Anecdotal Evidence: `A Spy in the Service of Literature'

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Spy in the Service of Literature': And an uncharacteristically terse snippet from Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus (1944): “While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.” 

Again, we’re not talking about formal influence. I have no idea whether Sinyavsky was familiar with any of these writers. All were bottomlessly curious. None was a systematic thinker. Here is a passage from A Voice from the Chorus devoted to the great Isaac Babel, who was murdered with a bullet in the head by the NKVD in Lubyanka seventy-four years ago this week, on Jan. 27, 1940:  

"[Isaac] Babel exhibited a trait common, perhaps, to all writers: he was not merely an observer, he was also a snooper. All his life he spied 'through the keyhole' in the hope of seeing...

Happy Catholic*: Day of the Little Way ... St. Therese and Twitter

Happy Catholic*: Day of the Little Way ... St. Therese and Twitter: Here's an initiative which seems like a good way to use Twitter, which I admit I largely use just for links in case anyone there is int...

HEATHER KING: BOOKS THAT HAVE SHAPED ME

HEATHER KING: BOOKS THAT HAVE SHAPED ME:
A recent email from a young seminarian in Missouri: "Every writer is a writer in part because of the influence of other writers....

Masters of 'destruction' -especially those who disagree with you...

..The Nazis were by no means the only architects of the suffering that the people who lived in this part of Europe had to endure in the 1930s and 1940s. Hitler’s enemy in the East, Joseph Stalin, was just as murderous in his pursuit of a utopian programme, different though Stalinist Communism might have been from the hierarchical racist ideology of the Nazis. Up to five million people, mostly Ukrainians, were sacrificed to the Bolshevik plan to collectivise agriculture in the early 1930s   [IE, starved them to death or absolute compliance...]; three-quarters of a million Soviet citizens perished in Stalin’s purges later in the decade; during the war, the transmutation of Stalin’s vision from social revolution to patriotic defence of the Russian homeland led to the forcible deportation of millions more – Poles, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars and other ethnic minorities – under conditions so appalling that hundreds of thousands died.

Altogether, Snyder reckons, some 14 million people perished in this part of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of policies enacted by the Nazis and their allies, or the Soviet Communists and theirs...

~Richard J. Evans, review of 'The Bloodlands'

Just a few victims:   Osip Mandelstahm and other poets(mostly Jewish); Sabina Spielrein and her whole family...

Tear-Water Tea....

Tear-Water Tea is Always Good, or Why I Write

Excerpt:
...he proceeds to weep into his tea-kettle. When the kettle is full, he boils it for tea, saying, "It tastes a little bit salty . . . but tear-water tea is always good."

There's something reminiscent of a sacrament, I think, in the idea of tear-water tea, which uses the commonest, plainest, most mundane and intimate substance -- a substance whose association with suffering is inescapable -- to make something else, something comforting and curative. All true works of art, I suppose, are reflections, however pale, of that divine confection, the sacrament of God's mercy, made from materials which are worked by human hands. In my own small, particular, faltering, and anonymous way, I would like to reflect God's mercy here, in the hopes that it might be useful to someone else. That's why I write...             h/t Pentimento

Aggie Catholics: A Culture That Values Consequence-Free Sex Over Ba...

Aggie Catholics: A Culture That Values Consequence-Free Sex Over Ba...:
President Obama's Administration has decided that the "right" to free contraception is more important than the 1st Amendment Right of the freedom of religion. In fact, contraception is so sacrosanct, it is fighting the Little Sisters of the Poor, in the Supreme Court - in order to force the nuns to pay for contraception!....

Stones themselves "cry out"...

Drums

   “The King is working in the garden.”   “The very stones will cry out.”

...”beyond...to Karagatch...”  --Hagemann...Time-and-History in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time

I heard the drums coming down the street.

There cornadas--inert in dark sand-- deplete

burlap rings--awaiting coups de grace at

grungy walls as colored waifs collapse and fall

in the midst of a gritty, thorny and stormy thrall.

Under the bridge the Greek Maritza flooded red

for miles even in high rains degrading, they said,

the slain, the tortured, the lame and the Christian.

Turkish cowpunchers reveled in their droning drive,

freakishly commanding that none remain alive.

Black-horsed, mulish and rabid as dogs snapping

at running heels, ragged cavalry rode high slapping

at faceless rags on carts pulled by bullocks and cows.

