Inspiration for Life
Posted by cathannabel in Personal on February 20, 2013
For the last eight years, I’ve been lucky enough to know this bloke called Tim. He was a colleague, and a friend. Each time he passed my office he’d put his head round the door and offer some truly awful joke, or a greeting in French, Spanish or Latin (or some mix of the three). Occasionally, just a rude noise. He made me laugh, but he was also one of the people I knew I could turn to for support, if I needed it. He was warm, generous, open and positive. Tim was a physicist, an artist (his work regularly featured at the Physics & Astronomy Art Exhibition – idiosyncratic semi-abstract paintings, and an installation involving apples at various stages of decay), a poet and a writer (as will be evident when his diary is published shortly), a musician, a gardener and passionate lover of the natural world – and above all a communicator.
Tim had terminal cancer. He was diagnosed back in June, and told that as the cancer has spread to his liver there wasn’t any chance to operate. Chemo could give him a bit of extra time. Tim reckoned he could beat the odds, that the time estimate the doctors gave was skewed both by the desire to not give false hope, and by the inclusion in the statistics of those whose life expectancy was already shortened by old age or other frailties. He found, along with despair and grief, a way of living in the world more intensely:
I’m looking at everything differently with a renewed intensity and concentration, as if to draw out of every image all the information I’ve never ‘seen’ before. The deep colour of the leaves of trees, the vivid green of grass, the happy laughs of children playing, the clinking of tea cups in a café accompanying the chat and the laughter. I remember that I am still part of this world and no tumour is going to defeat me without a fight. I’m sad, yet I’m happy; I’m angry yet I’m calm and I’m scared yet I’m brave for this new challenge that lays ahead.
When we heard of Tim’s diagnosis we had to think about how to tell people. Because it wasn’t just me whose life was enhanced by Tim being part of it, it was everyone in the department, staff and students. And Tim was adamant that the students who were about to graduate, all of whom he’d looked after during their first year at University, mustn’t have their celebration spoiled by this news. Some already knew he was ill, and already feared the outcome, and we had to tell them that it was pretty much as bad as it could be. Students came back in September to find that he was no longer in the department, that he wouldn’t be returning. That was hard, and there were tears. As the news spread, people have wanted to do something, to show their love and gratitude.
Initially this was expressed through messages of support for Tim and his family – it wasn’t easy to see what else we could actually do. The impetus to do something more, something different, came, of course, from Tim. On the day he was told that the cancer was terminal, he said that he’d been keeping a diary and wanted to use it in some way to help other people. The obvious thing was to publish it to raise funds for the specialist cancer services that he and so many other people rely on – and we will. But Tim’s vision went far beyond that. As first year tutor and PhD supervisor, Tim supported and inspired generations of students in Physics & Astronomy. And he wanted that to continue – to encourage people to believe in themselves, and to carry on learning throughout their lives, to revel in the possibilities that life holds.
So we set up a charity, called Inspiration for Life. Tim wasn’t sure about the title, didn’t think it was catchy enough. We were sure. The title sums up everything that we hope to do, and more than that, it sums up the impact Tim has had on so many of us. We’re working towards our first big event, 24 hours of lectures, on a host of topics, from physicists, philosophers, zoologists, historians, psychologists, lawyers and more. We’ve got musicians who’ll be busking around the building through the night, and people across the University baking biscuits and cakes to sell. And the wonderful thing is that we haven’t had to beg or cajole people to do this. The response – from speakers, and bakers, from students and staff – has been so enthusiastic, so generous, that it’s often moved me to tears. It’s going to be amazing, I know that.
The only thing is, Tim won’t be there. We knew he was unlikely to be well enough to attend, but we did hold on, for as long as we could, to the hope that he would be able to enjoy it vicariously, to watch the recordings afterwards and see the funds mount up for the causes we want to support.
But Tim slipped away on 5 February, after several weeks when it was clear his strength was failing. He died at home, with his family around him, as he had wished.
He didn’t beat the odds, as he’d hoped he would. But he’s in our hearts, in our memories. He’s made such a difference, touched so many people’s lives, given them, yes, inspiration. That’s been evident in the messages since he died, so many expressions of loss and grief, but also so many heartfelt thanks, so many debts of gratitude, and so much love, for him and for his family in their heartbreak.
From all of us, who’ve been privileged to have had you as part of our lives, thank you Tim.
Atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale.
http://www.justgiving.com/forTimRichardson
http://www.inspirationforlife.co.uk
And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell (Catullus, 61-54 BC)
More than a Name on a List: Hélène Berr
Posted by cathannabel in French 20th century history, Genocide, Second World War on January 26, 2013
It’s Holocaust Memorial Day. I’m thinking about how we can build bridges between past and present, by telling individual stories, by giving back to the people who were swallowed up in that terror their names, their faces, their uniqueness.
Sometimes we just have a name, sometimes a photograph and fragments of a life. And sometimes from the darkness a voice emerges that is so vivid that as you read you hear it, you hear the urgency, the passion, the despair and you want to reach out. Helene Berr’s is such a voice.
Her diary describes her life in Paris between 1942 and 1944. It wasn’t published till 2008, but since then it has become an essential document of the Holocaust and specifically of the Occupation of France. After the Liberation, her fiance and surviving family members circulated the manuscript amongst themselves, but eventually it was offered to the Shoah Memorial, published to great acclaim, and since then has been translated into 26 languages. It’s inspired an exhibition at the Shoah Memorial , which uses Helene’s story and her words to illuminate some of the darkest corners of those dark years.
Hélène has been called the French Anne Frank, but whilst both kept journals which have become key documents of the Holocaust, and both died in the last weeks before Liberation, they’re very different. Others have noted the parallels between the publication of her journal, and the discovery of the manuscript of Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise.
However, these comparisons don’t do justice to the remarkable and unique qualities of this diary. Hélène lived in the heart of Occupied Paris, walked its streets wearing the yellow star, worked with Jewish orphans, played music, fell in love. And she wrote this poignant, vivid and impassioned account of the events she witnessed, ‘pour ne pas les oublier, parce qu’il ne faut pas oublier’, setting herself the task of recording everything, giving the unfolding tragedy its full weight, showing it raw, naked, without distortion.
16 April 1942
S said ‘The Germans are going to win the war’. I said ‘No!’. But I didn’t know what else to say. I was conscious of my cowardice – the cowardice of not standing up in front of him for what I believed – so I shook myself – I exclaimed ‘But what will become of us if the Germans win?’. He shrugged: ‘Bah! Nothing will change ‘. I knew what he would say. ‘There will always be the sun and the water’. I was all the more irritated because deep down, at that moment, I felt the supreme pointlessness of all these arguments, in the face of beauty. And yet I knew that I was falling under a malign spell. … I forced myself to say: ‘but they won’t let everyone enjoy the light and the water’. Happily, this phrase saved me. I don’t want to be a coward.
8 June 1942
My God, I had no idea it would be so hard. I was so brave all day. I held my head high, and looked people straight in the face, when they averted their eyes. But it’s hard. …. This morning I went out with Mother. Two kids in the street pointed at us, saying ‘Hey, have you seen? Jews’. But otherwise things seemed normal. … A young couple were waiting, I saw the woman point me out to her companion. I heard her say. ‘It’s heartbreaking’. On the bus there was a woman, probably a domestic servant, who had already smiled at me before getting on board, and who turned several times to smile; a smart gentleman stared at me: I couldn’t interpret the stare, but I looked back proudly.
18 July 1942
I felt guilty, that there was something I hadn’t seen, this reality. This woman, her sister who has four children has been taken. The evening of the round-up, she hid, but unluckily went back up to the concierge just as they came to find her. Mme Bieder is like a hunted animal. She’s not afraid for herself. but she’s terrified that they’ll take her children from her. …. At Montmartre, there were so many arrests that the streets were blocked. The faubourg Saint Denis is almost deserted. They’re separating mothers from their children. I’m recording the facts hastily, so as not to forget, because we mustn’t forget.
31 January 1944
I used to quote, not long ago, a phrase from a Russian play: ‘We shall rest, Uncle Vanya, we shall rest’. It meant the sleep of the tomb. But more and more I say to myself that only the dead escape this persecution; when I hear of the death of a Jew now, I think, ‘they’re out of the reach of the Germans’. Isn’t that horrible? We hardly weep for the dead any more.
15 February 1944
Why then does the German soldier who I pass in the street not attack or bother me? Why does he often hold the train door for me, or say ‘Excuse me’ if he blocks my way? Why? Because people don’t know – or rather they don’t think any more, they’re just about whatever they’ve been ordered to do right now. But they don’t even see the incomprehensible illogic of holding the door open for me, when tomorrow they may send me to be deported, and yet I will be the same unique person. … Also no doubt they don’t know everything – one atrocious characteristic of this regime is its hypocrisy. They don’t know all of the horrible details of the persecutions, because there’s only a small group of torturers, and of Gestapo who are implicated in it. Would they feel it, if they knew? Would they feel the suffering of these people dragged from their homes, these women separated from their flesh and blood? They’re too brutalised for that. And then they don’t think – I always come back to that – I believe it’s the source of evil and the thing on which this regime bases its power. Annihilate personal thoughts, the reaction of the individual conscience, that’s the first step to Nazism’.
