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Wild Things

There’s one less today, though the many he released into the world and the imaginations he unlocked dwarf even his own demise.

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.

He was one artist who had the keys – to the till, to the store, to the mind, however you want to think about it. RIP, Maurice.

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Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011

There are many dates within those two that you could use to conflate the influence and importance of any individual who witnessed them. With many, they might well be a coincidence. Not so with Vaclav Havel.

When Mrs. G and were living in France the first time, neighbors in the next farmhouse up the chemin became great friends with us over the months – in part because of common interests but also because the painter-wife was also a transplant and non-native speaker, and therefore showed great sympathy and care for us, second-language-wise. She is a bit older and a native of what is now the Czech Republic. Though I had read some Kundera and seen Unbearable Lightness, it was not until our time with her that I began to gain some basic understanding of the Prague Spring. Near the center of events during that tumultuous year in a far away capital, was Havel.

Mr. Havel describes his playwriting in much the same terms – defending what is human against repressive social mechanisms. He openly identifies his work as theater of the absurd, unlike other writers (Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet) who disliked such generic descriptions. But the absurd for Mr. Havel is as much a political and philosophical concept as an esthetic one. He believes, along with the best 20th-century playwrights, that illusionistic theater is a sham, that realism is inadequate to the obscurity and unpredictability of modern life, that the role of the theater is not to be positive or instructive, soothing or explanatory, but rather to remind people that ”the time is getting late, that the situation is grave.”

This sounds like a civil-defense alarm, and Mr. Havel’s view of the absurd has a lot to do with a sense of social crisis, collapsing worlds, language abuse, robotic structures, entropic rule, metaphysical uncertainty – which is to say, with his experience of life in Czechoslovakia (no wonder he adds that if the theater of the absurd had not existed, he would have been forced to invent it). Still, Mr. Havel’s relationship to political theater is as ambiguous as that of Chekhov, who wrote, ”Writers must occupy themselves with politics only in order to put up a defense against politics.” The absurd for Mr. Havel is another form of artistic resistance.

Our mileage varies on some of those precepts, yet did he put his work where his heart and conscience thought best and fought hardest. Rest in Peace.

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Back to the Well, again

Someone, a person unknown to me, at the ______ last night asked me to name my favorite book. Typical _____-talk. After a few beats, I said it was really four – Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. This is from Justine, opened at random to page 108. By the way, I can’t find this text  anywhere on the internets, which feels like a kind of theft in reverse, were that possible.

They were drifting, Melissa and he, across the shallow blood-red waters of Mareotis, in each other’s arms, towards the rabble of mud-huts where once Rhakotis stood. He reproduced their conversations so perfectly that though my lover’s share was inaudible I could nevertheless hear her cool voice, could deduce her questions from the answers he gave her. She was desperately trying to persuade him to marry her and he was temporizing, unwilling to lose the beauty of her person and equally unwilling to commit himself. What interested me was the extraordinary fidelity with which he reproduced this whole conversation which obviously in his memory ranked as one of the great experiences of his life. He did not know then how much he loved her; it had remained for me to teach him the lesson. And conversely how was it that Melissa had never spoken to me of marriage, had never betrayed to me the depth of her weakness and exhaustion as she had to him? This was deeply wounding. My vanity gnawed by the thought that she had shown him a side of her nature she kept hidden from me.

Now the scene changed again and he fell into a more lucid vein. It was as if in the vast jungle of unreason we came upon clearings of sanity where he was emptied of his poetic illusions. Here he spoke of Melissa with feeling but cooly, like a husband of a king. It was as if now that the flesh was dying the whole funds of his inner life, so long dammed up behind the falsities of a life wrongly lived, burst through the dykes and flooded the foreground of his  consciousness. It was not only Melissa either, for he spoke of his wife – and at times confused their names. There was also a third name, Rebecca, which he pronounced with a deeper reserve, a more passionate sorrow than either of the others. I took this to be his little daughter, for it si children who deliver the final coup de grace in all these terrible transactions of the heart.

