More Epithets and Apothegms

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?