Cultured and intelligent, a student at the Sorbonne until the anti-semitic laws prevented her from continuing her studies, 21 year old Hélène begins her journal in 1942 with an account of her visit to the home of poet Paul Valéry, who’s signed a copy of a book for her. She is ‘overwhelmed with joy’. At this stage, the war is, in a sense, just background noise. Even so, even this early on, she senses a chasm opening up between her life, and that of her non-Jewish friends. Little by little she is overwhelmed as she grasps the reality of what is happening around her, and the last words of her journal are a quotation from Macbeth ‘Horror! Horror! Horror!’
Hélène constantly questions herself. Should she try to get away, or stay in Paris? She asks herself why, knowing what her fate is likely to be, she’s done nothing to avoid it. She understands that the danger is increasing: ‘There aren’t many Jews left in Paris, and it’s the Germans who are arresting people now [rather than the French police], so there is less chance of escaping, because we won’t be warned.’ She believes, nonetheless, that to flee would be a defection, an act of bad faith.
In January 1944, Hélène writes ‘Will I make it to the end?’. After several months of moving around each day and staying with different friends, she and her parents went home, for just one night. That’s where they were arrested, on 8 March.
They were taken to the Drancy transit camp, and then deported, on Convoy 70 to Auschwitz, where Antoinette Berr was gassed on 30 April, and Raymond Berr was murdered in September. Hélène survived for more than a year. She was moved to Bergen-Belsen in November, where she was killed, just five days before the camp was liberated.
She so nearly did make it to the end.
- Berr, Hélène, Journal, 1942-1944 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008)
- Bracher, Nathan, ‘Des Considérations inactuelles au cœur de l’Occupation: Le Cogito à rebours d’Hélène Berr’, Modern & Contemporary France, 18, 1 (2010), 17-32
- Bracher, Nathan, ‘Éthique et esthétique dans le Journal d’Hélène Berr’, L’Esprit Créateur, 50, 4 (2010), 150–63
- Jaillant, Lise, ‘A Masterpiece Ripped from Oblivion: Rediscovered Manuscripts and the Memory of the Holocaust in Contemporary France’, Clio, 39, 3 (2010), 359-79
- Kelly, Debra, ‘From Cultural Amnesia to “Anamnesia”’, Synthesis, 2 (2010), 48-61
- Sinder, Henri, ‘Lights and Shades of Jewish Life in France, 1940-2’, Jewish Social Studies, 5 (1943), 367
- Classe de 1° ES2, Lycée Pierre Bourdieu-Fronton, ‘Helene Berr, une jeune étoile dans le Paris de l’Occupation’, 2008-9
- http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/upload/minisites/helene_berr/index.html
- http://www.nonfiction.fr/article-463-par_delicatesse__jai_perdu_ma_vie.htm
- http://www.actualitte.com/critiques/journal-1942-1944-helene-berr-preface-de-patrick-modiano-287.htm
- http://www.lepoint.fr/culture/2007-12-20/helene-berr-l-autre-anne-frank/249/0/215612
- http://lettres.blogs.liberation.fr/sorin/2007/12/une-toile-jaune.html
- http://www.ajpn.org/personne-Helene-6381.html
- http://www.veroniquechemla.info/2010/04/helene-berr-une-vie-confisquee.html
Sebald and Balzac – quests and connections
Posted by cathannabel in W G Sebald on January 20, 2013
Yesterday, on a quest to explore Sebald’s links with Alain Resnais’ L’Année derniere à Marienbad (for another blog), I noticed in Austerlitz the name Marie de Verneuil. She is the friend with whom Austerlitz has been in correspondence since his time in Paris, and who invites him to accompany her on a visit to Bohemia, to do some research on the spas of Europe (thus Marienbad). It would not have struck me the last time I read Austerlitz, but Marie de Verneuil is the heroine of Balzac’s first non-pseudonymous novel, Les Chouans, a historical romance based on the counter-revolutionary rebellions in Brittany.