Mm hmm.

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Pervasiveness in the Larvarium Project

Because it’s one of the high points of our civilization, which may or may not feel like they’re passing you by at the moment, or like its greatest moments are in the past, Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Long live the written word. Part 1, Chapter 8:

On the same morning, or a couple of days later, on the terrace:
“Mais va donc jouer avec lui,” said Mlle Larivière, pushing
Ada, whose young hips disjointedly jerked from the shock.
“Don’t let your cousin se morfondre when the weather is so
fine. Take him by the hand. Go and show him the white lady
in your favorite lane, and the mountain, and the great oak.“
Ada turned to him with a shrug. The touch of her cold
fingers and damp palm and the self-conscious way she tossed
back her hair as they walked down the main avenue of the park
made him self-conscious too, and under the pretext of picking
up a fir cone he disengaged his hand. He threw the cone at a
woman of marble bending over a stamnos but only managed
to frighten a bird that perched on the brim of her broken
jar.
“There is nothing more banal in the world,” said Ada, “than
pitching stones at a hawfinch.“
“Sorry,” said Van, “I did not intend to scare that bird. But
then, I’m not a country lad, who knows a cone from a stone.
What games, au fond, does she expect us to play?”
“Je l’ignore,” replied Ada. “I really don’t care very much how
her poor mind works. Cache-cache, I suppose, or climbing trees.”
“Oh, I’m good at that,” said Van, “in fact, I can even
brachiate.“
“No,” she said, “we are going to play my games. Games I
have invented all by myself. Games Lucette, I hope, will be
able to play next year with me, the poor pet. Come, let us start.
The present series belongs to the shadow-and-shine group, two
of which I’m going to show you.”
“I see,” said Van.
“You will in a moment,” rejoined the pretty prig. “First of
all we must find a nice stick.”
“Look,” said Van, still smarting a bit, “there goes another
haw-haw finch.”
By then they had reached the rond-point—a small arena en-
circled by flowerbeds and jasmine bushes in heavy bloom. Over-
head the arms of a linden stretched toward those of an oak, like
a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hang-
ing by his feet from the trapeze. Even then did we both under-
stand that kind of heavenly stuff, even then.
“Something rather acrobatic about those branches up there,
no?” he said, pointing.
“Yes,” she answered. “I discovered it long ago. The teil is the
flying Italian lady, and the old oak aches, the old lover aches,
but still catches her every time” (impossible to reproduce the
right intonation while rendering the entire sense—after eight
decades!—but she did say something extravagant, something
quite out of keeping with her tender age as they looked up and
then down).
Looking down and gesturing with a sharp green stake bor-
rowed from the peonies, Ada explained the first game.
The shadows of leaves on the sand were variously interrupted
by roundlets of live light. The player chose his roundlet—the
best, the brightest he could find—and firmly outlined it with
the point of his stick; whereupon the yellow round light would
appear to grow convex like the brimming surface of some golden
dye. Then the player delicately scooped out the earth with his
stick or fingers within the roundlet. The level of that gleaming
infusion de tilleul would magically sink in its goblet of earth and
finally dwindle to one precious drop. That player won who
made the most goblets in, say, twenty minutes.
Van asked suspiciously if that was all.
No, it was not. As she dug a firm little circle around a par-
ticularly fine goldgout, Ada squatted and moved, squatting,
with her black hair falling over her ivory-smooth moving knees
while her haunches and hands worked, one hand holding the
stick, the other brushing back bothersome strands of hair. A
gentle breeze suddenly eclipsed her fleck. When that occurred,
the player lost one point, even if the leaf or the cloud hastened
to move aside.
All right. What was the other game?
The other game (in a singsong voice) might seem a little
