A Chalcedony Cat

dejuiced

2008-10-20T21:11:06Z

I'd hoped to make any number of posts today, but writing about Wiesel seems to have worn me out. I can experience and respond to a fairly large number of things, but once I distill a single response into words I feel wrung dry. I wonder if this is the sort of thing that will improve with practise? Anyway, I am going to put the computer down (although Pandora has my permission to keep making music for me) and see what I can do to feel less arid.

reading someone else's memories

2008-10-20T20:35:42Z

I just read a translation (by Alexander Schwarz) of Elie Wiesel's 1965 article "The Last Return," about returning to Sighet, the town from which he was deported (along with, it sounds like, about 10,000 other Jewish residents) during the Holocaust. Wiesel is one of those people I 'ought' to know about, but I don't, so I read this article knowing his name as a survivor and nothing more. And this is not a critique, or a review, or anything like that, just my own reactions to it; the sort of posting I hope to be doing a lot more of.

At the beginning of the essay I was caught by this description of Sighet: "It has denied its past; it is condemned to live outside of time; it breathes only in the memory of those who left it." V. S. Naipul, describing Argentina in one of the essays in his book The Death of Eva Peron, also uses this idea; that a place which denies its own history ceases to exist. And the idea came up quite a bit in my Japanese Culture class, a few years back, around the notion that official Japanese history can't accept what the Japanese did in China (and elsewhere), and thus the war years must be denied in a way that makes Japan a little unstuck in time, and the looseness (lack of solidity) caused by this official denial reveals itself over and over again in popular culture, from Godzilla to the anime that's being shown this very moment. And when it comes to Japan I certainly saw that, from a scholarly angle, in works like Twelve Kingdoms which deal head-on with complicit war guilt but can only do so by setting it all in a fantasy world.

So for Wiesel, Sighet is such a place; he returns and it is exactly, exactly like it was when he left it for a concentration camp 20 years before, except of course not alike at all, because there are no more Jews. He speaks to very few people, but even those who might remember him (his elementary school teacher) have forgotten. This was in the 60s, behind the Iron Curtain; the web tells me Sighet Prison was being used to imprison political opponents of the Communist regime, so in a way I'm not sure how to read the forgetfulness Wiesel encountered; the hopeful part of me thinks, "Was it safe for people in that time to speak their memories of their lost population when they were in the process of losing another population?" But it doesn't matter, because what Wiesel experienced was that his people, his community, his family and friends, had all been erased from history. It was not that they were gone, but that as far as the town and its people were concerned, they never existed. His childhood had not happened.

There's a website on PBS about Wiesel which includes a powerful section on Life in Sighet, Romania 1920-1939, told through photos. To see these people, these buildings, this ordinary life which was erased -- not just destroyed but then erased -- brings it home to me.

When I come across stories of desolation and horror (usually in fiction, because in non-fiction it's easier to avoid, or at least easier for me to avoid being hit by because I tend to read history of pasts very distant) I often feel it high in my chest, as a passionate sorrow threaded through with anger. What Wiesel describes as he walks the streets of Sighet looking for his past evokes different emotions entirely; a dropping away of the bottom of my stomach, my mind, a sense of true horror as the known becomes unknowable. My sense of boundedness has returned (it was a few hours ago that I read the essay), but while reading it space didn't seem to have any edges and nothing was solid and although I couldn't feel it, I was very very thankful in my mind that this was not a place in which I had to live.

a hot summer's day

2007-09-03T00:32:42Z

Why did summer decide to wait until September? June and July and most of August were breezy and cool and sometimes even grey and brisk, but now that classes have begun again and I most dearly need to think straight for long periods, it is unbelievably hot. Today, though, the tabby cat is lying on an ice pack; the blue-eyed cat has retreated to some mysterious den of her own and only ventures forth occasionally to see if anyone has done anything about the heat yet.

I am reading Austen's Northanger Abbey with great good will but a lack of focus; I keep putting the book down and wandering off to, say, read LJ and consider how much nicer it would be if it were less hot. Still, I'm very much enjoying it, and also enjoying the rambling professor who teaches the Austen class; his first two lectures have included Locke and Burke, Chaucer, Saul Bellow, Cowper, Samuel Johnson, and a hilarious reading out-loud of the first few pages of Love and Freindship. I'm unlikely to end up teaching at a university (because the jobs are so scarce and I'm so attached to my current location) but if I ever do I hope I can range that wide and far with so much grace, and yet bring it all together at the end.

The urge to sit here and keep typing is strong, but I will exert my self-discipline and go back to reading Austen.

writing about reading

2007-08-09T01:05:44Z

One of my primary reasons -- perhaps the primary reason -- for starting this journal is to write about what I read. I really think my reading habits are fascinating, and there's no way to say that without sounding a little arrogant, but if I didn't think they were fascinating why on earth would I want to share them with anyone? A healthy dose of arrogance appears to be necessary if I'm going to write anything, ever, so I may as well attempt to embrace it.

That being said, I'm never sure how to go about the details. Whom shall I model myself after? Michael Dirda of the Washington Post, whose book Readings always inspires me to write about my own readings? But essays are hard; there's a reason that someone like Dirda gets paid for his writing -- he ties things together, rambles beautifully around the edges of a subject, darts into the centre, and then brings the reader out again feeling like they've made a journey. I might be able to do that, I suppose, but it would be, well, work.

Then again, is there any way of writing about my reading meaningfully (more than a list of titles & authors, say) that wouldn't be work? It seems a sad truth of the world that all of the things I'd like to do in it end up being work one way or another. Perhaps the best solution is for me to admit that while I don't much like work, it needs to be faced head-on or I won't accomplish anything. (Why is it, though, that when I am too busy to do any work of my own, that's the time I'm inspired to do so? And when I have loads of free time, like right now, I don't want to do anything at all? Aside from the aforementioned being ill, I mean. What is it about having fifteen pages of academic prose to crank out about Mary Elizabeth Braddon that makes me want to write about Robertson Davies for my own personal pleasure?)

the chalcedony cat has a cold

2007-08-08T23:41:52Z

I think it's a cold; at any rate, my stomach is often upset, and my head and throat sometmes ache, and I appear to be capable of sleeping sixteen hours a day instead of my usual ten or twelve. And I am disinclined to do the laundry (although it badly wants to be done) or to do the dishes or to answer my email, or really to do much of anything except eat and sleep and read. Of course, I'm lucky enough to be able to get away with doing just that for a few days, so there is much less to complain about than there would be if I had a job to be at, or if classes had already started.

Still, summer colds are always a little depressing; they feel so out of place. The mornings lately have been cool and windy and overcast, more like October than August, and at those times it doesn't feel strange to be wrapped up in warm blankets drinking tea and thinking about going back to sleep. During the afternoons, though, when the sky clears up and the sun shines and it's warm and slow, I feel like I ought to be active, energetic, listening to 80s music on a beach somewhere -- but instead I drink yet more tea, poke idly at the web, and wish I wasn't sick.

First entry

2007-08-05T00:23:46Z

First entries are always dull, so one might as well get it over with.