As I wrote in my celebration of Lewis Carroll on his birthday, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; but only in those truths which I myself create or claim, and which in turn claim me.
This is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
Let there be total truth and absolute transparency between us, O my brothers, sisters, and others; for our word must be an inviolate force of nature if we are to mean anything, one which shapes, defines, motivates, and informs not only how we choose to be human together but also our own possibilities of becoming human. Lies dehumanize and falsify; therefore do I pursue a sacred calling to discover and live the truth. Having so defined the ground of struggle in my writing here as in all things, and with an awareness that this self-disclosure and public intimacy is terrifying to others in some cultures and part of my personal myth as it is for Kenzaburo Oe in Japan, what do I mean when I use the word faith?
My intention is not to deceive in this or any regard; its simply that this is a complex, ambiguous, relative, dangerous, and highly fraught issue, one which bears the legacies of both my personal history and that of my family, and of our millennia of civilization.
A full accounting and interrogation of my influences will not be brief and merits its own study; here I am primarily questioning its praxis as vision, described in the film Oz in reference to Thomas Edison as “the ability to look into the future and make it real.”
I am a scholar of Islam and a member of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism, a former Buddhist monk and Dream Navigator of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order in Kathmandu Nepal, and grew up from the age of nine with ten years of formal study in Zen Buddhism.
Often I use the word faith as solidarity of action with others; as loyalty, allyship, and recognition of our interdependence and the universal nature of our humanity which connects us. But I also use this word faith as a sacred calling to pursue the Truth, whatever the source or where it leads, an idea from ibn Arabi and the most radical definition of faith I know of, which makes Islam the most revolutionary of faiths, especially compared to Christianity and its centuries long burning of books in repression to dissent and subjugation to authority claiming to speak for the Infinite. Only six copies of Plato’s books survived the Dark Ages, courtesy of the Islamic scholars who preserved them.
So for myself, faith is a process of questioning and pursuit of Truth, one which is antithetical to its usual use as submission to authority. Any who stand between ourselves and the Infinite serve neither.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision as symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical truth, as reimagination and transformation, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Herein my ars poetica uses methods of literary criticism, history, psychology, and philosophy, an extension of the interdisciplinary methods pioneered in The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite which I read in high school during a time when I chose the origins of evil as my field of study, to interpret the meaning and direction of current events as they unfold in real time, and to change the balance of power in the world.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and imaginal truth allows us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 3 2022, On Creativity and Poetic Vision as Revolution, Transformation, and Liberation; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” Keats
My sister wrote of her recurring vision of the Night Mountain this morning, a vast and enormous city or structure of lights floating in the sky above the desert just before dawn, and it provoked memories of and reflections on my own many visions and encounters with the transcendent, especially those which became Defining Moments and shaped my becoming human; among them the Illumination of Our Beautiful Flaws as I crossed the Thar desert in Rajasthan by camel, the Games of Beauty and Vision as I sailed upon the Lake of Dreams in Srinagar, my Journeys through the Gates of Possibilities as a monk in Kathmandu, the Kiss of the Fallen Star which struck my hand in a meteor shower as I reached for the Impossible among the heavens, the Dream of the Toad transferred to me as a chthonic guardian spirit and guide of the soul by one of my father’s Beatnik friends, William S. Burroughs, in a line of succession from Nietzsche as its avatar, in the strange fairytales he told in the evenings of his visits as the coals of the fire burned low and darkness swallowed us in its endless chasms, and the moment of my Awakening and vision of Possible Futures of Humankind when as a child at my mother’s side during a protest in People’s Park in Berkeley the police fired on the university students in the most terrible incident of state terror in American history, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969, and I escaped my body and had a unitary moment of awareness outside of time.
Like the dreams to which they are akin, such visions can be read as symbols, metaphors, and allegories; they are also stories woven into our lives which connect us with the universe and with other people, and through which we create ourselves. Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
I am looking at the scar on my hand from where a Fallen Star touched me one night during a cosmic event like tonight’s Quadrantid meteor shower, like the hand of a rebel angel bearing the stolen Promethean Fire, decades ago, when I reached up to pull the stars from the heavens and something reached down to enfold my hand in a nimbus of light, and for a moment I was sublimed and exalted in the Kiss of the Fallen Star, riding the light among the spheres, the earth a vanishing orb, then lost among the solar system, a sea of stars, a whirling dance of galaxies, and return to the hill where I stood transfigured by the embrace of Infinite. Stunned not by our smallness next to a universal scale, but by the eternity and timeless immensity of Being in which we share.
This meteor strike was witnessed by Jim Shafer, Jennifer Wendt-Damico, Kimberly Wine, Claud Gipson, and several others who had assembled on top of the old artillery battery overlooking the valley below Cavedale Road in Sonoma California in the 1980’s, with its awesome petroglyph caves hidden behind a waterfall, where a door to the Unknown was opened possibly thousands of years ago, letting beings of strangeness through.
If ever I need to be reminded of our true nature, of the presence of the transcendent and the immanence in nature of truths written in our flesh, of the vast and limitless sea of being and consciousness of which we are part, I need only open my hand to see written there the signature of the Unknown Infinite and the sign of our hope, for from the moment I touched a star I have been without despair, fear, or doubt, a bearer of hope and the fire of liberation.
I have been no stranger to what is strange; it has defined my Otherness and the kinship I feel with those others, however different from myself, who are marginalized, excluded, vilified, and oppressed, those whom Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth, the dispossessed and the powerless, the silenced and the erased; the monsters and the freaks whom I claim as my family and my tribe.
Of all the gifts and wonders life has given me, this I cherish most of all; that with all the numberless and unimaginable horrors to which I have been witness, in Mariupol and Sarajevo and the crimes and atrocities whose names become an endless litany of woes which define the limits of the human as a fragile and ephemeral quality among chasms of darkness, I have emerged from the legacies of our history Unconquered as in Henley’s poem Invictus, with the ability to bond, empathize with, and inhabit the lives of others as the bearer of sacred wounds which open me to the pain of others. I cherish my pain, for like the Abyss which I have embraced and wrestled with it has made me human.
If I can do this, so can we all. This is my faith as solidarity, hope, and love.
This above all else defines what is human; our ability to transcend the limits of our flesh and of our differences, to share and learn from the lives of others, across vast gulfs of time and space, through the civilization we create as partners in a Great Conversation. Much of who we are is stored potential in the form of our most precious resource, the written word, which is created by our historical community and belongs to the commons; this is both its power as a shaping force and its danger as a limitation of our uniqueness and autonomy.
Such are my thoughts on creativity and poetic vision as revolution, transformation, and liberation; but I did not invent the language with which I create them, nor the millennia of historical antiquity which informs my ideas; rather they are instruments with which I create myself. Who then owns the artifacts of my thinking? To this I must answer with a line from the great film Il Postino; “Poetry belongs to those who need it.”
In reverence for the gifts and guidance I have been given I have tried, however poorly and within my limitations, to understand the meaning and significance of such moments of insight, to enact them in my life as a fulcrum of change and to use poetic vision as leverage with which to transform the balance of power in the world.
Regardless of how we name and taxonomize the Source of our reality and the sea of our being in attempts to rationalize and control life, it remains wild, irrational, uncontrollable, and also very real. The wonder and terror of vision and immersion in what Coleridge called the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, Ibn Arabi the Ālam al-Mithāl, and is termed the Bardo in the Tibetan classic which I translate as The Book of Liberation, in the contexts of four lineages of ideology in which I may claim membership, has inspired some of the greatest achievements of civilization and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and some of the most fearsome terrors of our historical atrocities, madness, and degradation.
The liminal bears creative and destructive forces in equal measure, and not reductive to the interplay of darkness and light, but ambiguous, contingent, and relative. We who are its witnesses and bearers of poetic vision are the arbiters of this power among humankind and of its consequences for the material universe and the order and fate of the cosmos. Who bears the fire of the gods becomes an agent of transformation, insight, and the reshaping of human being, meaning, and value; this is true of all art and of creativity in general.
Revolutions are born of such insight, in sciences and arts of understanding as well as in politics as choices we make about how to be human together, and in our ongoing creation of ourselves. With this inner fire and vision we may forge new truths, and in this mission I offer guidance and warning as you sail into the unknown; transgress boundaries, violate norms, abandon limits, and seize your power to create yourself anew, for nothing is Forbidden and all Authority is illusion and lies; but always know what you are trying to achieve, for force always operates in both directions at once.
Act without fear, and in action be fearless; but with awareness of the consequences of your actions. Life and liberty, as well as good and evil, may depend on the smallest of changes in our lives and our world, both for ourselves and for others.
Best wishes, and may you find joy, freedom, healing, and love in your reimagination of yourself and our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch figures and images I called my Dream Gates; William S. Burroughs would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heaven and hell, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in discomfort and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Godels Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021, Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memiors: the Case of Facebook; Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.
As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?
This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or a truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As written by Helena de Bresis, author of author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.
When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.
You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.
What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.
A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.
The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.
Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.
That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.
To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.
But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.
Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. There is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Six Impossible Things: Slaying the Jabberwocky
Il Postino film
Faith as poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation; a reading list
A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries,
primary texts of The Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, Padmasambhava, Karma Lingpa, Chögyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle translators
What is this thing of rapture and despair, wonderful and terrible like immersion in the Infinite, more precious and fundamental to our humanity than any other, more dread than hope as a gift and curse which offers redemption and healing when all else fails, full of numinous powers of reimagination and transformation in the face of our nothingness, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world?
I write in reflection on the 70th birthday of my partner Dolly (Theresa) McKay today, with our parents now gone, though we still have our siblings, and primarily reliant on one another for connection to this world and the ongoing creation of meaning and value for ourselves as a sustaining function and a motivating and informing source in the performance of ourselves.
This year she has asked me to write our story, which I do now as context for my questioning of the meaning and purpose of love.
We have known each other our whole lives; our fathers grew up across the street from each other and attended the same schools as friends since childhood, and she, being four years older than myself, was my babysitter from when I was literally a baby. She tells the story of when my mother put me in her arms on my first day home after I was born with the words; “Want to hold him?”, and Dolly gathering me in asked; “Can I keep him?” I remember this moment, she an enormous orb of light, like a bodhisattva, who I reached for and who reached out to me in return, to gather me in, where all was luminous among infinite seas of being. This was the magic spell which bound us together; I believe I imprinted on her as mate bonding or recognition from this moment, in the way of wolves. Or as we constructed this event and the mystery of our relationship together from childhood, we recognized each other from our past lives together in a bond which survives death and rebirth, and like all love transcends the limits of our form.
Our first kiss was during a hayride in the snow in a wagon driven by her father with a tractor, in the winter of 1968 now fifty seven years ago; I was a very precocious eight and she twelve.
In the years that followed, during visits between our families on Christmas and summer vacations as my father moved us to California when I was two to teach high school and both my parents families were in Spokane Washington as well as their childhood friends like the McKays, we discovered that we shared the same dreams, literally, and together puzzled out a chronology for our backstory full of impossibly romantic imagined lives. This was my first historical research project, identifying where and when things from dreams were real and in use, and my first writing project, a dual biography of past lives; and whether real or imagined remains irrelevant, because it was real to us and instruments through which we created ourselves as we wished and chose to be.
By the time I was fourteen and she eighteen, I just before my first year of high school and she just graduated from hers, ours had become a grand romance; also a secret one, though the difference in our ages is nothing now. Such was our glorious Forbidden Romance, unfolding from and energized by a secret history of incarnations together across vast gulfs of time constructed from shared dreams. We saw each other, Dolly and I; and when this is true nothing else matters.
I count our anniversary from that summer of 1974, running amok together during the World’s Fair in Spokane just before my fateful trip to Brazil, and here we are still, she in her lair downstairs in the library doing the bureaucratic judo with some fifty different governments and negotiating their legal systems as a Regulatory Affairs Director with a job title of Strategist of Takeda, a three hundred year old Japanese pharmaceutical company, me in mine; in a home we built together and named Dollhouse Park because she wanted a park and moved a chair around the hills for days watching the sunset and the lights of the city to choose the best view. We can see the hills where we went on that hayride from here.
Fifty one years of love and partnership together, now. Glorious and strange, shaping each other here beyond the boundaries of our maps of becoming human, living in the blank and unknown places marked Here Be Dragons.
Who were we then? Dolly had begun her career as a professional musician playing the 1974 World’s Fair, having discovered that while piano recitals and competitions earned union scale in the symphony and a bit more for the occasional concert or television appearance, cocktail lounges paid well and hotels and cruise ships offered a free room with maid service and meals in the restaurant as well as lots of money. She had just lived her last year of high school in a private suite at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane with its stunning stained glass ceiling in the Peacock Lounge where she played piano, then went to Victoria British Columbia and lived at the Empress Victoria Hotel for two years, with a sailboat in the harbor for exploring. She spent the next decades playing grand hotels and cruise ships in Europe; the Princess and Norwegian Lines, the Harry’s New York Bars in Paris and Hamburg, and her favorite places to live, Bath England and a resort in Bavaria, as well as Vegas casinos, but before all of this hobnobbing with royalty and high living she was the girl who saw the film Lawrence of Arabia at the cinema and then went home and played the entire score from memory.
Of course the rapture of her beautiful music fired my imagination and captivated my soul. We shared interests in music, but also a general enthusiasm for learning; her best memory of high school was designing rockets for a moon lander others were building, mine being carried through the hallways on the shoulders of my fellow students during my first political action at the start of my Freshman year, a victorious school walkout and strike when the local church ordered the school counselor to lose all the signup sheets for my father’s Forensics class and debate team for asking inconvenient questions about Apartheid, which the walkout forced the school to re-do. While she played piano, I wrote poetry; she once expressed our intellectual differences this way; “Music is my native language; you think in words, I think in songs.”
Above all we both bore marks of strangeness and of otherness as survivors of death or near-death experiences, myself from a moment of awareness outside of time and a vision of multiple possible human futures during the most terrible incident of state terror since the Civil War, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969, at People’s Park Berkeley, when the police opened fire on a student protest over the University of California’s investments in Israeli war industries and complicity in the Occupation of Palestine, while I held my mother’s hand and a police grenade hurled me from my body and I stood outside of time and beheld myriads of possible human futures, she from being stabbed during a home invasion by an obsessed fan, a retarded fellow high school student who had developed a jealous fixation, and left for dead, thereafter with awareness no longer limited to her form. Her thoughts can leap across the gap between the forms of others and her own as both thoughts and feelings or telepathy and empathy, where mine do the same across time and possible futures or alternate realities. I’ve spoken with others who have returned from death, and there is nothing unusual in this opening of consciousness as an effect; death is nothing more or less terrible and wonderful than freedom from the limits of our form. As I said to my mother on returning from death as a child in her arms and visions of thousands of lives across millennia and our myriad possible futures; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but Awakening from an illusion.”
We returned from death with unique angles of view in an irrational and threatening universe whose meaning we struggled to make sensible and had fallen down the special rabbit hole of magic, vision, imagination, fantasy, Surrealism, myths and fairytales, all things occult, bizarre, and strange, the Addams Family with Gomez and Morticia our models as who we wanted to grow up to be, muy romantico and festooned with weapons, both forms of armor against a hostile universe we swore to face together back to back, and together developed interests in history and writing ourselves into it. This was a secret world we shared together, and secrets are a bond like no other. We imagined an enormous backstory of our romance as serial reincarnations together across centuries, from shared dreams; this was when I began to write, from the stories we used to shape each other, though it was my father’s Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs who taught me to write with his bizarre storytelling of an evening. And the vast scope and intricate mechanisms of history began to open for me as I researched details of our dreams and charted our course across, as Dracula phrases it in the film; “oceans of time”.
As to myself in the summer of 1974, my eighth grade had been spent devouring the works of Plato and Nietzsche, with Napoleon as my hero, in my second year of studying French at the high school and some months of learning Portuguese for my upcoming trip to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games as the Northern California foil and saber champion in my age division, and as I had since the age of nine studying fencing and chess with my father and obsessively practicing martial arts, Chinese and some Japanese language and calligraphy, the game of Go, and in formal Zen study with my teacher, whom I called the Dragon. Chinatown had become a community of refuge for me from the theocratic Reformed Church town I grew up in where my father taught high school, but I had also grown up among my beatnik-hippie parents circle of intellectuals, my father a director of underground theatre and my mother a political activist, and home was also Telegraph Avenue and Haight-Ashbury.
No recounting of my youth can be complete without mention of William S. Burroughs, family friend and a kind of unofficial uncle, and the bizarre stories he would tell of an evening; journeys to other realities, duels with chthonic beings, the art of curses, summoning and ritual magic. In short, precisely the same kind of imaginal world in which I lived, and through which I sought meaning in an Absurd and hostile universe. I still have the Tarot cards he gave me and taught me to shape reality with; I had asked him if the cards could tell the future, and he said; ”Tarot can do so much more than that; the true art is to create new futures, new selves, journey across alternate realities and timelines, break and recreate the rules.” Direct lines of transmission and successorship can be drawn from medieval ceremonial magic to Aleister Crowley to H.P. Lovecraft to Burroughs, and in a secondary line of transmission from Friedrich Nietzsche to Georges Bataille to Burroughs in another; and both from Burroughs to myself.
During the summer before my Sophomore year of high school I traveled to Spokane to find her, but she was gone, moved to Victoria though I learned this later from a letter. We did not meet again until the summer before my senior year, when I was seventeen, in Otter Crest Oregon, and again in Seattle the following summer after my graduation, and then in June 1989 for my father’s funeral in Spokane, that last between the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola ending in March 1988 where we broke the Apartheid regime and when we brought down the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
For the acts of our story which occurred after I began high school and she the grand adventures of her career as a diva and torch singer, I refer to my post of August 21 2025, A Cave of Stories: the Archeology of My Writing Space As An Imaginarium, in which I interrogated the idea of home as a memory palace space of reflection, serenity, refuge, and creativity in a world which can be quite terrible and offers few of any of these fine things, and also the functions of home as an instrument for creating ourselves and the kind of relationship we image as our best; Herein I interrogate and problematize how we construct identity through our material environment as instruments of our stories, histories, memories; in the case of the archeology of my writing space. Dolly has also asked me to tell the story of her and I, and I do so now in the context of this mimetic shell we have constructed for ourselves, our cottage Dollhouse Park.
Close by is a photo of her building a sandman; this was the summer before my senior year of high school, when I drove up to visit her when she was playing her regular summer gig at Otter Crest Oregon, at the time the hottest resort on the coast, and we built a sandman together and let the tide carry him out to sea, so that the tides would always bring us back together; I believe this magic has returned me from death many times since.
We would find one another once again before our different currents carried us into strange seas for a long time, in Seattle the summer after my graduation from high school in 1978, myself 18 and university bound, she 22 and a career musician in Europe with a home in Bath England and while playing gigs living at her favorite resort in the Black Forest of Germany, the opulent Brenners Park-Hotel with the Villa Stefanie spa – my favorite in Baden-Baden is the quiet Hotel Belle Epoque, on Princess and Norwegian cruise ships, and in Paris within a short walk from the Opera and her gig playing Harry’s New York Bar. She can speak conversational French and some German as a result of years working the room gladhanding the glitterati during breaks at her gigs. Through her twenties and thirties Dolly was a kind of minor star in Europe, in a very rarefied and exclusive circuit of cocktail lounges, restaurants, clubs, and ballrooms, and once turned down a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon to retain artistic control of her own music.
When living out of suitcases on the road began to lose its charm, she returned home to Spokane.
Our home, Dollhouse Park, began when Dolly’s father sold the land she was living on in a mobile home out from under her to build a housing development, a somewhat extreme solution to the problem of adult children living at home. This of course was not the classic Failure to Launch, as she had lived on the road playing music for over twenty years before returning to go to university for the very first time, first to Gonzaga University in Engineering where her father had founded the Engineering Advisory Group when he owned a multinational and had eighty engineers working for him, thereafter she went to Eastern Washington University in Cheney to study Chemical Geology which she taught while working on her Master’s, to work in mining, for which her field camp was at the MacKay School of Mining in Nevada where a distant relative once discovered the Comstock Silver Lode. And when the mines began closing she went into Regulatory Affairs at Spokane’s Hollister Stier Pharmaceuticals, a field which combines science and law; during which time she also studied Business Intelligence at Harvard.
Between her family home and the old Jesuit monastery of Mount St. Michaels where her father Gene used to jog over and help in the bakery as a boy was a hill with a spectacular view of the city at night, across a wetlands and up a winding dirt road where a horse farm once stood. To this spot she brought a chair and watched the sun set for several days from different vantage points and angles of view, and then bought the hilltop, had a daylight basement dynamited out of the backside and concrete poured for the foundation, framed in steel I beams, and her mobile dragged over them and oriented just as she had chosen.
Then she had a detective track me down where I was teaching high school AP English in California, and called me. We had not spoken in over twelve years, since my father’s funeral in 1989; I had gone through yet another teacher credential program and returned to teaching to fulfill the terms of a vision I had in which she came to my classroom to claim me.
Much happened in the meanwhile; the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Second Intifada, the Siege of Sarajevo, the resistance of the Karen and Shan against the ethnic cleansing campaign of Myanmar, the defense of Kashmir and my studies of Sufism as a member of the Naqshbandi order, becoming a monk and Dream Navigator of the Kagyu Vajrayana order of Tibetan Buddhism and the Revolution in Nepal, the end of Apartheid, my trek across America by horseback as a counselor for teenage felons, the Zapatista movement, a pirate campaign to liberate enslaved sailors in the Indonesian Islands and South China Sea, learning the Raja Harimau or tiger style of silat among the Minangkabu people after being castaway in a storm on one of the Mentawai Islands and building an outrigger to sail to Sumatra, and so much more of which I am a witness of history.
The previous time I had spoken with Dolly was also by phone, after the funeral where we met again over ten years after our last adventures the summer after my graduation from high school. I was living in a two level Victorian brick house in Glen Ellen near Sonoma at the foot of Jack London State Park and next to the burned out derelict of the Chauvet Hotel, once the hideout of Machine Gun Kelly and a casino of Bugsy Siegel’s, and a port for the steamboats that ran up Sonoma Creek from the San Francisco Bay when it was a navigable waterway. My view was an open wild meadow along the creek where a gypsy would park his wagon over the winter, a real wooden wagon pulled by a donkey who brayed mournfully at night, and just upstream from the Old Mill.
Dolly called me just as a rascally opossum arrived on my kitchen counter to share my breakfast as he often did, quite uninvited, and impatient for the offering of leftovers I would put out on the deck, through eaves where my bats lived. He was sniffing my breakfast fry up as we said our hellos, and I turned from our conversation to yell at him “Get Out of Here!”
As she has told me, she thought I was yelling at her, and hung up.
The line went dead, and there was no caller id or callback on the old landline phones. I had no idea where in the world she was, only that she had reached out to me and believed herself rebuffed. But she was out there, somewhere, waiting for me to find her.
There were many other causes and reasons for what I chose to do next; first the death of my father, who took me to his theatrical rehearsals where I sat with him and Edward Albee listening to their conversations between director and author, taught me to fence and play chess, took me to martial arts lessons and brought me in to his theatricals of ceremonial magic staged with his Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs, was my high school Drama and Forensics teacher and debate and fencing coach, whose death was a life disruptive event, which left me wondering who I was without these things connected with my father that shaped me, and who I was doing all this Forensics and martial arts teaching for.
Second, we had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and I thought; Why not bring down all the Walls, everywhere, my own most especially?
The third and final cause in this cascade of dominoes and the trigger event was the tragedy of the Dropped Call and missed connection; somewhere in this very large world, in which I had nothing and no one as anchorages from which to create meaning, love was waiting for me to find.
And for love we must dare anything.
So I found myself driving to work one day, with my lunch packed beside me, and in a moment of lightning bolt illumination, to use the Buddhist term, realized that I was literally living in Nietzsche’s Hell, that I was about to have the same day as I had beyond remembering, swallowed by the sameness and the Nothing. And I thought; Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this, and took a wrong turn, to the airport where I bought a continuous ticket for round the world travel. When the ticket agent asked where I wanted to go, I said the other side of the world.
I only discovered my destination was Kuala Lumpur Malaysia when I got off the plane, and was whisked away to the glittering business district where everyone was doing things I could have easily done at home in San Francisco if I wished. So I found a map of the bus routes, where all the roads ended in the Cameron Highlands, and decided to begin my journey there, doing what no one else was doing and where none dared go. I got off the bus at the end of the road, and walked into an unmapped jungle.
Thus began my Great Trek, wherein I crossed much of South Asia on foot and by sail, and after many adventures returned on the tenth anniversary of my journey, because of a vision which set forth the conditions I must meet to find Dolly; I had to be teaching high school again, which required classes and recertification, and she would come to my classroom to claim me. This she did nearly three years later in 2002.
Quite wily about her plan she was; she called and ended the conversation with; “I’m coming to San Francisco to visit a Jesuit priest who was my friend at Gonzaga. Would you like to meet for coffee?” Over coffee she told me; “Really I came to see you.”
Once I moved in we began rebuilding everything, and all of it is custom work now, but the Dollhouse, so named for her, began as a mobile home for a couple who had never lived together before though we had known each other our whole lives, with a lot of dreams and very little money with which to realize them. That last bit has changed in the past few years, long after Dollhouse Park was completed, and we did most of the work ourselves with whatever we could gather, though with crucial family help.
Her father drew the plans for the house; I drew the design for the landscape, and we hired out only the electrical box and the plumbing, with help from a number of her family’s employees, available because her brothers own Bullseye Amusements which they founded as a pinball arcade on their uncle Bob’s carnival as teenagers and now own over two thousand machines in casinos and bars in the Spokane area, and control the local gaming industry.
Our cottage is now a main house of three thousand square feet on two levels, with a Cat Tower connecting the daylight basement with the main upper floor by two flights of stairs, totaling 4,152 square feet counting the Tiki Bar Deck, plus a 1280 square foot three bay garage with a shop and storage. This means that the Dollhouse is tiny, 5,576 sf if you count the gazebo and garage, with just enough storage room for two people and our things, but I think the grounds are the finest private park in the city.
And nothing can surpass for us the stories of ours it holds, the hopes and dreams and visions of our lifelong romance and the histories of our struggles to make them real.
So it is that a boy who wanted to be Gomez writes in celebration of a girl who wanted to be Morticia, over fifty years after a Defining Moment of realization that we dream each other’s dreams.
And this birthday of Dolly’s coincides with our ancient celebration of death and transformation as Halloween, wherein we let our demons out to play, a time of masquerades, the performance of secret identities, violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, reversals of order, the embrace of our monstrosity, of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, and the pursuit of new truths through ecstatic trance and poetic vision, which for us now begins with the Festival of Loki as Breaking the Silence, and includes Kali Puja and our new national holiday of amok time and the celebration of love, transgression, and vision as divine madness, the Festival of the Mad Hatter.
The Mad Hatter acts as a psychopomp or guide of the soul in Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is a Holy Fool like Parsifal, but he and Alice are also figures of a single whole person and the story one of hierosgamos or heavenly marriage; like Beauty and the Beast or Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
The genius and allure of the Addams Family is not only that they combine an iconic romantic couple as an aspirational ideal of relationships with a family which accepts the uniqueness of its members and valorizes transgression in both themes, but that they are also a pantheon, and one entirely free from the consequences of patriarchy.
Much like the figures of Morticia, who occupies the imaginal space of Lillith, Kali, Persephone, and the Morrigan as a goddess of time, death, sex, and rebirth, and Gomez, like Pluto an Underworld King of fate, luck, wealth, chaos, and mischief who subsumes elements of Milton’s Rebel Angel and Loki the Trickster. Or in our own unique ways, Dolly and myself as people who claimed these roles as children and dreamed ourselves into such shapes as best we might.
We have defined this month as a liminal time which begins with a festival of desire or eros and ends with one of death or thanos; a space of balance in which all things become possible.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
We can parse the meaning of the word love in terms of its origins, as does Professor Babette Babich; “The classical list, as C.S. Lewis and others detail it, is: storgē, love of the home or the family; philia or friendship, which we hear in philosophy as love of wisdom; eros which is what we’re most interested in — taking us back to the #metoo movement, including questions of men and women in love. And then there is agapē, a pure, specifically selfless love, in contrast to eros, which is anything but selfless. Agapē is anticlimactic, and even St. Augustine, praying for grace, prayed to be perfect but, as he famously wrote, not yet.
The hierarchy of kinds of love mirrors — to tell a fanciful, proto-evolutionary story — the story of our lives. We’re born into storgē, family love, the love of home and hearth. That can be conflicted to be sure, as Robert Frost reminds us: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’”
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the matrix of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death are all we truly own. It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
Theresa McKay’s 1970’s promo picture for her music show; she is seventeen in this photo, which she used on her marquee at the Davenport and the Empress Victoria.
Dolly and I at Expo 74 in Spokane; I about to begin high school in California, she graduating it in Spokane Washington and about to move from her suite at the Davenport Hotel into the Empress Hotel in Victoria British Columbia for the next two years. After that she began her Grand Tour of Europe for the next twenty years, singing and playing piano and keyboards.
Competing Visions of our future; we can have Kermit leading the Revolution
Or we can have vile tyrants like Jabba perving Princess Leia or Trump perving Virginia Giuffre and all of America
Herein I offer a magic mirror in which our possible futures may be envisioned, a retrospective of the crimes of Traitor Trump from my posts of this year and of the public trauma which we share; no mere figure of madness and idiocy is he, but the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and Nazi revivalism globally which threatens infiltration and subversion of democracy and the capture of the state in America, Hungary, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Austria, nearly the whole of Europe now shadowed by the legacies of our history.
In the years of America’s Last Stand Against Fascism and the Second Trump Regime, a Rashomon Gate Event which has horrifically determined the future of humankind wherein we must either redefine our institutions and ideals of democracy or abandon them and be cast into an Age of Tyranny, we all of us together must present a united front in solidarity against fascist tyranny, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and the Party of Treason.
We must now wage Resistance and War to the Knife, beyond hope of victory or survival, or witness and endure in abjection, despair, learned helplessness, and the complicity of silence the fall of democracy in America and globally, possibly also the fall of civilization in the Age of Tyrants to follow, brutal police states of thought control, propaganda, and repression of dissent in which we have no rights whatever, and centuries of wars of imperial conquest and dominion fought with unimaginable weapons of horror ending with the extinction of humankind.
This future has come upon us already, in the ICE white supremacist terror force and human trafficking syndicate and National Guard armies of Occupation loosed in our cities, and the repression of dissent falsely called terror by the Nazis who have captured the state and now seize and shake us in their jaws. I will not go quietly.
The time has come to tell the truth about life and the world we have made to live in; it is full of blood and death and horror, a vast and amoral machine of power into which we are fed as the raw material of the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and those who would enslave us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and the best we can do is refuse to submit and go down fighting against the darkness, the legacies of our histories and systems of unequal power and oppression bearing unanswerable and totalizing force.
Unless we stand together, and seize our power.
This is how we heal the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity.
My sister commented on a photo of a rose I posted here on Face Book; “Beautiful. That’s the content I’m here for. Literally.”
To this I replied; “This particular flower has been so hard to get a clear shot of. I too find I need Beauty to live, increasingly so as I get older and bear with me the weight of history.”
And thinking of the Trump regime in the context of the loss of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, of the loss of our humanity, I annotated a picture of my apples as follows; The apples love a cold snap before harvest, but only the toughest of roses remain in bloom this far into the night frosts. In years past the whole hill was still full of roses through October, but like so many things only a faded ghost of the season remains. I fear the Beauty is withdrawing from the world, before the dark tide of the Nothing. And I do not wish to live in a world without Beauty; this is why I fight, and why I will dance the Death of Tyranny on No Kings Day.
Let us take our fear and our rage, our anguish and our despair, our horror and our grief before the madness of fascist tyranny and terror now performing the Fall of America, and make something beautiful with it. We cannot defeat our darkness nor its monstrous reflections in our politics and society, but we can embrace it and seize its power for our own in refusal to submit or to abandon our fellow human beings, no matter how different those who would enslave us claim them to be.
Like Jacob wrestling the angel, we Resist not to be victorious over systems of oppression which are vast and unfathomably ancient and powerful, embedded through our whole history and society like a cancer; white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and the amoral plutocrats and grifters who are the apex predators of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. No, friends; we Resist to remain Unconquered, and to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
Let us perform on the stage of history and the world the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and in this context of mass action and protest by Challenge I mean Disbelieve and Disobey. For the great secret of power is that without legitimacy it is hollow and brittle, and cannot survive Disbelief and Disobedience.
And in this kind of revolution, whose purpose is the Restoration of democracy and of the Humanist values on which it is constructed to institutions of government which have been captured and subverted by fascist tyranny, to refuse to submit to Authority is to become Unconquered and free, Living Autonomous Zones, and this is a victory and a power which cannot be taken from us.
So I ask you, on this No Kings Day, to dance with me the Death of Tyranny and be free, with everything Trump’s Fourth Reich regime inflicts on us to subjugate us gathered in and hurled back at them. “If we burn, you burn with us”; thus saith the Mockingjay.
And as the passage underlined by Nelson Mandela in the copy of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar known as the Robbin Island Bible to authorize direct action against the regime and the system of Apartheid so very like the one Trump now sends his ICE white supremacist terror force to realize, Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
Dance in rage, dance in joy, dance it out.
As I wrote in my post of June 5 2021, Remember Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and His Legacy of Dishonor, Treason, and Fascist Tyranny; Our Clown of Terror; his jests did distract us from his subversion of democracy until almost too late. Idiot madman of monstrous perversions that he was, we must give the devil his due; Trump was the greatest foreign agent to ever attack America, and he nearly brought our democracy down into fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror.
Remember the Clown, and his absurd empire of lies and depravities, his subversions of democracy and violations of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, his kleptocracy of looting the public wealth, his Wall of Hate, his syndicate of Epstein sexual terror and human trafficking, his orchestration of white supremacist terror and treason, his use of racists in disrupting the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of violence, arson, vandalism and looting to discredit the mass action for equality and racial justice and provide a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities and the founding of a fascist tyranny, and the pathetic puppet show of Traitor Trump and his master Putin.
Remember him and his era of fascism as the collapse of values which nearly became the Fall of America, for the enemies of democracy never rest, and neither must we.
Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
And remember, you can always discover someone’s secret Republican name whereby they recognize each other; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
We near a Labyrinth of nested puzzle boxes, each a possible future and universe. The choices we make in our election this November will open gates and let angels through, or devils, and deliver us to heavens or hells. We may never know which we have chosen, but this one true thing I can tell you with absolute certainty; America and humankind will never be the same, for in this Defining Moment we will be forever changed. Who do we want to become, we humans? Masters and slaves divided against each other in an Age of Tyrants and wars our species cannot long survive, or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each others universal human rights in solidarity? May we each of us choose wisely.
