Christoper Hitchens by Carol Blue

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.*

Onstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.

If you ever saw him at the podium, you may not share Richard Dawkin’s assessment that “he was the greatest orator of our time,” but you will know what I mean – or at least you won’t think, She would say that, she’s his wife.

Offstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.

At home at one of the raucous, joyous, impromptu eight-hour dinners we often found ourselves hosting, where the table was so crammed with ambassadors, hacks, political dissidents, college students, and children that elbows were colliding and it was hard to find the space to put down a glass of wine, my husband would rise to give a toast that could go on for a stirring, spellbinding, hysterically funny twenty minutes of poetry and limerick reciting, a call to arms for a cause, and jokes.  “how good it is to be us,” he would say in his perfect voice.

The new world for us began on the sort of early summer evening in New York when all you can think about is living. It was June 8, 2010, to be exact, the first day of his American book tour. I ran as fast as I could down East 93^rd Street, suffused with joy and excitement at the sight of him in his white suit. He was dazzling.  He was also dying, though we didn’t know it yet. And we wouldn’t know it for certain until the day of his death. . . Only he and I knew knew he might have cancer. We embraced in a shadow that only we saw and chose to defy.  We were euphoric.  He lifted me up and we laughed.

We went into the theatre, where he conquered yet another audience.  We managed to get through a jubilant dinner in his honor and set on on a stroll back to our hotel through the perfect Manhattan night, walking more than fifty blocks.  Everything was as it should be, except that it wasn’t.  We were living in two worlds.  The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little except to fear it, had not yet arrived.

The new world lasted nineteen months. During this time of what he called “living dyingly”, he insisted ferociously on living, and his constitution, physical and philosophical, did all it could to stay alive.

Christopher was aiming to be among the 5 to 20 percent of those who could be cured.  Without ever deceiving himself about his medical condition, and without ever allowing me to entertain illusions about his prospects for survival, he responded to every bit of clinical and statistical good news with radical, childlike hope.  His will to keep his existence intact, to remain engaged with his preternatural intensity, was spectacular.

 Christopher’s charisma never left him, not in any realm: not in public, not in private, not even in the hospital.  He made a party of it, transforming the sterile, chilly, neon-lighted, humming and beeping and blinking room into a study and a salon. His artful conversation never ceased.

The constant interruptions: The poking and prodding, the sample taking, the breathing treatments, the IV bags being changed – nothing kept him from holding court, making a point or an argument or hitting a punchline for his “guests.”  He listened and drew us out, and had us all laughing.  He was always asking for and commenting on another newspaper, another magazine, another novel, another review copy. We stood around his bed and reclined on plastic upholstered chairs as he made us into participants in his Socratic discourses.

When he was admitted to the hospital for the last time, we thought it would be for a brief stay. He thought -we all thought-  he’d have the chance to write the longer book that was forming in his mind.  His intellectual curiosity was sparked by genomics and the cutting-edge proton radiation treatments he underwent, and he was encouraged by the prospect that his case could contribute to future medical breakthroughs.  He told an editor friend waiting for an article, “Sorry for the delay, I’ll be back home soon.”  He told me he couldn’t wait to catch up on all the movies he had missed and to see the King Tut exhibition in Houston, our temporary residence.

The end was unexpected.

I miss his perfect voice. I miss the first happy trills when he woke; the low octaves of “his morning voice” as he read me snippets from the newspaper that outraged or amused him; the delighted and irritated (mostly irritated) registers as I interrupted him while he read; the jazz-tone riffs of him “talking down the line” to a radio station from the kitchen phone as he cooked lunch, his chirping, high-note greeting when our daughter came home from school; and his last soothing, pianissimo chatterings on retiring late at night.

I miss his writer’s voice, his voice on the page. I miss the unpublished Hitch also: the countless notes he left for me in the entryway, on my pillow, the emails he would send while we sat in different rooms and the emails he sent when he was on the road. And I miss his innumerable letters, postcards, faxes and instant dispatches from some dicey spot on another continent.

His last words of the unfinished fragmentary jottings at the end of this little book may seem, to trail off, but in fact they were written on his computer in bursts of energy and enthusiasm as he sat in the hospital using his food tray for a desk.

Back home in Washington, I pull books off the shelves, out of the book towers on the floor, off the stacks of volumes on tables.  Inside the back covers are notes written in his hand that he took for reviews and for himself. Piles of his papers and notes lie on surfaces all around the apartment. At any time I can peruse our library or his notes and rediscover and recover him.

When I do, I hear him, and he has the last word.  Time after time, Christopher has the last word.