Marie is a spy, in the employment of the revolutionary national government, whose mission is to identify and entrap the young leader of the rebels, the Marquis de Montauran. They fall in love, and the vicissitudes of their doomed romance mirror the ebb and flow of the fortunes of the opposing armies as towns change hands over and over again. This is not the Balzac of the great Comedie Humaine novels. Heavily influenced by both Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, its interest primarily lies in the way in which Balzac personifies and mythologises the landscape of Brittany as disorientating and treacherous, savage and primitive, and the way in which despite fairly obvious Republicans sympathies he enlists our emotional sympathies with Marie and the Marquis and their cause, as doomed as their romance.
But what does all of this have to do with Sebald? Balzac has an important role in Austerlitz: ‘the fifty-five small volumes of the Comedie humaine bound in carmine red’, in one of which, Le Colonel Chabert, Vera finds two small photographs, possibly placed there by Agata just before the Germans marched in. And Austerlitz, seeking respite from his frustrating and obstructed searches in the Bibliothèque Nationale, begins reading Balzac, starting with Le Colonel Chabert.
Chabert is a ghostly figure, left for dead on the battlefields of Eylau, recorded as dead in the histories of those wars, and now returned, ‘risen from the dead, so to speak’, to reclaim his identity, his inheritance, his wife. Chabert introduces himself as ‘Colonel Chabert, who died at Ehlau’, and tells of the pit of corpses in which he had been thrown after the battle and from which he clawed and tore his way out. For Austerlitz the book ‘reinforced the suspicion … that the border between life and death is less impermeable than we commonly think’.
When I first read Chabert, I thought of the deportees returning home from the camps, appearing on the streets where they had once lived but now as ghosts, revenants, shocking and uncomfortable presences amongst the living and, as revenants so often are, goads to their consciences (think of Banquo, or Jacob Marley).
Chabert, whose memories are shadowy and often confused, still hears at night the groans and sighs of the wounded and dying, just as the deportees, returned to life, brought with them the nightmare that they had escaped. And the dubious welcome he received was shared by some who found their apartments now occupied by neighbours – who sometimes justified their continued occupation on the grounds that the sole survivor of a deported family would not now need all that space.
But what of Marie de Verneuil? Pure coincidence? The only reference I can find which acknowledges the source of the name simply says that Les Chouans is never mentioned by Sebald. So did Sebald recall the name from his reading of Balzac without it having any particular significance to him? That seems improbable. Every name, every place, every reference in Sebald carries the weight of so many connections that I cannot believe this carries none. And yet it’s hard to see the link.
Maybe if I return to Marienbad, I might find something there.
Butor and Sebald – brief further thoughts
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, The City, W G Sebald on January 19, 2013
I’ve written previously about the relationship between Bleston and Manchester, and about the links between Butor and Sebald, and I’ve just been exploring the fascinating collection of essays on Sebald in Melilah, the Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies, alerted by Helen Finch’s recent blog about Sebald’s Manchester. It’s good to see the link with Butor explored a bit more, but I would have to take issue in some respects with Janet Wolff’s article, ‘Max Ferber and the Persistence of Pre-Memory in Mancunian Exile’, which I think fails to fully identify the deeper connections between the two writers.
I would agree that Passing Time is not about Manchester in a straightforward way but I think Wolff takes that too far when she says that ‘none of this is about an actual city’, and that Revel’s diatribes against Bleston are ‘the ravings of a neurasthenic, whose debilitated psychological state produces monsters in the environment’. (p. 52) This is not a new charge – reviewers have in the past diagnosed Revel with depression or schizophrenia. But I’d argue that rather than alerting us to an unreliable narrator, the mismatch reminds us that Bleston is not just Manchester, not just any particular city. It contains many cities, real and fantastical.
But it is based more upon Manchester in its physical reality than on any other city, and contrary to Wolff’s statement that ‘there are no physical descriptions at all (quite unlike the Manchester of ‘Max Ferber’)’, there are many descriptions of Manchester landmarks, as J B Howitt has shown (in his article ‘Michel Butor and Manchester’, even though Butor takes and uses those features which are relevant to him, and changes or ignores those that are not.
What interests me most, however, is Wolff’s argument that the Manchester of The Emigrants fades into insignificance in relation to ‘another geographical, phantasmic and persistent presence’.
My studies of Butor are concerned precisely with identifying that presence in Passing Time. More anon.
