d i a m o n d s e a: The Singaporeans are alright
It’s a sunny Tuesday, and I wake up to learn that 3 are dead and more than 100 are injured from bombings at the Boston Marathon.
[…]But should you grieve for a tragedy so remote? And how do you go about doing it? What if you do? Is far-flung empathy still empathy, or is it superficial?
On the same day, around 55 people were killed (the count is still rising) and hundreds injured in a spate of bomb attacks across Iraq. And no doubt many others die to no one’s notice in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Singapore (especially Singapore, where the only death in the news is this), in the UK, indeed everywhere. We don’t deserve the consolations of sadness or grief. What we ought to feel is guilt, for we will never account for all these deaths, all this suffering; even if it were possible, it would be too much to bear.
But I don’t feel guilt. I felt relief when a couple of people I know were confirmed to be unharmed; one of them had run the marathon and crossed the finish line only an hour before the bombs went off. Before that, I had hoped (prayed) for their safety, I had also therefore hoped that someone else (someone else’s friend) would make up the undeniable and unconfrontable statistical count of the dead (3) and injured (more than 100, up to 10 with amputated limbs).
President Obama said as part of his first statement on the tragedy:
And we will find out who did this; we’ll find out why they did this.
Why why? Why the need to make a narrative for the perpetrator? Who speaks for the dozens hurt and already forgotten? The Boston Marathon was dedicated to the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre — one mile for each victim. What do we remember of Sandy Hook, which was in every headline all over the world less than half a year ago? By now, nothing, not even the perpetrator’s name (and then, why not ‘not even’ the victims’ names? And not at all their voices, their stories?).
In The Work of Mourning (trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas), Derrida writes of Max Loreau:
How to let him have the last word and yet speak of him, of him alone?
Derrida’s anxiety in mourning Max, as he calls him, is that he cannot mourn him without co-opting his alterity, without turning Max into Derrida’s mourning, thus dealing him a second death, as a final act of exclusion, from the community of the living.
This being at a loss also has to do with a duty: to let the friend speak, to turn speech over to him, his speech, and especially not to take it from him, not to take it in his place — no offense seems worse at the death of a friend (and I already feel I have fallen prey to it) — to allow him to speak, to occupy his silence or to take up speech oneself only in order, if this is possible, to give it back to him.
This injunction — to take up speech only in order to give it back to those we mourn — is a paradox, it is impossible, and not just impossible, but the impossible (in Derrida’s French, l’impossible). Mourning presents itself not as a problem to be solved but as an aporia that one must live, like Luisa Lanzberg in W. G. ‘Max’ Sebald’s The Emigrants (trans. Michael Hulse) seems to do:
I really cannot say how I went on living, or how I got over the terrible pain of parting that tormented me day and night after Fritz’s death, or indeed whether I have ever got over it. At all events, throughout the war I worked as a nurse with Dr Kosilowski. All the spa buildings and sanatoria in Kissingen were full of the wounded and the convalescent. Whenever a new arrival reminded me of Fritz, in appearance or manner, I would be overwhelmed afresh by my tragedy, and that may be why I looked after those young men so well, some of whom were very seriously injured — as if by doing so I might still save the life of my horn player.
Not as if the seriously injured were Fritz, but as if by tending to them she might save Fritz’s life, which had already been lost — an indefinite mourning, rehearsing over and over again the trauma of loss and the fantasy of retrieval, which in Luisa’s case meant keeping company among the small and silent victims of an incomprehensible Great War and which in Sebald’s case meant telling the stories of Max Ferber and his mother Luisa Lanzberg and of all the other unremembered people that his books are forever unable to escape.
Lota, Laughter
On 17 September 1967, Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares arrived in New York City to visit Elizabeth Bishop, who was then staying at a West Village apartment owned by Loren MacIvers. That night, Lota, as she was known, took an overdose of Valium and slipped into a coma from which she never awakened.
