high violettes

David Burliuk, Revolution, 1917

“Contemporary things in prose can have value appropriate to the contemporary psyche only if they’re written in one sitting. Reflections or recollections of twenty or thirty lines—say, at the maximum a hundred lines—that’s the contemporary novel

The epic seems to me neither necessary nor, as a matter of fact, even possible.

Big books are now read in intervals—on the subway, even on its escalators-so why then should a book be large? I can’t imagine anyone reading for a long time—all evening, say. First here are millions of television sets. Next you’ve got to read the papers. And so on.

Let me write fragments without finishing them—at least I’m writing! Even so, this is literature of a kind, in a sense perhaps the only kind. Perhaps it’s impossible for a psychological type like myself in a historical period like the present to write otherwise. Yet if he writes and to some extent knows how to write, then let him write, even this way.

It may appear to some that in these fragments I’m pursuing some kind of individualistic nonsense, that somehow I want to place the emphasis on myself, on my own relation to the world. That isn’t so. I want us to write well. And it’s my hope that one way or another I can be of help in that regard. This book is by no means an attack on anyone at all.” No Day Without A Line, Yury Olesha.

This is an excerpt from the preface of No Day Without A Line, a book that consists of the notebooks written by Yury Olesha over the course of his life, translated by Judson Rosengrant. The book is composed of thoughts, reflections, recollections.

Could there be anything better, more fulfilling than the truth that emanates from a carefully conceived of and assembled sentence? Entire realities can be bundled up in one sentence. Truth will always be accompanied by an infinite amount of footnotes, but the scope of each attempt to capture it can be as small or as large as you can grasp.

Here are some of Yury’s:

“This probably was first love. There was a little girl I wanted to imitate.”

“I TOO would like to pass back through my life as Marcel Proust managed in his day.”

“I should write a story about a soul that has been cast into the world in terror but that seeks optimism, a story about myself, beginning after all with my first visit to the gymnasium.”

“Of all the colors, the most beautiful is carmine. And its name is beautiful too.”

“But did any prince consider himself an ignoramus because of that? Or did any Pico della Mirandola? Or did any young mother posing for Titian regard herself as less happy because of it?… The most intelligent people still believed in the music of the spheres, but did they think about, did they lament the fact that they were behind, that their education was on such allow level? By no means. For every age views itself as standing on the pinnacle. Thus, someday someone will look back on our own age much as I’m looking back on that of Florence, and will, like me, entertain the idea that in that age—just imagine!—people lived for only fifty years. Well, he’ll say, were they any less happy and beautiful than we who live for three hundred?”

Yury Olesha died in 1960. So while he lived to see television, movies, talk shows, stand up comedians, etc. he did not live to see the internet, let alone facebook, twitter, blogs, etc. These are perhaps modern forms of writing that represent the zenith of the fragmented way in which he characterizes the impulse of contemporary writing and thinking.

Olesha spent his youth and nascent years as a writer during the height of Stalinist Russia, in the 1920’s and 30’s in Moscow. Olesha’s political leanings diverged from his upbringing as a member of the Russian gentry and prerevolutionary Russian society. While Olesha’s family did not possess opulent wealth, they defended prerevolutionary society due to their strong aspirations and the potential it represented to them. Olesha joined the Red Army, like many young Russians, supporting the Bolsheviks and their battle to achieve economic justice for the new generation. His first job was in fact working as a “poet-agitator” (as he liked to call himself, or a “propagandist” as others call him) at the Bureau of Ukranian Publications. Olesha also served as an editor for a popular transportation newspaper The Whistler. While working at The Whistler, Olesha discovered his knack for political satire, but also developed a more “abstract” and less politically literal prose.

While producing his many publications and stories, and working for various media, Olesha also maintained his private writings in notebooks that have been strung together to form No Day Without A Line. What extent did the process of structuring a sentence so that it reflected reality to him just so, steer his own conception of reality. The symbiotic relationship between the creation (the sentence, for example) and the thought that spurs the creation forth is so cyclical it seems difficult to isolate one from the other. Thus, jotting down our day-to-day thoughts is perhaps essential to the creation of them.