A History of the Second Trump Regime In Its Crimes
January 5 2025 Let Us Bring A Reckoning For the January 6 Insurrection and the Capture of the State By Traitor Trump, Figurehead of the Global Fourth Reich and Nazi Revivalist Movement, Russian Agent, Rapist In Chief, and White Supremacist Terrorist, and All His Minions
January 23 2025 We Have Our First Hero Of The Resistance To The Second Trump Regime, Now Called The Enshittification, Truth Teller Bishop Mariann Budde
January 30 2025 Anniversary of The Return of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Most Successful Russian Agent to Ever Attack America, Figurehead of the Fourth Reich in the Global Subversion of Democracy, and Now Once Again Our Rapist In Chief, Who Began His 2024 Presidential Campaign on this the Anniversary of His Idol Hitler’s Seizure of Power as Chancellor of Germany
February 6 2025 We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich
February 7 2025 Troll King Elon Musk and the Great American Bank Robbery: the Theft of Our Private Records As Hostage Taking, Information Warfare, and Subversion of Democracy
February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians
February 17 2025 Among the Best and the Worst of Us: Our Presidents as Symbols and Figures of the American Soul, and Our Glorious Mass Actions and Protests In All Fifty Of Our State Capitals On This Day Against the Trump Regime’s Campaign To Destroy Our Democracy
February 23 2025 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump and the Fourth Reich, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization
February 26 2025 A Mirror of Our Darkness and a Gate to Bizarro World, Where All Meanings and Values Are Reversed As Theatre of Cruelty: the Case of CPAC
February 28 2025 On this Day of National General Boycott of Trump Co Conspirators In Fascist Tyranny and Terror and the Subversion of Democracy, Let Us Bring A Reckoning To Those Who Would Enslave Us In Honor Of Mangione the Avenger
March 4 2025 Anniversary of Our Supreme Court Putting Trump, An Insurrectionist, Russian Agent, and Nazi Revivalist Who Conspired In the Murders of Police Officers and Attempted Hanging and Guillotining of Members of Congress, On Our Election Ballots
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
April 10 2025 Attempts to Impose Order By Force and Control Create Their Own Resistance and Inevitably Fail Due to Internal Contradictions: Case of the Unpredictable Tariff Threats and the Collapse of the Stock Market and Global Economy
April 17 2025 Trump Regime Tests Its Power to Violate the Constitution and Abduct and Imprison Without Cause Or Trial Any Random Person and All Of Us: Case of Kilmar Ábrego García
May 19 2025 Beauty and Ugliness, Horror and Wonder, and the Limits of the Human: Case of the Kristi Noem Television Commerical For Homeland Security’s White Supremacist Terror
June 9 2025 We Celebrate the Anniversary of the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets
June 12 2025 Why We Fight: Authorized Versus Chosen And Ambiguous National Identities As a Ground of Struggle, Symbolized By the Mexican Flag In the Battle of Los Angeles
June 18 2025 Red Triangle Day: Anniversary of Trump’s Open Declaration of Nazi Allegiance in Using a Symbol of the Holocaust to Launch His 2020 Re-Election Campaign
July 16 2025 The Epstein Files: A Mirror of Our Monstrosity Under Patriarchy As An Imposed Condition of Struggle, and A Fable of Silencing As Immunity In Service To Power
August 18 2025 Anniversary of Trump’s Use of Gas Chambers Against Migrants, As He Abases Himself and America to Putin and Is Confronted By A United Europe
September 3 2025 Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others
September 5 2025 The Question of Patriotism, Loyalty, Honor, Respect For Service, and the Idea of America As A Band of Brothers: Case of The Arlington Incident
October 1 2025 Trump Stages His Own Ritual Humiliation: His Reprise of Hitler’s 1934 Imposition of the Fuhrer Oath On the Armed Forces Finds No Applause From Its Officers
We celebrate the founding of the Black Panthers on October 15 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in Oakland, California, a visionary organization of revolutionary struggle, resistance to tyranny, and liberation from white supremacist terror and the legacies of slavery.
As we look forward to the great work ahead, the abolition of divisions of exclusionary otherness from our society and the restoration of democracy throughout the world, as the injustices and inequalities of our civilization are exposed, as our government is threatened by the return of Trump’s fascist tyranny of state force and control which has betrayed and subverted our liberty, as we rise up and resist our enslavement and dehumanization and the theft of our universal rights, as we join together to question and challenge authority as is the primary role and responsibility of citizens in a free society of equals, the most important thing we can say to one another now is direct and simple; I stand with you.
In this moment of peril, let us swear ourselves to one another in the cause of our liberty and in mutual aide of our rights and freedoms as citizens and as human beings.
This is the time to forge of ourselves a true Band of Brothers, Sisters, and Others, and all varieties of humanity as yet undreamed, to reach toward an America of allyship united in our diversity and the common needs of our human condition. Of this mission much remains to be discussed and explored, and it will continue to change with time.
Such is the great lesson of the Black Panthers, who maintained a principle of bottom unity, of diversity inclusive of all who challenge and resist those who would enslave us, as brothers and sisters in liberation and revolutionary regardless of gender, color, or class, or the nuances of ideology. As Nelson Mandela once said of his alliance with Cuba and the Soviet Union against Apartheid; “We are not in the position to refuse help from anyone.”
But mine is not the voice that needs to be heard in this context, for I cannot speak from within this realm of lived experience. So instead I recall to all of us the wisdom of our elders in the words of an exemplar of resistance and a champion of the people, the great and visionary Huey Newton, in the proclamation of the Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party as written in October 1966 and published in War Against the Panthers:
“We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine
The Destiny Of Our Black Community.
We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
We Want Full Employment For Our People.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
We Want An End To The Robbery
By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.
We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
We Want Education For Our People That Exposes
The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society.
We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History
And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
We Want An Immediate End To
Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.
We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense.
We Want Freedom For All Black Men
Held In Federal, State, County And City Prisons And Jails.
We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
We Want All Black People When Brought To Trial To Be Tried In
Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black
Communities, As Defined By The Constitution Of The United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.
We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education,
Clothing, Justice And Peace.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
How relevant and filled with creative potential for our future his words remain for us now, anchored to the principles and values of the American Revolution as an ongoing process and experiment in becoming human.
For further reading I recommend Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, by Bloom & Martin, and The Black Panthers Speak, Foner editor.
Stanley Nelson -“Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” film trailer
The Discipline of Showing Up: Allyship as a Daily Practice of Unlearning and Redistribution
We have all been in those spaces, from rallies to meetings to community forums, where the energy is about justice, but our own role feels unclear. We want to help. We feel the urgency. But many of us have also felt that moment of unease, watching a well-meaning white person center themselves in the struggle and unintentionally drain the room of its power.
This is not about guilt. It is about strategy. It is about effectiveness.
For non-BIPOC individuals, “showing up” is not a passive state of agreement. It is a disciplined, daily practice of unlearning supremacy and embodying solidarity. It is about moving from wanting to be the savior to becoming a reliable part of the team.
Step One: Listen to Understand, Not to Respond
Our first instinct, shaped by a culture that tells us we are the heroes of every story, is to speak, fix, and lead. The most radical first step is to actively fight that instinct.
This means:
• Practicing restraint in meetings. Maybe that means not speaking for the first few you attend, to truly listen.
• Reading the full articles and books by Black and Indigenous thinkers, prioritizing authors whose work is rooted in lived experience and movement-building, not just academic analysis.
• Believing people of color when they share experiences of racism, without playing devil’s advocate or pointing to exceptions.
This is the work of unlearning supremacy. It feels passive, but it is not. It is active, disciplined, and necessary.
Step Two: Find Your Role in the Engine Room, Not on the Bridge
We often think usefulness means being the face of the movement. That is ego, not strategy.
The real work happens in the engine room. This is the logistical backbone. It is not glamorous, but it is essential. Ask yourself:
• Can you drive? Offer rides to elders or organizers.
• Do you have a printer? Print and distribute flyers.
• Are you good with kids? Provide childcare during meetings.
• Do you have a stable job? Set up monthly donations to BIPOC-led bail funds or mutual aid groups. This is redistribution, not charity.
• Are you organized? Manage spreadsheets, sign-up sheets, or social media.
This is how we shift from wanting to lead the charge to ensuring the charge is equipped, grounded, and sustained.
Step Three: Wield Your Privilege as a Shield
We carry privilege simply by being white in a racist society. The goal is not to shed it; that is not possible. The goal is to deploy it strategically against the system that gave it to us.
This means:
• Being a buffer at protests by placing your body between BIPOC leaders and police.
• Calling out racism in your own circles: family, workplace, and friend groups. This includes interrupting microaggressions, challenging coded language, and refusing silence when harm is normalized.
• In meetings, if a BIPOC colleague’s point is ignored, amplifying it:
“I think Jamal’s idea is crucial here.” Redirect the credit and the conversation.
This is where our presence is most strategic. Not to speak over, but to shield, support, and redirect.
Step Four: Earn Trust Through Consistent Action
Trust is not earned through symbols or slogans. It is built through consistent, principled action and lost through performative missteps.
We earn it by:
• Showing up consistently, not just when it is trending.
• Taking correction without defensiveness. When we mess up, a simple “Thank you for the correction. I will learn from this” is key. No performative guilt.
• Matching actions to words, even when it is inconvenient.
• When we cause harm, apologizing sincerely, learning, and changing our behavior without expecting a gold star for our growth.
• Practicing unconditional solidarity, especially when tactics challenge our comfort or privilege.
This is how we build trust that can withstand the pressures of struggle.
Step Five: Redistribute Power, Not Just Resources
Ultimately, “showing up” is a conscious act of power redistribution. It is about dismantling the hierarchy within the movement itself.
This means:
• Ceding platforms by recommending BIPOC colleagues, sharing their work, and deferring to their expertise.
• Redirecting resources directly to BIPOC-led efforts without strings or control.
• Using your voice within your own communities to educate and challenge, which is where you have unique access and influence.
• Offering specialized skills, from legal to medical to tech, in service to goals set by BIPOC-led leadership. These contributions must be directed by BIPOC-led strategy, not personal initiative. The goal is to serve, not steer.
It takes more strength to listen than to speak, to follow than to lead, and to serve than to be served.
The Bottom Line
This is a lifelong practice. Messy. Humbling. Necessary.
When we learn to show up in these ways, quietly, consistently, and with discipline, we stop being a liability and begin contributing to collective strength.
And in the process, we do not just help build a more liberated world for others. We begin to free ourselves from the toxic roles this system assigned us, too.
ALL Power to The People.
For a Living Marxism: A Collective Challenge
Comrades, this isn’t a critique from the outside; it’s a challenge from within our own ranks, born from collective frustration and a stubborn hope that we can still get this right. We share the goal of total liberation, but the map we’ve been using the classic, Eurocentric Marxist playbook, is leading us into a trap. It’s a theory that hasn’t kept pace with how capital actually grinds people down, and if we don’t wrestle with that, we’re just reciting dogma while the world burns.
So here is our collective argument, one we’ve had to confront in our organizing: for our movements to have any real shot in this century, we need to rebuild our orthodox Marxism from the ground up. It’s not about adding “diversity” to a class-first analysis. It’s about realizing that power works through race, gender, and colonialism at the same time as it works through class—they are fused. And once we truly get that, we can see that even our goal of “internationalism” is looking through a dirty lens. The real, grittier, more profound goal is what we’ve come to call Intercommunal Mutualism (The Praxis), a vision that our best ancestors, from Indigenous communities to Maroon societies, have been practicing all along.
The Straightjacket of Class-Only Thinking
We all agree capitalism is the enemy. But when we treat class as the only real contradiction, we’re not being tough-minded revolutionaries; we’re being blind tacticians. We’ve learned this from the ground, in the fractures within our own ranks.
The “worker” we talk about in theory is a ghost. In reality, our class is fractured. A white guy on a factory line, a Black single mom facing a slumlord and cops, an Indigenous water protector defending their river from a pipeline, we’re all getting screwed by capital, but the way we’re getting screwed is fundamentally different. W.E.B. Du Bois showed us how a “psychological wage of whiteness” was used to split us, and we can still see that script playing out today [1].
This isn’t a new trick. Cedric J. Robinson forced us to see that capitalism was never a pure economic system; it was born as “racial capitalism,” stitching itself together from the racial hierarchies of the old world [2]. And we see the proof in the Maroon societies throughout the Americas. They weren’t just hiding; they were building a new world in the swamps and mountains, creating social orders based on reciprocity and fierce defense, a living, breathing rejection of the racial capitalist state [3].
Meanwhile, thinkers like Silvia Federici connected the dots, showing how the witch hunts in Europe were a war on women and communal knowledge, all to create a patriarchal system that would pump out new workers for the factories [4]. And from Indigenous scholars like Glen Sean Coulthard, we learn that capitalism is not just an economic system but a relentless attack on a “mode of life” itself, on the very grounded normativity and reciprocal relationships with the land that define Indigenous existence [5].
This isn’t a neat row of separate oppressions. It’s a single, tangled knot. A class-only analysis tries to cut one thread and hopes the whole thing falls apart. It won’t.
Why the Vanguard Feels Like a Ghost
The classic vanguard party model? It feels like trying to use a key from a different lock. It claims to have all the answers, but that very claim dismisses the wisdom that our communities forge in their own fights to survive.
This model creates a top-down structure that just mimics the state we’re trying to replace. Rosa Luxemburg saw this danger early on, warning that hyper-centralism would suffocate the spontaneous, creative power of the masses [6]. And she was right.
What’s the alternative? We look to the ways our people have always organized outside the state. The consensus-based councils of many Indigenous nations. The free federations and mutual credit networks advocated by Mutualists [7]. These aren’t disorganized; they’re differently organized—horizontal, accountable, and rooted in the community. Leadership here isn’t a title; it’s a trust we earn by showing up, much like the cell-based resilience of Maroon societies.
The Problem with “Internationalism”
So, let’s say we fix our analysis. We still hit a wall with “internationalism.” Why? Because it’s a handshake between states. It accepts the nation-state as the default setting for politics.
But the nation-state is a cage built on stolen land and broken treaties. Its borders are tools of control, its citizenship a legal weapon. Huey P. Newton called this decades ago with his theory of “Revolutionary Intercommunalism (The Core Theory).” He argued that U.S. imperialism had become so total that it smashed real national sovereignty, turning the world into a collection of communities under a single empire [8].
This resonates deeply with how Indigenous peoples have always seen the world. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson teaches, Indigenous resistance is a “constellation of co-resistance” that builds power through relationship, not domination [9]. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy didn’t deal in “internationalism” between states, but in relationships between sovereign peoples. Our solidarity must be the same—not state-to-state, but community-to-community, people-to-people, bypassing the prison of borders entirely.
Building the New World Now: Intercommunal Mutualism (The Praxis)
This all leads to a single, practical question: what do we actually do? The framework that makes sense is Intercommunal Mutualism (The Praxis). It means building the world we want, right now, by linking our communities through direct action and mutual support.
Revolutionary Intercommunal Mutualism (The Theory) is the Horizon. It’s the recognition that our primary relationships are with other communities in struggle, everywhere. This is the modern expression of an ancient, Indigenous understanding of the world as a web of reciprocal relationships.
Intersectional Mutual Aid is the Work (Praxis). This is the engine. It’s not charity. It’s the gritty, beautiful work of meeting our own needs together, a principle documented by Peter Kropotkin [10] but lived for millennia in the potlatch, the seed sharing, and the collective care of the commons. It’s the community land trust (a modern commons), the tenant union, and the mutual credit union—practices that build a counter-economy of life, not profit.
We Prefigure by Doing. Every time we practice this, we’re not just surviving—we’re engaged in the active work of decolonization, building the new society in the shell of the old. We are making a free world tangible, not just a promise in a party pamphlet.
The Choice We Face
Walking this path requires a humility that’s hard for any movement, especially one that’s seen itself as the vanguard. It demands that we decenter our certainties and center the leadership and epistemic insights of those who have been living at the sharpest edge of this system for generations.
The choice isn’t to abandon class struggle. It’s to finally make it real by deepening it into a fight against the whole interlocking system, racial capitalism, patriarchy, and the imperial state. Our revolution won’t be found in a dusty textbook. It’s being written in the daily practices of care, defense, and cooperation that our ancestors never forgot. It’s on us to remember, and to join that work.
ALL Power to The People.
References
[1] Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America.
[2] Robinson, C. J. (1983). Black Marxism.
[3] Sayers, D. O. (2014). A Desolate Place for a Defiant People.
[4] Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch.
[5] Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks.
[6] Luxemburg, R. (1904). Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy.
[7] Proudhon, P.-J. (1840). What Is Property?
[8] Newton, H. P. (1972). To Die for the People.
[9] Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done.
[10] Kropotkin, P. (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.
The Discipline of Showing Up: Allyship as a Daily Practice of Unlearning and Redistribution
We have all been in those spaces, from rallies to meetings to community forums, where the energy is about justice, but our own role feels unclear. We want to help. We feel the urgency. But many of us have also felt that moment of unease, watching a well-meaning white person center themselves in the struggle and unintentionally drain the room of its power.
This is not about guilt. It is about strategy. It is about effectiveness.
For non-BIPOC individuals, “showing up” is not a passive state of agreement. It is a disciplined, daily practice of unlearning supremacy and embodying solidarity. It is about moving from wanting to be the savior to becoming a reliable part of the team.
Step One: Listen to Understand, Not to Respond
Our first instinct, shaped by a culture that tells us we are the heroes of every story, is to speak, fix, and lead. The most radical first step is to actively fight that instinct.
This means:
• Practicing restraint in meetings. Maybe that means not speaking for the first few you attend, to truly listen.
• Reading the full articles and books by Black and Indigenous thinkers, prioritizing authors whose work is rooted in lived experience and movement-building, not just academic analysis.
• Believing people of color when they share experiences of racism, without playing devil’s advocate or pointing to exceptions.
This is the work of unlearning supremacy. It feels passive, but it is not. It is active, disciplined, and necessary.
Step Two: Find Your Role in the Engine Room, Not on the Bridge
We often think usefulness means being the face of the movement. That is ego, not strategy.
The real work happens in the engine room. This is the logistical backbone. It is not glamorous, but it is essential. Ask yourself:
• Can you drive? Offer rides to elders or organizers.
• Do you have a printer? Print and distribute flyers.
• Are you good with kids? Provide childcare during meetings.
• Do you have a stable job? Set up monthly donations to BIPOC-led bail funds or mutual aid groups. This is redistribution, not charity.
• Are you organized? Manage spreadsheets, sign-up sheets, or social media.
This is how we shift from wanting to lead the charge to ensuring the charge is equipped, grounded, and sustained.
Step Three: Wield Your Privilege as a Shield
We carry privilege simply by being white in a racist society. The goal is not to shed it; that is not possible. The goal is to deploy it strategically against the system that gave it to us.
This means:
• Being a buffer at protests by placing your body between BIPOC leaders and police.
• Calling out racism in your own circles: family, workplace, and friend groups. This includes interrupting microaggressions, challenging coded language, and refusing silence when harm is normalized.
• In meetings, if a BIPOC colleague’s point is ignored, amplifying it:
“I think Jamal’s idea is crucial here.” Redirect the credit and the conversation.
This is where our presence is most strategic. Not to speak over, but to shield, support, and redirect.
Step Four: Earn Trust Through Consistent Action
Trust is not earned through symbols or slogans. It is built through consistent, principled action and lost through performative missteps.
We earn it by:
• Showing up consistently, not just when it is trending.
• Taking correction without defensiveness. When we mess up, a simple “Thank you for the correction. I will learn from this” is key. No performative guilt.
• Matching actions to words, even when it is inconvenient.
• When we cause harm, apologizing sincerely, learning, and changing our behavior without expecting a gold star for our growth.
• Practicing unconditional solidarity, especially when tactics challenge our comfort or privilege.
This is how we build trust that can withstand the pressures of struggle.
Step Five: Redistribute Power, Not Just Resources
Ultimately, “showing up” is a conscious act of power redistribution. It is about dismantling the hierarchy within the movement itself.
This means:
• Ceding platforms by recommending BIPOC colleagues, sharing their work, and deferring to their expertise.
• Redirecting resources directly to BIPOC-led efforts without strings or control.
• Using your voice within your own communities to educate and challenge, which is where you have unique access and influence.
• Offering specialized skills, from legal to medical to tech, in service to goals set by BIPOC-led leadership. These contributions must be directed by BIPOC-led strategy, not personal initiative. The goal is to serve, not steer.
It takes more strength to listen than to speak, to follow than to lead, and to serve than to be served.
The Bottom Line
This is a lifelong practice. Messy. Humbling. Necessary.
When we learn to show up in these ways, quietly, consistently, and with discipline, we stop being a liability and begin contributing to collective strength.
And in the process, we do not just help build a more liberated world for others. We begin to free ourselves from the toxic roles this system assigned us, too.
ALL Power to The People.
Strategic Divergences in Leftist Movement Building
This framework offers a comparative analysis of the United Panther Party’s (UPP) Survival Pending Revolution strategy alongside other major leftist tendencies, including Marxist-Leninist vanguardism, anarchist/autonomist mutual aid, and social democratic electoralism.
Grounded in the UPP’s foundational document From Survival to Revolution, this chart highlights the philosophical and practical distinctions that shape each approach to power, organization, unity, and revolutionary change. The UPP’s model centers Intercommunal Mutualist Networks and the Five Pillars of Survival as the terrain for building dual power from below—prioritizing life, dignity, and collective infrastructure over ideological uniformity or state capture.
By contrasting these strategies, this framework is designed to support political education, coalition-building, and strategic clarity for organizers navigating the complex landscape of leftist movement work.
Comparative Framework: UPP vs. Other Leftist Tendencies
Dimension:
UPP: Survival Pending Revolution – Build dual power from below; replace oppressive systems through survival work
Marxist-Leninist Vanguardism – Seize state power via revolutionary rupture; centralized party leads
Anarchist/Autonomist Mutual Aid – Abolish hierarchy; build horizontal networks of care and resistance
Social Democratic Electoralism – Reform the state through elections and policy
—
Role of the Masses:
UPP – Center unaffiliated locals; leadership through shared practice
ML Vanguardism – Mobilize masses under party leadership; education flows top-down
Anarchist/Autonomist – Empower individuals and collectives; direct action and autonomy
Social Democracy – Mobilize voters and constituents; policy advocacy
—
Organizational Structure:
UPP – Decentralized cooperating chapters; united by shared code
ML Vanguardism – Centralized, disciplined party; ideological uniformity
Social Democracy – Formal chapters, committees, and campaigns; institutional focus
—
Strategy for Unity:
UPP – Mosaic of strengths; unite through survival work, not ideology
ML Vanguardism – Ideological alignment required; unity through party line
Anarchist/Autonomist – Affinity-based networks; unity through shared values and tactics
Social Democracy – Coalition-building around policy goals; pragmatic alliances
—
Terrain of Struggle:
UPP – Five Pillars: food, housing, health, defense, education
ML Vanguardism – Political agitation, party-building, state confrontation
Anarchist/Autonomist – Mutual aid, community defense, direct action
Social Democracy – Legislative reform, electoral campaigns, public policy
—
Revolutionary Timeline:
UPP – Gradual construction of dual power; revolution is lived
ML Vanguardism – Ruptural moment of state seizure; revolution as event
Anarchist/Autonomist – Ongoing resistance and prefigurative politics
Social Democracy – Long-term reform; revolution often deferred or rejected
From Survival to Revolution: A Plan for Socialist Unity
No One Is Saved Alone: The Case for Intercommunal Socialism
Issued by the United Panther Party (UPP), in solidarity with all forces for liberation
Comrades,
We stand at the edge of crisis. The hunger, the engineered scarcity, the violence of neglect, and the ecological collapse are not distant futures, they are daily reality for millions. In this moment, endless debates about perfect futures are a luxury we cannot afford.
Theoretical purity cannot feed a child. Sectarian division cannot stop an eviction.
One truth binds us all, a truth from which every revolutionary practice must flow:
Survival Pending Revolution.
We cannot speak of liberation to those who are perishing. Our first and most sacred duty is to preserve life, health, and dignity, here and now. This is not retreat from revolution. It is the only practical road toward it: building the new world within the shell of the old.
Intercommunal Mutualist Networks: Unity in Struggle
This is a call to form Intercommunal Mutualist Networks, a united front grounded not in ideological sameness, but in shared, practical survival work. Our power lies in harnessing our differences for the common good.
The Strength of Our Mosaic
Each current of the movement has a role to play:
Mass Organizations (DSA, PSL, and other structured formations): Your strength is scale and institutional capacity. You can mobilize resources, operate community centers, and coordinate city-wide tenants’ unions. You are positioned to provide the backbone for People’s Free Health Clinics and to use electoral shields to defend our mutual aid.
Anarchists & Autonomists (IWW, Anti-fascist networks, local affinity groups): Your strength is rapid response and horizontal mutual aid. You power eviction blockades, organize community defense patrols, and respond first in disasters. Your praxis of “solidarity, not charity” is mutualism in action.
Marxist-Leninists & Vanguard Parties (CPUSA, PSL, FRSO, and others): Your strength is discipline, long-term strategy, and deep political education. You run Liberation Schools, build curricula that explain the crises, and ensure survival work develops revolutionary consciousness.
The Unaffiliated, the Community Organizers, the Everyday People: You are the most vital force. Rooted in neighborhoods, workplaces, and places of worship, you are trusted by your communities. This movement is for you and by you.
The Pillars of Survival Pending Revolution
Together, these networks will build dual power, meeting urgent needs while preparing the ground for liberation. Our pillars are clear:
Material Security: Community kitchens, urban farms, clothing exchanges.
People’s Health: Free clinics, harm reduction, mental health support.
Community Defense: Copwatch patrols, de-escalation training, collective safety.
Liberation Education: Teaching true history, revolutionary theory, and socialist principles in every act of service.
Our Shared Code
We will not always agree. But we will be bound by a shared code:
Serve the people in all we do.
Build collective power, not personal prestige.
Oppose all oppression and exploitation.
Turn survival work into revolutionary power.
Revolution as Daily Practice
Revolution is not a single, spectacular event. It is daily, patient work: feeding, defending, teaching, healing. It begins when we share a meal, defend a neighbor’s home, or heal a wound together.
Survival work is not charity, and not the end. It is the seedbed of dual power—the organized will of the people, able to replace the systems that oppress us.
Lets stop waiting for a distant revolution. Lets build it today, with our own hands, in our own communities, with our own power.
Join us. Contribute your unique strengths. Together we’ll build a front so essential, so rooted in The People, that its survival guarantees the revolution.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE.
United Panther Party
United Panther Party (UPP) Revolution: A Comprehensive Report
The United Panther Party (UPP) represents a revolutionary synthesis of Black radical tradition, dialectical materialist analysis, Black anarchist praxis, and Indigenous resistance. This report examines their ideological framework, strategic implementations, and critical interventions in leftist discourse.
1. Core Ideological Foundations
◘ Intersectional Mutualism
Blending Kropotkin’s evolutionary biology of cooperation with Indigenous gift & Tribal economies and Panther survival programs (Black cooperative economic models), creating living alternatives to state and market systems.
◘ Revolutionary Intercommunalism
Huey Newton’s framework expanded through Indigenous sovereignty movements and global anti-imperialist struggles, rejecting both neoliberal capitalism and state communism.
◘ Black Anarchism
A distinct tradition emerging from maroon societies and urban resistance, differing fundamentally from Eurocentric anarchist movements in its centering of racial colonialism, organized collective resistance, community care and mutual aid.
2. Strategic Frameworks
◘ Dual Power Infrastructure
Building autonomous medical clinics, food distribution networks, and community defense programs that simultaneously meet needs and dismantle reliance on oppressive systems.
◘ Decolonized Technology
The People’s Tech Protocol reimagines technological development through Indigenous data sovereignty principles and Panther commitments to arming the people with knowledge.
◘ Accountable Allyship
Rigorous protocols for non-Black participation that prevent the historical patterns of white radical co-optation and erasure of Black revolutionary leadership.
3. Critical Interventions
◘ Beyond Marxist Limitations
Documenting how traditional communism failed Indigenous nations and Black radicals, from Soviet collectivization to Marxist-Leninist party vanguardism.
◘ The Performance Trap
Analyzing how nonprofit industrial complexes and symbolic activism drain revolutionary potential while maintaining oppressive structures.
◘ Movement Assessment Tools
Practical diagnostics like the “Is Your Movement Trash?” flowchart that test organizational integrity against radical principles.
4. Living Revolution
◘ Mutual Aid in Practice
From urban bail funds to land defense initiatives, demonstrating the material power of collective care outside state and capitalist systems.
◘ Ideological Evolution
Stress-testing political theories against frontline struggles, maintaining theoretical rigor without dogma.
◘ Political Education
The Revolution in PowerPoints series as both continuation and innovation of Panther educational traditions for the digital age.
The UPP articulates a 21st century revolutionary praxis that honors its Panther lineage while innovating beyond traditional leftist paradigms. Their work demonstrates that another world isn’t just possible – it’s already being built in community clinics, land back struggles, and liberated technologies.
References
◘ Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902)
◘ Newton’s Revolutionary Intercommunalism essays
◘ Indigenous resistance literature
◘ Black anarchist theoretical works
◘ UPP’s complete Revolution in PowerPoints series
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Commonwealth of The People?
An ideological position rooted in Marxist-Leninist thought presents a forceful argument for the necessity of a centralized revolutionary authority. This perspective critiques anti-authoritarianism as naive and counterproductive. While this position offers a valid critique of disorganized opposition, examining its conclusions through the framework of Revolutionary Intercommunal Mutualism reveals a more complex and historically grounded path. This lens affirms the need for revolutionary discipline while fundamentally challenging the model of a centralized state as the ultimate goal.
Understanding the Framework: A Synthesis of Theory and Practice
Revolutionary Intercommunal Mutualism is a living practice informed by historical struggles for liberation. It integrates two core components.
First, it draws from Dr. Huey P. Newton’s theory of Revolutionary Intercommunalism. Newton argued that U.S. imperialism had eroded traditional nation states, replacing them with a global system of exploited communities. He termed this system “Reactionary Intercommunalism,” controlled by an empire centered on the American ruling class. The revolutionary response is to break these monopolies and forge a “Revolutionary Intercommunalism,” where liberated communities connect through solidarity, moving toward a stateless world.
Second, it is grounded in mutualist praxis, which finds its roots in long standing traditions of non exploitative economics. This includes Indigenous gift economies, the Black cooperatives movement, and the reciprocal networks of the Underground Railroad and Maroon societies. Mutualism is defined as cooperation where all involved benefit, creating a mode of reciprocity that opposes capitalist extraction. This is operationalized through Survival Programs like free breakfast initiatives and community health clinics. These are not charity but “survival pending revolution,” designed to meet immediate needs while building collective power and political consciousness outside the state apparatus.
The synthesis of these ideas creates a philosophy guided by solidarity over charity, self determination, collective care, decentralization of power, and reciprocity.
Points of Convergence: Agreement on Revolutionary Necessities
From this perspective, the Marxist-Leninist position makes several critical points that align with revolutionary history.
There is agreement on the critique of a formless opposition to power. The Black Panther Party exemplified rigorous discipline and organization. A successful revolutionary movement clearly requires structure, coordination, and a unified political line to challenge a powerful enemy.
Furthermore, the position correctly emphasizes the need for collective force and self defense. The Panthers’ practice of community armed patrols demonstrated the people’s right to defend themselves against state violence. Any revolutionary theory must account for the necessity of organized community defense.
Finally, the focus on the importance of political education is paramount. Breaking through imperialist indoctrination was a core Panther practice. A revolution cannot succeed without a politically conscious populace that understands its own history.
The Fundamental Divergence: Building New Worlds Versus Seizing the Old
This is where Revolutionary Intercommunal Mutualism presents its most significant challenge to the centralized state solution. The Panthers’ strategy evolved toward building power outside of the state, not within it.
The primary divergence lies in the concept of prefigurative power versus state power. While the Marxist-Leninist solution culminates in seizing the existing state, the strategy of Revolutionary Intercommunal Mutualism is to build alternative structures from the ground up. The objective is to make the state irrelevant through the long term practice of building dual power.
This connects directly to Newton’s rejection of nationalism in favor of intercommunalism. He argued for a worldwide coalition of liberated communities. This vision of a decentralized network contradicts the call for a single, centralized policy making and enforcing body.
Ultimately, this leads to a different understanding of revolutionary authority. The Panthers derived their authority from direct service and deep community organization. Their legitimacy was earned through action. This model suggests true revolutionary authority is decentralized and earned through practice. It is an authority of service, not of command. It shifts the question from “Who should wield the state’s power?” to “How can we build people’s power to make the state obsolete?”
An Intercommunal Mutualist Response to Questions of Revolutionary Transition
The questions posed are serious and necessary. An intercommunal mutualist perspective proposes a different strategic approach centered on building popular power.
On the Immediate Elimination of the State:
This question presents a false binary. Our opposition to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is based on its historical failure to wither away. Our strategy is Dual Power, the deliberate project of building a new society within the shell of the old. We seek to render the state obsolete, not to immediately eliminate it.
On Protecting Gains from Reactionaries:
The plan is decentralized, community based self defense. Defense is the responsibility of the entire community, organized into democratically controlled militias accountable to local popular assemblies. This model is more resilient than reliance on a standing army. Defense is also economic; expropriating capitalist property removes their material base of power.
On Serving and Protecting the Most Vulnerable:
Protection is a structure built with marginalized communities, not for them. This is the principle of self determination. The communities most targeted must control their own defense and service programs. Services will be provided through decentralized mutual aid networks organized to be responsive to specific needs.
On Coordinating Infrastructure and Vital Needs:
Large scale coordination does not require top down command. The model is confederalism. Local communities manage their own affairs and then voluntarily federate to coordinate large scale projects. These federations use recallable delegates with strict mandates to implement decisions made at the base level.
On Ensuring Safe Travel and Dismantling White Supremacy:
The goal is to dismantle white supremacist enclaves, not just make travel safe within them. A revolution would dismantle local power structures and replace them with intercommunal assemblies. Safety would be ensured by a continent wide network of BIPOC led community defense organizations. A traveler moves through a linked network of allied communities. Ultimate security comes from the cultural transformation achieved through self organization.
The Revolution is in the Building
In conclusion, the Marxist-Leninist position provides a valid critique of politics that mistake discipline for authoritarianism. It correctly identifies the need for organization and defense.
However, its prescribed solution of centralized revolutionary authority risks regenerating the very systems of domination it seeks to overthrow. Revolutionary Intercommunal Mutualism proposes a different means to the same end. It is focused on building power from the bottom up through community based institutions and international solidarity.
The choice is between a system of domination and a world of liberated communities practicing mutual aid. This is a practical strategy. As the Panthers put it, their programs were “survival pending revolution.” The process of collective survival and building is the revolution itself.
ALL Power to The People.
Intercommunal Mutualist News is a grassroots project advancing anti-colonial, anti-capitalist solidarity.
References
Alkebulan, P. (2007). Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party. University of Alabama Press.
Bloom, J., & Martin, W. E. (2016). Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. University of California Press.
Gordon Nembhard, J. (2014). Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Penn State University Press.
Newton, H. P. (1970). To the Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention. Speech delivered in Philadelphia, PA.
Newton, H. P. (1973). Revolutionary Suicide. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Newton, H. P. (1974). Intercommunalism. Retrieved from BlackPast.org.
United Panther Party. (2021, August 5). Revolutionary Intercommunal Mutualism: A Living Practice of Resistance and Reconstruction [Facebook post]. Facebook.
Williams, E. (2020). The Politics of the Black Panther Party’s Social Programs. Anarchist Library.
