Wednesday, 31 May 2017
Tuesday, 30 May 2017
Connections are obvious, yet denied 3 & 4
The ABC - terrorism and refrigerators
Last Week US academic Lawrence Krauss told his fellow ABC - Q&A panellists Islamic terrorism isn't as dangerous as a refrigerator: "You're more likely to be killed by a refrigerator, in the United States, falling on you." The next morning (Aus. Eastern Time), in Manchester England, twenty-two people, mostly female and children were killed in an explosion detonated by an Islamic suicide bomber, Salmand Abedi. This name is not a brand name for refrigerators.
Doctors and politically correct diagnostics
On Friday 5. - The Public Health Association of Australia's submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs - The PHAA urges the committee to include the recommendations in its report which disavows the notion that there is any inherent link between Islam and terror.
On Friday, 26 May, in Egypt, Islamists attacked buses carrying Coptic Christians., killing 29 people, including children. The Islamist group ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre.
PHAA is a national organisation comprising about 1900 individual members and representing over 40 professional groups concerned with the promotion of health...
Presumably some of the 1900 members are doctors. It's to be hoped that their medical diagnoses are more accurate than their political diagnoses.
The infallible Word of God as revealed to Mohammed by the Angel Gabriel, the Koran
The 'Imrans 3;148
"We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. They serve other deities besides God for Whom He has revealed no sanction. The Fire shall be their home: dismal indeed is the dwelling of the evil-doers."
Saturday, 27 May 2017
Primo Levi - his dream - his nemesis
Richard Ford, a Pulitzer prize winning author latest book is titled: Between Them: Remembering My Parents. In a telephone interview with Stephen Romei, an Australian author and book reviewer, Ford described Romei's interpretation of how he, Ford, saw his parents, as "psychological bullshit". He asks Romei: "Why can't you just read my book?" (Weekend Australian Review, Books May 20-21, 2017). I had just finished reading Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner in two parts: This Is A Man and The Truce, when I read Romei's review of Ford's memoir about his parents. How apposite, indeed, is this question, in the context of criticism of Levi, during his life, and the extraordinarily insensitive criticism of him, for having ended his own life.
In October 1985, an attack on Primo Levi, made by Fernanda Eberstadt, appeared in the Jewish magazine Commentary, published in New York. Levi was charged with an inability to respond to the pious Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews, whom he met in the camp, with having a tin ear for religion, and with a gentlemanly aloofness; and she was at pains to convey that his later books are inferior to the ones he began with. Well, I would be amazed, if Levi has written anything else, to equal his account of his time in the Lager (camp), and his life-long attempt to escape from it.
His voice in If This Is A Man is soft and modest, despite that its meaning, circumstance and sound threaten his own being.
"Then one of them took my arm and looked at my number and then both laughed still more strongly. Everyone knows that the 174000s are the Italian Jews, the well-known Italian Jews who arrived two months ago, all lawyers, all with degrees, who were more than a hundred and are now only forty; the ones who do not know how to work and let their bread be stolen, and are slapped from the morning to the evening. The Germans call them "zwei linke Hande" (two left hands), and even the Polish Jews despise them as they do not speak Yiddish.
The nurse points to my ribs to show the other, as if I was a corpse in an anatomy class; he alludes to my eyelids and my swollen cheeks and my thin neck, he stoops to press on my tibia with his thumb, and shows the other the deep impression that his finger leaves in the pale flesh, as if it were wax.
I wish I had never spoken to the Pole: I feel as if I had never in all my life undergone an affront worse than this. The nurse, meanwhile, seems to have finished his demonstration in this language which I do not understand and which sounds terrible. He turns to me, and in near-German, charitably, tells me the conclusion: "Du Jude, kaput. Du schnell Krematorium fertig." (You Jew, finished. You soon ready for crematorium.)"
Levi mastered German during his imprisonment and this linguistic feat helped him and others to survive. He was known in Auschwitz as "debrouillard et demerdard" - smart and good at getting out of trouble. He could speak Italian, French, German, and gathered together, as best he could, bits of Polish and Russian. He had no need of English, because England and its colonies, and its former colony, the United States of America did not deport their Jews. Languages and his professional knowledge of chemistry were for him, life saving tools. There's a wonderful incident in TheTruce, when he and a priest are forced, because of incompatible languages, to talk to each other in Latin! Yiddish, he admits, was beyond him - no Latin prefixes or endings, or familial sounds, to build on - impenetrable. But some of the Yiddish Jews, Levi writes, were multi- lingual, and Levi engaged with them. Eberstadt's article tries to convince the reader that Levi was less a Jew or imperfectly Jewish because he was an agnostic. But that is nonsense. Levi was there, in the Lager, because he was a Jew. He was not a criminal, a political prisoner, or in the Lager because of a bureaucratic accident. He was a Jew, destined, just like the more religious Jews, to leave the Lager, par la cheminee.
