Archive for ‘Books’
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The Bad Homeschooler is what we ought to call this blog except for the fact that I don’t write much about homeschooling here (relatively speaking) and it’s not like we want to draw attention to ourselves and have people gathering about going, “Look, they’re bad homeschoolers!”
It’s that time of year in which books I’ve ordered for H.o.p.’s studies begin pouring in via the mail. Such as today the doorbell rang and orders for the past two weeks were dropped in my arms in a heap. “For H.o.p.’s studies” I sometimes mean to aid me in deconstructing myths and highlighting cultural biases. The prize so far is “The Distorted Past, A Reinterpretation of Europe” by Josep Fontana, which came in last week and which I’ve just begun reading through. Fun! We already have Lowen’s “Lies My Teachers Told Me” and “Lies Across America”. I suppose we ought to pick up Howard Zinn’s, “A People’s History of the United States” as well.
We are eclectic and do a mishmash of approaches, so today found us sitting around the computers working on stuff we know that the going agenda for state and national schooling would like for us to be working on.
Such as Roman and Greek numerals.
“It’s not bad to know this, but I’ve gotta tell you that probably the only time you’ll use Roman numerals is checking out the dates older animations and movies were made,” I admitted to H.o.p. who has already No Use For Math Whatsoever, who responded Roman numerals are good for helping to construct film names that look “really Epic”. It wasn’t too long before we were arguing about doing math at all but we made it through the material for the day.
In the 5th grade learning folder for Social Studies at Time 4 Learning (one of the several things we sometimes use as a base, just because it’s there, but it tends to drive us nuts) the first file was on the Olmecs.
I’ve not a clue why Olmecs are decided by someone as the thing to learn at the age of 10. Last year it was Aztecs, Incas and Mayas. This year it’s the Olmec.
“You are 9, you will learn a bit about Aztecs, Incas and Mayas. Now you are 10 and will learn about Olmecs. Because it is, has been and always will be thus. First Aztecs, Incas and Mayas, then the Olmec, who we will tell you almost nothing about other than that they made big heads and provide one illustration of that so you may see that they did.”
The lesson was a very vague, not very good one on the three centers of Olmec civilization, those being La Venta, San Lorenzo and Laguna de los Cerros. One controlled rubber and cacao and salt and one had dibbs on the rivers and one made the big heads because they had the rock for it, and that’s all we need to know about the Olmec, apparently. And that they ate fish.
Mind you, I’ve just read to H.o.p., “The Olmec were the first civilization in North and Central America” (and I amended that by saying “known, apparently, I guess”). So after telling him that I then tell him that the three centers of Olmec civilization were La Venta, San Lorenzo and Laguna de los Cerros.
To which H.o.p. says (bless his little heart)…
“BUT THAT’S SPANISH!”
I don’t know if the rimshot belongs there or a beat after my reading the Spanish names.
“If they’re Olmec, why are they giving Spanish names to them?” he asked, his eyes narrow with frustration over “one of these things is not quite like the other, can you tell me which one it is”.
As in, “I care not too learn anything about the Olmec from those who would define them in Spanish terms.”
I took H.o.p.’s hand and shook it and told him he got an A for thinking over blind acceptance.
He has spent his evenings, for all of August, with his dad watching all the old “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. It’s not part of the curriculum of the popular “Well Trained Mind”, I’m sure, but should be essential viewing.
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Anybody got a Harold Jacob’s “Mathematics, A Human Endeavor” book they want to sell me for cheap? Never mind. I found a second edition copy that I purchased for $26.
I should not have. H.o.p. will hate it. But we’ll have it none-the-less.
I’m on a math list that is starting a study using the book, the plan being to use the first edition as it was very available and cheaper than the 3rd edition which goes for something like $75. But everyone started buying the first edition and the cost leaped to $50 and up for it.
In the meanwhile, Amazon tells me that I would be interested in all these books on the Mysteries of Mithras, which I would be, but there are so many and I can’t decide which one to buy. And I need other things besides.
Or I don’t.
