The mango trees are
flowering ...
Little girls from different cultures who sing, shout and chant in Hebrew, and one eight year who says she dreams in Hebrew. A charming scene but these are children of migrant workers who live in a place where 'it is illegal for migrant workers to have children.' What a chilling line to read so early in the morning.
A little girl who’s never been to her mother’s land and is conscious of only a few words of its language is now facing deportation from a land whose dominant society itself suffered centuries of wandering, living beyond the pale, rootless except in their faith. Aye, aye, aye, aye, a-y-e as they say in
The first time I visited
I so remember the sense of shock I experienced when many years later during a seminar, Professor Herman Rappaport talked about the primacy of language to our sense of being. When I asked what he thought of the denial of the mother tongue, he, multi-lingual himself, looked directly at me and said; ‘it is an act of violence’ - a moment of connection in that room.
To be allowed to own your language, your sense of being, and your culture, to belong to the land in which you live - not tolerated but truly belong - is valuable indeed. So who is being discussed here? Less clarity now around this rupture isn’t there? So I’ll leave it to Rotem Ilan, head of the Children of Israel, protesting against the children’s deportation, to summarise:
For 20 years Israeli governments have turned a blind eye to these children. They are now part of the fabric of this country. They go to school here. They celebrate the same holidays as us. If there is something we [Jews] have learned from our history is that you must not, you cannot deport children.
Primo Levy said, ‘It happened, therefore it can happen again, this is the core of what we have to say.’ And let’s remember that we’re living in reactionary times and regard what’s under our own noses.
Can the spectacular view from a space platform see this epistemic paradox that says everything is true and some things are false?
Google Earth can see this, the 2005 Holocaust memorial in
Jonathan Jones, questioning the aim of the memorial, states that ‘what needs to be explained is why memorials have grown in importance for those who have no personal reason to grieve.’
For me, this memorial is more than an appropriation of someone else's grief, it stand as a warning to us all - pity 'tis that we still need it - that something can start to happen in small and reasonable ways and, like the beginning of a hardly perceptible wave, it can wash aside our humanity with its own reasonable force, leaving us to wonder how it could have happened. The memorial's architect, Peter Eisenman, said, 'the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason'.
Avoir du pois, a kind of weight so named to distinguish it from the Troy weight and so it starts…
Just read The Penelopiad in which Margaret Atwood’s revisionist mythology effectively deals with the dreadful Helen’s narcissism. When speaking to poor old Pen of the waiting game, Helen says:
You wouldn’t have any idea of how exhausting it is, having such vast numbers of men quarrelling over you, year after year. Divine beauty is such a burden. A least you’ve been spared that!’
(I like Penelope’s character; she’s pissed off with the neutrality of the Asphodel Fields, preferring to discourse with spirits in the darker grottoes.)
Then I pick up Elizabeth Grosz to read, ‘The narcissistic woman is described as vain, shallow, skilled in artifice, but above all, she is bound up with the desire to be loved. What threatens her most is the loss of love.' Bugger.
Where does that leave us all in our quest for love? Devoted to the masquerade apparently, seeking impossible, imaginary tests of love, tied inextricably to the ghosts of a pre-oedipal past.
Because the love we wish to return to is no longer available to us in the way we might wish – the safety and nurture of the womb - we reach a market economy of demand outstripping supply. Poor exhausted mother, never ceasing to produce; she produces in her offspring feelings that were planted with the sound of her voice and her body even before they were born.
The single most important sound in the world to each and every one of us comes from our mothers. Whether or not we like it, whether or not they abandon us, whether or not they praise or censure us, it was always there from the beginning and it is back to there we want to go. They are our strength and our weakness.
This is all getting a bit serious so bugger Lacan – (well it gets the penis closer to the phallus – cuts out the middle (wo)man) – let’s have some fun.
This is the wonderful Mme Deinsac, an 1835 steel engraving, current market value: 35 euro. Current emotional value: priceless.I love this picture. I bought it on a day trip to
This brings us nicely to this podcast of Stephen Vizinczey (who studied under Lukacs) talking this morning about his 1965 novel, In Praise of Older Women - nicely resurrected by the
Well it could only be this, the song that sparked the thought, that set the mood, that was nicked from a friend...