Djilas

I’m flicking through a 1957 edition of ‘The New Class’.   Flickings about all I’ll do with this, though its beautifully written – clear eyed and it rings with fairness.

The author, Milovan Djilas, is a bit of a hero of mine, and I think I’ve worked out why.  He got it right about Communism early on.  And he got it right through deduction and observation.

The New Class does not seem to be an act of opportunism, but rather the final straw for a man very very slowly disillusioned.  There’s a touching humanity about that.

Djilas writes in the intro:

During my adult life I have traveled the entire road open to a Communist: from the lowest to the highest rung of the hierarchical ladder… No one compelled me to embrace or to reject Communism. I made my own decision according to my convictions, freely, in so far as a man can be free… I cut myself off consciously and gradually…

This account may appear strange to those who live in the non-Communist world.

And it does seem strange.  The debates and the struggles are strange because they were deemed redundant long ago in the capitalist West.  That is the thing with Communism, it is not feared anymore, nor mocked, just irrelevant. And the intellectual work of Djilas and his striving fairness, it all seems so irrelevant.

But perhaps he played a part in that?

His clear-eyed thinking leads him to a conclusion that now seems brilliant, spot on for Europe.  Communism will be defeated, he tells us, because of its lack of energy.  The tendency of the world is t0wards unification and it cannot be stopped. Irresistible.

In any case, the world will change and will go in the direction in which it has been moving and must go on — toward greater unity, progress and freedom.  The power of reality and the power of life have always been stronger than any kind of brutal force and more real than any theory.

Communist writing is a crack up these days, isn’t it.  How much intellectual effort did those dudes waste? For what?

And some time

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the flaggy shore,

in September or October…

The Radetzky March – Notes 1

Still Radetzky marching.

I seem to be in some war rut at the moment. Empire of the Sun, In Europe, The Road, now The Radetzky March.  And The Great Fire after this.

I need to go in a different direction, fellas.  New roads.

The Melways 2010 is just out.  Melways never used to appear until November, but I saw my first 2010 on a dashboard about a month ago. From what I could see, the 2010 uses a whole new format.  It looks larger, for firsts.  I tremble thinking about what other advances might be inside those plastic covers.

It took me some time to find The Radetzky March.  Had to order it online from Berry.

This Chojnicki is a mercurial character who hates lovingly.  ”Chojnicki used to say:

that the Kaiser was mindless and senile, the government a gang of nincompoops, the Imperial Council a gathering of gullible and grandiloquent idiots, and the national authorities venal, cowardly and lazy.

The German Austrians were waltzers and boozy crooners, the Hungarians stank, the Czechs were born bootlickers, the Ruthenians were treacherous Russians in disguise, the Croats and Slovenes, whom he called Cravats and Slobbers, were brushmakers and chestnut roasters and the Poles, of whom he himself was one after all, were skirt chasers, hairdressers, and fashion photographers.

This empire is doomed…”

And there are more beautiful moments, some not containing invective.

Roth is like us reading an old novel from a time when people behaved differently.  He is like us as he looks at this time so close to his.

When people moved differently.

For in those days people in the Monarchy had a very distinctive and now completely forgotten way of leaving trains and carriages, entering restaurants, mounting perrons, stepping into houses, and approaching friends and relatives…

Notebook: Geographies

Boy or girl?

“Show me your hands”.

Hands are shown.

“Ahh you showed them palms up. Girl”.

These little threads of superstition, or maybe not superstition.  Maybe time-spun lore.  Slowly vanishing. In defeating ignorance and early death we lose hold of such threads.

[What is the current state of nursery rhymes?]

In the evolution of modern jet flight there has been a dramatic shift away from the use of navigation references outside the plane, such as rivers, to the use of electronically displayed informtaion within the plane.  Some of the copilots I spoke with, in fact, had only hazy notions of the geography they were flying over.

