A Mile-Long Essay by the Wayside

Over the weekend we celebrated J.'s and Gi.'s birthdays. The feasting comprised above all a chocolate chip cake, lemon cake, and marble cake, decorated with Smarties or M&Ms as the tradition demands.

Then I also spent much of Saturday baking Bienenstich, a pastry which is very popular in this household and which is concocted of a biscuity or yeasty dough, cut in half and filled with vanilla pudding, and topped with a caramelized layer of sliced almonds. I use the recipe in the Dr. Oetker Grundbackbuch. The pudding filling is too much of a fuss for me, so we always have pudding on the side. My preparation of the yeast dough (which intimidates me despite the dozens of times I've made it) was eccentric and would have struck horror into the soul of any professional baker, but once it was out of the oven the taste, texture and appearance were so perfect that they honestly did embody the Platonic ideal. We had no almonds so I substituted ground hazelnuts, which were equally delicious and looked like a baklava filling after they were mixed into the butter and sugar and milk.

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At the piano I've been looking at Chopin's ballades and études and so on, but haven't so far managed to sightread the first pages or two with much justice, so I mostly give up and leaf on to the Raindrop Prelude and try yet again not to overpedal and to slur the chords in the left hand properly. Then, after coming across Schumann's Piano Concerto in a minor maybe a week ago (it's undoubtedly a major work, but I was ignorant of its existence) and bookmarking the recordings by Dinu Lipatti and Sviatoslav Richter on YouTube, I found a score in a pocket-book-sized edition on top of the piano, and played bits of it today for the first time. It is kind of fascinating seeing what all the other instruments are doing, especially because the scores for the other concertos I practice are all transcribed so that the orchestra's part is smushed into a second piano part. (Some day I'll have to learn the proper musicological terms for that.)

The reason why I've been playing the piano more than usual is because the attack on the Gaza flotilla knocked me for an emotional loop. After brooding about politics unhealthily during the Bush years I don't want to say or think hateful things, or lose sight of what actually goes on, or feel terrible every day again. So instead I played Beethoven's early sonatas, Chopin's Polonaise Héroïque, and Rachmaninoff's Prelude in g minor.

***

To return to politics, I thought a lot about writing to the Israeli government, simply expressing sorrow at what occurred, but vacillated too much and ended up not sending anything. Reading commentary on Gawker and Jezebel (especially the latter) lowered my blood pressure because it was often clear-eyed and sympathetic, and the news coverage in general reassures me that the press is fulfilling its task and that governments like the UK's, Spain's and Greece's are adequately defending the law. (Even the New York Times forbore from muttering about bad public relations in its first editorial on the subject, but instead wrote fairly and reminded its readers about the poverty and hunger in the Gaza Strip.)

But I am disappointed in the American and Canadian governments for suggesting that the Israeli government carry out its own probe into the incident. Practically no government could be trusted with such a probe at any level, and even the courts often fail with such cases. An example that comes to mind (though maybe there are extenuating circumstances I don't know about) is when New York police officers got away with shooting 50 bullets into an unarmed man (Sean Bell). So the suggestion is stupid, biased, and callous toward the people who died and their friends and relatives. It's not that I want to see revenge done; I just think that the propaganda must be effectively disproven so that the memory of the dead is not traduced, and perhaps some remorse instilled in the people who are responsible.

I'm surprised anyway that an Israeli voter would put up with the country's soldiers being ordered to commit outright piracy. But too many people evidently subscribe to the brainless belief that you can "ambush" soldiers who are illegally trying to take over your ship in international waters. Assigning the aggression to the people on board the Mavi Marmara is like walking into the wall of a library and then suing the municipality for building the wall there in the first place.

Which is not to say that I don't have huge problems with calling oneself a peace activist and then hitting someone with a baseball bat; I think if an activist does not decide to unresistingly endure imprisonment and ill-treatment should the situation befall him, he cannot call himself a peace activist. In this case I especially see a problem with hitting soldiers who are bearing weapons and boarding your ship but have not physically assaulted you (yet) or unequivocally signalled their intentions to do that. But maybe the "peace" label was fixed on the activists by someone else. Besides I don't quite understand why it takes 600 people to deliver the aid, except if they are trained in its distribution or if the principle was to have safety in numbers (that went well).

I think that a pragmatic approach to aid is best, basically acquire the supplies and make sure that they will actually be useful, find a direct and safe way to deliver them, deliver them, then leave. Besides I think that ordinary people can participate in cultural and other exchanges to relieve the isolation of those who live in the Gaza Strip. Political pressure has to go through diplomatic channels behind closed doors, I guess, and though I'm not sure if it has much of an effect in practice I think that unbiased reporting on events in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip is intensely valuable. But I think that personal pressure might work, too; if you're friends with an influential member of any government, I think that letting him or her know quite clearly and unaggressively what you've observed and which conclusions you've drawn, and if he really makes a wrongheaded decision making your disappointment succinctly but decidedly clear, could have a good effect on policy. Sensationalism and opinionmongering and righteous ranting are sometimes justified and effective but they do make something of a circus out of the suffering of others, the irony being that many people seem to like this circus and wouldn't care much about politics if that aspect were missing.

Anyway, I hope these thoughts weren't too inaccurate or offensive.

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As for my French Revolution research (I could probably have led into this subject in some subtly clever way, but anyway), I've gone off on a tangent to read up on horses. It's reminding me of the two weeks spent in a children's horseriding camp with T. when I was ten years old or so, on the initiative of my grandmother. The camp was run a little like a cult: the trainers were hierophants, the older children or the ones who already had lessons the knowledgeable acolytes, and we the lowly neophytes. We had to navigate the intricacies of grooming and caring for the horses, and were threatened with dire anecdotes of wrongdoing which led to injury and death in the complex and fragile animals; I didn't like this fear-of-God pedagogy so much and would have liked friendlier explanations of how to treat horses kindly and without making honest and disastrous mistakes. What also played into the hierarchical character of the camp was the presumptive fact that many of the children were in private schools and wealthy, and rightly or wrongly I had the impression that they were a little snobby and spoiled and prone to Gossip-Girl-style backbiting, and frighteningly self-assured and well-educated, as the stereotype goes.

Either way it is unsurprising that I never caught the horse fever, though I did start drawing horses, diagramming the "tack" (saddle, girth, bridle, etc.), and borrowing a handful of relevant books from the library. Which effect even the moving literary travails of Black Beauty never had.

But considering how integral transportation by aid of horse was historically, I thought it high time to learn about it, and besides I still harbour fantasies of spending three to six months working on a horse or dude or cattle ranch in Australia or New Zealand or the US, or any kind of farm in North America or Europe outside of Germany (for reasons of the grass seeming more exciting on the other side of the border). Being jobless first of all it's difficult to grasp the reality of hard work, and secondly one feels the need to overcompensate for the inactivity. I've recognized to a degree that I genuinely prefer to sit around at home, but I think that this very preference is a problem in itself, though not one which I care for people to sit around in judgment on. The principal cause is that I don't expect to find anything worthwhile if I emerge from the apartment, because I've tried it and it wasn't fruitful; and until there is a job description or a job interview or anything that convinces me otherwise, that's the way it will remain.