On the horizon tall, thin towers wailed their howls

rejoicing in such red grapes filling wrathful chalices.   1/2/14

‘Twas the 23^rd of June

                       …”The dead are invisible, they are not absent.” ~St. Augustine       

 Ethnic Cleansing

                       "When the great terror came/I fell dumb."   ~Nellie Sachs

        …más o menos sanos, más o menos enfermos…

“Batak is situated about thirty miles south of Tatar Bazardjik as the crow flies, high up in a spur of the Balkans that here sweeps around to the south from the main range… Mr. Disraeli was right when he wittily remarked that the Turks usually terminated their connection with people who fell into their hands in a more expeditious manner than by imprisoning them. And so they do. Mr. Disraeli was right. At the time he made that very witty remark, those young girls had been lying there many days…

..lying about were all women's apparel. These, then, were all women and girls. From my saddle I counted about a hundred skulls, not including those that were hidden beneath the others in the ghastly heap nor those that were scattered far and wide through the fields. The skulls were nearly all separated from the rest of the bones - the skeletons were nearly all headless. These women had all been beheaded. We descended into the town. Within the shattered walls of the first house we came to was a woman sitting upon a heap of rubbish rocking herself to and fro, wailing a kind of monotonous chant, half sung, half sobbed, that was not without a wild discordant melody. In her lap she held a babe, and another child sat beside her patiently and silently, and looked at us as we passed with wondering eyes.

Of all the cruel, brutal, ferocious things the Turks ever did, the massacre of Batak is among the worst! Of all the mad, foolish things they ever did, leaving these bodies to lie here rotting for three months un-buried is probably the maddest and most foolish! But this village was in an isolated, out-of-the way place, difficult of access, and they never thought Europeans would go poking their noses here, so they cynically said, “These Christians are not even worth burial, let the dogs eat them.”  ~J. A. MacGahan(1876), Bulgarian Horrors—a report- The Bulgarian Atrocities.  http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/related/macgahan.php

‘Twas the 23^rd of June—from Tatar Bazardjik—dull peal,

Thunderous roars, rolling whispers—moaning awful seal;

Mountainous shreddings in Herzegovina-Bosnia tossed

Behind sheets of a burning village school—all lost—

Lambs bleating in ravaging packs of wolves-in-raging,

Scrupulous dark purveyors chained corroboration waging

Monstrous atrocities—unworthy of any human generis.

Mocked humane respects drowned before blackest abyss.

Globe-ality testified freely before all—‘distinguished’ kind;

Inherent neglect of a witnessed stand of  times’ walled blind.

Circling Greeks, Germans, Americans-isolated-occupied in work

Turned in whirling disgusts but awry,a-skirt away from the Turk.

MacGahan primed in courage persevered in time’s mission

Of redeeming silence before tyrannical atrocities’ inquisition.

Degraded ‘tyrades’ devouring of innocents—unholy offense—

Philippopolis—still witnesses—‘supped full of horrors’—tense. 12/1/12

Still, I feel better: now everything is public, exposed, and this is preferable to being the silent victim of concealed forces.

The ancestor syndrome: transgenerational psychotherapy and the hidden links ...

 By Anne Ancelin Schützenberger

   It is as though somewhere, one did not have the right to know and to speak about it; and at the same time, as if one did not have the right to forget, and all that had had to be know, but not said explicity, nor known that it was known and passed on: a doubly binding devilishly constraining double bind, a double Gordian knot.

    Again, we can identify a characteristic of the secret.  The Fr. psychoanalyst Guy Ausloos¹ noted, as we have, that  ‘it is forbidden to know and forbidden not to know.’

…Every system depends on its ecosystem….family context and frame of reference…in the past and in the present….it is surpising to note these repetitions generation upon generation…As Lacan says…on Fechner about The Interpretation of Dreams, “Ca parle sur l’autre scene,”²  but pulling the red thread brings us further backstage.

        Conrad writes in Typhoon, “It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable goals and in undreamt-of directions.” As if an extraordinary force drove us to our destiny.”

"Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites," Judith Herman writes, "for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual[s]."

O, Divine Eagle

It was a cold New Year's Eve day but we visited Higgin's Point which is much more of a fjord than a lake. The giant eagles were out vying with large gulls for the huge species of trout who had come to spawn. When I dream of eagles I think of St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross and St. Therese...true eagles of His flock...He-the Divine Eagle...away from Him we lose everything...