"An experience in which one feels, though one cannot intellectually know it, the slipping away of all-that-is into the Nothingness in which it is suspended…” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness)
“Estimates of the death toll alone, as a result of the
"dekulakization" and collectivization
campaigns and the ensuing famine,
range from a "modest" 3 or 4 million to, as
some current Soviet figures
indicate, more than 20 million. The higher estimates
have, if anything,
gained more credibility as new archival material has
become
available.” (Scott, Seeing Like a State)
“They created, in place of what they had inherited,
a new landscape of large, hierarchical, state-managed
farms whose
cropping patterns and procurement quotas were
centrally mandated
and whose population was, by law, immobile. The system
thus devised
served for nearly sixty years as a mechanism for
procurement and control
at a massive cost in stagnation, waste,
demoralization, and ecological
failure." (Scott, ibid.)
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither
swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” (American Declaration of Independence)
"A developed country is one that allows all its citizens to enjoy a free and healthy life in a safe environment." (Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations)
“…All experience hath shewn that mankind are
more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” (American Declaration of Independence)
“In an arrangement later copied in the "strategic hamlets" in Vietnam,
the reluctant residents were lodged in identical, numbered houses arrayed in
straight lines.
The population's movement in and out was strictly
monitored. They
were one short step away from the concentration camps
built in wartime
to create and maintain a legible, bounded,
concentrated state
space and seal it off as completely as possible from
the outside. Here,
direct control and discipline are more important than
appropriation.” (Scott, ibid.) “It would be, Wilson wrote to a friend, the largest mechanized wheat farm in the world. They planned the entire farm layout, labor force, machinery needs, crop rotations, and lockstep work schedule in a Chicago hotel room in two weeks in December 1928.31T he fact that they imagined that such a farm could be planned in a Chicago hotel room underlines their presumption that the key issues were abstract, technical interrelationships that were context-free. As Fitzgerald perceptively explains: "Even in the U.S., those plans would have been optimistic, actually, because they were based on an unrealistic idealization of nature and human behavior. And insofar as the plans represented what the Americans would do if they had millions of acres of flat land, lots of laborers, and a government commitment to spare no expense in meeting production goals, the plans were designed for an abstract, theoretical kind of place. This agricultural place, which did not correspond to America, Russia, or any other actual location, obeyed the laws of physics and chemistry, recognized no political or ideological stance." (Scott, Ibid.)
“The concept of state spaces, suitably modified for the context of a market economy, can also help us to resolve an apparent paradox in colonial agrarian policy in Southeast Asia. How do we explain the decided colonial preference for plantation agriculture over smallholder production? The grounds for the choice can certainly not have been efficiency. For almost any crop one can name, with the possible exception of sugarcane, 17 smallholders have been able historically to out-compete larger units of production. Time and time again, the colonial states found, small producers, owing to their low fixed costs and flexible use of family labor, could consistently undersell state-managed or private-sector plantations. The paradox is largely resolved, I believe, if we consider the "efficiencies" of the plantation as a unit of taxation (both taxes on profits and various export levies), of labor discipline and surveillance, and of political control.” (Scott, Ibid.)
“They were described by their would-be civilizers as "not yet arranged" or "not yet ordered" (belum di-ator), as "not yet brought to religion" (belum berugamd), and their cultivation practices were described as "disorderly agriculture" (pertanian yang tidak teratur).” (Scott, ibid.)
“After
seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in
moving
the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and
schoolbooks
as quickly as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience.” (Scott, ibid.)“I believe we ought not to speak of the weaknesses of very great men.”
(Lafcadio Hearn)
"He would go to libraries and read books. Feel something literary, he thought. He would read books from the shelves. He would sit on comfortable chairs. When he needed water, there was a drinking fountain. From the windows he could see the rain. The sky rained and it fell to the green grass and fed the thick green moss on the headstones. Sometimes when he went to the library he was inspired. Other times he fell asleep. He felt sad about the man who was born on the Greek isle. According to the book, he was born to a Greek mother of noble lineage and his father a soldier. Her brothers didn't like his father, and one night they attacked him with knives and left him for dead. She found him and hid him in a barn. She nursed him back to health. They eloped and were married. The marriage was consummated. Two boys were born. He moved her from the isle to England, and she lamented of the rain and the strange language and her isolation. Her cousin came for her and she left the two boys and the soldier. She married her cousin and and returned to the isle. His father remarried but gave him to a relative. He would never see again his brother, his father, or his mother.
It affected the way he lived, this past of his. He would see each new person in his life as a god, like his mother, a Greek goddess. His love knew no boundaries. But no one he met possessed such a capacity to love, no one on earth could see gods in each man and woman. And so he would feel betrayed, incredulous and bludgeoned that those in his life could not feel as he did. And so he would disappear from their lives, never to be seen again.
Toward the end of his life he had a Japanese wife and lived in Japan. It struck me as odd that he chose a Japanese woman because his first love was a Norwegian. Love was different then, or at least for him. It was a 4 day train ride to Ohio from the East coast and he had already gone 38 hours without food, just breathing the smoke from the 3rd class car full of immigrants. She sat across from him, 18, blonde hair wrapped in a blue bonnet. How could such an angel be put in such a cattle car? It wasn't out of his timidity but out of his shame and hunger that he did not speak to her. The Jewish man sitting to his right saw into him. "You like her, no, don't you?" He was enraged the man could be so forward in speaking to him about such a personal matter; doubly enraged that the man found him so obvious."You should say something to her," he said.
The train moved on and his hunger resonated in his mind. He saw her coming towards him in a blur. She handed him a large piece of brown bread with a slice of yellow cheese. He devoured the bread and cheese and then realized he had not thanked her. Can food be more important than a Norwegian angel? In haste he thanked her, but she spoke nearly no English. Her face became crimson and washed with rage. He said something terrible and now they were at war. The Jewish man intervened with his slight command of Norwegian yet she was not open to negotiation. She turned her back on him and he never spoke to her again.
In his last days his health was very poor, afflicted with a cough and the failing eyesight of his only eye. "Maybe she knew I only had one eye," he thought. He never stopped thinking of the Norwegian girl, even in Japan, she appeared everywhere. To think now she is old, tending to her grandchildren, it didn't matter where he was. It could have been back on the Greek isle. She was the only woman who had a light brighter than his mother. In all places he was without her, her face, her blue bonnet. What had he said to her? Why did she turn away and suddenly hate him? He still loved her because he knew she could love him even more than he could love her.
He was nearly blind and without energy. He would sleep after his fits of coughing and when he would wake there was little he could see--to work, to type his remaining lectures he had to assume his hands could write as they had always. He had resigned his post in Japan but his offer to lecture in America had been reneged due to a typhus outbreak. He abandoned the last of his friends, this time not due to their incapacity to love but rather due to self-preservation. He had no energy, no feeling left, save the last few sparks which were devoted to his final book.
The book was finished. If he could not lecture in the United States, he could publish the lectures in a book. He held his book. She appeared with her golden hair wrapped in her blue bonnet and her blue eyes that saw his hunger. "I love you," she said.""
--Saint Maximin, his best recollection from The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Elizabeth Wetmore, Houghton, Mifflin, 1906.
(Maximin noted the text had never been checked out since its publication 108 years ago. The library was closed due to Spring Break and Maximin, in a hurried state to share the Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, wrote down what he could, as best he could remember, indulging at times in important detail neglected by Elizabeth Wetmore Houghton, a known author.)
