Monday, June 26, 2006
Helga Mailliet
(25.10.24–24.06.06)
This week-end passed away in Luxemburg City my very closest friend of the last few years and a friend for most of my life who has often helped me and my mother a lot (I did too!), and very generously so. For the last three years she has also been practically the only sponsor of my websites, taking over from my deceased friend C. Neal Brady. Without her I would not have been able to continue these sites. And this was also an immense sign of tolerance, that essential part of freedom, as she, her deceased mate Georges Penning, who had been an even closer friend of mine since high school (we had been room mates and lovers in college), and her whole circle of intellectual friends were, and those still alive still are, very left-wing: Marxists, Trotskyites, communists, Maoists or whatever you may call them in all their various shades. Thus they had political and especially economic views I would call stark errors, they were statists, but very critical of present governments and politicians, in an often very astute and brilliantly funny way (just wait for Georges' posthumous novel soon to be published). They were bourgeois, gentlemen (or women), honnêtes hommes, but their heart was with the weak ones, the oppressed ones in society. As leftists of that type they had a sense of liberty and of human natural rights that I really would like to find with, and if not, to use as a bludgeon to hit the face of, those many ignorant and arrogant (especially American) conservatives who call themselves libertarians, just because they are for a market economy and low taxes. And at the same time are hawks, extreme territorialists, and bigots like even our gifted and brilliant Ilana Mercer has recently outed herself to be, regarding Brokeback Mountain. [I and/or someone else might get back to this on my gay site www.malebeauty.de.] Mourning can also lead to anger, as you can see. Helga, dearest Helga, as our common lover Georges always said: "Helga understands.": you were intelligent AND loving, and thus will be remembered and sadly missed by some of the best. You have been, with your wide education (Helga had studied psychology at the Sorbonne and was a licenciée, Georges the same in economics from the H.E.C. at Lausanne, both had also operated a private school in Switzerland for a long while, Georges as director, later then becoming a high school teacher in Luxemburg), an invaluable help and inspiration, a Muse, for your first husband, Nic Molling, a writer and journalist also, like Georges had mainly been. Born in Bonn, she was the daughter of a physician, but doctors could not really help her with her cancer, that modern day scourge which reaped others in her family. But fortunately she did not suffer pain and passed away peacefully. She looked beautiful on her deathbed, as I remember also of my own mother. Incineration will be on Wednesday and it is planned to deliver her ashes to the North Sea off the Belgian coast which she had liked and often visited, for the last time, for a week, just four weeks before her passing.I extend my condolences to her recently adopted son Philippe, to her niece Monique and nephew Marco, to her friend Ronald Pierre and his mate, to Georges' sister Lea, to the nephews of Nic Molling, to Lolette, to her housekeeper Assunção and all others concerned. You will be gratefully remembered, dear Helga.
I wish that the following persons, the whereabouts of whom I presently do not know, happen by chance to read this obituary: Pier Giorgio Rosso of Torino, who should remember our meeting with Helga in Zurich half a century ago, and the brothers Diether (music!) and Manfred (art!) de la Motte, as Helga was a de la Motte through her mother. R.I.P.
Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 11:38 PM GMT+1 [Link]
Thursday, June 22, 2006
This Awful Spring
Yesterday, three months have passed since the day I learned of the decease of my friend and author Richard Rieben. I and this group of sites are still in mourning and this will never end. But I took a hint from another friend, and as I have slowly to make the effort to revive my sites, I decided today to take the black announcement below off the home page of my portal and archive it here in this blog, pending my announced longer obituary you must be waiting for, like Richard's family does. I apologize for the delay, but I didn't have the strength so far and actually still do not have it, but I feel that the day is coming closer when I will be able to tackle that job, requiring to study all our past correspondence, many of his texts and make inquiries with friends and family. I had been prevented from writing it right away, but my spontaneous ideas about the first sentences are still more or less in my memory. It's the rest that requires real work...I take the opportunity already now to thank all those who have sent me such sensitive condolences. I will get back to those individually and/or in the obituary.
This awful spring had more in his bag for me than I can list and a surprising number of other people have reported the same regarding their own spring. But I will still mention another major loss: Jean-François Revel, of the Académie française, to just name one only of his many prestigious attributes, died on April 30 at the age of 82, which I learned very late, on May 23, having been largely cut from the news due to my computer situation. Jean-François Revel had been an author of my magazine "Interferences" in the early sixties of the last century (I'm getting old, but who isn't...), which magazine now sells in the antiquarian market in America for surprisingly [really? ;-)] high prices. I would have liked to give you details here, but cannot find my records quickly enough now. At any rate, I will have to get back to Jean-François Revel on these pages. Since a good number of months I had been planning to contact him for a possible collaboration on my sites, in particular a new planned cooperative blog, which was meant to comprise Richard Rieben also. Life out there is always quicker than the possibilities of one's own individual pace. Revel having been one of the main mentors in my life, I definitively have to put him on my agenda for further content on this site.
Heartfelt thanks to the three people (all women!!!) who have helped me in this spring's financial emergency, which is not over really. Three may be enough for a Trinity, but not for me... Get the hint?
And so it goes.... With these four words ends each of the latest two messages (of February 23 and 24) I received from my friend and author Richard Rieben.Richard passed away in Malaysia on March 13, 2006, as I was informed this morning, March 21, by a friend. Now I am and this site is in deep tragic mourning. And the future of this site is in mourning. I am in tears since half a day and cannot write more now. I will write more later. Christian Butterbach Mayday!!! The saddest weeks in a long time for us radically freedom-minded individualists: Harry Browne, Richard Rieben, Chris Tame have passed away and leave us unconsoled. For me the tragic death in Malaysia of Richard Rieben is the very biggest blow, as he is the only one among the three with whom I had a close friendly relationship and he was an author on my sites planned to become a major contributor in the future, starting on his return to the States in May. But that is not all, as far as I and my sites are concerned. On Thursday night the only sponsor of my sites and my closest female friend, who had felt very bad since four weeks and was in the hospital since almost two weeks, was diagnosed with cancer. The chemotherapy started yesterday. She is in the hands of the best possible cancer doctors, so that I have great hopes that she will recover. If not, and at any rate till then, she will not be in a position to help me like before, as her treatment is very costly. I may be forced to close down my sites. And if this had not been enough as catastrophes for the last days and week, my computer broke down, I had it in the clinic for four days. And when I got it back, the guys had succeeded in making a zombie out of it and erasing most of my data of which I have only partial backups. I hope the data can be restored, but it's the work of specialists and various additional hardware (like an UPS and several hard disks) and software has to be bought to get working again and save me from similar happenings in the future. All this costs money which I don't have, unless I don't buy anything to eat for myself and my cat... As long as this problem is not solved, I cannot use my computer or I will overwrite data that then cannot be saved anymore. So I have to go to an internet cafe, which also costs money and allows only for a very restricted kind of working. As a measure of emergency and an exception, I put this message online from the internet cafe. To remedy this unbearable situation (I cannot write the obituary for Richard I have announced, as for that I need information I cannot access now), I am asking all of you who are reading this to please, please, make donations. I truly need them now and in the future. In the past I have managed to get along without them (over several years there had only been a couple), thanks to my sponsor who had taken over from the previous one, also a friend, who died. Please don't hesitate to send amounts as small, as one, two or three dollars/Euros. More is of course better, but small amounts are more likely to come in more frequently, more regularly, do help a lot and make it easier for you. How about a standing order? As long as those oil billionnaires are in the sulks with my websites. Thanks! C.B. Saturday, March 25, 2006 |
Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 10:53 AM GMT+1 [Link]
