Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels Seferis — ‘Mythistorema’

For J.G. Farrell

Even now there are places where a thought might grow —

Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned

To a slow clock of condensation,

An echo trapped forever, and a flutter

Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,

Indian compounds where the wind dances

And a door bangs with diminished confidence,

Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,

Dog corners for bone burials;

And a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,

Among the bathtubs and the washbasins

A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.

This is the one star in their firmament

Or frames a star within a star.

What should they do there but desire?

So many days beyond the rhododendrons

With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,

They have learnt patience and silence

Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor

Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,

Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure

of the expropriated mycologist.

He never came back, and light since then

Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.

Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew

And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —

A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue

Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking

Into the earth that nourished it;

And nightmares, born of these and the grim

Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.

Those nearest the door growing strong —

‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’

The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling

Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning

For their deliverance, have been so long

Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark —

Poor preparation for the cracking lock

And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,

Powdery prisoners of the old regime,

Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought

And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream

At the flashbulb firing squad we wake them with

Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.

Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,

They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,

To do something, to speak on their behalf

Or at least not to close the door again.

Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!

‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,

‘Let the god not abandon us

Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.

We too had our lives to live.

You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,

Let not our naive labours have been in vain!

Derek Mahon

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
— Walter Benjamin (and see also here for more on Benjamin’s ideas about history and meaning)

 

“That whenever any form of government…”

In essence, it argues that the American people have a right to make up a new form of government, of whatever sort they like, any time the old forms of government seem like they aren’t working. Needless to say, this is an incredibly bold and incredibly dangerous proposition to put forth. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the document, was — along with his colleagues — perfectly aware that he was opening a massive can of worms with this principle of revolution and self-rule.

More at:
The Smart Set: Independent Streak

Some Second Thoughts

Americans do love their founding fathers, and their founding documents. And they publish lots of books and articles about them, like the one above. And with reason.

But..

I’m reminded of the remark to the effect that all the documents of civilisation are also documents of barbarism.

The Declaration of Independence is an inspiring document, with its roots in the radicalism of English revolution -Locke, The Putney Debates and so on -and with the ability to stir thoughts of resistance to our current masters (whether American, British or whoever..)

But it’s also a bit of cover – ideology – that suited people who wanted retrospective justification for insurgent militias who had killed Crown troops. They also wanted ‘Indian’ land, not to pay taxes for a war they had done well out of, AND of course,  they wanted to keep their slaves. What injustices had these prosperous white men put up with, compared to the death and oppression they were intending to unleash on certain unlucky others?

Truly, the document has many meanings!

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival….

Frederick Douglass, 1852

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge–unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”

–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” (Spring, 1940) trans. Harry Zohn.

via walterbenjamin.html.

Waking the dead

Terry Eagleton

For Walter Benjamin, history was more than a series of dispassionate facts. He showed how the struggle for the past shapes our future

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open. Benjamin thought that the past could be transformed by what we do in the present. Not literally transformed, of course, since the one sure thing about the past is that it does not exist.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it. Napoleon will be squat and Einstein shock-haired to the end of time. Nothing in the future can alter the fact that Benjamin himself, a devout Jew, committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 as he was about to be handed over to the Gestapo. Short of some literal resurrection, the countless generations of men and women who have toiled and suffered for the benefit of the minority – the story of human history to date, in fact – can never be recompensed for their wretched plight.

What Benjamin meant was that how we act in the present can change the meaning of the past. The past may not literally exist (any more than the future does), but it lives on in its consequences, which are a vital part of it. Benjamin also thought this about works of art. In his view, the meaning of a work of art is something that evolves over time. Great poems and novels are like slow-burning fuses. As they enter into new, unpredictable situations, they begin to release new meanings that the author himself could not have foreseen, any more than Goethe could have foreseen commercial television. For Benjamin, it is as though there are meanings secreted in works of art that only come to light in what one might call its future. Every great drama, sculpture or symphony, like every individual person, has a future that helps to define what it is, but which is beyond its power to determine.

More at:

New Statesman – Waking the dead.

From On The Concept of History by Walter Benjamin (1940) (sometimes a.k.a. Theses on the Philosophy of History)

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.