WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.230 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:00:01.230 --> 00:00:04.440 align:middle line:84% I want to give you the poem, the code poem of the book ourselves 00:00:04.440 --> 00:00:07.290 align:middle line:90% or nothing. 00:00:07.290 --> 00:00:10.755 align:middle line:84% It's a poem, which was written to Terrence Des 00:00:10.755 --> 00:00:14.700 align:middle line:84% Pres, who is the author of a book called The Survivor-- 00:00:14.700 --> 00:00:17.730 align:middle line:84% An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. 00:00:17.730 --> 00:00:21.660 align:middle line:84% It was published by Oxford in 1976. 00:00:21.660 --> 00:00:27.138 align:middle line:84% Terrence lives in a huge wooden farmhouse in upstate New York, 00:00:27.138 --> 00:00:28.680 align:middle line:84% but he only lives in two of the rooms 00:00:28.680 --> 00:00:32.070 align:middle line:84% because he can't afford to heat the whole thing. 00:00:32.070 --> 00:00:35.070 align:middle line:84% In order to do his book, he spent five years 00:00:35.070 --> 00:00:38.130 align:middle line:90% reading the camp literature. 00:00:38.130 --> 00:00:41.640 align:middle line:84% The camp literature are all novels, diaries, journals, 00:00:41.640 --> 00:00:44.370 align:middle line:84% letters, anything produced by a man 00:00:44.370 --> 00:00:51.330 align:middle line:84% or woman or child who survived the death camps under Hitler, 00:00:51.330 --> 00:00:55.590 align:middle line:84% or who survived the camps, the labor camps under Stalin. 00:00:55.590 --> 00:00:58.650 align:middle line:84% He studied these camps together; the study 00:00:58.650 --> 00:01:04.080 align:middle line:84% was to determine what is this survivor sole. 00:01:04.080 --> 00:01:09.330 align:middle line:84% And what is it that moves some men and women to obsessively 00:01:09.330 --> 00:01:12.450 align:middle line:84% relive the most horrible experience of their past 00:01:12.450 --> 00:01:15.390 align:middle line:90% in order to bear witness to it. 00:01:15.390 --> 00:01:18.020 align:middle line:90% 00:01:18.020 --> 00:01:21.140 align:middle line:84% And halfway through doing the research, 00:01:21.140 --> 00:01:24.170 align:middle line:84% he confronted himself and felt that he 00:01:24.170 --> 00:01:33.800 align:middle line:84% had to either commit suicide or complete the work very well; 00:01:33.800 --> 00:01:38.180 align:middle line:84% and fortunately, he did complete it. 00:01:38.180 --> 00:01:41.450 align:middle line:84% There are some things in this poem, which you will hear once 00:01:41.450 --> 00:01:43.400 align:middle line:84% moving through the, poem and I will just 00:01:43.400 --> 00:01:45.230 align:middle line:84% tell you what they are since some of them 00:01:45.230 --> 00:01:48.770 align:middle line:90% might be unfamiliar. 00:01:48.770 --> 00:01:50.840 align:middle line:84% I addressed him at the house and then you 00:01:50.840 --> 00:01:55.070 align:middle line:84% will hear an "Anna" mentioned, she is my paternal grandmother. 00:01:55.070 --> 00:01:59.030 align:middle line:84% And then Theresienstadt, this was a transit camp mostly 00:01:59.030 --> 00:02:02.960 align:middle line:84% for children in Czechoslovakia, near the village of Terezin, 00:02:02.960 --> 00:02:07.460 align:middle line:84% it was where children waited to be taken to death camps. 00:02:07.460 --> 00:02:09.770 align:middle line:84% He is quoted, "every once in a while" very briefly 00:02:09.770 --> 00:02:11.450 align:middle line:84% through the poem, and then I also 00:02:11.450 --> 00:02:15.560 align:middle line:84% quote, Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, which most of you 00:02:15.560 --> 00:02:17.480 align:middle line:90% are familiar with. 00:02:17.480 --> 00:02:20.720 align:middle line:84% Then the poem, there is a little bit 00:02:20.720 --> 00:02:24.140 align:middle line:84% of a wandering in the reverie to Vietnam, 00:02:24.140 --> 00:02:29.193 align:middle line:84% Ao Dai are the tunics and pants worn by women of Vietnam. 