[Reader-list] was asked how the current climate of war "feels different"........thought I would share my response

[hight at 34n118w.net]

The difference is everywhere and nowhere.  It informs sounds, shapes,
colors, fragments of conversations.  The media images are confetti,
scatterings, small bits of controlled color and uncertain textures
captured together; they are details and pieces of something, but are so
small, so not of a whole.  The walk past a television or a news display
reveals war in so many other ways, in infusions of anger in piles of paper
to be collected as though the clutter is of something more, and the futile
tiny feeling that at least this can touched with my hands, sorted.  It
reveals  feelings of helplessness among something so much larger than the
puny geometry of a human life and its ephemera.  The spectre of some
unfound context looms in years ahead when whatever this leads to reveals
itself in books, documents with zebra stripes of what will never be known,
in the cooling of magma that comes in time in terms of what this all will
be seen as , and what we are not being told.  It makes history seem to
reach with bony hands from texts and seem to be given patches of flesh, to
seem to violate laws of time and seem so prescient and fused to "now" and
all it entails.  The air is the same, a rind of orange tastes the same,
salt falls on eggs in the same trajectories as before, but something
looms, is nestled in pauses in conversations, in unsaid things, and at
times breaks volcanic in hot frustrated jets or oozes out slow in
narcotized black discussions as though from the grave itself.  These are
our times.