Do I really need to buy a book specially on the Periodic Table of Elements with its own chart appropriate for hanging on the wall? A couple of months ago, I joined another list specifically for learning the Periodic Table of Elements and purchased a Periodic Table of Elements through it and was a little dismayed by the Table and accompanying material, that I paid for information that I can find better presented on the internet, nor have I been impressed with the list. But such is life and I didn’t pay that much. So…whatever.
Instead of buying any books on the Mysteries of Mithras I instead purchased for H.o.p. The Story of Mankind and A Little History of the World and The Story of Art and The Periodic Table, Elements with Style.
As my reward for spending my money on periodic tables instead of Mithraic Mysteries, I’m now going to go watch “Shakes, the Clown”.
I love that movie.
Me, I’m just waiting for the water for my coffee to heat up. Waiting for Marty to get home from the laundry. Waiting for H.o.p. to get going (he drug a pile of books to bed with him and read late into the night). In the meanwhile I clean the bathroom which is never in danger of looking very clean no matter how clean it is because there isn’t any part of it that’s younger than 1950 except for the paint. I think about a great Philip K. Dick quote where he says something about how nothing and no one gets too old and dirty in America because Americans kill off what’s old and dirty and not plastic (reads better in context of his biography, and he didn’t mention plastic in that quote but in context he was also railing against plastic America, in particular California, while acknowledging also it was plastic and money that marked the difference between being counted as productive and allowed to live as a sane individual or shoveled under as mad). I think about how much I like Philip K. Dick despite the fact his biography reveals he beat up on a few of his wives and it’s even difficult to write, “he beat up on a few of his wives” but there it is, he did, there’s no way to get around it, there’s no excusing it, and his biographer and people interviewed didn’t excuse it but set it in context of the personality as something inexcusable but there it was and the people who loved him loved him anyway, even if they had to do it from a distance and in small doses. I’m thinking about that while I’m scrubbing the toilet. Then my mind skips to thinking about how maybe I’ll do a post on Stephen and Lucy Hawking’s “George’s Secret Key to the Universe” which we finished last week and is a decent book but not great but better than just decent I guess, but am not too enthused about posting on that. Then the coffee water is ready and I grind the coffee and flip the coffee grinder upside down as I finish grinding so all the grounds will settle in the cap and I clean the French Press and put in the coffee and water and stir it. Then Marty comes home with the laundry and surprise flowers and I put up the laundry and he puts the roses in a vase and he tells me how, as he was driving off to do laundry, he saw that some asshole had knocked over our Sentinel Snowman Knight, but on his return he saw it had been set back up. We hear the landlord and I imagine that it was the landlord who had set it back up and Marty opens the door to call up the stairs and thank him but the landlord says he saw someone walking down the street set the Snowman Sentinel back up.
Rather, the Iceman Sentinel.
When I built the Snowman Sentinel with H.o.p. we were dealing with wet snow so I packed that sucker down good during the making of it, porting bucket upon bucket of what was very wet snow, packing it all down solid, porting more buckets, packing those down solid, thinking it would have a better chance of surviving at least a couple of days if it became essentially one big ice block. So today when whoever it was knocked over the snowman, it didn’t fall apart, it stayed together, the head didn’t even come off and the branches didn’t come out.
Then some nice person came by and saw the snowman lying on its back and picked him up and put him back up on his base.
I sit down to think about something anything to write and Marty tells me that he had bad news from a friend of his, that a relative of theirs, in the process of getting a divorce, just shot his wife in the head and then killed himself. There’s more to the story than what is in the papers, just as there always is, but what matters in the end is there was an argument, there was a gun, and, no, really, that’s not the end of the story because there are those left behind.
So, H.o.p. and I sit down to do some Egyptian history. We’ve been reading and I like to supplement with videos. I had found one on Netflix that I thought would be good to watch.
H.o.p., who doesn’t mind his cartoon figures sometimes killing each other off, is pretty selective about his movies. He doesn’t like gore.
“I don’t want to study history,” he says. “People are always killing each other.”