00:02:29.193 --> 00:02:31.610 align:middle line:84% So you will know when you hear that word, that's where you 00:02:31.610 --> 00:02:34.250 align:middle line:90% are, it goes then to Salvador. 00:02:34.250 --> 00:02:38.180 align:middle line:84% And there is a line in French near the end. 00:02:38.180 --> 00:02:40.550 align:middle line:90% ici repose un dèportè inconnu 00:02:40.550 --> 00:02:41.480 align:middle line:90% 00:02:41.480 --> 00:02:45.230 align:middle line:84% This is here lies the unknown deported. 00:02:45.230 --> 00:02:48.110 align:middle line:84% That line is engraved on a slab of stone 00:02:48.110 --> 00:02:51.110 align:middle line:84% near the sand behind Notre-Dame in Paris 00:02:51.110 --> 00:02:55.310 align:middle line:84% in the memorial to the 200,000 French deportees who 00:02:55.310 --> 00:02:58.450 align:middle line:90% died in the camps. 00:02:58.450 --> 00:03:03.370 align:middle line:84% Ourselves or nothing, for Terrence Des Pres. 00:03:03.370 --> 00:03:06.820 align:middle line:84% After seven years, and as the wine leaves 00:03:06.820 --> 00:03:10.360 align:middle line:84% and black trunks of maples wait beyond the window, 00:03:10.360 --> 00:03:12.040 align:middle line:90% I think of you. 00:03:12.040 --> 00:03:15.790 align:middle line:84% North, in those few lighted rooms 00:03:15.790 --> 00:03:22.300 align:middle line:84% of that ruined house, a candle in each open pane of breath. 00:03:22.300 --> 00:03:27.130 align:middle line:84% The absence of anyone snow in a hurry to Earth. 00:03:27.130 --> 00:03:31.300 align:middle line:84% My fingernails pressing half moons into the sill 00:03:31.300 --> 00:03:36.490 align:middle line:84% as I watched you pouring three, then four fingers of scotch 00:03:36.490 --> 00:03:38.080 align:middle line:90% over ice. 00:03:38.080 --> 00:03:41.800 align:middle line:84% The chill in your throat like a small blue bone 00:03:41.800 --> 00:03:45.550 align:middle line:84% those years of your work on the Holocaust. 00:03:45.550 --> 00:03:48.460 align:middle line:84% You had to walk off the darkness, 00:03:48.460 --> 00:03:51.670 align:middle line:84% miles of winter riverfront, windows 00:03:51.670 --> 00:03:53.710 align:middle line:84% the eyes in skulls along the river 00:03:53.710 --> 00:03:57.130 align:middle line:84% gratings in the streets over jeweled human sewage, 00:03:57.130 --> 00:04:01.810 align:middle line:84% your breath hanging about your face like tobacco. 00:04:01.810 --> 00:04:04.690 align:middle line:90% I was with you even then. 00:04:04.690 --> 00:04:07.450 align:middle line:84% Your face, the face of a clock as you 00:04:07.450 --> 00:04:09.880 align:middle line:84% swept through the memoirs of men and women 00:04:09.880 --> 00:04:12.850 align:middle line:90% who would not give up. 00:04:12.850 --> 00:04:15.670 align:middle line:84% In the short light of December's, you 00:04:15.670 --> 00:04:19.180 align:middle line:84% took suppers of whole white hens and pans of broth 00:04:19.180 --> 00:04:23.140 align:middle line:84% in a city of liquor bottles and light. 00:04:23.140 --> 00:04:27.400 align:middle line:90% Go, after that, which is lost. 00:04:27.400 --> 00:04:30.100 align:middle line:84% And all the mass graves of the centuries dead 00:04:30.100 --> 00:04:34.960 align:middle line:84% will open into your early waking hours. 