MELANCHOLY MUSING ON THE MEANING OF HISTORY
§ I read the history of Europe on
the eve of the Holocaust, thinking as I do, such and such happened ten years,
five years before I was born, and then three and two; and suddenly, that was on
the day before I was born, and here is an incident when I was probably already
crawling or walking or asking questions.
Had I been born over there, in the Old Country, probably I would not be
here now. Had my grandparents decided to
leave the world of pogroms and persecutions fifty years before then, my parents
would never have met, and their lives, like so many millions of others, been
extinguished in grief, humiliation and pain.
Each moment of recognition that I could have been in such and such a
place when some catastrophe unfolded and at such and such time and yet have
been oblivious to all the suffering is now unbearable. All this drives me to study harder and to try
to picture what it was impossible then for me to know.
§ There were once so many old
friends of the family, relatives and neighbours, now most of their names are
forgotten, photographs cannot be identified, and online searches fail to show
any details, if any at all. The whole
world that filled up my life back then is mostly gone. In a short while, even that
little will disappear. Can the huge gap
be filled by the imagination?
§ Books come together in strange
and exciting, often unexpected ways. One
author deliberately or inadvertently goes over the same journey as another,
discovers the same ideas lurking in the landscape and among the people he
meets, though the lapse in time may be several generations. Another book meditates on a problem that has
been worked out under very different circumstances by a previous author, and
mere force of juxtaposition opens up new ways to examine life and history. In still others, writers argue with one
another, answering the previous text, occupying the territory used as a novel’s
setting, taking over the other’s characters and recreating them in new
contexts. In other words, it is not
enough to read one book on its own, or to see clusters of books forming a
context for one another, or establishing chains of connectivity over long
periods of time and criss-crossing each other’s paths with illuminating
insights: we have to see ourselves as part of this matrix of inter-inanimation,
and then imagine our parents, our friends, our communities within similar
models of history. We are never alone,
even if for the moment—lasting many generations—we have forgotten this essential
truth.
§ Jokes, wit and comedy can prove
to be useful approaches to problems that are otherwise irresolvable, although
these resolutions to impasses and gaps in knowledge and emotional energy may be
self-destructive and harmful to others.
Seriousness and arrogance, however, more often do more than exacerbate
the problems; in missing the point of a tragic situation, they destroy the very
elements that can be salvaged as helpful relics and reminders of what has been
lost, transformed into positive features by simple or complicated processes of
polishing and redefinition and integrated into a more salutary experience that
is strong enough to encompass past losses and misunderstandings. Irony, in other wor4ds, can work in several
ways: not only by saying or saying that which is harmful and corrective in
outright invective or more subtle satire, but by modifying or breaching the
walls of indifference through a modification of the seemingly intransient
barrier of insult and injury allowing sometimes for compromise and
amelioration.
§ Sometimes it seems as though the
whole world is tilting, sliding and collapsing into itself, those moments we
remember always as so important that nothing on the previous side of our
thoughts can ever be reconstructed in the same old way, and in which rugged
pathways have to be negotiated before we reach a point from which everything
starts to make sense again. We find the
bits and pieces, the dribs and drabs, the fragments that were held very dear
but now seem meaningless or infantile.
We might put them in an album of pointless souvenirs or a cabinet of
curiosities, and then, in a dozen years or a century, someone will see them and
form a pattern, claim to see a collage or a prophetic dream. But anyone who was once there and has now forgotten
will know that all the essentials are gone and the rhythms are fortuitous.
§ Speaking of
earthquakes, I have been in a few big ones and they are scary—or funny,
depending on your outlook. Once at night in Saint Louis, Missouri the
bathtub started sloshing about and I was sure it would carry out down the
street and into the Mississippi River in my glorious deshabile.
Then there was a time in Israel when suddenly every tree swished and every bird
rose up in a vast noisy cloud as the building slowly shook back and
forth. It was so fascinating we forgot to hide under a table or in an
archway.
§ Every thirty or forty years, the river starts
to go down, the reservoirs upstream are closed, and one can see almost a whole
dry bed. Around the bridges, what you
will expect—bicycles, prams, shopping carts and a whole load of unrecognizable
rubbish, metal and organic, corroded into sludge. Perhaps there are skeletons of dogs and cats
or fragments of other life forms, but you would have to poke around in the
mud. Further along, the smell isn’t too
bad, except for rotting bushes and river weeds, where the ducks used to nest. No fish, of course. Turtles and frogs have long since gone. Only memories remain, hidden under the
surface, like a Golem, waiting to be
revived when the next catastrophe appears.
§ There are times when life shows itself to be
precarious and teetering on the rim of its own demise. We have already once or twice come right up
to the precipice, looked down, and, feeling a little dizzy, waited for some not
so strong wind to push us over. Later, on
a dark, rainy evening, hardly able to see the road, another vehicle loudly slid
past, and between the screech and the silence, one simply waited for what is inevitable
to come, and the waiting was itself painful and eventually humiliating. Then not too long ago, pieces of time fell
out of consciousness, empty spaces of silence and invisibility, and though each
had only been intermittent, a few moments, an hour or two, it is now evident
that sooner or later the veil will come down, thick and heavy, with no breeze
to blow it away.
§ Hallucinations came for many days, and were
retold as myths over the next few years, and then after so many generations no
one could them rationalized into ideologies.
Then as philosophers picked apart the ideas, they made a system which
everyone could believe, and things left over were preserved as
decorations. At this point, some
scientists scrutinized the images, put them to the test, and, finding one or
two made sense, decided that long ago what everyone believed was true. The ideas were allegorized to make better
sense, and thus everyone was very happy.
Except Jonah who tried to run away and Job who never stopped arguing,
and even Esther who learned to do the job all by herself that no one else was
willing or able to do. Do you see what I
mean?