Saturday, November 26, 2016

Been somewhere, all this time





    2016's book of the year is 
    a diptych memoir, the first 
    panel written in one language, 
    the second in another, by an 
    historian who thinks in French, 
    writes in English, and speaks 
    at home in a hereditary language 
    he never heard as a child, Hebrew. 


The first panel has just been republished after some 40 years, on the occasion of the appearance of the second, and they have been heralded in the current New York Review of Books by two full-page announcements, sharing a common hinge. The hype, if this is what it is, was only considerate. 



Saul Friedländer’s When Memory Comes and Where Memory Leads set them-selves the implicit task of tracing the formation of a whole mind within recurrences of catastrophe. I can imagine no one who could not be enthralled, and there are many who will be encouraged. Those who reel, right now, beneath the spectacle of the highest office in the world’s most powerful republic’s being seized by only millions of fewer votes than would make that ascendancy legitimate, are now being helpfully led to popular, ad hoc anthropologies of semi-concealed subcultures of resentment, as if to dispose of disbelief in the gaining of understanding. Friedländer’s personal and professional life, at the epicenter of human history’s greatest perversion, has led him instead to anatomize the problem of shock from within, preserving disbelief while portraying the painstaking acquisition of resolution. The effect is to sustain objectivity as well as judgment.


This task, which once knew dignity as borderless, timeless, merciful and unending, may now seem so again; so it may be that literature’s subordination to journalism will one day wane. Still, that work and its text must endure being beautiful, which is to say vulnerable, subject to denial, and patronizing contempt. Friedländer has barred the door against neglect from the social sciences, by first having compiled unimpeach-able histories which leave only a few writhing mullahs and alt-Right skinheads denying the Holocaust. That extraordinary bulwark, although far off in the margins of these memoirs, is such a daunting foundation for this private journey, that metaphor emerges as not only credible, but the optic of everyday life, the irrefutable scale to bring to its perception.

Both volumes traverse time in both directions, as memory is reclaimed and circumstances stand out as essential to Friedländer's gradual progress in accessing his feelings, even his identity as a repeatedly displaced, even renamed person. He elaborates a dictum from one of the great texts of his inheritance - a volume of which his father took with him to Auschwitz - Gustave Meyrink's The Golem - When knowledge comes, memory comes too, little by little. Knowledge and memory are one and the same thing. But there we are: his burden of understanding bears the burden of direst proof. 


Have we met a culture which mocks and humiliates its way to dominance? Have we met a disorder which prospers from bogus terrors? Ignore the paraphernalia of ostracism and familial dismemberment, set aside the disruption and desolation of a continent, and to understand, look at its personal conduct — the howling of abusive chants, the lust for vituperation, the frenzy to destroy, of everyday American civic life, are not unexampled wherever temptation is reinforced as communal protection. Here, the young man Friedländer takes his daily afternoon walk, with a patient at his uncle’s sanitarium in rural Sweden - and he notes, When the Gripsholm slowly pulled away from the Göteborg docks, I knew that this strange stay in Sweden had opened doors for me that would never close again. This, his vision can do for any time.






   On a winter morning about three months after my arrival, I took Arne, a boy of fifteen, for his usual walk. The first snows had already fallen, but the roads had been cleared and I hoped to reach Elsgård, where we could have a hot cup of herb tea before starting back. Arne was very sick: he would pour out an incomprehensible flood of words and gesticulate endlessly as he told himself stories whose meaning only he could understand. As usual, he walked quite a distance ahead of me on the way back and disappeared round a bend at the entrance to a village, waving his arms furiously, deep in the mysterious world of his fantasies. When I again caught sight of him at the end of this village street, he had a gang of youngsters, who had just come out of school, at his heels, mimicking his screams and gestures. Panic seized Arne, who started off at a run, with the youngsters behind him, and me still further behind, trying to catch up with them. We left the village and ran through the pristine white fields. After a few hundred yards, tired out and in tears, Arne threw himself down in the snow; forming a big semicircle around him, the children continued to shout gibberish at him, waving their schoolbags and their caps. Arne's fury then turned against himself. When I finally caught up with him, he was rolling in the snow, the whites of his eyes showing, foaming at the mouth, trying to tear his clothes off. I could only hold him by the shoulders as best I could and try to calm him by talking. A few moments later the youngsters scattered, hurling a few parting insults at him. At that point Arne suddenly gripped one of my hands and raised his face to me. Everything that was locked inside Arne's head, everything that he was never to express, all his howling, dumb suffering was there on the contorted face covered with tears, mucus, slaver, and melted snow. Arne blinked his eyes, trying to tell me everything, but how could he do it? "Herr Friedländer," he burst out, "Herr Friedländer!" -- and could say no more.


