00:04:34.960 --> 00:04:37.645 align:middle line:84% Belsen, Dachau, Saigon, Phnom Penh 00:04:37.645 --> 00:04:38.470 align:middle line:90% 00:04:38.470 --> 00:04:41.710 align:middle line:84% And the one meaning bridge of Ravens, 00:04:41.710 --> 00:04:46.000 align:middle line:84% Sao Paulo, Armagh, Calcutta, Salvador; although these 00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:48.280 align:middle line:90% are not the same. 00:04:48.280 --> 00:04:51.850 align:middle line:84% You wrote two of Theresientadt that word that 00:04:51.850 --> 00:04:56.230 align:middle line:84% ran screaming into my girlhood lifting its gray wool dress. 00:04:56.230 --> 00:04:59.440 align:middle line:84% The smoke in its violent plumes and feathers, 00:04:59.440 --> 00:05:04.120 align:middle line:84% the dark wormy heart of the human desire to die. 00:05:04.120 --> 00:05:09.880 align:middle line:84% In Prague, Anna told me, "There was bread, stubborn potatoes 00:05:09.880 --> 00:05:13.810 align:middle line:84% and fish, armies and the women who lie down with them, 00:05:13.810 --> 00:05:18.925 align:middle line:84% eggs perhaps, but never meat; never meat, but the dead." 00:05:18.925 --> 00:05:22.180 align:middle line:84% In Theresienstadt, she said, "There was only 00:05:22.180 --> 00:05:28.530 align:middle line:84% the dying; never bread, potatoes, fish or women, 00:05:28.530 --> 00:05:32.380 align:middle line:84% they were all as yet girls then". 00:05:32.380 --> 00:05:35.950 align:middle line:84% Vast numbers of men and women died, you wrote, 00:05:35.950 --> 00:05:41.800 align:middle line:84% because they did not have time - the blessing of sheer time 00:05:41.800 --> 00:05:44.350 align:middle line:90% to recover. 00:05:44.350 --> 00:05:49.600 align:middle line:84% Your ration of time was smaller than a tin spoon of winter, 00:05:49.600 --> 00:05:52.527 align:middle line:84% piano notes one at a time from the roof to the gutter 00:05:52.527 --> 00:05:55.180 align:middle line:90% - I am only imagining this. 00:05:55.180 --> 00:05:57.730 align:middle line:84% As I had not yet entered your life, 00:05:57.730 --> 00:06:01.570 align:middle line:84% like the dark fact of a gun on your pillow, 00:06:01.570 --> 00:06:06.520 align:middle line:84% or Anna Akhmatova's Requiem; and its final. 00:06:06.520 --> 00:06:10.840 align:middle line:84% I can when the faceless woman before her asked, "Can you 00:06:10.840 --> 00:06:13.810 align:middle line:90% describe this?" 00:06:13.810 --> 00:06:16.450 align:middle line:84% I was not yet in your life when you 00:06:16.450 --> 00:06:19.990 align:middle line:84% term the bullet toward the empty hole in yourself 00:06:19.990 --> 00:06:25.080 align:middle line:84% and whispered, "Finish this or die." 00:06:25.080 --> 00:06:28.650 align:middle line:84% But you lived in what you wrote, "Became the survivor 00:06:28.650 --> 00:06:33.570 align:middle line:84% that act of contrition or despair". 00:06:33.570 --> 00:06:37.500 align:middle line:84% They turn to face the worst, straight on, 00:06:37.500 --> 00:06:45.210 align:middle line:84% without sentiment or hope, simply to keep watch over life. 00:06:45.210 --> 00:06:49.770 align:middle line:84% Now, as you sleep face down on your papers, 00:06:49.770 --> 00:06:52.140 align:middle line:84% the book pages turning of themselves 00:06:52.140 --> 00:06:54.600 align:middle line:90% in your invisible breath. 00:06:54.600 --> 00:06:58.230 align:middle line:84% I climb the stairs of that house, fragile with age 00:06:58.230 --> 00:07:00.090 align:middle line:84% and the dry fear of burning, and I 00:07:00.090 --> 00:07:03.210 align:middle line:84% touch the needle to music to wake you. 00:07:03.210 --> 00:07:09.210 align:middle line:84% The snow long passed falling something by Vivaldi or Brahms. 00:07:09.210 --> 00:07:12.090 align:middle line:84% I have come from our cacophonous ordinary lives 00:07:12.090 --> 00:07:15.390 align:middle line:84% where I stood at the sink last summer, scrubbing mud 00:07:15.390 --> 00:07:18.120 align:middle line:84% from potatoes, listening to the supper 00:07:18.120 --> 00:07:22.860 align:middle line:84% fish in the skillet, my eyes on the narrowed streets of rain 00:07:22.860 --> 00:07:25.020 align:middle line:90% through the windows. 