As to his alleged gentlemanly aloofness, some of his comrades may have perceived him to be so, because his humanity, intellect, and European middle class manners would have been clearly evident on first meeting him. Without these qualities, he could not have written the books. Chapter 3 of The Truce is titled The Greek. Mordo Nahum, the Greek Jew, was a man whose activities in trade, fraud, smuggling and prostitution were foreign to the scientific and literary pursuits of Levi. These two very different men were thrown together by chance, in threatening circumstances, and they collaborated successfully. Levi, in humorous self-deprecation concedes, he was very much the junior partner; 'he [The Greek] said to me in a thoughtful tone: "Je n'ai pas encore compris si tu es idiot ou fainéant." '. Another thing evident on reading Levi, is his love of anecdotes and their retelling. These personal gems cannot be mined, without the warm engagement of others. So much for the alleged hauteur of this man, Levi. Levi was hurt by, and replied to, the Commentary piece, which was followed in February 1987 by another piece by Eberstadt, this time praising a "deeply religious", gulag memoir by Gustav Herling.
"Sometime after 10.am, Saturday, April 11, 1987, on the third floor of a late - nineteenth - century building in Turin, a concierge rang the doorbell of Primo Levi's apartment. Levi- research chemist, retired factory manager, author of our humanly compelling accounts of the Holocaust - had been born in that apartment 67 years earlier. He opened the door and collected his mail fro the concierge like every other day. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt. He smiled, thanked her as usual, and closed the door. The concierge descended on foot the ample spiral staircase occupied in the middle by a caged elevator. She had barely reached her cubicle on the ground floor, she later told the police, when she heard Levi's body hit the bottom of the stairs by the elevator. It was 10:20. A dentist who lived in the building heard her screams. He immediately saw, he subsequently reported, that Levi was dead. The autopsy established that he died instantaneously of a "crushed skull". No signs of violence unrelated to the fall were found on his body." Boston Review: Primo Levi's Last Moments - June 01, 1999.)
It didn't take long before friends and commentators expressed dissatisfaction with his choice of ending. How could he be so selfish to forget us?
"the efficacy of all his words had somehow been cancelled by his death - that his hope, or faith was no longer usable by us."
"He spoke for the bet that there is no blow from which the soul may not recover. When he smashed his body, he smashed his bet."
Others, more sympathetic, sought excuses - depression - the after effects of recent prostate surgery - an accident - the tendentious criticism of his role in the Lager. "Did anyone see him jump over the bannister?" And how could a writer of Levi's stature depart with leaving a note of explanation? "Did anyone find a piece of paper announcing his intention to end his life?"
I did. I read of the recurring dream, in his books. You don't need any Freudian insight to understand its meaning. In the dream. Livi's sister gets up and leave the family table; like the others, she is unaware of Levi's presence. Levi is only twenty-four years old, when he first begins to have this dream.
"This is my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the whistle of three notes, the hard bed, my neighbour whom I would like to move, but whom I am afraid to wake as he is stronger than me. I also speak diffusely of our hunger and of the lice-control, and of the Kapo, who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I were no there. My sister gets up without a word.
A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of one's early infancy. It is pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain like that which makes children cry: and it is better for me to swim once again up to the surface, but this time I deliberately open my eyes to have a guarantee in front of me of being effectively awake.
My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and although awake I am still full of its anguish: and that it is not a haphazard dream, but that I have dreamed it not once but many times since I arrived here, with hardly any variations of environment or details. I am now quite awake and I remember that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone. Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated sense of the unlistened-to story?"
The last publication of this dream occurs in the very last two pages of The Truce, written in Turin, December 1961-November 1962.
'....a dream of horrors has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals.
It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside: in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds slowly or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it: I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream: this dream of peace is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word and expected: get up, "Wstavac".'
Levi's son, Renzo doesn't indulge in denial: "Now everyone wants to understand, to grasp to probe. I think my father has already written the last act of his existence. Read the conclusion of The Truce and you will understand." Levi wrote his suicide note, twenty-five years before his death.
