Stars

In his essay "Kafka goes to the movies", Sebald claims that cinema's magic power lies in the possibility it offers to watch oneself dead. This insight can now be read as one dead author's gesture towards another, as the method of Sebald's essay is remarkably unscientific, but rather based, in its core, on mere chance. Thus, at a certain point he halts altogether his meticulous research concerning the film Kafka might have seen while in Verona on September 20^th, 1913, and simply takes a random guess.

One day in summer, a threesome – two men and a woman – drove the road to Jerusalem after having arbitrarily picked a film to go to from the program of the Jerusalem Film Festival. As it turned out, their pick lead them to a collection of four short films of the young Romanian director, Cristian Nemescu, a brightening star in the falling skies of European culture, who was killed in a car accident in 2003.

Cristian Nemescu

At least for one of them, though, the encounter with the brilliant art of Nemescu was a chance to remember how in another summer, while in Paris, wondering around the halls of the Orsay with his two friends, he felt the uplifting pride of cinematographic revelation, as he gazed at the still objects populating the interior walls of the museum, careless in his negligence of the possibility of stars' falling down from the sky onto the rough grounds.

At Musée d'Orsay, Summer 1988

The Owl and the Pussycat would be brought here as an example for how sailing in a pair, under moonlit star dust, is immune from the threat of destruction that lurk all along the paths of those who travel terrestrially in three. (The end).

Guitar man

The short season that was lived between May 14^th and May 20^th had as its soundtrack Roki Erickson's "You don't love me yet", covered by Bongwater.
Unlike the fear of life to be passed-by unsung, expressed in the words of a heartbroken lover in Erickson's song, Edward Lear, who was born two days earlier, in a flash of a lightning, on May 12^th 1812, and died just before the spring-summer of 88', suffered the ongoing tormenting fear of epileptic fits, always unexpected and ever more dangerous and hard to recover from. His life went by, as Canetti notes of Kafka, haunted by a ceaseless threat of shame, which, in other words, was no other than the fear of facing one's own death.

But Lear, in his most celebrated poem, managed to calm the fear of unsung life, and the shame of dying alone, by letting the Owl, with his guitar, retrieve the ring right under the nose of the Pig, and thus marry the Pussycat under the übersehen of sparkling starts and a glowing moon.

The Owl and the Pussycat's unique and somehow paradoxical method for concealing their money while sailing away – wrapped in a five-pound not, that is, contained within itself - brings to mind the all-the- more-so unique, even bizarre, method for concealing hand grenades inside oranges, as it was used by the accessories of the two Jewish prisoners facing the gallows in "The Russian Camp", the British military detention house in Jerusalem.
Feinstein and Barazani took their own lives on the day before their scheduled execution, on April 21^st,1947, detonating the two grenades smuggled to their cell disguised as oranges in an operation often referred to as "Grenade between two hearts".

On the morning of his departure on March 9^th 1992, Menachem Begin's last words were a request to be buried, not in the National Cemetery shoulder to shoulder with old statesmen and young soldiers but rather on Mount Olive, alongside Feinstein and Barazani.

Justice/Education

Lord Kitchener's body was never recovered. The Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, who like Kitchener - pushed by young political rivals away from the midst of the British warfare in WW1 into diplomatic service - died at old age, exiled from his natural surroundings, after the Nazis shut down the university of Leiden in 1940, notes that in this respect, Kitchener can be likened to Jesus Christ.

HMS Hampshire, that carried him from Orkney Islands in Scotland to the Russian port town of Arkhangelsk (or Archangel, as the English and Scottish merchants who had used it in the 16^th century as a harbor on their way to China, before the White Sea became dominated by Dutch trade) either hit on a German mine or exploded by bombs that had been pre-set on board by conspires – Irish Republicans, a famous German spy or maybe even high level British officials (so go the speculations and rumors) - drowned in the Northern Sea on June 5th.

In 1926 Kitchener's body was claimed to had been found on the Norwegian coast, and an empty coffin was all prepared for burial in St. Paul, before the deceit was exposed, and one, Frank Power, was arrested for its organization.

Archangel Michael on Arkhangelsk's Coat of Arms

Brothers in arms have the custom of collecting the belongings of their fellow soldier who had been killed and bringing it back to his relatives, hoping, maybe, to exhibit by this gesture that they claim nothing more than the dead body of the young man.

But, on the morning of May 20^th, the confused soldier who was sent by his peers to hand the goods, was too tired and embarrassed to approach the agonizing family, so instead, he addressed, perplexed, a friend of the dead. Carrying the sack on his shoulder like a wondering merchant, he offered him to relieve him of the burden.

In the young man's room in his parents house, a note was left – one of these indecipherable scribbles often drawn absentmindedly while one is on the phone or in the midst of another activity, and the hand is wondering about the page as a stray ship in high seas, leaving an irregular trace of foam behind.

After his release from the war prisoners camp in Cassino, in August 1919, Wittgenstein was set to plan a meeting with Russell to discuss his newly signed off Tractatus. In the correspondence preceding the meeting, Wittgenstein asked Russell to sell his belongings left in his Cambridge rooms before the war and bring him the money to the Hague, while the manuscripts and notebooks left there should, so he continued to ask, be burnt entirely.

