My Sequel to Notes from PhD Land: On truth — War Poet — A Canadian Forces Artist Project by Suzanne Steele...

My Sequel to Notes from PhD Land: On truth — War Poet — A Canadian Forces Artist Project by Suzanne Steele...
The heart, mind and soul of man is living, dynamic, ever-changing and part of that is processing, dealing, interpreting 'what actually happened' for there is light between the seconds, pulsations between the steps, and higher, lower chords beyond those played.
As my poem line says: Tell it slant-till it kind....
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The needless words are needed; they're part of the journey from platitude to point.
The distribution began. Sam made himself a dispenser of bric-a-brac, with a pin pot here, a matchbox there, a napkin ring beside, and a snuffbox neighbouring, and again a pin pot, according to the choice of men and women.....

On Remembering....Elie Wiesel:

Breshit:  I persisted. “It says so in the Torah.” That stopped me. The Torah demanded silence and a kind of sacred respect. All prohibitions came from the Torah.

With time, however, study became a true adventure for me. My first teacher, the Batizer Rebbe, a sweet old man with a snow-white beard that devoured his face, pointed to the twenty-two holy letters of the Hebrew alphabet and said, “Here, children, are the beginning and the end of all things. Thousands upon thousands of works have been written and will be written with these letters. Look at them and study them with love, for they will be your links to life. And to eternity.”

When I read the first word aloud—Breshit, “in the beginning”—I felt transported into an enchanted universe. An intense joy gripped me when I came to understand the first verse. “It was with the twenty-two letters of the aleph-heth that God created the world,” said the teacher, who on reflection was probably not so old. “Take care of them and they will take care of you. They will go with you everywhere. They will make you laugh and cry. Or rather, they will cry when you cry and laugh when you laugh, and if you are worthy of it, they will allow you into hidden sanctuaries where all becomes …” All becomes what? Dust? Truth? Life? It was a sentence he never finished... 

*I am also told that to write your memoirs is to make a commitment, to conclude a special pact with the reader. It implies a promise, a willingness to reveal all, to hide nothing.* People ask, Are you capable of that? Are you ready to talk about the women you have loved for a year or a night, the people who have helped or denigrated you, the grandiose projects and petty schemes, the true friendships and the ones that burst like soap bubbles, the fruitful adventures and the disappointments, the children dead of starvation and old men blinded by pain? You have yourself written that some experiences are incommunicable, that some events cannot be conveyed in words. How do you intend to surmount that contradiction? How can you hope to transmit truths that you yourself have said lie beyond human understanding and always will? It was said of Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk that he remained silent even when speaking. Is there a language that contains another silence, one shaped and deepened by the word?

And yet... Precisely because the future eludes us, we must create it.

I mean to recount not the story of my life, but my stories. Through them you may perhaps understand the rest a little better. Some see their work as a commentary on their life; for others it is the other way around. I count myself among the latter. Consider this account, then, as a kind of commentary.

Moreover, I must warn you that certain events will be omitted, especially those episodes that might embarrass friends and, of course, those that might damage the Jewish people. Call it prudence or cowardice, whatever you like. No witness is capable of recounting everything from start to finish anyway. God alone knows the whole story.

To paraphrase a Talmudic saying, I hope the last page will bring me greater certainty than the first.  Do we write because we are happy or because we’re not?  -Elie Wiesel, Memoirs, Vol. 1

"In extremity, states of mind become objective, metaphors tend to actualize, the word becomes flesh.(1977,205) -Terence Des Pres, 'The Survivor'