Monday, January 9, 2012

The Liars Club

By Mary Karr


Karr writes about her life growing up in small town Texas with her family falling outside of "normal." She tells the stories of her life with raw honesty, in particular those of her Daddy. He becomes the story of the stories. And as such, it leaves a piece of him bore into the reader. 


"It was during one of these visits that I  . . . stumbled upon the Greek term ate. In ancient epics, when somebody boffs a girl or slays somebody or just generally gets heated up, he can usually blame ate, a kind of raging passion, pseudo-demonic, that banishes reason. So Agamemnon, having robbed Achilles of his girlfriend, said, 'I was blinded by ate and Zeus took away my understanding.' Wine can invoke ate, but only if it's ensorcered in some way. Because the ate is supernatural, it releases the person possessed of it from any guilt for her actions. When neighbors tried to explain the whole murder-suicide of the Thibideaux clan after thirty years of grass-cutting and garbage-taking-out and dutiful church-service attendance, they did so with one adjective, which I have since traced to the Homeric idea of ate: Mr. Thibideaux was Nervous. No amount of prodding on my part produced a more elaborate explanation." Pg. 7


"In the distance, giant towers rose from each refinery, with flames that turned every night's sky an odd, acid-green color. The first time I saw a glow-in-the-dark rosary, it reminded me of those five-story torches that circled the town at night. Then there were the white oil-storage tanks, miles of them, like the abandoned eggs of some terrible prehistoric insect." Pg. 34


"For the first time, I felt the power of my family's strangeness gave us over the neighbors. Those other grown-ups were scared. Not only of my parents but of me. My wildness scared them. Plus they guessed that I'd moved through houses darker than theirs. All my life I'd wanted to belong in their families, to draw my lunch bag from the simple light and order of their defrosted refrigerators. The stories that got whispered behind our supermarket cart, or the silence that fell over the credit union when Daddy shoved open the glass door - these things always set my face burning. That afternoon, for the first time, I believed that Death itself lived in the neighboring houses. Death cheered for the Dallas Cowboys, and wrapped canned biscuit dough around Vienna sausages for the half-time snack." Pg 267


Book 2

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

The Gulag Archipelago

1918 - 1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation


By Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn


"If only it were that simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" Page 168


Much of my reading is devoted to the attempt to wrap myself around human suffering. More to the point, how one human being can inflict pain, suffering, humiliation, torture on another human being (and then move up en masse). The above quote distills some of the praxis running through this book (praxis: process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practised, embodied, or realized). Or is this the reflection of praxis, when ones experience births theory to try to wrap oneself around that experience?


The maxim is "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke) But this is too simple, to easy to swallow, so convenient to put those evil people on that other side and to draw the line around myself and the other good men. Instead, I challenge myself: evil triumphs in me when the good parts of myself do nothing. 


An important part of this is understanding what Solzhenitsyn calls the threshold of evil within this internal fluctuation between good and evil. Once that threshold is crossed, something is unleashed.  


It is my understanding that if we do not acknowledge this, we ourselves can and do easily participate and perpetuate evil.


I am afraid I did not capture this quote but it is important and potentially life saving if any of us should ever find themselves suddenly, irrevocably and unjustifiably imprisoned: the quicker you can accept that your old life is dead and this new existence is your true reality the quicker you will adjust and the greater your likelihood of surviving will be. Perhaps you find this a bit irrelevant? I hope it is and remains so.


Quotations from The Gulag Archipelago:


Begin with a quote from near the end of the book:
"In our happy, blind existence, we picture condemned men as a few ill-fated, solitary individuals. We instinctively believe that we could never end up on death row, that it would take an outstanding career if not heinous guilt for that to happen. A great deal has still to be shaken up inside our heads for us to get the real picture: a mass of the most ordinary, average, gray people have languished in death cells for the most ordinary, everyday misdemeanors, and, although some were lucky and had their death sentences commuted, which was purely a matter of chance, they very often got the super." Pg 440


"Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another. . . . 
That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.
That's all. And neither for the first hour not for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else." Pg. 4


"A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf." Pg. 11


"'Resistance! Why didn't you resist?' Today those who have continued to live on in comfort scold those who suffered. 
Yes, resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of the arrest itself.
But it did not begin." Pg. 15


"A convenient world outlook gives rise to a convenient juridical term: social prophylaxis. It was introduced and accepted, and it was immediately understood by all. . .  And when else, in fact, should unreliable fellow travelers, all that shaky intellectual rot, be arrested, if not on the eve of the war for world revolution? 
. . . And so in Moscow they began a systematic search, block by block. Someone had to be arrested everywhere." Pg 42


Samples of Solzhenitsyn's exploration of Article 58 which "In all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58." Pg. 60


"Broadly interpreted, this turned out to include the refusal of a prisoner in camp to work when in a state of starvation and exhaustion. This was weakening of state power. And it was punished by execution. . . . 


