A dozen notes and quotes #3
October 4th 2007 05:07
When you've had a strong teacher, then a lax teacher, you yearn for the whip; and when you've had lax then strong, you yearn for the holiday.
When you're a tourist, you look for things to interest you: when you're a native, you stare through glazed eyes.
... a gestalt shift when I gaze at the landscape. This could be an English road, and this could be English weather. I then imagine myself transported there, and I say, "It appears the same; so what is the difference really between being in England and being here?" And it seems to me that this is the difference -- that apart from the practical, and apart from the symbolic, all foreign country has the quality that you don't know what to expect -- so you look and react and live in it a different way -- somewhat like Bad Boy Bubby, new to the world...
In England the earth is so worked over, so human-adapted, that the place needs myth to survive.
In England and Japan, the trains run on time to the minute -- generally. Whereas, this is not exactly the case in Sydney.
The drawback to such efficiency is that people begin to factor it into their planning, they develop a sense that on-time trains are normal. And sooner or later this evolves into a sense of entitlement or necessity or rightfulness.
But if you don't set up high expectations in the first place...
It's unavoidable, over time, that things will imbed themselves in your skin -- bits of dirt, splinters, microbes, other foreign bodies... Just as, when you go to the zoo, you see all types of things imbedded in the creatures there.
You will die carrying a lot of your history, quite literally, with you.
... the sense that you've been to fairyland, you've been enlightened, you've been mentally to Mars, and back again, and you've got little to show for it. Good novels are sometimes like this. You live a hundred lifetimes, and then you return to real life, and you feel like you're changed, but that change needn't reflect in behaviour, nor be evident to anyone else.
And so there is another sensation -- that you're a beginner again, a novitiate, though you've spent decades mastering.
... to have been on mental adventures to who knows where, to the furthest reaches of reason, but I come back to you now, and I can't convey to you what's happened or what I've done or where I've travelled.
The strange sense, the "Memento" sense, that it was a different person who was there...
The times when you wake me up in the middle of the night, and talk to me, and actually have a conversation with me, and I have no memory of the event afterwards, and I ask about what I said.
The times when I've been to hospital, and the anaesthetic begat amnesia.
The times when I was drunk and had no recollection.
Philip K Dick and "Paycheck".
Perhaps I've written all of this before.
And to judge from the pride on the Confederate side
I'd say five hundred thousand rebels can't be wrong.
-- Michelle Shocked, "Shaking Hands"
Sunday Age, 16/9/07, page 18
The Ethicist
by Juliette Hughes
... No one would argue that it’s good to let kids shove cutlery in power points, but if what’s stopping them is fear of punishment, they’re learning nothing. If they obey only because they fear you, does that make them good? It follows that if they are obedient to you only through fear, they may develop a tendency to obey anyone who can intimidate or charm them. Such training creates potential cult-followers, not people of conscience.
... The most rigidly conforming cultures provide great liberties for a powerful few and limited freedoms for the rest, with no one taking ultimate responsibility for their actions.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the concept of blind obedience was ending even as teachers and parents thundered: "Because I say so!" Baby boomers fought their parents and resisted war-mongering governments with unprecedented assistance from a movement towards human rights that had occurred at the very highest level. The old bedrock of unthinking compliance that had underpinned armies, legal systems and religions had cracked when Nazi mass murderers sat in the dock at Nuremberg and claimed they were only following orders... if any country made laws that enabled crimes against humanity, it was every person’s moral duty to disobey them...
In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to test the effect of obedience on ethics... Milgram believed when he began that very few people would intentionally hurt someone else, but in fact 65 per cent of the participants went on to deliver what they believed to be a potentially fatal shock...
Ahu Ghraib proved that ordinary people still follow orders to commit crimes against humanity.
[...]
In the end, obedience is a poor substitute for a conscience.
The Germans are portrayed always as the horde, the mindless many, unfairly over-armed and outnumbering.
One rarely hears of the heroism of German soldiers -- commando teams that infiltrate against the odds -- self-sacrifice -- gritty determination.
And no one dares endow Germans with fairytale qualities like intelligence and good luck.
