Notebook Transcription 59
transcribed March 7, 2007

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That's what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events.
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"So I took Anse. And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. >As I Lay Dying
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And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who have never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget thw words. Like Cora, who could never even cook. >138
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And then he died. He did not know he was dead. I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the dark land talking of God's love and His beauty and His sin; hearing the dark voicelesness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in people's lacks, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wile darkness in the terrible nights, [?] of the deeds like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told, That is your father, your mother. >138
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of Ghosts: they seemed to be like normal people, but as soon as you looked more closely their faces blurred and flickered at the edges.
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That is hard on a man, He may ask the animal: "why do you just look at one instead of telling me about your happiness?" The animal wants to reply: "Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say" but then forgets even this answer and says nothing. >Nietzsche
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totally unhistorical: Nietzsche on animals
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The dilemma: the inherent distance between language (words) and what it names. "all symbolism harbors the curse of mendacity: it is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal...Literature can transcend this dilemma only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication." >Sebald
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"or was all this just the stage set for a fantastic opera?" >Kasack
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The reason for the murder of memory lies in the fear that Orpheus' love for Eurydice might turn to a passion for the goddess of death; it knows nothing of the positive potential of melancholy. >Nussbaum?
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"The outcast dared not look back, since there was nothing behind him but fire." >See Elias Canetti, on Hiroshima diaries of Dr. Hachiya
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Human beings learn as much from catastrophes as laboratory rabbits learn about biology. >Brecht's dictum
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The [?] (German) have come home with "the sniffed insight that it smells everywhere, and not only in quaint one-family houses, that sometimes frankly and pungently, sometimes lavender-sweetened, here masked by refrigeration, there streaked with mold, and next door unspeakably, it stinks, because here, there and next door the cellars harbor corpses." >Grass on German war guilt
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a despair that is moving in itself.
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Wolfgang Hildesheimer's novel Tyuset: 1st person narrator tormented by insomnia and melancholy, uneasy and disturbed by unsanctioned legacy. All around him he begins to choose names out of a phonebook or calls them say that everything has been revealed. calls randomly but invariably the call is followed by a departure and disappearance. One day he picks up the phone and hears the telltale crackle and knows that his experimental system of Persecution has been turned against him. He leaves town.
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Claude Levi-Strauss' proposition that in American Indian myths the hair-lip was the remaining trace of a twin who was never actually born. This duality in one person makes the hare, with its split face, one of the highest deities, mediating between heaven and earth. >Sebald
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"The greater the suffering the greater the poet. The harder the work, the deeper the meaning." >Ernst Herbeck schizo poet in Germany
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Thunderstorms appeared on the day of Beethoven's death, also on the day of Kafka's death, over Low Sanatorium.
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Nabakov tried, he vowed, to cast a little light on the darkness lying on both sides of our life, thus to illuminate our incomprehensible existence.
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Claritas was always for St. Thomas Aquinas the true sign of epiphany
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"Life is a chequer-board of Nights and days/ Where Destiny with men for pieces plays:/ Hither and Thither moves, and mates, and slays,/ And one by one back in the closet lays." >Edward Fitzgerald and his translation of a Persian poet.
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So great a temptation is akin to that of St. Anthony in the desert (Egypt precisely) see Flaubert "Temptation of St. Anthony"
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Sebald says Zionism took its cues from the early 19th C emergent German nationalist ideology -- physical health, hardiness, haleness
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Hitler settled on a irrefutable proof for the annihilation of the Jews: there could not be two chosen peoples.
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January 1901 Milan: As Verdi lay dying the people on his street covered the paving stones with hay so the carts would pass in silence and the composer could die in peace and quiet.
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Receive me kindly, stranger that I am

"Am I to fare like the thousands who in their springtime days lived in both foreboding and love, but were seized by the avenging Parcae on a drunken day, secretly and silently destroyed, to do penance in the dark of an all to sober realm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where they count slow time in frost and drought, and man still praises immortality in sighs alone? >Sebald on Holderlin
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In Roman mythology, the Parcae (three) were the personifications of destiny (their Greek equivalent were the Moirae). They controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal and immortal from birth to death. Even gods feared the Parcae. Jupiter was subject to their power.
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adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life. >Sebald on his own writing
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Hebel: rode a pale horse
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Japanese cedar can be buried in the earth until it becomes a deep green color and is regarded as a semi-precious stone.
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18th C Kantian dreams of perpetual peace
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It is no accident that our European allies -- for whom the twentieth century was a traumatic catastrophe -- are predisposed to accept that cooperation, not combat, is the necessary condition of survival -- even at the expense of some formal sovereign autonomy. British military casualties at the Battle of Psscherdaele in 1917 alone exceed all US losses in WWI and II combined. The French army lost twice the total number of US vietnam casualties in the course of just six weeks fighting in 1940. Italy, Poland, Germany and Russia all lost more soldiers and civilians in World War I than the US has lost in all its foreign wars put together (in the Russian case by a factor of 10 on both occasions). Such contrasts make quite a difference in how you see the world. >Pfaff, see reading notes on nyrb article
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George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlan (?) -- American diplomatic titans
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in 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
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Decologue 2nd commandment -- no graven images
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In our culture lawyers do not have to be wise, they have to be well-briefed. >Postman
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Truth does not come unadorned. It is in all cases a kind of cultural prejudice. >Postman
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"immunity to eloquence" >Bertrand Russell looking to meaning not tone
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Rationality and scholarship, legalistic hallmarks
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The aim to save civilization in America by "creating rationality in the land." >John Marshall
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Voting, we might say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent (the last being a poll) >Postman
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Flux and infinite variety
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The "Pseudo-event" was one staged just to be reported (press conference) -- see Boorstein "The Image"
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Culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, impotence
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When Bernard Shaw first saw the lights of Broadway he remarked: "It would be beautiful if you couldn't read."
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The medium forms us to it thus we are brought to heel, like a man of intellect, or a man of severity, in front of the television camera.
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"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies." >Walter (Walta) Lippmann
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"Big brother turns out to be Howdy Doody"
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technological changes to our means of communication are ideology-landen -- they change cognitive habits, social relations, notions of community, history and religion. >157
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On the old roots of American exceptionalism: "the case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of the world...we have no occasion to roam for information into the obscure field of antiquity, nor hazard ourselves upon conjecture. We are...as if we had lived at the beginning of time. >Thomas Paine
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Bush and his historicisms: America's foreign policy objective had become: "ending tyranny in our world." Karl Popper called it historicism: faith in large scale laws of historical development.
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It is in the nature of political relationships that an effort to translate a position of material superiority into a power over others will provoke resistance, and may fail, possibly in costly ways. >William Pfaff
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Kennan was above all author of cold-war containment policy
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Epicetus: "watch out for yourself like an enemy lying in wait."
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She acknowledges a certain passivity before the world.
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Proust calls emotions "geological Upheavals of thought."
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Pharaoh gave the name to Joseph: Zaphenath-paneah "God speaks, he lives" "creation of life"