Nietzsche who awakens, Nietzsche who challenges, Nietzsche who illuminates and inspires; these are the three Nietzsche’s who have been my companions throughout life, my guides and muses, and whom I offer you as a Song of Orpheus and Ariadne’s Thread whereby to find your way through the labyrinth of life.
As the world rips itself apart at the point of fracture between theocratic tyranny and democracy as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and co-owners of the state in the bifurcated realities of Democratic and Republican America and its mirror Israel and Palestine as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history, and those who would enslave us weaponize fear in service to power and act with amoral brutality in committing crimes against humanity as interpreters of the will of death gods, the illumination of Nietzsche and his songs of liberation become newly relevant.
Protean in his forms, he may take whatever shape is needed in your quest; and will play his roles as befitting at different stages of the journey. There are many Nietzsche’s, who like an endless series of dancing Schrodinger’s Cats offer possibilities which echo and reflect those of his readers as an inkblot test. Who is Nietzsche to me?
Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a space in my life and imagination like no other shaping, motivating, and informing source, because my discovery of him in the year before I began high school was the final break of the Great Chain of Being which bound me to the will of authority and my fellow schoolmates ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty in a theocratic, patriarchal, and racist society aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and set me free to create myself in a universe without imposed meaning or value; then helped me to process a primary trauma which became a Defining Moment as I joined the liberation struggle of a foreign land whose glittering citadels of splendor concealed horrible truths.
Nietzsche it was who helped me to balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
We will need such balance all of us, as we confront our complicity in systems of oppression both in America’s sponsorship of our imperial colony Israel and its seventy years of Occupation of Palestine, and throughout the world and history, for we are all caught in the gears of a machine of elite wealth, power, and privilege, and systems of oppression which are special to nothing, though conflicts often illuminate the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
When I speak of the enforcement of normality as an evil to be resisted, it is with the voice of the old woman burned alive in her home as a witch by a mob which included fellow children I grew up with. To fully understand Nietzsche, you must inhabit the historical space of liberation from systemic tyranny which his anti-authoritarian iconoclasm represents. Much of our world still lives in such darkness, and many of its evils originate in theocratic sources.
There is always someone in a gold robe who claims to speak for the Infinite, and with this false and stolen authority of lies and idolatry transfers the true cost of production of the wealth he appropriates to himself while others do the hard and dirty work. The particulars of such claims are meaningless; only the fact of unequal power and systems of oppression are real.
I grew up in such a world, a premodern world bound to the laws of a cruel and implacable Authority of alien and unknowable motives and those who would enslave us and claim to speak in his name as a tyranny of the Elect, whose hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege rely on our commodification as weaponized disparity and theft of the commons, falsification through lies and illusions, subjugation through learned helplessness and divisions of exclusionary otherness, fear as an instrument of the centralization of power by carceral states of force and control through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and faith weaponized in service to power as theft of the soul.
Such atavisms of barbarism hold dominion still over much of humankind and possess us as legacies of our history, bound by embedded tyrannies of many kinds, a world America was founded to replace as a free society of equals. Ours is a very fragile civilization, defined by its ability to question itself but threatened always by chasms of darkness which surround us and with relentless, pervasive, and systemic enemies in fascist tyranny, patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, the fetishism of death and violence in identitarian nationalism and its police states and imperial militarism, and dehumanization. This we must resist, and I read Thus Spake Zarathustra as a luminous song of resistance.
Among the great loves of my literary life, I first discovered him after reading through all the works of Herman Hesse in seventh grade, in whom I found resonance with the Taoist poetry and Zen riddles which were among my subjects of formal study, then abandoning fiction after the nightmare of Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties and its implied erotic horror, which I had chosen after reading his stunning novel of my favorite game after chess, The Master of Go, and turned thereafter to Plato whom I adored, and read voraciously all his works throughout my eighth grade year. The Trial of Socrates founded our civilization as a self-questioning system of being human together, and in the dialectics of Socratic method offered me tools of self-construal and reinvention which became central to my identity.
My father, who was a theatre director as well as my English, Drama, and Forensics teacher, Debate Team coach, and my Fencing Club coach throughout high school, and who taught me fencing and chess from the age of nine, suggested I might like the discussion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche’s vision of civilization as a struggle between passion and reason, chaos and order, conserving and revolutionary forces, which interlinks with that of Kawabata and of Herman Hesse in The Glass Bead Game to form a unitary vision of a process of becoming human, and informs my reading of literature, politics, and all human activity, to this day.
So it was that during the summer of my fourteenth year before I began high school I discovered with unforgettable joy and recognition a book written by someone who spoke for me, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Wedded in my imagination to the context of my encounter with his work was the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division of under 16, as I had been in the under 14 and remained through high school in the under 20 division. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, and I have been living beyond the walls ever since.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true mission of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol from March 22 to April 18 2022 and at Panjshir in Afghanistan from the last week of August til September 7 2021, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Throughout all of this, Nietzsche’s great song of liberation pulled me into its heart and ignited in me a will and vision to transgress beyond our boundaries into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons.
I thereafter read all his works, though Thus Spake Zarathustra remained a kind of sacred text to me; I used to quote it in refutation to my fellow students who quoted the Bible to me as an instrument of subjugation to authority.
Redolent with the cadences of poetic oratory and a phraseology which echoes that of the beautiful King James Bible, pervasive in my town of Reformed Church stalwarts whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, it was both familiar and utterly strange, an empowering work of liberation proclaiming the death of Authority and the limits of the Forbidden. How I cherished it, this treasure and marvel; by summer’s end I could recite it entirely by memory so many times had I read it.
May we all find such books, which illuminate our imagination and offer to us the Promethean fire.
Read therefore the immortal classics of Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, and Ecce Homo.
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen provides an insightful overview.
Maurice Blanchot’s lifelong engagement with Nietzsche can be illuminating and wonderful; The Step Not Beyond, a reply to Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which references Deleuze, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Infinite Conversation all center on his reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as an Existentialist principle in which the negation of presence is a path of total freedom. In the pivotal 1945 essay On Nietzsche’s Side, Blanchot reimagines Karl Jaspers’ seminal thesis on Nietzsche; thereafter his works interrogate Nietzschean themes including the Will to Power, the nature of time, ecstatic vision and the Dionysian principle, the Death of God as symbol and metaphor of the emptiness of tyranny and the illusion of authority, and the relativity of meaning and value.
A student of the philosopher Henri Bergson, Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis “Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State” interrogates the reimagined doctrine of Original Sin as the innate Depravity of Man, which is the basis of all our law and an apologetics of authoritarian power which both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis made a life mission of overthrowing, a theme which continued to inform Kazantzakis throughout his life and is central to understanding his unique brand of Existentialism. In large part his works explore the implications of the Nietzschean conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as personal and social struggle.
Do read also C.G. Jung’s work Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake. An engagement with Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-gospel and Zarathustra as a figure of Liberation like Milton’s rebel angel, as for both Jung and myself, will lead you as it did me to the works of William Blake and his rebel figure Los; Milton, Nietzsche, and Blake form a line of transmission which unfolds gloriously in Jung’s Red Book.
Last of all I must cite the influence which prefigured and later reinterpreted the meaning of Nietzsche for me, the great storyteller of my childhood William S. Burroughs, whose own ideology was shaped by his friend Georges Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche. Bataille’s On Nietzsche brilliantly interrogates the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us to free ourselves from them, in a fearless reimagination of the will to power as a will to transgress. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, compiles the secret documents of his occult circle, disciples of Nietzsche who attempted to reimagine civilization and whose ritual transgressions echo de Sade and Jean Genet.
The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated. Burroughs derived his Anarchist Trilogy, The Wild Boys, The Cat Inside, and the Revised Boy Scout Manual, from Bataille’s synthesis of Nietzsche, de Sade, and Freud, though its central premise, The Algebra of Need, references Marx.
This is the Burroughs with whom I found connection as a teenager; the anarchist philosopher for whom the Wolfman was a figure of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, whose novel on the subject, The Wild Boys, was written during the period of his visits at our home and possibly influenced by my father’s tales of our family history.
For Burroughs, writing was conjuration; an act of chaos magic and liberation struggle in which the tyranny of authorized identities and orders of human being, meaning, and value can be destabilized as fracture, disruption, and delegitimation, and created anew through poetic vision.
In this mission William S. Burroughs was the successor and reinterpreter of of Bataille and of their shared model Nietzsche, as ritual transgression, the delegitimation of authority and seizures of power as liberation struggle, poetic vision and ecstatic trance as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Burroughs also believed himself to be the literal successor of Nietzsche as the possessed avatar of a chthonic underworld god, a Shadow figure in Jungian terms which represents his animal nature and inchoate desires as a beast with a beast’s soul, unconquerable and free, in reference to the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and that Burroughs’ Welsh nanny had cursed him with as a child. A powerful guardian spirit and otherworld guide to be offered, as was I in reciting together the line with which Burrough’s often ended his bizarre versions of Grimm’s fairytales, a line written by Shakespeare in The Tempest for Prospero, who says of Caliban; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
So the circle of meaning returns to swallow its own tail like an Ouroboros or an infinite Mobius Loop in the embrace of our darkness as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and of the balance we must find for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of total freedom in a universe without imposed meaning, wherein the only being, meaning, and value that exists are those we create for ourselves, even if we must seize them from those who would enslave us.
Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling
Looking Into the Abyss: the Hamas-Israel War of October 2023
Biden’s Speech asking Congress to fund Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing
(General Ursus speech from Beneath The planet of the Apes)
“The only thing that counts in the end is POWER! Naked merciless FORCE!”
15 Oktober 2025 Lieder der Befreiung vom theokratischen Terror: Zur Feier Nietzsches
Nietzsche, der erweckt, Nietzsche, der herausfordert, Nietzsche, der erleuchtet und inspiriert; Dies sind die drei Nietzsches, die mein ganzes Leben lang Begleiter, meine Führer und Musen waren und die ich Ihnen als Lied des Orpheus und Ariadne als Faden anbiete, um Ihren Weg durch das Labyrinth des Lebens zu finden.
Während die Welt an der Schnittstelle zwischen theokratischer Tyrannei und der Demokratie als einer freien Gesellschaft von Gleichen, die sich gegenseitig die universellen Menschenrechte garantieren und Miteigentümer des Staates sind, in den gespaltenen Realitäten Israels und Palästinas auseinanderbricht, während wir darum kämpfen Wenn wir aus den Hinterlassenschaften unserer Geschichte hervorgehen und diejenigen, die uns versklaven wollen, die Angst im Dienste der Macht als Waffe einsetzen und mit amoralischer Brutalität Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit als Interpreten des Willens der Todesgötter begehen, wird die Erleuchtung Nietzsches und seiner Befreiungslieder zu neuem Leben erweckt relevant.
Er ist in seinen Formen vielfältig und kann jede Form annehmen, die Sie für Ihre Suche benötigen. und wird seine Rollen in den verschiedenen Phasen der Reise angemessen spielen. Es gibt viele Nietzsches, die wie eine endlose Reihe tanzender Schrödingers Katzen Möglichkeiten bieten, die als Tintenkleckstest die seiner Leser widerspiegeln. Wer ist Nietzsche für mich?
Friedrich Nietzsche nimmt einen Platz in meinem Leben und meiner Vorstellungskraft ein wie keine andere prägende, motivierende und informierende Quelle, denn meine Entdeckung von ihm im Jahr vor Beginn meiner Schulzeit war der letzte Bremspunkt der Großen Kette des Seins, die mich an den Willen band der Autorität und der Vorstellungen meiner Mitschulkameraden von Tugend, Wahrheit und Schönheit in einer theokratischen, patriarchalischen und rassistischen Gesellschaft, die mit dem Apartheidregime Südafrikas verbündet ist, und mir die Freiheit gab, mich in einem Universum ohne aufgezwungene Bedeutung oder Wert zu erschaffen; Dann half er mir, ein primäres Trauma zu verarbeiten, das zu einem entscheidenden Moment wurde, als ich mich dem Befreiungskampf eines fremden Landes anschloss, dessen glitzernde Zitadellen der Pracht schreckliche Wahrheiten verbargen.
Nietzsche war es, der mir half, den Schrecken unseres Nichts mit der Freude der völligen Freiheit in Einklang zu bringen.
Wir alle werden ein solches Gleichgewicht brauchen, wenn wir uns unserer Komplizenschaft in Unterdrückungssystemen stellen, sowohl bei der Unterstützung unserer imperialen Kolonie Israel durch Amerika und ihrer siebzigjährigen Besatzung Palästinas als auch in der ganzen Welt und in der Geschichte, denn wir sind alle darin gefangen Getriebe einer Maschine aus elitärem Reichtum, Macht und Privilegien und Unterdrückungssystemen, die nichts Besonderes sind, obwohl Konflikte oft die Mängel unserer Menschlichkeit und die Zerbrochenheit der Welt ans Licht bringen.
Wenn ich von der Durchsetzung der Normalität als einem Übel spreche, dem man widerstehen muss, dann mit der Stimme der alten Frau, die in ihrem Haus als Hexe von einer Meute, zu der auch meine Mitkinder gehörten, mit denen ich aufgewachsen war, lebendig verbrannt wurde. Um Nietzsche vollständig zu verstehen, müssen Sie den historischen Raum der Befreiung von der systemischen Tyrannei bewohnen, den sein antiautoritärer Bildersturm darstellt. Ein Großteil unserer Welt lebt immer noch in dieser Dunkelheit, und viele ihrer Übel haben ihren Ursprung in theokratischen Quellen.
Ich bin in einer solchen Welt aufgewachsen, einer vormodernen Welt, die den Gesetzen einer grausamen und unversöhnlichen Autorität aus fremden und unerkennbaren Motiven und denen verpflichtet war, die uns versklaven und behaupten würden, in seinem Namen zu sprechen, als Tyrannei der Auserwählten, deren Hegemonien des Reichtums Macht, Macht und Privilegien beruhen auf unserer Kommerzialisierung als bewaffnete Ungleichheit und Diebstahl von Gemeingütern, auf Fälschung durch Lügen und Illusionen, auf Unterwerfung durch erlernte Hilflosigkeit und Spaltungen ausschließender Andersartigkeit, auf Angst als Instrument der Machtzentralisierung durch kerkerhafte Gewalt- und Kontrollzustände durch Faschismen von Blut, Glauben und Boden und Glauben, der im Dienst der Macht als Diebstahl der Seele bewaffnet wird.
Solche Atavismen der Barbarei beherrschen immer noch einen Großteil der Menschheit und besitzen uns als Vermächtnisse unserer Geschichte, gebunden durch tief verwurzelte Tyranneien verschiedenster Art, einer Welt, die Amerika als freie Gesellschaft von Gleichen ersetzen sollte. Unsere Zivilisation ist sehr zerbrechlich und wird ständig von den Abgründen der Dunkelheit, die uns umgeben, und von unerbittlichen, allgegenwärtigen und systemischen Feinden in der faschistischen Tyrannei, dem patriarchalischen Sexualterror, dem Terror der weißen Rassisten, dem Fetischismus von Tod und Gewalt im identitären Nationalismus und seinen Polizeistaaten bedroht und imperialer Militarismus und Entmenschlichung. Dem müssen wir widerstehen, und ich lese „So sprach Zarathustra“ als ein leuchtendes Lied des Widerstands.
Unter den großen Lieben meines literarischen Lebens entdeckte ich ihn zum ersten Mal, nachdem ich in der siebten Klasse alle Werke von Herman Hesse gelesen hatte, bei dem ich Resonanz mit der taoistischen Poesie und den Zen-Rätseln fand, die zu meinen formalen Studienfächern gehörten, und gab dann die Fiktion auf nach dem Albtraum von Kawabatas „Das Haus der schlafenden Schönheiten“ und dem darin enthaltenen erotischen Horror, für den ich mich entschieden hatte, nachdem ich seinen atemberaubenden Roman über mein Lieblingsspiel nach dem Schach, „Der Meister von Go“, gelesen hatte, und wandte mich danach an Plato, den ich verehrte, und las alles gierig sein w Orks während meines achten Schuljahres. Der Prozess gegen Sokrates begründete unsere Zivilisation als ein sich selbst hinterfragendes System des gemeinsamen Menschseins und bot mir in der Dialektik der sokratischen Methode Werkzeuge zur Selbstkonstruktion und Neuerfindung, die für meine Identität von zentraler Bedeutung wurden.
Mein Vater, der Theaterregisseur sowie mein Englisch-, Theater- und Forensiklehrer, Debate-Team-Trainer und mein Fechtclub-Trainer während der gesamten High School war und der mir ab meinem neunten Lebensjahr Fechten und Schach beibrachte, schlug vor, dass es mir gefallen könnte die Diskussion des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen in Friedrich Nietzsches „Die Geburt der Tragödie“; Nietzsches Vision der Zivilisation als ein Kampf zwischen Leidenschaft und Vernunft, Chaos und Ordnung, bewahrenden und revolutionären Kräften, die sich mit der von Kawabata und Herman Hesse im Glasperlenspiel zu einer einheitlichen Vision eines Prozesses der Menschwerdung verbindet und informiert meine Lektüre von Literatur, Politik und allen menschlichen Aktivitäten bis heute.
So kam es, dass ich im Sommer meines vierzehnten Jahres, bevor ich mit der High School anfing, mit unvergesslicher Freude und Anerkennung ein Buch entdeckte, das von jemandem geschrieben wurde, der für mich sprach: Also sprach Zarathustra. In meiner Vorstellung war mit dem Kontext meiner Begegnung mit seiner Arbeit das große Abenteuer und das zerstörerische Trauma meiner ersten Alleinreise ins Ausland verbunden, nach Brasilien, um mit anderen Fechtern für die Panamerikanischen Spiele zu trainieren.
Lassen Sie mich dies in einen Kontext stellen; Brasilien war mein erstes alleiniges Reiseerlebnis im Ausland. Als ich vierzehn war, flog ich nach Sao Paulo, um mit einer Gruppe von Fechtern für die Panamerikanischen Spiele zu trainieren, die dort stattfinden sollten. Ich war in meiner Altersklasse San Francisco Bay Area-Meister im Säbel und Florett. Ich hatte etwas neu erlerntes Konversations-Portugiesisch, eine Einladung, bei einem Jungen zu übernachten, den ich aus der Zeit bei Fechtturnieren kannte und mit dem ich den lokalen Unfug entdecken konnte, und Visionen von Strandpartys.
So betrat ich eine Welt voller höfischer Manieren und weißbehandschuhter Diener, liebenswürdiger und brillanter Gastgeber, die lokale Koryphäen waren und einen großartigen formellen Ball veranstalteten, um mich und einen Freund vorzustellen, mit dem ich eine verrückte Leidenschaft für Kampfkunst und Sport teilte , aber auch eine Welt voller hoher Mauern und bewaffneter Wachen.
Mein erster Blick über diese Illusion hinaus erfolgte durch die Geräusche des Gewehrfeuers der Wachen; Als ich von meinem Balkon aus schaute, um zu sehen, wer das Eingangstor angriff, stellte ich fest, dass die Wachen auf eine Menge Bettler, hauptsächlich Kinder, schossen, die einen Lastwagen mit den wöchentlichen Lebensmittelvorräten überfallen hatten. An diesem Tag unternahm ich meinen ersten geheimen Ausflug über die Mauern hinaus, und seitdem lebe ich außerhalb der Mauern.
Ich erinnere mich jetzt an diesen entscheidenden Moment, an den Tag, an dem ich über meine Grenzen hinausschaute und die Grenzen des Verbotenen überschritt, um die Grundlage meines eigenen Privilegs zu entdecken und in Frage zu stellen und über Grenzen autorisierter Klassen- und Rassengrenzen hinweg in Solidarität mit denen zu blicken, die das Harte tun und Drecksarbeit für den Rest von uns und Schaffung unseres Reichtums, an den wir die wahren Kosten der Produktion exportiert und als unsere De-facto-Sklaven von ihren Vorteilen ausgeschlossen haben, was meine Vorstellungskraft anregt, ist, dass ich eine Allegorie des Erwachens gelebt habe, die die Geschichte von der Buddha und ist als Prinz im Goldenen Käfig zu einem Weltmythos geworden. Ich hatte keinen Wagenlenker, der meine Fragen beantwortete und aus meinem Zeugentrauma Ordnung und Sinn schaffte; Ich hatte einen ganzen Stamm von ihnen, die Matadore. Zu diesem Teil kommen wir gleich.
Welche Wahrheiten verbergen sich hinter den Mauern unserer Paläste, über die hinauszuschauen es verboten ist? Es ist leicht, den Lügen der Autoritäten zu glauben, wenn man der Elite angehört, in deren Interesse sie angeblich Macht ausüben, und die eigenen Motive und die privilegierte Stellung nicht in Frage zu stellen. Erschreckend leicht zu glaubende Lügen, wenn wir die Nutznießer von Hierarchien ausschließender Andersartigkeit, von Wohlstands- und Machtunterschieden und Ungleichheiten sind, die im Dienste der Macht systematisch hergestellt und als Waffe eingesetzt werden, sowie von Völkermord, Sklaverei, Eroberung und Imperialismus.
Achten Sie immer auf den Mann hinter dem Vorhang. Denn es gibt keine gerechte Autorität, und wie Dorothy im Zauberer von Oz sagt, ist er „nur ein alter Humbug“, und seine Lügen und Illusionen, seine Gewalt und Kontrolle dienen nur seinen eigenen Interessen.
Als naiver amerikanischer Junge hielt ich es für meine Pflicht, den Vorfall zu melden; Aber auf der Polizeistation hatte ich Schwierigkeiten, mich zu verständigen. Sie dachten, ich sei dort, um bei einem monatlich stattfindenden Wettbewerb, bei dem Polizisten die meisten Straßenkinder erlegten, auf meine Wachsamkeit zu wetten; Dafür gab es an der Bahnhofswand eine Tafel und ein Glas mit markierten Ohren. Bei einem weiteren Wettspiel namens „The Big One“ traten Polizisten den schwangersten Mädchen in den Bauch und zählten zu den zehn häufigsten Todesursachen für Mädchen im Teenageralter in Brasilien, die ausnahmslos in Slumgebieten lebten, in denen die ärmsten und meisten Schwarzen lebten Bürger; dies in einer Stadt, die von entflohenen afrikanischen Sklaven als freie Republik gegründet wurde.
In den folgenden Wochen habe ich viel gelernt heiraten; dass ganze zehn Prozent der Brasilianer verlassene und verwaiste Straßenkinder waren, auf die als Lösung Kopfgelder ausgesetzt worden waren, dass ein Viertel der Bevölkerung in Elendsvierteln lebte, dass die Lebenserwartung für 80 % der Menschen bei 35 Jahren lag und dass zuvor 350.000 Kinder gestorben waren jedes Jahr fünf Jahre alt waren und nur 13 % die Grundschule abschlossen, bedeutete, dass fast die Hälfte der Menschen Analphabeten waren.
Und doch war es eine reiche Nation; Der brasilianische Goldboom im 18. Jahrhundert löste die industrielle Revolution Europas aus, und in dieser Zeit allgegenwärtiger und systemischer Armut und Rassismus war Brasilien der weltweit größte Kaffee-, Zucker-, Orangen- und Benzinproduzent, der zweitgrößte Kakaoproduzent und der drittgrößte Holz- und Rindfleischproduzent Hersteller. Aber über die Hälfte des Reichtums befand sich im Besitz von weniger als zwei Prozent der Menschen, wie etwa der Familie, die meine liebenswürdigen Gastgeber waren.
Vor allem habe ich erfahren, wer für diese Ungleichheiten verantwortlich ist; Wir sind es, wenn wir die Produkte eines ungerechten Systems kaufen, als Zeugen der Geschichte zu Ungerechtigkeiten schweigen oder unsere Fürsorgepflicht gegenüber anderen aufgeben, wenn sich das Böse vor uns abspielt, und durch eine Mission des Handelns andere vor Schaden bewahren können. Dies ist die wahre Mission elitärer Hegemonien von Reichtum, Macht und Privilegien; unsere gegenseitige Abhängigkeit und die Solidarität unserer universellen Bruderschaft als Voraussetzung ungleicher Macht zu zerstören.
In den Nächten meiner Abenteuer jenseits der Mauern und bei Aktionen zur Unterstützung der Banden von Kinderbettlern und zur Behinderung der Kopfgeldjagd der Polizei hatte ich eine zweite Nahtoderfahrung, dieses Mal ähnlich, wenn auch nicht so formell wie die Scheinhinrichtung von Maurice Blanchot durch die Nazis 1944 und Fjodor Dostojewskis durch die Geheimpolizei des Zaren im Jahr 1849; Sie flüchteten mit einem verletzten Kind unter anderem vor der Verfolgung durch ein Tunnelgewirr und wurden im Freien von zwei Polizeischützen gefangen, die flankierende Positionen einnahmen und auf uns zielten, während der Anführer hinter der Kurve eines Tunnels zur Kapitulation aufrief. Ich stand vor einem Jungen mit einem verdrehten Bein, der nicht rennen konnte, während die anderen sich zerstreuten und flüchteten oder Verstecke suchten, und der sich weigerte, beiseite zu treten, als er dazu aufgefordert wurde. Dies war mein Ring des Feuers und der erste von mehr letzten Kämpfen, an die ich mich jetzt nicht mehr genau erinnern kann, und ich finde Hoffnung für uns alle in der instinktiven Fürsorgepflicht des kleinen Jungen, der ich einst war und dem es nie in den Sinn kam, wegzulaufen, sich zu ergeben , oder einen Fremden dem Leid auszusetzen, und wie Wagners großer Held entschied sich Siegfried stattdessen für das Feuer.
Mit all den Schrecken, die ich in einem Leben erlebt habe, das ich in den unbekannten Räumen unserer Karten der Menschwerdung gelebt habe, markiert Here Be Dragons, jenseits der Grenzen des Menschlichen und der Grenzen des Verbotenen, durch Kriege und Revolutionen als Unheilstifter für Tyrannen und ein Monster, das andere Monster jagt, um etwas von unserer Menschlichkeit zu retten, obwohl ich dabei oft versage, wie ich es in Mariupol vom 22. März bis 18. April 2022 und in Panjshir in Afghanistan von der letzten Augustwoche bis zum 7. September getan habe Im Jahr 2021 weigert sich etwas in uns, sich der Erniedrigung und erlernten Hilflosigkeit autoritärer Systeme zu unterwerfen, ungeachtet der Zerrüttung der Welt und der Mängel unserer Menschlichkeit, und strebt nach Erhöhung und Freiheit. Ob diese Hoffnung ein Geschenk oder ein Fluch ist, muss jeder von uns in der Art und Weise, wie er sein Leben lebt, herausfinden.
Am Ende kommt es nur darauf an, was wir mit unserer Angst machen und wie wir unsere Kraft nutzen.
Siegfried geht durch das Feuer und wird menschlich. Eine gute Nacherzählung davon gibt es in der Musicalfolge „Once More With Feeling“ von Buffy – Im Bann der Dämonen.
Als die körperlose Stimme meines Henkers aus der Dunkelheit des Fegefeuerlabyrinths, in dem wir gefangen waren, meine Kapitulation anordnete, mit dem Leben eines Fremden auf dem Spiel, fragte ich, wie viel wir gehen lassen sollten, und er befahl seinen Männer zum Feuern. Aber es gab nur einen Schuss statt einer Demonstration von Kreuzfeuer, und zwar ein Fehlschuss; er hatte Zeit zu fragen: „Was?“ bevor es zu Boden fällt.
Und dann zeigten sich unsere Retter, die sich von hinten an die Polizei herangeschlichen hatten; die Matadors, die man als Bürgerwehr, kriminelle Bande, revolutionäre Gruppe oder beides bezeichnen könnte, gegründet von Brasiliens berüchtigtem Bürgerwehrmann und Verbrecher Pedro Rodrigues Filho, der im Vorjahr verhaftet worden war. In dieser furchterregenden Bruderschaft wurde ich willkommen geheißen, und in diesem Sommer war ich nie wieder allein auf den Straßen von Sao Paulo.
Von dem Moment an, als ich sah, wie die Wachen der Adelsfamilie, bei der ich zu Gast war, auf die Menge obdachloser Kinder und Bettler feuerten, die den Lebensmittelversorgungswagen am Tor des Herrenhauses bevölkerten, nackt und ausgehungert, vernarbt und verkrüppelt und missgestaltet von unbekannten Krankheiten an alle Menschen, für die Gesundheitsversorgung und Grundnahrung kostenlose und garantierte Voraussetzungen des universellen Rechts auf Leben sind und die verzweifelt auf eine Handvoll Lebensmittel angewiesen sind, die einen weiteren Tag zum Überleben bedeuten könnten; In diesem Moment habe ich mich für meine Seite entschieden, und mein Volk sind die Machtlosen und Enteigneten, die Zum Schweigen gebrachten und Ausgelöschten.
Wie einer meiner Retter es ausdrückte; “Komm mit uns. Du sind einer von uns. Wir können nicht alle retten, aber wir können uns rächen.“
Möge uns allen die Gabe der Vision unserer gegenseitigen Abhängigkeit und der Universalität unseres Menschseins geschenkt werden, sowie der Wunden, die uns für den Schmerz anderer öffnen.
Während all dem zog mich Nietzsches großartiges Lied der Befreiung in sein Herz und entfachte in mir den Willen und die Vision, über unsere Grenzen hinaus an die unbekannten Orte mit der Aufschrift „Here Be Dragons“ vorzudringen.
Ich habe danach alle seine Werke gelesen, obwohl „So sprach Zarathustra“ für mich eine Art heiliger Text blieb; Ich habe es als Widerlegung gegenüber meinen Kommilitonen zitiert, die mir gegenüber die Bibel als Instrument der Unterwerfung unter Autoritäten zitierten.
Mit dem Klang poetischer Reden und einer Phraseologie, die an die wunderschöne King-James-Bibel erinnert, die in meiner Stadt mit Anhängern der reformierten Kirche allgegenwärtig ist und deren Mund voll von „Du“ und „Du“ war, war es sowohl vertraut als auch völlig seltsam, ein kraftvolles Werk der Befreiung verkündet den Tod der Autorität und die Grenzen des Verbotenen. Wie ich es schätzte, diesen Schatz und dieses Wunder; Am Ende des Sommers konnte ich es vollständig auswendig aufsagen, so oft ich es gelesen hatte.
Mögen wir alle solche Bücher finden, die unsere Fantasie erhellen und uns das prometheische Feuer schenken.
Lesen Sie daher die unsterblichen Klassiker von Friedrich Nietzsche, „Also sprach Zarathustra“, „Die Geburt der Tragödie“, „Die fröhliche Wissenschaft“, „Jenseits von Gut und Böse“, „Über die Geneologie der Moral“, „Der Fall Wagner“, „Der Antichrist“, „Götterdämmerung“ und „Ecce Homo“.
„American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas“ von Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen bietet einen aufschlussreichen Überblick.
Maurice Blanchots lebenslange Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche kann aufschlussreich und wunderbar sein; „The Step Not Beyond“, eine Antwort auf Klossowskis „Nietzsche und der Teufelskreis“, die sich auf Deleuze, „The Writing of the Disaster“ und „The Infinite Conversation“ bezieht, dreht sich allesamt um seine Neuinterpretation von Nietzsches „Ewige Wiederkehr“ als existentialistisches Prinzip, in dem die Negation der Präsenz ein Weg ist der völligen Freiheit. In dem entscheidenden Aufsatz „On Nietzsche’s Side“ von 1945 interpretiert Blanchot Karl Jaspers‘ bahnbrechende These über Nietzsche neu; Danach hinterfragen seine Werke Nietzsches Themen wie den Willen zur Macht, die Natur der Zeit, ekstatische Vision und das dionysische Prinzip, den Tod Gottes als Symbol und Metapher für die Leere der Tyrannei und die Illusion von Autorität sowie die Relativität von Bedeutung und Wert .
Nikos Kazantzakis, ein Schüler des Philosophen Henri Bergson, hinterfragt in seiner Dissertation „Friedrich Nietzsche über die Philosophie des Rechts und des Staates“ die neu interpretierte Lehre von der Erbsünde als der angeborenen Verderbtheit des Menschen, die die Grundlage unseres gesamten Rechts und eine Apologetik davon ist autoritäre Macht, deren Sturz sowohl für Nietzsche als auch für Kazantzakis eine Lebensaufgabe war, ein Thema, das Kazantzakis sein ganzes Leben lang prägte und für das Verständnis seiner einzigartigen Art des Existenzialismus von zentraler Bedeutung ist. In seinen Werken geht es zum großen Teil um die Implikationen des nietzscheanischen Konflikts zwischen dem Apollinischen und dem Dionysischen als persönlichen und sozialen Kampf.
Lesen Sie auch C.G. Jungs Werk Nietzsches Zarathustra, Notizen aus den 86 Seminaren, die er in 11 Semestern an der Universität leitete und die sich mit dem großen epischen Gedicht befassten, das mich packte und wachrüttelte. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Also sprach Zarathustra als Gegenevangelium und Zarathustra als Befreiungsfigur wie Miltons Rebellenengel, sowohl für Jung als auch für mich, wird Sie wie mich zu den Werken von William Blake und seiner Rebellenfigur Los führen; Milton, Nietzsche und Blake bilden eine Übertragungslinie, die sich in Jungs Red Book prächtig entfaltet.
Zu guter Letzt muss ich den Einfluss anführen, der für mich die Bedeutung von Nietzsche vorwegnahm und später neu interpretierte: den großen Geschichtenerzähler meiner Kindheit, William S. Burroughs, dessen eigene Ideologie vom Nietzsche-Kult seines Freundes Georges Bataille geprägt war. Batailles „Über Nietzsche“ hinterfragt auf brillante Weise das Problem des Deus Absconditus, des Gottes, der uns an seine Gesetze band und uns verließ, um uns von ihnen zu befreien, in einer furchtlosen Neuinterpretation des Willens zur Macht als Willen zur Übertretung. „The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology“ stellt die geheimen Dokumente seines okkulten Kreises zusammen, Schüler Nietzsches, die versuchten, die Zivilisation neu zu erfinden und deren rituelle Übertretungen an de Sade und Jean Genet erinnern.
Der Einfluss von Bataille auf William S. Burroughs kann nicht hoch genug eingeschätzt werden. Burroughs leitete seine Anarchisten-Trilogie „The Wild Boys“, „The Cat Inside“ und „The Revised Boy Scout Manual“ aus Batailles Synthese von Nietzsche, de Sade und Freud ab, obwohl sich die zentrale Prämisse, „The Algebra of Need“, auf Marx bezieht.
Das sind die Burroughs, mit denen ich als Teenager eine Verbindung gefunden habe; der anarchistische Philosoph, für den der Wolfsmann eine Figur der Wildheit der Natur und der Wildheit von uns selbst war, dessen Roman zu diesem Thema, The Wild Boys, in der Zeit von geschrieben wurde
seine Besuche bei uns zu Hause und möglicherweise beeinflusst durch die Erzählungen meines Vaters über unsere Familiengeschichte.
Für Burroughs war Schreiben eine Beschwörung; ein Akt der Chaosmagie und des Befreiungskampfs, in dem die Tyrannei autorisierter Identitäten und Ordnungen des menschlichen Seins, der Bedeutung und des Wertes als Bruch, Störung und Delegitimierung destabilisiert und durch poetische Vision neu geschaffen werden kann.
