Any cursory eye overlooking a list of the Absurdists reveals one defining characteristic and primary insight; other than its inventor Camus, they are all playwrights. Absurdism regards the world in which we must live as a stage, and we but players in a theatrical performance, as Shakespeare wrote in MacBeth;
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
But it is crucial to recognize that this applies to our political life as well; it is a performance on the stage of history and the world, and in America our democracy is performative and designed to deceive us into belief that we are in control.
If the re-election of Trump teaches us anything, it is that no one is in control.
Like security, control is an illusion, and a dangerous one which offers leverage and influence to those who would enslave us.
Lies and illusions born of fear and faith in those who claim to speak for us and as interpreters of divine will in service to the centralization of power to authority, and the hollowing out of human being, meaning, and values through our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization; this is the path we have chosen for our future, and possibly for all humankind as the futures which offer us freedom are destroyed and go dark and we are cast down into inchoate chaos and degeneration into things less than human.
What remains of us, once we have abandoned each other and our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice?
America has elected our destroyer, and we will find out.
So I wrote last year in the wake of Trump’s election and the capture of America by the Fourth Reich. Thus far the Second Trump Regime has exceeded even the depravities, violations of our ideals and values, and subversion and destruction of the American Way and of our institutions of government, no less than I had feared and envisioned.
In this time the poor starve, as Americans are denied the SNAP funds which are preconditions of the right to life as a basic living stipend just as some 800,000 of the poor beyond our shores were starved to death by the Trump-Musk cabal and Theatre of Cruelty through denial of food aid, all while plutocrats dance at a Gatsby Party full of strippers in the White House, a White House being demolished at the whim of a tyrant who wants a golden ballroom for elites to dance in while the nation starves.
The poor are not equal; there was never true equality in America, merely a seductive lie at our founding; “All men are created equal”, written by slaveowners. In this nothing has changed in 250 years.
But we can make it real, if we act in solidarity as guarantors of each others rights as citizens and our universal human rights.
A few days ago the stunning victory of The Great Zohran proved this is still possible, that democracy and a free society of equals is still possible among our infinite futures and possibilities of becoming human. Now we must build momentum and seize power through our elections and legislative and legal actions as our system provides opportunity, and in Resistance and War to the Knife against the tide of fascist tyranny and terror.
And in Resistance Camus can help us.
As I wrote in my post of March 12 2024, The Idea of America As a Symbol of the Absurd: Edward Albee, On His Birthday; Here I began, at the door to the Absurd, and I look back now from the other side, after a lifetime of strangeness, among the freaks and monsters myself; America was always an illusion, a figment of lies, distorted shapes in the funhouse of our Wilderness of Mirrors, echoes and reflections which capture, possess, and falsify, but which also reveal truths and extend us into the Infinite among chasms of darkness.
The works of Albert Camus have become foundational to me personally and to our civilization, studied in every high school in America as core curriculum and by anyone else pursuing an education; these include the great novels The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, as well as the philosophical essays in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, and The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt.
Albert Camus constructed his philosophy as a direct reply to his model Dostoevsky’s arguments in The Demons, was influenced by Augustine, and as a literary stylist was influenced by the poetry of Rene Char and, a most singular decision for an ars poetica, modeled his prose on American noir crime fiction. As an Absurdist he belongs to the tradition of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Ionesco, and Beckett.
Far from nihilistic, Camus references Nicholaus of Cusa on the Conservation of Ignorance and parallels the mission of Godel in his mathematical proof of the Infinite; his conclusions are diametrically opposite those of Sartre, and therein lies all the difference. Like Plato and Aristotle or Freud and Jung, they share a common ground of ideas but face the world Janus-like as dyadic forces, divided by questions of political and philosophical ideology. Neither is entirely comprehensible without the other.
The Absurdism of Camus borders on the Pauline Absurdism of Flannery O’Connor; I always directed students to his remarks in the lecture he gave to the Jesuits, “the difference between us is, you have hope.”
Albert Camus used hope in a special context, for in that lecture on hope and faith Camus seizes the problem directly; hope is ambiguous, relative, a Rashomon Gate of contingency and multiplicities of meaning, and like its myth in Pandora’s Box both a gift and a curse.
As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut 1982, when we were trapped by Israeli soldiers in a burning house, moments before we expected to be burned alive having refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” It is a principle of action by which I have lived for forty years now.
Herein lies a gate which opens not to Dante’s Inferno, but to freedom and self-ownership as authenticity, and to seizure of power from authorized identities, the boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, marked by a sign bearing the famous warning; “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
Albert Camus shares many of the sources and references of Vladimir Nabokov and his theme of the flaws of Idealism which led him to mistrust any state which centralizes power and authority and enforces virtue, including both fascism and Stalin’s totalitarian perversion of communism, and embrace the inherent ambiguity of revolutionary France whose glorious Resistance to the Nazis coexists with her colonial and racist dominion of Algeria and French Indochina as a mirror of Nazi Occupation; this became the cause of the fragmentation of the postwar intellectual Left as typified in the sensational and iconic rupture between Sartre and Camus over Algeria and the question of power as a system of oppression.