. . . when our soldiers were sentenced to only ten years for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. Pg 61


"'We draw no distinction between intention and the crime itself, and this is an instance of the superiority of Soviet legislation to bourgeois legislation.'" From the Criminal Code, quoted page 62


"'Subverting and weakening' the government could include any idea which did not coincide with or rise to the level of intensity of the ideas expressed in the newspaper on any particular day. After all, anything which does not strengthen must weaken: Indeed, anything which does not completely fit in, coincide, subverts!" Pg. 66


"In actual practice, this section was so broadened that no organization whatever was required. I myself experience the subtle application of this section. Two of us had secretly exchanged thoughts - in other words we were the beginnings of an organization, in other words an organization." Pg 67


"Throughout the years and decades, interrogations under Article 58 were almost never undertaken to elicit the truth, but were simply an exercise in an inevitably filthy procedure: someone who had been free only a little while before, who was sometimes proud and always unprepared, was to be bent and pushed through a narrow pipe where his sides would be bent and pushed through a narrow pipe where his sides would be torn by iron hooks and where he could not breathe, so that he would finally pray to get to the other end. And at the other end, he would be shoved out, an already processed native of the Archipelago, already in the promised land. (The fool would keep on resisting! He even thought there was a way back out of the pipe." Pg 95


"There is a very simple connection here. Once it was established that charges had to be brought at any cost and despite everything, threats, violence, tortures became inevitable. And the more fantastic the charges were, the more ferocious the interrogation had to be in order to force the required confession. Given the fact that the cases were always fabricated, violence and torture had to accompany them. This was not peculiar to 1937 alone. It was a chronic, general practice. . . . The types of torture used were not regulated and every kind of ingenuity was permitted, no matter what." Pg. 99


" . . . Andrei Vyshinsky . . . pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to take: that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative. Therefore when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, but only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense, that we are punishing a guilty person. Thence arose the most practical conclusion: that it was useless to seek absolute evidence for evidence is always relative or unchallenged witnesses for they can say different things at different times. The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them, even when there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his office. " Pg. 101


"If he has been indoctrinated to believe that even among other officers he is the salt of the earth? And that he knows more than others and is entrusted with more responsibility than others and that, consequently, it is his duty to force a prisoner's head between his legs, and then to shove him like that into a pipe . . . 
Why shouldn't he?
I credited myself with unselfish dedication. But meanwhile I had been thoroughly prepared to be an executioner. And if I had gotten into the NKVD school under Yezhov, maybe I would have matured just in time for Beria.
So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now.
If only it were that simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: Know thyself!
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.
If Malyuta Skuratov had summoned us, we, too, probably would have done our work well!
From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
And correspondingly, from evil to good.
From the moment when our society was convulsed by the reminder of those illegalities and tortures, they began on all sides to explain, to write, to protest: Good people were there too - meaning in the NKVD-MGB!"168


"But no; that's not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions." Pg 173


"You can cool oxygen to 100 degrees below zero Centigrade and exert as much pressure as you want; it does not yield, but remains a gas. But as soon as minus 183 degrees is reached, it liquefies and begins to flow.
Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return." Pg. 175


"People who have never starved as our war prisoners did, who have never gnawed on bats that happened to fly into the barracks, who have never had to boil the soles of old shoes, will never understand the irresistible material force exerted by any kind of appeal, any kind of argument whatever, if behind it, on the other side of the camp gates, smoke rises from a field kitchen, and if everyone who signs up is fed a bellyful of kasha right then and there - if only once! Just once more before I die!" Pg. 246


"There is a simple truth which one can learn only through suffering: in war not victories are blessed but defeats. Governments need victories and the people need defeats. Victory gives rise to the desire for more victories. But after a defeat it is freedom that men desire - and usually attain. A people needs defeat just as an individual needs suffering and misfortune: they compel the deepening of the inner life and generate a spiritual upsurge." Pg. 272


"We have forgotten another concept of valor - civil valor. And that's all our society needs, just that, just that, just that! That's all we need and that's exactly what we haven't got." Pg. 462


"They, too, will have nothing left of them in one days' time - just like you. This is the principle of the second law of thermodynamics: all differences tend to level out, to disapper . . . 
Own nothing! Possess nothing! Buddha and Christ taught us this, and the Stoics and the Cynics. Greedy though we are, why can't we seem to grasp that simple teaching? Can't we understand that with property we destroy our soul?
So let the herring keep warm in your pocket until you get to the transit prison rather than beg for something to drink here. And did they give us a two-day supply of bread and sugar? In that case, eat it in one sitting. Then no one will steal it from you, and you won't have to worry about it. And you'll be free as a bird in heaven!
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday." Pg. 514


"The imagination of writers is poverty-stricken in regard to the native life and customs of the Archipelago. When they want to write about the most reprehensible and disgraceful aspect of prison, they always accuse the latrine bucket. In literature the latrine bucket has become the symbol of prison, a symbol of humiliation, of stink. Oh how frivolous can you be? Now was the latrine bucket really an evil for the prisoner? On the contrary, it was the most merciful device of the prison administration. The actual horror began the moment there was no latrine bucket in the cell." Pg. 540


"In 1937 there were no latrine buckets in certain Siberian prisons, or there weren't enough. Not enough of them had been made ahead of time - Siberian industry hadn't caught up with the full scope of arrests." Pg. 540


"You are submerged in the mass of freedom, and you push and shove with the others in the station waiting room.
. . . On all the railroads of the country this very minute, right now, people who have just been fed salt herring are licking their dry lips with bitter tongues. They dream of the happiness of stretching out one's legs and of the relief one feels after going to the toilet. In Orotukan the earth thaws only in summer and only to the depth of three feet - and only then can they bury the bones of those who died during the winter. And you have the right to arrange your own life under the blue sky and the hot sun, to get a drink of water, to stretch, to travel wherever you like without a convoy. So what's this about unwiped feet? And what's this about a mother-in-law? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart - and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory." Pg 591-2


Book 1