And I give him the same old song and dance that I always give him about why history must be known.
And how it’s not all war. We learn plenty that isn’t about war.
“But it all comes around to war. History’s all about people killing each other,” he says. “I don’t like that. It’s scary.”
I read him the description at Netflix of “Egypt’s Golden Empire”.
This three-part porgram tracks the development of Egypt’s glorious New Kingdom, a majestic era marked by the rise of powerful rulers, the birth of a sophisticated civilization and advances in art, culture and politics that would influence the world for years to come. Originally broadcast on PBS, the series blends archival documents and ancient artifacts with on-location footage and expert interviews to weave a complex but compelling narrative.
“Art and culture,” I say. “How about it?”
“OK,” says H.o.p.
So, I click on the movie and up came the three episodes. The first episode is named “Warrior Pharaohs”.
“Oh, warrior pharaohs,” I say.
“War,” H.o.p. says.
“But it’s PBS. Want to try it?”
“PBS? OK,” says H.o.p., trusting it wouldn’t be so bad.
We watch “Warrior Pharaohs”.
“See, they’re all killing each other,” says H.o.p.
“Yes,” I say. “But at least it’s not bloody. They’re not showing anything…much. Wow, look at that temple,” I say, hopeful.
And they really aren’t showing anything much.
H.o.p. has me rewind the movie three times at points, twice to listen to music he likes, and once to review a sculpture.
The warring continues.
“Why did they show those kids running with the soldiers?” H.o.p. says.
“Maybe they were running away,” I say, though it didn’t look exactly like that.
“It looked instead like they were maybe going into battle,” H.o.p. says.
“It kind of looked like that,” I agree.
They show the children running again. “Maybe the kids got away,” says H.o.p. “I hope they got away,” he says.
Dead, desert-mummified soldiers lay in the sand gazing empty-eyed at the camera.
“Would they have really left them like that?” says H.o.p. “Didn’t they have museums back then they would have put them in?”
Oh, yes, all the mummies in the museums that we’ve seen. “No, they wouldn’t have put them in museums,” I say.
“Why not? We put them in museums,” says H.o.p.
Then we learn that the Egyptians didn’t have head counts of people they’d slain in war, instead they had hand counts. And they drop on the screen in front of us a bunch of severed hands.
“Oh, gross!” says H.o.p.
We take a nice long break after that.
“Why is there always war?” H.o.p. first asks.
“Empire, goods, people wanting to mark their names in history,” I say. “But history remembers more than just rulers and politicians. It remembers thinkers and artists.”
“Homer wrote about war,” H.o.p. says and runs off.
(P.S. Well, Homer didn’t “write” about war, and Homer was actually a number of people, but never mind.)
Penthouses From 14th Street
Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage…
Music for the ride. Smashing Pumpkins, Bullet with Butterfly Wings at You Tube.
The truth is the world really does look different from the penthouse, or the mountain top. And the ministers never tell their congregations the truth. I know that, having relatives who were ministers. The laymen leaders of congregations have their own agendas, certainly, which they also don’t disclose to the unwashed masses, and are often powerful enough to lord it over the clergy. Clergy which they choose to shepherd the flock. And the clergy? Whether they’re bitten or biting, they just don’t tell, and don’t tell what the penthouse view is. The congregation is as much an Other to them as the citizenry is to the police. They will smile and embrace you, and you will think you know them and that they serve you absolutely and are your friends, but they will never let on what transpires in the inner sanctum.
Systematic lying creates what communications scientists call a “disinformation situation,” in which everybody eventually begins to distrust, demonize and diabolize everybody else. Paul Watzlavik, among others, has performed classic experiments in which totally sane people will begin to behave with all the irrationality of hospitalized paranoids or schizophrenics–just because they have been lied to in a calculated and systematic way. This sort of “disinformation” matrix is so typical of many aspects of our society (e.g., advertising and organized religion, as well as government) that some psychiatrists, such as R.D. Laing, claim it is the principal cause of psychotic breakdowns. When the politics of lying becomes normal, paranoia and alienation become the “normality” of the day.
Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger Volume 1
Ah, you didn’t know that I have read RAW, did you? But of course I have. Certain interests of his like cryogenics and the reach for physical immortality, I never had much use for, but RAW dovetails nicely with Philip K. Dick.
A problem with the above quotation is that it’s expressed in such a way that it makes everyone sound like raving, isolated paranoids, which the normal mom or pop or teen isn’t going to recognize in themselves. Because people are imminently adaptable, whether rewarded with the occasional door prize or the threat of loss of something dear, like income, and succumb to the status quo, whatever is handed down by the paramount threat/god in their lives. They build community and personal nests at the base of the mountain from which the law is handed down so the news of what’s good/bad for the day is readily available, and the system becomes theirs, becomes normal, is the way to conduct your affairs, and the paranoia is directed against out-of-towners. Thus the horror flicks of vacationers happening on the town from hell.
But the problem with RAW also is that that the townies aren’t going to want to read RAW because he is the out-of-towner. If I handed RAW over to any of my conservative relations or friends, they would, at their best, take a glance at the Eye of Horus on the cover and knowing that the Eye of Horus is all superstitious myth they would promptly discount as without merit and laughable. At paranoid worst, they would see the Eye of Horus and the words “Final Secret of the Illuminati” and without a clue as to what is within the covers they would distrust, demonize, diabolize–all based on that Eye of Horus or Ra. The wdjet, wadjet, udjat. Which was/is a symbol of protection and a mathematical representation of the Egyptian Kingdom.
Curiously, we now have widgets (whether there’s a relationship, I don’t know) as nothing sort of whatevers, objects that are mute as to their value or meaning when not in direct context, and maybe even then. You just know that you don’t want to spend your life making widgets which are mysterious dark critters as compared to gadgets that are obviously not widgets. Except that widgets, if you know their function, may be just what the doctor ordered. Such as with different widgets I can install in my sidebar that make blogging more convenient.
So one way of describing most religions and governments is that they’re paranoid systems which make paranoid living a comfortable situation by giving people concrete somethings (everything outside the system) about which to be paranoid. The thing is that there are multiple paranoid systems that have every right to be paranoid of each other, and even if there weren’t multiple paranoid systems, just one is enough as everything exterior becomes adversarial by reason of its place in the paranoid system, which is the diabolical, free-wheeling Other that is out to corrupt the status quo. In other words, the paranoid system takes everything prisoner. Everything must have its reason and place in the system, even those things which are not remotely connected with it ideologically.
America was already paranoid before Bush, before 9/11. It just felt more in control and less worried about the Other, such as weary travelers who just happen to have a brief pit stop in Los Angeles and must fill out lengthy forms and be fingerprinted and photographed before heading on to that Not-A-United-States-Place where they plan to have some fun, because who wants to vacation in a police state?
What’s to be questioned is what the leaders are paranoid about, both Democrat and Republican. Do they buy the same fears they’re selling, which are used to justify the information gathering and over-the-top controls? Do they buy their hype?
I’m not saying that the overlords don’t fear. I just believe they’ve got their own set of fears, which they keep reserved for themselves, while feeding the general public a special set of fears, just like you have your skin cream products that are for the general masses and then you’ve got the specialty stuff which the general public doesn’t need as it’s just security camera time for them rather than High Definition TV. After all, the general public is part of the Other, the Adversary. And are the Priests of Fear going to take the General Public into their confidence and let them know what keeps their cogs oiled and the home fires burning with their own rarefied paranoid fuel?
Dorothy and Dylan in Sepia, 2
When we first got goldfish, it freaked me out that we had pets that didn’t blink or close their eyes when they slept. They just stared. What were they thinking? Marty still sometimes stands by the aquarium, regarding, and asks, “What are they thinking?”
I don’t believe a single cartoon has been able to handle the fact that fish don’t blink. We’re so used to blinking as a response. Closing eyes and opening them. And so people describe sharks as having lifeless eyes because they don’t blink. Snakes, too.
