..."Tell it slant'... ~Emily Dickinson
"And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."~Anais Nin
Now you know. The next time you go into the basement wear a helmet. ~Eve
"In extremity, states of mind become objective, metaphors tend to actualize, the word becomes flesh.(1977,205) -Terence Des Pres, 'The Survivor'
“I decided to go in search of the shaking woman.” Siri Hustvedt
A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. ~Albert Einstein
As Christians and Jews, following the example of the faith of Abraham, we are called to be a blessing to the world. (cf. Gen. 12:2ff). This is the common task awaiting us. It is therefore necessary for us Christians and Jews, to be first a blessing to one another. (L'Osservatore Romano, Aug. 17, 1993) ~John Paul II
"...there is need for acknowledgment of the common roots linking Christianity and the Jewish people, who are called by God to a covenant which remains irrevocable (cf. Rom.11:29) and has attained definitive fullness in Jesus Christ." ~John Paul II
...a consistent contempt for Nazism(condemning it as early as 1930...as 'demonic' and 'wedded to Satan') and Communism as virulent atheism...he referred to them as "Gog and Magog"... ~on Claudel

Today, it seems, most were born ‘left-handed.’ Every one I see walking is ‘hinged at the hips’, in-sync’ and glued to metallic boxes. ~Chelé
"A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge[illusory] solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged." - Czeslaw Milosz
*A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul*. Tolstoy
I will not let thee go except thou be blessed. Now wouldn’t it be a magnificent world if we all lived that way with each other or even with ourselves?
"I, Sister Faustina, by the order of God, have visited the abysses of hell so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence...But I noticed one thing: that most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a hell." -Saint Faustina

Do you hear what I hear? A child, a child crying in the night.

"Every time you dance, what you do must be sprayed with your blood. ~Rudolf Nureyev
Why would someone who looked God in the face ever suppose that there could be something better? ~Matthew Likona

We cannot know what we would do in order to survive unless we are tested. For those of us tested to the extremes the answer is succinct: anything

…”The Stoics throned Fate, the Epicureans Chance, while the Skeptics left a vacant space where the gods had been –[nihilism]—but all agreed in the confession of despair;...and...Oriental schemes of thought contributed a share to the deepening gloom..." ~Gwatkin

"...notes to the committee...why do you invite cows to analyze the milk?" -Peter de Vries

"I run because it gives Him pleasure." ~Eric, Chariots of Fire

“God’s truth is life,” as Patrick Kavanagh says, “even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.” What is the difference between a cry of pain that is also a cry of praise and a cry of pain that is merely an articulation of despair? Faith? The cry of a believer, even if it is a cry against God, moves toward God, has its meaning in God, as in the cries of Job. ~Christian Wiman

"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage." - Ray Bradbury

As for what concerns our relations with our fellow men, the anguish in our neighbor's soul must break all precept. All that we do is an end in itself, because God is Love. ~Edith Stein, St. Benedicta of the Cross.

“Lastly, and most of all. Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind; abandons them as vile…; does wrong to Heaven and man, to time and to eternity. And you have done that wrong!” ~Dickens, The Chimes, 1844

Dieu me pardonnera. C'est son métier . ~Heinrich Heine.

Remember the 'toe-pick' and you won't get swallowed by the whale or eaten by the polar bear.

Someone else needs to become the bad example in our group
But you wear shame so well ~James Goldman, Eve [Or, tired of being the scapegoat yet? ~Sue]

There is a point where the unfortunate and the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, miserable; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity be all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great? -[Jesus Christ said so.] -- Br. Humbert Kilanowski, O.P.

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. -Sir Edward Grey

We are still fighting to use the tools we have to grapple with the unknown.

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” ~Joan Didion"

When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky

" ...wie geht es zu, daß ich alles so anders sehe ...?"

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”― Maya Angelou

'Have you ever noticed that the meanest, most misogynist, and dangerous people tend to be activists who claim to be for freedom and love?'