more complicated. To play it properly one had to wait for p.m.
to provide longer shadows. The player—
“Stop saying ‘the player.’ It is either you or me.”
“Say, you. You outline my shadow behind me on the sand.
I move. You outline it again. Then you mark out the next
boundary (handing him the stick). If I now move back—”
“You know,” said Van, throwing the stick away, “personally
I think these are the most boring and stupid games anybody has
ever invented, anywhere, any time, a.m. or p.m.”
She said nothing but her nostrils narrowed. She retrieved the
stick and stuck it back, furiously, where it belonged, deep into
the loam next to a grateful flower to which she looped it with
a silent nod. She walked back to the house. He wondered if
her walk would be more graceful when she grew up.
“I’m a rude brutal boy, please forgive me,” he said.
She inclined her head without looking back. In token of
partial reconciliation, she showed him two sturdy hooks passed
into iron rings on two tulip-tree trunks between which, before
she was born, another boy, also Ivan, her mother’s brother, used
to sling a hammock in which he slept in midsummer when the
nights became really sultry—this was the latitude of Sicily, after
all.
“A splendid idea,” said Van. “By the way, do fireflies burn
one if they fly into you? I’m just asking. Just a city boy’s silly
question.”
She showed him next where the hammock—a whole set of
hammocks, a canvas sack full of strong, soft nets—was stored:
this was in the corner of a basement toolroom behind the lilacs,
the key was concealed in this hole here which last year was
stuffed by the nest of a bird—no need to identify it. A pointer
of sunlight daubed with greener paint a long green box where
croquet implements were kept; but the balls had been rolled
down the hill by some rowdy children, the little Erminins, who
were now Van’s age and had grown very nice and quiet.
“As we all are at that age,” said Van and stooped to pick up
a curved tortoiseshell comb—the kind that girls use to hold up
their hair behind; he had seen one, exactly like that, quite re-
cently, but when, in whose hairdo?
“One of the maids,” said Ada. “That tattered chapbook must
also belong to her, Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical
romance by a pastor.”
“Playing croquet with you,” said Van, “should be rather like
using flamingoes and hedgehogs.”
“Our reading lists do not match,” replied Ada. “That Palace
in Wonderland was to me the kind of book everybody so often
promised me I would adore, that I developed an insurmountable
prejudice toward it. Have you read any of Mlle Larivière’s
stories? Well, you will. She thinks that in some former Hindooish
state she was a boulevardier in Paris; and writes accordingly.
We can squirm from here into the front hall by a secret passage,
but I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chêne
which is really an elm.” Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s
poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like
it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors
and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it?
“And now,” she said, and stopped, staring at him.
“Yes?” he said, “and now?”
“Well, perhaps, I ought not to try to divert you—after you
trampled upon those circles of mine; but I’m going to relent
and show you the real marvel of Ardis Manor; my larvarium,
it’s in the room next to mine” (which he never saw, never—
how odd, come to think of it!).
She carefully closed a communicating door as they entered
into what looked like a glorified rabbitry at the end of a marble-
flagged hall (a converted bathroom, as it transpired). In spite
of the place’s being well aired, with the heraldic stained-glass
windows standing wide open (so that one heard the screeching
and catcalls of an undernourished and horribly frustrated bird
population), the smell of the hutches—damp earth, rich roots,
old greenhouse and maybe a hint of goat—was pretty appalling.
Before letting him come nearer, Ada fiddled with little latches
and grates, and a sense of great emptiness and depression re-
placed the sweet fire that had been consuming Van since the