- Janet Wolff, ‘Max Ferber and the Persistence of Pre-Memory in Mancunian Exile’, in Melilah, 2012 Supplement 2, Memory, Traces and the Holocaust in the Writings of W.G. Sebald. (Guest editors: Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Janet Wolff)
- http://helenfinch.wordpress.com/2013/01/13/the-roman-road-under-the-casino-lost-manchester/
- J B Howitt, ‘Michel Butor and Manchester’, Nottm French Studies, 12 (1973), 74-85
Michel Butor et le livre-monde / 2 – LES GRANDS TRAITS DU PROJET « BUTORIEN » (2).
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor on January 4, 2013
More on Butor from Les Lignes du Monde
La démarche de Michel Butor est une démarche d’appréhension et de description du monde. Il veut dépasser son statut d’occidental, il rêve d’interculturalité et de transculturalité. M. Butor pratique une écriture qui voit le monde et notre rapport au monde se transformer. Cette écriture devient une réflexion sur la condition humaine des années 1950 – 2000 alors que le monde devient de plus en plus accessible. Il recherche des formules pour rendre compte de cette condition mondialisée de l’homme et expérimente des formes littéraires en rapport avec son expérience du monde, du territoire, des autres cultures, et par rapport à un temps qui est celui de la mondialisation et de l’interactivité. Cela ne se limite pas à une forme d’écriture mais engendre aussi des signatures typographiques et des essais graphiques pour rendre sensible des lieux et des rapports entre les lieux. M. Butor est engagé dans une condition contemporaine d’écrivain…
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Michel Butor et le livre-monde / 2 – LES GRANDS TRAITS DU PROJET « BUTORIEN ».
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor on January 3, 2013
More about Butor from Nathanael Gobenceaux at Les Lignes du Monde.
LES GRANDS TRAITS DU PROJET « BUTORIEN » de retranscription du monde. Comme le dit M. Spencer, le projet de Michel Butor est de « transformer la façon dont nous voyons et racontons le monde »[2]. Par ailleurs, Michel Butor entretient une relation particulière avec la planète, relation qu’il imaginerait volontiers holistique : « […] tous les textes de Butor procèdent de la même passion méthodiquement assumée : celle de devenir son propre contemporain ou, ce qui revient au même, citoyen du monde à part entière. »[3] Michel Butor se sent concerné par le Monde et par sa diversité, c’est ce qui le fait aller voir les Aborigènes d’Australie ou les Indiens d’Amérique du Nord pour les rencontrer et raconter une certaine relation qu’ils entretiennent avec la Terre, pour étudier la façon dont les lieux antipodiques peuvent être mis en relation : « De là chez Butor une défense et illustration passionnée…
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Justice for the Hillsborough Families
Posted by cathannabel in Football, Politics on December 19, 2012
Gerry’s blog, That’s How the Light Gets In, marks the vindication of the Hillsborough victims, survivors and families with Dickensian reflections on injustice. RIP the 96, and massive respect to the campaigners.
I’m currently reading The Old Curiosity Shop and, in one of those curious coincidences without which Dickens’ plots would have ground to a halt, I read the following passage shortly after hearing news that the Hillsborough families are one step closer to justice:
Let moralists and philosophers say what they may, it is very questionable whether a guilty man would have felt half as much misery that night, as Kit did, being innocent. The world, being in the constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and malice have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be sustained under his trials, and somehow or other to come right at last; ‘in which case,’ say they who have hunted him down, ‘—though we certainly don’t expect it—nobody will be better pleased than we.’ Whereas…
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Marvellous Mistakes
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, Music on December 5, 2012
I’ve always been intrigued by the creative possibilities of mistakes. So many medical and scientific discoveries, after all, have come about through the combination of chance or error with painstaking research and experimentation. The key is to see the possibilities created by that chance or error, and to follow them through.
Tacita Dean spoke of the magic of mistakes in relation to her Turbine Hall installation – asked whether, if she could rewind, there was anything she would do differently, she said:
No. They are mistakes in the film, there are some shots misregistered that I use deliberately. Mistakes don’t exist in our digital world anymore. An effects man I spoke to in Germany said, “Analogue mistakes can sometimes be magical. Digital ones never are.” You know, the magic of mistakes and the magic of not knowing what you are going to get, these things are important.
When she talked to Michael Berkeley on Radio 3’s Private Passions, she chose as one of her pieces of music Allegri’s wonderful Miserere, a piece that never fails to make me want to weep. But the moment that does that most powerfully is the famous top C, which, according to some historians, is the result of a transcription error. If so, there have been few more marvellous mistakes in the arts.