I believe the origin of evil is in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, not in an innate depravity of man or evil impulse or personal sin but in the systems and structures of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, in generalized and overwhelming fear shaped by authority in service to power through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of membership and belonging, especially in fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. This is why revolutions, especially anticolonial ones, become tyrannies as a predictable phase of struggle.
Camus offers us a similar schema of revolutionary struggle and liberation based on the primary value of freedom which hinges on two key ideas; hope and the unknown.
Unknowability defines the Infinite and our relationship to it, but also the boundaries of ourselves and the limits of the human beyond the flags of our skin; one recalls the thought experiment known as The Spear of Archytus. He throws the spear, and where it lands defines the limits of knowledge, the area that can be mapped. Then he does it again; doubling the known. And so on; but no matter how much we learn, the Unknown remains as vast as before. This I call the Conservation of Ignorance, which as with Camus I hold as the First Principle of any future epistemology.
We who live among the dragons on the maps of our topologies of becoming human, in the blank spaces of unknowns marked Here Be Dragons where all things become possible, know that the total freedom of a universe empty of any meaning or value but that which we create, a universe without Laws to bind us, with no Good or Evil but in our actions toward others, with no imposed purpose or design, is both a terror and an endless joy. And we call to you with songs of freedom and agency and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, songs which say; Come dance with us.
How is this of use to the audience Camus wrote for, the freedom fighter who resists and yields not, beyond hope of victory or survival? How do we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of civilization and make yet another Last Stand? How answer overwhelming force and the unwinnable fight?
Albert Camus forged an ideology of rebellion which locates freedom not exclusively in the Sartrean-Marxist Revolutionary and transformative change of systemic and structural externalities such as capitalism and the cash nexus of exchange which determine the imposed conditions of struggle, but also within us as a condition of being; we resist to claim ourselves, to seize ownership of our own moment and the skin in which we live, and in this primary human act we become Unconquered. By our choosing to be free we achieve our freedom, for who cannot be compelled is free.
Here also is a great secret of power; no one has power over us unless we give it to them, and without legitimacy power is hollow and brittle, for the tyranny of brutal repression and a carceral state of force and control fails when met with disbelief and disobedience.
So also is authority delegitimized when we no longer trust and believe in it; when we perform the four primary duties of a citizen in forging a free society of equals; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
For authority defines an unequal relationship, and as such there is no just authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Of those who would enslave us and claim the throne of the Great and Powerful Oz, whether tyrant or god, we may say with Dorothy; “You’re just an old humbug.”
We are the inheritors of Prometheus, undaunted by the threat of punishment and death, for in our defiance of authority and refusal to submit we are victorious over those who would dehumanize, falsify, commodify, and subjugate us.
Let us give to those who would steal our souls to power the mechanisms of their own wealth, power, and privilege the only reply it merits; Never Again!
The Zero Theorem official trailer
Albert Camus, a reading list
A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, by Robert Zaretsky
And his massive interrogations of ideas of history in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History, and Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason,
For an insightful discussion of Existentialism which gives you a seat at the table during its founding, read Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others.
The Labyrinth: An Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre, by Ben Argon is a graphic novel of rats caught in a maze and trying to discover a path to freedom, as are we all.
Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, by Tilottama Rajan is an excellent history of relevant ideas.
The A to Z of Existentialism, by Stephen Michelman is a dictionary of 300 entries clarifying the ideas of its major figures including Sartre, De Beauvior, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and others.
Primary Existentialist Works and Studies, listed by Author
Existentialism is a Humanism, Nausea, No Exit, The Wall, Being and Nothingness, To Freedom Condemned, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, Literary Essays, Truth and Existence, Existential Psychoanalysis, Notebooks for an Ethics, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Mallarmé or the Poet of Nothingness, Baudelaire, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, The Family Idiot, Jean Paul Sartre
Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn
The Second Sex, The Mandarins, Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir
The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, The Rebel, The Possessed, Albert Camus
A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Robert Zaretsky
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, Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, C.G. Jung
On Nietzsche’s Side, The Step Not Beyond, Maurice Blanchot
Thomas the Obscure, The Last Man, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, The Infinite Conversation, The Space of Literature, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Community of Lovers, Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, Christophe Bident
The Thief’s Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, Treasures of the Night: collected poems, The Declared Enemy, Fragments of the Artwork, Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet
Genet: a biography, Edmund White
The Hélène Cixous Reader, Cixous, Sellers ed, foreword Jacques Derrida
Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Verena Andermatt Conley
The Magic Lantern, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews, Ingmar Bergman
The Odyssey, a modern sequel, Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis
The Essential Kierkegaard, Hong eds.
Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard,Clare Carlisle
I and Thou, Between Man and Man, Martin Buber
Martin Buber, Diamond
The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology, Steven Kepnes
Learning Through Dialogue: The Relevance of Martin Buber’s Classroom, Kenneth Paul Kramer
Waiting for Godot, The Unnameable, Samuel Beckett
A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, Hugh Kenner
Kangaroo Notebook, Beyond the Curve, The Face of Another, The Ruined Map, Secret Rendezvous, Woman of the Dunes, Kobo Abe
The Idiot, The Crocodile, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Diary of a Madman, Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Strange Library, 1Q84, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
The Trial, The Castle, The Complete Stories, The Zürau Aphorisms, Franz Kafka
Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch
Franz Kafka: a biography, Max Brod
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari
The Nightmare of Reason: Kafka, Pawel
Existentialist Psychotherapy, a reading list
Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Žižek
The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, Paul Rabinow
Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, Specters of Marx, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida
Desert Islands: And Other Texts, 1953-1974, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, Gilles Deleuze
Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Slavoj Žižek
The Theory of the Novel, Soul and Form editors John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, The Historical Novel, Goethe And His Age, Essays on Thomas Mann, Solzhenitsyn, György Lukács
Žižek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation?, In Defense of Lost Causes, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, First as Tragedy Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek
The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, by Jean Baudrillard, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor)
What are they all arguing about? Origins of Existentialism in Husserl’s Phenomenology: an outline
Phenomenology: The Basics, Husserl’s Phenomenology, by Dan Zahavi
Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, Maurice Alexander Natanson
Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,
by Jacques Derrida
Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, by Leonard Lawlor
Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, by Theodor W. Adorno
We celebrate the triumph of hope over despair, as The Great Zohran phrased it in his historic victory speech, a title I now confer upon our Mayor-Elect of New York because he has truly done the impossible in liberating the people of New York from both the state tyranny and white supremacist terror of the Republicans and from repression of dissent, marginalization of the poor, and political capture by the Collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party and its machine now forever branded with complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians.
Zohran Mamdani I name as a magician, for he leads a class war against elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their systems of oppression as well as a revolution against the Fourth Reich’s captured American state of force and control with its brutal ICE white supremacist terror force, a tide of darkness which threatens both democracy and our universal human rights not only here in America but throughout the world, and against vast and enormous power has emerged victorious to call out the Abomination Trump in a televised speech to all future humankind. What does one call this, if not magic?
And the people of America have triumphed over despair and division not only in New York which leads the way into the future as the Social Democrats do the nation, but in the liberation of Virginia and in the glorious mass resistance of California to subjugation in the face of federal Occupation armies and ICE white supremacist terror. Throughout America, the tide turns toward liberty and a free society of equals.
Among the last words Jean Genet and I said to each other in Beirut 1982, I asked “What do I do with my life, now that I know everything we think we know is a lie? How do I live when the world is a lie?” To which he replied; “Live with grandeur.”
The tide of fascist tyranny has not yet been turned, but thanks to the window of possibilities opened by this Rashomon Gate Event we may all have a chance to live with grandeur.
As I wrote in my post of June 25 2025 The Mamdani Miracle of New York; The Mamdani Miracle of New York smashes the Collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party’s containment cell for revolutionary forces of change, reimagination, and transformation of our systems and institutions which enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and marginalize and silence dissent.
Vast wealth and propaganda machines have been defied and overthrown as a deathgrip of reactionary forces which Janus like bear two faces, Democratic and Republican, and across the last forty five years have conspired together in the neoliberal order of capitalist exploitation and the erosion of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and as human beings.
As this order collapses from the mechanical failures of its internal inconsistencies and contradictions and before the intrusive force of Nazi revivalism and white supremacist terror together with Gideonite theocratic patriarchal sexual terror which captured the Republican Party in 1980 and now has metastasized throughout our society to capture the state under the loathsome and aberrant Trump regime, the people rise to seize power from those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
Last November the momentum of Resistance to the Fall of America and democracy broke upon the shoal of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of our principle of universal human rights and complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians, as well as abandonment of the Green New Deal and hope of human survival under threat of ecological collapse and species extinction, abandonment of universal healthcare as a precondition of the right to life and a just society, and abandonment of the Abolition of Police as a racist state terror force and army of occupation designed to re-enslave Black citizens as prison bond labor, a police state made more terrible still by the nefarious Patriot Act which militarized policing and birthed the counterinsurgency model of police, and now with ICE and federal troops occupying our cities has become a primary instrument of subversion of democracy and theft of our equality and of meaningful citizenship.
Then of course we have our Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump, who was elected because he is a white supremacist terrorist and patriarchal sexual terrorist whose voters want permission to do the same, openly. The driving force behind all of this is the death spiral of capitalism as capital tries to free itself of its host political system, democracy.
The Democratic Party also lost the crucial votes of nonwhite men who voted to keep the only power they have, patriarchal privilege, during Kamala’s single issue abortion rights campaign which attempted to reverse 2,700 years of patriarchy as our primary system of oppression, dated from the writing of The Hanging of the Maids attributed to Homer and interrogated by Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad.
These are the four goals any movement toward the Restoration of America as a democracy must champion and realize; universal human rights including those of women and bodily autonomy and Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel, a Green New Deal, universal free healthcare, and Abolition of police and the total dismantling of our institutions of state terror and tyranny.
And now suddenly, as faceless police terrorists abduct nonwhite people without cause or trial and send them to foreign hells to be forgotten, a champion arises to join others in the liberation and Restoration of New York and one day all America.