In dieser Mission war William S. Burroughs der Nachfolger und Neuinterpret von Bataille und ihrem gemeinsamen Modell Nietzsche, als rituelle Übertretung, Delegitimierung von Autorität und Machtergreifung als Befreiungskampf, poetische Vision und ekstatische Trance als Neuinterpretation und Transformation unseres unbegrenzte Möglichkeiten, Mensch zu werden.
Burroughs glaubte auch, dass er der buchstäbliche Nachfolger Nietzsches sei, als besessener Avatar eines chthonischen Unterweltgottes, einer Schattenfigur in jungianischen Begriffen, die seine tierische Natur und seine unentwickelten Wünsche als ein Tier mit einer Tierseele, unbesiegbar und frei, darstellt Die Kröte Nietzsche fürchtete, er müsse schlucken und Burroughs‘ Kindermädchen habe ihn als Kind verflucht. Ein mächtiger Schutzgeist und ein jenseitiger Führer, der angeboten werden muss, ebenso wie ich, als ich gemeinsam die Zeile rezitierte, mit der Burrough seine bizarren Versionen von Grimms Märchen oft beendete, eine Zeile, die Shakespeare in „Der Sturm für Prospero“ geschrieben hat und der von Caliban sagt; „Dieses Ding der Dunkelheit erkenne ich als meins an.“
So kehrt der Kreis der Bedeutung zurück, um seinen eigenen Schwanz zu verschlucken wie ein Ouroboros oder eine unendliche Mobius-Schleife in der Umarmung unserer Dunkelheit als der Wildheit der Natur und der Wildheit von uns selbst, von Wahrheiten, die der Natur immanent und in unserem Fleisch geschrieben sind, und von der Wir müssen für den Schrecken unseres Nichts ein Gleichgewicht in der Freude der völligen Freiheit in einem Universum ohne auferlegte Bedeutung finden, in dem das einzige Wesen, die einzige Bedeutung und der Wert, die existieren, diejenigen sind, die wir für uns selbst erschaffen, auch wenn wir sie denen entreißen müssen, die sie haben würde uns versklaven.
In this liminal time of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves, of questioning human being, meaning, and value, and of its praxis as revolutionary struggle during these Mad Hatter Days, I celebrate madness as a force of redemption and liberation in its three primary forms as love, transgression, and vision.
Such I have devised as a festival in three phases, each of one week beginning on the first, second, and third Sundays of October. This is the week of madness as transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden.
With Renfield in Dracula we may say of ourselves; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.” Madness in literature and history has always been a metaphor of resistance and revolutionary struggle against authority and systems of unequal power, as with Lewis Carroll’s magnificent and truly strange allegories and his figure of the Rebel, the Mad Hatter.
Today I perform sacred acts of violation of normalities, reversals of authorized identities, transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden, and changing the rules of the games by which we live. This I do to free myself from the legacies of my history and disrupt my own ideas, expectations, and routines; but we must all do the same as seizures of power from authority and liberation from systemic inequalities on a national and civilizational scale as well. As Max Stirner wrote; Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.
Let us frighten the horses; let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2022, How Does My Happiness Hurt You? On Transgender Day of Visibility; The frightening of the horses; it is a phrase I use often to describe the performance of identity as a form of theatre, and public spectacle as protest and challenge against authority, force, and control. Herein I reference a quote by George Bernard Shaw’s muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress who played Eliza Doolittle, with which she replied in 1910 to someone who thought the display of affection between two male actors was indecent; “”My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
Here is a quote from one of George Bernard Shaw’s letters to her, which celebrates and defines love as freedom, inchoate wildness, transformation, reimagination, liberation, rapture, and exaltation; “I want my dark lady. I want my angel. I want my tempter, I want my Freia with her apples. I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour, laughter, music, love, life and immortality. I want my inspiration, my folly, my happiness, my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my final sanity and sanctification, my transfiguration, my purification, my light across the sea, my palm across the desert, my garden of lovely flowers, my million nameless joys, my day’s wage, my night’s dream, my darling and my star.”
To see and be seen, to hear and be heard; this is what it means to become human, and why interdependence is at the heart of becoming human. When we see and hear others we empower and validate their process of becoming human, and they do the same for us.
Our processes of becoming human operate by three principles; we must each reinvent how to be human, humans create themselves over time, and humans create themselves through others. We choose our friends, partners, and sometimes our families from among those who can help us become who we wish to be, a process which occurs in tension with the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, and the boundaries of the Forbidden, and from this primary struggle to create ourselves emerges human being, meaning, and value.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
And as George Bernard Shaw and his muse Mrs. Patrick Campbell taught us, there is a force of liberation written in our flesh with which we can free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; that of love.
Love is dangerous because it is free, uncontrollable, wild. Love redeems, transforms, and reimagines; love totalizes and transcends. Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioners, because that is exactly what it is.
As I wrote in my post of February 15, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire; Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.
Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.
Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.
Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.
Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle, seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals the embodied truth of others.
Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.
Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.
Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called truth telling and performing the witness of history confer authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and delegitimize tyrants.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.
The four primary duties of a citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
There is no just Authority.
Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.
Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
For a brilliant interrogation of madness as a means of social control and repression of dissent I turn to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which parallels many of the themes of Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization as well as Orwell’s 1984. As I wrote in my post of October 8 2021, The Uses of Madness as Repression of Dissent and Authorization of Normality and a Consensus Model of What is Real and True; Madness as joyous transgression and seizure of power and madness as an instrument of social control, repression of dissent, the authorization of identities, enforcement of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden; Sides of a coin of power bearing Janus-like faces of tyranny and liberty, madness and sanity are a ground of struggle. Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for autonomy and the ownership of ourselves.
Herein I offer a simple test by which to disambiguate madness from sanity; whose truth is this? Who defines, owns, and controls this reality?
For all who own and live their truth are sane, and all who are falsified and subjugated by authority are mad.
Who possesses and controls himself is sane; who is possessed and controlled by others is mad.
Our passions are useful servants and terrible masters. There is nothing wrong with anything you may feel, even negative emotions such as rage or despair; but you must be their master.
As I wrote in my post of June 31 2020, Paradigms of Madness as Thought Control and Class Struggle; “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.” So wrote the visionary George Orwell in the great novel which prophecies the terminus of the arc of history of the American Empire as it has unfolded since the end of World War Two, 1984.
As the final arbiters of what is real and what is not, psychiatrists are the apex predators of our society and its most privileged class; no other persons hold the power to abduct and imprison others by authority of a signature, nor to conduct treatments, research, or experiments which may be considered torture or theft of memory, identity, and the soul such as surgical or electroshock personality interventions, or confinement in isolation and in secret without right of redress.
Media moguls may shape our ideas of self and other and overwhelm the truth with propaganda and lies, politicians may fatten themselves on the miseries of others and spin illusions for the benefit of their paymasters, plutocrats and oligarchs may control their workers well being and quality of life and fund the subversion and corruption of democracy, and our police and security services may hunt and kill us with impunity to enforce the power asymmetries of elite wealth, race, and gender which divide us in the service of tyranny, patriarchy, and white supremacy so long as they have concealment and immunity of judicial and political collaborators, but only the modern priesthood of medical professionals of the mind are answerable to none but their peers and are masters of them all.
With this absolute and secret power pervasive throughout the carceral state in both our prisons and educational systems acting as a success filter and authoring force of identity and repression of dissent, our mental healthcare system reinforces the power asymmetries of the status quo. The differences between our system and those of the Nazi health courts and the psychiatric institutions of the historical Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party today are those not of kind, but of degree. Just compare them to the torture and interrogation program designed by Spokane’s own Mengele for use in Guantanamo Bay and the secret political prisons operated by our intelligence services throughout the world.
Guantanamo is important because it provides a glimpse into our future, a future in which the state can imprison people without charging them with a crime for 18 years, enact crimes against humanity while the torturers go bowling next door after work, a tyranny of force and control and a fascism of blood, faith, and soil. Here dwell monsters, and they are not behind bars.
As reported in the Spokesman Review by Thomas Clouse; “Two Spokane psychologists who devised the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that a federal judge later said constituted torture,” “James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen” whose “company was paid about $81 million by the CIA for providing and sometimes carrying out the interrogation techniques, which included waterboarding, during the early days of the post 9/11 war on terror.”
“Both Mitchell and Jessen were deposed but were never forced to testify as part of a civil suit filed in 2015 in Spokane by the ACLU on behalf of three former CIA prisoners, Gul Rahman, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud.
According to court records, Rahman was interrogated in a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison in isolation, subjected to darkness and extreme cold water, and eventually died of hypothermia. The other two men are now free.
The U.S. government settled that civil suit in August 2017 just weeks before it was scheduled for trial in Spokane before U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush.
That suit was based on a 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that found ample evidence that Mitchell and Jessen provided the CIA with torture methods, including prolonged sleep deprivation, confinement in small, enclosed spaces and waterboarding that were used on dozens of detainees yet produced no useful intelligence.”
“Mitchell no longer lives in the Spokane area, but Jessen is believed to still reside in the area. They got their start at Fairchild Air Force base as survival trainers who formed a company to help train military personnel to resist interrogations. They reverse-engineered their training and devised a program drawn from 1960s experiments involving dogs and the theory of “learned helplessness.”
Sometimes it is not the prisoner, but the state which is mad.
As I wrote in my post of March 8 2022, International Women’s Day: Interrogating the Idea of Woman and Identities of Sex and Gender As Performance Art and Revolutionary Struggle; What is a woman or a man, and how are such identities constructed?
On this International Woman’s Day, I am wondering how we define such a thing, and how our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty shape our range of choices in the performance of ourselves.
I am thinking of these things in the context of a conversation in which a friend described the primary trauma of realizing they were imprisoned in a body whose sex did not match their gender, and in this vulnerable space was multiply attacked on grounds of falsely identifying as female in order to appropriate female spaces of performance.
It seems to me that trans exclusion reinforces and originates in a narrow definition of gender restricted to biology, and one which privileges signs and forms over hormones and inner experience; this ignores social construction of identity entirely, and also perpetuates systemic inequalities and authorized identities of sex and gender.
Gender is always fluid, relational, ambiguous, and a ground of struggle. It is also, like sexual orientation, distinct from biological sex and not a spectrum with endpoint limits but an infinite Moebius Strip where we are born and exist everywhere at once as polymorphosly perverse, to use Freud’s delicious phrase; except where identity is chosen as seizure of power or imposed by other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
To be an outcast is a terrible thing; but to be forced to create your own forms because you fit in no one else’s bottles can be a wonderful thing as well, though never an easy one.
Sartre described this with the phrase; ”We are condemned to be free,” in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is A Humanism, and what this means is that in a universe empty of all meaning and value other than that which we ourselves create, we must balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of our total freedom.
In such a universe, free of imposed meaning and of purpose, all rules are arbitrary and can be changed, rules which are legacies of our histories and the fictional laws of false and unjust authorities, wherein all normalities are negotiable, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human may be pursued as our uniqueness through the reimagination and transformation of poetic vision and metaphorical truths.
Life is a performance art, and we all have one problem in common; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
This process of becoming human or individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence.
Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
Our identities, including those of sex and gender, are literally masks; social constructs and artifacts of our process of adaptation and becoming human. Herein the primary shaping, informing, and motivating source is the interface between authority and autonomy as an unknown and unclaimed potential, a blank space of limitless possibilities of the reimagination of humankind, like the places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities of sex and gender is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
This need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Amy M. Vaughn on the Surrealist site Babou691; “I love genderfuck. I love watching the disruption of enculturated norms, which is what genderfuck does to traditional notions of the male/female, masculine/feminine dichotomy.
While genderfuckery has had a place in both gay culture and, to a lesser extent, punk rock since the ’70s, it remained mostly underground until drag hit mainstream media. I am, of course, referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR).
These days drags serves as an umbrella term for the work of several different types of performance artists. The most well-known of these are drag queens, who perform as women, and drag kings, who perform as men. Sometimes this traditional type of drag is campy, sometimes it’s realistic, but it’s always based on the idea of the gender binary—fucking with the binary, but still within it. Genderfuck rejects the binary, often aggressively, sometimes playfully, always purposefully.
I believe there may be something to gain from looking at these performative manipulations of gender though the ideas of the Surrealists of the early 20th century. The Surrealists saw themselves as a revolutionary cultural movement. Their goal was to free people from false and restrictive conceptions of reality. In other words, they wanted to disrupt enculturated norms. And their method was the juxtaposition of disparate entities with the intention of creating a surprising or startling effect.
I don’t think it’s too far a leap to say performative genderbending fits this approach. Whether we’re talking about overlaying feminine characteristics on a masculine form or vice versa, or combining the genders together in incongruous ways, done well, the effect is literally stunning.”
“And RPDR has provided a platform for genderfuck, but because the goal of the competition is to find the “next drag superstar”—a person who can represent RuPaul’s polished, feminine brand to the world— genderfuck queens rarely excel. “May the best woman win,” has been one of the show’s catchphrases, repeated every episode until the current season. Now RuPaul says, “May the best drag queen win.” We could speculate that this change is due to the casting of the first ever trans contestant, though the point remains the same—RPDR is a safe space for gay males to express themselves through female impersonation.
Which is drag but not genderfuck.
However, something even more subversive has entered through the door that RPDR opened: The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, an “alternative drag competition” based on the principles of horror, filth, and glamour. And the Boulets’ stage is far more welcoming of genderfuck.
While drag has traditionally been dominated by gay men performing as women, genderfuck is not gender specific or sexual-orientation specific. Disasterina, on season two of Dragula, described himself as hetero-fluid and is married to a woman, while season three featured two AFAB contestants: Landon Cider, a lesbian drag king, and Hollow Eve, who identifies as nonbinary.
At this point, spelling out all of these distinctions seems more than a little cumbersome and like a whole lot of nunya bizness, as if these descriptions have no place in the discussion of genderfuck because genderfuck is beyond them. In fact, jabs at traditional drag culture are not rare on Dragula, as can be seen in Evah Destruction’s disposable razor bikini on her hirsute body, a look which would not have a place in RPDR.
The Surrealists believed that art could bring about revolutionary social change through the process of the Hegelian dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If we examine the recent history of drag and genderfuck through this lens, while vastly simplified, it might look something like this: the thesis that there are two heteronormative genders was met with the antithesis of an artform superimposing one gender over another to provoke the surreal effect of juxtaposing opposites in order to startled people out of ingrained cultural constructs. The synthesis has been greater acceptance of gay male culture and freedom of expression. Worthy goals, no question.
The dialectic for genderfuck, which I see as following traditional drag to further the same and expanded goals, would also start with the thesis that there are two genders but it would add three sexual identities (gay, straight, and bi). The antithesis is the performance of multiple expressions of gender and sexuality, provoking the surreal effect, and leading to the synthesis of radical freedom of expression and an existence untethered to preconceived cultural definitions—gay, straight, or otherwise.”
“Real progress has been made through queer art in providing a surrealist antithesis to the idea of a gender dichotomy, and the result has been to guide mainstream culture toward not just tolerance or acceptance but celebration of gender differences.”
All the best people are
The Mad Hatter’s Revolution; a montage in two parts
Rewrite the Stars; song by Zendaya and Zac Efron, with montage of Alice and the Mad Hatter
Mad Hatter – A Case Study in Borderline Personality Disorder
History as authorized identity has always been key to the idea of nation and the power of the state. Today we celebrate a unique holiday, a contested ideological ground of revolutionary struggle against divisions of exclusionary otherness which are designed to create a disparity of wealth and power by those who would enslave us, a holiday which forces decision and sets each of us in an arena of competing and mutually exclusive narratives of American identity.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, racism and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are embedded in our triumphalist narratives of the European Conquest of the Americas celebrated as a national holiday as Columbus Day. The same events are mourned as a national shame and origin of historical legacies of genocide and the theft of a continent as Indigenous People’s Day. We live now in both nations simultaneously, our two souls riven asunder by history and locked in a titanic struggle across generations and centuries as epigenetic trauma.
What I find most interesting about the dual visions of national identity valorized by these competing narratives is that both were founded as antiracist holidays versus specific intrusive threats to national identity; Columbus Day to stop anti Italian and anti-immigration hysteria, first in reply to our nation’s most massive lynching and nationalized by Roosevelt in 1934 versus fascist subversion, Indigenous People’s Day as an anti-colonialist counterbalance to valorizing narratives of the European Conquest and white supremacy. What happened in the meanwhile between these two anti-racist holidays was first that Italians were reimagined as white in a process of assimilation common to European immigrants notably including the Irish and Polish, and here I mean the word as it is used in the Star Trek mythos by the Borg “You will be assimilated; you will service us”, and the eclipse of the ideas of Manifest Destiny, the legitimation of colonialism on the basis of civilizing savages with all of the white supremacist ideology this authorizes, and of Orientalism applied to our indigenous peoples. In this case the unfolding of history has been one of liberation struggle and movement toward diversity and inclusion.
We dwell in two realms which are discontiguous, defined by power asymmetries and the echoes of tragedies and atavisms of instinct which we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
Monet once said, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world. One looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.” He meant this literally, as metaphysics, and his art was an attempt to demonstrate the processes by which consciousness creates reality, but his primary insight applies equally to the narrative function of identity.
The great struggle for ownership of ourselves between autonomous individuals and the ideas of other people as authorized identities imposed by state force and control is driven by three principles; each of us must reinvent how to be human, humans create themselves over time, and humans create themselves through other humans.
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to other people. The question we must ask of any such story is simple; whose story is this?
As written for National Geographic; By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY; “Today is a federal holiday in the U.S., but what are we celebrating?
The first national Indigenous Peoples’ Day honors “America’s first inhabitants and the Tribal Nations that continue to thrive today,” President Joe Biden said, highlighting the resilience of native people and recommitting to honor the government’s treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.
Biden also issued a Columbus Day proclamation acknowledging the contributions of Italian Americans as well as “the painful history of wrongs and atrocities” that resulted from European exploration.”
The dissonance in the two proclamations is hard to fathom. In recent years there’s been a pivot away from recognizing Columbus Day and toward Indigenous Peoples’ Day (pictured above, an early celebration in 1992 in Berkeley, California). In the move, the origins of Columbus Day at times have been lost. Erin Blakemore writes about how the day came to be:
“In 1890 anti-Italian sentiment boiled over in New Orleans after police chief David Hennessy, reputed for his arrests of Italian Americans, was murdered. In the aftermath, more than a hundred Sicilian Americans were arrested. When nine were tried and acquitted in March 1891, a furious mob rioted and broke into the city prison, where they beat, shot, and hanged at least 11 Italian American prisoners.
None of the rioters who lynched the Italian Americans were prosecuted. It remains one of the largest mass lynchings in the nation’s history,” Blakemore writes.
This soured U.S. diplomatic relations with Italy. In an attempt to appease Italy and acknowledge the contributions of Italian Americans on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival, President Benjamin Harrison in 1892 proclaimed a nationwide celebration of “Discovery Day,” recognizing Columbus as “the pioneer of progress and enlightenment.” Eventually, the nations mended their relationship and the U.S. paid $25,000 in reparations. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated it a national holiday.
For many, especially Indigenous people, the Columbus Day holiday is offensive—a celebration of invasion, theft, brutality, and colonization. The arrival celebrated by some as a day of triumphant discovery was the beginning of an incursion onto their homeland.
Columbus and his crew enabled and perpetrated the kidnapping, enslavement, forced assimilation, rape, and sexual abuse of Native people, including children. The Native American population shrank by about half after European contact.
Today, 21 states and many cities celebrate Columbus Day. Others, including Columbus, Ohio—the largest city named for the explorer—have shifted to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It is now a paid state holiday in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon (which celebrates both Columbus Day and Native American Day), South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
“We must never forget the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country,” Biden said in his proclamation. “
As written by Howard Zinnin Jacobin magazine, in an article entitled The Real Christopher Columbus: There was no heroic adventure, only bloodshed. Columbus Day should not be a celebration. Republished from A People’s History of the United States.”; “Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They would make fine servants . . . with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic — the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.
Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.
There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over newfound lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant’s clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.
Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia — the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds.
These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean Sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.
So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.
This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.
Columbus’s report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He insisted he had reached Asia (it was Cuba) and an island off the coast of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were part fact, part fiction:
Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and beautiful . . . There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals . . .
The Indians, Columbus reported, “are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone. . .” He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage “as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask.”
Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. From his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend.
In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up 1,500 Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the 500 best specimens to load onto ships. Of those 500, 200 died en route.
Too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed. When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps 50,000 Indians left. By 1550, there were 500. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.
The chief source — and, on many matters the only source — of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed Columbus’s journal and, in his fifties, began a multi-volume History of the Indies.
In book two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. After a while, Spaniards refused to walk any distance. They “rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry” or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. “In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings.”
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” The Indians’ attempts to defend themselves failed. So, Las Casas reports, “they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help.” He describes their work in the mines:
. . . mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times; they dig, split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks them.
After each six or eight months’ work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides . . . they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them . . . Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation. . . .in this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk. . .and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile . . . was depopulated,
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it. . .”
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. They used the same tactics, and for the same reasons — the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call “the primitive accumulation of capital.” These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
How certain are we that what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew, who watched Cortes and Pizarro ride through their countryside? What did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutality visited on the Indians of the Americas? As Hans Koning sums it up in his book Columbus: His Enterprise:
For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.
Thus began the history of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure — there is no bloodshed — and Columbus Day is a celebration.”
As I wrote in my post of November 6 2023, Native American Heritage Month: A Reading List; Freud defined civilization when he wrote; “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” The idea of civilization as the degree to which we have abandoned the social use of force and a measure of a society’s equality, diversity, and inclusion, expressed by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek as “infinite diversity in infinite combination”, is central to the American experiment toward creating a true free society of equals as democracy.
The consequences of failure to act as each other’s guarantors of our universal human rights can be seen now in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the terror and tyranny of Israeli imperial dominion and Occupation of her neighbors, an echo and reflection of the European Conquest of the Americas along with many other conflicts of faith and ethnicity weaponized in service to power throughout history and the world, wherein colonial powers conquer, enslave, and erase in genocidal terror indigenous peoples, and the heroic Resistance of all those who refuse to be subjugated, assimilated, commodified, falsified, and ultimately become nothing, silenced and erased like the lost languages of stolen histories.
Both on national and personal levels we ourselves may be measured by our embrace of otherness and our solidarity in resistance to authority and the weaponization of fear in service to power, to divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
So also are we forged by how we bring a reckoning for the historical legacies and epigenetic multigenerational trauma and harm of inequalities and injustices which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail, especially those of colonialism and imperialism, racism and patriarchy, and the systems and structures of oppression which still persist.
But we are also shaped by our seizures of power and the limits of our vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization; how to be human together and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Behold the Man; Columbus, a reading list
The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, Matthew Restall
500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians, Josephy
The Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, American West, Dee Brown
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer
Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, Peter Nabokov (editor)
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King
Native American Mythology, Hartley Burr Alexander
Pocahontas, Paula Gunn Allen
This Land is Their Land, David J. Silverman
The Cherokee Nation; a history, Robert J. Conley
One Vast Winter Count, The Indian World of George Washington, Colin Calloway
Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides
Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynne
The Comanche Empire, Lakota America: a new history of indigenous power, Pekka Hamalainen
The Killing of Crazy Horse, Thomas Powers
Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men, Leonard Crow Dog
Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, Richard Erdoes
The Apache Wars, Paul Andrew Hutton
The Serpent’s Tongue: Prose, Poetry, and Art of the New Mexico Pueblos, Nancy Wood
The Trickster: A Study In American Indian Mythology, Paul Radin, Karl Kerényi, C.G. Jung
Native American Literature
Secrets from the Center of the World, How We Become Human: poems 1975-2002, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: poems, Soul Talk Song Language: conversations, Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo
Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means
Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog
Black Elk Speaks
The Man Made of Words: essays, stories, passages, N. Scott Momaday
Night Flying Woman, Ignatia Broker
Fool’s Crow, James Welch
Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Louise Erditch
Our Stories Remember: history, culture, & values through storytelling, Joseph Bruchac
Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Storyteller, Turquoise Ledger, Leslie Silko
Blue Highways, William Least-Heat Moon
Firesticks, Primer of the Obsolete, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha, Uprising of Goats, Designs of the Night Sky, The Mask Maker, Stories of the Driven World, American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, The Dance Partner, The Dream of a Broken Field, Diane Glancy
The Journey of Crazy Horse, John Marshall III
Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Blasphemy: new and selected stories, Sherman Alexie
Two Old Women, Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun, Velma Wallis
The Voice of Rolling Thunder, Sidian Morning Star Jones
Spirit and Reason: the Vine Deloria, Jr Reader
Aurum, Santee Frazier
Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2023, History, Identity, Power: On Native American Heritage Day, Falsification, and the Echoes of the Conquest In Our Lives; The Gordian Knot of history, memory, and identity as a function of narrative has always been a ground of struggle between autonomy and authority, between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, in which power silences and erases the voices of those it wishes to enslave and uses sophisticated techniques of disinformation and propaganda to falsify the identities of those it claims to represent as well as those it disavows.
The torturer and his prisoner are both victims of authority, and the instruments of unequal power and divisions of exclusionary otherness with which it sets them against each other in subjugation to an elite hegemony and dominion.
It only gets worse from there; unless it begins to get better.
Our story, of America and of humankind, is a lamentation, a howl of loneliness and despair, of unutterable pain, disconnectedness, horror; but also of survival of those horrors, and the roar of defiance against fathoms of darkness and unanswerable force, of the triumph of the unconquerable will to become.
Who resists becomes Unconquered and free.
This is the forge of the spirit, this place beyond fear of death or hope of victory, and those who live here are transformed and liberated by our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves as autonomous and self-created individuals.
Each of us who refuses to submit to authority and its laws which serve power becomes a living Autonomous Zone.
And this is why we will make a better future than we have the past; because tyrannies of force and control have no power over us unless we consent to give it to them. Each of us who in resistance is beyond compulsion opens the door to limitless unknowns and possibilities of becoming human, and this no authoritarian regime can survive. For authority must colonize, assimilate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us, and if it cannot it has failed.
This is the great secret of power; its emptiness. Power requires complicity, for it is stolen from those it subjugates and enslaves.
As to Native American Heritage Day, let us reclaim our stories and our ownership of identity. Thanksgiving is one notable example of lies and illusions designed to serve state power and create a national identity of imperialism; as written in Time by Olivia Waxman, “early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son”.
Such stories are numberless as the stars in the heavens; time to reclaim the truth behind the illusions, and free ourselves from the grip of authorized histories and identities.
I have often written that we in the sacred pursuit of truth, including those truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature in the discovery and creation of our uniqueness and of truths made for us by others against which we emerge in struggle, often against vast historical and systemic forces and inequalities, confer twin responsibilities and rights upon us all which are both seizures of power and duties of care for others as guarantors of each others universal human rights and our inherent freedom to create ourselves and how we choose to be human together as we ourselves decide to construct human being, meaning, and value; remembrance and reckoning.
For only this offers escape from the Wilderness of Mirrors; lies and illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, falsification, dehumanization, and theft of the soul whereby those who would enslave us enact our subjugation.
So for the legacies of our history from which we must emerge; the truths we must keep and those we must escape in liberation struggle, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As written by Kisha James, The Lilly, in Popular Resistance, in an article entitled My Grandfather Founded the National Day of Mourning; “ I’m Carrying On His Legacy.
Every Year, I March To Tell The True History Of The European Conquest Of The United States.
On Thursday, millions of families across the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving without giving much thought to the truth behind the heavily mythologized and sanitized story taught in schools and promulgated by institutions. According to this myth, 400 years ago, the Pilgrims were warmly welcomed by the “Indians,” and the two groups came together in friendship to break bread. The “Indians” taught the Pilgrims how to live in the “New World,” setting the stage for the eventual establishment of a great land of liberty and opportunity.
In the usual narrative, no further mention is made of the Native people, as if they all faded away. By sanitizing the English invasion of Wampanoag homelands, the Thanksgiving myth blatantly disregards the true history of the Pilgrims’ arrival in America and the centuries of violence and oppression that Indigenous peoples have endured as a result of the colonization of the Americas.
I know the Thanksgiving myth well. For my entire life — 22 years — I have gathered annually with hundreds of other Native Americans and supporters in Plymouth, Mass., on the fourth Thursday in November. We gather and march to challenge this myth, to tell the true history of the European conquest of the United States, to speak about the devastating and continuous impacts of colonization on Indigenous peoples. We gather to declare Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning for Native Americans.
The protest was founded in 1970 by my grandfather, Wamsutta Frank James, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah).
His story of the founding of the National Day of Mourning goes like this: In 1970, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited my grandfather to give a speech at a banquet celebrating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. However, when state officials saw an advance copy of his speech, they refused to allow him to give it, labeling it as too “inflammatory.” My grandfather had revealed in his speech the truth about the Pilgrims and their treatment of the Wampanoag, the often-unnamed “Indians” in the Thanksgiving myth.
He described how the English even before 1620 had brought diseases that caused a “Great Dying” — nearly decimating our people — and how they took Wampanoag people captive, selling them as slaves in Europe.
The meal Thanksgiving dinner is modeled after is misremembered, too. Although there may have been a meal provided largely by the Wampanoag in 1621, it was not a “thanksgiving”; and the Wampanoag people certainly weren’t invited. Rather, the first official “thanksgiving” has its origins in 1637, when White settlers massacred hundreds of Pequot men, women and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut.
Within 50-odd years of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, the Wampanoag and many other tribes had been nearly wiped out because of warfare and disease, and had been dispossessed of most of their ancestral lands. Those who resisted were killed and their families enslaved.
State officials offered to rewrite my grandfather’s speech to ensure that it presented a more sanitized version of history, but he refused to have words put into his mouth and was disinvited from the banquet. His suppressed speech was printed in newspapers across the country.
But that wasn’t enough: My grandfather and other organizers decided that something had to be done in Plymouth to ensure that the truth about the Pilgrims would be loud and clear.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1970, Wamsutta Frank James, along with other Native activists and allies, gathered on a hill above Plymouth Rock to speak about the true history of Thanksgiving, the violent history of the European settlement of the United States, the lasting impacts of colonization, and the social and political issues faced by Indigenous peoples.
They declared it a National Day of Mourning for the millions of Indigenous peoples killed as a result of European colonization. United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the organization that my grandfather founded and led for decades, has continued for more than 50 years to organize National Day of Mourning and challenge the mainstream Thanksgiving narrative, as well as highlight the modern-day struggles faced by Indigenous peoples.
My grandfather was heroic, and I am proud to be his granddaughter and help lead UAINE as we continue our work. But I also have noticed over the years, and especially while going through old newspaper clippings, that for decades the media often focused solely on the men as spokespeople and organizers of National Day of Mourning.
Women from the Boston Indian Council and other organizations played a key organizing role from 1970 on. My grandmother Priscilla helped write my grandfather’s 1970 speech. A Native activist, Judy Mendes, was attacked by police dogs in 1972 for wearing an upside-down American flag.
My mother, Mahtowin Munro, has been a major contributor to the National Day of Mourning and a tireless advocate for Indigenous rights. She and my late father, Moonanum James, became the co-leaders of UAINE in 1994. My twin brother and I learned from a young age how to patiently explain to non-Native peers and adults why we did not celebrate the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. We are not against giving thanks or family gatherings, I’d tell my classmates; in fact, we are taught to give thanks every day. But we will not give thanks for the invasion of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, nor for the ongoing colonialism and genocide that our communities continue to face.
Now, I am the co-organizer of the National Day of Mourning along with my mother. I feel a great sense of pride in my family’s role in the Indigenous rights movement and in sharing the truth about Thanksgiving, and I look forward to continuing to raise awareness about contemporary front-line Indigenous issues such as climate justice, the preservation and expansion of tribal sovereignty, and the ongoing demand for the return of our ancestral lands.
In recent years, my mother and I have worked to ensure that women’s voices, as well as those of Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people, are amplified at the National Day of Mourning. When I look at the Line 3 struggle or at the Indigenous people who were on the streets in Glasgow demanding climate justice, I see Indigenous people of all ages, and especially women and Two-Spirit leaders, as part of a continuum of resistance leading into the future.
Women have long been at the center of Indigenous activism, and are respected and revered within many traditional Indigenous cultures as leaders and culture-bearers — even if they were silenced by settlers. That’s why it’s crucial for our voices to be amplified within modern-day movements, especially because settler-colonial violence continues to disproportionately impact women, as evidenced by the ongoing epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in the United States and Canada.
On this National Day of Mourning, I am honored to walk not only in the footsteps of my grandfather, but also in the footsteps of all the Indigenous women who have led the way for my generation.
We will not stop telling the truth about the Thanksgiving story and what happened to our ancestors.”
Here is the speech that turned the tide of history for lies in the service of white power to truth which offers equality, diversity, inclusion, remembrance and possibly hope for a Reckoning:
“THE SUPPRESSED SPEECH OF WAMSUTTA (FRANK B.) JAMES, WAMPANOAG
To have been delivered at Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1970
ABOUT THE DOCUMENT: Three hundred fifty years after the Pilgrims began their invasion of the land of the Wampanoag, their “American” descendants planned an anniversary celebration. Still clinging to the white schoolbook myth of friendly relations between their forefathers and the Wampanoag, the anniversary planners thought it would be nice to have an Indian make an appreciative and complimentary speech at their state dinner. Frank James was asked to speak at the celebration. He accepted. The planners, however, asked to see his speech in advance of the occasion, and it turned out that Frank James’ views — based on history rather than mythology — were not what the Pilgrims’ descendants wanted to hear. Frank James refused to deliver a speech written by a public relations person. Frank James did not speak at the anniversary celebration. If he had spoken, this is what he would have said:
I speak to you as a man — a Wampanoag Man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry, my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction (“You must succeed – your face is a different color in this small Cape Cod community!”). I am a product of poverty and discrimination from these two social and economic diseases. I, and my brothers and sisters, have painfully overcome, and to some extent we have earned the respect of our community. We are Indians first – but we are termed “good citizens.” Sometimes we are arrogant but only because society has pressured us to be so.
It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you – celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.
Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt’s Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians’ winter provisions as they were able to carry.
Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts, yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers of the Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps he did this because his Tribe had been depleted by an epidemic. Or his knowledge of the harsh oncoming winter was the reason for his peaceful acceptance of these acts. This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.
What happened in those short 50 years? What has happened in the last 300 years?
History gives us facts and there were atrocities; there were broken promises – and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned. Only ten years later, when the Puritans came, they treated the Wampanoag with even less kindness in converting the souls of the so-called “savages.” Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the Indian was pressed between stone slabs and hanged as quickly as any other “witch.”
And so down through the years there is record after record of Indian lands taken and, in token, reservations set up for him upon which to live. The Indian, having been stripped of his power, could only stand by and watch while the white man took his land and used it for his personal gain. This the Indian could not understand; for to him, land was survival, to farm, to hunt, to be enjoyed. It was not to be abused. We see incident after incident, where the white man sought to tame the “savage” and convert him to the Christian ways of life. The early Pilgrim settlers led the Indian to believe that if he did not behave, they would dig up the ground and unleash the great epidemic again.