A friend reports seeing the shoes at Auschwitz (there are glass cases full of shoes) -- and it was then that he had the experience. The chill, the horror. This is an evil, evil place. Over here is a pair just like I would wear. Over there is a pair just like my wife's. -- The reality of Auschwitz, the facticity of the event, comes home to you, or at any rate a small part of it.
And I don't think that this is at all an unusual experience. Must blog about it sometime. I think a lot of people see those shoes, or the shoes at a neighbouring camp, Madjanek, and they're profoundly moved by them.
A month ago, I saw archive footage of the siege of St Petersburg, and it was striking how ordinary was the clothing of the people there, how little the fashions have changed.
Smell is sometimes alleged to be the most evocative sense. Acting teachers will often make use of it, and Peter Railton, writing on "desire", mentions that it's the sense most linked to motivation.
From an article entitled "Staying human in the face of suffering", by Walter Reich: --
... But I also asked him if any of those documents had made him cry... Hilberg was taken aback by my question. Others had asked him a similar question -- whether reading any document had made him feel nauseated -- but, apparently, no one had asked him whether any had made him cry...
Hilberg thought awhile. And then he said yes, he had cried once when he read a document. He had come across the record of a court proceeding in Berlin in 1941 or 1942. A Jew had been issued a voucher to buy a ration of coffee, a rare commodity in Germany at the time. Vouchers for coffee were among the increasing number of privileges that Jews in Germany didn’t have -- until, finally, they didn’t have the privilege to live. The Berlin Jew understood that he had received the voucher in error. But he took it to a grocer anyway who, knowing that his customer was a Jew, refused to sell him the coffee. Indignant, the Jew went to court. The German judge acknowledged that the voucher was genuine and that, according to the letter of the law, the Jew should be sold a ration of coffee. But he added that selling the coffee to the Jew would violate the spirit of the law, which aimed to restrict Jews from enjoying such privileges.
The case was, in retrospect, an absurd one; very soon afterwards, that Jew was almost surely sent for gassing. Reading that document, Hilberg told me, he cried. I asked him why, of the many documents he'd read, it was that one, about one Jew's absurd quest for coffee, that made him cry. What about all those documents about the ghettos, the starvation, the cattle cars filled with human cargo sent for extermination, the execution pits, the gassing centres? Hilberg told me that the document stirred up an ancient olfactory memory. It reminded him of the cafes of his youth in pre-war Vienna, Austria. He remembered the smell of the coffee. And Hilberg, the insistent documentarian, may have identified with the Jew insisting on the validity of his voucher. The clinical wall he had set up to enable him to work on the Jewish catastrophe had developed a temporary crack through which wafted not only the smell of the coffee but also the memory of the Jewish people and of himself as one of them. And he cried.
Three years later, I received from Hilberg a published copy of The Politics of Memory. On a card he wrote, "The paragraph you suggested is on page 76." He had inserted the story of the court record he had seen about the Jew and the coffee. In his paragraph he didn’t mention that the story had made him cry. He said it had made him feel "nauseous". He apologised to me, a physician, for using the word "nauseous" -- he knew it should have been "nauseated". He wrote that he had queried his editor, because, "medically speaking, a nauseous person is someone who causes nausea, but as you can see, people are not nauseated any more". He was right, his editor wrong. For the record, Hilberg was not only nauseated; he also cried.
Notes
-- Tuesday 16 October 2007: About things imbedded in skin... This image is used to striking effect in the "Orphues" role-playing game. A type of spectre called a "Lawgiver" is described thusly: "Lawgivers carry the same faces they did as spirits, albeit chalk-white. They are wrapped in a thick, leather-like skin and the chains of their servitude, which they can control like tentacles. They also carry wounds of torture, sometimes with the implements still embedded into their gauze ["gauze" being the ghostly stuff spectres are made of]."
The series, and its predecessor, was generally imagistically striking. Wikipedia notes: "[T]he significant presence of morbid and horrific content creates a tone of despair and horror with immense creativity, bringing to mind the works of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Clive Barker. Wraith: the Oblivion has been described as the most artistically consistent of the World of Darkness series line (due to its rich depiction of the afterlife and steadfast dedication to thematic integrity), but also is the least commercially popular (due to its graphically dark tone and sometimes confrontational style of play)."