There’s a difference between using creatively the mistakes that occur through chance or human error, and deliberately creating an environment where ‘mistakes’ are always potentially a note away.
Jimi Hendrix improvised constantly, whether he had an audience or not. He never played the same song exactly the same way twice, and given the chance (i.e. without an audience shrieking to hear ‘Wild Thing’ or ‘Hey Joe’) he’d mess around with the song, take it somewhere different and bring it back home again – the challenge for anyone else was to keep up.
But after his death the self-appointed keeper of his flame decided that we didn’t need to hear what he regarded as Jimi’s ‘mistakes’ and that we instead should hear doctored versions of his late unreleased work with other session musicians drafted in to cover the gaps and the glitches. Even when those musicians were of the calibre of the late lamented Bob Babbitt, this was a wretched way to treat the rich legacy of such an inventive and risk-taking artist. And not all of the musicians were of that calibre.
Greg Tate, in his fascinating book on Hendrix and the black experience (an oddly neglected area of study), says that Hendrix ‘took the odd pleasurable accident as not just serendipity but as a way to embark upon a new line of inquiry, the intent being not merely to duplicate the shock-of-the-new aspect of the thing but to intensely lyricize it. Like Jackson Pollock … Hendrix lived to transmute the accident into intention.’
Postwar composers such as Boulez, and Michel Butor’s collaborator Henri Pousseur, used what Boulez called ‘controlled chance’, where the possibilities are predefined by the composer, within parameters. The performer has choices to make, which leaves the audience – and fellow performers – faced with the unexpected. This does give the possibility that one performer’s choice will wrong-foot others, but this would still clearly be, in the composer’s terms, a mistake rather than a new line of flight. The overall course is fixed, only the ordering of the elements can be tinkered with. John Cage’s use of the I Ching in composition and in performance was far from random, but brought in an arbiter other than the composer or the performer, in line with his wish to take the preferences of composer and performer out of the music. But he did incorporate improvisation in some later works, in ways which did introduce elements of real chance. Could the performer in such works be permitted to ‘transmute accident into intention’ ? One suspects not.
Even where that Hendrixian alchemy is not encouraged, the possibility of mistakes, the risk of them, is part of the joy of live music, where the artists are confident enough to respond positively – like Ensemble 360 who responded to one member contributing a repetition too many or too few, thus throwing them all off track, by pausing, laughing uproariously, and then resuming the piece with their usual panache. Back to Hendrix again (always), and a gorgeous acoustic version of his blues ‘Hear my Train a Comin”, where he plays it one way during the intro, stops because he’s been thrown off track by the cameras (not that anyone listening would hear that) and restarts it in a completely different version.
For those of us not so gifted mistakes are to be feared, to be remembered with hideous shame and self-flagellation, to be avoided either by careful preparation or by shunning activities where risks are high.
But we admire those who go ahead anyway – I always loved Paul Scott’s Daphne Manners: ‘She had to make her own marvelous mistakes. She didn‘t ever shrink from getting grubby. She flung herself into everything with zest. The more afraid she was of something, the more determined she was not to shrink from experiencing it. She had us all by the ears finally. We were all afraid for her, even of her, but more of what she seemed to have unlocked, like Pandora who bashed off to the attic and prised the lid of the box open.” (The Jewel in the Crown, pp. 104 – 105).
And artistically, we often respond emotionally to the imperfect rather than to the inhumanly perfect. (Some people illustrate that distinction using Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, which I can’t accept – Ella’s voice doesn’t have Billie’s fragility but it has such incredible warmth that it is never merely a perfect instrument, it’s full of emotion.)
I had been trying to finish this post for months, and then read this wonderful and moving blog which says so much that I will leave Gerry (and Leonard) with the last words:
http://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/scientist-reveals-how-the-light-gets-in/
- Greg Tate, Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003)
A Hate Crime Named Destitution – reblogged from Sheffield RASAG
Posted by cathannabel in Refugees on November 22, 2012
“Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”[1]
“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…”[2]
Hate crime occurs when an antagonist is able to hurt a victim, physically, mentally, financially, sexually or in any manner where the motivation for committing that crime against you, or the expectation of being able to get away with that crime against you is discrimination, inequality or intended hatred.
During a recent survey of refugees and asylum seekers of all categories of status from destitute through to permanent resident’s status, almost 85% had experienced hate crime. Among those 15% of people not having experienced hate crime 2/3 were destitute asylum seekers, so must be either lucky, scary, or fibbing.
The police do not have a sanctuary policy…
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Passing Time 