Barry Lopez.  You might well say this is a relief, thank god the pilot is not confusing one hill with another, one valley with another, and sending us into the trees using his human notion of geography.

What if the technology fails?

But a more interesting question is what we lose or forget.  Paying witness might be all that can be done.

It is not an anti-technology narrative.  It is a lament for local knowledge. Our lives seem increasingly peripatetic. Our locations are unfixed and provisional.  We are losing the deep knowledge of place that comes from time and close observation and is revealed in insights about the local weather, the people, the history, the birds and animals, the soils, the sounds.

It is the chilling nature of modern society to find an ignorance of geography, local or national, as excusable as an ignorance of hand tools; and to find the commitment of people to their home places only momentarily entertaining.  And finally naive.

[This is surely behind the taste for local food at the moment.  The thirst for knowing the provenance of something.]

The more superficial a society’s knowledge of the dimensions of the land it occupies becomes, the more vulnerable the land is to exploitation, to manipulation for short-term gain.

………

I got up on the roof.  I can see the care of previous owners in this roof. Where gaps have been patched.  Where cracks have been filled. I climbed up to the 1920 facade, all curlicues and flourishes.  It felt like standing behind the scenery backstage at a theatre.

The openness and air. It was reviving.

….

Ovid’s tales of metamorphosis explain the natural world.  How did that island come to be? How did that flower?  This is mythology for geography.

What about some new myths for the modern and local landscape?

You might set them 200 years ago, with the first appearance of the whites, perhaps.  Or in the gold rushes.   In some unspecified but old time, just out of living memory’s reach.

Myths for giant buildings. For the casino. How the casino came into being.  A myth of creation.  Of metamorphosis.  A lost boy is turned into a building, his brother into sunlight, and in the early morning the lost boy is found by his brother. …

And so on……

Notebook – art and politics

“Mandelstam…poses the question of the right of the poet to evaluate the state not as an empirical, political reality but as an aesthetic category…”

“[X] once defined his own differences with Soviet authorities as ‘aesthetic not political‘, and this can be applied to the aesthetic rebellion of Mandelstam.”

“This was consistent with his conviction that aesthetics precedes ethics, and is even its source” [Milosz on Joseph Brodsky].

Dali flip-flopped over Franco, then declared Hitler to be arousing.  It was patently ridiculous, and thus he was excused.

“The category of beauty becomes for the poet an ethical and only then a political reference point”.

This is ‘Art for Art’s sake’, but more than that, I think.

Travels through the twentieth century

One time, in Kadikoy, that’s Istanbul, I got in a taxi, with my friend Rob, and at the end, maybe twenty minutes later, I said to the driver ‘Bravo’ and I was applauding, spontaneously, because it was a fucking amazing performance, of skilled fast taxi-driving, overtaking, at the highest of speeds, always finding best position in the line up, growling at other cars, u-turning, shortcutting beside mosques, merging, taking on the buses, it was fucking scary but at the same time you could tell, this man, whataperformance, was in complete control, and when the whole ride stopped you stepped out like you had been on a flight, and you smoothed your clothes down and you felt the whole earth changed.

And that’s what it feels like finishing Geert Mak’s ‘In Europe’.  Just closed it then.  Smoothed the bent front cover down.  Hefted it a bit to remember the journey.

Whataperformance.  Bravo.

It is full of quotable lines and facts and he saves his best for late in the day.  Like the fact that the 60 years since WWII is the longest period without a pan-European war “in history”.

I noticed few flaws or even thoughts I disagreed with.  One of the latter though is a throwaway line about Srebrenica:

The fall of Srebrenica, in other words, came as a great relief even to Bosnia strategists.  But no one will ever hear about that.

And on that mysterious note he ends the chapter, just hanging, without the courage to go one and tell us his theory.  In doing this I believe he gives hope to the internet nut-jobs who prosecute the ‘Srebrenica was a hoax’ line and the ‘Milosevic was murdered’ line.  The die-hard conspiracies of post communism.   It takes me back to talking with Serbs on a train about 9/11 and discovering that the Americans and the Japanese were both involved in that crime.