In the words of Zohran Mamdani himself, writing in Jacobin in an article entitled “We’re Going to Win the City We Deserve”; “here are over three thousand New Yorkers here this evening — and thousands more watching from home. New Yorkers who believe that living here shouldn’t be a daily grind of anxiety. New Yorkers who are ready to turn the page on years of corruption and incompetence. To reject the politics of distraction and fear, of big money and small vision, of cowardice and collaboration in the face of Trump’s authoritarianism. New Yorkers who are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.
My brothers and sisters, you are the beating heart of this campaign. You have climbed six floor walkups and braved the pouring rain to canvass our city, sharing our message with the very New Yorkers you’ve lived alongside for years but never had the chance to meet. And make no mistake, this campaign is reaching every corner of this city.
I see the work each of you do when New Yorkers wave excitedly from bus windows and shout “freeze the rent” from moving cars.
I see it when volunteers who have never participated in politics before dedicate their every Sunday night to spreading our message. I see it when thousands of New Yorkers post proud screenshots of their first ever ballots. And I feel it when the aunties and uncles who have long felt abandoned by a broken status quo pull me aside to tell me that finally, they’re excited to believe again.
We stand on the verge of a victory that will resonate across the country and the world. Make no mistake: this victory will be historic, not just because of who I am — a Muslim immigrant and proud democratic socialist — but for what we will do: make this city affordable for everyone.
New Yorkers are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.
I think of a woman I met on the BX33 in the Bronx, who said to me: “I used to love New York — but now it’s just where I live.” We’re going to make this city one that working people can love once again.
That’s who I’m thinking about tonight: the New Yorkers who make this city run. For after this rally, as many of us sleep, millions of our neighbors will step out onto moon-lit streets across our city.
Nurses working the night shift will put on their scrubs and save lives. City workers will clean subway stations and pick up our trash. Office buildings will be made new again, as the midnight shift scrubs and polishes in the dark.
Many of these New Yorkers are immigrants, who traveled to this city from faraway countries with nothing in their pockets except a dream of a better life. And even more of them will spend the entire night tirelessly working, and return home carrying the burden that it still isn’t enough. The sun rises, the bills continue to climb, and the stress never seems to fade.
If New York truly is the city that never sleeps, we deserve a mayor who fights for those of us who labor at every single hour of the day. I will be that mayor.
When we launched this campaign on a cold October evening, few thought we could win. Only a couple more could even pronounce my name. Andrew Cuomo still can’t.
The so-called experts said we’d be lucky to break 5 percent. But I always knew that we would build a campaign like this.
So when a disgraced former governor questions whether or not we can lead this city, I look at our campaign and I know the answer.
Over a million doors knocked. More than 40,000 volunteers. A movement that the pundits and politicians had written off, now on the precipice of toppling a political dynasty. And because of that, we will win a city that we can afford.
But what does winning look like?
It looks like a rent-stabilized retiree who wakes up on the first of every month, knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since the month before.
Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the rent.
It looks like a single mom who can drop her kids off at school and know she won’t be late to work, because her bus will arrive on time and cost nothing at all.
Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and free.
It looks like a young family that doesn’t have to move to the suburbs because childcare doesn’t cost more than college. In fact, it’s free.
Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal childcare.
And it looks like safety for everyone — whether you’re on the street, riding the subway, or in a house of worship — with our Department of Community Safety. We’ll invest in the mental health services that we know work and we’ll tackle the rise in hate crimes that fill too many Jewish and Muslim New Yorkers with fear.
We’re going to make this city one that working people can love once again.
We’ll stand up for small businesses and take on bad landlords and greedy corporations. We’ll make sure our public schools are excellent — our kids deserve better than crowded classrooms and neglected facilities. We’ll do all this from a City Hall that is accountable and transparent to the New Yorkers it proudly serves.
And I’ll be a mayor who doesn’t bow down to corporate interests, doesn’t take his orders from billionaires, and sure as hell doesn’t let ICE steal our neighbors from their homes. There are no kings in America, whether that’s Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo, or the Republican billionaires who fund their campaigns.
For too long, New Yorkers have learned not to expect much from those they elect. Failure has become familiar.
Make no mistake: our democracy is under attack from the outside, but it has also been eroded from the inside. When politicians give you crumbs time and again and tell you to feel satisfied, it should come as no surprise that so many among us have lost faith.
But this campaign has given hope again through our vision that every person deserves a good and dignified life — and that government must deliver an agenda of abundance that puts the interests of the 99 percent over the 1 percent.
That’s why Republican billionaires are spending millions of dollars to stop you. To stop us.
They know that this election isn’t just about the future of our city. It’s about the future of our democracy. Whether billionaires and massive corporations can buy our elections.
Trust me, they will try. From now until June 24, you will not be able to turn on your TV, check your mail, or watch a video on YouTube without seeing an attack on our movement. There will be lies to stoke fear and suspicion, even hate. And behind these lies are the same billionaires who put Donald Trump back in office.
But we know that this movement is more powerful than their money. That’s what New Yorkers have already begun to say today, at polling places across our city. And on June 24, we will speak in one voice.
The days of moral victories are over.
And to everyone who pulls me aside to whisper with the best intentions: “You have already won”: I am sorry, but the days of moral victories are over. As my father told me years ago, when the Right wins power, the Left writes a great book. Those days are over too.
This campaign is going to win on June 24 — and it’s thanks to each of you.