00:07:25.020 --> 00:07:29.790 align:middle line:84% As I thought of the long war, that misted country 00:07:29.790 --> 00:07:33.240 align:middle line:84% turned to the moon's surface gray and ring 00:07:33.240 --> 00:07:35.940 align:middle line:90% warmed with ridges of light. 00:07:35.940 --> 00:07:39.690 align:middle line:84% The women in their silk ao dais along the river. 00:07:39.690 --> 00:07:42.030 align:middle line:84% Those flowers under fire roll at night 00:07:42.030 --> 00:07:45.990 align:middle line:84% in the desperate arms of American men. 00:07:45.990 --> 00:07:48.120 align:middle line:84% Once I walked your rooms with my night dress 00:07:48.120 --> 00:07:51.030 align:middle line:84% opened, a cigarette from my lips to the darkness 00:07:51.030 --> 00:07:54.360 align:middle line:84% and back, as you worked at times through to the morning, 00:07:54.360 --> 00:07:57.570 align:middle line:84% always on my waking, you were gone. 00:07:57.570 --> 00:07:59.580 align:middle line:84% The blue holes of your path through snow 00:07:59.580 --> 00:08:03.840 align:middle line:84% to the road, your face still haggard in the White mirror. 00:08:03.840 --> 00:08:06.930 align:middle line:84% The pained note where 10 times you had written the word 00:08:06.930 --> 00:08:10.200 align:middle line:84% recalcitrance, and once, you will 00:08:10.200 --> 00:08:17.110 align:middle line:84% die and live under the name of someone who has actually died. 00:08:17.110 --> 00:08:21.820 align:middle line:84% I think of that night in the Tropic hotel, the man who 00:08:21.820 --> 00:08:25.150 align:middle line:84% danced with a tray over his head and offered us free 00:08:25.150 --> 00:08:28.780 align:middle line:84% because we were socialistas; not only that he sang, 00:08:28.780 --> 00:08:31.600 align:middle line:90% but young and pretty. 00:08:31.600 --> 00:08:33.820 align:middle line:84% Later as I lay on a cot in the heat, 00:08:33.820 --> 00:08:37.090 align:middle line:84% my friend was able to reach for the guns 00:08:37.090 --> 00:08:39.520 align:middle line:84% and load them clicking in the moonlight with only 00:08:39.520 --> 00:08:41.710 align:middle line:90% the barest of sounds. 00:08:41.710 --> 00:08:45.700 align:middle line:84% He had heard them before me moving among the poems we 00:08:45.700 --> 00:08:48.130 align:middle line:90% were going to die there. 00:08:48.130 --> 00:08:51.250 align:middle line:84% I remember the moon notching its way through the poems 00:08:51.250 --> 00:08:54.430 align:middle line:84% and the calm sense that game for me. 00:08:54.430 --> 00:08:59.170 align:middle line:84% At the end of my life, in that moment, the woman beside me 00:08:59.170 --> 00:09:01.510 align:middle line:90% became my sister. 00:09:01.510 --> 00:09:04.450 align:middle line:84% Her hand cupping her mouth, the blood that 00:09:04.450 --> 00:09:07.270 align:middle line:84% would later spill from her face if what we believed 00:09:07.270 --> 00:09:09.380 align:middle line:90% were the truth. 00:09:09.380 --> 00:09:11.830 align:middle line:84% Her blood would crawl black and belly down 00:09:11.830 --> 00:09:16.030 align:middle line:84% onto a balcony of hands and flashlights, cameras, flowers, 00:09:16.030 --> 00:09:18.400 align:middle line:90% propaganda. 00:09:18.400 --> 00:09:20.590 align:middle line:90% Her name was Renee. 00:09:20.590 --> 00:09:24.580 align:middle line:84% And without knowing her, you wrote all things, 00:09:24.580 --> 00:09:26.470 align:middle line:90% human take time. 00:09:26.470 --> 00:09:29.980 align:middle line:84% Time, which the damned never have. 00:09:29.980 --> 00:09:34.450 align:middle line:84% Time for life to repair, at least the worst of its wounds. 