Gabriel Marcel, Michael Krüger

De Franse filosoof en toneelauteur Gabriel Marcel werd geboren op 7 december 1889 in Parijs. Zie ook alle tags voor Gabriel Marcel op dit blog.

Uit: De Mens Zichzelf een Vraagstuk (L’Homme Problématique, vertaald door Edward Brongersma)

“We zagen dat Nietzsche niet stil blijft staan bij de uitspraak ‘God is dood’, op dezelfde manier als Pascal, in een toespeling op een passage uit Plutarchus, eens zei: ‘De grote Pan is dood’. Wat Nietzsche  beweert is oneindig tragischer, omdat hij zegt dat wij, wij. zelf, God hebben gedood, en dit alleen verklaart de heilige ontsteltenis waarmee Nietzsche hier zijn uitspraak doet. Men heeft mij verzekerd dat Jean-Paul Sartre, toen hij op het toppunt van zijn roem was, en vlak na de bevrijding door de journalisten te Genève werd binnengehaald, hun zo eventjes tussen neus en lippen door uiteenzette: ‘Mijne heren, God is dood’. Wie ziet niet, dat dit existentieel een geheel andere klank heeft, juist omdat de heilige ontsteltenis eruit verdwenen is en plaats heeft gemaakt voor de voldane toon van iemand, die voorgeeft zijn stelsel te grondvesten op de puinhopen van iets waaraan hij nooit geloofd heeft? En toch kan men zeggen, dat de beweerde dood van God reeds bij Nietzsche de trekken vertoont van een inleidend feit, in deze zin dan dat deze tragische gebeurtenis de weg vrijmaakt voor de komst van de Übermensch; deze kan immers onmogelijk komen eer de daad is verricht waardoor de mens zich de dood van God bewust maakt en in zeker opzicht zijn verantwoordelijkheid daarvoor erkent. In de studie, die Heidegger in zijn ‘Holzwege’ heeft gewijd aan de dood van God bij Nietzsche, brengt hij ons in herinnering, dat met het bewust worden van de dood van God ook de bewustwording begint van een radicale verandering in de waardering van die waarden, welke tot dusver als de allerhoogste werden beschouwd. De mens zelf komt dan te verkeren in een andere en verhevener geschiedenis, omdat de wil tot macht daar ervaren en erkend wordt als het beginsel, dat aan de waarden hun plaats geeft. Het kan overigens niet sterk genoeg worden beklemtoond, dat dit het gegeven is waarmee Nietzsche meent te kunnen ontkomen aan het nihilisme. Want daarin zouden wij vervallen, of daartoe zouden wij gedoemd zijn, als wij niet doorgingen doch bleven stil staan bij de dood van God, als wij in alle gemoedsrust het lieten bij het vaststellen van dit tragisch gebeuren, of als we er zelfs een soort pervers genot uit gingen putten, in plaats van te begrijpen, dat dit slechts een uitgangspunt kan zijn, zoiets als een springplank voor de sensationele sprong, voor het scheppend vooruitschieten, waarzonder de Übermensch en de Übermenschheit ondenkbaar zijn.”

 

Gabriel Marcel (7 december 1889 – 8 oktober 1973)

 

De Duitse dichter, schrijver en vertaler Michael Krüger werd geboren op 9 december 1943 in Wittgendorf. Zie ook alle tags Michael Krüger op dit blog.

 

Weervoorspelling

Ooit zal de sneeuw
oplossen in smeltwater
en een bruisend beekje worden,
dat de donkere rivieren oplicht
in hun bewaakte loop
naar de zee. Ooit
zullen de wolken opstijgen
en het podium vrij maken
voor de smekende ogen.
Ooit zullen we weer
buiten zitten
aan de fris gebeitste tafels
en de boeken lezen,
die winterslaap hielden.
Dus kom alsjeblieft snel,
zoals het er nu uitziet
wordt het ooit weer

 

Vertaald door Frans Roumen

 

Michael Krüger (Wittgendorf, 9 december 1943)

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 7e december ook mijn blog van 7 december 2020 en eveneens mijn blog van 7 december 2018 en eveneens mijn blog van 7 december 2014 deel 2.

Tatamkhulu Afrika, Dirk Stermann, Johann Nestroy, Joyce Cary, Gabriel Marcel, Willa Cather, Noam Chomsky, Friedrich Schlögl, Samuel Gottlieb Bürde

De Zuid-Afrikaanse dichter en schrijver Tatamkhulu Afrika werd geboren op 7 december 1920 in Egypte. Zie ook alle tags voor Tatamkhulu Afrika op dit blog.