"For others of us, the most loving thing we can do for our abusers is to keep them from having opportunity to abuse ever again." (Dawn Eden) My Peace I Give You, Ch. 1)

No child is ever responsible for abuse perpetrated on them by ANYONE. I understand that others may not "get it" and that's fine. Blaming the victim is never right or just under any circumstances.

Stay In Touch -Have I not proven to you that I Am in the saving sinners business? -Jesus


HOPE: Hold on to the great truths of the Faith...Own your challenging affliction...Persevere...Expect God's providence and intervention... ~Johnette Benkovich, Woman of Grace
O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, help those especially in need of thy mercy. - OL of Fatima
Prescription #1: Give God the greatest possible glory and honor Him with your whole soul. If you have a sin on your conscience, remove it as soon as possible by means of a good Confession. ~St. John Bosco
Prescription #2: In thankful tenderness offer Reparation for the horrible mockery and blasphemies constantly uttered against the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; against the Blessed Virgin Mary; the saints and angels; His Church; His priests and religious; His children; and His loving Heart by reciting the Golden Arrow which delightfully wounds Him:
'May the most holy, most sacred, most adorable and ineffable Name of God be forever praised, blessed, loved, and honored by all the creatures of God in heaven, on earth and in the hells through the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar. Amen.
Prescription #3: So, let us go out to Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach. ~Heb.13:13
Prescription #4: "Do whatever He tells you." ~John 2:5
Prescription #5: Sometimes when I am in such a state of spiritual dryness that not a single good thought occurs to me, I say very slowly the "Our Father" or the "Hail Mary"and these prayers suffice to take me out of myself. ~St. Therese of Lisieux
Prescription #6: Have confidence in God's Love, Justice, and Mercy: ...as for me, O my God, in my very confidence lies all my HOPE. For Thou, O Lord, singularly has settled me in hope." -St. Claude de la Colombiere SJ

Pages

Friday, December 21, 2012

Cain Strategy and ‘Fast and Furious’