Insects don’t have eyelids and don’t blink but they’re too small for us to be consciously bothered by it. But, as with fish, when we blow them up large and make them characters in cartoons and movies, we give them eyelids so they can blink and show emotion. If it blinks and shows emotion you may be able to attempt to reason with it. Whatever doesn’t blink is lacking “soul”, without feeling, having no ability to reason as we reason (or even as a blinking cat reasons), “blindly” motivated by only its own mechanical sense of instinctual justice and therefore not subject to personal, passionate plea and argument. Except for god. Many people think of god as having a kind of All Seeing Eye that doesn’t blink. If that god’s All Seeing Eye blinked, then all the lights would go out. So, god doesn’t blink. Yet people don’t think of god as lacking soul. Indeed, people think of god as being the god father of soul. But they’re wrong. James Brown was the god father of soul.
Inspired by the movie, I reread Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and finished it last night.
At the wheel of his slow car, Bob Arctor forgot theoretical matters and did a rerun of a moment that had impressed them all: the dainty and elegant straight girl in her turtleneck sweater and bell-bottoms and trippy boobs who wanted them to murder a great harmless bug that in fact did good by wiping out mosquitoes–and in a year in which an outbreak of encephalitis had been anticipated in Orange County–and when they saw what it was and explained, she had said words that became for them their parody evil-wall-motto, to be feared and despised:
IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS
I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.That had summed up to them (and still did) what they distrusted in their straight foes, assuming they had foes, anyhow, a person like well-educated-with-all-the-financial-advantages Thelma Kornford became at once a foe by uttering that, from which they had run that day, pouring out of her apartment and back to their own littered pad, to her perplexity. The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they’d meditated on how to ball her, and remained. Her heart, Bob Arctor reflected, was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about.
The novel’s even more brilliant than I’d remembered it to be.
Because I’m Worth It has a Mysteries blog post up and yesterday I made a couple of silly comments on it, in which I speculated the object in question was a “sentient life being”. I’d intended to write “sentient living being” but was eating ice cream and was conversing with Marty so was distracted. Playing around, meaning to correct my comment with another comment on how I’d intended to write “sentient living being”, I instead questioned if “sentient life being” was redundant, though I was thinking, no, not on certain levels, at the same time already bogging myself down with now we’re getting into questions on how to absolutely qualify sentience when all I’d intended to do was make a stupid joke with Kate Moss as the punch line. I’d this fantasy going that the metallic sphere in the picture was some alien being and the tube or nozzle down near the grass was its one eye. Sucked in by the celeb columns and using them as its only information source about Earth, the creature had fallen in love with Kate Moss and had come to Earth and landed in this out-of-the-way lawn behind a nowhere building and was waiting for Kate Moss to pass by, its one lonely eye inspecting all that passed and no one even knowing it was sentient and stopping to welcome it to Our World. Certainly, as it was in England, Kate Moss should pass by at any time, the creature had at first believed. But the days and weeks passed and no Kate Moss. Eventually, Because I’m Worth It comes along and takes the photo, wondering what is this thing, but failed to recognize it was a sentient living being as the creature, despondent, sunk in hopelessness, too long ailing over both the loss of its dream and its foolhardiness, was scarcely aware of her presence and so didn’t even bother to squack and buzz in greeting. And because its one eye doesn’t blink as ours blink.
Yeah, I know. But that’s my story for the creature and I’m sticking by it.
Returning to reading A Scanner Darkly, I came on this passage about an hour later.
“Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person’s eyes maybe died back in childhood. What’s dead in there still looks out. It’s not just the body looking at you with nothing in it; there’s still something in there but it died and just keeps on looking and looking; it can’t stop looking.”
I’m so tired I can hardly focus but I’ve had this sitting on my computer for a couple days and it’s time to clear the desk.
First confounded then allured by pre-Raphaelite art…
…I have just wasted some time trying to read Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia, upon which this painting of the pagan, Greek philosopher, by Charles Williams Mitchell, is said to be based. She in nubile form (though she was probably murdered in her sixties, but what fun is that) about to be be torn apart by a Christian mob, having just herself apparently been converted to Christianity. So goes Charles Kingsley’s story and yes I spy a sardonic moral there (maybe) but I’ve read the book is supposed to be in parts humorous, and if it’s black humor it is so soppy with overwrought flesh and spirituality that it’s difficult to detect, unless it’s very very very black humor, and the determined manner of overwroughtness has me thinking this isn’t the case.
Anyone have good words to say about this book before I put it down?
So Vonnegut has died.
The first post I made on this blog, I ended with a few paragraphs on Vonnegut, one of a few of my favorite authors.
He said one should write for one person.
We who enjoyed his work are fortunate to have been that one person.
“We are prone to think the Indian problem is solved. It is not. Generation after generation must pass away before the last drop of Osage blood in amalgamated lines shall be lost. The future of the remnant of this once great tribe, its influence in the middle west, is a story yet to be written. In the years gone by it was never the government that controlled it so much as the church in its broad reach of influence. What the Osages did or refrained from doing can oftenest be traced back to the character of the red man as shaped by the good influence of the white man’s civilization.”
Written by Margaret Hill McCarter in a sketch on the Catholic missionaries to the Osage, Mother Duchesne and Mother Bridget.
Pg. 284 “Life and Letters of Fathers Ponziglione, Schoenmakers and Other Early Jesuits at Osage Mission, Sketch of St. Francis’ Church, Life of Mother Bridget” by W.W. Graves 1916
My sinuses are exploding, I’m fuzzed with heavy duty Benadryl but can’t sleep, can’t think to do anything marginally useful or productive, and so here I am ready to talk about George Alec Effinger’s “What Entropy Means to Me”. Jennifer at Saying Yes picked it up as I’d good things to say about it and because it features giant people-terrorizing vegetables.
No, I’m actually up to read it again. I just read the first chapter. It’s been at least 15 years since I last read this book, maybe longer. I was probably 17 when I first read it. And I still love it.
She was Our Mother, so she cried. She used to sit out there, under that micha tree, all day as we worked cursing in her field. She sat there during the freezing nights, and we pretended that we could see her through the windows in the house, by the light of the moons and the hard, fast stars. She sat there before most of us were born; she sat there until she died. And all that time she shed her tears. She was Our Mother, so she cried.
She cried from our yard, and the chairs that had been put there. We had many chairs on the scrubby lawn between the house and the chata fields. Some of the other estates have iron and stone statues placed around, but none of them have chairs. We have quite a few. Our Mother taught us that she got the idea from reading one of the plays that Our Father brought with him from Earth. We still have many of those books. Sometimes we thrown them into the River when it looks like it might flood. But we still have most of them.
How can you not love a book that begins like that?
This will be perhaps the toughest book I’ve ever read and hope I am ever likely to read.
By way of the internet, I came upon Gideon Grief’s “We Wept Without Tears; Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz”. How I came upon it was first I had read a NY Times story of Dina Babbitt, a surivor of Auschwitz, who has been trying to retrieve from the museum there some paintings she’d done, at the command of Mengele, of gypsies condemned to extermination. I had gone to look up the museum’s website and perhaps it was there, in one of the internal pages, I came across a mention of this book. I don’t remember the exact trail to it. But I came upon through some link a PDF of a few pages of “We Wept Without Tears” and based on that I decided I must order it.
