David Prashker's Book Of Days

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

August 24

79, 472, 512, 685, 787, 968, 1037, 1068, 1078, 1631

History, as I believe I may have said more than once in this collection, is only interesting, let alone significant, when there is a personal dimension. So, aged 6 or 7, I had climbed to the very summit of Mount Vesuvius and stared into its crater, seen the Inferno from the bleachers so to speak, and picked up my illicit lava souvenir (if every tourist took one piece of lava home, the mountain would be flattened completely in less than two million years)... and skipping my youthful way down along the slalom, I slipped, and fell, served me right of course for not listening to my parents telling me to slow down and be careful, but slipped, and fell, and rolled, jagged lava digging into me and scratching me and tearing at my flesh, until I finally reached a dead halt, still alive, if only just, utterly petrified of course, though only in the psychological sense, about five feet from where I slipped, and hardly scratched in fact, but that isn't how my psyche remembered it, that isn't how the vertigo I acquired that day remembered it, even if I can laugh about it now.

So Vesuvius became a seminal moment in my young life, and volcanoes (or volcanos, if you prefer; unlike potatoes and tomatoes, let alone Big Toes and Little Toes, which English grammar insists must have that "e")...

Diary, December 16th 2004:

Planning for our Italian holiday found me telling my younger daughter about various previous trips, to Venice in particular, when I was 6 or 7, but also to the south around the same age, staying in Salerno, going to Naples, by hydrofoil to Capri where I remember only the grotto and the house where Gracie Fields lived; and coming back by helicopter because of the rough seas. We went to Pompeii too, and climbed Vesuvius, which smothered Pompeii today (August 24th) in 79 CE: the younger Pliny witnessed it from Cape Misenum, 15 miles away, while his uncle, Admiral Pliny the Elder, was losing his life trying to rescue the endangered...

Galenus reported that it was still smouldering 93 years later, and 31 years after that, in 203, Dio Cassius heard it erupt again as far away as Padua.

There were two more, in 472 and 512, the first of which Marcellinus Comes described as "causing night during the day and covering all Europe with a fine ash." Cassiodorus described the latter, as part of a plea for tax exemption for those affected by it - so the account may contain elements of hyperbole or subjectivity:

"a burnt ash flies in the sky, and forming ashy clouds it rains with ash droplets also in the provinces beyond the sea... it is possible to see ash rivers flowing like liquid, bringing hot sands... the fields... are ravished by the sudden heat."

685, 787, 968, 1037, 1068, 1078... the dates, or at least the list of dates, is as long as a lava-flow itself... the eruption of 1139 lasted eight days and its ashes covered Salerno, Capua and even Naples... but then... nothing.

Nothing for nearly four hundred years.

1631 made up for it though, the 16th December to be precise

I wish I'd known that when I wrote that diary entry.

And always, for me, that lingering memory of climbing to the summit - the Summa Caldera - and looking down into the Gran Coro, half-expecting dragons to accost me or a Dantesque demon to seize me by the throat and drag me down.

As to the piece of lava that I brought home as a souvenir, it sat on my window sill for years, until I left home, and left it there, and my parents moved house, and presumably they too left it there, or threw it away because it looked like junk, because I have never seen it since, except in memory, which anyway has served me better.

Amber pages

William Wilberforce, the man who single-handedly removed the dog-collar from the high priests of slavery, born today in 1759

Henry Maximilian Beerbohm, or simply (“Max”), English critic and wit, born today in 1872

Jean Rhys, novelist, parturated the waters of the Wild Sargasso Sea, today in 1894

And this in purple, even on an amber page, because royalty always requires purple: Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine poet and author, emerged from the labyrinth of pre-oblivion (and presumably arrived early), today in 1899

While among the events of history:

The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Huguenots in France, described in detail in my novel "A Journey In Time", today in 1572

The female protagonist of that novel, Amelia by name, is somewhat obsessed by her namesake Amelia Earhart, and... but I won't spoil the ending by saying what. In her honour nonetheless, even though there were far greater achievements, and far more tragic dates on which to mark her life (see July 3), Amelia became, today, the first woman to fly non-stop across the USA

And I simply can't resist pointing out, because there are all sorts of things that I really, really want, but which I know I will never be able to obtain, that today, in 1969, "Alice's Restaurant" premièred.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

August 19

1994

Really this should be posted under either July 12 (his birth-date in 1876) or better still March 5 (his death-date in 1944), but in my personal history this is the correct date.