On Election Night, after the polls have closed and the results have come in, we’ll go home. As we close our eyes, the days of countless others will only be beginning. Doors in Jackson Heights and Parkchester and Bay Ridge will open at midnight. New Yorkers will leave their homes and commute under streetlights to work, where they’ll drive buses and mop floors and bake bread.
For some, this will feel like any other night. But for so many more, thanks to all of you, it will feel like the dawn of a new day. And when the sun finally climbs above the horizon, the light will seem brighter than ever before.
We’re going to win the city we deserve, my friends. And it’s going to be one we can afford. One where we can dream again.”
In the words of The Great Zohran in his historic victory speech; “Thank you, my friends. The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’
For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.
My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty. I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few. New York, tonight, you have delivered a mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.
On January 1st, I will be sworn in as the mayor of New York City. And that is because of you. So before I say anything else, I must say this: Thank you. Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past. You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership. We will fight for you, because we are you. Or, as we say on Steinway (Steinway Street in the Borough of Queens, called Little Egypt) ‘ana minkum wa alaikum” (translation “I am from you and for you”). Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.
To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: This city is your city, and this democracy is yours too. This campaign is about people like Wesley, an 1199 organizer I met outside of Elmhurst Hospital on Thursday night. A New Yorker who lives elsewhere, who commutes two hours each way from Pennsylvania because rent is too expensive in this city.It’s about people like the woman I met on the Bx33 years ago, who said to me, “I used to love New York, but now it’s just where I live.” And it’s about people like Richard, the taxi driver I went on a 15-day hunger strike with outside of City Hall, who still has to drive his cab seven days a week. My brother, we are in City Hall now.
This victory is for all of them. And it’s for all of you, the more than 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign into an unstoppable force. Because of you, we will make this city one that working people can love and live in again. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics. Now, I know that I have asked for much from you over this last year. Time and again, you have answered my calls — but I have one final request. New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know. We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count, held it because we cannot afford to exhale. Thanks to all of those who sacrificed so much. We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn.
To my campaign team, who believed when no one else did and who took an electoral project and turned it into so much more: I will never be able to express the depth of my gratitude. You can sleep now. To my parents, mama and baba: You have made me into the man I am today. I am so proud to be your son. And to my incredible wife, Rama, Hayati: There is no one I would rather have by my side in this moment, and in every moment. To every New Yorker — whether you voted for me, for one of my opponents, or felt too disappointed by politics to vote at all — thank you for the opportunity to prove myself worthy of your trust. I will wake each morning with a singular purpose: to make this city better for you than it was the day before.
There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us simply to more of the same. And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn. New York, we have answered those fears. Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy. And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.
Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” Tonight, we have stepped out from the old into the new. So let us speak now, with clarity and conviction that cannot be misunderstood, about what this new age will deliver, and for whom. This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt. Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia: an agenda that will freeze the rents for more than two million rent-stabilized tenants, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal childcare across our city. Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come. This new age will be one of relentless improvement. We will hire thousands more teachers. We will cut waste from a bloated bureaucracy. We will work tirelessly to make lights shine again in the hallways of NYCHA developments where they have long flickered. Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a Department of Community Safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head-on. Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception.
In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another. In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too. And we will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong — not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power. No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.
This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another. We will prove that there is no problem too large for the government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about. For years, those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January 1st, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.
Now, I know that many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game anymore. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us. Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.
After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.
We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.
New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.
When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them. A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all. And we must chart a new path, as bold as the one we have already traveled. After all, the conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate. I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.
And yet, if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind. We will leave mediocrity in our past. No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great. Our greatness will be anything but abstract. It will be felt by every rent-stabilized tenant who wakes up on the first of every month knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since the month before. It will be felt by each grandparent who can afford to stay in the home they have worked for, and whose grandchildren live nearby, because the cost of childcare didn’t send them to Long Island. It will be felt by the single mother who is safe on her commute and whose bus runs fast enough that she doesn’t have to rush school drop-off to make it to work on time. And it will be felt when New Yorkers open their newspapers in the morning and read headlines of success, not scandal. Most of all, it will be felt by each New Yorker when the city they love finally loves them back.
Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the rent! Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and free! Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal childcare! Let the words we’ve spoken together, the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together. New York, this power, it’s yours. This city belongs to you. Thank you.”
On the previous occasion of our November elections, which brought us a Second Trump Regime, I also interrogated the dialectics of hope and despair, but from the other direction.
As I wrote in my post of November 6 2024, Now is the Time of Monsters: Hope and Despair In the Wake of Our Elections; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” Thus goes the famous paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci, a lens through which this moment of shared public trauma and grief may be seen and understood.
Ours is also a time of chaos, disruption, and fracture of our norms and ideals, our values and our institutions of democracy, and of our history. As such it is also a measure of our adaptive potential, a liminal space between bounded realms which defines limits but also communicates as interfaces, and in which new possibilities of becoming human are created as old orders are destroyed.
When they come for us and for one another, as they always have and will, let them find not an America defeated in submission to terror and tyranny with learned helplessness, but united in solidarity as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights. Now is the time of monsters; but also of organizing resistance.