The white man used the Indian’s nautical skills and abilities. They let him be only a seaman — but never a captain. Time and time again, in the white man’s society, we Indians have been termed “low man on the totem pole.”
Has the Wampanoag really disappeared? There is still an aura of mystery. We know there was an epidemic that took many Indian lives – some Wampanoags moved west and joined the Cherokee and Cheyenne. They were forced to move. Some even went north to Canada! Many Wampanoag put aside their Indian heritage and accepted the white man’s way for their own survival. There are some Wampanoag who do not wish it known they are Indian for social or economic reasons.
What happened to those Wampanoags who chose to remain and live among the early settlers? What kind of existence did they live as “civilized” people? True, living was not as complex as life today, but they dealt with the confusion and the change. Honesty, trust, concern, pride, and politics wove themselves in and out of their [the Wampanoags’] daily living. Hence, he was termed crafty, cunning, rapacious, and dirty.
History wants us to believe that the Indian was a savage, illiterate, uncivilized animal. A history that was written by an organized, disciplined people, to expose us as an unorganized and undisciplined entity. Two distinctly different cultures met. One thought they must control life; the other believed life was to be enjoyed, because nature decreed it. Let us remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white man. The Indian feels pain, gets hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh. He, too, is often misunderstood.
The white man in the presence of the Indian is still mystified by his uncanny ability to make him feel uncomfortable. This may be the image the white man has created of the Indian; his “savageness” has boomeranged and isn’t a mystery; it is fear; fear of the Indian’s temperament!
High on a hill, overlooking the famed Plymouth Rock, stands the statue of our great Sachem, Massasoit. Massasoit has stood there many years in silence. We the descendants of this great Sachem have been a silent people. The necessity of making a living in this materialistic society of the white man caused us to be silent. Today, I and many of my people are choosing to face the truth. We ARE Indians!
Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. We may be fragmented, we may be confused. Many years have passed since we have been a people together. Our lands were invaded. We fought as hard to keep our land as you the whites did to take our land away from us. We were conquered, we became the American prisoners of war in many cases, and wards of the United States Government, until only recently.
Our spirit refuses to die. Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting We’re standing not in our wigwams but in your concrete tent. We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.
We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.
You the white man are celebrating an anniversary. We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.
There are some factors concerning the Wampanoags and other Indians across this vast nation. We now have 350 years of experience living amongst the white man. We can now speak his language. We can now think as a white man thinks. We can now compete with him for the top jobs. We’re being heard; we are now being listened to. The important point is that along with these necessities of everyday living, we still have the spirit, we still have the unique culture, we still have the will and, most important of all, the determination to remain as Indians. We are determined, and our presence here this evening is living testimony that this is only the beginning of the American Indian, particularly the Wampanoag, to regain the position in this country that is rightfully ours.
And finally, on the principle of Virginia Woolf that “if we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell it about anyone else” here follows my interrogation of my own Native American ancestry; November 2 2023, Native American Heritage Month and the Hidden Costs of Unequal Power in the Falsification and Erasure of History as Authorized Identities: Day of the Dead Part Two, Case of the Phantom Ancestor
In contemplation of the echoes of our past as multigenerational history and of our ancestors as ghosts who possess us, literally as our DNA and metaphorically as family stories, I find intriguing the effects of falsified and erased history on self-construal and the creation of identity.
We bear the shape of our stories as a prochronism, a history expressed in out form of how we have made choices in adaptation to change across vast epochs of time, under imposed conditions of struggle.
How if intrusive forces impose conditions of struggle which interfere with this process as assimilation, silence and erasure, or internalized oppression?
Here I have a ready example in the case of a phantom Native American ancestor substituted for an erased African one as internalized oppression under conditions of survival and resistance to slavery.
November is Native American Heritage Month, a subject shaped by vast historical forces of conquest and resistance and the ambiguous and often violent relationships between indigenous peoples and European empires as a ground of struggle which authorizes identity, here I shall begin the questioning of my own historical identity as an example.
As Virginia Woolf teaches us; “If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
As I wrote in my post of January 25 2021, The Search for Our Ancestors and a Useful Past: Family Histories as Narrative Constructions of Identity; One of the great riddles of history is untangling the knots of meaning, often shaped by erasures, silences, lies, and misdirections, which arise from the motives of our sources.
Today is my sister Erin’s birthday; I sent her a greeting which referenced some of the Defining Moments of her personal history as I remember them; “I remember our family’s discovery when you were in seventh grade that you were writing poems and stories in some of Tolkien’s invented languages, had puzzled out his sources and taught yourself a working knowledge of several ancient languages in order to write in them (Old Norse, Old Welsh, Gothic, and Old English), when you gave the Valedictorian Address for the International College at UC Santa Cruz as a graduate in Soviet Foreign Policy and Russian Language, and then became Pushkin Scholar at Kalinin University near Moscow, when Rolling Stone called your reporting on the Fall of the Soviet Union the best political writing in America, and when we celebrated your six hundredth publication. I have always been glad that in writing and the world of literature you have found your bliss.”
Among the messages which followed Erin posted a photograph which symbolizes her search for belonging, membership, and connection through the family history of our ancestors, a typically American quest for meaning as many of us share a trauma of historical abandonment and displacement, and pathologies of identity falsification and disconnectedness from relationships with families and communities, anchorages which in traditional societies nurture wellness and growth. These maladaptive disruptions and obfuscations often result from intentional breaks with the past as liberation on the part of new immigrants who wish to create themselves in no image but their own; but often they are legacies of assimilation, denial, silencing, and erasure by authority as well.
Our family history claimed Cherokee as the identity of an ancestor who we recently discovered was not a Native American but African, and probably a slave of the Cherokee, the descendants of which the tribe refuses to recognize as tribal members. As the only nonwhite General in the Confederate Army was a Cherokee, this erasure of disturbing history and inconvenient truths is unsurprising; and authorized lies can become truths when there are no counternarratives.
It is also possible that this ancestor was among the Haitian professional revolutionary soldiers whom an ancestor of mine fought alongside in the War of 1812; an origin which would explain the family faith of my father being Voodoo.
And an entirely different ancestor of mine became Shawnee by marriage during the American Revolution, making me Shawnee by blood through a many-greats grandmother, this one historically authenticated by the Shawnee tribe though no less complex than my phantom ancestor.
The truths with which authority is uncomfortable are the ones which are crucial to seizures of power and liberation, and it is to the empty spaces in our narratives of identity, the voices of the silenced and the erased, and to stories which bear the scars of rewritten history, to which we must listen most closely.
The Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Mock Authority, Expose Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Erin has claimed Native American Cherokee as her racial and historical identity since childhood, enthralled with the story of an Indian great grandmother, studied traditional drumming and made pilgrimages to pow wows, learned to the point of obsession what vestiges of Cherokee language and culture she could find, and as an adult went to the tribal archives in search of our ancestor.
There she hit a wall of silence; no records of such a tribal member exist. Worse, no living speakers of Sa La Gi could be found; when asked where the native language speakers were, the curator of the tribal historical archive pointed to an old vinyl record which held the voices of the last known bearers of an extinct language. All was dust, lost on the Trail of Tears.
No crime against humanity can be more terrible than the erasure of an entire people and civilization, as the United States of America perpetrated against many indigenous peoples both on our continent and throughout the world as imperial conquest and colonial dominion. Like slavery with which it is interdependent and parallel, colonial imperialism is a central legacy of our history for which we have yet to bring a Reckoning.
Like many tribes and peoples, the Cherokee had been eaten by our systems of unequal power as human sacrifices, and had no truths or songs of becoming human to offer. Here was an unanswerable tragedy of loss of meaning and belonging, which finds echo in our modern pathology of disconnectedness.
Or was deliberate obfuscation; what didn’t they want known?
Like many Americans, Erin pursued our elusive history and ambiguous identity for decades through genealogical research and recently the Pandora’s Box of DNA testing, where she struck gold; her test revealed no discoverable Indian ancestry, but instead an intriguing African heritage. Near her fifth decade of life, suddenly she was no longer Native American and Cherokee, a discovery which must have been a life disruptive event, but one balanced with the gift of an unlooked-for membership and belonging.
More importantly as regards race and other constructions of identity, who decides? And what happens if those you claim do not in turn claim you?
Of Non-European DNA; 1.2% sub-Saharan Africa, including: .9% Ghana / Liberia / Ivory Coast / Sierra Leone and .3% Senegambian and Guinean. There is also an Islamic Diaspora component; .7% North Africa, including: .2% Egypt and Levant and .5% broadly West Asia and North Africa, and .5% Central and South Asia including: .2% North India and Pakistan and .3% South India and Sri Lanka. These probably represent two different lines of descent, occurring at between five and eight generations of separation respectively.
Who were these mysterious and wonderful ancestors, and where was the cherished Native American heritage? Like much of nature, DNA is tricky; each generation is a total randomization of information potential, so you can inherit traits from ancestors anywhere in your history back to the dawn of humankind, in virtually any proportion of traits from any combination thereof.
On average, you will have a quarter from each grandparent at two generations of separation, and if grandmother only passes on 20%, grandfather must pass on 30%. Sometimes gene sequences are not passed on, so its possible for a known ancestor to be unconfirmable by a DNA test, and for siblings to have differences. I look like our mother, of Austrian family with hazel eyes though sadly I did not inherit her glorious red hair; my sister looks like our father whose black hair fell in tight wringlets around his shoulders.
At seven generations distance you will probably inherit less than one percent from each of the 128 ancestors in that generation, or be undetectable; the percentages are 12.5 for great grandparents at the third generation from you, 6.25 at the fourth, 3.12 at the fifth, 1.56 at the sixth, and .78 at the seventh.
DNA tests from cousins can be used with a family tree to triangulate and identify which DNA components came from which ancestors; a female cousin from Jean, one of my father’s two brothers, tests as 70% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 19% Ireland and Scotland, 6% Sweden, and 5% Norway. A male cousin from my father’s second brother Dean tests as 1% Benin and Togo and 1% Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu peoples, an approximate match with my sister’s Sub Saharan Africa descent, the remainder being 47% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 32% Norway, 11% Ireland & Scotland, and 4% Sweden. My sister’s European DNA tests as 44.7% French & German, and why some of these groups are scientifically identical boggles the imagination, 24.8% British & Irish, 19.5% broadly northwestern European, .2% Scandinavian, and 5.8% southern European, which includes 3.1% Italian and 1.1% Spanish and Portuguese.
Illustrative of the vagaries of inheritance are the differing proportions among three first cousins, two of whom inherit nothing from a paternal grandmother shared by all three, whose family came from Genoa Italy after the Napoleonic Wars. They were still living in an enormous stilt house in Bayou La Teche built from their ship, guarded by ancient cannon, when my mother visited them in 1962.
But the best way to discover our origins is through family history, which can be consistent over great epochs of time. So we come to the origin story of the photograph and of my family in America, well documented as Kentucky and Revolutionary War history whose dates can be confirmed precisely by public records, of how a mixed and diverse community of Revolutionary War survivors came to be living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
A direct patrilineal ancestor of mine, Henry, had been captured along with much of his family in the June 21 1780 British assault on Ruddle’s Fort during Bird’s Invasion of Kentucky. One hundred fifty British Regulars of the 8th and 47th Regiments, Detroit Militia, and six cannon of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, with one thousand or more warriors from the Shawnee, Huron, Lenape, and other tribal allies of Britain, compelled the surrender of the fort by cannon fire and a guarantee of status as British prisoners of war offered by Bird, who when the gates were opened broke his word and loosed the native troops to sack the fort and take slaves.
Over two hundred pioneers were killed in the attack; the remains of twenty of them were later put in iron caskets specially made in Philadelphia and sealed in a cave by a descendant of one of my family’s survivors who had moved back near the site of Ruddle’s Fort, where they remain today. The inscription on the stone archway on a cliff overlooking the Licking River reads, “Please do not disturb the rest of the sleeping dead, A.D. 1845”. I have often wondered what was so terrifying about ones own family that they needed to be entombed in iron and sealed in a cave, and why they are called “the sleeping dead’.
Near the site of the burial chamber was The Cedars, a stone home rebuilt in 1825 at a cost of $40,000 by Charles Lair, a Ruddles Fort descendant using one of the many variants of our family name. The Cedars burned in 1930; it had fifteen rooms including six bedrooms and two kitchens, a drawing room with a carved mantel, dining room, library, and a hall with a staircase.
Henry and his brothers George Jr and Peter were listed among the 49 men of the Ruddle’s Fort garrison, and many had their families with them. Survivors were marched with those of other raided forts, four hundred seventy in all, to the heartland of the Shawnee nation in Ohio and to villages of their captors along the way, though Bird still had 300 prisoners with him when he reached his base at Fort Detroit, six hundred miles from Kentucky; some were then sent another 800 miles to Montreal. Britain did not release its prisoners until fifteen years after the war, and many never found their families again.
Henry was held as a slave and/or prisoner of war until he married into the tribe four years later, making him fully Shawnee under tribal law though he was by modern constructions of race an ethnic European. His story is interwoven with that of his childhood friend and neighbor Daniel Boone, and he was among those with whom Boone discovered a route through the Cumberland Gap and explored Kentucky. I like to imagine Henry as the hero in the film Last of the Mohicans, a fictionalization of the July 14 1776 abduction and subsequent rescue of Boone’s daughter Jemima and two daughters of Colonel Richard Callaway, Elizabeth and Frances, from Chief Hanging Maw of the Overhill Cherokee, leading a mixed band of Cherokee and Shawnee.
Henry joined George Washington’s army, possibly during the retreat from the Battle of Long Island in the fall of 1776, fought in the Battles of Trenton and Princeton that December, at Brandywine on September 11, 1777, and in the victory at the Second Battle of Saratoga on October 7 1777 which nearly ended the war and brought help from France.
Among the family members at Ruddle’s Fort were Henry’s two brothers. Peter, who was killed in action, his wife Mary who was captured with their two daughters, of whom Katarina was rescued in 1786 and another is mentioned as married and living in Sandwich Canada in an open letter written by Mary published in the Kentucky Gazette on April 7 1822 to their third child Peter, who vanished after the battle and whose fate is unknown. It reads in part; ”I was taken at Fort Licking commanded by Captain Ruddle, and was brought into upper Canada near Amherstburgh (Fort Malden) where I now live having been 16 years among the Indians. Your eldest sister is now living in Sandwich, but the youngest I could never hear of. Now, my dear son, I would be very glad to see you once more before I die, which I do not think will be long, as I am in a very bad state of health, and have been this great while. I am married to Mr Jacob Miracle (fellow captive from Ruddle’s Fort Jacob Markle) for whom you can enquire.” These are the words of a woman who had been coerced into marrying one of her captors by torture and had a son by him whom she raised with her youngest daughter by a husband who died defending her and their children from capture, two of whom had vanished in the cauldron of war and whose fates she never learned, though her youngest daughter was safe with George Jr’s family.
Also present were Henry’s second brother George Jr and his wife Margaret, who were captured and later freed, and their children Johnny, George III, Eva, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Johnny, 1776-1853, four years old when captured, was raised with Tecumseh and fought at his side as a British ally through the War of 1812. He married Mary Williams in 1799; they had eight children. Of Margaret we know only that she survived to marry Andrew Sinnolt in 1793. Eva, captured when 14 years old and taken to Canada, ran the gauntlet to win her freedom after six years of enslavement and two years later in 1788 married fellow Ruddles Fort survivor Casper Karsner.
Elizabeth Lale, 1752-1832, eldest of the children at 28, escaped from the Shawnee capitol city of Piqua on the Great Miami River in Ohio and survived a solo trek of hundreds of miles through the wilderness back to the colonies, then with Washington and Jefferson planned and guided General Clark with 970 soldiers in a raid which liberated many of the other prisoners of war held as slaves at the Battle of Piqua, August 8 1780. With her was Daniel Boone, who had also been held captive at Piqua by Blackfish, Great Chief of the Shawnee, between his capture at the Battle of Blue Licks on February 7, 1778 and his escape six months later in June. In 1783 Elizabeth married John Franks; they had two children.
And George III, 1773-1853, captured when seven years old, was taken in 1781 to a camp in Cape Girardeau Missouri, base of a Shawnee trade empire from which the entire Mississippi basin could be navigated, becoming the first white pioneer in the region, near the land which in 1793 was granted by Baron Carondelet to the Black Bob Band of the Hathawekela Shawnee.
Nearby was a Spanish land grant awarded to Andrew Summers for service in the Cape Girardeau Company of the Spanish-American Militia by Governor Lorimier, during a six week campaign in 1803. Andrew Summers had married Elizabeth Ruddle, daughter of Captain George Ruddle and granddaughter of Isaac Ruddle; Andrew and Elizabeth moved with their family to their land in Cape Girardeau after the War of 1812; later her father joined them, as did George Lale III and his wife Louisa Wolff. George and Louisa’s seven children were born there; the old Summers cemetery where George III is buried lies two miles SW of Jackson Missouri.
Many of my family who survived the Revolutionary War moved to Cape Girardeau where the families of George III Lale and Andrew Summers had established a community of pioneers and former slaves of Indians, apparently both African and European, and the Indians they had fought alongside and against, been captured by and intermarried with. In the end I think they understood each other better than those who had not survived the same collective trauma and shared history.
Our great grandmother Lilly Summers could claim direct patrilineal descent from the Summers family of Fairfax Virginia, descended from Sir George Summers, who commanded the Sea Venture, one of the ships which brought over the Jamestown colony in 1607, through the first settler in Alexandria, John Summers, who lived from 1687 to 1790 and had at the time of his death four generations of descendants, including some four hundred individuals. Lilly was equally descended from her mother, M.B. Croft who is listed as Dutch which probably means German, and her father John William Summers, of English lineage but designated as Cherokee in family records, which we now know is a fiction describing descent from a probable African slave of the Cherokee.
It is also possible that this ancestry came into the Summers line from fellow soldiers who served with them during the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, among them free Black militia companies which pre-existed the war, including slaves promised freedom and armed by Andrew Jackson as the first Black company of the American army, a former Spanish colonial Black militia with whom Andrew Summers had served alongside against France, and Major D’Aquin’s Battalion of Free Men of Color from Haiti who were elite professional revolutionaries and soldiers who had once been part of the French army. The origin of this DNA can be no nearer than Lilly’s paternal grandmother, at five generations separation from my sister and I.
Among the documents of my genealogy and family history research I have a daguerreotype from the 1840’s of Elizabeth Lale, named for her ferocious aunt, daughter of parents from opposing sides of the Revolutionary War, Me Shekin Ta Withe (White Painted Dove) of the Shawnee and Henry Lale.
Born in 1786, Elizabeth had four sisters and two brothers including my ancestor George Washington Lale, named for the future President with whom Henry crossed the Delaware, and whose battle cry at Trenton in 1776, Victory or Death, Henry adopted as our family motto on our coat of arms.
My sister and I are the fifth generation from Henry, and sixth from the original immigrant Hans George Lale who arrived with his family in Philadelphia in 1737 on the ship Samuel, sailing from Rotterdam.
As our family history and myth before coming to America is beyond the subject of my inquiry here, epigenetic trauma and harms of erasure and internalized oppression in the case of a phantom ancestor in the context of relations between indigenous and colonial peoples, I will question this in future essays.
Here are the generations of our family in America; my parents A.L. Lale and Meta (Austrian), Enoch Abraham Lale and Gertie Noce (Italian), Andrew Jackson Lale 1840-1912 and Lilly Summers, George Washington Lale 1790-1854 and Elizabeth Ross, Henry Lale 1754-1830 and White Painted Dove, and Hans George Lale 1703-1771 and Maria Rudes.
But its never as simple as that, each of us a link in a chain of being which encompasses the whole span of human history; migrations, wars, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Often our ideas of identity as nationality and ethnicity would have been incomprehensible to the people we claim membership with.
Take for example my family name; its original form is on Trajan’s Column in Rome, and Cicero wrote his great essay on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia, about an ancestor of mine; Gaius Laelius, whose political and military career as an ally of Scipio Africanus spans the Iberian campaign of 210- 206 BC where he commanded the Roman fleet at New Carthage, the African campaign of 204-202 commanding the cavalry at Zama, enjoyed two terms as praetor of Sicily from 196 and was granted the province of Gaul about 190, and in 160 BC met the historian Polybius in Rome, becoming his eyewitness source for the Second Punic War in The Histories.
Here I signpost that all of us are connected with the lives of others across vast millennia of history, often in surprising ways. If I accounted my identity and ethnicity as where my ancestors immigrated to America from, I would be German and not Roman, but it would not be the whole truth. We lived in Bavaria for generations until 1586, when we were driven out as werewolves during the start of an eighty year witchburning craze; Martin Luther called us Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon. During this time we absorbed many of the pre Christian myths gathered as Grimms Fairytales as family history. And still a half truth, as this tallies only my patrilineal descent, and nothing of the half of myself from my mother, whose stories I will tell another time.
As events become more remote in time and memory, the boundary between historical and mythopoeic truth becomes ambiguous, interdependent, and co-evolutionary with shared elements which reinforce each other. This is true for narratives of national identity as well as self-construction in the personal and family spheres, in which such processes may be studied in detail. Stories are a way of doing exactly thing; both creating and questioning identity.
Often with family history we are confronted with discontiguous realms of truth as self-representation and authorized identity, always a ground of struggle as a Rashomon Gate. Such stories are true in the sense that we are their expressions as living myths, but are these narratives we live within and which in turn inhabit us also history?
Who are we, we Lales?
Native American, yes, if to a lesser degree and from different sources than we had previously imagined as an authorized identity and historical construction, Shawnee rather than Cherokee and generations more distant. Indian also in the sense of an ancestor from Mughal India over three hundred years ago, great grandmother of Henry the revolutionary, and that complex. Who this grand and mysterious ancestor and source of our Indian and Eqyptian-Levantine DNA was remains an open question, though she claimed to have once been a courtier of the Mughal princess and poet Zeb-un-Nissa which is another story. And in the place of the phantom Cherokee great grandmother, an African voice among the cacophony of multitudes sings of liberation.
In retrospect, that my father practiced Voodoo as the traditional family faith should have been an enormous clue to his ethnicity, Louisiana Creole of mixed European-African-Native American ancestry. He described himself as Cajun, which means French speaking and is a cultural and historical claim.
Of my father who is my link to this history of the founding of America as a reborn Rome with all of its shifting ideas of nationality and identity, who in this our Day of the Dead I honor among my ancestors, I say this; he was my high school English, Forensics, and Drama teacher, who taught me fencing and chess and took me to martial arts lessons from the age of nine, gave me a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in eighth grade which became a counter text to the Bible for me, and was an underground theatre director who collected luminaries like William S. Burroughs who told fabulous stories after dinner and Edward Albee whose plays he directed while I sat beside them as a child and listened with rapt attention to their conversations. He it was who taught me the principle of action; “Politics is the art of fear”. For one day he was arguably the greatest swordsman in the world, having defeated all the national champions at an international reclassification tournament, and went on to become a coach of Olympic fencers. He grew up fencing and playing the treasured family Stradivarius, and his favorite story from childhood was how he got his nickname, Gator Bait; grandpa used to tie a rope around his waist and throw him in the swamp to splash about and attract alligators to shoot. One story he never told but his friend Sparrow Hutchins from the Korean War did, was that they had escaped a North Korean POW camp with three others, one of whom died in the breakout, and the four survivors carried the dead soldier all the way back to South Korea. His last years were spent in seclusion flyfishing on a remote wilderness mining claim in Montana.
Before immigration to America, European and originally Roman, unquestionably; along the way from Gaius Laelius and the conquest of Carthage to myself, our family once briefly ruled what is now France, Germany, Spain, and the British Isles, in the Gallic Empire of 260-274 A.D. As a university student influenced by classical studies I responded to questions about my historical identity, nationality, and ethnicity in this way; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.”
I did so once to the wife of a poetry professor, who immediately whipped out a notebook and thereupon began taking notes on our conversations; this was Anne Rice, who based her character of Mael in Queen of the Damned on me as I was in my junior year at university, over forty years ago now, before the summer of 1982 which fixed me on my life course as a hunter of fascists and a member of the Resistance.
Its always interesting to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we are transformed by their different angles of view; such changes and transforms of meaning are the primary field of study in history and literature as songs of identity and a primary ground of revolutionary struggle.
Anne Rice’s idea of Mael as the caretaker of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a comment of mine about the dead white men whose books created our culture for both good and ill during a discussion of the canon of literature; There are those who must be kept, and those from whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Who are we, we Americans, we humans?
Identity, history, memory, which includes changing constructions of race and nationality; these hinge on questions which often have no objective answers.
We are as we imagine ourselves to be; the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and the groups and historical legacies in which we claim membership, and who claim us in return.
Family history is always a personal myth of identity, though it may also be history. We bear within us thousands of other lives, in multiple states of time across vast gulfs of history, possessed by the ghosts of our ancestors literally as DNA and metaphorically as stories; we are legion.
As with all history, as narratives of authorized identities and in struggle against them as seizures of power, autonomy and self-ownership, and self-creation, a Rashomon Gate of relative and ambiguous truths, the most important question to ask of a story is this; whose story is this?
You who are fearless, unconquered, and free, who have seized ownership of your identities and made of your lives enactments of beauty and of defiance; know that you shall never stand alone, while we who love liberty yet remain.
You are not invisible. And to all those who transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden, who in the performance of themselves challenge and defy the authorization of identities including those of sex and gender, and by their representation champion the silenced and the erased as heroic figures of autonomy and liberation, I salute you.
On this second day of the Festival of Loki inclusive of Coming Out Day as Breaking the Silence, we celebrate Transgression of Authorized Identities and the Seizure of Ownership of Ourselves and Our Possibilities of Becoming Human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
Go ahead; frighten the horses.
As I wrote in my post of June 30 2019, Truths Written in our Flesh: Freedom as the Struggle for Ownership of Identity; Here is a marvelous set of nested boxes of ideas regarding identity, communication and language, history and memory, psychology and transhistoric and epigenetic trauma, politics and aesthetics, the necessity of pride and self-ownership and the art of being human.
Writing in The Paris Review of the art and meaning of David Wojnarowicz, Patrick Nation interrogates the borders of self and other in an inspired meditation on the use of pronouns, the we and I, in both essays and persons as self-referential systems.
His words become a labyrinth, an echo of values which are immanent in nature like the spirals of a seashell, truths written in our flesh awaiting our discovery, an evocation of a virtual third realm and interface between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, as two essences of perfume will create together a new and prodigal scent.
It is precisely this uniqueness and surprise, and the transitory nature of experience, which confers value on the moments of our lives and on art as a motive force and a fulcrum of our passion and our vision.
Art, like one’s persona, is not an object but an experience; not a fixed quality but an adaptive and fluid process in motion and subject to change.
Gender and sexual personae are a performance, both a struggle for ownership of identity between self and other and an event occurring in the free space of play between these bounded realms.
I myself have been lucky to have found in my childhood friend and life partner Dolly, whom I bonded with the moment my mother brought me home from the hospital days after being born and put me in her arms as she uttered the magic spell “Can I keep him?”, someone to share that liminal space of imaginal and transformative power with me, with whom to explore the limitless possibilities of becoming human. We saw each other, and when this is true nothing else matters.
May all of us find the gaze of the other in which our truths are realized by the redemptive and liberating powers of love, joy in our uniqueness and the journey to become human, and hold such space for others as guarantors of each other’s humanity.
And here following are my three part series of posts regarding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test as a tool of discovery of one’s own identity:
June 13 2021, Masquerade: Identities of Sex and Gender as Culture, Ethnicity, and Performance; A friend has written a brilliant, insightful, and very emotionally charged essay on the subject of queer identity, finding ones tribe, and being ostracized by ones role models due to the fracture and balkanization of identities of sex and gender in queer culture, consequences of the imposed conditions of struggle against systems of oppression. To be a Painted Bird is a tragedy on the scale of a private Holocaust, and some of this seems to me to be a result of increasing specialization, fragmentation, and siloing of LGBT subcultures as a negative tribalization or struggle to build community as exclusivity, and also a shocking failure of solidarity. And it is a special case of a general condition, like the ideological fracture which broke the power of the Left to oppose fascism a century ago. If those who are marginalized by normative society do not stand united, surely they will become vulnerable to silencing and erasure.
I am not a member of this queer LGBTcommunity, and can not speak from within this space, nor from lived experience, nor have I studied as a subject of scholarship what seem to be a highly diverse, nuanced, and complex set of authorized identities, as evidenced by the curious and to myself often surprising and outre tribal identities offered by a cursory examination of instruments of identity and community native to this space of play such as Grinder, so am utterly clueless about how such representations and choices are negotiated. I suspect this is true for many potential allies who would stand with any human who stands alone, but may not know how to do so, or recognize when someone is in pain or needs help.
Sadly, it may be also be true for those whose awareness of desire, sexual orientation, and identities of sex and gender are emerging, and who may feel confusion, ambiguity, and dislocation not as freedom and joy but as crisis and trauma, especially those who become aware of differences and chasms of meaning between themselves and others, and must cope with isolation and disconnectedness at best and shame, unworthiness, and ostracism at worst as consequences of negotiating identities in a social context of judgement, ridicule, and massively unequal power.
How many of us are imprisoned still in oubliettes of exile, silencing, and erasure or fed into fiendish machines of assimilation, marginalized and broken down into the raw material of power for authority and hegemonic elites, like Oscar Wilde obliviated and consumed for daring to embrace his uniqueness?
The universal human struggle for autonomy here collides disastrously with authorized identities and a Patriarchal-Theocratic value system which reinforces heteronormative narratives as submission to authority, in parallel with the need for belonging and membership in the quest to find a tribe within a society riven with hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, wherein our negotiations between self and others are mediated by elite hegemonic forces of dominion, whose lies and illusions, like a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, can falsify and steal our souls.
Such are the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle under theocratic-patriarchal systems of oppression. And as our possibilities of becoming human are limited only by our imagination, and by belonging as a means of exchange, how can we discover our true and best selves?
The awakening to total freedom as a self created being can be both wonderful and terrible. How do we safeguard that freedom? What does our duty of care for each other require of us as mentors and stewards for each other’s limitless possibilities of becoming human?
So I ask all of you for guidance in this matter, for whom celebrations such as Coming Out Day and Pride Month are personal and intimate, part of your story and a celebration of survival and resilience, and not merely an aspect of Resistance in general, defiance of authority, and transgression of the Forbidden as it is for me as an agent of Chaos and a revolutionary; beyond amplifying your voices and standing in solidarity when called on for help, how can we help you champion each other?
We also have a need for another kind of work, one whose intention is to provide guidance in finding ones tribe among the full spectrum of multilayered and wonderfully diverse smorgasboard of choices available in our society now, chess pieces in a great game of human being, meaning, and value, and reveals and opens the limitless possibilities of becoming human and discovering communities of wellbeing and mutual aid which can foster such a journey of introspection for the young and curious and for their parents and teachers as gatekeepers of belonging, without authorizing a prescriptive set of identities.
Identity is not a static frame into which one must fit oneself regardless of our pluralities; we are all pluralities, we are all in processes of change and growth, and our nature, to paraphrase Freud’s delightfully wicked phrase “polymorphously perverse”, obeys but one law; anything goes.
Are we not both Harley Quinn and the Joker, Beauty and the Beast, bound together in one flesh?
Does the range of choices act as an intrinsic limit on autonomy? If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, fracture and disruption, destruction and re-creation, reimagination and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. As Guillermo del Toro wrote in Carnival Row;” Chaos is the great hope of the powerless”.
Audubon publishes a wonderful field guide to birds, which usefully describes their glorious and beautiful differences and uniqueness’s without suggesting it is better to be a falcon than a dove; each have a niche in the system of life, as do we all. We need a version for humans; Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
This raises the question of how we discover who we want to become. If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation, I would base the process not on prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, “Man and Woman He created them” as the Bible imagines it, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor as the great question of being remains Who Chooses, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
Our masquerade of identities of sex and gender as culture, ethnicity, and performance can be played as a game or as live action theatre as well as enacted as transformation magic or guerilla theatre as political action; here I offer you a ritual act of Chaos and Transformation which is useful in disrupting order and randomizing the masks we wear. Write down three masculine and three feminine characters you know well enough to perform, roll a six sided dice to find today’s persona, and live as that character until tomorrow, when you can become someone entirely different. And regardless of who you are today, you will have five more selves in reserve.
Such constructions of identity as performance flow from the nature of self as a development of the persona or Greek theatrical mask characters speak through; a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems in adaptation, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to create ourselves.
And what of the underlying forces of love and desire from which such structures and figures are made?
Milan Kundera, paraphrasing Plato in Phaidos, wrote; “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost”. To this I would add a conditional which directs us to the function of love in the construction of identity; love also reveals us to ourselves, for we choose those we love as figures of who we wish to become.
We choose those we love and share our lives with in part because they represent potential selves and qualities we aspire to realize within ourselves, as informing and motivating sources and shaping forces. This is what it means to become human, and why interdependence is at the heart of becoming human. Our values are revealed in our circle of partners and friends.
Love is dangerous because it is free, uncontrollable, wild. Love redeems, transforms, and reimagines; love totalizes and transcends. Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioners, because that is exactly what it is.
As I once said to Jean Genet, it is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
As I wrote in my post of July 17 2021, A Sorting Hat of One’s Own: A General Theory of Identities of Sex and Gender as Processes and Functions of Personality; In my previous post in this series of June 13 2021, Masquerade: Identities of Sex and Gender as Culture, Ethnicity, and Performance, I posed a question of how we discover who we want to become. As a joke I imagined a field guide and called it Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
As Mary Oliver framed the question; “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In the following paragraph I speculated about what such a work might involve; If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation and identities of sex and gender, I would base the process not on any precut selection of labels or prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
How does that work? With nothing more than a change of emphasis in terms, though I’m sure diagnostic questions specific to sexual orientation and desire can be written for the purposes of finding oneself, viable partners, and communities where one belongs.
We must first define what we mean when we speak of identities of sex and gender. By gender I mean who you are; as identity this means a confluence of holistic and interdependent and evolving relations between all four categories of being, which include nature, thinking, feeling, and nurture, and as expression, social, cultural, and historical constructions of values and ideals of masculine and feminine beauty and gender roles as performances. By sex I mean biology including evolutionary influences, genetics, and hormones, and by sexual orientation I mean whom and what one desires, which can be influenced by both sex and gender but is determined by neither, for this is nondeterminative and must be chosen. Such identities are complex, layered, nuanced, and ambiguous, shifting and protean, as our identities of sex and gender shape each other as adaptive processes of change.
As I’ve often said, this is a primary ground of struggle, of life, growth, adaptation, and individuation, and the creation of ourselves as autonomous beings in revolution against authority and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and beauty, and idealizations of masculinity and femininity.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Let us answer the question of who we are with grandeur and the frightening of the horses; let us claim, I am a Bringer of Chaos and Transformation, I am a fulcrum of change, and like Napoleon declare I am the Revolution. And with Loki the Trickster let us say; “I am burdened with a glorious purpose.”
If we are to map the topologies of identities of sex and gender as possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, we must consider as distinct classes the social and interpersonal sphere of action and relations or gender expression and in a limited sense sexual behavior, what one does, as opposed to sexual orientation, what one wants, which include as motivating, informing, and shaping forces authorized gender identities and role models offered us by history, society, and culture, which are arbitrary and ephemeral, and those of the intrapersonal, our processes of thinking and feeling, which arise from within us rather than being imposed from without, but which are then shaped and conditioned by role modeling and how we are treated, especially by our parents.