Saul Friedländer

When Memory Comes
  Part II, pp 100-101
Helen R. Lane
  translation
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979©
Other Press, 2016©

Where Memory Leads
  My Life
Other Press, 2016©

Kathleen Digrado
  dust jacket design

ii, iii  Ryan Schira x Carter Smith








Friday, November 25, 2016

Voltaire is a martini






       bracing, vivid miracles
       of wit and penetration;
       Rousseau's born of bar-
       rels in the Hebrides we
       savor for their peat or
       ambient salt. Terroir's
       the child of art, what-
       e'er we think of place.

       We aren't very settled.
       I do believe we'll win.



























Thursday, November 24, 2016

It was kind of a quiet Thanksgiving





     They closed the store
     where we live, so no-
     nobody really went
     out. Jack did bring
     his skateboard, but
     without a decent 18-
     wheeler to rope onto,
     there wasn't much to
     do except push each
     other, like kids on 
     a swing. It would've
     been just another 
     power outage, if 
     Harry hadn't brought 
     his Veuve Clicquot.


















A sailor and his rigging











 aren't
 soon 
 parted





        This is for Tom,
        the photographer
        says, who seems
        to have emigrated
        to Scotland.




















iii  Blacksmith's Eye






Always someone at the table's changed







            Always someone
            will be found.






















  





            

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Make us a watchman iii


we're given
an example.






           tramontate, stelle
           all'alba vincerò






  People are bound to say,
  a great power needs more
  than a coach, to run the
  place. We've already no-
  ticed, they mean a fist.

  They always did. And for
  jaw - they never offered
  theirs.

  The way of life, the way
  of love, of playing fair
  is not emboldened false-
  ly by an apostle of con-
  ditioning and endurance. 




 
























President of the United States
John F. Kennedy Airport
  New York
October, 2012
Damon Winter, photography
The New York Times©

Loammi Goetghebeur
Michael Elmquist, photography














Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Sea change


Barbados, an island we love un-
idly, is leeward and windward, in
her commanding vantage point atop 
the Grenadines. When I encounter-
ed this visionary experience of 
her Atlantic side, I felt the af-
finity of an indulgent sojourner
there; but the temptation to hop
into my rented Jeep was great, to 
haul ass west, to gentler parishes.






It would be idle of one to say,
I don't know about you, in con-
nection with our Constitution's
provision of a pristine month
remaining to us all, before the
onslaught of a minority thug's
sworn and already unfurling bes-
tiality. One does know about you,
because you come back, even with-
out remark, just to claim the
beach. It doesn't need an excuse.

I wish to protect December, here,
for the treasure it always yields.
In January, it will be absurd to
affect a disengagement: we owe a
knife at the throat, its answer.

For now, I do wish to commemorate
the American Thanksgiving, even if
a serene December is far-fetched,
as an accident of grace one could
ever expect, before our looming 
storm is turned away.

To this, it would not be undignified
to be dedicated. To that inevitable
dispersal, every resident and guest
of these shores deserves a Thanks-
giving of hope and resolution.

To readers overseas, especially the
many in France, I hope that our exam-
ple of catastrophe may gird and guide
your navigation of similar straits.
We think of the fleet of France, off
the beaches at Yorktown, and we know
fraternité can never expire, in sub-
stance or necessity.

On y va.

































Adam Patterson
Study for Transgressing
  the Atlantic, Barbados
2016

Ivan Terestchenko
tricouleur










Sunday, November 20, 2016

Dog whistler






  The keeper of the pending
  regime's dog whistles, of
  Indiana's repressions of
  gender, Republicans' de-
  nials of science, and de-
  cency's every waking tor-
  ment, the present gover-
  nor of that sorry State,
  made the mistake of pres-
  enting himself in public
  at a celebration of our
  history. He might learn.
























Paolo Gallardo
Latch
Disclosure, 2013©