Amber pages
For the Positive to be realistically positive, there also has to be the Zero. Relativity theory, applied to philosophy. Though I have no idea if it applies to the philosophy of:
José Ortega y Gasset, born today in 1883; another of those names that I feel I must have heard, ought to have heard, need to know something about...
whereas it definitely applies, mostly as a Zero, indeed as a Definite Negative, to:
"1607: First permanent English settlement in the US established (Jamestown, Virginia)".
My inclination is simply to rewrite that statement from the persepective of the indigenous people who had been living there for centuries, millennia possibly, but now displaced, inferiorised, conquered, the Powhatan apparently, an Algonquian-speaking people. Something like this perhaps, as part of a campaign of Boycott, Dispersement and Sanctions against the TomPaineist International Conspiracy:
We love America really; it's just that, just that... see my piece on the Statue of Liberty by clicking here, and then, below:
Today in 1969, William Beecher, military correspondent of the New York Times, published a front page dispatch from Washington, "Raids in Cambodia" ... the Americans had been secretly bombing it, and not just any sort of bombs either...
But how else do you overthrow tyrannies, remove despots, eradicate dictatorships, if not by taking up the bomb for what you believe is good and right? (see my passing mention of a minor but fully deserved example of this on Sept 11)
And speaking of "love will rule the world, at gunpoint if necessary" (very bad form, I know, to quote oneself, but I need to sell books; it's from "The Flaming Sword"):
Today in 1976, Ulrike Meinhof, German terrorist leader, was found hanged in her cell. Was this another Steve Biko, or did she really commit suicide? GER either way
But mostly I want to dedicate this page to Danielle Casanova, who was born Vincentella Périni on the island of Corsica on January 9, 1909 (DC was both her married name and her nom de guerre), and who I first encountered in a rather enigmatic piece by W.G. Sebald, back in the 1990s; and then recognised her when the ferry-boat taking us on our family holiday to Spain was named for her; I found her online when I got home, in an interview that Sebald had given gave to Joe Cuomo in 2001 (full text here); the subject-matter was "coincidence"; this is what he said:
“... nevertheless, it has significance. I mean, the first section of ‘Vertigo’ is about Stendhal, and this rather short piece finishes with Stendhal’s death in a certain street in Paris, which is now called the Rue Danielle Casanova. I didn’t know who Danielle Casanova was - Casanova meant something for me in the context of that book, but not Danielle Casanova. The following summer I went to Corsica. I was walking through the mountains, and I came to the coastal village of Piana, and there was a little house with a plaque on it, and it said it was a memorial plaque for Danielle Casanova, who had been murdered by my compatriots in Auschwitz. She’d been a dentist and a Communist and was in the French Resistance. And I went past the house three or four times, and it always seemed closed. On one occasion, I went round the back, and there was her sister. And then I talked to her for a week. These things do happen. I have all her papers, and now I don’t know what I shall do with them. But it’s that sort of connection. And if that sort of thing happens to us then we think, perhaps, that not everything is quite so futile. It gives one a sort of passing sense of consolation, occasionally.”
I liked what he had to say about coincidence so much, I made my own version of it in a novel that I was writing at the time, my history-of-the-world "A Journey In Time", adding a detour so that I could adapt my diary entry:
We travelled, Susan, Hannah, Michael and I, by boat from Plymouth to Santander, a day-long journey of the utmost tedium whose only high-points were the pair of dolphins playing in the ferry’s wake even before we had exited Plymouth Sound, and the discovery that the ferry, which normally travelled between the South of France and Corsica but was going to Santander on this occasion for refurbishment, was called the Danielle Casanova, which name belonged originally to a Parisian Jewish dentist who became a heroine of the French Resistance; but for the rest, purple skies unmeriting of purple prose: the landscape of the sea, alas, is mercilessly unchanging.
And I swore, even as I was amusing myself writing that paragraph, that one day I would pen a full piece about her; this, alas, is as far as I have managed to get. Except to add that I don't really need to write it, because a full account of her dedication to the Zero Positive can be found here, in the Hall of Fame of the Cercle Shoah. And to note that she was arrested in Paris on February 15, 1942, deported to Auschwitz on January 24, 1943, and died there of typhus, today in 1943.
No comments:
Post a Comment