Uit: Bitter Eden

“Down at the dead end of the beach, I wash my face in the tideless sea, stare out over the still darkened warm-as-blood water to the skyline that has become a cage’s prohibitive ring, go back, then, to the higher, now sunlit land where silent men are smashing rifles over rocks with the ferocity of those who wrestle serpents with their bare hands. I pass what is clearly an officer’s tent. It is dug in until only the ridge shows, neat steps leading down. Outside, a batman is washing a china plate, saucer, cup, his pug-dog peasant’s face seemingly unconcerned, but it does not raise from its staring down at the trembling of the hands. I pass another tent sunk in the sand. Again the ubiqui-tous robot’s playing games, denying midnight now. Frenziedly the hands polish the buttons on an officer’s tunic, button-stick inserted round the buttons so that the Brasso will not whiten the sullen cloth, bring upon the hands a comic wrath. The tunic’s shoulder flaps flaunt a crown. I am thinking ‘Christr, beating back bile. He is coming towards me, studying the anonymity of my fatigues, two pips glinting on his shoulders, sandy hair lifting in the awakening wind. The hair, the prissy pursing of the lips, the button mushroom eyes, warn of the worst of the breed and I snap him my still smart training college salute. He floppy-chops an arm back, barks, ‘Unit and rank?’ I think to tell him I am Colonel this-or-that because how would he — now — ever find out otherwise, but the solemnness in the air like bells’ dissuades me and I say, ‘Ser-geant. Second Divisional Headquarters. Sir!’ His eyes widen a little as he balances between surprise and what I suspect is a chronic tendency to disbelieve. ‘Div. H.Q? What do you do at Div. H.Q.?’ There is a slight em-phasis on the ‘you’. `Chemical Warfare Intelligence and Training. Sir!’ He is impressed and it shows in a slight inclining to me of stance and tone, and something like a greediness of the eyes, which makes no sense and which I dismiss as a stress-induced fancifulness of the mind. `Do you want to hand yourself over like a sheep or make a break?’ His voice is casual but his glance is sharp and I hear myself saying, ‘Make a break,’ even though previously there had been no thought of that in my mind. I am honest enough to admit that I am no hero and, even now, I am painfully aware that my excitement at the prospect of escape only slightly exceeds my congenital dread. `Get in that truck then,’ he says and indicates a battered three-tonner a few paces off. ‘Where’s your kit? Are you armed?’ `No kit, sir. No arms.’ Even as the words still sound, I realize what I’m saying and I hump not my kit but my shame as I for the first time am faced by the fact that I never even thought of retrieving my kit from the anti-gas truck before I set the latter alight.“

 
Tatamkhulu Afrika (7 december 1920 – 23 december 2002)
Cover

 

De Duits-Oostenrijkse schrijver, presentator en cabaretier Dirk Stermann werd geboren op 7 december 1965 in Duisburg. Zie ook alle tags voor Dirk Stermann op dit blog.

Uit: Kurz & Klein

„Mein Name ist Caspar. Manchmal gehe ich gern in den Wald. Manchmal aber auch nicht. Im Wald da gibt es Bäume. Ich kenne Eichen und Fichten und die Bäume, die man zu Weihnachten in die Häuser stellt. Die heißen Tannen. Die meisten Bäume sind ganz schön hoch, es gibt aber auch welche, die sind nicht so hoch. Wenn die Hohen umkippen, muss man ganz schnell in Deckung gehen, weil sonnst hauen die einen um. Ich hab deswegen Angst vor den hohen Bäumen. Die Kleinen sind ja nicht so schlimm. Wenn die umkippen. find ich das lustig. Meine Freunde und ich machen das oft. Im Wald da gibt es sonnen Tümpel oder so und da drin sind Frösche. Viele Frösche. Denen stecken wir ein Strohhalm hinten rein und blasen die dann auf. Die werden dann ganz dick, dann kann man Fußball mit den spielen. Wer den dicksten bläst, hat gewonnen. Meistens gewinn ich nie nicht, :aber manchmal doch. Da gibt es auch noch so andere Tiere, die erschrecken wir immer. Man braucht nur in die Hände klatschen, dann hauen die schon ah. So feige sind die. Der Michael ist mein Freund und hat gesagt, daß er Tiere doof findet. Das find ich nicht. Ich finde, man kann sie ja immerhin aufblasen und erschrecken und so. Und viele Menschen haben ja auch Tiere zu Hause. Nicht nur Weihnachten wie die Tannen, sondern ich glaub immer. Aber das sind ja auch ganz andere Tiere. Nicht so richtige. Die beißen einen ja auch. Michael wurde neulich von einem gebissen. Der mußte dann ins Krankenhaus und da haben die den mit einer Nadel und einem Nähgarn genäht. Ich glaub, ich find Tiere doch doof. Am liebsten spiele ich bei uns auf der Straße.“


Dirk Stermann (Duisburg, 7 december 1965)

 

De Oostenrijkse dichter en schrijver Johann Nepomuk Eduard Ambrosius Nestroy werd geboren in Wenen op 7 december 1801. Zie ook alle tags voor Johann Nestroy op dit blog.

K.-Jammer

Diese graue Wolkenschar
Stieg aus einem Meer von Freuden;
Heute muß ich dafür leiden,
Daß ich gestern glücklich war.

Ach, in Wermut hat verkehrt
Sich der Nektar! Ach, wie quälend,
Katzenjammer, Hundeelend
Herz und Magen mir beschwert!

 

Ein steiler Felsen ist der Ruhm

Ein steiler Felsen ist der Ruhm,
Ein Lorbeerbaum wächst darauf.
Viel kraxeln drum und dran herum,
Doch wenig kommen ‘nauf;
Darneben ist ein Präzipiß,
’s geht kerzengrad hinab,
Da drunnt’ ein Holz zu finden is,
Es heißt der Bettelstab.

Wer nicht enorm bei Kräften is,
Soll nicht auf’n Felsen steig’n.
Er rutscht und fallt ins Präzipiß,
Viel Beispiel tun das zeig’n…
Die Mittelstraßen ist ein breiter Raum,
Die Fahrt kommod talab,
Es wachst zwar drauf kein Lorbeerbaum,
Doch auch kein Bettelstab.