***
When you're a tourist, you look for things to interest you: when you're a native, you stare through glazed eyes.
***
... a gestalt shift when I gaze at the landscape. This could be an English road, and this could be English weather. I then imagine myself transported there, and I say, "It appears the same; so what is the difference really between being in England and being here?" And it seems to me that this is the difference -- that apart from the practical, and apart from the symbolic, all foreign country has the quality that you don't know what to expect -- so you look and react and live in it a different way -- somewhat like Bad Boy Bubby, new to the world...
***
In England the earth is so worked over, so human-adapted, that the place needs myth to survive.
***
In England and Japan, the trains run on time to the minute -- generally. Whereas, this is not exactly the case in Sydney.
The drawback to such efficiency is that people begin to factor it into their planning, they develop a sense that on-time trains are normal. And sooner or later this evolves into a sense of entitlement or necessity or rightfulness.
But if you don't set up high expectations in the first place...
***
It's unavoidable, over time, that things will imbed themselves in your skin -- bits of dirt, splinters, microbes, other foreign bodies... Just as, when you go to the zoo, you see all types of things imbedded in the creatures there.
You will die carrying a lot of your history, quite literally, with you.
***
... the sense that you've been to fairyland, you've been enlightened, you've been mentally to Mars, and back again, and you've got little to show for it. Good novels are sometimes like this. You live a hundred lifetimes, and then you return to real life, and you feel like you're changed, but that change needn't reflect in behaviour, nor be evident to anyone else.
And so there is another sensation -- that you're a beginner again, a novitiate, though you've spent decades mastering.
... to have been on mental adventures to who knows where, to the furthest reaches of reason, but I come back to you now, and I can't convey to you what's happened or what I've done or where I've travelled.
***
The strange sense, the "Memento" sense, that it was a different person who was there...
The times when you wake me up in the middle of the night, and talk to me, and actually have a conversation with me, and I have no memory of the event afterwards, and I ask about what I said.
The times when I've been to hospital, and the anaesthetic begat amnesia.
The times when I was drunk and had no recollection.
Philip K Dick and "Paycheck".
Perhaps I've written all of this before.
***
And to judge from the pride on the Confederate side
I'd say five hundred thousand rebels can't be wrong.
-- Michelle Shocked, "Shaking Hands"
***
Sunday Age, 16/9/07, page 18
The Ethicist
by Juliette Hughes
... No one would argue that it’s good to let kids shove cutlery in power points, but if what’s stopping them is fear of punishment, they’re learning nothing. If they obey only because they fear you, does that make them good? It follows that if they are obedient to you only through fear, they may develop a tendency to obey anyone who can intimidate or charm them. Such training creates potential cult-followers, not people of conscience.
... The most rigidly conforming cultures provide great liberties for a powerful few and limited freedoms for the rest, with no one taking ultimate responsibility for their actions.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the concept of blind obedience was ending even as teachers and parents thundered: "Because I say so!" Baby boomers fought their parents and resisted war-mongering governments with unprecedented assistance from a movement towards human rights that had occurred at the very highest level. The old bedrock of unthinking compliance that had underpinned armies, legal systems and religions had cracked when Nazi mass murderers sat in the dock at Nuremberg and claimed they were only following orders... if any country made laws that enabled crimes against humanity, it was every person’s moral duty to disobey them...
In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to test the effect of obedience on ethics... Milgram believed when he began that very few people would intentionally hurt someone else, but in fact 65 per cent of the participants went on to deliver what they believed to be a potentially fatal shock...
Ahu Ghraib proved that ordinary people still follow orders to commit crimes against humanity.
[...]
In the end, obedience is a poor substitute for a conscience.
***
The Germans are portrayed always as the horde, the mindless many, unfairly over-armed and outnumbering.
One rarely hears of the heroism of German soldiers -- commando teams that infiltrate against the odds -- self-sacrifice -- gritty determination.
And no one dares endow Germans with fairytale qualities like intelligence and good luck.