*Saul Bellow

Corruption and Indiscipline by Chinua Achebe

Corruption in Nigeria has grown because it is highly encouraged. In The Trouble with Nigeria I suggest, “Nigerians are corrupt because the system they live under today makes corruption easy and profitable.  They will cease to be corrupt when corruption is made difficult and unattractive.” Twenty-eight years after that slim book was published, I can state categorically that the problem of corruption and indiscipline is probably worse today than it’s ever been, because of the massive way in which the Nigerian leadership is using the nation’s wealth to corrupt, really to destroy, the country, so no improvement or change can happen.  Recently, out of despair, I stated, “Corruption in Nigeria has passed the alarming and entered the fatal stage, and Nigeria will die if we continue to pretend that she is only slightly indisposed.”

The World Bank recently released numbers indicating that about $400 billion has been pilfered from Nigeria’s treasury since independence.  One needs to stop for a moment to wrap one’s mind around that incredible figure.  This amount - $400 billion – is approximately the gross domestic products of Norway and Sweden.  In other words, Nigeria’s corrupt ruling class stolen the equivalent of the entire economy of a European country in four decades! This theft of national funds is one of the factors essentially making it impossible for Nigeria to succeed. Nigerians alone are not responsible. We all know that this corrupt cabal of Nigerians in power has friends abroad who not only help it move the billions abroad and help them hide the money, but also shield the perpetrators from prosecution! (3)

[ There is no attribution for this concluding statement, as indicated by the (3) footnote in the Notes section of the book. Nor do footnotes 1 and 2 appear in this section of the text titled “Corruption and Indiscipline’. Perhaps he was simply quoting from his earlier book in all three cases.  He could also be referring to reports  by the OECD or perhaps Poisoned Wells; The Dirty Politics of African Oil  by Nicholas Shaxson; [associate fellow with the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London];Palgrave MacMillan, N.Y. 2007]

See http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2010/03/dirty-money-by-nicholas-shaxson.html

Martyr of the Revolution by Camille Paglia

Jacques-Louis David’s shocking painting was no mystery story when it first went on public display three months after the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, a radical populist and crusading journalist who was already the focus of an emotional mortuary cult in Paris. Whatever explanatory notes it may need today, the Death of Marat still stands on its own as a powerful image of strange, repellent beauty.

Cherchez la femme: missing from the picture is Marat’s murderer, Charlotte Corday, a tall, attractive, and articulate twenty-five-year-old who had traveled from Normandy to strike this daring political blow. A fervent supporter of the moderate Girondin Party, Corday blamed Marat for the carnage then consuming the French Revolution, as faction warred against faction. Modeling herself on the heroes of antiquity whom she studied in Plutarch, she had planned to assassinate Marat, like Julius Caesar, in a public forum – the floor of the National Convention,.  But when illness made Marat stay home, Corday tracked him to his apartment and, after several tries, won a private audience.

Because of his “leprous” skin condition (probably arthritic psoriasis), Marat worked and wrote while bathing his emaciated body in sulfur salts, a vinegar-steeped Rag (to sooth the fiery itching) wrapping his head.  This was how he had received his friend and ally David just the day before.  After conversing with Marat about the Girondins, whom she pretended to denounce and he promised to guillotine, Corday stabbed him once in the chest with a butcher knife she had purchased in a Paris shop. The six-inch blade pierced his lung and heart, and he was dead within minutes.

The picture shows none of the tumult that erupted after Marat’s cry for help. Here time has stopped: the gently smiling bather seems asleep and pleasantly dreaming.  But in the first angry rush, Corday was knocked to the floor and soon arrested.  She spent four days in prison before her trial, where she never wavered in her defense of the righteousness of the murder.  She was convicted the same day and immediately sent to the Guillotine.  It was said that when the executioner held up her severed head and slapped it on the cheek, the other check blushed. Madame Tussauds made on-site wax death masks of both Marat and Corday.

David, who was a militant Jacobin deputy at the National Convention, organized a lavish mass spectacle of Marat’s funeral procession and service. Because of the scorching midsummer heat, heavy perfumed were used to mask the corpse’s decay. A portrait of Marat was commissioned from David to adorn the Convention’s great hall, one of a pair of icons of martyrs of the Revolution framing the lectern.  Coincidentally, on the day The Death of Marat was first shown to the public in the courtyard of the Louvre, Marie Antoinette was guillotined.  David sketched the haggard queen as she rode by in the cart with her hands bound behind her back.  The following year, when David and other partisans of the regicidal Maximilien Robespierre were arrested, the two martyr paintings were removed.

After his release from prison, David reacquired The Death of Marat but never showed it again. Indeed, within a few years, he made a sharp career turn and became a supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he commemorated in a glamorous series of heroic portraits.  Though he disliked Napoleon’s metamorphosis from idealistic First Consul to megalomaniacal emperor, David’s chameleon-like shift opened him, then and now, to the charge of political opportunism.  The Marat painting was hidden away until it was briefly seen among the contents of David’s studio, auctioned after his death in 1825.  Exhibited two decades later, the picture cause a sensation and was hailed by the poet Charles Baudelaire as David’s “masterpiece.”