00:09:34.450 --> 00:09:40.750 align:middle line:84% It took time to wake, time for horror to incite revolt. 00:09:40.750 --> 00:09:44.020 align:middle line:84% Time for the recovery of lucidity and will. 00:09:44.020 --> 00:09:46.540 align:middle line:90% 00:09:46.540 --> 00:09:49.480 align:middle line:84% In the late afternoons, you returned. 00:09:49.480 --> 00:09:52.210 align:middle line:84% The long teeth shining from the eaves, 00:09:52.210 --> 00:09:55.990 align:middle line:84% a clink in the wood half burnt and as you touched it alive, 00:09:55.990 --> 00:09:57.685 align:middle line:90% ici repose un dèportè inconnu. 00:09:57.685 --> 00:10:00.490 align:middle line:90% 00:10:00.490 --> 00:10:03.550 align:middle line:84% In the mass graves, a woman's hand 00:10:03.550 --> 00:10:07.520 align:middle line:90% caged in the ribs of her child. 00:10:07.520 --> 00:10:11.150 align:middle line:84% A single stone in Spain beneath olives. 00:10:11.150 --> 00:10:15.260 align:middle line:84% In Germany, the silent windy fields in the Soviet Union 00:10:15.260 --> 00:10:17.450 align:middle line:84% where the snow is scarred with wire. 00:10:17.450 --> 00:10:20.960 align:middle line:84% In Salvador, where the blood will never soak into the ground 00:10:20.960 --> 00:10:27.220 align:middle line:84% everywhere and always go after that, which is lost. 00:10:27.220 --> 00:10:32.980 align:middle line:84% There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter. 00:10:32.980 --> 00:10:37.690 align:middle line:84% And behind it, we hover in a calm, 00:10:37.690 --> 00:10:42.250 align:middle line:84% protected world, like netted fish, 00:10:42.250 --> 00:10:45.940 align:middle line:90% exactly, like netted fish. 00:10:45.940 --> 00:10:48.250 align:middle line:84% It is either the beginning or the end of the world 00:10:48.250 --> 00:10:52.600 align:middle line:84% and the choice is ourselves or nothing. 00:10:52.600 --> 00:10:53.140 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:10:53.140 --> 00:10:56.556 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:10:56.556 --> 00:11:02.420 align:middle line:90% 00:11:02.420 --> 00:11:03.110 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:11:03.110 --> 00:11:06.582 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:11:06.582 --> 00:11:09.070 align:middle line:90% 00:11:09.070 --> 00:11:09.580 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:11:09.580 --> 00:11:12.620 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:11:12.620 --> 00:11:13.120 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:11:13.120 --> 00:11:15.410 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:11:15.410 --> 00:11:15.910 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:11:15.910 --> 00:11:17.410 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:11:17.410 --> 00:11:18.100 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:11:18.100 --> 00:11:19.430 align:middle line:90% Do you have questions? 00:11:19.430 --> 00:11:19.930 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:11:19.930 --> 00:11:23.325 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:11:23.325 --> 00:11:28.190 align:middle line:90% 00:11:28.190 --> 00:11:29.600 align:middle line:90% Do I have some minutes? 00:11:29.600 --> 00:11:32.300 align:middle line:84% I'd like to know if you have any questions. 00:11:32.300 --> 00:11:35.240 align:middle line:84% I wasn't able to be here this afternoon for that, 00:11:35.240 --> 00:11:40.790 align:middle line:84% and they can be of poetics or politics, or both, or Central 00:11:40.790 --> 00:11:42.455 align:middle line:90% America, or whatever you like. 00:11:42.455 --> 00:11:46.280 align:middle line:90% 00:11:46.280 --> 00:11:52.300 align:middle line:84% Does anyone curious about anything particular?