Last month the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals retired to decide over the lawsuit brought by black South Africans against several multinational corporations for their role in the brutal military and security policies of the South African apartheid regime. I am eagerly anticipating the court’s ruling on this matter because of the implications it might have on corporate accountability for conflicts elsewhere, especially Israel, Palestine. As an undergraduate student I was in a campus organization called Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel. Our group’s goal was to get our school to selectively divest from companies aiding Israel in its illegal occupation of the Palestinian Occupied Territories and enabling their human rights abuses of Palestinians. Not only did our group consider Israel’s ethnic division and usurpation of the land and resources of Palestine and Palestinians analogous to the white supremacist government of South Africa, but we also saw divestment as the best means to produce change. The BDS movement aims to create an economic incentive for companies to stop doing business with Israel. If the court finds in favor of plaintiffs it would create another pressure, a legal incentive, for companies to divest from potentially objectionable conflicts. I was disappointed when Amy Goodman, the leading challenger to mainstream American journalism, neglected to note this in her recent piece, “Holding Corporations Accountable for Apartheid Crimes”, published originally on truthdig.com.[1]

If the Court decides today that South Africans may file suit against corporations profiting from the rogue and unjust policies of a government, then the international political and legal environment in which corporations conduct business will undergo serious changes. Yet Goodman makes no reference to the relevance this ruling might have around the world.

Amy Goodman makes a glaring omission in discussing the significance of the court’s ruling today by making no reference to Israel, Palestine and the BDS movement. I’m no legal scholar, but here’s why I think the connection is essential:

1) The case will affirm the right of foreigners to address their grievances in US Courts. The case is being brought to court under the Alien Tort Statute established in the 18^th century, which allows individuals to sue against violations of international law in American courts. This would mean that Palestinians could address their grievances against US corporations in a US courtroom.

2) The case predominately discusses whether a corporation is responsible for crimes being perpetrated with the commodities and equipment they manufactured and sold to governments committing the crimes.[2] The claim in this case is that corporations knowingly and willingly cooperated with the brutal policies of the South African government throughout the apartheid regime. Thus far, attempts to do the same in the case of Israel have failed: after Rachel Corrie was run over and murdered by a Caterpillar bulldozer, her parents tried unsuccessfully to sue the company that made and sold the machine to Israel. In this ruling the panel of judges found that because Caterpillar was not violating the United States’ trade and foreign policy with Israel, they were not to fault.[3]

The current lawsuit, led by the human rights organization, Khulumani Support Group, hopes to hold the international community (by way of the multinational corporations) responsible for their intrinsic role in the Apartheid government. The lawsuit believes that the corporations should not be exempt under the auspices that they were merely obeying their respective government’s trade policies, thus asserting that corporations must be held accountable for their cognizance of human rights abuses and the law. The group hopes this case will set a legal precedent against future similar collusions. On their website they state, “Khulumani furthermore hopes that its case would prevent future conduct on the part of banks and corporations aiding and abetting rouge regimes, with particular reference to the Myanmar regime”.[4] Indeed, this would send a strong warning to corporations like Caterpillar, that have up until now faced no consequences for the violence that have occurred at the hands of their profitable products.

The BDS movement is growing in visibility, momentum, and pertinence as Obama shows no indication of halting or even slowing aid to Israel. Hampshire College, having been the first college campus to announce its selective divestment from Israel, held a BDS Conference in November of 2009. Students, activists and teachers convened from all over the country to discuss and strategize this form of action against the crimes of the Israeli government.

The legal implications for the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on corporations acting on behalf of Israel’s racist and brutal policies in Palestine are clear; the relevance of this case to current and future legal battles is also. What is less clear is why Goodman is not making this connection herself.

[1]http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/holding_corporations_accountable_for_apartheid_crimes_20100112/

[2] http://www.khulumani.net/in-the-media/media-statements/9-media-2010/355-jan-11-2010-court-hearing-exposes-multinationals.html.

[3] http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14696

[4] http://www.khulumani.net/ny-lawsuit/222-lawsuit-overview.html