beginning of their innocent games on that day.

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In the Midst of War

Roger_Fry_-_Virginia_Woolf

Whatever you are tying to do – be a family, be civilized, be an artist (there are, admittedly, more than these three possibilities) – it’s both more difficult to do in the midst of a war and a type of war all in itself. Battling opposing forces and circumstances beyond your control, encountering unforeseen obstacles, the similarities are all there.

Perhaps no writer ties all of these struggles together in one like Virginia Woolf. Your mileage may vary of course, but, it’s all there in To the Lighthouse (1927). This is from the second section, Time Passes:

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they time at their disposal) the torn letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?

So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostlily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they would look, once, on the shut eyes, and the loosely clasping fingers, and fold their garments wearily and disappear. And so, nosing, rubbing, they went to the window on the staircase, to the servants’ bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending, blanched the apples on the dining-room table, fumbled the petals of roses, tried the picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.

[Here Mr Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was past midnight.]

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No Insurance Office

On a day when the Obama Administration decided to turn people who want to breath clean air into “enviros,” whatever that means, it was difficult to find something appropriate and fitting of the moment. Then, bingo.

Honore de Balzac, Bureaucracy, Chapter 5: The Machine in Motion

At this moment the division of Monsieur de la Billardiere was in a state of unusual excitement, resulting very naturally from the event which was about to happen; for heads of divisions do not die every day, and there is no insurance office where the chances of life and death are calculated with more sagacity than in a government bureau. Self-interest stifles all compassion, as it does in children, but the government service adds hypocrisy to boot.

The clerks of the bureau Baudoyer arrived at eight o’clock in the morning, whereas those of the bureau Rabourdin seldom appeared till nine,–a circumstance which did not prevent the work in the latter office from being more rapidly dispatched than that of the former. Dutocq had important reasons for coming early on this particular morning. The previous evening he had furtively entered the study where Sebastien was at work, and had seen him copying some papers for Rabourdin; he concealed himself until he saw Sebastien leave the premises without taking any papers away with him. Certain, therefore, of finding the rather voluminous memorandum which he had seen, together with its copy, in some corner of the study, he searched through the boxes one after another until he finally came upon the fatal list. He carried it in hot haste to an autograph-printing house, where he obtained two pressed copies of the memorandum, showing, of course, Rabourdin’s own writing. Anxious not to arouse suspicion, he had gone very early to the office and replaced both the memorandum and Sebastien’s copy in the box from which he had taken them. Sebastien, who was kept up till after midnight at Madame Rabourdin’s party, was, in spite of his desire to get to the office early, preceded by the spirit of hatred. Hatred lived in the rue Saint-Louis-Saint-Honore, whereas love and devotion lived far-off in the rue du Roi-Dore in the Marais. This slight delay was destined to affect Rabourdin’s whole career.

Sebastien opened his box eagerly, found the memorandum and his own unfinished copy all in order, and locked them at once into the desk as Rabourdin had directed. The mornings are dark in these offices towards the end of December, sometimes indeed the lamps are lit till after ten o’clock; consequently Sebastien did not happen to notice the pressure of the copying-machine upon the paper. But when, about half-past nine o’clock, Rabourdin looked at his memorandum he saw at once the effects of the copying process, and all the more readily because he was then considering whether these autographic presses could not be made to do the work of copying clerks.

“Did any one get to the office before you?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Sebastien,–“Monsieur Dutocq.”

“Ah! well, he was punctual. Send Antoine to me.”

Too noble to distress Sebastien uselessly by blaming him for a misfortune now beyond remedy, Rabourdin said no more. Antoine came. Rabourdin asked if any clerk had remained at the office after four o’clock the previous evening. The man replied that Monsieur Dutocq had worked there later than Monsieur de la Roche, who was usually the last to leave. Rabourdin dismissed him with a nod, and resumed the thread of his reflections.

“Twice I have prevented his dismissal,” he said to himself, “and this is my reward.”

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The Heavens Are Strange

One of my open books right now is a biography of D.H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess, a present from Mean Joe for which I am increasingly grateful. Right after he and Freida fled Germany to Italy, Lawrence had to get down to work and make some money. The travelogue, Twilight in Italy, is one of those; his publisher came up with the cheesy title. Freida had another name for it, but anyway, this is from Chaper 4, San Gaudenzio:

In the autumn the little rosy cyclamens blossom in the shade of this west side of the lake. They are very cold and fragrant, and their scent seems to belong to Greece, to the Bacchae. They are real flowers of the past. They seem to be blossoming in the landscape of Phaedra and Helen. They bend down, they brood like little chill fires. They are little living myths that I cannot understand.