Pitiless consciousness. The proverbial fruit of the fabled Tree of Knowledge. At some point in our migration to the land of the modern human we pick up, they say, imagination, and became dreamers of worlds, rather than simply living beings. However it happens, it remains that we are each of us, and every other thing, conduits and product of what has transpired before, with us come these long passings of DNA and the experience of what has transpired before being passed along as well, some say, and then one day there you are and you open your eyes as world experiencing world in the unique fashion that is the unduplicatable you. Regardless of what spiritual or philosophical or religious beliefs any of us may have, that is the nut of it, that we are each the produce and bearers of that world and its history. And are also, we modern humans, dreamers of worlds. of potentials for making a difference in our worlds, in however big or small a fashion, to satisfy instinctual desires and the dreams which occur to us or are sold to us are transmitted to us to carry on, all humankind in one way or another living out the dreams of someone else when we labor in societies those people created, walk down the roads they made, read the books they wrote, pass along these things called values, and those people too who made these patterns they too were carrying out dreams of someone else before them. Dreams built upon dreams built upon dreams becoming our world and the dreams and worlds of others to follow. I don’t myself believe that humans are the penultimate of that chain of dreams, or are the only ones to dream.
I remember when I was seven and woke up to consciousness in the way where you realize the infinite, as a seven-year-old may comprehend it, the fear of timelessness wrestling with the fear of not existing, the comprehension too of the limits of my reason. Of course I remember many things before then, being aware of time, feeling love, experiencing bitterness, learning and intuiting what I sensed to be “moral” choices (me making a choice in ethics), even already aware of death at a very young age and when two and three surrounding myself with all my toys and books, making sure they were in my bed and embraced by me just in case I should die during the night, so not one would be left behind, if they were in bed with me I’d the idea they would be magically enfolded in my love for them, knowing I loved them, and cross over with me into whatever that after life was. So when I was quite young I was aware of death and cherished some idea of after life, a very vague one, probably taught me. But it wasn’t the same as the awareness of consciousness that came at seven, which would keep me awake at night, wondering, and in a kind of mental pain at the knowledge of the weight of enduring unenlightened consciousness. I thought about how the infinite, whatever that meant, would be from then on with me. I thought about how I was a part of it, part of the infinite, and if I was to die and lose all consiousness of self, there was fear in me of that, of that loss, the loss of myself as thus a separate being, which really meant grief over losing the ability to look at something, at another, at myself too, and love and be loved. But then if I died and remained awake, remained conscious, my seven-year-old brain felt no more at ease with that either. I must have been told something about god as limitless light and love for I recall trying to imagine the infinite in that context and all I could muster was an eternal isolation chamber. I wished I had never become conscious for I didn’t see how one could tolerate the unknown without going mad and I could see no resolution. Exhuasted, I’d fall asleep eventually. I wondered how everyone else was able to live with this knowledge–or lack of knowlege–but if the rest of humanity managed it then perhaps I could find a way to as well.
Life happens. In the ensuing years you gather experience, your experience, the experience of others which you must be able to imagine in order to have empathy and perhaps sometimes learn something from it. You go about the business of living as a dreamer of worlds, probably first confident in your dreams then becoming aware you are making your way through the dreams of others, eventually then wondering whose dreams you are living, what dream will you have to transmit of your own along the way, and does it even matter in the long run. You decide why it might matter in the long or short run, determine what is precious to you, how you at least hope to live (not the way you might want to live, but the way you hope to conduct yourself, having determined what is precious). You in the great sea of what is understand of life, of present, past and future, conducting yourself not only as you attempt to choose, but living just plain and simply because that’s where you are, here and now, and your body demands it of you.
You experience death and birth and empathize and sympathize with the losses and joys of others. You understand more and more the many ways you’re not unique and how you may not after all be the be all and end all of things. You wonder at how much you may have learned when compared with everything you don’t know.
Me, I mean.
Life is painful so it’s a wonder anyone should intentionally put themselves through pain, but we do, for it is at times nothing less than a duty to listen to the painful experience of others and imagine it, out of respect for those who have suffered, and because we tend to have the hope that the more the stories are told, the more sympathy and empathy and understanding is aroused, the better the chances of passing along that learning and trying to dream better worlds.
I had read some of the stories of the survivors of those in Auschwitz, the death factories. I have read the trials. I have read the facts of the things that happened there. (And Auschwitz is of course not the only place, it is a symbol of a certain kind of horror.) I have read the diaries of the people who dreamt the world which built the camps and ran the death factories, who were in some part living out dreams of worlds devised before them as well.
