only you have to feel and act as if you´re taking a casual stroll across a hotel lobby, after paying the bill. People around you can forget, or never realize to begin with, just how stressed out you really are…or how much thought and energy you´re putting into NOT appearing that way…and since mere appearances won´t do, you have to, in a way, do an excellent job of denial. And that can get you in trouble in other ways. You may well make that dangerous walk successfully…but you´ll pay for it elsewhere. And I did
>
>It was in the cards that I would eventually go off the deep end…couldn´t be helped. I HAD to be so determined that nothing would stop me even when, as was bound to happen, I crossed swords with the kinds of people in our community who´d managed to control things in the past. Though it might have been infinitely easier to “get along” with them and do nothing contrary to their wishes, for better or worse the very sort of person who´d start such a project, in our community of all places, could not have done any differently than barrel over anyone standing in the way, as I´d had to storm past all sorts of obstacles just getting to that point.
>
>To my credit though I must say that I waited patiently for three years, my barrel at rest, for Nimrod to suggest an alternate site for the Shumirum…so displeased was he with the excellent one chosen by the Chicago Arts Commission. Of course it was a tactic meant to frustrate us all into turning the monument over to him. Only after he tried to hornswaggle me out of the commission Helen gave me and then threatened to sue Chicago if they dared go forward with the installation, after never having heard from him again, did I prime my barrel.
>
>The Assyrian community suffers from professional amateurism. The movers and shakers within it are determined to keep it that way because they all need their day-jobs, in order to survive, and so want to keep “Assyrianism” something undemanding that can be done, without too much strain, after supper for an hour or two before bedtime…because they need their sleep in order to go do what REALLY counts in the morning: the job they get paid for. None of them had committed so much of their time and energy or were willing to stake everything on that one toss as I had…as I have.
>
>I was bound to clash with them. My “Assyrianism” was life and death…like their jobs and professions are to them…and just as much as they take their jobs seriously and will brook no fooling around, so too did I have everything riding on my work…and that made me supersensitive at times, and then increasingly so, to how it proceeded and, most importantly, how much meddling I was going to allow from amateurs…just as they would have felt had I showed up at the hospital where they worked and suggested they hold a scalpel “like this” etc.
>
>As I say, this degree of professionalism… I´m not talking about how good a professional one is, just about the feeling and attitude one has about ones “profession” as the basic underpinning of one´s existence(not to mention the well-being of one´s family), was completely new for us, so far as anyone before having tried to make a professional living from things Assyrian. Jackie, John Nimrod or Atour Golani and the rest couldn´t really understand why I was being so “stubborn”, as they liked to call it, about my work…after all, what does it really matter to anything how the next, “Petition to the World Regarding The Rights of The Assyrian People” is worded, or if it gathers dust on a shelf for decades…Jackie, John, Atour and any number of other “leaders” know it isn´t going anywhere even as they write it out…but I WAS planning on, “going somewhere”.
>
>You can´t be the sort who decides to toss your hat into the ring in, say, New York (kidnapping your son in the process)…to grapple and overcome rejection, to keep faith in yourself, while at the same time remaining mousy enough to take “advice” or direction from the owner of, not one but, two video-porn shops just because he was elected president of the AANF one year. If you do that sort of thing you may be popular among the AANF members (and even that isn´t certain), but that´s all you´ll ever be.
>
>I was aiming higher. I wanted first to make my statement IN the community…but to go outside it too…to New York and the world. And it´s almost impossible to please our community while at the same time retaining the fire-in-the-belly you need to take on everyone else. So, I maintain, having the additional goal, besides putting up a chunk of bronze with my name on it, of raising the level of professionalism and standard for achievement in our community to begin to match that of the outside world( so maybe one day we won´t force our talented people to go elsewhere), I was bound to clash with those whose greatest fear, where anything Assyrian is concerned, is their knowledge, and the resentment that comes from that knowledge, that they are neither fit, able nor really willing to go out into that world as professional Assyrians, and insist, therefore, that no one else must either because anyone´s success will be seen as an “attack” against them and a “threat” to their status… holding their achievements, which was the only game in town until you came around, up to “ridicule”. While they may say they are glad to see you and welcome your input and energy, the truth is they´re hellbent to either reduce you to their non-threatening and also unproductive level or do away with you entirely if you don´t conform.
>
>Truly we believe that the other Assyrian´s success is a slight aimed at us…showing off, by contrast, how little we achieve or how incapable we are. That´s the reason an Assyrian would rather trip up a fellow Assyrian who looks to have a chance to come out first, or do very well. We don´t mind it when someone from another group beats us….we´re conditioned to accept that as normal…but if another Assyrian wins…that can only mean we could have too…if not for something, possibly, terribly wrong with us…some flaw or weakness that the other, successful, Assyrian doesn´t share. If we all lose then we all deserve consolation and commiseration…but if one of us wins the crowd is naturally thrilled and lavishes praise and rewards on the winner, while the rest of us are ignored.



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