Most of my posts have to do with the creative energy of visual art. But this blog is also about words which change me. About writers who say things which call forth from within me a response. Although in this case the depth of this writing almost reduces me to incredible silence.
Other than posting quotes on the blog I have not posted thoughts along this line recently - and this is a difficult post! What I write will not do justice to the author - I invite you to read her book.
The words seared into my mind are:
"They expect the worst - not the unthinkable."
After reading, A Train in Winter [2012], an account of women of the French Resistance who were taken to prison and from there to Auschwitz, I was drawn to read more of these women. Only a few returned to France. after the war. A few wrote about their experience. One of these was Charlotte Delbo, arrested in March 1942 along with her husband a leader in the resistance, on a charge of distributing anti German leaflets in Paris. Turned over to the Gestapo, they were imprisoned and her husband was executed by firing squad in May. Delbo was deported to Auschwitz in January 1943 and later to Ravensbruck.
In Auschwitz and After, Delbo documents her experience and that of the Holocaust into "spare, austere, yet lyric prose." In her poetry I find indelible pictures of deep meaning. Many times I found that my eyes closed over tears and I had to set the book aside.
In the Introduction I read: "Delbo's ambition as a writer about the Nazi concentration camps is enshrined in one of her favourite expressions, which became the ruling principle of her art: Il faut donner a voir, which we might translate as "they must be made to see." In the first part of the book, titled, None of Us Will Return, she says about the new arrivals in Auschwitz, "They expect the worst [le pire] - not the unthinkable [l'inconcevable]." She then resolves to reveal to readers "the way it really was," so that we might somehow grasp in words at least, "the daily struggle of Delbo and her friends to stay alive while besieged by hunger, thirst, abuse, fatigue, and despair."
But how does one "explain the inexplicable?" I can only read the words and ponder the depth of pain that such a dehumanizing experience had on these 'ordinary' people placed in this unthinkable situation. How does one hear terror, or see anguish? How does one describe the feelings of women on the way to the gas chamber or of the temporarily reprieved who must watch them? How does one describe the physical and emotional horror of carrying a frozen, dead body a mile back to camp in the cold winter dusk on an icy, diarrhoea splattered road wearing clogs held on by strings! How does one hang onto sanity when they awaken before dawn to realize that during the night the woman beside you has died and you are lying next to a corpse. As witness to the panic of the human condition when atrocity rules, Delbo attempts the impossible:
"We watch with eyes that cry out, eyes full of disbelief.
Each face is inscribed with such precision over the icy light,
the blue of the sky, that it remains marked there for eternity.
For eternity, these shaven heads, squeezed against one another,
bursting with shouts, mouths twisted by cries we do not hear,
hands waving in a mute cry.
The cries remain inscribed upon the blue of the sky."
People often comment on the silence of soldiers returning from war. Did they realize we would not really listen or understand. I recently read in the book, Between Gods, how some Jews who survived and emigrated to America hid their Jewishness - perhaps this was a way to silence their loss. It has taken many years for 'that' generation to speak out - is it that in face of the atrocities in the world today we are somehow learning to listen.
The final section of this book. 'The Measure of Our days' is an account of how difficult it was for people returning, to both justify their return [because so many had died], and confront the burden of their adjustment upon returning. She writes, "I have returned from beyond knowledge / and now must unlearn/ for otherwise I clearly see a world / I can no longer live."
Later she writes,
"Each one had taken along his or her memories, the whole load of remembrance, the weight of the past. On arrival, we had to unload it. We went in naked. You might say one can take everything away from a human being except this one faculty: memory. Not so. First, human beings are stripped of what makes them human, then their memory leaves them. Memory peels off like tatters, tatters of burned skin. That a human being is able to survive having been stripped in this manner is what you'll never comprehend. And I cannot explain it to you. At least, when it comes to the few survivors. People call the inexplicable a miracle. The survivor must undertake to regain his memory, regain what he possessed before: his knowledge, his experience, his childhood memories, his manual dexterity and his intellectual faculties, sensitivity, the capacity to dream, imagine, laugh. If you're unable to gauge the effort this necessitates, in no way can I attempt to convey it."
Somehow deep within I'm immeasurably saddened that mankind may never learn that inexplicable hatred of others can and must be replaced with mercy and grace.
As Delbo describes the winter days - the death and numbness, the hunger and tiredness - I was reminded of Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream. I have never really wanted to look at this painting but as I progressed through the book it has become the picture seared into my mind. So I close with the picture and explanation.
The Scream by Edvard Munch
According to Munch’s personal diaries, the idea for the modern art
painting The Scream came to him while looking down over the Norwegian
landscape from an elevation. While a mountaintop or a scenic view from a summit
might sound like a beautiful natural landscape to paint, Munch’s personal
interpretation of “nature” below was very different than you might imagine.
Interpretation of Munch's famous The Scream
Quote
What does the famous Edvard Munch quote associated with The Scream
mean? On the surface, Munch describes a typical evening in Norway, taking a
walk at sunset with some friends beside a "fjord." While an evening
out walking by the water might sound relaxing and enjoyable at first, on closer
look we see that Munch is really describing a moment of an almost existential
personal crisis. In the painting's background, we can see two people walking
away (probably the "two friends" Munch describes) in the other
direction, creating the feelings of isolation and "fear" the artist
talks about in his quotation. In the manner of a true Expressionist painter,
Munch uses color to express his emotional reactions to his environment,
commenting on the "red" sky and the "bluish black" fjord,
described almost as an all-consuming black hole hell where "tongues of
fire" savagely lick at the frazzled and overwhelmed subject,
unidentifiable as either a man or woman.
While there is certainly something ominous about Munch's description of The Scream landscape, the repeated use of the word "blood" in combination with the twirling, swirling, and whirling warm tones used to paint the background suggest actual physical violence. What is the source of violence in this seemingly isolated landscape in Norway? Art history sources indicate that a slaughterhouse was within earshot of the spot illustrated in The Scream painting. The proximity of the slaughterhouse could very well account for Munch's repeated mentions of "blood" in connection with the painting.
Along with the slaughterhouse, the very mental asylum where Munch's own
sister was hospitalized was very nearby, too, causing us to wonder: Who is the
subject in The Scream? While it seems obvious that the painting is a
self portrait of the artist himself, due to the ambiguity of the subject's
gender, the sexless person depicted in The Scream may actually be a
working combination of both Edvard Munch and his sick sister, hospitalized in
the asylum nearby.
Meaning of The Scream
(1893) by Edvard Munch
What is the meaning of Edvard Munch's 1893 modern art painting The
Scream? When it all comes down to it, a "scream" is above all a
sound and an auditory sensation. The wailing of both the dying animals and the
cries overheard coming from the nearby insane asylum, however faint they may
have been, give an added and potent personal and autobiographical meaning to
the painting's simple title. The true
meaning behind the title of Edvard Munch's "soul painting" The
Scream may very well come back to the decidedly ugly, even hideous, sounds
of living beings undergoing both physical and emotional suffering in the modern
age.