But I hadn’t read the personal accounts of the Jewish Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz. Those who were forced to superintend the doomed, a thousand at a time entering the undressing rooms and going to the gas chambers, a thousand at a time who would be dead within one hour of passing through the selection, mothers and fathers with their young children, the elderly alone and with their children who had their children in arms. The Sonderkommandos who had the duty forced on them of superintending the doomed as they undressed, told to calm them. Who afterwards pried the bodies apart from each other, whole families clinging in embrace, who were commanded to farm their teeth for gold, carting the bodies to the crematoriums or the pits, disposing of the ashes which they would pound with shovels to smash the remaining small bits of bone to gravel, thousand after thousand like this so that sometimes in the one day’s time there will be the ashes of twenty thousand, or in the space of two weeks the ashes of forty thousand who had been embarrassed with the shame of undressing, who had attempted to calm the fears of their children, wives who calmed rebellious husbands, each bewildered in someone else’s dream of how the world should be, imaginations which had determined they should all be slaughtered, thousand after thousand stripped and dead within an hour of a hand waving you to one side or another, to the pain of the gas chambers or the horrors of the camp. Dreamers of worlds determining that a million and a half dreamers of worlds should die in the gas chambers. A steady methodical deliverance of thousands upon thousands walking several abreast into the undressing rooms, their clothes piling in the center of the floor, their ash eventually destined for the concealing river, but their clothing esteemed as having some value, permitted to continue to exist in the worlds of those dreamers and sent on to another camp and then sent to Germany.
The dream of some of the Sonderkommandos was to live to tell their tale to the world, which would be their witness of those who perished.
Dreamers of worlds. The Sonderkommandos who tell their stories trusted that those stories would matter, that their dream of telling their stories would make a difference in the dreamers of worlds who heard and read them. I was unaware of the book, but Dina Babbit wanted her paintings back and I read that story, and because of reading that story I looked up the Auschwitz museum on the internet and by some link or another eventually came to a PDF with a portion of “We Wept Without Tears” that made me feel I ought to read this book. I checked at the Atlanta library and they didn’t have a copy. So I ordered one. It arrived yesterday and I sat down to read last night. I stopped reading halfway through the first interview and went in to sleep, a full day ahead of me.
Pityless consciousness. While lying in bed, I looked at my hand for a half an hour, thinking of how my hand is so different than it was twenty years ago, who might love that hand now and twenty years from now and who might think it a horrible reminder of mortality. Thought of the dreams of worlds we work on realizing with our hands. I thought too of how I didn’t want to go to sleep and sleeping dream this story of the Sonderkommandos, not right then.
I thought of how trails of knowledge and action work. I have tried to raise H.o.p. with a knowledge that all that we do has an effect on everything else. Not just something else, but everything else, and to be mindful of this. At least be mindful.
Chains of action and knowledge. I read of Dina Babbit and tonight I began reading the stories of the Sonderkommandos, which I may not have come upon had it not been for her struggle to get back her paintings. I would not be present as a witness at the last moments of these million-and-a-half murdered in the gas chambers without the stories of the Sonderkommandos. A remote witness, via ink and paper. But the stories they tell pull you past the ink and paper and through time. It is too close a position in which to stand, but we must. One goes through the selection process with the condemned, one enters with them into the undressing room, one carries in the food which you’ve brought to satisfy your childrens’ hunger, you feel a hope that everything will be all right as the Nazis tell you to hurry, hurry, that there’s coffee and cake waiting for you after your showers. Via the Sonderkommandos descriptions, you feel the vulnerability of being stripped of your clothing–which is why the people were all stripped, being nude stealing from their confidence, making them awkward, vulnerable. You step into the showers where soon too many are crammed. The door closes and now you depart the doomed, outside again with one of the few Sonderkommando who lived to tell the story that eventually the shipments slowed to a step because the ghettos had been emptied, after which began the dismantling process of the crematoriums and gas chambers in an effort to hide the evidence.
Restrain with order, pacify with lies, control with vulnerability. It is too terrifyingly easy.
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