***
A friend reports seeing the shoes at Auschwitz (there are glass cases full of shoes) -- and it was then that he had the experience. The chill, the horror. This is an evil, evil place. Over here is a pair just like I would wear. Over there is a pair just like my wife's. -- The reality of Auschwitz, the facticity of the event, comes home to you, or at any rate a small part of it.
And I don't think that this is at all an unusual experience. Must blog about it sometime. I think a lot of people see those shoes, or the shoes at a neighbouring camp, Madjanek, and they're profoundly moved by them.
A month ago, I saw archive footage of the siege of St Petersburg, and it was striking how ordinary was the clothing of the people there, how little the fashions have changed.
***
Smell is sometimes alleged to be the most evocative sense. Acting teachers will often make use of it, and Peter Railton, writing on "desire", mentions that it's the sense most linked to motivation.
From an article entitled "Staying human in the face of suffering", by Walter Reich: --
... But I also asked him if any of those documents had made him cry... Hilberg was taken aback by my question. Others had asked him a similar question -- whether reading any document had made him feel nauseated -- but, apparently, no one had asked him whether any had made him cry...
Hilberg thought awhile. And then he said yes, he had cried once when he read a document. He had come across the record of a court proceeding in Berlin in 1941 or 1942. A Jew had been issued a voucher to buy a ration of coffee, a rare commodity in Germany at the time. Vouchers for coffee were among the increasing number of privileges that Jews in Germany didn’t have -- until, finally, they didn’t have the privilege to live. The Berlin Jew understood that he had received the voucher in error. But he took it to a grocer anyway who, knowing that his customer was a Jew, refused to sell him the coffee. Indignant, the Jew went to court. The German judge acknowledged that the voucher was genuine and that, according to the letter of the law, the Jew should be sold a ration of coffee. But he added that selling the coffee to the Jew would violate the spirit of the law, which aimed to restrict Jews from enjoying such privileges.
The case was, in retrospect, an absurd one; very soon afterwards, that Jew was almost surely sent for gassing. Reading that document, Hilberg told me, he cried. I asked him why, of the many documents he'd read, it was that one, about one Jew's absurd quest for coffee, that made him cry. What about all those documents about the ghettos, the starvation, the cattle cars filled with human cargo sent for extermination, the execution pits, the gassing centres? Hilberg told me that the document stirred up an ancient olfactory memory. It reminded him of the cafes of his youth in pre-war Vienna, Austria. He remembered the smell of the coffee. And Hilberg, the insistent documentarian, may have identified with the Jew insisting on the validity of his voucher. The clinical wall he had set up to enable him to work on the Jewish catastrophe had developed a temporary crack through which wafted not only the smell of the coffee but also the memory of the Jewish people and of himself as one of them. And he cried.
Three years later, I received from Hilberg a published copy of The Politics of Memory. On a card he wrote, "The paragraph you suggested is on page 76." He had inserted the story of the court record he had seen about the Jew and the coffee. In his paragraph he didn’t mention that the story had made him cry. He said it had made him feel "nauseous". He apologised to me, a physician, for using the word "nauseous" -- he knew it should have been "nauseated". He wrote that he had queried his editor, because, "medically speaking, a nauseous person is someone who causes nausea, but as you can see, people are not nauseated any more". He was right, his editor wrong. For the record, Hilberg was not only nauseated; he also cried.
***
Notes
-- Tuesday 16 October 2007: About things imbedded in skin... This image is used to striking effect in the "Orphues" role-playing game. A type of spectre called a "Lawgiver" is described thusly: "Lawgivers carry the same faces they did as spirits, albeit chalk-white. They are wrapped in a thick, leather-like skin and the chains of their servitude, which they can control like tentacles. They also carry wounds of torture, sometimes with the implements still embedded into their gauze ["gauze" being the ghostly stuff spectres are made of]."
The series, and its predecessor, was generally imagistically striking. Wikipedia notes: "[T]he significant presence of morbid and horrific content creates a tone of despair and horror with immense creativity, bringing to mind the works of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Clive Barker. Wraith: the Oblivion has been described as the most artistically consistent of the World of Darkness series line (due to its rich depiction of the afterlife and steadfast dedication to thematic integrity), but also is the least commercially popular (due to its graphically dark tone and sometimes confrontational style of play)."
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Love this intriguing post (as always!)
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