Ostensibly we were on our annual family holiday, the seven and the five year old being dragged from museum to art gallery to tourist church in the mornings, in exchange for a promise of beach or swimming-pool or aquarium, some less culturally-oriented adventure playground, in the afternoon. We were in Brittany because, frankly, we loved Brittany, but also because I was writing a novel that was set in Brittany, and there were aspects of research I had not known I needed to do on our previous visit (funny, but my piece about Pablo Casals on November 13 also stemmed from a family holiday in Brittany, still researching the same book - eight years later!)

So we had returned to Quimper, the capital of Cornouaille where King Gradlon had once ruled, with his daughter Dahut - the mythological pair who, reborn as a doting English Arthur and a very liberated, modern French Guinièvre, were the hero and heroine of that novel, The Land Beside The Sea. In the shadows of the threatening storm-clouds, the double-spired cathedral made for a strange contrast of dark versus light: one half completely stonewashed, renovated to the very curlicues of the Archbishops' mitres as they lay in – or statuesquely upon – their sarcophagi. That cleanness was emphasised by the light which it too emphasised, giving back its real meaning to the word "graceful". But the other half remained stuck in its own dark age, blackened both with stone-dirt and gloom-light, a mournful lugube of Gregorian chant over the loudspeakers adding sombreness to sombreness. In one of the Lady Chapels a group of alabaster figures congregated round a coffin; they could so easily have become Disneyesque, but managed instead to merit a rare photograph.

I tried to take another photograph in the Musée Des Beaux Arts, but was prevented by a rather belligerent warden. It would have shown Naomi, the five year old, crouched on the floor with wax crayons, making one of several copies of the masters which she insisted on drawing over a two-hour period: her version of Picasso's portrait of Max Jacob (his is at the top of this blog-page), the one he made as an "étude" for "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon", the best of all her efforts.

Jean Moulin - "Au Pardon de Sainte-Anne"

I hadn't realised that Jacob originated from Quimper – born here, as noted above, on July 12th 1876, and commemorated with a permanent exhibition at the museum; one that had been augmented for the season with the story of his friendship with Picasso, and the excuse to show the works of several of their other artist friends as well: Elie Lascaux, Roger Toulouse, Géo Augsbourg, Jean Moulin – some delightful watercolour sketches by him, and two portraits of him, one a charcoal sketch by Tuset, the other a wistful Cubist one by Jacob. Pierre de Belay, weak and clichéd as a painter, but strong and interesting in his charcoal sketches – pen-&-ink drawings like squared-off versions of Dürer: one of Picasso in his prime, and another of Max Jacob in the Rue Ravignan strongly reminiscent of Mervyn Peake.

An outstanding poet and prose-writer - he published under the pen-name Léon David Morven le Gaëlique - Jacob was very much a minor painter, conventionally Impressionist before he met Picasso, dutifully experimental afterwards (you can see dozens of his works at the Quimper Museum's online archive, just click here and keep scrolling the pages). But it was neither his poetry nor his prose nor his paintings, nor even his homosexuality, which cost him his life. When the Nazis occupied France and Jews were made to to wear the yellow star, his formal baptism into the Catholic faith, with PP as his godfather, long before Hitler came to power, meant absolutely nothing. A Jew was a Jew, even if he wore the Cross. And after the yellow star, the deportation.

On February 24th 1944 he was arrested and, after spending four days in an Orléans prison, was sent to Drancy, the main transition-camp for Poland. He died of pneumonia on March 5th 1944, without ever reaching the official death-camps. His body was exhumed in 1949 and buried in his adoptive home of St Benoit sur Loire. Portraits by PP, Cocteau, Modigliani and many others show a distinguished, Roman head, completely hairless, long and thin and thoroughly Germanic.

The Picasso section contained several from the very first, Vollard, exhibition of 1901, at the culmination of the Blue period: innumerable collages, cubist sketches, cartoons, études for "Mlle Léonie". There was a heaviness, in form and colour – the portrait of Suzanne Bloch for example – which reminded me of Chagall's muddy juvenilia; though the woman in "Woman & Child At The Seaside" is magnificent: light of touch, serene of face, a candidate for a Pietà.