Let us speak, write, teach, organize, and act in solidarity for a free society of equals and a United Humankind; because silence is complicity.
As Alan Moore teaches us in 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.”
Chaos is the great hope of the powerless, as Guillermo del Toro teaches us in his epic of migration and diversity Carnival Row. In this moment we can bring change, though we have lost our best chance to do so while voting and action within our system is possible and meaningful.
Do not despair. Evil prevails when good people do nothing. Use your fear and loathing and rage in refusal to submit.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
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 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 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 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 civilization 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 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.
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, 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; As a student of the origins of evil I studied everything, but especially the nexus of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, and wrote, spoke, taught, and organized always, for democracy and liberation from systems of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for our universal human rights and against dehumanization, tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for the values of a free society of equals; among them liberty, equality, truth, and justice. During vacations from graduate school and teaching English, Forensics, and Socratic seminars in various subjects through the Gifted and Talented Education program at Sonoma Valley High School and my practice as a counselor I wandered the world in search of windmills that might be giants at which to tilt.
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 day job teaching high school as a sacred calling to pursue the truth to my very elegant office in San Francisco where I practiced the repair of the world as a healer of the flaws of our humanity, things I loved but had begun to feel determinative of my scope of action, when the lightning of insight struck. In that moment of illumination I realized that I was literally in Hell, trapped in Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, for I had lived the same day more times than I could remember and was about to do so yet again. And I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this.
I recalled a line of poetry from a book on the game of Go, handwritten variously in Chinese, Japanese, and English which had mysteriously been left at the front door of our home when I was in seventh grade; “This is a message from your future self; I return from living fifty thousand years rapturous in sky, to find you living in a box. Seize the heavens and be free.”
We had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and all things had become possible. So I wondered, what if we brought down all the other walls, beginning with my own?
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 Malay Peninsula. There I boarded the Bus to the Unknown, among the incense and purple smoke of the Ganesh temple across the street and I believe now with his blessing on my journey, and got off where the road ended in a dirt trail leading into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and began walking into an unmapped wilderness.
So began a journey from which I have never truly returned, a Great Trek across Asia which may be described with the words of Obi Wan to Luke Skywalker as “some damn fool idealistic crusade.”
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 students 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.
It may have begun in Mariupol when the horror was given form as I spent hours in utter darkness crawling through partially collapsed tunnels after an artillery shelling, through the bloody piles of entrails and savaged parts of the dead among echoes of the sounds of the dying whom I could not help; this bothered me not at all, being far from the worst I have survived, but I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when later I discovered what the Russian Army was doing with some of the children it had stolen.
These days its mostly the oracle of a disembodied head that bothers me, in the wake of my expedition to Beirut from September 23 to the second week of October; when a family searching for a missing child found only his head, Israel having erased the rest of him with their bombs. It feels like a pomegranate in your hands, such a tiny head, and I fear what its seeds may one day bear. In my dreams it tells me things, and I do not like the truths it speaks.
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.
Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, in disobedience, and defiance of authority, we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
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.
Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as wild things who are masterless and free.
As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.
Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;
“Cowards die many times before their deaths.
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.
Postscript and Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad
I wrote this as guidance in direct action and general principles of Resistance to tyranny in antifascist action and revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters here in America and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action which became a moving street fight in over fifty cities for several months with forces of repression including deniable assets of state repression of dissent including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and other white supremacist cadre, and their co conspirators and infiltration agents within the police, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent and the Black Lives Matter movement through state terror and learned helplessness.
We Antifa networks of alliance are the only forces to have defeated the federal government of the United States in open battle on its own ground since Little Bighorn, in actions following the watershed event in which the counter revolutionary forces of state terror, including the most brutal criminals from our prisons and the most elite special operations hunter killer teams from our military and police merged into a national terror force of Homeland Security, broke and ran from us. This resulted after two months more of fighting in the articles of surrender offered us by President Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, and recognition of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones ceded to the people from the United States.
Friends, the Fourth Reich can be victoriously Resisted and defeated.
A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Victory Speech of The Great Zohran
A Conversation with Zohran Mamdani, Robert Reich interview
As the gates of the Labyrinth of Dreams open and beckon us hither, into wonder and into sublime realms of inchoate passion and authentic being, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden whose transgression confers self ownership and power,
As the wheel of time spins round again to its seasonal setting point and enfolds and liberates us from history, memory, and the tyranny of other people, and by its recursion of the Great Trick exchanges the masks others have shaped for us and restores to us the masks we make for ourselves,
As the image of the world is destroyed and recreated anew in the abyssal not-space of infinite possibilities, between the tipping of the vessel and the drop which falls from it wherein miracles are born and truths are chosen and revealed, limitless iterations of universes and of futures springing from Pandora’s Box of paradoxes like an endless circle of dancing Schrodinger’s Cats, and the sacred fire lances through the heavens to illuminate and awaken us,
So do I summon and conjure by its secret names, (speak here that which you claim as your own and which in turn claims you, in whatever language you may dream and by such signs as the Infinite calls to you), so do I claim the power to be whomever I choose, and to pursue the destiny I have chosen in total freedom as a bearer of the mantle of Invictus, the Unconquered, and by this do I invoke and declare as written by the poet William Ernest Henley; “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul”.