Levi, claims rightly, that his purpose in life was to bear witness to, and to record the horrors of German Nazism and its attempt to exterminate Judaism. But this role eviscerated his psyche, gutted his very being. In the Lager, he trod precariously close to oblivion, alone in his agnosticism. A non-believer, no divine transcendence or revelation could save his being. There was no god to guide him - no Virgil, Dante's guide and protector in the Inferno. His survival depended on the single strength of his inner core, the spirit of his own unique self. He walked out of the Lager free or was he? That dream! He kept it and reality separate, away from his self, for as long as he could. The writing of the books probably helped him do that - a depository - separate from himself - for a horrific past. However, once reality and the dream finally merged, he began living inside the dream. The armour of his self was fatally penetrated. How could he escape the Lager? Seek the reality of eternal refuge in the void?
If This Is A Man
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
Levi wrote this poem, at the age of 25 years. Was he ever a man thereafter?
In addition to being a penetrating personal autobiography, these books are testament to the depths of depravity reached, during the twentieth century, capturing the political essence of that century - ideology and the descent from the sacred into the mire of profanity. Let's not kid ourselves; the twentieth century will be remembered not for humanism, but for barbarism. Levi was an exceptional man, in an age of barbarism, and the mode of his death does not make him any less a man. A fitting epitaph for the man, Levi: " Appel a tous. Ceci est mon dernier cri avant silence eternal".
Saturday, 20 May 2017
Film Review: Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993) - Spanish Film Festival Brisbane 2017
Directed and written by Carla Simón
Initial Release - February 2017
This is a film about a six year old orphan, Frida (Laia Artigas) - singularly pleasing in that there is no need of Kleenex. Carla Simón, in her first feature film is deserving of high praise. She uses two children to tell the story of Frida's displacement, despite their inability to express emotion verbally. Their story is devoid of sentimentality. Instead of inserting adult sentiment and speech into the mind and mouth of Frida, her character is permitted to express emotion through behaviour, both good and bad. Verbally, Frida and Anna (Paula Robles) are blanks. Anna is a lovely little blonde pudding, full of innocence and charm - the three-to-four year old child of Frida's new parents. Scenes of their play imitating adults in Frida's life, unconsciously betray the negligence of Frida's deceased mother.
How can Frida replace Anna or equal her, in the eyes of her new parents? This issue cannot be resolved without patient and prudent responses from her new parents - her mother's brother, Esteve (David Verdaguer) and his partner, Marga (Bruna Cusi). Both are compromised by the native love for their biological daughter and the elusive need to find an emotionally secure place for Frida, in their new family.
Frida has to confront other issues: the frightening physical displacement, from city life to a mountainside pueblo, and the pain of separation from her previous family of indulgent grandparents and aunts. Essential to her well being and the acceptance of her new family, is an explanation of her mother's death. Can the joy of the moment between a father and his daughters, and the design of a mother for her daughters, overcome Frida's resistance?
Foot Notes:
Carla Simón aged six, was sent to live with her uncle and aunt after her parents died. The summer of 1993 was the first time she spent with her new family. "...I have sweet memories of it and I wanted to translate them. We shot in the area where I was raised."
The casting: "It was quite long about five or six months. The casting director, Mireia Juarez, saw almost 1,000 children for all the roles in the movie. In fact Laia was the penultimate girl that we saw. Because I could not find her. And when we were almost done, Laia appeared."
Rehearsals: "We did a long process of rehearsals with Bruna, David and the children for the girls to believe the relationships. We played for hours, for instance, four hours playing that the four of them were a family. Doing this, they built memories that were used during the shoot. The girls never read the script. If I wanted the girls to say something, I told them before the take."
"Every sequence includes Frida."
Estiu 1993 director Carla Simón
Note: The above quotes of Carla Simón were taken from Kristina Zorita's interview with her for the European Women's Audiovisual Network http://www.ewawomen.com/en/events/interview-with-director-carla-simon.html
Saturday, 13 May 2017
Film Review - The Exile (El Destierre)
Written and directed by Arturo Ruiz Serrano
This film is not "commercial". It is grim. Notwithstanding that, I rate it highly. I'm not alone in that opinion. The entire audience was absorbed by the film.
During the Spanish civil war, three individuals are unwillingly crammed together physically and emotionally in the tiny space of a stone lookout, atop a ridge, in a snow covered mountain range. It is winter and the snow is knee deep. Horizons are absentees - vision blurred by snow and mist.
The two male individuals are members of the Nationalist army. Just what these two sentinels of the sky are supposed to be guarding or watching over, is not clear. The Nationalists built a line of outposts, together with machine gun bunkers, tank camouflages and ammunition dumps, dug into hills and rocky outcrops, in the Pyrenees, during World War II, presumably to deter invasion from France by the Nazis or the Allies. Stalin had urged Truman and Churchill to combine with Russian forces and invade fascist Spain. But England and America were done with war and Stalin's desire for revenge on Franco went unfulfilled. He had to settle for a trade embargo against Spain. The photograph of the bunker below is typical of the fortifications built after the civil war. I suspect the stone lookout used in the film is a remnant of this line. There may be a simpler explanation - a shepherd's summer shelter. Does anyone know?