Pablo Picasso, “Portrait of Max Jacob” (1915).

Private collection. Courtesy of ARS.

Nor had I realised that it was Matisse who introduced Picasso to African art, and thereby prompted the "Demoiselles d'Avignon", of which four quite stunning études were on display here, one of them that Max Jacob portrait with blue hair which looks quite remarkably like a homage to Matisse's 1905 portrait of his wife.

Apparently Matisse held a dinner for Max Jacob, Picasso, Apollinaire and André Salmon one night in 1907, and showed them some miniatures he had just acquired – a 9” model from his collection was one of the pieces on display, which my diary tells me I copied in rough biro, though sadly I can find no trace of the sketchbook. I tried to explain Cubism to Hannah, the seven year old, but she could make no sense of it - who really can, even among the adults? - nor discern the real shapes reduced to those geometric forms. Since most, especially the faces, are based on triangles not cubes, is not the name wrong anyway? Triangularism? Nay sat on a chair and coloured in a quick cubist invention of her own, much impressing the tourists! Han made worm-drawings!

And why such deep interest in Max Jacob, beyond the wish to commemorate still one more of the Holocaust dead, and the love of great Art? In the summer of 1982 I began work on a novel, and when I needed a name for what was then a secondary character, but who would become the equally primary character when the one novel grew into a novel sequence (click here), I named him Max for my great-uncle who rescued scores of Jews from Poland in the years before it was no longer possible, and gave him the last name Jacob, because Biblical Jacob, the wrestler with the inner-angel at Penu-El, is central to all my books. At that time I had never so much as heard of this Max Jacob, neither as poet nor as painter, let alone as one of the six million.

You can find many of his poems, in translation, at The Poetry Foundation - click here.

Amber pages

Orville Wright, aviation pioneer, born today in 1871. More on him, and brother Wilbur, in my novel "A Journey In Time"

Quentin Bell, member of the Bloomsbury crowd, born today in 1910

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the man who really brought down Soviet Communism, ousted from power by a military coup, today in 1991

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

July 10

1099

We are brought up to have heroes who are Arthurian - but when eventually we learn that there was no human Arthur, only a mythological one, an analogy for the sun and the twelve constellations of the round table of the heavens, that we have been cheated with a fairy-tale, our faith in all our heroes fails, even those who were genuinely flesh and blood.

As a child my greatest hero was King David, and it took me the writing of a novel to gain the non-Arthurian perspective without actually losing faith (click here). Along with David - I am excluding the living heroes, the Dylans and the Bothams, but even more the Sakharovs and Wallenbergs and Bikos - there was El Cid, a character I first encountered in a Hollywood biopic that may or may not have been directed by Cecil B de Mille, but ought to have been; and which may or may not have been historically accurate (in Hollywood, alas, they very rarely are), but likewise ought to have been.

Cid is the Spanish pronunciation of Sidi, "my lord", an Arabic variation on the Semitic Adonis, as I now know but didn't then; this was what his Moorish enemies called him, and it is a most complimentary name, for one who is your mortal enemy, vowed to your defeat, your overthrow, your expulsion.

His real name was Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, and though he was merely a Castillian nobleman by birth, he styled himself Ruy (King) Diaz before he became El Cid, and sometimes, even more vaingloriously, even more preposterously, El Campeador, something equivalent to the Bolívaran "El Liberador" (see my piece on July 5), but even more to the Arthurian "Champion" - and of course Arthur is really Ar-Thur, in Saxon: "the king", so maybe this is where the English mediaevalists who reduced the mythological tales of god-Arthur to the mere courtly romances of King Arthur found their model. Just look at the wings of that flying cape, look at that beard - is that not King Arthur, is that not his Breton equivalent, King Gradlon, is that not the model for Cervantes' Don Quixote, riding out to liberate España from the fairy-tale fantasies of knighthood?

A Spanish Arthur then - and a precursor of Simón Bolívar in every way. He came into the world of authentic fairy tales in Burgos in 1043, and left it, having spent his whole life fighting for the liberation of Spain from the Moors, having achieved only one victory - the capture of Valencia in 1094 - on this day in 1099. One of the heroes of the Immaculate Failure.

