Chopin

I seem to be drawn to disgruntled composers…

Listen to me tickle the ivories-

http://www.mp3.com/danielrichter

Note: If Chopin were alive today, he would no doubt be even more discontented should he hear my renditions of his masterpieces. However, he being deceased, I take the liberty to play said pieces, butcher though I may.

Mbaye Diagne

This photo is of Mbaye Diagne. He is a man who threatens, whenever I think of him, to restore my faith in the human race. You see, there are not many Mbaye Diagne’s in the world.

In 1994, a large part of the Rwandan population went mad. In less than 100 days, 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans were murdered by Hutu Rwandans, most of them bludgeoned to death with machetes. A militia calling themselves the Interahamwe set up checkpoints along roads leading to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda; they waited at each checkpoint with machetes in hand.

The United Nations had a force in Rwanda. As the violence burgeoned, the United Nations saved all Europeans and Americans who were in Rwanda. If you were white, you had a ticket out.

The United Nations, in order to avoid conflict, did nothing to save the rest. In fact, there was an order not to intervene.

Sometimes the word “non-intervention” is used to indicate the fact that men have made rules which prevent other men from saving families who are being cut into bits and pieces.

Were the men really prevented from helping?

There was a captain from the United Nations peace keepers, named Mbaye Diagne. He came from Senegal.

The machetes did not scare Mbaye Diagne.

The orders of superiors and the actions (inaction) of others did not discourage Mbaye Diagne.

While dozens of armed soldiers from the UN enjoyed themselves by a pool at a hotel in central Kigali, Mbaye Diagne drove out in his jeep through 23 checkpoints of Interahamwe, who were often drunk and thirsting for blood, found Tutsis who were hiding, drove them back through the 23 checkpoints, and hid them from the Interahamwe. Countless missions. Hundreds of Tutsis. He was alone.

He smiled, joked, offered cigarettes to the murderers, and talked his way through the checkpoints. Again and again.

Toward the end of the conflict, the Rwandan Patriotic Front closed in on Kigali. A random mortar shell aimed at a checkpoint fell next to Mbaye Diagne’s jeep, killing him.

All that is left of Mbaye Diagne are some photos, footage he recorded at the beginning of the conflict, memories of those who knew him, and the hundreds of Tutsis he rescued.

Don’t be Yggdrasilly

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.” – Thomas Jefferson.

I found this quote on a web site called Yggdrasil University, a site which, while I leafed through their electronic pages, tried to convince me that there is a Jewish conspiracy to exaggerate the horrors of the Holocaust.

The irony of this quote greeting me from a racist hate group’s web page aside, I think it diagnoses America’s and the world’s problems pretty neatly. Bush loves to throw around the word freedom, and has admitted he doesn’t get past the headlines of the newspaper. Literature, history books, and what goes on outside America (and currently Iraq, but that will change as soon as people stop murdering each other so frequently over there) is fairly widely seen by the façade of America (what you see if you turn on the television) as something for grad students who happen to be studying whatever topic it is (the African novel, Argentina’s economy, choose a topic alien to the American mass culture machine, in other words from the multitundinous sphere consisting of cultural objects conspicuously absent from any mention on the television (our new God?)), brainiacs and “intellectual types”.

America plays a huge role in determining the path the entire world is taking. Since our populace elects the leaders who will choose the role America will take, it seems like a dangerous situation when a good percentage of that populace has never even heard of the names of many countries who sink or swim based on how we treat them (i.e. whether the WTO et al. decides to be nice to them about their debts). Democracy only works if the population spontaneously demands it, tears itself away from fanatically religious elements of its society, educates itself as to the issues it will be voting about, and votes acordingly (Bush is learning this the hard way in Iraq). Otherwise we might be better off with a king. Who could be a worse leader for the Palestinians right now than Hamas? Who could be a worse leader for Iran than Ahmadinejad? Fine, maybe you can think of someone worse, but democracy doesnt seem to be working very well in the Middle East (at least recently..I hate to be so negative, perhaps things will change for the better)