 

Heute ist Tag der Lyrik

O Knute, o Knute!
Die schwingen man tute,
Machst Wirkung sehr gute
Bei frevelndem Mute.
Was dem Kinde die Rute,
Ist dem Volke die Knute;
Du stillest die Wute
Rebellischem Blute.
Das alles, das tute
Die Knute, die Knute!
Wehalb ich mich spute,
In einer Minute
Poetischer Glute
Schrieb ich an die Knute
Dies Gedichtchen, dies gute.


Johann Nestroy (7 december 1801 – 25 mei 1862)

 

De Brits – Ierse schrijver Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary werd geboren op 7 december 1888 in Derry, Ierland. Zie ook alle tags voor Joyce Cary op dit blog.

Uit: Mr. Johnson

“No officer who has ever commanded a Nigerian company can forget the Hausa Farewell, that tune upon the bugles played as he rides away for the last time. But I don’t know why, having met and greeted plenty of veterans, I remember so vividly that scene on the parade ground—perhaps only because I was taken by surprise, I can still see the sergeant’s face, the men running; I can’t forget their grins (and laughter—an African will laugh loudly with pleasure at any surprise), the hands stretched out, the shouts of greeting from the back where some young and short soldier felt excluded. It is not true that Africans are eager but fickle. They remember friendship quite as long as they strongly feel it.
As for the style of the book, critics complained of the present tense. And when I answered that it was chosen because Johnson lives in the present, from hour to hour, they found this reason naïve and superficial. It is true that any analogy between the style and the cast of a hero’s mind[Pg 8] appears false. Style, it is said, gives the atmosphere in which a hero acts; it is related to him only as a house, a period, is related to a living person.
But this, I think, is a view answering to a critical attitude which necessarily overlooks the actual situation of the reader. For a critic, no doubt, style is the atmosphere in which the action takes place. For a reader (who may have as much critical acumen as you please, but is not reading in order to criticize), the whole work is a single continuous experience. He does not distinguish style from action or character.
This is not to pretend that reading is a passive act. On the contrary, it is highly creative, or recreative; itself an art. It must be so. For all the reader has before him is a lot of crooked marks on a piece of paper. From those marks he constructs the work of art which conveys idea and feeling. But this creative act is largely in the subconscious. The reader’s mind and feelings are intensely active, but though he himself is fully aware of the activity (it is part of his pleasure) he is absorbed, or should be absorbed, in the tale. A subconscious creative act may be a strange notion, but how else can one describe the passage from printer’s ink into active complex experience. After all, a great deal of rational and constructive activity goes on in the subconscious. We hear of people who dream solutions of difficult mathematical problems. “

 
Joyce Cary (7 december 1888 – 29 maart 1957)
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De Franse filosoof en toneelauteur Gabriel Marcel werd geboren op 7 december 1889 in Parijs. Zie ook alle tags voor Gabriel Marcel op dit blog.

Uit:The mystery of being

“One might note here, in passing, that in our modern world, because of its extreme technical complication, we are, in fact, condemned to take for granted a great many results achieved through long research and laborious calculations, research and calculations of which the details are bound to escape us.
One might postulate it as a principle, on the other hand, that in an investigation of the type on which we are now engaged, a philosophical investigation, there can be no place at all for results of this sort. Let us expand that: between a philosophical investigation and its final outcome, there exists a link which can not be broken without the summing up itself immediately losing all reality. And of course we must also ask ourselves here just what we mean, in this context, by reality.
We can come to the same conclusions starting from the other end. We can attempt to elucidate the notion of philosophical investigation directly. Where a technician, like the chemist, starts off with some very general notion, a notion given in advance of what he is looking for, what is peculiar to a philosophical investigation is that the man who undertakes it cannot possess anything equivalent to that notion given in advance of what he is looking for. It would not, perhaps, be imprecise to say that he starts off at random ; I am taking care not to forget that this has been sometimes the case with scientists themselves, but a scientific result achieved, so to say, by a happy accident acquires a kind of purpose when it is viewed retrospectively ; it looks as if it had tended towards some strictly specific aim. As we go on we shall gradually see more and more clearly that this can never be the case with philosophic investigation.
On the other hand, when we think of it, we realize that our mental image of the technician of the scientist, too, for at this level the distinction between the two of them reaches vanishing point is that of a man perpetually carrying out operations, in his own mind or with physical objects, which anybody could carry out in his place. The sequence of these operations, for that reason, can be schematized in universal terms. I am abstracting here from the mental gropings which are inseparable, in the individual scientist s history, from all periods of discovery. These gropings are like the useless roundabout routes taken by a raw tourist in a country with which he has not yet made himself familiar. Both are destined to be dropped and forgotten, for good and all, once the traveller knows the lie of the land.”


Gabriel Marcel (7 december 1889 – 8 oktober 1973)
Parijs in de Adventstijd

 

De Amerikaanse schrijfster Willa Cather werd geboren op 7 december 1873 in de buurt van Winchester, Virginia. Zie ook alle tags voor Willa Cather op dit blog.