Cain Strategy and ‘Fast and Furious’
We’ll never waste a good crisis...”  Rahm Emmanuel
Alinsky Rule: Polarization...left vs right, Republicans vs Democrats, guns vs no guns, conservative vs liberal, union vs non-union, straight vs gay...etc...God vs...?
or..The ‘Cain’ Strategy from the Biblical ‘Cain and Abel’
So, while the ‘poles’ are fighting, destroying each other...who is it that moves in and takes over?
In the meantime nothing...except ‘power grabbing’...
       For the record: I hate guns.  Twice a bullet from an ‘unloaded’ gun narrowly missed
         my head.
What I hate more than guns: predatory, selective memory and hypocrisy
              I guess everyone has forgotten the ‘Fast and Furious’ gun sales debacle?
But, as Chesterton warns us, those ‘shadows’ we so carelessly discard stare ‘hard’ at us without smiling.
from After Every War
I remember that when my parents left the room, and
there was no need to learn or be polite, they spoke to each other in...
Even their voices began to return. What was it I had heard? Gossip
and anecdote? Or was I hearing distant towns, in their harsh
moment of reckoning—and wider tragedies of nationhood and
inhumanity—creeping through their words like fog under a
windowsill?
The truth is I couldn’t know: not then, not now...  ~ Eavan Bolan
Offering a Handful of Birdsong
Antigone takes place in the aftermath of a great war, when the dead are piled upon each other just outside the gates of the city-state. Hasenclever's Antigone (1917) shows that it was impossible to bury the dead to commemorate Germany's mass casualties in a therapeutic fashion. The commemoration that takes place on stage is in implicit dialogue with discourses of memorialization during and after World War I, converting the stage into a space of memory.
Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943) Wir Juden ... called to me, Yearning: Redeem me, destined one— — —Who are you, that your command should be heard?
Yearning
I think of you,
I think of you always.
People spoke to me, but I didn’t take heed.
I looked into the deep Chinese blue of the evening sky from which
the moon hung as a round yellow lantern,
And mused upon another moon, yours...
The Street Sweeper: As the novel progresses, and more characters – from the past and present – are introduced, the connections and links between people multiply, rather like a Dickensian novel. There is, though, a point to these connections. Early in the novel, Perlman writes that
you never know the connections between things, people, places, ideas. But there are connections.
And these connections, whether we know it or not, can direct the trajectory of our lives – as they do for the characters in The street sweeper. There is also a central ideological connection in the book, and this is that there are “parallels between...
==========
Us.  Gertrud Kolmar reminds me again of the great danger in ‘deleting’ people, erasing them nonchalantly from my inside list as of no connection or interest to me.
                       I call then with a thin, ethereal cry.
                      You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel? - Gertrud Kolmar
She died in Auschwitz.
Da ich zittrig noch hingestellt
Was ich war: ein wächsernes Licht
Für das Wachen zur zweiten Welt.
(Because I tremblingly still set down
What I was: a waxen light
For the awakening to the second world.)
 The Woman Poet
You hold me now completely in your hands.
My heart beats like a frightened little bird's
Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is paper, cloth, and ink,
Some binding thread and glue, and thus is dumb,
And cannot touch you (though the gaze be great
That seeks you from the printed marks inside),
And is an object with an object's fate.
And yet it has been veiled like a bride,
Adorned with gems, made ready to be loved,
Who asks you bashfully to change your mind,
To wake yourself, and feel, and to be moved.
But still she trembles, whispering to the wind:
"This shall not be." And smiles as if she knew.
Yet she must hope. A woman always tries,
Her very life is but a single "You . . ."
[...]
So then, to tell my story, here I stand.
The dress's tint, though bleached in bitter lye,
Has not all washed away. It still is real.
I call then with a thin, ethereal cry.
You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel? - Gertrud Kolmar (trans. Henry A. Smith)
I'm always amazed about these stories about children being abused in the proximity of so many "good citizens".  We have the usual reports from neighbors, who interacted with the family on a daily basis:
Wien - Als "freundlich und ganz nett", als "sympathisch und unauffällig" beschreiben die Anwohner in der Ybbsstraße von Amstetten ihren Nachbarn Josef F. (Residents of the Ybbstrasse in Amstetten described their neighbor Josef F. as "friendly and really nice" "there was nothing unusual at all")
And more:
Wie in solchen Fällen üblich sagen die Nachbarn, dass sie sich „das nicht vorstellen konnten“. Die Familie F. war „sehr nett “, Josef F., der bis zu seiner Pensionierung Elektriker war, „hat immer gerne geholfen, wenn es wo Probleme gab“, und er ist „sehr lieb mit Kindern umgegangen“. Dass er zu so einem Verbrechen fähig ist, nein, das will in Amstetten niemand glauben.
(As is customary in such cases the neighbors claim "they could never imagine such a thing".  The family was "very nice",  Josef F., a retired electrician, "was always there to help out when there were problems" and was "always very sweet to the children.")
