I am intrigued, not so much by what we (irrationally) think is the logical (rational) continuum of time, but by its actual illogicality and complete lack of continuum, to the extent that it appears to operate in cycles and spirals (is it possible that time follows genetics, and operates in helices?), and not to be linear at all.
Trotsky has written, for example, in "Literature and Revolution":
"Alongside the twentieth century there lives the tenth, the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity, and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope broadcasts over the radio the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous machines created by Man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters..."There are, especially, the constant repetitions, the seeming coincidences. Each moment may appear to be unique, but the constellations of the moments perambulate diurnally, clusters forming clusters. So it is September 1st today, and on this day every year, but each one is different, though each one is also remarkably the same, and who can say that, in the seeming arbitrariness of time, events belonging to this day are not connected?
Thus it was on the same date, but 705 decidedly un-Christian years later, in 1864, that Roger Casement was born in what was then called Kingstown, but now, since Home Rule and the revival of Gaelic, is called as it should be Dun Laoghaire.
Casement was a significant Republican who made his political reputation, not through the "Irish Question" originally, but through his denunciation, while serving as a British consular official, of atrocities in the rubber plantations of the Congo and Peruvian Putumayo. In 1911 he was knighted, but these were the years of Arthur Griffith and Éamon De Valera, of the Easter 1916 uprising. When Yeats wrote that "I have met them at close of day, coming with vivid faces from counter or desk among grey eighteenth century houses", he should have included Roger Casement in his "them", because he as much as anybody was responsible for the "terrible beauty" that was being born. Except that Casement had been uncurtained by then. A German submarine brought him to the shores of Eireland, but British intelligence had warning of his arrival, and the man who would have been the leader of Sinn Fein and the vanguard of the Easter uprising was arrested, degraded, and executed for high treason. His naked body was thrown in an open grave (see April 24).
This, at least, is the English view of Roger Casement. Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian Nobel Prize laureate, holds a different view. Llosa wrote a novel based on Casement's life, "El Sueño del Celta" ("The Dream of the Celt"). In a BBC interview in 2011 he described him as "a man ahead of his time in exposing the widespread abuse of colonised countries and natives... I think Casement is one of the great fighters of human rights of the late 19th, early 20th Century. He was probably one of the first Europeans in denouncing colonialism… I am fascinated with the courage with which he fought against abuses, injustice and the atrocities that were committed in Africa and in the Amazon basin. He opened the eyes of the world to the reality of colonialism."
Two very different views of the same man, but we only ever teach our schoolchildren one of them, and the decision about which to teach is never founded in "truth" but always in "patriotism" - for which see my poem "Nursery School" in "Welcome To My World".
I set this blog entry in partnership with my piece on André Gide, on November 22.
Amber pages
Germany invaded Poland, today in 1939 (the man who organised and led the pretext-creator was the number 4 in Military Intelligence, a war criminal now regarded as Saint Oskar Schindler - see Aug 23 and further links there)
Germany invaded Poland, today in 1939 (the man who organised and led the pretext-creator was the number 4 in Military Intelligence, a war criminal now regarded as Saint Oskar Schindler - see Aug 23 and further links there)
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi came to power, today in 1969. I would prefer to put this on the date of his overthrow, but it is difficult to determine when exactly that was: Libyans now speak of the "February 17 Revolution", but it took till September 16th of that year (2011) for him to be truly gone and a National Transitional Council recognised by the United Nations - utterly ineffective, and only one of several in the warlord anarchy left behind. Perhaps I should move this to October 20, the day on which a mob tracked him down in his hidey-hole and Mussolinied him.
Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in a World Chess Match, today in 1972. Apparently the real battle wasn't over kings or pawns, but what kind of seating they would use:
Boris Spassky did not want to use the duplicate of the swivel chair that Bobby Fischer had ordered from New York. He was perfectly comfortable with the big, cloth‐upholstered chair that the Icelandic Chess Federation had supplied. Spassky would sit in it, motionless, elbows on the handsome but impractical table that the Icelandic organizers had built for the world championship chess match, chin supported by both palms, his leonine head expressionless, his eyes moving from the king rook 1 square to the queen rook 8 square, assessing, balancing, weighing, anticipating, planning. Across from him sat Bobby Fischer, lolling back, gently swiveling to and fro, feet jigging in that nervous habit of his. But one day shortly after the match started Spassky, without any comment, was also using a Fischer‐type chair, a $500 (U.S.) black, leather‐upholstered, chrome‐trimmed beauty flown in from New York courtesy of the manufacturer. There was one difference. Fischer sat directly facing Spassky, in profile to the audience. But Spassky played much of the fivehour sessions with his back to the pieces, the chair swiveled at right angles to the chessboard.
That piece of lyrical prose-poetry from the New York Times, under a headline which included the phrase "psychic murder". Methinks some correspondents do take their little world too seriously. "Psychic murder" is a phrase applicable to Eireland under colonial rule, to Hitler's aspirations regarding Poland, to forty years of Muammar Gaddafi, not to two nerds moving pieces around an over-decorated chequers board.
And lastly, very sadly, the day on which Terrance Stanley Fox could no longer take another prosthetostep, and had to end his "Marathon of Hope" walk across Canada - see June 28.
And lastly, very sadly, the day on which Terrance Stanley Fox could no longer take another prosthetostep, and had to end his "Marathon of Hope" walk across Canada - see June 28.
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