What is freedom? I’m pretty sure it’s not whatever Bush and the American right wing are talking about. So that’s a start. Or perhaps it is, but they have only touched a tiny part of what freedom is without fathoming everything it entails. Two main strains of 20th century continental philosophy were both concerned with it. Existentialists believed that we are free to be authentic, that the individual was much more free than she or he took themself to be. The only way to be free however, is if I stop using a preconceived set of rules given to me from a book, a parent, a teacher, or society’s prejudices about what one should or shouldn’t do in order to decide how to act. In the words of Bérénice Einberg, I am a sculpture who is trying to sculpt myself. I don’t do good things because I am a good person, I am a good person because I do good things. However, if I do good things in order to “be” a good person, I’m definately not free! That would be taking a convention and trying to fit myself into it. This is why according to the existentialists one can never know who one is until one has died!! Only until one has finished all one’s actions can one know for sure that one will not start doing things differently. Only when one accepts that and starts acting accordingly can one accept one’s freedom. And there is no god and no afterlife so, basically I will never know who I am. What an idea. If I really wanted to, I could start using a front window to enter and exit my house, and use my front door in order to let fresh air in, despite the fact that that would fly in the face of society’s conventions and provoke comments by my neighbors questioning my sanity. So, why don’t I? Even for one day! If nothing else I would remember that moment of leaving my house through my window for a good while, instead of instantaneously forgetting what I just did after I went out my door as usual.. but I digress.

The other big idea about freedom is from the other end of the spectrum. It pretty much swept the existentialists off the stage, not so politely in some cases. The postmodernists, or post-structuralists, tell me that freedom is simply a word. A word is a sign that consists of a signifier and a signified. The signifier is the sound image that points to the signified concept. The sound image “elephant” points to the idea I have in my head of what an “elephant” is. One problem is, in a language spoken by millions of people, the signified’s get lost sometimes in that big structural jungle of meaning. Case in point- me sitting here trying to expound what I know about the not-so-simple concept of “freedom”. Another problem- according to these guys, I dont speak language; rather, LANGUAGE SPEAKS ME!!! I can sit here and write the most subversive essay I can muster, attacking everything and everyone, get it published on the front page of the New York Times, and I will be doing nothing more than perpetuating the real problem, which is that we treat language as if it contained THE truth, and as if we can access THE Truth through language, when in fact language DETERMINES our truth, the idea that we are “telling the truth” when we talk is a hoax perpetrated on us by our ancestors. Try as I may, I can’t come to any other conclusion from all this than that there is no such thing as truth, or at least, if there is truth, it is not accessible. And if truth is inaccessible, why try? These people are trying to tell me “I” don’t exist, because “I” am actually fragmentary. There is no unitary “being”. Therefore “I” cannot act. I do not like this philosophy, because I think that if nothing else, I exist. And if I dont exist, then it really doesnt matter whether “I” have created an illusion of existance for my imaginary self, does it? That’s the thing that doesnt make sense, also: if I am only an illusion, an illusion entails someone who is taken in by the illusion, does it not? The shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave wouldn’t ever have been mentioned if there were no one chained to the floor watching them, right? So, if I am nothing but an illusion, than an illusion for WHO? How can something trick itself into thinking it exists if there is nothing/no one to trick? It makes no sense. Postmodernists would no doubt answer that I am only playing linguistic games, and that grammar does not correspond to reality. All I can reply to that is, thank you very much, you have made me much more confused than I ever would have been, had I never heard of your IMAGINARY EXISTANCE.

And now for something completely different! This is an image of the world according to norse mythology. The Yggdrasil (pronounced ig-dra-sil) is a giant ash tree that starts underneath the earth, whose trunk comes up through the middle like an axis, and whose leaves reach accross the sky. Guess what the etymology of the word Yggdrasil is! Ygg means “terrible”, and drasil means “steed” in old norse, therefore “terrible steed”. From what norse scholars guess, this terrible steed belonged to a god named Odin, who spent 9 nights hanging from the tree in search of runes which would give him ultimate knowledge. “Terrible steed”, sounds familiar…but from where?