I say again, gender identity is an artifact of being influenced by all four levels of self.
These dyadic forces of sex and gender function interdependently to create and shape the highly relational and context-determined thing we call our selves; a dance of potentialities as feminine anima and masculine animus, and our persona or the masks we wear.
For such a mapping system and wayfinding compass, I turn first to Jung’s magisterial work Psychological Types, and to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which was developed from it. It is a precision tool, which allows us to locate ourselves and others through our constellations of traits along the infinite Moebius Loop of human possibilities of sex and gender with predictive and explanatory power in terms of our relationships in romance, friendships, and work.
By direct word substitution of descriptors in the Jungian personality quadrants, we find a useful general theory of sexual and gender identity as a function of the interfaces between the bounded realms of biological determinants including neurotransmitters and epigenetic or multigenerational historic legacies, and historical, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts which balances nature and nurture.
We begin at birth with sexual identity, which stands outside the system of personality but influences it, primarily through relative prenatal exposure to testosterone and estrogen in the intrapersonal sphere, which we can broadly think of as gender identity with awareness that identity is complex and nondeterminative, and dopamine and serotonin in the interpersonal sphere of gender performance. Everyone has degrees of both masculinity and femininity, just as a whole person possesses both a conscious self and an unconscious self which is of the opposite gender, our animus and anima. These anima-animus relations and processes are found at all four levels of being, of which we may or may not be aware and so have limited volitional control of or personal responsibility for, meaning that we cannot simply choose to be other than we are.
Always there remains the struggle between the stories others tell about us and those we tell about ourselves, and between those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those we ourselves create.
This means that any relationship is quadratic and includes our own relationship with our unconscious which is figuratively of the opposite gender from our conscious selves, our partner’s internal relations, our conscious relationship with our partner’s waking self, and our submerged unconscious relations of which we are not aware but which shape our conscious ones. Simple, no?
And we wonder why relationships can be laden with issues, when the answer is simple; relationships are complex because we are.
Jung’s primary layer of personality, mind, maps directly onto this dyadic anima-animus relation, and is a measure of masculinity or independent self construal, as Extroversion which includes dominance and assertiveness, and femininity or interdependent self construal, as Introversion or nurturance.
Masculine traits of Extroversion include Initiating, Active, Expressive, Gregarious, and Enthusiastic; the first two related to dominance and assertiveness, and the last three components of sociability.
Feminine traits of Introversion include Receiving, Contained, Intimate, Reflective, and Quiet.
This fundamental dichotomy is inborn and manifests in infants as preferences for attention, interests, and play; in boys for things and how they work as objects and motion, and in girls for human facial expressions and imaginative doll play.
Jung’s second layer of personality and the next to develop as a childhood stage of growth, energy, describes how we conceptualize the world and process information, a balance of feminine Intuitive and masculine Observant traits.
Masculine Observation involves part to whole reasoning, quantitative analysis, and how things work; logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition.
Jung’s third layer of personality, nature, describes how we make decisions and process emotions; here we have traits shaped most directly by hormonal factors, though hormones influence all three of our first layers of personality as developmental stages. Otherwise gender identity would be a function of this third layer, when it is a coevolutionary product of all four successive layers of personality. This area measures our Thinking, influenced by testosterone or masculinity, and our Feeling, influenced by estrogen or femininity.
Masculine Thinking traits influenced by testosterone include: decisive, focused, direct, logical-analytical, strategic thinkers, bold, competitive, excel at rule bound systems such as machines, math, and music.
Feminine Feeling traits influenced by estrogen include: holistic and contextual thinking, imaginative, superior at verbal skills and executive social skills like reading expressions, posture, gestures, and tone of voice; also nurturing, sympathetic, intuitive, and emotionally expressive.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of gender performance and expression or one’s strategic and tactical approach to life, relationships, and work; here we have traits shaped by acculturation and historical factors. This area measures our balance of structure versus spontaneity; our Perceiving, influenced by dopamine and corresponding to masculinity, and our Judging, influenced by serotonin and corresponding to femininity.
Masculine Perceiving or Prospecting traits influenced by dopamine include: seeking novelty, risk taking, spontaneity, curiosity, creativity, mental flexibility, optimism.
Feminine Judging traits influenced by serotonin include: calm, social, cautious, persistent, loyal, orderly, fond of rules and facts.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test gives us four categories of personality types, of four types each.
The Analyst Group contains the Architect (INTJ), Logician (INTP), Commander (ENTJ), and Debater (ENTP) types.
The Diplomat Group contains the Advocate (INFJ), Mediator (INFP), Protagonist (ENFJ), and Campaigner (ENFP) types.
The Sentinel Group contains the Logistician (ISTJ), Defender (ISFJ), Executive (ESTJ), and Consul (ESFJ) types.
The Explorer Group contains the Virtuoso (ISTP), Adventurer (ISFP), Entrepreneur (ESTP), and Entertainer (ESFP) types.
What does this look like in the context of real people? Here I will use myself as an example and case, for as written by Virginia Woolf; “If you cannot tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
I test as an ENFP or Campaigner; in my most primal layer of personality I am 65% Extrovert over 35% Introvert. This manifests in me as a love of risk and adventure, and a natural leadership and people-centeredness which has been useful in my professional career as a teacher and counselor. I instinctively and reflexively seek to dominate and seize power in any situation, even when consciously trying to keep myself in check as Extroversion favors competition over cooperation though my ideology construes this as a negative. My Extroversion also influences my idea of life as a game of transgression and chaos, to be played with creative freedom, improvisation, fearlessness, and a gourmet aesthetics which valorizes both the monstrous and the beautiful; you can count on me to ignore authority, change the rules of any game, delight in the violation of norms, and to play our games of human being, meaning, and value without any boundaries whatever.
I remain the boy who upon hearing the term Original Sin for the first time from a friend, said; “I’ll think of some new ones we can play, games of our very own.”
In the layer of Energy, how we direct our thoughts and passions, I am 83% Intuitive over 17% Observant, a balance toward femininity. This means that I reason holistically and infer hidden relationships and patterns as a strength, that interpretation and qualitative analysis comes more easily than quantitative or mechanical tasks, and that I think outside the box and draw outside the lines, which makes me good at solving unknowns. On a team I’m the one you want as the fire brigade handling unforeseen issues, so long as I have a good forensic investigator for failure reconstruction and analysis at my right and a staff officer to handle logistics and planning at my left. I’m a natural at intelligence and policy functions, putting puzzles together and guessing what the picture they make could mean and how to use it to achieve goals.
In the third layer of Nature, how we make decisions and process emotions, I am 92% Feeling and only 8% Thinking. This is an extreme score, statistically anomalous and my strongest personality trait; a preference for empathy and ungoverned passion. As an influence in relationships it makes me the caretaker of partnerships, and professionally I’m a natural at quickly reading people and profiling motives and intentions, sifting for truth, and assessing character.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of Tactics or one’s approach to life and work, I am 57% Prospecting and 43% Judging. This means my masculine/feminine balance in terms of gender performance and roles, the most outwardly visible part of oneself and the layer of being others interact with most often, is toward masculinity, and informs how I read to others as a system of signs.
To restate how I interpret my personality; both my intrapersonal gender identity and interpersonal gender performance as an observable external cueing system, the mask I wear in the social performance of myself, in my case controlled by my Extroversion and Prospecting traits in the first and fourth layers of personality, is masculine or animus, which makes my unconscious self, always a mirror image, feminine or anima, and comprised of the layers of personality which are internal and hidden, as reflected in my Intuitive and Feeling traits. I regard this as an achievement of integration and the work of finding balance and wholeness, though I am an extreme case as most people are around 50/50 or differ only marginally in both realms of being. Because my masculine score is extreme in the conscious areas, so my unconscious scores extremely feminine. These two pairs of traits face Janus like as sides of a whole person in dynamic balance, and together form a quadratic personality type which can take 16 forms, which reflect and organize relative masculinity and femininity as adaptive processes.
As to type compatibility and the use of the MBTI system in sifting for partners, in general opposites attract in the first and fourth layers of personality, Introverts with Extroverts and Prospectors with Judges, dyadic masculine-feminine pairs and aspects of personality revealed in gender performance, and like aligns with or has no influence in the second and third layers, which are mainly concealed from public view and correspond to the unconscious.
The surfaces of ourselves and the masks we wear in our dances with others are but images and reflections moving atop a vast and bottomless sea, within whose chasms of darkness we are all interconnected.
And none of this tells you anything about the interdependent realm of love and desire as informing and motivating sources and shaping forces which both act on us as their subject and through us as their figures and agents, though it tells us everything we need to know about what we would be like as a romantic partner, friend, colleague at work or comrade in action. A human being is a work of art shaped by such forces of our nature as well as history, like stone sculpted by the action of wind and water.
Insightful work in the influence of neurotransmitters on personality has been pioneered by Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who built chemistry.com’s matching systems from her studies. Her schema, which modernizes and maps directly onto the Jungian theory of personality as I have described, dispenses with Jung’s first two categories, the Introvert/Extrovert primary layer and the Intuitive/Observant secondary layer, and yields a simple dominant and recessive binary personality type rather than the 16 types in the Myers-Briggs scale. This is why I am inclined to incorporate Fisher’s studies of hormone and neurotransmitter biochemistry into the Jungian model of personality and use her test as a quick reference tool in addition to the MBTI rather than a replacement; the Fisher model lacks predictive power because it is flawed. Personality is a developmental process which unfolds in stages as a child becomes a person, and if you ignore this and the first two stages of growth the results become unreliable. The Fisher model can be a useful tool for matching with partners using the test and essay together, if you don’t take it too seriously, but for a tool of self discovery I turn to the Myers-Briggs test.
Her Word Type study asked people to describe themselves in an essay for Chemistry.com and found the ten most common words each type used.
Explorers, Jung’s masculine Perceivers, used adventure most often, with the other ten in descending order being; venture, spontaneous, energy, new, fun, traveling, outgoing, passion, and active.
Builders, Jung’s feminine Judges, used family most often, then honesty, caring, moral, respect, loyal, trust, values, loving, and trustworthy.
Negotiators, Jung’s feminine Feelers, used passion most often, then real, heart, kind, sensitive, reader, sweet, learn, random, and empathetic.
Directors, Jung’s masculine Thinkers, used intelligent most often, then intellectual, debate, geek, nerd, ambition, driven, politics, challenging, and real.
Here you can take the Fisher Personality Type Test; read each statement and record the answer that best applies to you. Acronyms are Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
Scale 1
1. I find unpredictable situations exhilarating.
2. I do things on the spur of the moment.
3. I get bored when I have to do the same familiar things.
4. I have a very wide range of interests.
5. I am more optimistic than most people.
6.I am more creative than most people.
7. I am always looking for new experiences.
8.I am always doing new things.
9. I am more enthusiastic than most people.
10. I am willing to take risks to do what I want to do.
11. I get restless if I have to stay home for any length of time.
12.My friends would say I am very curious.
13. I have more energy than most people.
14. On my time off, I like to be free to do whatever looks fun.
Total
Scale 2
1.I think consistent routines keep life orderly and relaxing.
2. I consider and reconsider every option thoroughly before making a plan.
3. People should behave according to established standards of proper conduct.
4. I enjoy planning way ahead.
5. In general, I think it is important to follow rules.
6. Taking care of my possessions is a high priority for me.
7. My friends and family would say I have traditional values.
8. I tend to be meticulous in my duties.
9. I tend to be cautious, but not fearful.
10. People should behave in ways that are morally correct.
11. It is important to respect authority.
12. I would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends.
13. Long established customs need to be respected and preserved.
14. I like to work in a straightforward path toward completing the task.
Total
Scale 3
1. I understand complex machines easily.
2. I enjoy competitive conversations.
3. I am intrigued by rules and patterns that govern systems.
4. I am more analytical and logical than most people.
5. I pursue intellectual topics thoroughly and regularly.
6. I am able to solve problems without letting emotion get in the way.
7. I like to figure out how things work.
8. I am tough-minded.
9. Debating is a good way to match my wits with others.
10. I have no trouble making a choice, even when several alternatives seem equally good at first.
11. When I buy a new machine (like a camera, computer, or car) I want to know all of its technical features.
12. I like to avoid the nuances and say exactly what I mean.
13. I think it is important to be direct.
14. When making a decision, I like to stick to the facts rather than be swayed by people’s feelings.
Total
Scale 4
1. I like to get to know my friends deepest needs and feelings.
2. I highly value deep emotional intimacy in my relationships.
3. Regardless of what is logical, I generally listen to my heart when making important decisions.
4. I frequently catch myself daydreaming.
5. I can change my mind easily.
6. After watching an emotional film, I often still feel moved by it several hours later.
7. I vividly imagine both wonderful and horrible things happening to me.
8. I am very sensitive to people’s feelings and needs.
9. I often find myself getting lost in my thoughts during the day.
10.I feel emotions more deeply than most people.
11. I have a vivid imagination.
12. When I wake up from a vivid dream, it takes me a few seconds to return to reality.
13. When reading, I enjoy it when a writer takes a sidetrack to say something beautiful or meaningful.
14. I am very empathetic.
Scoring the test
0 for each SD, 1 for each D, 2 points for each A and three for SA. Add each section separately.
Scale 1 measures Masculinity as Dominance, the degree to which you are butch or an Explorer based on your Perceiving traits.
Scale 2 measures Femininity as Submissiveness, Judging traits or the degree to which you align with Fisher’s Builder personality type.
Scale 3 measures Masculinity as logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition, Thinking quadrant traits or what Fisher calls the Director personality type.
Scale 4 measures Femininity as linguistic-emotional-interpersonal cognition or Feeling traits on the Myers-Briggs scale which Fisher calls the Negotiator personality type.
The two top scores are your primary and secondary traits.
For further study of the idea of gender, I refer you to the works of Judith Butler; including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Undoing Gender, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, and to those of Anne Fausto-Sterling; Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men.
The nature versus nurture debate can be explored in the oppositional works of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine, and Human Diversity: Gender, Race, Class, and Genes by Charles Murray.
In histories, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century,
by Charles King.
In biography, Monsieur d’Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade by Gary Kates.
In fiction, we have Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joseph Cassara’s House of the Impossible Beauties, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confession of the Fox, and Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, by T. Fleischmann.
As I wrote in my post of July 18 2021, Of Love and Desire as Forces of Autonomy and Liberation; In my previous journal entry of yesterday I provided a brief outline of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test as a tool of discovery and description of the processes of masculinity and femininity as interdependent aspects of a whole personality, in the context of gender identity and performance.
So we come to the final category of our interest here, sexual orientation. The most important thing to know about human sexuality as a dimension of experience is that it involves the whole person. Whereas a personality test can tell you who you are, and who others are or wish to represent themselves as, it cannot tell you who or what you desire. Desire remains ambiguous, and that is its great power as a force of liberation and autonomy.
The second is that desire is uncontrollable as the tides, an inherently anarchic and chaotic force of nature which is nonvolitional and for which we cannot be held responsible, unlike our actions toward others.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2021, A Year of Quarantine in Retrospect;
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to deny our true nature. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise; fear weaponized in service to power, fear and of otherness but also of nature and ourselves. Here is the true origin of evil as the social use of force and violence in self-hatred.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which as with the figure of Alberich the dwarf require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
And in my closing arguments regarding the problematization of masculinity and femininity as figures of human wholeness in a chiaroscuro of forces, in accord with the truth telling principle of Virginia Woolf that “if we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell it about others”, as I wrote in my post of June 22 2025, If My Masculine and Feminine Halves Could Perform Their Truths On the Stage of the World, What Would We Sing? Idealizations of Gendered Beauty and the Struggle Between Authorized Identities and Truths We Create Or Are Written In Our Flesh: On Father’s Day, Part Two; Beings of darkness and light are we, defined by the boundaries of our chiaroscuro which represent our Janus-like masculine and feminine halves; each creates the other and seeks to realize and awaken itself as a unitary and whole being through dreaming the other.
Often have I written of the primary human act of rebellion and refusal to submit to authority, of negotiations and seizures of power versus authorized identities including those of sex and gender, of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle as both systems of oppression and as the limits of our forms, but when we interrogate our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty we must also consider that such systems of signs and representations also describe the work of integration and the origins of human consciousness.
The human psyche is both male and female within itself, anima and animus in Jungian terms, and because the soul is born from this dynamism we can seize control of our own evolution and processes of adaptation and becoming human through embrace of our darkness and chthonic elements of our unconscious, shadows which include the side of us which is the opposite gender of our conscious identity and sometimes of our absurd flesh in which we are bound to this life, this reality, this system of social contracts and agreements about human being, meaning, and value and about how to be human together, this sideral universe.
Our forms are an imposed condition of struggle parallel and interdependent with the systems of oppression which coevolve from this as recursive processes of adaptation and change, and nothing is more universal than our identities of sex and gender and the twin tyrannies of Patriarchy and theocracy we have made of it.
Biology is not destiny, but it is immensely powerful and determinative as a ground of struggle.
Among the legacies of our history there are those we must keep to remain who we are and those we must escape to become who we wish, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
How do we negotiate the boundaries and interfaces of our masculinity and femininity, processes of change which are recursive, chaotic, nuanced and complex, relative, conditional, ephemeral, a dialectics of truths and illusions and of authorized identities, simulacra, falsifications and systems of oppression versus our autonomy and self-creation, and a ground of struggle which lies at the heart of becoming human?
Idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty and identity live at the origins of our power of love and the forms it takes in our lives; If my female side could perform our truth on the stage of the world as songs, without any limits whatever, what would we sing?
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina | Straight to Hell Music Video Trailer | Netflix; because I love this version of Persephone’s myth. How if we must seize our power or be subjugated to that of others?
Little Red Riding Hood – Amanda Seyfried’s cover of the song; sung in a fragile voice filled with such anguish, loneliness, and the absurdity of hope.
I dare the darkness and the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, beyond all boundaries of the Forbidden.
Where is the wolf who can match my daring and embrace together the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves?
Where is my Red Hot Riding Hood, who like myself lives beyond all limits and all laws?
Each contained within the other, like a nested set of puzzle boxes bearing unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Wednesday dances; How if we must tell our stories, or be rewritten and falsified by others? How if we must dance our truths to free ourselves from those of others? I find it interesting that Jenna Ortega chose a queer cruising anthem for her signature dance, which confuses and conflates in ambiguous meanings the rituals of mating and hunting, as this Netflix series does as an extended metaphor and allegory of subversions of authorized identities of sex and gender
So for the anima; what of the animus? Who speaks for me in masculine register?
Lucifer’s Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
Do we live in a world where love cannot redeem anything, as it so often seems when we look into the Abyss?
Or do figments like Beauty and The Good exist because we create them, as Keats suggests?
Hope, faith, and love remain powers which cannot be taken from us and which can liberate us as truths, inherent adaptive powers which define the human, but are also ambiguous, relative, changing, and can be ephemeral and illusory as well.
With such unreliable instruments we must create our humanity from falsifiable informing, motivating, and shaping forces of history, memory, and identity, and win our authenticity from the hungry ghosts of authorized identities as simulacra.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
In loving others we become ourselves.
“Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
With film montage of Marvel’s Loki
Let us embrace our monstrosity and proclaim with Loki the Trickster; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
Like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pool, this; with second and third order consequences which propagate outward through time and the alternate universes produced by Rashomon Gate events.
In a world which is a museum of holocausts and atrocities, how do we live among the unknowns beyond the limits of the human and claw back something of our humanity from the darkness?
In refusal to submit to Authority we become Unconquered and free, but also marked by Otherness and often savaged by loneliness and the pathology of disconnectedness because we no longer truly belong. This is a problem because belonging is the only thing that balances fear as a means of social exchange. But it can also become a sacred wound which opens us to the pain of others.
How do we seize power from those who would enslave us, without becoming tyrants ourselves? To become the arbiter of virtue in an unjust world is a seductive phantasm of tyranny we must avoid, and revolutions tend to become tyrannies as a predictable phase of struggle due to the imposed conditions of struggle as unequal power and its legacies.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
David Bowie sings of Resistance, beyond hope of victory or survival: Shoshanna prepares for German Night in the film Inglorious Basterds, a song I post to signal that I now begin a Last Stand; that I am about to do something from which I see no possible chances of survival. This I have done more times that I can now remember, yet I remain to defy and defend. Love too is a total commitment beyond reason, a glorious mad quest to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
There are some things we must behave as if are true, regardless if they ever were or can be; love can redeem the flaws of our humanity, hope can triumph over despair and the terror of our nothingness, abjection, and learned helplessness, solidarity of action and faith in each other can be victorious over division and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, Resistance confers freedom as a condition of being and a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and as Rumi teaches us the Beauty that we do can bring healing to the brokenness of the world.
We celebrate Coming Out Day as a national holiday in America, in honor of a courageous marginalized community and in solidarity of liberation struggle with all those who perform their true and best selves on the stage of the world and our history, as exemplars of seizure of power from authorized identities including those of sex and gender and of the grandeur of self ownership and the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
I am not a member of this queer LGBT community, nor do I speak for them or with the voice of lived experience, though I am formed in part by three personal relationships with those who did so, William S. Burroughs who taught me magic and storytelling as a child, Susan Sontag who during my early university days taught me how to see beauty in art and life, and Jean Genet who set me on my life’s path by swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance during the second of my numberless Last Stands in Beirut 1982 as we were about to be burned alive by the Israeli Army and refused to surrender.
But I can speak regarding the broader meaning of this holiday, Breaking the Silence.
The image of Silenced Loki, a totemic ritual statue called the Snaptun Stone which depicts the Trickster god (in Old Norse, a class of beings literally termed “Devourer” and commonly translated as Giants) with his mouth sewn shut as a ritual sacrifice to silence his power to reorder the universe and change, subvert, manipulate, or evade its laws, has become part of our popular culture through the influence of Marvel comics and films, and a subject of discussion.
What does it mean? Why would a god whose power is imprisoned in his flesh and useless be an object of worship? Why has this part of his myth, so near a parallel to that of Prometheus, become central to Viking culture and assimilated into our own at this moment of history?
Silence Equals Death, as the AIDS activist movement of decades ago constructed Elie Weisel’s Silence is Complicity. As he teaches us in his Nobel Prize Speech; “I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
I remember: he asked his father: “Can this be true?” This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?
And now the boy is turning to me: “Tell me,” he asks. “What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?”
And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”
Primarily I see this in terms of Loki’s role as what Foucault called a truthteller, parrhesia in classical terms, like the Jester of King Lear, as in the Lokasenna when he satirizes and mocks the gods. I call this the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen in a free society of equals; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority. For there is no just authority, and our mission as Bringers of Chaos is to subvert and delegitimize tyrants, be they gods or men who would enslave us.
Secondarily this relates to Loki’s role as a source of poetic vision and inspiration, here in the context of his grand trick, the Wager of Loki, which resulted in the forging of Mjolnir as embodied lightning and other signature powers of the gods, the price of which was having his mouth sewn shut to seal his power, but of course he like Ulysses outwits the gods and escapes to reclaim his power of true speaking. This myth makes him a patron of smiths and creative arts, not a maker, but a muse; also a patron of truth tellers.
The image of Silenced Loki, terrible though it may be, refers to his willing sacrifice to forge the truths of others, to abandon power over others in favor of equality and the empowerment of others, and to guide others seizure of power as liberation. As such it was probably used by smiths to avert the dangers of their profession, a lightning rod and totemic patron.
Magic, like revolutionary struggle, always has a cost; among the first things one will need is something to bear that cost for us. Such is the purpose of Silenced Loki.
Loki is a patron of outlaws, especially those of sex and gender, who finds reflection in Virginia Woolf’s gender changing immortal time traveler Orlando, of revolutionaries and anarchists in his guise as Milton’s rebel angel in Paradise Lost, the primary text of the iconic Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, of gamblers, chance, and luck as a figure of Fortune, of lost causes and forlorn hopes and the unknown heroes who fight for them, of all those who survive not by force but by wit and guile and changing the rules of play, and of us all as the source of our idea of the devil and his fairytale version as Rumpelstiltskin. What god or devil was ever more terrible than the Maker of Deals?
Above all else, Loki is a patron of outcasts and exiles, the abandoned and the vilified, a champion and liberator who places his life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, and of their vengeance in bringing a Reckoning to those who would enslave us and in revolutionary struggle. In this aspect he resembles Frankenstein’s monster, a child abandoned because he is imperfect, bearer of a sacred wound which opens him to the pain of others, an innocent child trapped in the same flesh with a tortured and demonized thing of rage and pain, who wonders why others find him monstrous.
As the Matadors who rescued me from execution by a police death squad in Sao Paulo Brazil 1974 in the summer before high school said; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.” To stand with others in solidarity against vast systems of oppression and claw back something of our humanity from the darkness is to be a monster who hunts other monsters and defines the limits of the human, or so tyrants, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whom they serve, and their enforcers and apologists wish us to believe. But there are other truths, other stories, of our own which can liberate us from the Wilderness of Mirrors by which power seeks to falsify us; lies, illusions, propaganda, misdirections, rewritten histories and alternate realities.
But Loki is also a god and daemon of creativity, inspiration, poetic vision, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization, a bringer of Chaos who disrupts order, frees us from the tyranny of authority, and bears the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and say with Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
As written by Olivia Lang, in an essay entitled A Stitch in Time: Enforced Silence, or some thoughts on a mouth sewn shut in history and literature; ”The enduring symbolism of a sewn mouth, from the works of David Wojnarowicz to recent protests by refugees; “The light’s behind them. Four men, somewhere on the border between Greece and Macedonia. They can’t go forward, can’t go back. The man on the left has his eyes closed. He’s unshaven, a single freckle on his temple. The light is tangling in his hair, running down his forehead and catching on his chin. Head bowed, careful as a surgeon, the man opposite him is sewing up his mouth. The blue thread runs from lip to hand. The sewn man’s face is absolutely still, upturned to the sun. I don’t know where I first saw this photograph. Maybe it washed up on my Twitter feed. Later, I searched for it again, typing ‘refugee lip sewing’ into Google. This time, there were dozens of images, almost all of men, lips sewn shut with blue and scarlet thread. Afghan refugee, Athens. Australian immigration centre in Papua New Guinea. Stuck on the Balkan borders, a first smattering of snow.
The mouth is for speaking. But how do you speak if no one’s listening, if your voice is prohibited or no one understands your tongue? You make a migrant image, an image that can travel where you cannot. An Afghan boy who spent three years at the beginning of the millennium on Nauru – the off-shore processing camp for refugees attempting to reach Australia – told the website Solidarity.net.au: ‘My brother didn’t sew his lips but he was part of the hunger strike. He became unconscious and was sent to the hospital. Every time someone became unconscious we would send a picture to the media.’
The first time I encountered lip sewing as protest was in Rosa von Praunheim’s extraordinary 1990 AIDS documentary, Silence = Death. One of the interviewees was the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. A former street kid, a gay man who had recently been diagnosed with AIDS, he talked with great eloquence and fury about the different kinds of silence ranged against him. He spoke of what it had been like to grow up queer; the need to keep his sexuality secret because of the omnipresent threat of violence. He spoke of the silence of politicians, whose refusal to confront AIDS was hastening his own oncoming death. And, as he talked, footage he’d collaged together appeared on screen: a kaleidoscope of distress, which was later given the title A Fire in My Belly (1986–87). Ants crawl over a crucifix; a puppet dances on its strings; money pours from bandaged hands; a mouth is sewn shut, blood trickling from puncture wounds. What is the stitched mouth doing? If silence equals death, the biting slogan of AIDS activists, then part of the work of resistance is to make visible the people who are being silenced. Carefully, carefully, the needle works through skin, self-inflicted damage announcing larger harm. ‘I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice,’ Wojnarowicz says. ‘I feel this incredible pressure to leave something of myself behind.’ You make an image to communicate what is unsayable in words. You make an image to go on beyond you, to speak when you no longer can. The image can survive its creator’s death, but that doesn’t mean it is immune to the same forces of silencing that it protests. In 2010, nearly two decades after Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at the age of 37, A Fire in My Belly was removed from a landmark exhibition of gay art at the Smithsonian, in Washington DC, following complaints from right-wing politicians and the Catholic League. This time, the stitched mouth became a symbol of censorship. At protests, people held up posters of Wojnarowicz’s face, lantern-jawed, implacable, five stitches locking shut his lips. Both images are in front of me now: stitches in time, reporting from the past. Wojnarowicz is dead; God knows where the man on the Greek border is. In other photos from the same protest, men sit or stand on train tracks, holding hand-lettered signs on scraps of dirty cardboard: ONLY FREEDOM and OPEN THE BORDER. They are bare-chested, wrapped in blankets, ranked against police with riot shields and bulletproof vests. The word ‘stitch’ is a double-edged prayer. It means the least bit of anything – the stigmatized, say, or the devalued. And it means to join together, mend or fasten, a hope powerful enough to drive a needle through bare flesh.”
As written by Doug Dorst in his blog Monkeys and Rabbit Holes, which annotates his magnificent translation and metafictional commentary on the novel Ship of Theseus by the mythic and possibly fictional revolutionary V. M. Straka, in an article entitled Enforced Silence, or some thoughts on a mouth sewn shut in history and literature;” In Ship of Theseus, S. sails on a ship with sailors whose mouths are sewn shut. Eventually he joins them and undergoes the procedure himself. It is a continuous motif in SOT and appears several times.
Typically a mouth sewn shut is a motif more at home in the horror genre, body modification enthusiasts, and more recently as a form of actual political protest as google brought up several pages of such events.
Loki may be the first victim of this practice. Loki had his mouth sewn shut with wire after losing a bet with some dwarves. He had wagered his head in the bet (which Loki then lost), but refused to let the dwarves take his head if they couldn’t remove his head without leaving his neck intact. Instead, the dwarves sewed his mouth shut for his slick way with words. According to wikipedia, this myth is the basis for the logical fallacy “Loki’s wager,” which “is the unreasonable insistence that a concept cannot be defined, and therefore cannot be discussed.”
The next instance is found in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The first installment, published in 1605, is considered one of the world’s great masterworks. At one point in the book, Sancho tells Don Quixote, “Senor Don Quixote, give me your worship’s blessing and dismissal, for I’d like to go home at once to my wife and children with whom I can at any rate talk and converse as much as I like; for to want me to go through these solitudes day and night and not speak to you when I have a mind is burying me alive. If luck would have it that animals spoke as they did in the days of Guisopete, it would not be so bad, because I could talk to Rocinante about whatever came into my head, and so put up with my ill-fortune; but it is a hard case, and not to be borne with patience, to go seeking adventures all one’s life and get nothing but kicks and blanketings, brickbats and punches, and with all this to have to sew up one’s mouth without daring to say what is in one’s heart, just as if one were dumb.”
In 1827, it appears again in the Atheneaum. The piece is titled Painters-Authoresses-Women, but it is not attributed to any author. “It was easier to look in the glass than to make a dull canvas shine like a lucid mirror; and, as to talking, Sir Joshua used to say, a painter should sew up his mouth.”
Here is the illuminating essay written by Patrick Nathan in The Paris Review; “For David Wojnarowicz, this decade has been a renaissance. He plays a guiding spirit in Olivia Laing’s 2016 internal travelogue, The Lonely City, and haunts the 2011 music video for Justice’s “Civilization.” In last year’s retrospective, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, the Whitney Museum reminded us that Wojnarowicz “came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes.” We recognize that decade in our own, and, with it, Wojnarowicz’s anger. Our present is magnetized to his past. His art, as Hanya Yanagihara wrote, “reminds you that there is a distinction between cynicism and anger, because the work, while angry, is rarely bitter—bitterness is the absence of hope; anger is hope’s companion.” In truth, renaissance is a cruel word to give to someone who died at thirty-seven. But we do love him. We do need him.
Some things to know about who we are:
We are trapped in a moment of political terror. We are dangerously close to cynicism, but angry enough to have hope. We are no longer interested in compromise. Men, we agree, have had their chance. White women we can no longer trust to uphold feminism, not while they cling to white supremacy. We are antiracist and antifascist and prison abolitionists; we rejoiced when Bill Cosby received his sentence. We canceled Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Al Franken with equal fervor. We are uninterested in what they think.
Welcome to we: a disingenuous pronoun that both paid and unpaid pundits alike brandish without consent. I’m often guilty, too: my points are more convincing if I ventriloquize your voice alongside mine. Are we really doing this? Is this what we want? When did we decide this was okay? As usual, Adorno said it best: “To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.” More often than not, we is an erasure, a linguistic illusion that you or I have endorsed some third person’s opinion, politics, or decisions. Deployed in politicized spaces, the subtext of we—i.e., I didn’t need to ask you—is a violation of political agency.
What’s dangerous in maligning we, however, is how badly I—a cisgender white man living in America—need to hear these voices. Often, the contemporary we is a backlash against centuries of a white cishet male monolith, which includes the we in the Constitution. It’s a backlash voiced by women, people of color, trans and nonbinary persons, and persons with disabilities. As Wesley Morris wrote for the New York Times last year, “Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginalized. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it.” Morris casts this moment as an inversion of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, when artists like Wojnarowicz faced censorship and humiliation from the religious right. After pushing their work to extremes and waging costly legal and political campaigns—including, in Wojnarowicz’s case, the very right to survive as a queer artist—the oppressed are now closer to power than ever. “This territory,” Morris writes, “was so hard won that it must be defended at all times, at any costs. Wrongs have to be righted. They can’t affect social policy—not directly. They can, however, amend the culture.” It’s in this sense that we becomes linguistic action. We cosign or cancel speech, endorse or excoriate art, all the while presuming that any I can borrow any you. We amplifies our voices as one, an assumption of power.
While Morris’s essay is a sensitive, observant, and smart examination of ethics in contemporary art, and while I’m grateful to have read and reread it, my first impulse upon seeing its subheading (“Should art be a battleground for social justice?”) was to throw the magazine across the room and tweet something like, “Do we really need another man whispering ‘art for art’s sake’ as he pins us against the wall?” This is what our politics has done to me as a queer artist. I carry so much anger that even the threat of some man saying, Let’s not get carried away, triggers rage.
Or perhaps more exact: revenge.
I want to believe we need Wojnarowicz’s art, but I can only say that I need it. I burn for its juxtapositions, the shadows in his photographs, and the narrative ambition of his paintings—exuberant perversions of renaissance epics. Close to the Knives, his “memoir of disintegration,” immolates me entirely. Like many queers in the seventies, Wojnarowicz grew up neglected and abused, prostituting his body by the time he was fifteen. As an artist, he received no formal training—only critique from other queer artists, including his one-time lover, Peter Hujar, whose body became one of his subjects. Hujar’s face and hands and feet, photographed on his deathbed in 1987, found their way into one of Wojnarowicz’s collages, lacquered over with a fiery indictment of the society that let this happen to a man he loved; and then Wojnarowicz, too, died, with so much art left unmade.