—-
On 17 September 1973, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Ashley Brown:
I feel the time is approaching when I must give a PARTY. I usually enjoy my own very much, but the prospect seems too much right now - probably because it’s because every time I laugh, I get an awful stitch in my side…
—-
On 17 September 1952, Bishop had written to U. T. and Joseph Summers about the wedding of the cook and the gardener who worked for her and Lota:
Driving away from the judge’s the blushing bride said she wasn’t going to sleep with him until they’d been married in the church (a fairy tale), ha-ha-ha, and Lota said, ‘Lulu’ (the gardener), ‘insist on your rights - insist on your rights in ten minutes’ - much laughter all around…
—-
On 6 October 1979, before she died of a brain aneurysm that same day, Bishop wrote and mailed a letter to John Frederick Nims:
Two of three years ago I was talking away about ‘The Quaker Graveyard [in Nantucket’, by Robert Lowell] and when I asked a question the whole class responded in chorus with what I discovered […] were the footnotes from the Norton anthology - some right, in that case, but again some wrong. We finally all got to laughing - but that was an unusually bright class.
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?nkyp63k1z50sng5
zipped up most of the music I’ve made so far for a friend, thought i’d put it up here too
includes: so far ep, sketches 29/12/12, 10 things, introduction, autumn, spring (for mick kelly), winter (for f. jasmine) and, with Organ Tapes, Tun Xi
C.
On a February many years ago, C. found himself afflicted with an overwhelming melancholy. It came to him like a vision, suddenly, and impossible to comprehend or avoid.
How distasteful everything was then for C., who could not even muster the will to feel disgust, much less hatred. He was left only with a sickening taste in his mouth that would start from the moment he woke up and then slowly increase in its intensity, so that when he finally collapsed into bed at night he would be on the verge of regurgitating what little food he had managed to eat that day.
His then girlfriend (whose last name C. can no longer recall, although he can sketch her face from memory with disquieting accuracy) left him, as she had become unable to tolerate the bitter ironic witticisms that had come to dominate all their conversations. For the same reason, C. lost almost all his friends. It was as if he had been possessed by a demon, for in a final analysis the way in which he alienated them had been nothing short of systematic. Before the end of March, rendered helplessly unproductive by his malady, C. was forced to leave his job by his puzzled superiors, who had seen in C. a promising young candidate for a managerial position before his inexplicable breakdown.
It seemed to C. that he had entered a dark night of the soul, that is to say a purgation almost to the point of an annihilation of the self; it is the emptying out of every hope and every felicity so that, at the extremities of emptiness and despair, one would be fully unified with God, being a wholly empty vessel ready to receive the Spirit, to put it somewhat crudely, for C. is no theologian, nor does he believe in God. In fact, C. is quite certain that he has mangled his interpretation completely. Nevertheless, he was capable of imagining the Christian’s disgrace as being similar to his own, and he had a paradoxical hope for a similar operation of grace, if not divine grace, then surely some sort of earthly grace. Yet, if one followed the argument, the only way for grace to express itself was for C. to go further down his path of degradation, to fully inhabit the dark night into which he had been thrust.
C. almost died that year. He contemplated suicide many times, and attempted it just once. It was on a rainy afternoon in September that C., lying in a warm bath, opened his veins from wrist to elbow. Until today, C. remembers how beautiful the blood looked as it gushed out into the water. It was like a nebula, a dense and sprawling cloud yearning towards the singular point of a heavenly star. This was the last thought that passed through C.’s mind before he slipped into unconsciousness.
To this day, C. does not know how he survived. He was brought to the hospital by a woman who had not given her name and never came to visit him. When he returned home, it was apparent that his apartment had been broken into. The door had been forced open, and several of C.’s valuables, including a Seiko watch that his father had given him, were missing. C. wonders now if he had been rescued by a potential burglar and, if so, why this burglar had personally driven him to the hospital in time for him to be saved. Compared to this, C. says, it seems almost more plausible that God had sent an angel to save me, and that I had only been burgled after that, during the time I spent lying in the hospital. I do not believe in God, but neither can I find any explanation for the strange happenings, indeed miracles, that came by me that day.
A few days after hearing C.’s account, Z. realises that C. had given no indication of whether he had ever managed to escape the dark night that first engulfed his soul on February all those years ago. C. had declined to exchange addresses or phone numbers, not because I dislike you, C. had assured Z., but for reasons that I could not explain to myself, let alone to you. At the time, Z. had accepted this without question, being a rather private person himself, but now, Z. feels himself besieged by suggestions that C. had been a ghost, or perhaps an angel, who had existed only for an instant, and that he had now vanished from the earth forever, without rescue.