Uit:Behind the Singer Tower

“It was a hot, close night in May, the night after the burning of the Mont Blanc Hotel, and some half dozen of us who had been thrown together, more or less, during that terrible day, accepted Fred Hallet’s invitation to go for a turn in his launch, which was tied up in the North River. We were all tired and unstrung and heartsick, and the quiet of the night and the coolness on the water relaxed our tense nerves a little. None of us talked much as we slid down the river and out into the bay. We were in a kind of stupor. When the launch ran out into the harbor, we saw an Atlantic liner come steaming up the big sea road. She passed so near us that we could see her crowded steerage decks.
“It’s the Re di Napoli,” said Johnson of the “Herald.” “She’s going to land her first cabin passengers to-night, evidently. Those people are terribly proud of their new docks in the North River; feel they’ve come up in the world.”
We ruffled easily along through the bay, looking behind us at the wide circle of lights that rim the horizon from east to west and from west to east, all the way round except for that narrow, much-traveled highway, the road to the open sea. Running a launch about the harbor at night is a good deal like bicycling among the motors on Fifth Avenue. That night there was probably no less activity than usual; the turtle-backed ferryboats swung to and fro, the tugs screamed and panted beside the freight cars they were towing on barges, the Coney Island boats threw out their streams of light and faded away. Boats of every shape and purpose went about their business and made noise enough as they did it, doubtless. But to us, after what we had been seeing and hearing all day long, the place seemed unnaturally quiet and the night unnaturally black. There was a brooding mournfulness over the harbor, as if the ghost of helplessness and terror were abroad in the darkness. One felt a solemnity in the misty spring sky where only a few stars shone, pale and far apart, and in the sighs of the heavy black water that rolled up into the light. The city itself, as we looked back at it, seemed enveloped in a tragic self-consciousness.”
 

 
Willa Cather (7 december 1873 – 24 april 1947)
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De Amerikaanse taalkundige, mediacriticus en anarchistisch denker Noam Chomsky werd geboren in Philadelphia op 7 december 1928. Zie ook alle tags voor Noam Chomsky op dit blog.

Uit: Propaganda, American-style

“Like the Soviets in Afghanistan, we tried to establish a government in Saigon to invite us in. We had to overthrow regime after regime in that effort. Finally we simply invaded outright. That is plain, simple aggression. But anyone in the U.S. who thought that our policies in Vietnam were wrong in principle was not admitted to the discussion about the war. The debate was essentially over tactics.
Even at the peak of opposition to the U.S. war, only a minuscule portion of the intellectuals opposed the war out of principle–on the grounds that aggression is wrong. Most intellectuals came to oppose it well after leading business circles did–on the “pragmatic” grounds that the costs were too high.
Strikingly omitted from the debate was the view that the U.S. could have won, but that it would have been wrong to allow such military aggression to succeed. This was the position of the authentic peace movement but it was seldom heard in the mainstream media. If you pick up a book on American history and look at the Vietnam War, there is no such event as the American attack on South Vietnam. For the past 22 years, I have searched in vain for even a single reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an “American invasion of South Vietnam” or American “aggression” in South Vietnam. In America’s doctrinal system, there is no such event. It’s out of history, down Orwell’s memory hole.
If the U.S. were a totalitarian state, the Ministry of Truth would simply have said, “It’s right for us to go into Vietnam. Don’t argue with it.” People would have recognized that as the propaganda system, and they would have gone on thinking whatever they wanted. They would have plainly seen that we were attacking Vietnam, just as we can see the Soviets are attacking Afghanistan.
People are much freer in the U.S., they are allowed to express themselves. That’s why it’s necessary for those in power to control everyone’s thought, to try and make it appear as if the only issues in matters such as U.S. intervention in Vietnam are tactical: Can we get away with it? There is no discussion of right or wrong.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. propaganda system did its job partially but not entirely. Among educated people it worked very well. Studies show that among the more educated parts of the population, the government’s propaganda about the war is now accepted unquestioningly. One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda. Another is that they have jobs in management, media, and academia and therefore work in some capacity as agents of the propaganda system–and they believe what the system expects them to believe. By and large, they’re part of the privileged elite, and share the interests and perceptions of those in power.”


Noam Chomsky (Philadelphia, 7 december 1928)

 

De Oostenrijkse schrijver en columnist Friedrich Kilian Schlögl werd geboren op 7 december 1821 in de Weense voorstad Laimgrube (nu Wenen). Zie ook alle tags voor Friedrich Schlögl op dit blog.

Uit: Veni sancte spiritus! (Wiener Blut)