Reading Wojnarowicz today—that is, in his words, “in a country where an actor becomes the only acceptable president … a man whose vocation is to persuade with words and actions an audience who wants to believe whatever he tells them”—empowers me. Art “can be reparatory,” Morris writes, “a means for the oppressed and ignored to speak,” and Wojnarowicz’s anger makes me feel as if it’s my right to demand silence from those I perceive to have oppressed queer people, or even those who just don’t have the luck of being queer. I feel as if it’s my right to shun artworks in which I don’t recognize myself or my friends. To not see oneself mirrored in culture feels like abuse, every renewed act of erasure newly unbearable.
While Morris writes about art specifically, his essay reflects a tendency in discourse overall toward separating, totally, that which we call bearable from that which we decide is not. This is the subject of Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. “At many levels of human interaction,” she writes, “there is an opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” As social creatures, communication and negotiation are human responsibilities. Activities that work against communication—shunning, silencing, and enlisting the power of the state to punish rather than resolve—shirk this responsibility, and are unfortunately common among vulnerable persons, for whom withdrawal and refusal are often the only communication skills they possess. This leaves both parties trapped—one behind a locked door they won’t open, the other outside. Schulman describes her struggle to understand her colleagues, who, despite their liberal politics, have developed an “almost prescribed instinct to punish, using the language originated initially by a radical movement but now co-opted to deny complexity, due process, and the kind of in-person, interactive conversation that produces resolution.” This language is that of “abuse,” which has a perpetrator and a victim.
In situations of abuse (ask yourself: is this a power struggle or does this person have power over me?), victims are indeed blameless. But Schulman’s thesis outlines how what often feels like abuse is instead conflict—a point of pain in need of resolution, arrived at only through honest and open communication, which can, and often does, hurt: “the collapse of Conflict and Abuse is partly the result of a punitive standard in which people are made desperate, yet ineligible, for compassion.” The state and its systems of power withhold assistance and compassion from those who are not “eligible.” This creates a system where the identity of victim is desired, if only to ensure one is met with compassion instead of derision. “This concept,” Schulman writes, “is predicated on a need to enforce that one party is entirely righteous and without mistake, while the other is the Specter, the residual holder of all evil.” Anyone who endured the punditry after the 2016 elections will understand why labeling oneself an economic or demographic victim can be toxic. In a sociological refusal to communicate, 63 million voters escalated decades of capitalist-driven conflict by turning their pain into a sacrosanct identity, regardless of how it would, and has, hurt millions of people far more severely than any pain, however legitimate, those voters felt.
Schulman’s ideas on conflict, communication, escalation, abuse, and repair encourage us to accept individual responsibility, however small, for as many of the conflicts in one’s life as we can stand. Yet it remains necessary to distinguish these conflicts from abuse. What’s interesting about Schulman’s essay is how it intersects with urgent questions of speech, de-platforming, and “cancelation.” Her insistence upon open and respectful communication seems like an inversion of the tactics of silence, shunning, exclusion, and sometimes of violence used by antifascist groups for decades to combat authoritarian politics. The strategies of antifascism contradict everything Schulman says in her plea toward mutual understanding and conflict resolution, but only in the way that shouting over Ann Coulter, for example, seems like an infringement upon her right to incite violence through “free speech.” The error here is to call fascism a conflict.
A primary goal of Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook is to illuminate the “trans-historical terror of fascism,” which is never a “defeated” enemy but a constant reactionary threat as long as inequality and suffering are tolerated. History is not fixed or written but being written. The post-Holocaust slogan—“Never again!”—is not a fact, observation, or conclusion, but a plea for understanding. As Bray writes, “History is a complex tapestry stitched together by threads of continuity and discontinuity… [Anti-fascism] is an argument about the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.” It could indeed happen again—maybe tomorrow—and one needs to recognize it, contain it, and drive it back out of sight. These tactics don’t seek to understand the conflict and work toward resolution because there is no understanding, nor resolution; there is, in fact, no conflict. Fascism is abuse, and its evangelists know it. As Bray says, “The point here is not tactics; it is politics.” Just as an abusive parent or partner has no right to demand that his victim sit down and hear his case (again: “power over,” not “power struggle”), a political system that is predicated on the oppression and elimination of human beings from the populace based on race, legal history, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, or ability has no right to a national platform, and merits resistance over resolution. Fascism assumes a false mask of victimhood—one that seems like a “politics in conflict”—in order to undermine those who’d speak against it. But fascism is not a politics in conflict: it is a politics of abuse on a national and transnational scale. Antifascism seeks a way out of trauma; fascism governs with it.
At the Morgan Library in New York, I saw Peter Hujar’s portrait of David Wojnarowicz, gaunt and severely shadowed, dark-eyed, a cigarette in mid drag; and I felt it, around my neck. Love there, and admiration. Grief. Seeing how Hujar saw his ex-lover, friend, and fellow artist seized me entirely. I didn’t understand why I was trembling. It just happened as these things happen—and, for me, are happening more and more. Last year, T magazine ran a special issue on the early eighties in New York. On one page, Edmund White remembered friends, writers, and artists who’d died young: “I was just thinking of Allen Barnett, who lived to publish one book of stories … He was so angry that he had to die.” On another page, the faces of over a hundred artists, choreographers, writers, performers, designers, and cinematographers “lost” to HIV related illnesses. I had no choice: I sobbed. The same thing happened with Tom Bianchi’s Polaroids of Fire Island in the early eighties, in which young men, naked or mostly naked, smile there on the sand, playing and drinking and fucking and loving each other with no idea what awaits them. “I could not have imagined,” Bianchi writes, “that my Polaroids would so suddenly become a record of a lost world—my box of pictures a mausoleum, too painful to visit. When I reopened the box decades later, I found friends and lovers playing and smiling. Alive again.” Even this, reread so many times, is hard to transcribe.
I began having sex with men in 2006. HIV is not only a treatable illness, but, thanks to PrEP, easier to avoid contracting than ever. I’ve lost no one to AIDS. I was a child when it decimated queer communities across the world. Because of this, it’s taken me a long time to understand that there is still trauma here, that for me to look back and see what has happened, and to see the people—the Reagan administration, state and local governments, charity organizations, and “normal Americans”—who stood by and let it happen, is for me a trauma I’m allowed to feel. It’s traumatic to know how many influential figures called it punishment, called it God, and how many millions nodded along with them. It’s traumatic that I believed, long after the documented success of antiretroviral therapy, that HIV was certain death. It’s traumatic to imagine myself and my friends in that other decade, losing all the men in my life I love and have loved, all while someone laughs on television, where they are paid to say, You had it coming.
Yes, they called me faggot, bullied me and threatened me; yes, I pushed myself so deeply into the closet that I thought I was someone else, hurting a lot of people in the process; and yes, I carry scars from those years when I craved physical pain instead of pain I couldn’t articulate. But no one I love died, not like that. Nor do I understand these intense reactions as merely empathetic, because I feel them a hundredfold more strongly than when I encounter the pain of people suffering in other situations. Instead—to adapt a phrase from Bray—this feels like transhistorical queer trauma. Not long ago, people like me suffered unimaginably and died in isolation, cut off not only from civil and social apparatuses but often their families; and this happened because those people were like me. Through shunning, violence, intimidation, and legislation, a society had so othered LGBTQ individuals that their drawn out and brutal deaths seemed permissible, even desirable. And alongside those deaths, what was a few million drug users, homeless persons, and black Americans living in abject poverty? Because of white supremacist and heteropatriarchal ideologies, a virus became a weapon of the state, allowed first to proliferate and then, once activists had pushed back hard enough, to be contained, managed, and controlled by federal subsidies and corporate pharmaceutical research.
I’m not stupid enough to think “never again” calls for anything but constant vigilance. In February of 2018, the White House proposed a 20% cut in the nation’s global HIV/AIDS fund, which would lead, according to a report issued by ONE.org, to “nearly 300,000 deaths and more than 1.75 million new infections each year.” On June 1 of this year, the president logged onto Twitter and mentioned how we would “celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation,” despite everything his administration and party have done to strip trans persons of their safety and their rights, to obstruct federal and state protections for queer families and workers. It’s especially tempting to ask this transphobic autocrat what he believes the T stands for when he reminds the nation to celebrate LGBT people, but that’s beside the point. It’s not ignorance that emanates from the White House. It is not a politics in conflict. No matter how many rainbow emoji the president tweets, his queer politics is death, hate, and exclusion. It is a legacy of abuse, and perhaps it’s only natural to feel it across generations, to break down sobbing when I discover another artist or writer or human being who was, not that many years ago, “so angry that he had to die.”
Those 63 million votes: was each an act of abuse? I want to say yes—I believed they were for a long time. As Bray indicates, “It is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamaphobia, and many more hateful traits.” For me and the people I love, these votes felt cruel, and while I’m no longer sure about saying yes, I don’t question my choice to end every relationship I had with anyone who used their vote to inflict such irresponsible, widespread harm.
Every fascist regime has snuck into power through legal means with a relatively small majority. In the 1930 elections, shortly before Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reichstag, the Nazis received 18.3% of the vote. When Vittorio Emanuele III appointed Mussolini as prime minister in 1922, after 30,000 blackshirts marched theatrically on Rome, the PNF only held thirty-five of more than five hundred seats. In 2016, Trump received over 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. As I write this, there are thirty-one states—plus D.C.—with party registration. In those states, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 12 million; yet Republicans currently control sixty-seven of the ninety-nine state legislative bodies and hold a majority in the Senate. Supremacist ideologies don’t need that many fervent supporters; what they do need is indifference. In the case of Trump voters, Bray continues, “it is always important to distinguish between ideologues and their capricious followers, yet we cannot overlook how these popular bases of support create the foundations for fascism to manifest itself.”
Here is where the difference between conflict and abuse becomes a societal urgency. I’m not going to mince words. The Republican party, championing Islamophobia, denying and exacerbating climate change, stripping trans persons of their rights, supporting police brutality against the black community, incarcerating immigrants and separating children from their families—in short, committing crime upon crime against humanity—is a global terrorist organization rooted not only in white supremacy, but the supremacy of wealth. It’s hard to see class in America—to see poverty as an identity—because the American fabrication is that today’s poor, through obedience and hard work, will be rich tomorrow. It’s a story that hides an oppressed class in plain sight of people who serve as a ready-made voting base for the rich, as long as the rich grant them whiteness, heteronormativity, male supremacy, or some other power over those more deeply oppressed. These are those who might not champion the oppression of others, but go along with it as a price paid for a seat at the table.
It’s difficult to accept responsibility for this transaction, so enticing is its reward: state-sponsored victimhood. To take an example from Schulman, the white queer community doesn’t want to hear that today, “with gay marriage and parenthood prevalent, and the advent of gay nuclear families and normalized queer childbirth … white queer families realign with the state that held them in pervasive illegality less than a generation ago.” At the same time, this community still sees itself as unable to do harm, so entrenched is its history with victimhood. To challenge this is perceived as antiqueer ideology: of course we have the right to families, to suburbs, to lattes and plaid. But so, too, do white queers, in their newfound positions of power, have newfound responsibility to uphold the greater community, and to use their privilege to resolve conflicts with the trans community and queers of color, not to mention other oppressed and persecuted communities.
There is a similarity in action, Schulman says, in both the supremacist and the victim. This is born of refusal: “For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent ‘right’ not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation.” For the conflicted, seeing their pain mirrored in another can become a way to justify pain: at least she feels what I feel, or even at least he’s worse off than me. What this creates is an ongoing and mutually reflective theater of trauma in which everyone is a victim, exempt from responsibility, beyond repair.
We live in a misogynistic, racist, homo- and transphobic, ableist, violent, and viciously unequal country whose relatively small population (4.4% of the world) and vast wealth (25%) leave us, individual voters, responsible for the fate and future of this planet as its oceans rise and reefs die, as its air grows increasingly contaminated and water less potable. To feel so powerless and yet accountable for the future of the human race means that the sheer number of traumatized persons living in America is staggering. We are rooted in a country created by two concurrent genocides and supported by two centuries of wars, spectacular terrorism, theft, and global oppression. What’s worse, as Schulman argues, traumatized persons, through their actions, amplify and spread trauma to others by shunning, bullying, silencing, scapegoating, and threatening; they cling to what little they’re given as payment for their complicity in worldwide destruction at the profit of a small minority of white, wealthy men.
What use am I, and who is profiting from my trauma? How has my pain been weaponized and turned against others to stoke greater conflict? These are questions every American should ask themselves, particularly as we enter the nauseating theater of the 2020 elections and what lies beyond.
Conflict is profitable. Not only is this obvious in two hundred years of U.S. foreign policy, but in millennia of art and entertainment: escalation is dramatic, and drama, if it doesn’t affect us directly, is cathartic. It’s fun to say, Did you see what he said about her? and to watch a conflict get worse. There’s a reason journalists crank the apocalypse up to eleven every time the president tweets. It keeps readers coming back. Resolution is boring. Resolution is unprofitable. A played-out resolution is not a drama but an education: you too are responsible, rather than, watch this. Resisting this is not easy, fast, or efficient—three values Americans cherish. To be conflicted, to explore one’s accountability in a relationship, this is not what makes an individual spectacularly eligible for compassion. Only victimhood opens that coffer, and whoever screams loudest gets the prize.
What is needed is a queering of compassion. To move beyond the truly rare (but extant) binaries of perpetrator and victim, it’s important that every individual recognizes their existence in a continuum of conflict, and seeks to resolve and repair rather than escalate and destroy. We—and here I do mean every single one of us—must question individual guilt, which is rooted in action, rather than shame, which is entrenched in identity. Because when we insist upon the binary—that everyone is either perpetrator or victim—the cost is literal human life. One need only to look to all the Black Americans murdered by police, summoned by a white neighbor’s perceived victimhood, amplified by the aesthetics of entertainment.
The we I want to belong to is the we that recognizes our vast diversity of pain—the we that understands we’ve been assigned this pain for someone else’s profit, and that we need no longer give them want they want. To reserve compassion only for victims deemed eligible is to accept an arbitrary division, one in which the state can deem some of us worthy of aid and exclude others, meanwhile ensuring that the victims never speak to one another, competing as they must to remain in their places. Is it so revolutionary to say that every human being is eligible for compassion? That men and women of any gender or sexuality, any skin color, any ability, any legal or migratory status, any age, receive the same compassionate understanding as any other, responsible only for their actions and not the identities coerced upon them by others? To believe otherwise is to let fascism shatter our society.”
Loki montage to the song Would You Turn Your Back On Me? (Monster)
David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, by Giancarlo Ambrosino, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor), Chris Kraus (Editor), Hedi El Kholti (Editor), Justin Cavin (Editor), Jennifer Doyle (Afterword)
With one simple order Trump has brought our client state of Israel to heel and ended the horror, break with all tradition of western civilization, and abandonment of our universal human rights which the Gaza War represents.
That he or any American President could have done the same at any time during the last seventy years of Israeli Occupation and imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors will forever remain a legacy of our history with which we must Reckon and bring healing.
This is of course presuming that Trump’s Peace, and we may unquestionably call it so, is real and lasting, that America can maintain her will to become the guarantor of our universal human rights we once were or dreamed, that we can maintain control of our mad dog Israel, and that a balance can be restored which ensures the liberty and equality of both nations as partners in becoming human.
We can spend all of our lives and those of generations to come parsing the meaning of balance in this case, and negotiating how to be human together, between one people divided by history and identity politics along with America and the whole international community.
Or we can seize the moment now, and reimagine and transform both Israel and Palestine as one united nation wherein all divisions of faith, race, and national identity are abandoned and wholeness restored.
Our futures are most probably somewhere between these two scales of balance, but the one thing we cannot sacrifice among all our possible futures is that the people of Israel and Palestine must be equal partners in choosing their own future and vision of who they wish to become.
There may be a transition period in which America and the international community must be guarantors of peace and our human rights, and any just future must include reparations to Palestine and her rebuilding and trial of the Israeli war criminals, but one cannot compel virtue at the point of a gun, only obedience, and this creates slaves and not citizens. There are other, better ways to build democracy.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue; let us be liberators, and not colonizers.
As written in The Palestine Chronicle, in an article entitled ‘They Stood Like Mountains’: Al-Hayya Hails Gaza’s People as Ceasefire Takes Effect; “Khalil al-Hayya, head of the Palestinian Resistance Movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the chief Palestinian negotiator, announced that an agreement has been reached to end the war and aggression against the Palestinian people, following two years of a brutal and ceaseless Israeli campaign that killed over 67,000 Palestinians.
In a speech broadcast on Al-Jazeera, al-Hayya said the movement had dealt responsibly with US President Donald Trump’s plan, which led to the announcement of a ceasefire agreement during the Sharm el-Sheikh negotiations.
He affirmed that Hamas had received guarantees from the mediators and the US administration, and that all parties confirmed the war had “completely ended.”
The agreement, according to al-Hayya, includes the entry of humanitarian aid, the reopening of the Rafah crossing, and a large-scale prisoner exchange involving 250 Palestinians serving life sentences and 1,700 detainees from Gaza who were arrested after October 7, 2023, in addition to all women and children.
Al-Hayya emphasized that Hamas will continue to coordinate with all national and Islamic factions to complete the remaining steps outlined in the Trump plan.
He also expressed deep appreciation for the mediators — Egypt, Qatar, and Turkiye — and extended gratitude to “our brothers in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, and to all the free people around the world who stood in solidarity with us, especially those who joined the land and sea convoys for Gaza.”
The Hamas leader described the steadfastness of Gaza’s residents as unparalleled in modern history.
“The world stands astonished by the sacrifices, steadfastness, and patience of the people of Gaza,” he said, adding that they fought “a war unlike any the world has ever seen” and stood firm against the enemy’s “tyranny, brutality, and massacres.”
He praised the people of Gaza for standing “like mountains,” enduring relentless killing, displacement, hunger, and the loss of family and homes without ever wavering.
Al-Hayya paid tribute to the leaders of the October 7, 2023 operation — Ismail Haniyeh, Saleh al-Arouri, Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Deif — calling them the commanders of the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
He lauded the heroism of resistance fighters who “fought from point-blank range and stood like a mighty mountain against the occupation’s tanks,” asserting that they thwarted Israel’s attempts to displace the population, impose starvation, and create chaos while Israel “stalled, committed massacre after massacre, and sabotaged mediation efforts.”
He concluded his statement by affirming that “for two years, Gaza has been defending Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa and fighting the enemy with all bravery,” stressing Hamas’ commitment to continue working with national and Islamic forces to implement the remaining stages of the agreement.”
Sadly I imagine that the Netanyahu regime and many Israelis will not see things quite the same way.
An interesting revision to Trump’s plan for Gaza has been written by Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares in Al Jazeera, in an article entitled A decolonised alternative to Trump’s Gaza peace plan: Only a decolonised plan centred on Palestinian sovereignty can bring lasting peace to Gaza; “United States President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan offers some constructive proposals on hostages, humanitarian aid, and reconstruction. Yet it is marred by an unmistakable colonial framework: Gaza is to be overseen by Trump himself, with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other outsiders cast as trustees for Palestinian governance, while Palestinian statehood is deferred indefinitely.
This logic is not new. It repeats the century-long Anglo-American approach to Palestine, beginning with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, when the UK acquired the Mandate over Palestine, and continuing through successive US interventions, direct and indirect, in the region since 1945.
A real peace plan must eliminate the colonial scaffolding. It should restore Palestinian sovereignty by addressing the central issue: Palestinian statehood. The plan must empower the Palestinian Authority (PA) by establishing that it holds governance from the outset, that economic planning is exclusively in Palestinian hands, that no external “viceroys” intervene, and that a clear and short timeline is set for Israeli withdrawal and full Palestinian sovereignty by the start of 2026.
What follows is a truly decolonised alternative — a plan that builds on these principles. It retains the practical elements of Trump’s proposal but removes its colonial underpinnings. It places Palestinians, not foreign “trustees”, at the centre of governance and reconstruction. Crucially, it aligns with international law, including the 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice, the recent resolution of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), and the recognition of Palestine by 157 countries around the world.
This revised plan preserves Trump’s core elements related to the release of hostages, the end of fighting, the withdrawal of the Israeli army, emergency humanitarian relief, and the reconstruction of the war-torn Palestine, while eliminating the colonial language and baggage. Readers may compare this version point by point with the original Trump plan available here.
The revised 20-point plan: The Trump plan with no colonial strings attached
1. Palestine and Israel will be terror-free countries that do not pose a threat to their neighbours.
2. Palestine will be redeveloped for the benefit of the Palestinians, who have suffered more than enough.
3. If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end. Israeli forces will withdraw to the agreed line to prepare for a hostage release. All military operations will end.
4. Within 72 hours of both sides publicly accepting this agreement, all hostages, alive and deceased, will be returned.
5. Once all hostages are released, Israel will release life sentence prisoners plus Palestinians who were detained after 7 October 2023.
6. Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.
7. Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip. At a minimum, aid quantities will be consistent with what was included in the January 19, 2025 agreement regarding humanitarian aid, including rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage), rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries, and entry of necessary equipment to remove rubble and open roads.
8. Entry of distribution and aid in the Gaza Strip will proceed without interference from the two parties through the UN and its agencies, and the Red Crescent, in addition to other international institutions not associated in any manner with either party. Opening the Rafah crossing in both directions will be subject to the same mechanism implemented under the January 19, 2025 agreement.
9. Palestine, and Gaza as an integral part of it, will be governed by the PA. International advisers may support this effort, but sovereignty lies with the Palestinians.
10. The PA, supported by a panel of Arab-region experts and outside experts as may be chosen by the Palestinians, will develop a reconstruction and development plan. Outside proposals may be considered, but economic planning will be Arab-led.
11. A special economic zone may be established by the Palestinians, with tariffs and access rates negotiated by Palestine and partner countries.
12. No one will be forced to leave any sovereign Palestinian territory. Those who wish to leave may do so freely and return freely.
13. Hamas and other factions will have no role in governance. All military and terror infrastructure will be dismantled and decommissioned, verified by independent monitors.
14. Regional partners will guarantee that Hamas and other factions comply, ensuring that Gaza poses no threat to its neighbours or its own people.
15. Arab and international partners, as per the invitation of Palestine, will deploy a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF) beginning November 1, 2025, to support and train Palestinian security, in consultation with Egypt and Jordan. The ISF will secure borders, protect the population, and facilitate the rapid movement of goods to rebuild Palestine.
16. Israel will neither occupy nor annex Gaza or the West Bank. Israeli forces will fully withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territory by December 31, 2025, as the ISF and Palestinian security establish control.
17. If Hamas delays or rejects the proposal, aid and reconstruction will proceed in areas under ISF and PA authority.
18. An interfaith dialogue process will be established to promote tolerance and peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis.
19. The State of Palestine will govern its full sovereign territory as of January 1, 2026, in line with the September 12 resolution of the UNGA and the 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice.
20. The US will immediately recognise a sovereign State of Palestine, with permanent UN membership, as a peaceful nation living side by side with the State of Israel.
How our plan differs from the Trump plan
The revised 20-point plan, in short, is not radically different in form from Trump’s. It retains provisions for demilitarisation, humanitarian relief, economic reconstruction, and interfaith dialogue. The main difference lies with Palestinian sovereignty and statehood.
Palestinian sovereignty and statehood: Trump’s version deferred Palestinian statehood to some indefinite future, contingent on reforms and external approval. The decolonised plan sets firm dates: Israel withdraws by November 1, 2025, and Palestine assumes full sovereignty by January 1, 2026, 126 years since the Treaty of Versailles.
Colonial oversight removed: Trump’s proposal created a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump himself, with Blair as a leading member. The decolonised plan eliminates this, recognising that Palestinians require no foreign viceroys. Governance rests with the Palestinians from day one.
Economic sovereignty: Trump’s plan announced a “Trump Economic Development Plan” to remake Gaza. The decolonised plan leaves economic planning to the Palestinians, supported by Arab experts, with outside proposals considered only at Palestinian discretion.
End of Anglo-American trusteeship: Trump cast the US as the guarantor and arbiter of the Palestinian future, with the support of the UK. The decolonised plan explicitly ends this 100-year model, affirming Palestinian and Arab leadership.
For more than a century, Palestinians have been subjected to external colonial control: British Mandate rule, US diplomatic dominance, Israeli occupation, and periodic schemes of trusteeship, as in Trump’s new plan. From the Balfour Declaration to Versailles to Oslo to Trump’s “Board of Peace”, Palestinians have not been treated as sovereign actors. This plan corrects that and recognises that the Palestinian people are a nation of enormous talents, and highly educated and experienced experts. They don’t need tutelage. They need sovereignty.
Our revised plan affirms that Palestinians, through their own authority, must finally and at long last govern themselves, make their own economic choices, and chart their own destiny. International actors may advise and support them, but they must not impose their will. The withdrawal of Israel and the recognition of Palestine’s sovereignty must be fixed and non-negotiable milestones.
A real peace plan must be aligned with international law, including the clear-cut rulings of the International Court of Justice and the UN resolutions. A real peace plan must be aligned with the overwhelming will of the global community that supports the implementation of the two-state solution. All parties to the peace plan should subscribe to this framework. This is the moment for honesty, global resolve, and moral clarity. Only practical steps that implement Palestinian sovereignty and statehood will bring lasting peace.”
Herein I must clearly state for the historical record that any true and durable peace must emerge from the reimagination and transformation of Israel as well as Palestine into secular democracies in which faith has no legal privilege, beginning with regime change in Israel and the trial for war crimes of Netanyahu and all who are complicit in the command and commission of genocide and other crimes against humanity, the total demilitarization and disarmament of Israel exactly the same as Hamas or any other force of armed combatants, and the rebuilding of Gaza and reparations to the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and others who have suffered Israeli violence.
Moreover, I and many Palestinians do not regard the current Palestinian Authority as anything other than a Vichy state of Israeli colonialism; I believe what we need as a caretaker government is a Confederation of Palestinian States in which all her peoples are co-owners, including representatives of de facto governments or polities such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
As an American, however, among my primary areas of interest must be the consequences of our shameful and criminal history regarding Palestine. Because what its done to us is also a tragedy, and one which remains a ground of struggle.
As I wrote in my post of November 24 2024, A Stain of Cruelty On Our Armour: America’s Complicity In the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians; There’s a stain of cruelty on our armour, my fellow Americans, to paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; and the twistings and turnings of time and fate which have brought us to this place are many and strange indeed.
An aphorism from my youth promises us that hurricanes are born with the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings; soon we may have opportunity to test that proposition.
We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.
On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.
In Palestine and Lebanon our taxes buy the deaths of children.
Let us return to First Principles with a simple question; Who is suffering and in need of mercy? It is a similar question to the one I ask to determine when and how to use force and violence, Who holds power?, but with a very different direction as to the unfolding of our future.
Here in a Holy Land divided by the sectarian particulars of how to be human together in accord with the will of the Infinite as universal brotherhood and love, crimes which define the limits of the human are perpetrated against our most innocent, utterly powerless, and incapable of threatening anyone; children. Children whom the enemy of our humanity, the state of Israel and its sponsors including America, either brutalize and kill with glee in the hysteria of power or refuse to see and recognize in complicity. And our history surfaces one figure to represent all of the children sacrificed to power and hate, and doomed by the complicity of silence.
I ask you now, all of humankind, to abandon the path of our dehumanization and renounce genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars of conquest and dominion, and crimes against humanity.
I ask, I beg, I demand; I ask you in the name of Anne Frank.
As I wrote in my post of May 21 2024, Abjection Despair Horror: Surviving the Terror of Our Nothingness in the Mirror Of Gaza; In the mirror of Gaza the Abyss looks back at us, and we are captives of the distorted funhouse images of Israel and America, vestiges of dreams as refuge of the outcasts and guarantor of our universal human rights, and the monsters we have now become.
I can recognize nothing in the figures which confront us, and though I hurl defiance at the endless chasms of darkness my words find no limit and return no echoes, as if devoured by the Nothing.
Yet I am neither defeated by the overwhelming force and terror of Authority nor subjugated by despair and learned helplessness, for this is the space where I live, this horror, this joy, this freedom.
As Jean Genet said to me in 1982 during the Siege of Beirut, in a lost cause, in a burning house, in a time of great darkness; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
I hope that this remains true, for all of us as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history and seize our power from systems of oppression, for this is the great task of becoming human, in general and in this Rashomon Gate Event now unfolding in Rafah and elsewhere; to dream impossible things and make them real.
There are some things which should be true even if they never were, even if Keats was wrong and finding a thing beautiful does not make it so, even if Thomas Mann was right and love cannot redeem anything, even if as Tolkien feared we have arrived at the Black Gate with no bonds of brotherhood to unify us, even if as did Camus we must claw our way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
What is Israel, if not a refuge for the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, among them the most demonized and persecuted people of human history, the Jews?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
As I wrote in my post of March 20 2020, Fear and Despair: How Dancing With Our Darkness May Help Us to Learn, Grow, and Transform Ourselves and Our World; In this time of suffering and of fear and despair, of injustice and loss, violence and greed, isolation and loneliness, life disruptive events and cataclysms, of vast power asymmetries of patriarchy, white supremacy, and plutocracy, and of the atavistic barbarisms of fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, we are confronted with the truth of the human condition in the darkness of its most negative aspects, but also liberated by these same empty spaces.
When illusion is robbed of its power over us, and the echo chamber of lies is revealed for the hollow misdirection of rapacious predators that it is, a space of freedom opens into which we may grow beyond our limits.
We are now all Edvard Munch’s figure in The Scream, overwhelmed with the horror of a world gone mad, our fear and despair made manifest in our cry for humanity and our lament for the brokenness of the world.
And in this moment of Awakening we seize our power and reclaim ourselves, for the realization of our flawed nature and the wounds of our humanity opens us to the pain of others, confers transformative power and heralds the redemption of the world. Humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them.
When all the evils have escaped the Pandora’s Box of authoritarian force and control, hope remains; for when all our gods and masters have been revealed as humbugs like Oz behind the curtain of their smoke and bluster, the realization that no one has any hold over us is swiftly followed by the terrible and wonderful awareness of our total freedom.
We are the negative spaces of our fears and other demons, figures cast like shadow puppets by the darkness which defines our limits and which we are able to embrace.
Cherish your darkness, for the darkness will set you free.
As I wrote in my post of July 22 2022, Now Is the Time of Monsters; Hope and Despair On the Cusp of Change; The government of Italy has collapsed, an act of sabotage by fascist revivalists who have abandoned the political coalition which has thus far prevented it from tumbling off the edge of a precipice into the Abyss, an existential threat to the survival of her peoples and the basic services of any state which include healthcare.
So does the looming threat of Traitor Trump’s return to power in America’s 2024 elections represent an existential crisis of democracy and of our whole global civilization and world order.
But if the Abyss holds terrors of a precariat held hostage by death and the material needs of survival, the Abyss is also where hope lies, for here the balance of power may be changed in revolutionary struggle.
In this liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human, of seizures of power and the performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, let us look to our glorious past in the Resistance which was victorious in the Liberation of Italy on April 25 and the hanging of Mussolini on April 28 1945.
May Trump and all who would enslave us, all tyrants, theocrats, fascists, monsters, may all of these join Mussolini in death and ruin.
As Slavoj Zizek’s favorite saying goes, a French mistranslation or paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci’s line in his Prison Notebooks “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”, literally “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, as “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”, which introduces the idea of monstrosity, referential to the historical development of the idea in Michel de Montaigne, Michel Foucault, and Georges Canguilhem’s work The Normal and the Pathological, a dialectical process of mimesis which results in the form of the principle as; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
Meanings shift, adapt, and change as they transgress boundaries, inhabit public and private spaces, and unfold over vast gulfs of time, and so must we.
As I wrote in my post of December 20 2022, This Christmas, Confront the Meaninglessness of Life Not With Abjection, Despair, and Helplessness But With the Joy of Total Freedom; As we enter the Christmas season, a time much of America will be consumed by orgiastic buying as displays of elite class membership and obligatory feasts often with people we don’t actually like or deeply know, adrift in a universe without imposed values living lives of random chaotic episodes of being which form no grand design, ephemeral and illusory, subjected to totalizing passions and caught in vast invisible systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslaved to authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege like Charlie Chaplin eaten by the gears of the machine he serves in The Factory, let us confront the meaninglessness of life and the terror of our nothingness not with abjection, despair, and helplessness but with the joy of total freedom.
When there are no rules, there are no impossibilities.
Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of October 13 2023, Our World Is Destroyed and Recreated in This Ritual of the Black Sun Wherein Our Humanity Is Eclipsed By the Legacies of Our History; As the season of Halloween is signaled tomorrow by the new moon, it opens with a solar eclipse and the Ritual of the Black Sun as symbolized despair, abjection, grief, and fear, illuminated with great beauty and horror in Stanton Marlin’s study of the alchemical works of Jung in The Black Sun: the alchemy and art of darkness, William Blake’s Book of Urizen, and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, my three primary references on this subject.
And this ritual of transformative rebirth occurs in the wake of the war crimes and atrocities of the Hamas terror attack on Israel, which now conclusively from plans and orders found on its slain perpetrators includes the planned mass murders and abduction of school children.
There are two possible replies to an event of this kind, which disrupts and fractures systems of order on the positive side and violates our humanity as degradation and dehumanization on the negative like a Janus coin of mirror reversals; with fear and its mad children rage and violence, or with love and its praxis as compassion and mercy.
To bring harm or healing, enforcement of virtue and the tyranny and terror of wars of imperial dominion and conquest and the centralization of power to authority and carceral states of force and control, or solidarity as guarantors of each others universal human rights and democracy as co owners of the state in a free society of equals.
If we choose war in this moment, and America sends military aid to Israel as a sponsor and collaborator in the genocide of the Palestinians in retribution for this vast war crime and atrocity perpetrated by Hamas to fasten their political control of the people of Gaza, the Age of Tyrants has begun.
If we choose peace and send humanitarian aid both to the people of Israel and of Gaza in the war of annihilation which is coming as Netanyahu gathers his forces to invade, we may yet have a chance for a future democracy to emerge in the region and globally as a United Humankind.
Our best chance to heal the legacies of our history and reunite the peoples of Israel and Palestine is if they turn their backs on those who claim to act in their name, both Netanyahu’s regime and that of Hamas, and refuse to kill each other in service to the power of those who would enslave us.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Yet hope remains for transformative change, the fall of theocratic regimes and the emergence of secular democracy free from the legacies of our history, a history which in the bifurcated and fragmented states and national identities of the region divides one people into Israelis and Palestinians through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in service to the power of tyrants and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, systems of oppression which are our true enemies.
A massive people’s protest movement has erupted both locally and globally, and this gives me hope that we may yet escape the Age of Tyrants, which I predict will unfold as six to eight centuries of totalitarian empires and wars of dominion ending with the extinction of humankind; with 92 to 98 percent probability.
But the chance to salvage something of our humanity and our civilization of democracy and universal human rights does exist, however fragile and unlikely, if we can unite and act in solidarity as each other’s liberators and guarantors of a free society of equals.
As written by Alex Lantier in the World Socialist Web Site of the Fourth International, in an article entitled Mass protests erupt internationally against Israeli war on Gaza; “A week after Palestinians initiated an armed uprising against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, protests are erupting internationally against Israel’s war on Gaza.
The fascistic regime of Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to flee Gaza City and go south, along roads bombed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel—which has now cut off Gaza’s water, fuel and electricity, and whose leaders call the Palestinians “human animals”—is targeting the Palestinians for genocide.