Thus do I conjure Liberty each full moon of November, the Frost Moon which marks the coming of winter and the time of the Giants of Frost and Old Night whose reign begins with or near the three days of my birthday celebrations and whom I claim and honor as my kin and symbols of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Here also do I celebrate my first transformation and rebirth, for among the mysteries of my origins is the story my mother told about why I have two birth certificates, one for the 14th and another for the 16th of November, not a clerical error or records confusion as I was the first baby born in the new hospital in Bonnersferry Idaho and the only one there at the time, but because of a wonderful and strange difference, which like all Otherness defines the limits of the human but also awakens and reveals those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
On November 14 1959 I was born as a beast, covered in fur and with a tail; mom said that when they set me on her at birth she thought; “Why, they’ve put a little monkey on me”. And just then I lifted up my head and raised myself up on my arms, something that normally occurs at one to three months of age, opened my eyes and looked around. So my first birth certificate, which is the day I have always celebrated as my birthday for I am a beast with a beast’s soul, even when I wear a human form like a puppet of flesh.
On Sunday, November 15, 1959 the full moon rose like a celestial doorway to realms of being beyond our own, letting angels through, or devils, depending on how we shape them to our purposes in the mirror of our fears and desires, for they are the same figural or archetypal beings which represent the hidden selves of their beholders, masks of forces within us which change according to who sees and hearkens to them, and like lightning I was struck and sublimed by its fury, riven and reforged in tidal forces of rapture and terror.
I was discovered the next morning to have been reborn as a human being, having resorbed my animal characteristics, and was issued a second birth certificate on November 16 1959 in honor of my humanity and recognition of my dual nature.
This legacy and duality remains with me, and has the force of law in the two birthdates on my drivers license and passport. Where the state has always officially recognized me as a beast and listed my first and preferred birthday on its records, the new federal passport surprised me by defining me as a human and certifying my second birthdate, probably because the hospital provided that one; in truth I am something between and of both sides of this boundary and interface, as are we all in the infinite continuum of being.
But having it signposting for me in this way has made me regard ideas of belonging and otherness in a different light.
I do not regard human dominance and control of nature, either of one’s own or of the world’s fragile ecological balances, as virtuous or a Good, nor as superior to ones animal self nor separate from other living beings in any fundamental way.
The space between truths immanent in nature and those we ourselves create, between the limits of our form and the legacies of our histories as imposed conditions of struggle, between the stories we tell about ourselves and those others tell about us, is both a ground of revolutionary struggle as we free ourselves from authorized identities and a fulcrum of change as we reimagine and transform ourselves and our ways of being human together.
The disunion of Psyche and Eros is a fissure through which destructive forces enter the world, but also a space of free creative play in which we can question and redefine ourselves. We humans are also animals and shadowed with vestigial drives and instincts, but what is gloriously unique about human beings is that we are also without souls, Being, inherent nature or truths other than those we create or imposed as our histories and systems of oppression which are also social constructions of our fellow humans.
Here we may grapple with each other to find the truths of ourselves, even as brother warriors, and of the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
We inherit a dual legacy, all of us, and I have come to think of this as the balance between the iconic lines in The Elephant Man; “I am not an animal; I am a human being”, with the Penguin’s lines in Batman Returns; “I am not a human being, I am an animal.”
I am not an animal! I am a human being! Elephant Man
I am not a human being! I am an animal! Batman Returns
Loki montage to the song Would You Turn Your Back On Me? (Monster)
Pantheon of the Giants, a name which means “Devourer”, in Norse Mythology
The Saga of the Volsungs with The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, Jackson Crawford
(Translator) (note: this family history and genesis of all humankind in the context of Viking myth is by the champion of the Old Norse language and its greatest living poet)
Mens portene til Drømmenes labyrint åpner seg og lokker oss hit, inn i undring og inn i sublime riker av uberørt lidenskap og autentisk vesen, utenfor grensene til det Forbudte hvis overtredelse gir selveierskap og makt,
Når tidens hjul snurrer rundt igjen til sitt sesongmessige settingpunkt og omslutter og frigjør oss fra historien, minnet og andre menneskers tyranni, og ved sin tilbakegang av det store trikset bytter ut maskene andre har formet for oss og gjenoppretter til oss maskene vi lager for oss selv,
Mens bildet av verden blir ødelagt og gjenskapt på nytt i det avgrunnsrike ikke-rommet av uendelige muligheter, mellom karrets tippning og dråpen som faller fra den der mirakler blir født og sannheter blir valgt og åpenbart, ubegrensede gjentakelser av universer og av fremtider som springer ut fra Pandoras boks med paradokser som en endeløs sirkel av dansende Schrodingers katter, og den hellige ilden spretter gjennom himmelen for å lyse opp og vekke oss,
Så kaller og tryller jeg med dets hemmelige navn, (snakk her det du hevder som ditt eget og som igjen hevder deg, på hvilket språk du enn måtte drømme og med slike tegn som den uendelige kaller til deg), så hevder jeg kraften til å være hvem jeg enn velger, og forfølge skjebnen jeg har valgt i total frihet som bærer av mantelen til Invictus, den uerobrede, og ved dette påkaller jeg og erklære som skrevet av poeten William Ernest Henley; “Jeg er herre over min skjebne, jeg er kaptein for min sjel.”