Is that his intent?  Hard to say because he doesn’t say.   If you were uncharitable you would see it as one Dutchman’s way of excusing the pathetic Dutch involvement in the whole sorry business.  But that would be uncharitable — and it was so much to the credit of the Dutch when the government asked for an independent investigation and then resigned.  That was met with amazement and admiration in Australia.

And  elsewhere his treatment of the history of Yugoslavia is, I think, very good.  Especially I like the quote from an interviewee:

It was the farmers getting back at the city.  That’s what happened everywhere during these wars.  It was maybe even the heart of the matter.

I always bore Europeans with my admiration for what they have achieved in Europe.  Out of the wost disaster, they produce this, the most amazing voluntary surrender of national sovereignty.  And I always tell them what I have seen in the margins of Europe, in the east, how the idea of the European Union, or perhaps less the EU and more the community, sustains the reform process and, importantly, keeps the young people hoping.   The EU is the dangling carrot for the politicians and the young people will make sure the politicians take it.

Geert Mak is amazed by the EU too.  But he is also clear-eyed about its limits and its flaws and is cautioning us all that the battles of the twentieth century are not won yet.

It is not a straight history, but a bit of travel and a bit of journalism. Humane and learned.  Brilliant.

Can you really not enter the same river twice?

A couple of discoveries:

Just to get the ball rolling, downhill:

*Lord Byron could not stand the sight of women eating.  A Fact.  Relayed to me by Hitchens.

It’s a good one.  I personally have known a woman who could not stand to be seen eating.  It terrified her, she only drank, and I’d say they were a match, except a woman fearful of a poppy seed in her smile is not going to go last with a man obsessed with the cloacal arts, as Hitchens also tells me Byron was, in a satisfying little essay I have just put down.

It is a delightfully humorous quirk, more so since Lord Byron was unfastidious when it came to other bodily issues.  We do well to recognise our tastes and tolerate our contradictions in this way…I think.

Which leads me to:

*Byron’s Darkness sung to me as I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.   Similar hellishness at the cold dark end of the world.  And by the by, am I the only one who thinks of The Road when they open the pantry?  Should I be stockpiling?  Is that the beginning of survivalism?

Which does not take me to:

*Viejo Marchente Valdepena Crianza 2005 tempranillo.   A real treat at $7.  Translation — Viejo Marchente is the winemaker’s name, Valdepena means ‘tasty wine’, Crianza 2005 is, I think, the model of the car the winemaker drives, probably a Skoda or one of those other Spanish cars, and tempranillo is completely made up.

I’m stocking up.  And as I do I realise:

*I miss Cambodia.  I miss the terrible heat and my constant sweating and don’t start me listing or I won’t stop.  Saw a van with ‘Tokay Industries’ on the side and a wee picture of a gecko and 50 metres on I put them together and felt that little wash in the stomach.

In North Melbourne our night-time animal sound  was the horses feet on the road as they finished another day of tourist-carrying and hurried to their stables.  In Phnom Penh we sat sweating all over cane chairs and listened for Nelson, the big white gecko who lived tucked under a water pipe high on the wall.  ’Dock-day!’, he call.

Great character.

He loved it when I left the light on and big moths would be a home delivery meal.

And then today running home with headphones in, Dengue Fever – ‘Connect Four’ made me all nostalgic again.

Geert Mak: ‘In Europe’

A fat happy whale of a book, this one.  (Perhaps a whale shark, a slow moving but purposeful old uncle whale shark, full of vignettes.  Vignettes? A talking whale shark then. )

You learn a lot from this book.  It is all about European history, but history is the least of what I got from it.  The author journeys around Europe in 1999, taking the temperature of Europe at the end of the century, and he journeys chronologically, starting in Amsterdam, his home, and ending, correctly, in Sarajevo.