As the scale of the crimes committed by the Israeli regime and its NATO allies has become clear, protests have erupted around the world in bold disobedience of media denunciations of Palestinians, police intimidation and protest bans.
The most significant demonstration Friday took place in New York City, where thousands rallied to oppose the onslaught against Palestine, in open defiance of the unrelenting pro-Israel propaganda of the entire American political establishment and corporate media. In the center of world imperialism, home to the largest Jewish population of any American city, masses of people—including over 1,000 Jews—expressed their revulsion with the unfolding crimes in Gaza.
Other protests on Friday involving hundreds of people were held in Pittsburgh, Portland and Washington D.C., with larger demonstrations planned across the US this weekend. Despite the efforts of the media and politicians to demonize all protests against Israel’s policies as “antisemitic” and to isolate those feeling sympathy for the Palestinians, opposition is building among workers and youth of all backgrounds. A 2021 poll found that one-quarter of American Jews consider Israel to be an “apartheid state” hostile to the Palestinians, a figure that will only continue to grow.
Thousands also took to the streets in London once again on Friday, defying similar propaganda and threats from the British media and political establishment.
A series of larger demonstrations also swept across the Middle East, involving hundreds of thousands of people. In Jordan, mass protests in Amman demanded the opening of Jordan’s border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Protesting crowds marched on the border with Israel, only to be turned back by Jordanian police.
Large protests took place in Sanaa and Tehran. In Cairo, tens of thousands rallied outside the Al Azhar Mosque, chanting “Free Palestine.” Thousands defied a state ban to march in support of Gaza in Tunis. In Iraq, a country that has lost over one million lives after decades of US-led sanctions, war and occupation since the 1991 Gulf War, hundreds of thousands marched in Baghdad.
Protesters in the Middle East are effectively opposing not only the Israeli regime, but also their own governments, which have betrayed the Palestinians for decades. The Arab bourgeoisie’s role is exemplified by the treachery of the Egyptian military dictatorship. Having signed a treaty with Israel in 1978, Egypt has now closed its borders to Palestinians trying to flee Gaza.
In Israel itself, despite the ultra-reactionary political atmosphere fostered by Netanyahu’s government, which has now been joined by the official opposition, there is explosive discontent. Millions joined protests earlier this year against Netanyahu’s attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary. The attack on the judiciary, as a letter titled “Elephant in the Room” from 3,000 predominantly Jewish intellectuals made clear, is intimately tied up with the conditions that led to the Hamas uprising.
The letter states:
(There is a) direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity. …
There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.
All the major imperialist powers stand exposed by their support for Netanyahu and his war on the Palestinians. On Sunday, October 8, the heads of state of France, Italy, Germany, Britain and the United States pledged “steadfast and united support to the State of Israel,” and an “unequivocal condemnation of Hamas.” At a press conference in Qatar on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken doubled down in condoning Israeli crimes.
Asked by a reporter if Israel is “retaliating in a fury” and whether the US supports this, Blinken replied with total hypocrisy and double-talk: “What Israel is doing is not retaliation. What Israel is doing is defending the lives of its people. … I think any country faced with what Israel has suffered would likely do the same thing.”
What message are the NATO powers sending? They aim to create on a global scale a new era of imperialist colonial rule. They brook no resistance to the Israeli state’s illegal, 16-year blockade of Gaza, its denial of food and medicine to the impoverished enclave, and its targeted assassinations of Gaza residents. If this united front of imperialist gangsters were to sum up its policy toward the Palestinian people in one phrase, it would be: “Slaves you were, and slaves you remain.”
In a video released Friday, which has gone almost entirely unreported in the Western media, Hamas official Basim Naim summarized the background of Israeli oppression, which led to the October 7 rebellion.
He said:
We are speaking about a 75-year-old occupation that neglected and ignored all political and legal means to settle the conflict, where the Israeli enemy continued their policy of denial of the Palestinian people’s existence and their national rights. We have repeatedly warned during the past few months and years that the situation on the ground was not sustainable and that the explosion was only a matter of time.
We have warned repeatedly about the Israeli continued violations in Al-Aqsa Mosque and their attempt to change its status quo in an apparent plan to divide the holy mosque spatially and temporally. We have also warned about the state terrorism implemented by the fascist settlers across the occupied West Bank. We have warned about the forceful expulsion of our people from Jerusalem. We have also warned about the systematic crimes against our prisoners, including women and children, in Israeli jails.
And lastly, we have warned about the Israeli siege on Gaza for more than 17 years, which is a war crime that turned Gaza into the biggest open-air prison on earth, where a whole generation has lost all kind of hopes. But unfortunately, no one listened to these warnings, and the international community, especially the Western countries, continue to give Israel the cover at all levels to continue committing its crimes.
In prosecuting their war against Gaza, the Israeli government and Western imperialist powers aim to obliterate this historical background and numb the population with wall-to-wall atrocity propaganda.
While the deaths of Israeli civilians are undoubtedly tragic, the violence that took place occurred in the context of a massively oppressed people rebelling against a heavily armed oppressor. Even if one were to accept all the accounts of Palestinian violence, it only raises the question—what could lead to such violence?
History judges differently the violence of a population rising up against oppression and the calculated resort to mass murder by capitalist state machines armed with vast military and financial resources. The imperialists have always claimed that the resistance of the oppressed to colonialism justifies their savage retribution. In exacting this retribution, they have always portrayed the oppressed as savages and murderers.
In 1899, the Boxers revolted against the division of China into imperialist spheres of influence. Citing the Boxers’ killings of Christian missionaries and their seizure of foreign property, eight imperialist powers sent armies to sack Beijing and massacre the Boxers. Mounting conflicts between these powers over the division of the spoils in China led ultimately to the bloody Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, which cost nearly 20 million lives, provoking the 1949 revolution that ended colonial rule over China.
In 1904, the Herero people in Namibia rose up against German colonial rule, killing more than 100 German settlers. The German army responded by carrying out the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero, forcing them into deserts where they died of thirst, or imprisoning them in death camps prefiguring the extermination camps of the Nazi regime. In 2015, German officials formally acknowledged the genocide and offered a state apology.
Netanyahu’s regime and its imperialist allies are resorting to similar methods against Gaza. However, the great anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century that broke out after the Russian revolutions of 1905 and October 1917 did not take place in vain. Among masses of workers and youth internationally, Netanyahu’s barbaric methods provoke outrage. This opposition will grow as the monumental scale of the crimes being planned and committed against Gaza become evident to ever broader layers of workers and youth throughout the world.
The NATO powers’ other justification for backing Netanyahu’s crimes—that they are defending Jews and opposing antisemitism—is collapsing. In reality, they are supporting Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in a close alliance with political descendants of the forces that carried out the Holocaust.
As the capitalist ruling elites plunge into barbarism, a mass movement is emerging in the international working class. Protests against imperialism and Zionism are erupting amid mounting global struggles of the working class. Strikes against exploitation, austerity, inflation and police violence shook all the major imperialist powers this year and will intensify in the weeks and months ahead.
The liberation of Palestine is only possible in the context of the growth of a powerful socialist movement of the international working class, including within Israel itself. This will create the conditions for the overthrow of Zionist chauvinism and the unity of Palestinian and Israeli workers. The struggle against the war in Gaza must acquire a clear, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist character, mobilizing the working class in a struggle for socialism across Palestine and the Middle East and internationally.”
In juxtaposition with this internationalist and revolutionary lens of vision are forces of reaction born of fear and trauma weaponized in service to power, the siren call of armed might and retribution as a form of security, but security is an illusion, and only love can reconcile these conflicted identities of Israeli and Palestinian and heal the systems of division and unequal power which are at the heart of this war which threatens to swallow us all.
As written by Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian, in an article entitled Israelis and Palestinians are facing their moment of greatest danger since 1948: There is still a slim chance of peace if wiser counsels prevail and other major powers intervene in a coalition of the willing; “Israel has just experienced the worst day in its history. More Israeli civilians have been slaughtered in a single day than all the civilians and soldiers Israel lost in the 1956 Sinai war, the 1967 six-day war and the 2006 second Lebanon war combined. The stories and images coming out of the area occupied by Hamas are horrific. Many of my own friends and family members have suffered unspeakable atrocities. This means the Palestinians, too, are now facing immense danger. The most powerful country in the Middle East is livid with pain, fear and anger. I do not have either the knowledge or moral authority to speak about how things look from the Palestinian perspective. But in the moment of Israel’s greatest pain, I would like to issue a warning about how things look from the Israeli side of the fence.
Politics often works like a scientific experiment, conducted on millions of people with few ethical limitations. You try something – whether increasing the welfare budget, electing a populist president or making a peace offer – witness the results, and decide whether to proceed further down that particular path; or you reverse course and try something else. This is how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has unfolded for decades: by trial and error.
During the 1990s Oslo peace process, Israel gave peace a chance. I know that from the viewpoint of Palestinians and some outside observers, Israeli peace offers were insufficient and arrogant, but it was still the most generous offer Israel has ever made. During that peace process, Israel handed partial control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority. The outcome for Israelis was the worst terror campaign they had experienced until then. Israelis are still haunted by memories of daily life in the early 2000s, with buses and restaurants bombed every day. That terror campaign killed not only hundreds of Israeli civilians, but also the peace process and the Israeli left. Maybe Israel’s peace offer wasn’t generous enough. But was terrorism the only possible response?
After the failure of the peace process, Israel’s next experiment in Gaza was disengagement. In the mid-2000s, Israel unilaterally retreated from the entire Gaza Strip, dismantled all settlements there and returned to the internationally recognised pre-1967 border. True, it continued to impose a partial blockade on the Gaza Strip and to occupy the West Bank. But the withdrawal from Gaza was still a very significant Israeli step, and Israelis waited anxiously to see what the result of that experiment would be. The remnants of the Israeli left hoped that the Palestinians would make an honest attempt to turn Gaza into a prosperous and peaceful city state, a Middle Eastern Singapore, showing to the world and to the Israeli right what the Palestinians could do when given the opportunity to govern themselves.
Sure, it is difficult to build a Singapore under a partial blockade. But an honest attempt could still have been made, in which case there would have been greater pressure on the Israeli government from both foreign powers and the Israeli public to remove the blockade from Gaza and to reach an honourable deal about the West Bank as well. Instead, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and turned it into a terrorist base from which repeated attacks were launched on Israeli civilians. Another experiment ended in failure.
This completely discredited the remnants of the Israeli left, and brought to power Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governments. Netanyahu pioneered another experiment. Since peaceful coexistence had failed, he adopted a policy of violent coexistence. Israel and Hamas traded blows on a weekly basis and almost every year there was a major military operation, but for a decade and a half, Israeli civilians could go on living within a few hundred metres from Hamas bases on the other side of the fence. Even Israel’s messianic zealots showed little zeal to reconquer the Gaza Strip, and even rightwingers hoped that the responsibilities involved in ruling more than 2 million people would gradually moderate Hamas.
Indeed, many on the Israeli right saw Hamas as a better partner than the Palestinian Authority. This was because Israeli hawks wanted to go on controlling the West Bank, and feared a peace deal. Hamas seemed to offer the Israeli right the best of all worlds: relieving Israel of the need to govern the Gaza Strip, without making any peace offers that might dislocate Israeli control of the West Bank. The day of horror Israel has just experienced signals the end of the Netanyahu experiment in violent coexistence.
So what comes next? No one knows for sure, but some voices in Israel are veering towards reconquering the Gaza Strip or bombing it to rubble. The result of such policy could be the worst humanitarian crisis the region has experienced since 1948. Especially if Hezbollah and Palestinian forces in the West Bank join the fray, the death toll could reach many thousands, with millions more driven from their homes. On both sides of the fence, there are religious fanatics fixated on divine promises and the 1948 war. Palestinians dream of reversing the outcome of that war. Jewish zealots like the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich have warned even Arab citizens of Israel that “you are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] didn’t finish the job in ’48 and didn’t kick you out”; 2023 could enable fanatics on both sides to pursue their religious fantasies, and re-stage the 1948 war with a vengeance.
Even if things don’t go to such extremes, the current conflict is likely to put the last nail in the coffin of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The kibbutzim along the Gaza border have been socialist communes and some of the most tenacious bastions of the Israeli left. I know people from those kibbutzim who, after years of almost daily rocket attacks from Gaza, still clung to the hope of peace, as if to a religious cult. These kibbutzim have just been obliterated, and some of the last peaceniks are either murdered, burying their loved ones, or held hostage in Gaza. For example, Vivian Silver, a peace activist from Kibbutz Be’eri who for years has been transporting ailing Gazans to Israeli hospitals, is missing and likely held hostage in Gaza.
What has already happened cannot be undone. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and the personal traumas will never completely heal. But we must prevent further escalation. Many of the forces in the region are currently led by irresponsible religious fanatics. External forces must therefore intervene to deescalate the conflict. Anyone who wishes for peace must unequivocally condemn the Hamas atrocities, put pressure on Hamas to immediately and unconditionally release all the hostages, and help deter Hezbollah and Iran from intervening. This would give Israelis a bit of breathing space and a tiny ray of hope.
Second, a coalition of the willing – ranging from the US and the EU to Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority – should take responsibility for the Gaza Strip away from Hamas, rebuild Gaza and simultaneously completely disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip.
There are only slim chances that these steps will be realised. But after the recent horrors, most Israelis don’t think they can live with anything less.”
As I wrote in my post of October 17 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: Case of the Hamas-Israel War; A wise friend has questioned my valorization of Chaos as a principle of change in the context of Black Saturday, a term which describes the Hamas attack on Israel and the immense forces of terror, death, destruction, fracture, grief, rage, and revenge it unleashed, becoming a single tide of darkness.
Thank you once again for your kindness and your wisdom.
In this moment of tragedy I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our ideologies to reveal the fragile humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row; “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless”.
What do I hope for now, for the peoples of Israel and Palestine? That both may unite to free each other, but first we will need universal humanitarian aid to any one on either side of these lines of division, and a Reckoning for the war crimes of both Hamas and Israel. For Israel took the bait, and gave Hamas the victory; they are now equal as war criminals without legitimacy.
Israel took the bait, and the world is calling them out for war crimes; this may be the end of the Netanyahu alt right regime and the dawn of a new Middle East. I was absolutely expecting Biden and allies to enable Israel’s Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature. Maybe the idea of human rights is not dead. As my mother used to sing to students who asked her to make authorizing statements about anything, artifact of a Shakespeare in Thirty Minutes theatrical show that toured nationally with some of her students in it, bouncing her open hands left and right; Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not.
No one seems to have noticed publicly that this means Israeli intelligence has been infiltrated. It is also possible that unknown puppetmasters have infiltrated and seized control of both Hamas and Israel, for purposes which are unclear and antithetical to the interests and well being of either. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, friends.
What Reckoning, for crimes against humanity by an organization of terror which has long been a vanguard of anticolonial revolutionary struggle under the imposed conditions of Occupation, slavery, and a genocidal Blockade?
Not the totalization of the general population of Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Netanyahu wishes and Hamas intends as a strategy of delegitimation of the Israel state in the moral equivalence of terror, for if Israel, her patron America, and the international community accept the terms of struggle offered by Hamas they too become organizations of terror, and Hamas wins.
This is a decolonial revolution, and victory goes to the side who can establish the legitimacy and moral supremacy of their story. As my father taught me, Never play someone else’s game.
Hamas also wishes in this provocation to weld the peoples of Gaza to them; this is a primary strategy of fascism and tyranny, to make the people in whose name you claim to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. Always beware those who claim to speak and act in your name as a strategy of your subjugation.
A third layer of meaning here is the ambiguity of the geopolitical and world-historical forces beyond the Holy Land; Russia, her ally Iran and the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, especially the Assad regime of Syria which has sent forces into Israel as a client state of Russia and Iran, and Hezbollah, which offers many of the social services of a government and may be in the process of emergence as an independent state, or a true empire in the transnational sense like the Holy Roman Empire. The great question here is; has Russia opened a new front of her plan of global conquest and made this a theatre of World War Three?
How does one answer all of this? How bring a Reckoning for the terror of Hamas without authorizing and becoming complicit in the greater terror of Israel’s kleptocratic Occupation and looming genocide of the Palestinians?
The forms that might take give me pause, for they will determine our future, and though I know what I myself must do, I do not like it, and am calling out here in my journals, where I work through the consequences of my decisions before acting on them, for unknown possibilities I myself cannot envision.
Yes, my friend, Chaos has profoundly destructive forms; death among them, ruin and civilizational collapse, the negation of all we have claimed as our identity, but all are also measures of the adaptive range of systems, and can give birth to new forms from this liberated energy. And as you point out, all forces operate in opposite directions at once, creating their own opposition in accord with Newton’s Third Law of Motion. These are not moral forces in balance, but ambivalent forces which contain each other in recursion and processes of change.
So, while our nations try to shatter each other’s truths with overwhelming force and mass terror, I must find a path of least force to salvage what I can of our humanity, and I hope I will not fail as I did at Mariupol and Panjshir.
This may be all we have as humans lost in chasms of darkness and a Wilderness of Mirrors, this refusal to abandon each other to dehumanization, but like our refusal to submit to authority it is a power which cannot be taken from us, even in imposed conditions of struggle designed to produce abjection and learned helplessness, or rage and tribalization as identity politics and the manufacture of consent to be fed into engines of death for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and tyrannies.
Such ephemeral and insubstantial things, like whispered prayers to abyssal unknowns, figments of love, hope, faith, which belong to the shadows, the delusions of grandeur of beasts harnessed to systems of oppression by others who yet dream that we might become more.
Dream with me.
Embrace our absurdity as flawed things wrestling with immense forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization in a mad quest to become human, under imposed conditions of struggle typified by atrocities designed to produce abjection, learned helplessness, and despair, as we are consumed by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whose primary weapon is division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as identity politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Against all of this we have only our faith in each other as solidarity and loyalty, the redemptive power of love, our refusal to submit or to believe and trust authority which frees us as Unconquered and self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, and our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and how we choose to be human together. Powers which cannot be taken from us, and which can seize the power of those who would enslave us.
This is why I practice the art of believing impossible things, but only those I myself have chosen or created. Among these are Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, Truth, Justice, our universal human rights and a United Humankind as a free society of equals in which we are guarantors of each other’s humanity. And crucially, act to make them real.
In cases of tyranny and terror, wars of ethnic supremacy, enforcement of virtue as crusades and inquisitions and faith weaponized in service to power,, and other conflicts of national identity, of conquest and imperial dominion, carceral states of force and control, of our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and of all forms of unequal power and systems of oppression, we must bring a Reckoning, especially to the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of who they may be or in the name of what cause they act, and silence the drums of war.
Dream with me, but act in solidarity to make it real.
As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; “That is an excellent practice, but right now you might want to focus on the Jabberwock.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of March 10 2023, On Hope and Despair: Surviving Life Disruptive Events; To a friend with suicidal ideation and facing multiple trauma, life disruptive events, and institutional catch 22s which include class and patriarchal oppression enforced by rentier capitalism and the political theft of our right to life through failure to provide the free universal healthcare which is its precondition, I have written this brief message:
Now is the time to reach out, make connections, and build community. Isolation is dangerous in the extreme for you in this moment. A sea of fellow humans surrounds us, all of whom must wrestle with the flaws of our humanity as imposed conditions of struggle. I hear you in this message, and am afraid. Choose life, my friend, as precarious and filled with pain and fear as it may be; our stories can always change, regardless of the limits of our scope of action and agency.
It may now become possible to reclaim the life which has been stolen from you, and begin to heal and reinvent yourself. May you find peace and joy in this terrible world, my friend.
All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.
We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.
A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.
And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.
As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times, a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion.
History begins with us, or ends with us.
What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?
So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.
Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
What is hope, and how is it useful?
Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.
Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.
Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.
These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.
How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three journeys in Charon’s boat and the first two Last Stands which created and defined me; when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969, when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the Israeli Defense Forces soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.
In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power.
First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global tyranny under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”
One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?
Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters, as Blanqui coined the anarchist motto, before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.
True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols. I remain the boy who discovered in eighth grade someone who spoke for me, in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop Lightningbolt Awakening, to use the Buddhist term, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”
It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.
Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.
Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.
Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it.
As the Wizard of Oz said of himself it’s a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
As we believe, so we may become.
Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flag of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy.
This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift.
Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.
It happened like this; one day I was driving from my fun job teaching high school to my real work counseling at my very elegant office in San Francisco, and I realized that I was going to have the same day as I had before more than I could remember, and was trapped in Nietzsche’s Hell of Eternal Recurrence, and I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this. So I took a wrong turn to the airport and bought a ticket to the other side of the earth. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia I found a bus station with a map that showed all the routes ending in the mountains, which were an enormous empty space along the spine of the country. So I took a bus there and got off at the end of the road, where a dirt track led into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and began walking.
Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we told our students and children what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
I am become the Abyss that looks back into you, and I speak to you now from the chasms of the unknown.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have long forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another Last Stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.
Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah (Live In London)
Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
Confronting the Jabberwock
The World After Gaza: A Short History, Pankaj Mishra
🟢 The Head of #Hamas in #Gaza, Dr. Khalil al-Hayya, delivered a speech on October 9, 2025, following progress on the ceasefire proposal.
Al-Hayya announced the achievement of an agreement to end the war and aggression — including a permanent ceasefire, withdrawal of occupation… pic.twitter.com/6Z0hNuXDyo
This post partum psychosis parallels how many of us feel about America now, trapped in a monstrous form we never chose by a monstrous future which we have birthed. Post election psychosis, but also our national Awakening to complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. Now is the Time of Monsters, truly.
At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.
0 באוקטובר 2025 אם השלום הופך לממשי ונמשך בין ישראל לארץ ישראל, לאן אנחנו הולכים מכאן?
עם סדר פשוט אחד טראמפ הביא את מדינת ישראל ללקוח שלנו לעקב וסיים את האימה ונשבר עם כל המסורת של התרבות המערבית וזכויות האדם האוניברסאליות שלנו שמלחמת עזה מייצגת.
שהוא או כל נשיא אמריקני יכלו לעשות את אותו הדבר בכל עת בשבעים השנים האחרונות של הכיבוש הישראלי וכיבוש הקיסרי ושליטת שכנותיה יישארו לנצח מורשת של ההיסטוריה שלנו שאנו חייבים להתייחס אליהם ולהביא ריפוי.
זה כמובן להניח כי השלווה של טראמפ, ואנחנו עשויים לקרוא לזה ללא ספק כך, היא אמיתית ומתמשכת, שאמריקה יכולה לשמור על רצונה להיות הערבה לזכויות האדם האוניברסאליות שלנו שהיינו פעם או חלמנו, שנוכל לשמור על שליטה על ישראל, וניתן לשחזר איזון שמבטיח את החירות והשוויון של שתי המדינות כשותפים להפיכת אנושיות.
אנו יכולים לבלות את כל חיינו ואת אלה של דורות לבוא לנתח את המשמעות של האיזון במקרה זה, ולנהל משא ומתן כיצד להיות אנושיים ביחד, בין עם אחד המחולק לפי היסטוריה ופוליטיקה זהותית יחד עם אמריקה והקהילה הבינלאומית כולה.
או שאנו יכולים לתפוס את הרגע עכשיו, ולהדמיין מחדש ולהפוך את ישראל וגם פלסטין כאומה מאוחדת אחת, בה ננטשים כל חטיבות האמונה, הגזע והזהות הלאומית ומשוחזרות שלמות.
העתיד שלנו הוא ככל הנראה איפשהו בין שני סולמות האיזון הללו, אך הדבר היחיד שאיננו יכולים להקריב בין כל העתיד האפשרי שלנו הוא שעם ישראל ופלסטין חייבים להיות שותפים שווים בבחירת העתיד שלהם ואת החזון שלהם למי הם רוצים להיות.
יתכן שיש תקופת מעבר בה אמריקה והקהילה הבינלאומית חייבת להיות ערבות לשלום וזכויות האדם שלנו, אך אי אפשר להכריח את המידה בנקודה של אקדח, רק ציות, וזה יוצר עבדים ולא אזרחים. ישנן דרכים אחרות וטובות יותר לבנות דמוקרטיה.
הבה נשלח שום צבאות לאכיפת סגולה; בואו נהיה משחררים ולא מושבים.
1 במאי 2024 אימה ייאוש מאכזב: לשרוד את טרור האין שלנו ביקום ללא משמעות או ערך
במראה של עזה התהום מביטה אלינו לאחור, ואנחנו שבויים בדימויי בית השעשועים המעוותים של ישראל ואמריקה, שרידי חלומות כמקלט של המנודים והערבים לזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, ושל המפלצות שהפכנו להיות עכשיו.
אני לא יכול לזהות דבר בדמויות העומדות מולנו, ולמרות שאני מטיל התרסה על תהומות החושך האינסופיות, המילים שלי אינן מוצאות גבול ואינן מחזירות הדים, כאילו נטרפות על ידי הכלום.
ובכל זאת אני לא מובס על ידי הכוח המכריע והאימה של הסמכות וגם לא כפוף על ידי ייאוש וחוסר אונים מלומד, כי זה המרחב שבו אני חי, האימה הזו, השמחה הזו, החופש הזה.
כפי שאמר לי ז’אן ז’נה ב-1982 בזמן המצור על ביירות, במטרה אבודה, בבית בוער, בתקופה של חושך גדול; “כשאין תקווה, אנו חופשיים לעשות דברים בלתי אפשריים, דברים מפוארים.”
אני מקווה שזה יישאר נכון, לכולנו בעודנו נאבקים לצאת ממורשת ההיסטוריה שלנו ולתפוס את כוחנו ממערכות דיכוי, כי זו המשימה הגדולה של להיות אנושיים, באופן כללי ובאירוע שער ראשמון הזה עכשיו נפרש ברפיח ובמקומות אחרים; לחלום דברים בלתי אפשריים ולהפוך אותם לאמיתיים.
יש כמה דברים שצריכים להיות נכונים גם אם הם מעולם לא היו, גם אם קיטס טעה ומציאת דבר יפה לא הופך את זה לכזה, גם אם תומס מאן צדק ואהבה לא יכולה לגאול שום דבר, גם אם כפי שחשש טולקין הגענו. בשער השחור ללא קשרי אחווה שיאחדו אותנו, גם אם כמו קאמי, עלינו לצאת מהחורבות כדי לעשות עוד עמדה אחרונה, מעבר לתקווה לניצחון או אפילו הישרדות.
אין ישראלים, אין פלסטינים; רק אנשים כמו עצמנו, והבחירות שהם עושים לגבי איך להיות בני אדם ביחד.
מה אנחנו שווים אם נאפשר למלכים שודדים חסרי רחמים לבצע זוועות, לבזוז ולשעבד אחרים?
מה שווה הציוויליזציה המערבית, אם לא נעמוד במילים היפות שלנו? ומילים יפות הן נשארות, כמו אלה שכתב תומס ג’פרסון בהצהרת העצמאות ב-1776, סינתזה ותיקון של רעיונות מהובס, לוק, מונטסקייה, וולטייר ורוסו; “אנו מאמינים כי האמיתות הללו מובנות מאליהן, שכל בני האדם נבראו שווים, וניחנו על ידי יוצרם בזכויות מסוימות שאינן ניתנות לביטול, שביניהן חיים, חירות והרדיפה אחר האושר.”
מהי אמריקה, אם לא ערבה לדמוקרטיה ולזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, ומגדלור של תקווה לעולם?
מהי ישראל, אם לא מקלט לחסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והנמחקים, כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי האדמה, ביניהם העם הדמוני והנרדף ביותר בהיסטוריה האנושית, היהודים?
הבה נשיב במילים שנכתבו על ידי J.R.R. טולקין בין 1937 ל-1955 בדמיונו המחודש והזוהר של מלחמת העולם השנייה בנאום האיקוני של אראגורן בשער השחור ב”שיבת המלך” המאחד אתוס, לוגו, פאתוס וקאירוס; “ייתכן שיבוא יום שבו אומץ לבם של בני אדם ייכשל, בו אנו נוטשים את חברינו ונשבור את כל קשרי האחווה, אבל זה לא היום הזה. שעה של זאבים ומגנים מנותצים, כשעידן הגברים מתרסק, אבל זה לא היום הזה. היום אנחנו נלחמים”.
הצטרף אלינו.
Arabic
0 أكتوبر 2025 إذا أصبح السلام حقيقيًا ودائمًا بين إسرائيل وفلسطين، فإلى أين نذهب من هنا؟
بأمر واحد بسيط، نجح ترامب في إخضاع دولة إسرائيل العميلة وأنهى الرعب والانفصال عن كل تقاليد الحضارة الغربية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية التي تمثلها حرب غزة.
إن قيامه هو أو أي رئيس أمريكي بفعل الشيء نفسه في أي وقت خلال السبعين عامًا الأخيرة من الاحتلال الإسرائيلي والغزو الإمبراطوري والسيطرة على جيرانها سيظل إلى الأبد إرثًا من تاريخنا الذي يجب أن نحسب له حسابًا ونحقق الشفاء منه.
هذا بالطبع يفترض أن سلام ترامب، ويمكننا أن نسميه ذلك بلا شك، حقيقي ودائم، وأن أمريكا يمكن أن تحافظ على إرادتها لتصبح الضامن لحقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية التي كنا نحلم بها ذات يوم، وأننا نستطيع الحفاظ على السيطرة على إسرائيل، وأنه يمكن استعادة التوازن الذي يضمن الحرية والمساواة لكلا البلدين كشريكين في التحول إلى بشر.
وبوسعنا أن نقضي حياتنا كلها وحياة الأجيال القادمة في تحليل معنى التوازن في هذه الحالة، والتفاوض حول كيفية أن نكون بشراً معاً، بين شعب واحد منقسم بسبب التاريخ وسياسات الهوية إلى جانب أميركا والمجتمع الدولي برمته.
أو يمكننا أن نغتنم الفرصة الآن، ونعيد تصور وتحويل كل من إسرائيل وفلسطين كأمة واحدة موحدة حيث يتم التخلي عن جميع الانقسامات الدينية والعرقية والهوية الوطنية واستعادة التكامل.
إن مستقبلنا يقع على الأرجح في مكان ما بين هذين الميزانين، ولكن الشيء الوحيد الذي لا يمكننا التضحية به بين كل مستقبلنا المحتمل هو أن شعب إسرائيل وفلسطين يجب أن يكونا شريكين متساويين في اختيار مستقبلهما ورؤيتهما لما يرغبان في أن يصبحا عليه.
ربما تكون هناك فترة انتقالية حيث يتعين على أميركا والمجتمع الدولي أن يعملا كضامنين للسلام وحقوقنا الإنسانية، ولكن لا يمكن للمرء أن يفرض الفضيلة تحت تهديد السلاح، بل الطاعة فقط، وهذا يؤدي إلى خلق العبيد وليس المواطنين. هناك طرق أخرى أفضل لبناء الديمقراطية.
دعونا لا نرسل جيوشًا لفرض الفضيلة؛ دعونا نكون محررين، وليس مستعمرين.
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في مرآة غزة تنظر إلينا الهاوية، ونحن أسرى الصور المشوهة لإسرائيل وأمريكا، وبقايا أحلام ملجأ المنبوذين والضامنة لحقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية، والوحوش التي أصبحنا عليها الآن.
لا أستطيع التعرف على أي شيء في الأشكال التي تواجهنا، وعلى الرغم من أنني ألقي التحدي في هوة الظلام التي لا نهاية لها، فإن كلماتي لا تجد حدودًا ولا ترد أي أصداء، كما لو أن العدم يلتهمها.
ومع ذلك، فأنا لم أهزم من قبل القوة الساحقة ورعب السلطة، ولم أخضع لليأس والعجز المكتسب، لأن هذا هو الفضاء الذي أعيش فيه، هذا الرعب، هذا الفرح، هذه الحرية.
وكما قال لي جان جينيه عام 1982 أثناء حصار بيروت، في قضية خاسرة، في منزل محترق، في زمن ظلام دامس؛ “عندما لا يكون هناك أمل، نكون أحرارًا في القيام بأشياء مستحيلة، أشياء مجيدة.”
آمل أن يظل هذا صحيحًا، بالنسبة لنا جميعًا ونحن نكافح للخروج من تراث تاريخنا والاستيلاء على قوتنا من أنظمة القمع، فهذه هي المهمة العظيمة المتمثلة في أن نصبح بشرًا، بشكل عام وفي حدث بوابة راشومون الآن وتتكشف في رفح وأماكن أخرى؛ أن نحلم بأشياء مستحيلة ونجعلها حقيقية.
هناك بعض الأشياء التي يجب أن تكون حقيقية حتى لو لم تكن كذلك أبدًا، حتى لو كان كيتس مخطئًا والعثور على شيء جميل لا يجعله كذلك، حتى لو كان توماس مان على حق والحب لا يمكنه تعويض أي شيء، حتى لو كنا قد وصلنا كما كان تولكين يخشى عند البوابة السوداء مع عدم وجود روابط أخوة توحدنا، حتى لو كان علينا، كما فعل كامو، أن نشق طريقنا للخروج من الأنقاض للقيام بمواجهة أخيرة أخرى، بعيدًا عن الأمل في النصر أو حتى البقاء.
لا يوجد إسرائيليون ولا فلسطينيون؛ فقط الأشخاص مثلنا، والخيارات التي يتخذونها حول كيفية أن نكون بشرًا معًا.
ماذا نستحق إذا سمحنا لملوك قطاع الطرق القساة بارتكاب الفظائع ونهب واستعباد الآخرين؟
ما قيمة الحضارة الغربية إذا لم نرتقي إلى مستوى كلماتنا الجميلة؟ وتبقى كلمات جميلة، مثل تلك التي كتبها توماس جيفرسون في إعلان الاستقلال عام 1776، وهي عبارة عن تجميع ومراجعة لأفكار هوبز، ولوك، ومونتسكيو، وفولتير، وروسو؛ “إننا نعتبر هذه الحقائق بديهية، وهي أن جميع البشر خلقوا متساوين، ومنحهم خالقهم حقوقًا معينة غير قابلة للتصرف، ومن بينها الحياة والحرية والسعي وراء السعادة.”
ما هي أميركا إن لم تكن ضامنة للديمقراطية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية، ومنارة أمل للعالم؟
ما هي إسرائيل، إن لم تكن ملجأ للضعفاء والمحرومين، والمُسكتين والممحيين، وكل أولئك الذين أطلق عليهم فرانز فانون اسم “المعذبون في الأرض”، ومن بينهم أكثر الناس شيطنة واضطهادًا في تاريخ البشرية، أي اليهود؟
دعونا نرد بالكلمات التي كتبها جي آر آر. تولكين بين عامي 1937 و1955 في إعادة تصوره المضيء للحرب العالمية الثانية في خطاب أراجورن الشهير عند البوابة السوداء في عودة الملك الذي يوحد الروح، والشعارات، والشفقة، والكايروس؛ “قد يأتي يوم تفشل فيه شجاعة الرجال، ونتخلى عن أصدقائنا ونكسر كل روابط الصداقة، لكن هذا ليس هذا اليوم. ساعة الذئاب والدروع المحطمة، عندما ينهار عصر البشر، لكن ليس هذا اليوم. هذا اليوم سنقاتل.”
Torch of Liberty 