On the way back, as I passed through the park, I was walking for a few minutes alongside a woman with two little girls of about seven or eight. In tough and anxious little voices, the girls were describing a boy at school who would run up behind them and graphically simulate sex while holding their arms back. They said he would do it on their desks and against their chairs too. They repeated the boy’s words and mimed his gestures, their high voices trailing off in uncertainty. The woman, who had a fixed look of bewilderment on her face, kept shaking her head and saying it was awful. After a while the little girls seemed satisfied and began to tell her about a raccoon that lives in the park.

~

I’m posting my notes on the Ruth Franklin essay in The Emergence of Memory, parts of which bothered me so much. They aren’t very orderly. I’m still bothered and I still don’t totally understand why.

…This is really beside the point, though, because the question concerns the responsibility of writers to respond to incidents in their culture, not the responsibility of the average citizen to open his eyes when confronted with the ugliness of humanity.

All I can say is—what? I can not even imagine how someone could come to that conclusion after reading Sebald. Maybe the author is speaking for herself?

Calling foul on a work because the author didn’t experience the event personally (the reference to Dieter Forte) is thin, though understandable coming from someone who did. However, the next generation will always have some indictment of the previous. There is no way to form a complete historical picture from a single point of view. Inevitably the best contemporary critique will be missing more and more as time passes. That doesn’t mean the original was anything but true at the time.

After one generation (maybe even before) a gap in literature IS a gap in memory. It’s not just about a wish to have a personal memory of something that took place, though maybe that’s part of it. I’ve always imagined that Sebald was frustrated by the blank spot where there ought to have existed a second generation memory in his life. Something to respond to; something tightened, loosened, and worked over by the generation who experienced the events first hand. Instead there was just a blank.

Okay, the critique that a work aestheticizes disaster or pain often sounds glib to me, so I’ll try to pay closer attention. I think that the pattern of beauty can annihilate causality, but are we talking about the same writer? The narrator who is nearly crushed under the guilt of the his nation’s history? It seems more as though the repetitive pattern is descriptive of the psychic pain of inescapably going over the same ground again and again… That accusation in general is something that’s bothered me often in the last few years and is bothering me again here. It is one of those statements that needs to be backward engineered to make sure it stands up. What is it in the description of this painful thing do you think ought not to be there? And what would you like to see in it’s place? Especially in a case like this in which Sebald is attempting to focus the reader down from a series of flat statistics to a complicated empathy for the human beings involved, why is writing beautifully, using his craft to the utmost (and I don’t mean with a bunch of prurient flourishes—I understand that objection), anything other than a way to honor those people? It starts to look like the problem is more with that, with the idea of transgressing some moral hierarchy in memorializing the suffering of the wrong set of humans…

Objecting to descriptions of the fire bombings of Dresden in On The Natural History of Destruction with the assertion that World War II was a righteous war is missing the point to an astonishing degree. It’s like saying that because the war was justified the casualties on the wrong side no longer consist of human beings and so cannot be spoken of. The irony of that reasoning is monstrous… Oh, it looks like all this is addressed perfectly by Charles Simic in the next essay, Conspiracy of Silence. (Wow. Nice editing!)

…bombing is a form of collective punishment premised on collective guilt.

…for those who are bombed it feels like destruction for its own sake. Since the bombs can hardly get at the leaders wining and dining in their well-protected underground shelters, the innocent will always have to pay for their crimes.

~

So many helpful stories lately from people who think my child takes up too much of my time (but are not offering to babysit). When we were young our parents just let us alone, they didn’t hover over us so much. Oh! Well then. What exactly does that look like? If I’m already consciously allowing him to eat the cat food and play in the garbage bin more times a day than I’m willing to admit in public in order to have a blessed four minutes at a time to myself, I suppose the next logical step would be to simply stop to responding to him when he speaks to me. But who does that to someone they love? I wouldn’t dream of ignoring my partner or sisters when they are speaking to me, much less when they’re struggling excitedly to find the right words. Why would I do that to my twenty month old? It seems shocking that I would have to point out that he’s a person… A busy and extremely social person with a flair for the dramatic, who shouted yesterday as I tried to remove his bedtime snack, Oh no—I mean—this is insane! Beg you!