I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions.
I weighed 87.4 kilos before breakfast.
I worked on this week’s Critical Summary. Here’s what I have for the second part so far:
There are people who still sympathize with the fascists but they are quiet and only speak up in private or in small fascist gatherings.
The eradication of good and bad memories to rid the people of their unpleasant recollections of war in The Buried Giant, also can be analogized with the use of electro convulsive therapy (ECT) to alleviate depression by destroying brain cells in the memory centres. Just as some victims of the mist in the novel experienced varying degrees of memory loss, patients who have undergone ECT have complained of everything from temporary amnesia of recent events to the wiping out of decades of their lives. But there are people who seem legitimately happy as a result of shock therapy and memory loss. We don’t remember everything. As Leonard Cohen said, “History is a needle for putting men to sleep / anointed with the poison of all they want to keep”.
Teo’s essay says that there is trauma and that forgetting is sometimes important.
I weighed 87.9 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been at midday in a long time. I’m three kilos heavier than I was last year at this time.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 86.9 kilos at 17:30.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:45.
I worked on this week’s Critical Summary and may have it mostly finished. I don’t think I’ll need to sweat over it on Thursday like I have for the last two. Here’s what I have:
Memory as Forgetting
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant the memory of both the Briton and Saxon communities is fogged by the breath of a dragon. They forget many things but mostly they forget the war that divided them and the genocide that was inflicted on the Saxon people by the Britons. We learn that this enchantment of the dragon’s breath was instigated deliberately by Merlin as a way of maintaining peace. If no one remembers hating or being hated they stop fighting. The memories are still there and surface in dreamlike fragments from time to time but they are more often buried by the spell of forgetting.
In “Monuments, Unreal Spaces and National Forgetting,” Yugin Teo suggests that some personal and public forgetting is a good thing but when it is forced on a mass scale it can cause serious side effects, such as interfering with the natural healing process of national mourning.
The dragon is a symbol of raw, wild violence, and war. It is ironic that a dragon would be the instrument for the enforcement of the mass forgetting of violence. But an analogy can be drawn between the dragon of The Buried Giant and other forms of mass forgetting that continue into modern times. For example, Remembrance Day is an annual event that commemorates the combatants who fought in the service of Commonwealth nations in conflicts we have been involved in since World War I. This collective of living and dead warriors can be compared with Querig the dragon in The Buried Giant and the periodic nature of staging an annual event of remembrance can be analogized with her exhalation. The annual breath of Remembrance Day is ironically also a day of forgetting. We remember the warriors who fell during World War II but our doing so serves to displace from our memory the fact that for every fallen warrior there were two non-combatants who lost their lives at the hands of many of those combatants who we memorialize.
When we remember our side’s victory over German fascism in the second world war we forget that some of the soldiers being honoured participated in the rape of hundreds of thousands of German women as they advanced into Germany. We forget also that fascism was not really defeated but rather repressed so that it was driven underground. What happened to all of the faithful fascists who were defeated in the war? Did they forget about a political ideology for which they had previously been willing to risk their lives? No, they simply lost their connection with a collective memory that had an army to provide support and amplification for its beliefs. There are people who still sympathize with the fascists but they are quiet and only speak up in private or in small fascist gatherings.
Teo’s essay points out that Ishiguro blurs the divide between individual and collective forgetting. The eradication of good and bad memories to rid the people of their unpleasant recollections of war in The Buried Giant, also can be analogized to the use of electro convulsive therapy (ECT) to alleviate depression by destroying brain cells in the memory centres. Just as some victims of the mist in the novel experienced varying degrees of memory loss, patients who have undergone ECT have complained of everything from temporary amnesia of recent events to the wiping out of decades of their lives. But there are people who seem legitimately happy as a result of receiving ECT. It could be that some memories interfere with maintaining a happy life while others give one the will to continue living. If a memory keeps an individual or a society in a positive and functional state, it may not matter if the memory is real. As Leonard Cohen said, “History is a needle for putting men to sleep / anointed with the poison of all they want to keep”.
Teo says that forgetting is sometimes important, but forced amnesia as depicted in The Buried Giant and in the real world may be too much of a quick fix for large scale social trauma. Perhaps we are too impatient and should allow individuals and communities to remember. Simply waiting for a mourning period to run its course may be more effective in the long run. Time heals all wounds.
I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 1, episode 23 of Burke’s Law.
Powerful architect and designer Avery Lord has a curved work knife in his back and dies. Tim finds a gold compact. Burke concludes that only a lady in a hurry would leave it behind. Les finds a key that fits no door in the house. Burke goes outside for a smoke and in reaching for his lighter pulls out the compact. A woman named Whiney Kelly says it’s hers and she’ll call the police. He tells her to get into his car while she tells him about it. The next thing you know they are kissing of course. She says Avery was designing a yacht for her and she came by earlier to discuss it. That’s when she forgot the compact. He drops her off but minutes later shows up in her apartment with a bottle of champagne. He gives it to her and tells her she can’t leave until he finds out what she was doing at the time of the murder. Burke and his team are going through some of Lord’s recent designs for clues. One is a building with Zachary Belden’s name on it. He has a reputation for building illegally substandard towers. Tim goes to see him and he says with Lord’s design he planned to build a safe tower for a change. The next morning Burke lets himself into Whitney’s apartment and wakes her up in her bedroom to talk about where she was when Lord was killed. He says they are going to have breakfast and she refuses but suddenly a table is wheeled in followed by two violinists and an accordionist. That night Burke is at home when Tim calls to say they’ve gotten a report of noises on Lord’s property. Burke goes there in thick fog. He sees a blond woman in white wandering through the house. When she sees him she runs outside through the woods in the fog. He pursues her but gets conked on the head. The next day Burke is accosted by Stanton Custer of the Heliotrope Grain Company. He says he gave Lord $175,000 and asks Burke to come with him to his warehouse. He says Lord was going to design him a new image but now he’s avoiding him so he wants Lord arrested. Burke tells him Lord is dead but Custer says, “He can’t do that to me!” and says he’s going to the morgue to revive him with some wheat germ. Burke sees the clip of Custer’s pen is missing and they found that the night of the murder. When Burke leaves the warehouse Whitney is sitting outside with a table and the same waiter and musicians set up for lunch. She says she was at Lord’s house an hour before he was murdered. Burke asks if Lord had a blonde girlfriend who wears white. She says her name in Anne. Burke and Tim discuss a new sports car that Lord was designing for Hamilton Talbert. Burke goes to see him. He has a chihuahua with a bark like a Doberman. He says the sports car Lord was designing runs on turpentine. Les locates a locksmith named George Merwin who knows the key fits an apartment in a certain building but doesn’t know which one. Three copies are made and Burke, Tim and Les split up the floors and go from apartment to apartment. Burke finds Anne, who has lost her mind. She just sings to her plush toy rabbit Freddie. Burke picks up the phone and calls a number, then has Anne sing into the phone. Minutes later Hamilton arrives. He admits he killed Lord. Lord’s business was failing and he took it out on Anne. He drove her mad and that’s why he killed him. At the end Whitney has a table set up at the police station for dinner for Burke with the same waiter and musicians. Burke closes the viewer’s TV screen like a shade for a fade to black.
Whitney was played by Felicia Farr who at fifteen became a lingerie model to pay for her dance lessons. She graduated from Penn State University in 1954 with a BA in Sociology. She was spotted in a local play and signed to Columbia Pictures. Her first film appearance was in Jubal in 1956. She co-starred in The Last Wagon, 3:10 to Yuma, Kotch, Charley Varrick, The First Texan, and Loser’s Crown. She married Jack Lemmon in 1962 and they were together until he died in 2001.
No comments:
Post a Comment