Idle pipes near the Ministry of Justice, The Hague, February 2008

Russell reports to Lady Ottoline on the meeting that at last took place on December 20^th, saying of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: "I feel sure it is a really great book, though I do not feel sure it is right".
Truth and value are one, said the Spaniard. So Russell had not only misunderstood the Tractatus, Michael replied, he had sinned, and his sin is all the more so grave, as it is this misunderstanding, as it is embedded in Russell's famous Introduction to the English translation of the book, which made its publication possible, i.e., set the conditions for its availability.

In the Hague, the Ministries of Justice and of Education dwell nowadays in the same premises, a newly built office building adjacent to the Central Station, where enormous construction works are now being held.

Action!

It was not the action of shooting, now trivially available to anybody, nor the supposed hectic action of the multitudes of Paris captured in the image, which like in every European contemporary metropolis are ever busy with idiocies that vanish into thin air as soon as you transcend over the vertical city and glance at it from above, as if from an aeroplane - but the American word Action! shouted in French accent by the great authors of cinema - and in particular in the voices of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker – that echoed within, beneath and above Paris, as it had been encapsulated in the image, one of so many, that was taken back in August 1988 by an eager day-dreamer.

In Khartoum, with her daughter sleeping on her lap, in burning heat, Kate would go out almost every evening of her fortnight transit in the city, to the cinema. There, at dark, with Hollywood melodrama features unfolding in front of her tear flooded eyes, she would crave for something beyond that place and these times, and mourn in silence over all that had already become irredeemable; lost in the day-to-day desert of unfulfilled dreams.

When almost three years later, the road back was cleared for all British nationals, she made the return journey, and Michael – the sights and sounds of the war still flashing and pounding in his mind like a nightmare – was so anxious to reunite with his child, that he spent the last days of waiting, rehearsing over and over again the words "I love you".

Springtime

For a man in confinement, unable to tell day from night, past from future, memory from actuality, awakens from sleep, delirium from reality, all that is present is the passage of time as it is projected upon a cinema screen.

For such a man, biography becomes a continuous horizontal movement on a timeline, lacking the year-index, i.e., comprised of four digit rather than six digits dates. On such a timeline one would be able to identify significantly intensive areas, where life has, so to speak, overflowed. Such areas are similar to what other people, free to walk, would call seasons.

The lifetime of Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, would be, for this man, as short as a butterfly's, and so would be the lives of many other men who were born, lived and died in the twinkling of an eye. So would the chronicle read:

April 26^th, born
April 29^th, died

Or in another adjacent case:

May 14^th, born
May 20^th, died

Etc.

Animals and Plants

Even in that summer, when the three young men were discovering as if for the first time the possibility of motion, and when the pre-figuration of destruction of all form and direction was present everywhere with all its thrust, creatures of various species made occasional appearance in the landscapes they were crossing.

Near Interlaken, August 1988

The image of a natural scene commonly produce an aura of organic being. But the more animate the creatures captured are, the more artificial is the act of their capturing.

Sienna, August 1988

Nowadays, the effort required to produce the conditions for a traveler to capture the image of a living creature, animate or inanimate, has become so wildly enormous that the result is always on the verge of monstrosity, unlike the peaceful unchanged routine associated with the act of living.

Bulldozers at work, Gordon Sq., London, 29.1.2008

The Spaniard said:

Evolution is not a phenomenon of natural history, but an organizing principle of natural history.

Organization is not a phenomenon in history, but a naturalistic principle conditioning the possibility of history.

Principles are not historical, but rather phenomena just like natural facts and human organizations.

Newly planted flowers, Gordon Sq., London, 29.1.2008

John Dalton, the first modern scientist to investigate the phenomena of colour-blindness (often referred to as Daltonism), was known for his tendency to allow for inaccuracies in his experimental methods. In 1793 he settled in Manchester, but unlike Wittgenstein, stayed there for the remaining years of his life, until he death, at home, in 1844.

Hair

Among the things found in his burnt army tent was a piece of hair, untouched by the fire, too tiny to be registered in the list of remnants (reusable and obsolete) compiled by the clerks who were rushed to the site, while the Spaniard was already long gone.

A list is a mode of organization with known therapeutic merits. Relation of mere succession offers comfort whenever the consecutive course of events is interrupted, in life, by a disaster.

But the modern fascination with lists, as means of representation immune from the outburst of atrocity, is accompanied, in its root, by the surrealistic realization that in the humdrum lullaby of the list, lies already the possibility of monstrosity.

It is only within the banality of a list that a woman's hairpin can dwell alongside the panoramic view of Florence, in summer, as seen by a dark haired young man sitting on the edge of a terrace.

Kate's Macmillan and Company 1933 edition of Frazer's Golden Bough, was dedicated to her on her birthday, March 17^th, 1937. By then, Macmillan and Co. held an office in St. Martin's St., London, right behind the famous St.-Martin-in-the-fields church, off Trafalgar square, as well as in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Melbourne, New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco and Toronto.