„Das war mir immer ein Räthsel; warum soll die Furcht der Anfang der Weisheit sein, wenn gerade die unverschämtesten Subjecte in diesem Jammerthale am klügsten fahren, und warum will die Menschheit überhaupt weise werden, wenn doch unstreitig die allerdümmsten ihrer Genossen zeitlebens vom Glücke begünstigt bleiben?
Aber man drillt uns fort und fort nach dem altmodischen Muster und mir drillen wieder unsere Sprößlinge, nur recht »weise« zu werden, und wir wissen nicht genug »lehrreiche« Bücher aufzutreiben, die die stupendeste Weisheit in brochürtem Zustande auf so und so vielen Druckbogen enthalten, welche Weisheit, in mäßige Dosen (Lectionen) vertheilt, löffel(seiten)weise genossen, den Lernbegierigen nach dem aufliegenden Schulprogramme in der gesetzlich bemessenen Zeit so vollkommen »reif« macht, daß er augenblicklich z. B. Verwaltungsrath der Lemberg-Czernowitzer Bahn, oder einer beliebigen, selbst der dunkelsten Bank werden könnte, wenn die bezüglichen Posten nicht von anderen »Reifen« bereits besetzt wären.
Sei es wie es sei; aber die letzte Septemberwoche war mir stets ein tragikomisches Kaleidoskop, wenn ich sah, wie sich Alt und Jung für den ersten oder abermaligen Schulanfang rüstet und welche kostspieligen Apparate mitunter benützt werden, um das junge Reis zu einem fruchtbringenden Baume, den unwissenden Knirps zu einem soi-disant »nützlichen Staatsbürger« heranzubilden. Welche herbe Opfer werden da oft gebracht und welch’ Schweiß klebt, um mich recht unbildlich auszudrücken, an diesen, außerdem noch mit einem Agio belasteten Banknoten, welche die obligaten Vehikel der Gelehrsamkeit, genannt Schulbücher, verschlingen.
Nun fällt mir nichts weniger ein, als gegen den in unserer wissenschaftlich gemäßigten Zone ohnehin nur sporadisch auftretenden »Büchereinkauf« zu predigen. Meine geehrten Landsleute treiben den Büchersport bekanntlich nur in zahmster Weise und die wenigen bibliothekarischen Dilettanten, welche die Metropole des Backhendlthums birgt, gehören zu den kulturhistorischen Curiositäten. Ja selbst die wohlhabendere Classe des Bürgerstandes findet es überhaupt meist »unbegreiflich«, für ein Buch – Geld auszulegen, und wenn z. B. der lebenslustige Hausherr X. und sein »Aeltester«, sich nicht lange besinnen, ihrem Leibfiaker einen Viertel Eimer Bier zu zahlen, falls es diesem gelingt, sie in fünfundsechzig Minuten von Schottenfeld zum »rothen Stadl« zu führen, so werden sie sicher die Zumuthung, etwa »Goethe’s Faust«, nach der neuen Classiker-Verschleuderung um zwanzig Kreuzer zu kaufen, für eine unnöthige »Geldverschwendung« erklären.“


Friedrich Schlögl (7 december 1821 – 7 oktober 1892)
Laimgrube (Wenen) Mariahilfer Straße, 1901

 

De Duitse dichter Samuel Gottlieb Bürde werd geboren op 7 december 1753 in Breslau. Zie ook alle tags voor Samuel Gottlieb Bürde op dit blog.

Wir gönnen jedem Glücklichen

Wir gönnen jedem Glücklichen
des Reichtums goldnen Fund;
er sei nicht stolz, noch poch er drauf,
das Glück geht unter und geht auf.
Sein Fußgestell ist rund.

Der Redliche, mit dem das Glück
stiefmütterlich es meint,
der seinem Schiffbruch kaum entschwimmt,
und nackend ans Gestade klimmt,
der finde einen Freund!

 

Freut euch des Herrn, ihr Frommen

Freut euch des Herrn, ihr Frommen,
und heißt mit lautem Jubelruf
das junge Jahr willkommen
und preist ihn, der den Frühling schuf!
Seht, wie im Blumenkleide
die Wiese lieblich prangt!
Nur der fühlt wahre Freude,
der Gott von Herzen dankt.
Auf, jeder pflügt und säe und singe froh dazu:
Ehr’ sei Gott in der Höhe, auf Erden Fried und Ruh!

 
Samuel Gottlieb Bürde (7 december 1753 – 28 april 1831)
Breslau – Pools: Wrocław, in de Adventstijd (Geen portret beschikbaar)

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 7e december ook mijn blog van 7 december 2014 deel 2.

Tatamkhulu Afrika, Dirk Stermann, Johann Nestroy, Joyce Cary, Gabriel Marcel, Willa Cather, Noam Chomsky, Friedrich Schlögl, Samuel Gottlieb Bürde

De Zuid-Afrikaanse dichter en schrijver Tatamkhulu Afrika werd geboren op 7 december 1920 in Egypte. Zie ook alle tags voor Tatamkhulu Afrika op dit blog.

The Beggar

When I passed
the bus-stop, his black
as biltong hand
thrust out,
demanding alms.
Beneath the grime,
he was a yellow man,
and small,
and crumpled as a towel,
eyes receding into bone,
shivering, too thin frame
denying the truculence of the hand.
‘No,’ I said.
and walked on,
annoyed that I was annoyed,
swatting off shame
all the way into town.
Coming back,
the day-long drizzle stopped
and a suddenly clear
sky sang
of summer round the bend,
white sails in the Bay,
birds grown garrulous again.
I looked for him.
He was lying on his back in the sun,
eyes closed,
stretched out as long as a spill,
hardly distinguishable
from any of the other
drifts of the debris in the lane.
‘Drunk again,’ I thought
and paused, then pressed
my penance into his palm.
Quick as a trap,
his fingers lashed
over it: suprised
sober eyes blessed
me for being kind.
Then he slept again,
fist wrapped, tight,
about the bribe my guilt refused
limbs thrown wide
as though a car had flung him there
and left him to a healing of the sun.

 
Tatamkhulu Afrika (7 december 1920 – 23 december 2002)
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Lees verder “Tatamkhulu Afrika, Dirk Stermann, Johann Nestroy, Joyce Cary, Gabriel Marcel, Willa Cather, Noam Chomsky, Friedrich Schlögl, Samuel Gottlieb Bürde”

Tatamkhulu Afrika, Dirk Stermann, Johann Nestroy, Joyce Cary, Gabriel Marcel, Willa Cather, Noam Chomsky

De Zuid-Afrikaanse dichter en schrijver Tatamkhulu Afrika werd geboren op 7 december 1920 in Egypte. Zie ook alle tags voor Tatamkhulu Afrika op dit blog.

