"Europe Central" William T. Vollmann

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From “Europe Central”
Chapter title Opus 110

“In 1946... Comrade Zhdanov .. announced to the Leningrad Union of Soviet writers: Leninism proceeds from the fact that our literature cannot be politically indifferent, cannot be "art for art's sake". They got quiet then; they knew what was coming. In truth the only wonder was that it hadn't come sooner... Folding his arms across his massive breast like one of our KV tanks, Comrade Zhdanov forthwith demanded that there be no further deviation from the task at hand on the literary front - namely to create art to light the way with a searchlight.

P 625
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(Shostakovich encountering Rabbi Luria in a dream)

Somehow he knew this individual was Comrade Luria and that Comrade Luria was angry with him.

"Because you betrayed us all with that facile Seventh Symphony which wears its meaning on its chest like an idiotic medal…"
"Well, well, well, then I must beg you to forgive me, replied Shostakovich, almost asphyxiated by dreaming dread. You see I wanted to inspire people, and- well I mean to say I though I could make myself useful-"
"Useful? Said Comrade Luria in a rage. You know all to well that utility’s the merest pimp for whom true art gets prostituted! Moreover…. He took a step closer. Shostakovich trembled. …Moreover, It’s high time we talked about form. Another step. And now Shostavovich was touched by the odor of burned hair.
I’m sure you’ve noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content together can remain as stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven upon it. There has to be emotion….
"Excuse me, excuse me; but isn’t emotion the same as, er, content in this case? Naturally I understand that it is not equivalent to form no matter what our social realists preach. For example in the right hands an allegro in a major key can convey anything, not just happiness –
"Exactly, said Comrade Luria, taking another step.
"……Thank you. But, if I may ask, what is musical content if not the feeling of the music?
Comrade Luria smiled, took three more rapid steps and touched him.
That touch! It was like entering a darkened room and suddenly getting assaulted by soft silent, hideous moths whose scales flaked off as they brushed in their dozens across nose, forehead, cheek and eyes, dryly flapping and dying, blindly disintegrating, polluting, attacking, asphyxiating. ……

Comrade Luria was a charred skeleton. Comrade Luria knowingly said: "After somebody’s been cremated (no matter weather he was living or dead), his form’s his image in your memory. His feeling, his emotional value if you will, is nothing more or less than the feeling you have when you remember him. So what is his content?
"I don’t know.
Is it a handful of ash? Demanded Comrade Luria, breathing in Shostakovich’s face that terrible breath which stank of roasted flesh.
"No, no-
What’s your content?
"I….I have no content; I’m empty.
"Then say so in your music.

P. 629, 630.

Cat's Cradle ( Bokonon's Calypsos)

"I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So they all fit nice
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise"

"Cat's Cradle" p. 157 Kurt Vonnegut

King Law

"But where says some is the King of America? I'll tell you Friend,he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed theron, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING."

Thomas Paine
"Common Sense"
Published 1776

Normality and the Crowd

"The Feminine in Fairy Tales" Marie-Louise Von Franz

"At the beginning of Nazism in Germany I was several times asked by Germans in what respect they were abnormal, for though they were unable to accept Nazism, not doing so made them doubt their own normality. Those who stuck to their instinctive reactions and in a higher sense, remained on the right path,

yet fell into misery and complete disaster. They were impressed by the collective impulse though they were right in not joining the collective movement. In that case misery fell upon people who had done the right thing."
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Copyright 1972
1993 Shamballa Press Edition
Page 36

The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles

"These temporizing proceedings (of ours) may to some seeme too charitable, to such a daily daring trecherous people: to others not pleasing,that we washed not the ground with their blouds, nor shewed such strange inventions in mangling murdering, ransacking,and destroying (as did the Spanyards) the simple bodies of such ignorant soules..."

The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles:
With the Names of the Adventurers, Planters, and Governours From Their First Beginning Ano: 1584. To This Present 1624. With the Procedings of Those Severall Colonies and the Accidents That Befell Them in All Their Journyes and Discoveries. Also the Maps and Descriptions of All Those Countryes, Their Commodities, People, Government, Customes, and Religion Yet Knowne. Divided Into Sixe Bookes. By Captaine Iohn Smith, Sometymes Governour in Those Countryes & Admirall of New England.
London: Printed by I.D. and I.H. for Michael Sparkes, 1624.

FULL TEXT LINK

Saul Bellow:"Herzog"

Saul Bellow

Herzog ruminations:

"Considering his entire life, he realized he had mismanaged everything - everything. His life was, as the phrase goes, ruined. But since it had not been much to begin with, there was not much to grieve about. Thinking, on the malodorous sofa, of the centuries, the ninteenth, the sixteenth, the eighteenth, he turned up, from the last, a saying that he liked:
Grief, Sir, is a species of idleness."

-"Herzog" Pgs 5,6

"Dear Dr. Shrodinger, in "What is Life" you say that in nature only man hesitates to cause pain. As destruction is the master- method by which evolution produces new types, the reluctance to cause pain may express a human will to obstruct natural law..... In your remarks on entropy... how the organism maintains itself against death- in your words, against thermodynamic equilibrium....Being an unstable organization of matter, the body threatens to rush away from us. It leaves. It is real. It! Not we! Not I! ....
To have a human life and also an inhuman life....To bite, to swallow and at the same time pity your food. To have sentiment. at the same time to behave brutally. It has been suggested ( and why not!) that the reluctance to cause pain is actually an extreme form, a delicious form of sensuality, and that we increase the luxuries of pain by the injection of a moral pathos. Thus working both sides of the street. "

From one of Moses E. Herzog's letters written in the head but never mailed in "Herzog"- pgs 194,195.

Empire

Exerpt from a review of "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic"
by Chalmers Johnson. Review by Jonathan Freedland in the June 14, New York Review of Books

"Americans have never constructed colonies abroad.(?) Oh, but they have, he says; it's just that Americans are blind to them. America is an "empire of bases," he writes, with a network of vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match for any Roman or Raj outpost. Official figures speak of 737 US military bases in foreign countries, adding up to an armed American presence, whether large or small, in 132 of the 190 member states of the United Nations.
Johnson reckons the number is actually higher, if one includes those bases about which the Pentagon is coy. The 2005 Base Structure Report omits to mention, for example, garrisons in Kosovo, as well as bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, even though it is well known that the US established a vast presence in both the Persian Gulf and Central Asia after September 11. (Admittedly, the US was evicted from its base in Uzbekistan in 2005.) Nor does the Pentagon ledger include the extensive military and espionage installations it maintains in Britain, estimated to be worth some $5 billion, since these are nominally facilities of the Royal Air Force. "If there were an honest account, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases overseas, but no-one—possibly not even the Pentagon —knows the exact number for sure," writes Johnson. Intriguingly, he notes that the thirty-eight large and medium-sized US facilities around the world, mostly air and naval bases, match almost exactly both the thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons Britain maintained at its imperial peak in 1898 and the thirty-seven major sites used by the Romans to police the empire from Britannia to Egypt, Hispania to Armenia in 117 AD. "Perhaps," muses Johnson, "the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty."