the time draws near

Advent has started - that magic time of waiting. Last night I forgot to shut the french doors in our bedroom until I went to bed, and as I stepped out onto the balcony to shut them, I was surrounded by hibiscus fragrance. The trees (yes, two) are up and decorated; there are presents under the tree.

It's a busy time of year, that's for sure. The end of year assemblies and concerts and parties. The winding down at work that actually means fitting some of January's work into December. The planning and the shopping and the logistics of who and where and what for Christmas Day, and beyond.

But there's beauty in the regularity, the annual-ness of this season. The Franklin Road lights, Santa on the side of the Whitcoulls Building, Santa parades and carols by candlelight in communities all over this city, GLOW.

Then the quiteness that fills the city, the blue Waitemata lapping against the golden sand, families gathering together to eat and drink and laugh. The summer stretches out before us like a sunbathing cat.

I hold all this in my heart. I say goodbye to what has been a hard year, a year that will be marked in my mind by dead children in Homs, Gaza, Tel Aviv, Connecticut.

Since those babies were shot in Connecticut, I've had a refrain in my head, from Auden's 'In Time of War' (1939):

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.

Where life is evil now/Nanking; Dachau/Where life is evil now/Nanking; Dachau

Also refraining in my head are other words; from Isaiah 9:6

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

for unto us a child is born/for unto us a child is born/for unto us a child is born.

There is a human need to both remember and forget - to hear the names of those children read, to lament that the names of other victims in places less familar to us are not listed, are forgotten. My academic work (such as it is now) is located in this inbetween space between memory and forgetting - history as a country we visit now and then.

The best thing I have ever read on this is the last few paragraphs of Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just:

"And so it was for millions, who turned from Luftmenschen into Luft. I shall not translate. So this story will not finish with some tomb to be visited in memoriam. For the smoke that rises from crematoruims obeys physical laws like any other: the particles come together and disperse according to the wind that propels them. The only pilgrimage, estimable reader, would be to look with sadness at a stormy sky now and then.
   And praised. Auschwitz. Be. Maidanek. The Lord. Treblinka. And praised. Buchenwald. Be. Mauthausen. The Lord. Belzec. And praised. Sobibor. Be. Chelmno. The Lord. Ponary. And praised. Theresienstadt. Be. Warsaw. The Lord. Vilna. And praised. Skarzysko. Be. Bergen-Belsen. The Lord. Janow. And praised. Dora. Be. Neuengamme. The Lord. Pustkow. And praised ...

  Yes, at times one's heart could break in sorrow. But often too, preferably in the evening, I can't help thinking that Ernie Levy, dead six million times, is still alive somewhere, I don't know where. . . Yesterday, as I stood in the street trembling in despair, rooted to the spot, a drop of pity fell from above upon my face. But there was no breeze in the air, no cloud in the sky . . . There was only a presence."

Memory lies within. Those we love who die - they live in our memories, with us.

And we remember them as we go about the ordinary wonder that is making a particular recipe, or reading a particular book (one they loved or would have loved), listening to a particular piece of music.

There is little comfort in that knowledge right now in Homs, in Gaza, in Tel Aviv, in Connecticut, in the myriad other places where babies died for no reason good enough that I can think of. But there is a little.