Uit: Bitter Eden

“I am lying on the only patch of improbable grass in a corner of the camp. Balding in parts, overgrown in others, generally neglected and forlorn, it is none the less grass, gentle to the touch, sweet on the tongue. The odd wild flower glows like a light left on under the alien sun.
I am not alone. Bodies, ranging from teak to white-worm, lie scattered at angles as though a bomb had flung them there. As at a signal, conversations swell to a low, communal hum hardly distinguishable from that of the darting bees, dwindle away into a silence in which I hear a plane droning somewhere high up, frustratingly free.
I am back in the narrow wadi sneaking down to the sea. I shelter under a rock’s overhang, clutching the recently shunted-off-on-to-me Hotchkiss machine gun that I still do not fully understand. Peculiarly, I am alone but I know that in the wadis paralleling mine there is a bristling like cockroaches packing a crack in a wall of thousands of others who wait for the jesus of the ships that will never come. I have stared at the grain of the rock for so long that it has become a grain on the inside of my skull.
A bomber, pregnantly not ours, lumbers over the wadi on its way to the sea, its shadow huge on the ground, its belly seeming to skim rock, scrub, sand. I dutifully pump the gun’s last exotic rounds at it, marvelling that, for once, the gun does not jam. But there is no flowering of the plane into flame, no gratifying hurtling of it into the glittering enamel of the sea, and I stare after it as it rises into higher flight and am drained as one who has milked his seed into his hand.
Later, a shell explodes near the sea, the sand and the windless air deadening it into the slow-motion of a dream, and the sun sets into the usual heedless blood-hush of the sky.
I squat down beside the now useless gun, resting my back against its stand, thinking I will not sleep, staring into the heart of darkness that is a night that may not attain to any dawn. But I am wrong. There are muted thunderings, stuttering rushes of nearer sound, an occasional screaming of men or some persisting gull, but I strangely sleep, as strangely do not dream, and am woken – not by any uproar but a silence – to a sun still far from where I have slumped down into the foetal coil. I do not need any loudhailer to tell me that the lines are breached, that the sand is as ash under my feet.
Dully, I struggle up, still tripping over trailing sleep, slop petrol over the gun and the truck of anti-gas equipment deeper in under the rock, curse all the courses at Helwan that readied frightened men for the nightmare that never was. The synthetics of the suits, gloves, boots, intolerably flare.”

 
Tatamkhulu Afrika (7 december 1920 – 23 december 2002)
Cover Franse uitgave

Lees verder “Tatamkhulu Afrika, Dirk Stermann, Johann Nestroy, Joyce Cary, Gabriel Marcel, Willa Cather, Noam Chomsky”

Tatamkhulu Afrika, Johann Nestroy, Joyce Cary, Gabriel Marcel, Willa Cather, Noam Chomsky

De Zuid-Afrikaanse dichter en schrijver Tatamkhulu Afrika werd geboren op 7 december 1920 in Egypte. Zie ook alle tags voor Tatamkhulu Afrika op dit blog.

Uit:Bitter Eden

“Do I love her? ‘Love’ is a word that frightens me in the way that these two letters frighten me and if I were to say ‘yes’, I would qualify that by adding that – in our case and from my side – love is an emotion too often threatened by ennui to attain to the grand passion for which I have long since ceased to hope.
Certainly, though, I loved her enough to be able to say, ‘No, everything is fine,’ and turn around and smile into the once so startling blue eyes that now – under certain lights and when looked at in a certain way – have faded into the almost as startling white stare of the blind.
Whether she believed me or not, I cannot say, and equally do I not know why I have bothered to even mention a wife, and a second one at that – the first having absconded to fleshlier fields a lifetime ago – who does not in any way figure in the now so distant and tangled happenings with which the letters deal. Or do I, indeed, know why and have I subconsciously allowed Carina to surface in a manner and image that have more to do with me than her and that will save me the pain of having to explain in so many words why, in those years of warping and war, an oddness in my psyche became set in stone?
Whatever the case, I am now back with the package and the letters, leaving Carina sleeping – or pretending to, she being disconcertingly perceptive at times – and no commonplace papers or gulls beyond the window to divert me: only a darkness that is as inward as it is outward as – yielding to the persuasion of the tide I thought had ebbed beyond recall – I turn to the package and start to unwrap it, then stop, not wanting this from him and as afraid of it as though it held his severed hand.
Or is this all fancifulness? Am I permitting a phantom a power that belongs to me alone? What relevance do they still have – a war that time has tamed into the damp squib of every other war, a love whose strangeness is best left buried where it lies?
Haplessly, unable to resist, I listen for the nightingale that will never sing again, hear only the screaming of an ambulance or a patrol car, a woman crying to deaf ears of a murder or a raping in a lane, and lower my face into the emptiness of my hands.”

