tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post885784774385591201..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: A City Without a Memory: Cologne Archives CollapseCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-44313301918178893942009-03-06T18:32:00.000-05:002009-03-06T18:32:00.000-05:00On my way out the door--interestingly enough, give...On my way out the door--interestingly enough, given the conversation, to see <A HREF="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/single/reserve.aspx?perf=9960" REL="nofollow">this</A>--so I can't track this down exactly, but it strikes me that Derrida, <I>Gift of Death,</I> on the impossibility of being a witness, would be quite apt here.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-88071492295089044092009-03-06T14:01:00.000-05:002009-03-06T14:01:00.000-05:00I do wonder about that: whether we create our own ...I do wonder about that: whether we create our own ghosts, or if certain events aren't so in excess of human ability to comprehend, contain, live in the aftermath of that they -- as event and as object and as cataclysm -- aren't the things that are the ghosts, or that threaten to ghost us.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-53694424073016984512009-03-06T12:36:00.000-05:002009-03-06T12:36:00.000-05:00Thanks for those bits from "Wuthering Heights," Je...Thanks for those bits from "Wuthering Heights," Jeffrey. It calls to mind, too, that Morrison also kind of gives her novel two endings: one, which ends with only the weather "and certainly no clamor for a kiss," and the other is the repeated refrain, "this was not a story to be passed on," even though, by writing and reading the story, it is passed on again and again. And since the very last word of the novel is "Beloved," which is a name that isn't really a name, the ghost of Beloved, in a sense, is both put to rest and called back again. But it isn't that ghosts really exist, is it [?[, but rather, that we create them: they are our own psychic bogeymen, the things we can't forget, or the demands we think the dead are making on us.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-76393417741595912332009-03-06T11:03:00.000-05:002009-03-06T11:03:00.000-05:00but I always return to the ending of Toni Morrison...<EM>but I always return to the ending of Toni Morrison's "Beloved," too, that at a certain point, the only thing left [in a particular site that may have once served as the location of certain traumatic horrors and later hauntologies] is the weather itself: grass, sky, horizon, a breeze--nothing to trouble anyone.</EM><BR/><BR/>But compare the ending of Wuthering Heights. On the one hand, you have this assertion:<BR/><BR/><EM>"But the country folks, if you ask them, would swear on the Bible that he walks: there are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you’ll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on ’em looking out of his chamber window on every rainy night since his death:—and an odd thing happened to me about a month ago. I was going to the Grange one evening—a dark evening, threatening thunder—and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish, and would not be guided.<BR/><BR/> ‘What is the matter, my little man?’ I asked.<BR/><BR/> ‘There’s Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t’ nab,’ he blubbered, ‘un’ I darnut pass ’em.’"</EM><BR/><BR/>On the other, you have this actual ending:<BR/><BR/><EM>"I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: on middle one grey, and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare.<BR/><BR/> I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."</EM><BR/><BR/>Of course the minute that unquiet slumbers are imagined as unimaginable, those unquiet slumbers become all the more possible ... as the restless heath, harebells, wind counter-assert.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27211614696977912742009-03-06T07:51:00.000-05:002009-03-06T07:51:00.000-05:00An interesting corollary.An interesting <A HREF="http://ghazalville.blogspot.com/2009/03/ghazalists-tomb-bombed-verse-lives-on.html" REL="nofollow">corollary</A>.Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34935185058081995972009-03-05T22:35:00.000-05:002009-03-05T22:35:00.000-05:00Then there is this poem, or fragment, from Milosz ...Then there is this poem, or fragment, from Milosz that I love, that is also apropos to this conversation:<BR/><BR/>Alexandria<BR/><BR/>In my early youth I got somewhere a conviction that "alexandrianism" meant a weakening of creative impulse and a proliferation of commentaries on great works of the past. Today I do not know whether this is true, yet I have lived to the epoch when a word does not refer to a thing, for instance a tree, but to a text on a tree, which text was begotten by a text on a tree, and so on. "Alexandrianism" mean "decadence." Then for a long time concerns about this game were abandoned, but what about an epoch which is unable to forget anything?<BR/><BR/>Museums, libraries, photographs, reproductions, film archives. And amid that abundance individuals who do not realize that around them an omnipresent memory hovers and besieges, attacks their tiny consciousness.<BR/><BR/>--from "Road-side Dog"Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-48760039520138190852009-03-05T22:15:00.000-05:002009-03-05T22:15:00.000-05:00Steve--thanks so much for that reminder that time ...Steve--thanks so much for that reminder that time is, of course, not narrow at all [or rather, the universe isn't]; Schulz was mainly talking about narrative time [and more pointedly, his own semi-fictionalized autobiography] and all of the things that never fit neatly into any narrative schema [historical, fictional, or otherwise].<BR/><BR/>Jeffrey: I think I agree with Renan that forgetting is essential to the creation of a nation [our own obviously included], and also to what might be called the forward time of progress [psychic, cultural, social, political, etc.], but with you I also agree that the events that are "forgotten" still exist somehow in their disavowal, but I always return to the ending of Toni Morrison's "Beloved," too, that at a certain point, the only thing left [in a particular site that may have once served as the location of certain traumatic horrors and later hauntologies] is the weather itself: grass, sky, horizon, a breeze--nothing to trouble anyone.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-62531300588783054192009-03-05T20:39:00.000-05:002009-03-05T20:39:00.000-05:00It is not time that is too narrow. A daily look at...It is not time that is too narrow. A daily look at the site Astronomy Picture of the Day would be a useful reminder of what is narrow and what it is wide and deep.Steve Muhlbergerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18136005762428407135noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-37399232470546965002009-03-05T19:26:00.000-05:002009-03-05T19:26:00.000-05:00"L'oubli, et je dirai même l'erreur historique, so..."L'oubli, et je dirai même l'erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d'une nation….tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy."(Ernst Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”, 1882)<BR/><BR/>I just reread that quote as I'm working my way through a paper by Andrea Frisch for a GW MEMSI seminar tomorrow. The paper is -- like Renan -- obsessed by how to forget that which is traumatic. Benedict Anderson pointed out that it is never as straightforward a temporal process as Renan makes it out to be: his formulation assumes that the memory still lives (in fact in a weird way the memory is incited) at the very moments we are commanded to forget. In this case it's a massacre being spoken of ... and above its bloody ruins is supposed to be erected a new French polity. But the event, even in its disavowal, lives on.<BR/><BR/>Forgetting is an extremely complicated process.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com