David’s breakthrough painting, Oath of the Horatii (1784), had triggered one of the most momentous shifts in style in the history of art: three athletic Roman brothers, blessed by their father, fling out their arms in a militant salute as they vow to sacrifice their lives for the nation.  The picture, painted in Rome, symbolized dawning neoclassicism and electrified everyone who saw it. Rococo suddenly seemed empty and frivolous compared with this vigor of assertion, rendered with austere colors and hard sculptural contours.  With this one work, David revived history painting and contributed to an urgent sense of purpose that would sweep France toward revolution.

Neoclassicism (new classicism) was inspired by the recent excavations of the Herulaneum and Pompeii, ancient Roman resort towns buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. There was a sudden craze for antiquity that influenced everything from fashion to interior décor. The Death of Marat has a sharp, clear neoclassical design.  The grisly narrative has been reduced to simple shapes and blocks of color, anticipating modern abstract art.  The plain background, like the marble wall of a Roman temple, is daringly diffuse, as if dissolving in the raking light. (It reproduces not Marat’s bleak apartment but David’s Louvre studio with its high windows.” The colors are subdued, except for drips and smudges of blood.  The picture is a parable of frugality and civic devotion: L’Ami du people (Friend of the People) was the newspaper published by Marat on a printing press in his apartment.  The white sheet ,lining the tub (to cushion his sores) is old and patched, while the nicked wooden crate, converted to a humble side table for ink pot and quills, is rudely studded with nails. David streaked brown paint over white primer to achieve the box’s rough yet beautifully glowing surface.

David has reworked the scene.  Marat is more muscular here than in real life, and his raw blisters and scales have been erased.  Distracting objects shelved on the wall are gone, and the ebony knife handle and boot shape of the tub have been altered. (Both the tub and knife survive in a Paris museum.)  Marat was not nude but wore a dressing gown over his shoulders.  Nor did he die holding Corday’s letter, whose language David has revised to highlight her treachery and sophisticated cadences, at odds with the brusqueness of the urban working class (sansculottes) whom Marat championed.  Seemingly poking from the canvas is a note Marat has just written, donating money to a widowed mother of five.  The competing letters pit one type of woman against another: the eloquent elite of the ancient regime versus the voiceless poor for whom Marat speaks.  At first glance, the sight of the naked man slain in his private quarters might pique suspicions about romance and revenge. Indeed, the erotic subtext was luridly dramatized by Edvard Munch in two 1907 versions of this painting, where the nude Corday has become a warrior-like femme fatale and the tub a bloody bed cradling a castrated Marat.

David’s beatific treatment of Marat’s body recalls Italian paintings of the dead Christ being laid in his tomb.  But the heaviness of composition, with everything falling to the bottom, conveys the finality of mortality.  The wood box is like a tombstone with its maker’s signature and dedication (“To Marat,” carved in Roman letters), also subtly sinking. The date in tiny letters (“ Year Two”) uses the short-lived Republican calendar, not yet in effect at Marat’s death.  David’s original; title was Marat at his last breath, capturing the fleeting moment between life and death.  The quill still loosely grasped in Marat’s right hand suggests his words taking wing and living beyond him.  Like the dove of the Holy Spirit, revolutionary ideas will illumine and inspire.  Marat would one day become a hero of international Communism.  But it is an open question whether this ruthless activist, author of so many massacres, was a saint or a monster.

Glittering Images; A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia; Pantheon Books, N.Y. 2012

Solitary Watcher by Camille Paglia

The sculptor Donatello was a pioneer of the Italian Renaissance, literally a ‘rebirth” of Greco Roman ideals of reason and beauty. His bronze statue of David standing dreamily over the severed head of Goliath was one of the most influential works in art history – the first “beautiful” nude and first life-size, free standing sculpture since the fall of Rome.

The fees for Donatello’s prolific commissions are heavily documented in Florentine archives, but little else is known about him except that he was apprenticed to a leading sculptor and goldsmith, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and became a friend and protégé of the powerful merchant prince Cosimo de’ Medici.  Pugnacious, bearded faces (including that of Goliath) in several of his works may have been self-portraits.  The erotic aura of his startling young David has led to speculation that Donatello was a pederast.  Despite homosexuality being both illegal and persecuted, there was evidently a thriving gay subculture in Florence, clustered around the salons of Neoplatonic philosophy.  It was from this sophisticated milieu promoting Greek love that Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo would emerge.