 
Tatamkhulu Afrika (7 december 1920 – 23 december 2002)

Lees verder “Tatamkhulu Afrika, Johann Nestroy, Joyce Cary, Gabriel Marcel, Willa Cather, Noam Chomsky”

Tatamkhulu Afrika, Johann Nestroy, Joyce Cary, Gabriel Marcel

De Zuid-Afrikaanse dichter en schrijver Tatamkhulu Afrika werd geboren op 7 december 1920 in Egypte. Zie ook alle tags voor Tatamkhulu Afrika op dit blog.

Trespasser

I wheel my bike under
the cathedral’s dark overhang.
Seized by a rictus of the wind,
the trees shed rain.
Rain slides down
Wale Street’s sleek, steep fall:
air is an ocean booming round
high bare walls.
My hands freeze on
the bike’s crossbar,
seek the sodden saddle, toy
with the ice-cold bell:
I am suddenly fugitive,
homeless and cornered in
a of pressure and cloud. caprice

Then they cough and I know
I am not alone:
far back, against the great, nailed doors,
they huddle: troglodytes
of night’s alcoves,
daytime’s shopping-malls,
parking lots, sparse green lawns,
municipal benches where
lunchtime’s city workers, stripping down
their food-packs, sit
in sober rows.

I fear to turn around,
stiffen in expectation
of the inevitable tugging at my sleeve,
wonder of I have any coins
wonder why they do not bicker,
as they always do,
cursing their mother’s wombs
in tired robots’ tones,
why only this
curious, chuckling, liquid sound
drawing me around.

She has the usual wrappings on
stick-thin, brittle shins,
patchy-purple, quietly rotting
methylated spirits skin:
doekie of incongruous elegance crowns
the scabrous, half-bald skull
Her man, grotesque
as a gargoyle roused from stone,
cradles an infant on his lap,
feeds it from a bottle with a teat,
makes the chuckling, crooning sounds
that turned me round,
that hold me now spellbound.
‘Good morning, sir,’ he says,
and his voice is grave
as a paterfamilias in his lounge.
Only the odd man out,
leaning against the harsh green walls,
looks at me with carefully indifferent eyes,
finding me , alien on his home ground
wishing the clouds would break and I be gone,
ringing my bike’s absurd, small bell.

 
Tatamkhulu Afrika (7 december 1920 – 23 december 2002)

Lees verder “Tatamkhulu Afrika, Johann Nestroy, Joyce Cary, Gabriel Marcel”

Tatamkhulu Afrika, Johann Nestroy, Gabriel Marcel, Friedrich Schlögl, Noam Chomsky, Willa Cather, Samuel Gottlieb Bürde

De Zuid-Afrikaanse dichter en schrijver Tatamkhulu Afrika werd geboren op 7 december 1920 in Egypte. Zie ook alle tags voor Tatamkhulu Afrika op dit blog.

Uit: Bitter Eden

“I touch the scar on my cheek and it flinches as though the long-dead tissue had a Lazarus-life of its own.
Uneasily, I stare at the two letters and accompanying neat package which are still where I put them earlier in the day. Within easy reach of my hand, they are a constant and unsettling focus for my mind and eye.
The single envelope in which the letters were posted is also still there. Airmail and drably English in its design, its difference from its local kin both fascinates and disturbs. I am not accustomed any more to receiving mail from abroad.
The one letter, typed under the logo of a firm of lawyers, is a covering letter which starts off by describing how they have only managed to trace me after much trouble and expense, which expense is to be defrayed by the ‘deceased’s estate’. Then comes the bald statement that it is he that has ‘passed on’ – how I hate that phrase! – after a long illness whose nature they do not disclose and that I have been named in his will as one of the heirs. My legacy, they add, is very small but will no doubt be of some significance to me and it is being forwarded under separate cover per registered mail.
The other letter is from him and I knew that straight away. After fifty years of silence, there was still no mistaking the rounded, bold and generously sprawling hand. Closer inspection betrayed the slight shakiness that is beginning to taint my own hand, and I noted this with an unwilling tenderness and a resurgence – as unwilling – of a love that time, it seems, has too lightly overlaid.
After reading the letters – but not yet opening the package – I had sat for a long time, staring out of the window and watching gulls and papers whirling up out of the southeaster-ridden street, but not knowing which were papers and which were gulls. Reaching for an expected pain, I had found only a numbness transcending pain and, later, Carina had come in and laid her hands on my shoulders and asked, her voice as pale and anxious as her hands, ‘Anything wrong?’
I do not mean to be disparaging when I refer to Carina in these terms. I am, after all, not much darker than her and although my hair is fair turned white and hers is white-blonde turned white, my body hair is as colourless and (as far as I am concerned) unflatteringly rare. I, too, can be nervy although not as pathologically so as Carina whose twitchiness sometimes reminds me of the dainty tremblings of a mouse – and that despite the fact that she moves her long, rather heavy bones in a manner that is unsettlingly male.”

 
Tatamkhulu Afrika (7 december 1920 – 23 december 2002)

Lees verder “Tatamkhulu Afrika, Johann Nestroy, Gabriel Marcel, Friedrich Schlögl, Noam Chomsky, Willa Cather, Samuel Gottlieb Bürde”

Tatamkhulu Afrika, Johann Nestroy, Gabriel Marcel

De Zuid-Afrikaanse dichter en schrijver Tatamkhulu Afrika werd geboren op 7 december 1920 in Egypte. Zie ook alle tags voor Tatamkhulu Afrika op dit blog.

