Les bienveillantes (2006)

One very considerable problem of antisemitism, as a subject to comprehend responsibly as a citizen of coffee, is its infuriating mutability. The horror of the canny molecular mutation, in the back of every retrovirologist's mind, is nothing more than the quotidian face of this desperate sociopathic infection. Even its most notable incidents of inflammation under the twelve-year Reich, 1933-45, have defied comprehension, at their most fundamental level; and yet nobody can be content to resign himself to this protracted enigma, in the way we accept the intractable mystery of heterosexuality. There is the fact that antisemitism is a choice.

The judeocide of the late War in Europe drew breath from the structuring of a choice which was assented to, in various modes and degrees and for various ostensible reasons, with breathtaking multilateralism. These layers of permission have stood in the way of historiography, despite the production of a plethora of sub-masterpieces on one or more of its moving parts. The most urgent first-person narratives and the assaults of poetry, too, have acquiesced in some way to an abiding resistance to comprehension of the whole, as if that would be pretentious, or an exhibition of blasphemy. Now, however, it feels as if a mighty fortress has all but finally fallen to prose fiction.

Jonathan Littell's fictional work, The Kindly Ones, written in French and published in France in 2006 as Les bienveillantes, is notorious for its baggage of literary prizes, exhausting length, and exhaustive catalogue of depravities. The book's existence restored itself to my attention in 2010 and occupied a couple of weeks of my reading calendar, gaining for itself the serious impression that one cannot understand the Holocaust without wading through it.

Remember how little you found you actually wanted to know, about whales? The book, itself, and the best review of the book remark explicitly on that sensation, of reading Moby-Dick. And that review is excellent on the book's self-conscious references to Aeschylus, the Oresteia. You will want to revisit the plays, and when you do, you will gain a necessary vantage point on their fearsome framing relevance in Robert Fagles' introductory essay to his own translation. You will not need to re-read Melville, because The Kindly Ones, itself, will steep you in recollection that Melville could not have 'quarreled with God' any other way. But you will have to read this Augean labour of an absorbingly researched, minutely crafted, fully anatomising book, all the way, to arrive outside the belly of the beast. There is no shortcut, no speed-read, no synopsis to its catharsis. There is no other exit. This is a great achieve-ment.

.. no war, no force, no prayer

can hinder the midnight Fury stamped

with parent Fury moving through the house.

                                Agamemnon, Chorus, 758-60

Only one material element in the judeocide eludes Littell's grasp - antisemitism. Of course this only purifies his accomplishment, to thrust it upon the stage as Aeschylus had done, confiding its human qualities.  

Jonathan Littell, Y'89
The Kindly Ones
  Charlotte Mandell, translation
Harper Collins, 2009©


Robert Fagles
  Late Professor of Comparative Literature
  Princeton University
The Serpent and the Eagle,
  A Reading of the Oresteia
Princeton, 1976©


Aeschylus
Agamemnon
The Libation Bearers
The Eumenides
  All 458 BC
Robert Fagles, translation
Penguin Classics, 1977©

An augury

the saltimbanques
though late, have
been learning

To be read is heaven.
To be seen through is better.














Photography W. Scott Martin,
  schoolmate of Laurent's father,
  bookseller to his mother,
  Laurent residence, Telegraph Hill

The latest in rowing?

I may well never know.
And why?

The Owner's Manual.


Oh, I'm as keen as the next guy - don't get me wrong - for the hot new thing, and (if that did not dishearten you) I can even get past a lurid font, an un-linear printing, a fuzzy illus-tration. It's the sequence of the assembly, that I don't think I could master, before it were time to take on the next inven-tion. Still, there must be a Customer Service department, surely?

Dawn, Aegean

Unambiguous glory.
Refulgent, radiant.


We think of the youth -
  aren't they obvious -


How they are stirred.

Tassos Paschalis 
  Attiki

Sibling molds

 Overnight, in France

What comes forth without making a sound

Pleases some part of us, rain at dawn

The perspiculum worm curling and uncurling

Pleases us, and the ice melt

Running blue from the glacier's tongue.

The peony - rose and pink - opens in the dawn

And only the moon sailing alone sees it.

Ivan Terestchenko

Photography and sculpture

Robert Bly

Hidden Things

Estero, A West Marin Quarterly

 Vol I, Nr 2, Fall/Winter, 1992

Point Reyes Station, California

Awe, remembrance, hope

native shepherds
  of the heart

Valéry Lorenzo, i
Ivan Terestchenko, ii
Tassos Paschalis, iii


Michael Praetorius, 1571-1621
Quem pastores laudavere
David Hill
Westminster Cathedral Choir
The Parley of Instruments
Hyperion, 2001©

Saturday commute x

for the choristers

I think, in every household that observes Christmas Day, there comes a moment when a guy's urge to get out and play, inflamed as it has been by importunings to linger in itchy pants, praise the nitrate breakfast, reciprocate the claustrophobic hugs of elders - in short, to look to the feelings of others - comes face to face with ferocious pressure to erupt into the nearest wave, snow bank, or romantic embrace, without the slightest regard for decorum in velocity or vector. 

I'm afraid that if we continue to approach this ancient crisis in holiday circulation from the point of view of denial, we are going to raise a generation much like ourselves. That's a job for rabbits.

There's nothing like a houseful of slow farts, clashing parfums, and endless fussing to hurl a fellow out the door. Nor is the torrent of annual good advice especially well calibrated for the intimacy it flaunts, or the orgy of connois-seurship much conducive to pleasure. [image subject to query of copyright]

It isn't natural to suffer so much coddling by Dickens' kitchen fumes, Thackeray's treacles, O'Neill's tipples. Good cheer is dross to good fun, and if guys were allowed to storyboard our Christmas daytimes, there would be a great deal more mirth at dinner. Don't stay home without it.

There's a fresh roll of monochrome in the Leica, and a world compressed to the bursting point. Whit and I intend to be there when it happens, and we know we aren't the only ones.

It isn't so hard. Christmas ignites energy, ebullience. Tchaikovsky's ballet and our own Recessional told us so. As we lay aside our choris-ter's bright crucifix, and fold away its black and silken cord, it can even be amazing.

My watch

To me, a brother was

the most obvious thing.

Not to him.

He'd never had one before.

The experience I've had least,

though he's been gone 10 times

that long, is not having him.

He was called, David.

He was rotten at tying his shoes.

Why wait for another day?
You know this one is happening
and will be the same after it has happened.


Nothing will come to take its place
and that will be fine, good.

Though not inhuman, we can play
at what it would be like to be God,
and God will not take us away.

Another time I was at your house.
It was suddenly dark inside.


A wind swept past the bark
of some trees. It was overdue,
they said. All storms are inept.











It was time to find the mind-crystal,
pore over what we still had,
the huge resource we owed.












John Ashbery
Hungry Again
  A Worldly Country
Harper Collins, 2007©




In San Marino with our mother
At his pool at school
College favoured on our mother's side
Navy tradition, junior officer's
  first crossing of the Date Line
Last hours
He and I