Donatello’s chief sculptures are of men: resolute Saint George in armor; grim Habakkuk (Zuccone), an Old Testament prophet; vigorous Gattamelata, a mercenary warlord astride his splendid charger.  Donatello’s two most important female sculptures have masculine attributes: the Hebrew heroine Judith, raising a heavy scimitar over the languid body of an enemy general; and Mary Magdalene, standing watch with her square jaw, lopped bangs, sinewy calves, and boyish biceps.

The wooden statue of Mary Magdalene is so harsh and imposing (over six feet tall) that it often draws gasps from people seeing it for the first time. Donatello apparently executed it upon his return to Florence in 14534 after a ten-year stay in Padua.  It marks a radical shift in style from his prior work.  Nothing here appeals to or seduces the eye; on the contrary, we sense a despairing recoil from the physical.  Donatello abandons nearly all his classical formulas and invokes instead the ghoulishness of northern European late Gothic, with its frightful apparitions of devils and gargoyles.  In contrast, a work produced fifteen years earlier, his wooden statue of the ascetic John the Baptist, shows the fiery saint speaking and proselytizing, expressively engaged with other people.

In the Gospels, Mary of the Galilean town of Magdala is a devoted disciple who appears at key moments in Jesus’s story.  Roman Catholics (but not all Christians) identify her with an adulteress whom Jesus saves from stoning and with the woman from who he casts out seven demons.  She anoints his feet with precious oil, stands with his mother and Saint John at the foot of the cross, helps to discover Jesus’s empty tomb, and is the first to see him after his resurrection.  The idea that Mary was a prostitute began in a medieval sermon by Pope Gregory the Great.  Legend claimed that Mary Magdalene accompanied the Virgin Mary to Ephesus, where they died, or to southern France, where Mary Magdalene became a hermit in a cave.  European art has often shown her as voluptuous, half-naked penitent with flowing red or blonde hair, its loosening and exposure signifying both her promiscuity and her contrition.

Donatello’s gaunt Mary Magdalene, his last know statue, is one of the most extreme surviving depictions of this saint.  Carved from white poplar wood with details in plaster gesso, the statue was once painted and its auburn hair gilt.  A flat brown paint, applied for protection long afterward, hid the colors (including Mary’s blue eyes) for centuries.  During the catastrophic 1966 flooding of Florence’s Arno River, muddy, oily waters broke into the Baptistery and submerged the statue, dissolving its dull coating and revealing tantalizing traces of Donatello’s original polychrome.  During restoration, the saint’s diadem, added decades after Donatello’s death and visible in many photographs, was not reattached.

What was Donatello, then in his late sixties, announcing to Florence by this stunning work?  Taste in the city had become far prettier, more delicate and refined, as in the ceramic sculptures of children by Desiderio da Settignano.  Was the aging Donatello, as divine judgment loomed, renouncing his past sexual adventures and proclaiming his remorse? There is a harrowing sense of isolation and desolation in his Mary.  Is she a self-portrait? – capturing a feminine sensitivity beneath his masculine, muscular brashness.  Or is this wizened, gap-toothed crone the artists own grieving mother, burdened by his notorious escapades and refusal to marry and doing penance for her son’s sins?

Draped in her long mass of hair, Mary Magdalene seems frozen in place, consumed with agonizing thought. She is a sleepless sentinel, like Jesus at Gethsemane. Her staring eyes are sunk in deep hollows, while her mouth gaps in dementia or shock.  Her nasal muscles constrict and retract, as if she were stifling sobs or repulsed by a bad smell, the stench of mortality which similarly afflicts Hamlet.  Her skull, like a memento mori, is surfacing through her sunken cheeks.  Fasting has stripped away her female curves.  There are emaciated, nearly skeletal Buddhas in Asian art, but they are images of contemplative ecstasy with none of the squalor and degradation seen here.  Mary is a pariah, both feeling and causing disgust.  She has been reduced to near-animal existence, shown by her foot gripping the rock edge like a bear claw.

That Mary Magdalene is sculpted of perishable wood, rather than Donatello’s usual costly bronze or marble, alludes to the Cross as well as to earthly decay: her spirit is crucified on the flesh that betrayed her. Her cascade of hair, tied rope-like at her waist (as on a monk’s robe), seems liquid –as if she were bathing in her own tears. With her weathered, leathery skin (unlike the fine white alabaster of Florentine ladies), she seems like a stony outcropping, beaten by the elements.  Her still graceful hands, with their elongated fingers, almost meet in prayer, like a Gothic arch.  But time has stopped in a moment of self-recognition or doubt.  Perhaps she is paralyzed by a fiery vision, the annihilation of the damned.  She is like Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at God’s destruction of the wicked Cities of the Plain.  Was Donatello saying, through Mary, that he too had looked back and seen his own Sodom burn?

Glittering Images; A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia; Pantheon Books, N.Y. 2012