After the cyclamens the Christmas roses are in bud. It is at this season that the cacchi are ripe on the trees in the garden, whole naked trees full of lustrous, orange-yellow, paradisal fruit, gleaming against the wintry blue sky. The monthly roses still blossom frail and pink, there are still crimson and yellow roses. But the vines are bare and the lemon-houses shut. And then, mid-winter, the lowest buds of the Christmas roses appear under the hedges and rocks and by the streams. They are very lovely, these first large, cold, pure buds, like violets, like magnolias, but cold, lit up with the light from the snow.

The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines. It is so still and transcendent, the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should have been blown out at the end of the summer. For as we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in the full sunshine.

Meanwhile, the Christmas roses become many. They rise from their budded, intact humbleness near the ground, they rise up, they throw up their crystal, they become handsome, they are heaps of confident, mysterious whiteness in the shadow of a rocky stream. It is almost uncanny to see them. They are the flowers of darkness, white and wonderful beyond belief.

Then their radiance becomes soiled and brown, they thaw, break, and scatter and vanish away. Already the primroses are coming out, and the almond is in bud. The winter is passing away. On the mountains the fierce snow gleams apricot gold as evening approaches, golden, apricot, but so bright that it is almost frightening. What can be so fiercely gleaming when all is shadowy? It is something inhuman and unmitigated between heaven and earth.

The heavens are strange and proud all the winter, their progress goes on without reference to the dim earth. The dawns come white and translucent, the lake is a moonstone in the dark hills, then across the lake there stretches a vein of fire, then a whole, orange, flashing track over the whiteness. There is the exquisite silent passage of the day, and then at evening the afterglow, a huge incandescence of rose, hanging above and gleaming, as if it were the presence of a host of angels in rapture. It gleams like a rapturous chorus, then passes away, and the stars appear, large and flashing.

Meanwhile, the primroses are dawning on the ground, their light is growing stronger, spreading over the banks and under the bushes. Between the olive roots the violets are out, large, white, grave violets, and less serious blue ones. And looking down the bill, among the grey smoke of olive leaves, pink puffs of smoke are rising up. It is the almond and the apricot trees, it is the Spring.

A break from this miraculous heat, at least.

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Enters the Leaf

Primo Levi survived Auschwitz to write a prodigious amount of scholarship, essays and fiction before plunging to his death down the stairwell of his Turin apartment building in 1987. This is from the final section of his memoir, The Periodic Table, in which he imagines the life of a carbon atom.

Our character lies for hundreds of millions of years, bound to three atoms of oxygen and one of calcium, in the form of limestone: it already has a very long cosmic history behind it, but we shall ignore it. For it time does not exist, or exists only in the form of sluggish variations in temperature, daily or seasonal, if, for the good fortune of this tale, its position is not too far from the earth’s surface. Its existence, whose monotony cannot be thought of without horror, is a pitiless alternation of hots and colds, that is, of oscillations (always of equal frequency) a trifle more restricted and a trifle more ample: an imprisonment, for this potentially living personage, worthy of the Catholic Hell. To it, until this moment, the present tense is suited, which is that of description, rather than the past tense, which is that of narration – it is congealed in an eternal present, barely scratched by the moderate quivers of thermal agitation.

But, precisely for the good fortune of the narrator, whose story could otherwise have come to an end, the limestone rock ledge of which the atom forms a part lies on the surface. It lies within reach of man and his pickax (all honor to the pickax and its modern equivalents; they are still the most important intermediaries in the millennial dialogue between the elements and man): at any moment – which I, the narrator, decide out of pure caprice to be the year 1840 – a blow of the pickax detached it and sent it on its way to the lime kiln, plunging it into the world of things that change. It was roasted until it separated from the calcium, which remained so to speak with its feet on the ground and went to meet a less brilliant destiny, which we shall not narrate. Still firmly clinging to two of its three former oxygen companions, it issued from the chimney and took the path of the air. Its story, which once was immobile, now turned tumultuous.