You can read the whole of his story, in English translation from the 12th century, "Cantar del mio Cid", by clicking here.

Amber pages

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, American painter, born today in 1834 - that's his "Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1" on the right, often mis-named "Whistler's Mother", which it is, but that wasn't his point. A counterfeit version of the painting by Tomas Dudando lies at the heart of my novel "A Singular Shade of Grey", due for publication very soon.

Marcel Proust, French novelist, entered lost time, or perhaps simply began to lose track of it, or merely to waste it, today in 1871.

Saul Bellow, Canadian novelist - Canadian, not American, though even most North Americans seem to make that error - began to do what Albertus Magnus predicted for the young Aquinas, today in 1915 (save your puzzlement, click here).*

*Wikipedia has him down on June 10; Wikipedia, as so often, is... well, maybe, let's make allowances for once, by clicking here

Paul Verlaine, French poet, shot Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, today in 1873. The wounds in Rimbaud's flesh would prove to be rather less than those in Verlaine's pride.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

July 5

1811

Simón Bolívar, the Spaniard who was no more Spanish than Marx and Freud were Jewish, the Liberator of South America who wasn't really a South American despite being born in Caracas, but rather a Frenchman manqué (he studied law in Madrid but trained for his destiny in Paris during the Revolution), today Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad de Bolívar y Palacios achieved his first triumph, the declaration of independence of Venezuela.

Liberator, or dictator - the words are not synonyms, though they are often used interchangeably? When they realised what freedom and independence actually entailed, the Venezuelans drove the Liberator out, and resisted all his endeavours to return (much the same attitude to the USA today!). When Venezuela proved indomitable, he invented the new nation of Colombia, an expansion of the original Colombia which incorporated the conquered parts of Venezuela, plus New Granada, with Ecuador added later, and briefly Peru, whose northern territories were given the honour of bearing his name into posterity: Bolivia.

Was this simply the dream of an ambitious man to found and govern his own empire? Or is Bolívar the prototype of another kind of individual, the one who, belonging to no nation, has to invent the symbol of himself so that others may make a nation or an institution of it, and thereby imbue him with importance, not through his sense of belonging, but through theirs?

Bolívar is remembered as a hero, yet plainly the man, like most despots and dictators, was far more Super Id than he was Super Ego, though there was no shortage of Ego either.

He learned Revolution in Paris, but in fact he didn't reach Paris until well after the Terror had bedded in; perhaps this clouded his understanding, and like so many before and after he mistook the one for the other. Born in 1783, he was not yet a teenager when the French gave up their Republican ideals for what became a prefiguration of both the Bolívaran and the Communist empires. I believe he chose the month of July, and specifically the 5th July, on the one hand as an act of ostentatious symbolism, on the other as a declaration, less of independence than intent, but also as an act of nostalgia for his Paris youth.

To begin the liberation of South America on the date immediately following that of North America places that moment at an interesting point of linear history. But the future history of that line is unpredictable, and now, if you look it up in an almanac, yes, it is still in situ where he placed it, but for we who come afterwards and can look back, there are also the pages that now follow it: the storming of the Bastille on the 14th, the shooting of the Tsar and all his family on the 16th, the guillotining of Charlotte Corday on the 17th, the burning of Rome and the publication of "Mein Kampf" on the 18th, and one of the great modern nationalist uprisings on the 26th, when El Liberador of the Arabs, Gamil Abdul Nasser, overthrew the yoke of Christian Capitalist Imperialism and declared the Suez Canal Egyptian. Plus ça change, or however you might say that in Bolívaran Spanish (nás ça cambio possibly?)...

See also my fuller account of his life and politics on the Bolivia page of The World Hourglass, and a reference and a picture of the London plaque under June 24 of this blog-book. The page on Venezuela in TheWorldHourglass may shortly be in need of further updating. The illustration at the top of the page shows the youthful Bolívar, in Haiti; the one on the right is the head of the statue in London's Belgrave Square (downloaded from the Internet because, on the day that I went to take my own photo, there was an anti-Maduro march in progress, and someone had hung a placard round his neck that read "Maduro Murderer"; so I didn't take the photograph).

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/