A few days ago I wrote about the the lyric poet Gertrud Kolmar who was virtually unknown in her short life, and even today does not receive the recognition she deserves for her powerful poems. But she did have some influential fans early in her writing career.  One was the bestselling author Ina Seidel, who achieved celebrity status in Germany with the publication of her novel Das Wunschkind (The Wanted Child) in 1930.  Ina Seidel became acquainted with Gertrud in Berlin and wanted to use her considerable influence to promote her poetry.  Together with Elisabeth Langgässer she published an anthology of poetry by women - Herz zum Hafen. Frauengedichte der Gegenwart - which included four key poems by Gertrud Kolmar and brought her to the attention of the broad reading public.  Unfortunately Herz zum Hafen was released in 1933, just after the Nazi seizure of power in Berlin. Ina Seidel threw her lot in with Hitler, and broke off all contact with Kolmar (as well as with the half-Jewish Langgässer).  [As did Heidegger and Wittgenstein, by the way...]  Gertrud Kolmar was devastated by the turn of events and the attitude of her erstwhile "friend".  She complained bitterly to her friend Karl Josef Keller, who recalled in his recollections of Gertrud Kolmar:
"G.K.beklagte sich auch bei mir über den plötzlichen Gesinnungswechsel ihrer 'arischen' Bekannten, die zuvor für ihre Arbeiten eingetreten waren. In diesem Zusammenhang nannte sie u.a. eine der bekanntesten deutschen Schriftstellerinnen, die m.E.in Berlin wohnhaft war."
(Gertrud Kolmar complained to me about the sudden change of heart of her "Aryan" friends who had championed her work.  In this connection she mentioned a very famous German woman author who was living in Berlin (Ina Seidel)).
Seidel became the most popular woman author in the Third Reich.  In her works she depicted the Nazi ideal of the feminine: the stoic mother of the German front soldier.  But she also wrote ecstatic poems and hymns to fuel the Nazi Führerkult...
A short time after this celebration, Ina Seidel's friend Gertrud Kolmar was sent to work as a slave laborer in a Nazi munitions plant.  Two years later she and the other Jewish workers were rounded up at the plant and sent to Auschwitz where they were murdered.  There is no record that Ina Seidel ever inquired about her friend or tried to intervene on her behalf.
After the war, Seidel's fame only grew.  Streets, Gymnasiums, elementary schools were named after her in West Germany.  Many bear her name still today.  And, in recognition of the new postwar order, Ina Seidel reminisced often about her "Jewish friend, Gertrud Kolmar"  up until her death in 1974. Posted by David Vickrey on’Dialog International...’
Forche, Carolyn [Forché];
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness, W.W. Norton, 1993, 812 pages ISBN 0393033724, 9780393033724
The resulting situation for Jews who had gone through the process of
assimilation was a perpetual state of ‘inbetweenness’. Perceived as inalienably other,
yet in many ways representative of gentile society that projects this otherness, Jews
were subject to contradictory and conflicting societal expectations so that it was
impossible to fit in with established constructs. In Gertrud Kolmar’s prose and
dramatic works, textual devices denote the continuous inbetween status of the
characters...
I
...Proficient in English and German, Kolmar worked as a teacher and an interpreter for a brief period in 1918... When Kolmar’s mother became ill, she returned to the family home to care for her, leading a life withdrawn from social activities and the literary circles of Berlin. Following the death of her mother in 1930, Kolmar remained at the family home to care for her father, whose health was deteriorating. Kolmar was to remain by her father’s side until his deportation to Theresienstadt in 1942, which was followed by Kolmar’s deportation to Ausschwitz in February 1943. Kolmar’s writing career dates from 1917, when her first cycle of poetry, Gedichte, was published. The prose and dramatic works were written in the years immediately preceding and during the Nazi regime in Germany. These works are available today because Kolmar sent them to her sister in Switzerland for safekeeping.
A number of works, including a collection of poetry written in Hebrew, remained with the author and were consequently destroyed.
Kolmar has been appreciated mainly as a gifted poet... the epistolary autobiography presents women writers with the opportunity to “emphasize the inner realm, the private sanctuary of emotions that is often shared with the partner in the epistolary dialogue” (Shafi 2000: 106). Shafi’s analysis explores the representation of this ‘inner realm’ in Kolmar’s letters, seeing in the letters the forging of a “self that would be
able to resist the onslaught on her subjectivity” (Shafi 2000: 105).
... the struggles of the protagonists, as the aporetic nature of asserting a sense of self in a hostile environment that oppresses the individual was the marker...
Silence, Self and Sacrifice in Gertrud Kolmar’s Prose and Dramatic Works  Suzanne O’Connor, Dept. of German, The National University of Ireland Maynooth.  June 2010

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,
barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window
in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,
offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

~ Billy Collins, The Art of Drowning (1995). Tuesday, June 4, 1991

               ‘Sin is nothing but the refusal to recognize human misery.’ -Simone Weil 
Memory, what does it mean
to be clear? To be ice? To be twice? To be more?
We are gasping with asking since infancy, answerless—
What is the name of the cure?   ~ Blaga Dimitrova, a Bulgarian anti-communist writer 
who served as her country’s vice president... 

         "Silence prevails; it is an awful silence. The voice of Mary is heard no
               longer in the valley..”

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