It was caught by the wind, flung down on the earth, lifted ten kilometers high. It was breathed in by a falcon, descending into its precipitous lungs, but did not penetrate its rich blood and was expelled. It dissolved three times in the water of the sea, once in the water of a cascading torrent, and again was expelled. It traveled with the wind, for eight years: now high, now low, on the sea and among the clouds, over forests, deserts, and limitless expanses of ice; then it stumbled into capture and the organic adventure.

Carbon, in fact, is a singular element: it is the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance: but its promotion, its entry into the living world, is not easy and must follow an obligatory, intricate path, which has been clarified (and not yet definitively) only in recent years. If the elaboration of carbon were not a common daily occurrence, on the scale of billions of tons a week, wherever the green of a leaf appears, it would by full right deserve to be called a miracle.

The atom we are speaking of, accompanied by its two satellites, which maintained it in a gaseous state, was therefore borne by the wind along a row of vines in the year 1848. It had the good fortune to brush against a leaf, penetrate it, and be nailed there by a ray of the sun. If my language here becomes imprecise and allusive, it is not only because of my ignorance: this decisive event, this instantaneous work a tre – of the carbon dioxide, the light, and the vegetal greenery – has not yet been described in definitive terms, and perhaps it will not be for a long time to come, so different is it from the other ‘organic’ chemistry which is the cumbersome, slow, and ponderous work of man: and yet this refined, minute, and quick-witted chemistry was ‘invented’ two or three billion years ago by our silent sisters, the plants, which do not experiment and do not discuss, and whose temperature is identical to that of the environment in which they live. If to comprehend is the same as forming an image, we will never form an image of a happening whose scale is a millionth of a millimeter, whose rhythm is a millionth of a second and whose protagonists are in their essence invisible. Every verbal description must he inadequate, and one will be as good as the next, so let us settle for the following description.

Our atom of carbon enters the leaf, colliding with other innumerable (but here useless) molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. It adheres to a large and complicated molecule that activates it, and simultaneously receives the decisive message from the sky, in the flashing form of a packet of solar light: in an instant, like an insect caught by a spider, it is separated from its oxygen, combined with hydrogen and (one thinks) phosphorus, and finally inserted in a chain, whether long or short does not matter, but it is the chain of life. All this happens swiftly, in silence, at the temperature and pressure of the atmosphere, and gratis: dear colleagues, when we learn to do likewise we will be sicut Deus [like God], and we will have also solved the problem of hunger in the world.

But there is more and worse, to our shame and that of our art.

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The Big Muddy

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From Mark Twain’s The Body of the Nation, Harper’s 1863:

It is a remarkable river in this:  that instead of widening toward its mouth,
it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper.  From the junction of the Ohio
to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water:
thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the ‘Passes,’ above
the mouth, it is but little over half a mile.  At the junction of the Ohio
the Mississippi’s depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually,
reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable–not in the upper,
but in the lower river.  The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez
(three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)–about fifty feet.
But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet;
at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two
and one half.

An article in the New Orleans ‘Times-Democrat,’ based upon reports
of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred
and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico–which brings to mind
Captain Marryat’s rude name for the Mississippi–‘the Great Sewer.’
This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred
and forty-one feet high.

The mud deposit gradually extends the land–but only gradually;
it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred
years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history.
The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be
at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred
miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river.
This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any
trouble at all–one hundred and twenty thousand years.
Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that lies
around there anywhere.

The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way–
its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow
necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself.
More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at
a single jump!  These cut-offs have had curious effects:
they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts,
and built up sand bars and forests in front of them.
The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg:
a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and Delta is now TWO
MILES ABOVE Vicksburg.