Baudelaire

Je vais commenter un poème des Fleurs du mal par Baudelaire. On peut trouver le poème ici. Le poème s’intitule L’albatros. Ce poème est composé de vers pairs de douze syllabes; c’est-à-dire, l’alexandrin. Presque tous les vers sont symétriques, avec la césure après la sixième syllabe de chaque vers. La seule exception est dans le troisième vers du premier hémistiche: “…Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage…” Dans ce vers, Baudelaire décrit l’albatros, qui est un symbole pour le poète dans le poème. Etant un poète, il veut se comparer lui-même à l’albatros. Baudelaire était un homme déprimé, détaché de la vie, même torturé. Il détestait la réalité qui était autour de lui, comme il détestait au moins des parties de lui-même. L’une de ces propres caractéristiques qu’il détestait était son indolence, et je pense donc que cela est la raison pour qu’il ait mis la césure entre les mots “indolents” et “compagnons” pour mettre en relief le mot “indolents”.

Une autre technique poétique plus frappante est utilisée dans le troisième hémistiche. Le poème décrit des hommes d’équipage qui capturent un albatros sur leur navire et se moquent de lui. L’albatros, normalement un grand oiseau plein de grâce, en harmonie avec ce qui est au-dessus de la terre, est rendu maladroit par son existence sur la terre (ou, plus précisément, sur le navire). De même, le monde de Baudelaire consistait des choses au-delà de l’ordinaire, le quotidien, la normale. En fait, ces trois choses le dégoûtaient. Il était constamment entouré par l’ordinaire, le quotidien, la normale, comme tout le monde. Dans le troisième hémistiche, Baudelaire décrit des hommes d’équipage qui se moquent de l’albatros. Tout l’hémistiche est maladroit, comme l’albatros atterri, et comme les insultes que les hommes d’équipage jettent sur lui. La majorité des mots sont courts, d’une ou de deux syllabes, et quand on lit l’hémistiche à haute voix, les vers ne coulent pas, ils manquent la beauté des autres hémistiches, qui volent comme l’albatros dans le ciel.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
L’un agace son bec avec un brûme-gueule,
L’autre mime, en boitant, l’infirme qui volait!

Le dernier hémistiche est le plus beau—les mots mélangent ensemble parfaitement, tous les quatre derniers mots partagent le même dernier phonème, il n’y a aucune virgule, et le langage qu’utilise le poète est paradisiaque. Il décrit la vie du poète, qui est condamné à vivre “au milieu des huées”.

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

Voici la citation de l’ouvrage que je cite:

Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs Du Mal. Paris: Flammarion, 1991. 61-62.

Colbert at WHCD

Apparently I wasn’t the only person who thought Stephen Colbert’s speech at the WHCD was funny. However, more importantly than being funny, which any comic could have done, there were certain parts of his ironic tirade that were serious jabs at everything Bush and the 32% of america who still support him stand for. So whereas Frank Caliendo last year did his John Madden schtick and then poked fun at Bush for his bad grammar while clarifying that he voted for Bush twice (yikes), and Leno made some jokes about choking on a pretzel, Colbert went for the jugular:

“I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”

Wow. At least there was one person in the room who wasn’t going to sit there and joke around with Bush as if everything is fun & games in the white house, and its ok to start wars on faulty premises and then come to banquets to yuk it up as if everything’s hunky dory. And he kept at it for a good 15 minutes, Bush pretended to laugh for a while, then just kind of half smiled, half grimaced for the rest.

Here’s another gem:

“Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it’s 2/3 empty. There’s still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn’t drink it. The last third is usually backwash.”

Damn, he called Bush supporters BACKWASH!