 

Uit: Mr Chameleon: An Authobiography

“Have I just written of Dennis C–as would a gay man? Did not only admiration but lust tire me as I was confronted with a wholeness and beauty of the flesh that | knew l could never achieve? What man can honestly say that he has felt no stirring of the genitals when faced with a virility he cannot rival–that challenges his Yin with its Yang? Today, we pretend that “male bonding” is asexual love–like hell it is! Where there is love of whatever kind, there is desire of a kind as variable, and that daunting sinuousness that is the arousal of the loins runs through them all.

(…)

Chameleon, reversing the process and wanting his surroundings now to conform to the colour and pattern he had chosen, exhorted the faithful fellows to follow him into the badlands of Shi’ism, but all they saw was that bloodyminded Whiteboy who could turna clever trick or two with his tongue, but what did a Whiteboy know about the Faith, particularly when it came to what their forefathers had followed for fourteen hundred years, and they left me in droves.”

(…)

So desperate was I to smash the Whiteboy image that was robbing my life of all fullness and light that, in the winter months when it incessantly rained and I could not get down to the beach to tan, I would colour my hands, arms, neck and face with Coppertone and try to persuade myself that I felt at home in my crude, wild simulation of a bastard’s skin … [I]f I was caught by an unseasonably hot day and the Coppertone with its vinegary smell began to run on my sweating skin, I would feel like a fool in paper clothes on a rainy day and would dart, silently crying, in pursuit of the least fragment of steadying shade.”

 

Tatamkhulu Afrika (7 december 1920 – 23 december 2002)

Lees verder “Tatamkhulu Afrika, Johann Nestroy, Gabriel Marcel”

Gabriel Marcel, Noam Chomsky, Willa Cather, Samuel Gottlieb Bürde

De Franse filosoof en toneelauteur Gabriel Marcel werd geboren op 7 december 1889 in Parijs. Zie ook alle tags voor Gabriel Marcel op dit blog.

 

Uit: Awakenings (Vertaald door Peter S. Rogers)

„This summer day of 1899 was a terrible date in the life of a child, asI learned that we were going to leave Stockholm and return to Paris.How can I ever forget the heavy heart with which I received thisnews? As my father suffered somewhat from the Swedish climate anddidn’t much care for the worldly and formal aspects of diplomaticlife, he was going to switch positions with a senior member of theCouncil of State, Monsieur Catusse. This meant first of all that Icould no longer hope to spend vacation in Finland or in Norway.What may seem peculiar is that nothing, or almost nothing, attracted me in the Paris where we were to settle definitively. I also felt that ourreturn would be, sooner or later, followed by my entrance into thelycée, something I vaguely feared since, until then, I had been educated at home. I can’t recall whether it was immediately before orafter our stay in Stockholm that, for some months, I attended classesat Rue Royale where my fellow students were mainly young girls.

What had I most appreciated in the Swedish capital? Without hesitation I would say the landscapes. I remember a discussion with myfather on the topic during a boat ride on the Saltsjön. He was essentially a man of the Midi, the French South, and this somewhat uniform and sad nature bored him. Yet there was something in it thatexalted me. But what words could I use to translate that emotion?

I must have expressed myself rather awkwardly. But when I thinkabout what I had lived during that year in Stockholm, I see this: itwas as though I had been removed from the humdrum life I was to suffer from so much later on, by the fact of being far away, and onthe edge of countries that were still farther away and which attracted me.“

 

Gabriel Marcel (7 december 1889 – 8 oktober 1973)

Lees verder “Gabriel Marcel, Noam Chomsky, Willa Cather, Samuel Gottlieb Bürde”

Gabriel Marcel, Noam Chomsky, Willa Cather, Samuel Gottlieb Bürde

De Franse filosoof en toneelauteur Gabriel Marcel werd geboren op 7 december 1889 in Parijs. Zie ook mijn blog van 7 december 2006 en ook mijn blog van 7 december 2008 en ook mijn blog van 7 december 2009.

 

Uit: Journal métaphysique 

 

„Les autres ne sont pas « ma pensée des autres »

[…] Rien ne fera que les autres ne soient pas ma pensée des autres […]. Je crois que c’est précisément cette position qu’il faut refuser radicalement. Si j’admets que les autres ne sont que ma pensée des autres, mon idée des autres, il devient absolument impossible de briser un cercle qu’on a commencé par tracer autour de soi. – Si l’on pose le primat du sujet-objet – de la catégorie du sujet-objet – ou de l’acte par lequel le sujet pose des objets en quelque sorte au sein de lui-même, l’existence des autres devient impensable – et sans aucun doute n’importe quelle existence quelle qu’elle puisse être.

[…]

Par là s’éclairent mes formules de ce matin. L’autre en tant qu’autre n’existe pour moi qu’en tant que je suis ouvert à lui (qu’il est un toi), mais je ne suis ouvert à lui que pour autant que je cesse de former avec moi-même une sorte de cercle à l’intérieur duquel je logerais en quelque sorte l’autre, ou plutôt son idée ; car par rapport à ce cercle l’autre devient l’idée de l’autre – et l’idée de l’autre ce n’est plus l’autre en tant qu’autre, c’est l’autre en tant que rapporté à moi, que démonté, que désarticulé ou en cours de désarticulation.“

 

 

Gabriel Marcel (7 december 1889 – 8 oktober 1973)

 

Lees verder “Gabriel Marcel, Noam Chomsky, Willa Cather, Samuel Gottlieb Bürde”