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1961

With all the highways and Zimmerman’s birthday coming up and all, seems like a good time for some Fanon. This time through the  [translated] words of J.P. Sartre. If you haven’t read Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnes de le Terre, 1961), you should. This is from Sartre’s preface:

NOT so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as go-betweens. In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved. The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open … thenon! … therhood!’ It was the golden age.

It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to talk by themselves? Just look at what we have made of them! We did not doubt but that they would accept our ideals, since they accused us of not being faithful to them. Then, indeed, Europe could believe in her mission; she had hellenized the Asians; she had created a new breed, the Graeco-Latin Negroes. We might add, quite between ourselves, as men of the world: ‘After all, let them bawl their heads off, it relieves their feelings; dogs that bark don’t bite.’

A new generation came on the scene, which changed the issue. With unbelievable patience, its writers and poets tried to explain to us that our values and the true facts of their lives did not hang together, and that they could neither reject them completely nor yet assimilate them. By and large, what they were saying was this: ‘You are making us into monstrosities; your humanism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart.’ Very much at our ease, we listened to them all; colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, and for that matter they do not read much of him, but they do not need a philosopher to tell them that uneasy consciences are caught up in their own contradictions. They will not get anywhere; so, let us perpetuate their discomfort; nothing will come of it but talk. If they were, the experts told us, asking for anything at all precise in their wailing, it would be integration. Of course, there is no question of granting that; the system, which depends on over-exploitation, as you know, would be ruined. But it’s enough to hold the carrot in front of their noses, they’ll gallop all right. As to a revolt, we need not worry at all; what native in his senses would go off to massacre the fair sons of Europe simply to become European as they are? In short, we encouraged these disconsolate spirits and thought it not a bad idea for once to award the Prix Goncourt to a Negro. That was before ’39.

1961. Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience.’ The tone is new. Who dares to speak thus? It is an African, a man from the Third World, an ex-‘native’. He adds: ‘Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to keep away from it.’ In other words, she’s done for. A truth which is not pleasant to state but of which we are all convinced, are we not, fellow-Europeans, in the marrow of our bones?

We must however make one reservation. When a Frenchman, for example, says to other Frenchmen ‘The country is done for’ — which has happened, I should think, almost every day since 1930 — it is emotional talk; burning with love and fury, the speaker includes himself with his fellow-countrymen. And then, usually, he adds ‘Unless …’ His meaning is clear; no more mistakes must be made; if his instructions are not carried out to the letter, then and only then will the country go to pieces. In short, it is a threat followed by a piece of advice and these remarks are so much the less shocking in that they spring from a national intersubjectivity. But on the contrary when Fanon says of Europe that she is rushing to her doom, far from sounding the alarm he is merely setting out a diagnosis. This doctor neither claims that she is a hopeless case — miracles have been known to exist — nor does he give her the means to cure herself. He certifies that she is dying, on external evidence, founded on symptoms that he can observe. As to curing her, no; he has other things to think about; he does not give a damn whether she lives or dies. Because of this, his book is scandalous. And if you murmur, jokingly embarrassed, ‘He has it in for us!’ the true nature of the scandal escapes you; for Fanon has nothing in for you at all; his work — red-hot for some — in what concerns you is as cold as ice; he speaks of you often, never to you. The black Goncourts and the yellow Nobels are finished; the days of colonized laureats are over. An ex-native French-speaking, bends that language to new requirements, makes use of it, and speaks to the colonized only: ‘Natives of an under-developed countries, unite!’ What a downfall! For the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even consider us as valid intermediaries: we are the objects of their speeches. Of course, Fanon mentions in passing our well-known crimes: Sétif, Hanoi, Madagascar: but he does not waste his time in condemning them; he uses them. If he demonstrates the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations which unite and oppose the colonists to the people of the mother country, it is for his brothers; his aim is to teach them to beat us at our own game.