Silverio (Eric Francis), a peasant? is a hard man, physically strong and direct in manner. His companion, Teo (Joan Carles Sau) is fresh from a seminary. The climate inside this bolt hole, like the weather outside, is bitterly cold and hostile. Silverio holds Teo in absolute contempt. Teo, in contrast to Silverio, is a lean ascetic, bespectacled, inexperienced and timid. He cringes, hard up against a wall, praying, while Silverio, from the other side curses him and labels him "the Priest".
The dualism of opposites is a constant theme. Silverio is practical, physically threatening, cold and solitary, profane and uneducated, the opposite to Teo, who is spiritual, effete, educated and obviously middle class. In politics, they are also divorced. Silverio has been drafted, unwillingly into the Nationalist army. His sympathies lie with his family and the Republicans in Madrid. Teo is a disciple of the Church and a supporter of Franco. Tense monotony reigns, until Silverio returns from one of his regular hunting excursions, carrying the wounded Zoska (Monika Kowalska), a Polish national and member of the Republican international brigade. After her recovery, she dominates the two male antagonists with her sexuality and femininity. Zoska's warming influence coincides with the advent of summer. The attitudes of Silverio and Teo soften and merge. But the tension of the film is maintained, by the fear of Zoska's presence becoming known to the Nationalist command. Discovery could result in death for each of the trio. When Paulino, the supplier and courier of the outposts disappears, investigators become suspicious and Silverio and Zoska flee. Teo remains at the post, to deal with the aftermath.
Strained relationships arrested and transformed in a brief interlude of love and warmth, renewal of anxiety, and unresolved apprehension to the last second, all spent in a threatening and isolated landscape.
Saturday, 6 May 2017
Film Review: A Dog's Purpose
Directed by Lasse Hallestrom (is the pronunciation 'Lassie'?). One of the human actors' first name is 'Pooch'.
Stars: in order of appearance - Bailey, a golden retriever; Ellie, a German shepherd police dog; Tino, a corgi; and Buddy, a Bernese mountain dog.
I confess I'm a dog-lover. My parents bought me my first dog Tim, when I was still in the pram. He was described without proper enquiry as to his origin, and generously, as a black and tan kelpie. As soon as I could walk, we spent every day together. On one occasion he led me, a toddler, into the shelter of a wheel-barrow leaning upright against a fence. There, we sheltered from a Mallee dust-storm. My mother was distraught when she realised I wasn't in the house. After the storm moved on, Tim emerged, in response to the frantic calls of my mother and siblings. I remained behind the wheel barrow - asleep! We continued our relationship for about another seven years. He walked with me to school, and when I came out of school; in the afternoon, he would be waiting for me. One afternoon, he wasn't there. I ran home, as fast as my short legs were capable. Mum was inconsolable. We stood in the drive way, embraced in grief. Tim, chasing a horse and cart, had been run over and killed by a car. Born and raised in a small hamlet near the Murray river in Victoria, Tim had no road sense. This was my earliest experience of genuine grief. I have never forgotten Tim and I'm now 72 years of age.
In the intervening years I have been involved with many dogs, pets, working dogs, giants and minnows. Unfortunately, they all die before you do. Grief upon grief. I nursed two of these dogs when they were dying. It was plain to me they knew they were dying. More grief.
This film uses reincarnation, to side-step the problem of a dog's short life. Bailey becomes Ellie, the police dog and dies a hero while on duty. As she dies, her handler stays by her side, paralysed by grief. With working dogs you must - like a good football coach - keep your distance from your charge, for the sake of performance. Disciplined reservation of emotional space is required. Yet I've seen hard men, eyes welled with tears and choked by grief, when their dog has been killed hunting in the field or working in the sale yards.
Tino, a corgi finds love for her young mistress and then leads her infant children in the joy and fun of play. Dogs are the perfect fit for children, full of crazy capers and rapid action, underpinned with unconditional love and devotion. There is a typical and funny scene of the owner being interrogated by a vet as to her feeding regime for Tino. She is evasive in her answers, guilty, like most dog owners of overfeeding their pet dogs with "treats".
Bailey reincarnates as Buddy. Old relationships are resumed and Buddy is set for a great life.
This is a film for dog lovers. The director plays on the emotions apparent between owners and their dogs. As a dog lover I did not resist her manipulation, experiencing only the slightest sense of guilt, for enjoying that base human failing - sentimentality.
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