A Brief Memorium

Today would have been Anne Frank's 80th birthday. Particularly with the violence that took place at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., I feel like this ought to be noted. For other reasons, such notation is important. In passing, I regard Anne Frank's diary and its functioning as a historical record flippantly; but whenever her writing is shared, such as when my class returning from India visited her family's home or the excerpts from the Reading Project broadcast over Democracy Now!, I am forced to stop and pay heed, to listen and to feel the weight of such wisdom and profundity borne by such a young woman.

I listened to Democracy Now! while rearranging and cleaning my room. I have been sleeping in, today until ten o'clock, which frustrates me. Part of the reason for sleeping in is that I do not usually see the sky when I wake in my bed at home. This, I have changed. Changing the delegation of space in a room is difficult, frustrating, and inconclusive. I do not know how I will feel tomorrow morning, after a night of work at Ivanna Cone and the (likely) bike ride home; nor do I know how I will stir on Sunday when my mother runs around preparing herself for Mass; nor any further day ahead and how it will change because of my number vantage. How will I dream differently? How will I sleep differently? How will I wake differently?

In a leisurely pause while reading White Noise, I picked up some Lovecraft and have been wandering through the Dreamworld in search of the alien city of Kadath with Randolph Carter. I bring this up because the style so well encapsulates the sojourn of an epic poem and the flow of a dream. We discover frightening things, wander in suspenseful landscapes, and converse with foreign peoples in our travels with Randolph Carter, but very little is given any formal difference in the writing. When I wake and recall my dreams, what stands out are neither particular instances of dialogue nor the most stupendous episodes, but the overall sensation of the dream; what follows is the recovery of the dream from the sensation like a shallow, archaeological dig.

In conversing at great length with Miss Kalisa Schweitzer yesterday, it became all the more apparent that stimulation, sensation, experience are very rarely all that illuminating on what lays underneath. What these actualities reflect on is the sort of dreamlike divinity that yields the sort of things we sense and recall. Anne Frank, likely without much insight into it, was able to articulate the personable reality underneath experiences so simply, so subtly, that I am frequently forced to stop and express silent gratitude at the clear seeing she details. Anne Frank articulates are shared, political, and spiritual cohabitation with brief phrases and enlightened loveliness. It reveals, I suppose, the necessary hybridity foisted on her by being a child and an adult, a victim and a survivor, a hopeful romantic humanist in the midst of desparation and suffering. She was neither innocent nor world-weary; rather, she was somewhere and someone that she both had to be and could not have become. For that, I am thankful in the face of the reasons for such personality and conditions.