Forgive and Forget?

If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.


- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

The Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

... those 50 grams of resin-soaked dope, which had been so potent that on the second day it had given him an anxiety attack so paralyzing he had gone to the bathroom in a Tufts University commemorative ceramic stein to avoid leaving the bedroom...

The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches.... and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs... and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes... and were reportedly blinding them...

The Awakening

Then suddenly this also was clear to him, he, who was in fact like one who had awakened or was newly born, must begin his life completely afresh. When he left the Jetavana grove that morning, the grove of the illustious One, already awakened, already on the way to himslef, it was his intention and it seemed the natural course to return to his home and his father. Now, however, in that moment as he stood still, as if a snake lay in his path, this thought also came to him: I am no longer what I was, I am no longer an ascetic, no longer a priest, no longer a Brahmin. What then shall I do at home with my father? Study? Offer sacrifices? Practice meditation? All this is over for me now.

Siddhartha stood still and for a moment an icy chill stole over him. He shivered inwardly like a small animal, like bird or a hare, when he realized how alone he was. He had been homeless for years and not felt like this. Now he did feel it. Previously when in deepest meditation, he was still his father's son, he was a Brahmin of high standing, a religious man. Now he was only Siddhartha, the awakened; otherwise nothing else. He breathed in deeply and for a moment he suddered. Nobody was so alone as he. He was no nobleman, belonging to any aristocracy, no artisan belonging to any guild and finding refuge in it, sharing its life and language. He was no Brahmin, sharing the life of the Brahmins, no ascetic belonging to the Samanans. Even the most secluded hermit in the woods was not one and alone; he belonged to a class of people. Govinda had become a monk, and thousands of monks were his Brothers, wore the same gown, shared his beliefs and spoke his language. But he, Siddhartha, where did he belong? Whose life would he share? Whose language would he speak?

At that moment, when the world found him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy dispair, but was more firmly himself than ever. That was the last shudder of his awakening, the last pains of birth. Immediately he moved on again and begain to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer looking homeward, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.

-Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Posted by Becca

A Place At The Table

It was late, maybe midnight
When we opened the door for Elijah
Fully expecting
Aunt Ida, in sable.
But it was Pharaoh that walked in to the wine and the whining
and asked for a seat at the little kids table
saying he had a few questions for us.

He said his son would have asked them
Had he been able to attend, that is,
had we not killed him.
But that was then, and they,
not we,
we hastened to mention,
and even they, one supposes, were decent of intention.

Our mother later insisted he'd been a perfect gentleman.
But for his beard,
and the bandages
he could have been one of us.
Oh, and except for the dust in the shake
of his hand
It isn't on all other nights, he began
that you toast the anniversary of a slaughter of lambs,
the painting of blood on the side of a door.
My son died Erev Pesach. What for?
To teach me my place? You didn't seen the look on his face
when the embalmers came to powder and pump and wrap him
into immortality.
They drained him like a crankcase.
You didn't see the look on his face.

But what of the faces whose traces you bear,
As a mirror bears ancestors
As if you were there
sandcrazy, sunblind, crowdcrazy, chainblind,
scared of the dark and the blood in the street
tired of freedom and nothing to eat
but half-baked masonry that tasted like sweat
aching to remember and afraid to forget
what slavery was like.
Admit it.
By the waters that parted you sat down and wept
when you remembered Goshen.

Once you were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt
and once, for a while, you were free.
But now you are masters with burdens more pressing
than dressing a desert in perfect triangles of mud.
You failed your God
when he sent a second flood
to make of a people, a Noah and more. What for?
Some thanks he got. A pawnshop in the wilderness.

"Let's see something in a god we can pen up and milk."
You needed that calf in its 14 carat clothes.
But just who were you fooling with the ring in its nose?

Tonight the celebration of the killing of lambs,
their blood dried to doorposts,
horseradish jam on the table it took you a week to set.
At least a week more, 'fore you get your digestion back right.
You couldn't leave Egypt if you wanted to tonight.

When they came to tell me about my son
in that dialect that doctors affect
the big words snaking past you like bad handwriting,
"In cases such as yours," they began, "let's speak frankly,
in cases of ... amputation,
it is not uncommon to encounter
the selfsame itches, burns, ticklishness
shooting as before from the direction of the ... amputee."
As if nothing had occurred.
As if I hadn't heard correctly.
As if he were still a part of me.

In cases such as mine, the good news is the area to which
the damage has been confined:
To my son, and another in every family in the land.
An extra place-setting at every household tonight,
except for the ones with the blood on the door.
What for? A lesson to mothers, drowning slowly in loss?
To fathers, who went quicker, strapped to chariots?
To horses, perhaps, their eyes bulging back against life, against sea.
And all so that you could be free.

Mine is the son unable to ask questions.
His is the blood in the libel of generations.
His, the wineglass untouched at the table.
His, the line that descends from Abel.
He will quietly crash your celebrations.
he will spike your festival punch with a vague taste of cracked glass.
Why on this night do you so carefully spill his blood
onto your best china?

Next year in Jerusalem,
or Hebron, or Shchem, don't say I didn't warn you
when playing the master has shaken and torn your dreams
to small sandy pieces.
Your God never did sell his property.
He only lets leases.
So shackle that promised land of yours.
Take, as your deed, your birth.
But know how much a promise is worth.
For once
you were promised
to me.


Gezer, Erev Pesach, 1979

--Posted by Jeff