I approve of his travelling technique too: go for the small sites of interest, a small town where something happened, or a street corner in a city, a railway station, a statue, and let the small thing tell your larger story.

Mak visits Sankt Radegund, where the faithful Franz Jagerstatter was the only one in the village to vote against Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany.  The inspiration from his story is worth the price of the book for me.

I’m listening to Fats Waller right now.  Very loose, very cool, he plays the piano and sings like he finds it all boringly easy. ( I check the index of Mak’s book but Fats aint in there.)

I like too his test of the boundaries of Europe.  Europe ends wherever people talk about going to Europe, for shopping, holidays etc.   Applying it, he finds Odessa is not Europe, neither is St Petersburg, maybe not Vilnius or Moscow either.

Finally, to end this trifle,  a quote:

The mid-1960s was an exceptionally romantic period, perhaps the most romantic since the start of the nineteenth century.

Boolgeeda, WA, 1963

A brown back hunched over a typewriter, far out in the Western Australian desert, at a mining site, outdoors, in the early 60s:

“I left camp after work and walked about two miles over an adjacent mountain; when I reached the summit I expected to see another mountain before me but instead appeared this vast undulating open area bordered on all sides by the almost blue cardboad cutout outlines of mountain range upon mountain range 50 miles distant.

In front of me a cliff fell sheer to the floor of this vast plateau which was so green with spinifex that it looked almost like lush rolling grasslands — however I had only to look at my feet to see that plant life here was purely an ephemeral thing as there is no surface soil but merely hard unrelenting fragmented rock…

…And my back is at the moment against the receiving trunk of one of these gums — only one for half a mile and perched precariously on the edge of this cliff and providing no clue as to how it could possibly have got there… For this seemed truly life from the rock — life from that ever present and ever existing store of energy whence came the original seed for the tree;

whence came this my back against the tree;

whence came eventually this my mind which now tries to impart importance and significance to these sentences — constructions of this my mind which is merely a variant of what my back leans against and what I sit upon.  (Of course “The Human Situation” has said all this and said it better but it is something I am trying very hard to…)

…I spent most of the day working alone on top of a high mountain splitting into two the core which comes from the diamond drills.”

I’d say this lad was a wee bit stoned, if it wasn’t my Dad, and I hadn’t known him enough to rule that out.

The young man typing away at this letter was far away from what he knew.   The other side of the continent.  And his life ’til then was (I get this from his letters) all about education and study and betterment, and then he was in a place where none of that was relevant.  Among men.

I might smile at the earnestness (and he is awake to it anyway: “…this letter seems to have consisted of almost continuous pantheistic description of the countryside, written by some half-baked wide eyed romantic poet, but one has little else to do but explore the depths of one’s reactions amidst a background of an overpowering and ever varying nature..”.), but a part of me recognises his exhilaration and his wonder.  His barefoot philosophising.  I envy it because I can’t find it right now.

And, with more sadness, I also recognise the older man in the boy.  He was a searcher, and reading this I see he was to be a searcher all his life.  The searching that led him to Buddhism was already there; it wasn’t what I thought it was – the reaction to a mid-life crisis (I’d go downstairs and snap on the light and there he’d be meditating in a beanbag).  As far as I could tell he was led on past Buddhism, but I don’t know to where. I wasn’t watching at the time.

I could ask him about all this now, knowing what I know.

We laugh at the Sixties (well I do anyway), but the seeking was innocently done and brave, I suppose.  We do smarts these days but not a lot of truth seeking.

Rooms I have called my room

Rooms I have called my room

Were never mine enough

My objects envoys to the shadows

Sent back. No thanks.

And those rooms were like my people

Who were never me. Inhaling/exhaling

Bivalves behind my back. I’d wonder how they did it

Because their words were like my rooms:

Noise I lived in, baseboards rotting,

Never steel, they were balloons

Skimming through fields, never stayed,

Those rooms, words, people.