Conjuration of Liberty, in Standard German
Während sich die Tore des Labyrinths der Träume öffnen und uns hierher winken, ins Wunder und in erhabene Reiche ansatzweiser Leidenschaft und authentischen Seins, jenseits der Grenzen des Verbotenen, dessen Überschreitung Eigenverantwortung und Macht verleiht,
Während sich das Rad der Zeit wieder zu seinem jahreszeitlichen Einstellpunkt dreht und uns von Geschichte, Erinnerung und der Tyrannei anderer Menschen umhüllt und befreit, und durch seine Rekursion des Großen Tricks die Masken austauscht, die andere für uns geformt haben, und uns die Masken zurückgibt, die wir für uns selbst machen,
Während das Bild der Welt zerstört und im abgrundtiefen Nicht-Raum unendlicher Möglichkeiten neu erschaffen wird, zwischen dem Kippen des Gefäßes und dem Tropfen, der daraus fällt, in dem Wunder geboren und Wahrheiten ausgewählt und enthüllt werden, grenzenlose Wiederholungen von Universen und Zukünften, die aus Pandoras Büchse der Paradoxien entspringen wie ein endloser Kreis tanzender Schrödinger-Katzen, und das heilige Feuer durch die Himmel saust, um uns zu erleuchten und aufzuwecken,
So rufe und beschwöre ich mit seinen geheimen Namen (sprich hier aus, was du als dein Eigen beanspruchst und was wiederum dich beansprucht, in welcher Sprache auch immer du träumst und mit solchen Zeichen, wie das Unendliche dich ruft), so beanspruche ich die Macht, zu sein, wer auch immer ich will und dem Schicksal, das ich gewählt habe, in völliger Freiheit als Träger des Mantels von Invictus, dem Unbesiegten, zu folgen, und hiermit rufe ich an und erkläre, wie es der Dichter William Ernest Henley geschrieben hat: „Ich bin der Herr meines Schicksals, ich bin der Kapitän meiner Seele.“
Today America chooses between theocratic sexual terror, white supremacist terror, theft of meaningful citizenship and our universal human rights as we become subjects and not citizens, falsification, enslavement and commodification, and dehumanization in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil under a mad idiot tyrant of deranged perversions and nonsensical but deadly pronouncements on the one hand, between the Fall of American and the Restoration of America as a democracy and a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights of citizens, between Traitor Trump the Russian spy, Nazi revivalist, rapist, felon, sex trafficker, and would-be tyrant and the Republican Party’s nightmare vision of our future in Project 2025 on the one side and on the other the Democratic Party and all our many figures of Liberty and champions of the people who in defying and challenging Trump and the Fourth Reich have placed their lives in the balance with all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Yes, the collapse of mercy, compassion, ideas of human value and universal rights which the Republicans perpetrate is astounding and surreal, like the Uncanny Valley effect of a predator that looks like us but is not; on the other scale of the balance we have people like you, my friends and readers, who look to my words for insight into the systems of oppression behind our current events and guidance in how to engage and combat them. And on this forlorn hope the restoration of democracy and the redemption of our humanity depends.
Who do we want to be, we Americans, we human beings everywhere and through all of time and history; masters and slaves, or equal partners in a diverse and inclusive society?
We cast now the dice, and choose.
As written by Robert Reich in Face Book; “It’s Election Day in many parts of the country. The governors, mayors, city councils, state reps, judges, school boards, and referendums you vote for today will be a vital line of defense against the Trump regime. You still have power. Use it.”
As I wrote in my post of November 4 2020, Where does freedom lie now?; America is held in the grip of despair and fear in this election, like Humpty Dumpty at the tipping point of a fall which may or may not shatter our hopes and dreams into loss and ruin; America rides the crest of a wave of liberation with joy and triumph as we enter a transformational state at the dawn of a new humankind.
We are all Schrödinger’s Cat now, waiting to discover which universe chance has brought us to as the votes are counted. It is a national trauma, this collective anxiety and existential threat, and our Clown of Terror and his forces of white supremacist terrorists are using fear to attempt to steal another election.
One of my friends posted in some alarm that they were offered a safe house to escape racist violence. It is indeed hard to believe our nation has come this far to degradation and collapse, all the way back to the Underground Railroad.
One of the comments cut directly to the true issue at hand. “Our ancestors huddled in safe houses on their way to freedom. Where does freedom lie now? In our hearts.”
To this I give a twofold reply; one which reaches outward through our connections with others to extend human consciousness into our material world in coevolution, and one which reaches inward to our possibilities of human being, meaning, and value. As Monet 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.”
We strange beings are a synthesis of immanence and transcendence; of truths written in our flesh and those we must create, of the stories which shape us as memory and history over vast epochs of time like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, and of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Freedom indeed lives in the secret chambers of our hearts, a condition achieved when we refuse to submit to authority and to force, for in resistance we become Unconquered. As the great philosopher Max Stirner said; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Freedom also lies with our solidarity, interdependence, and refusal to abandon our brothers, sisters, and others to authoritarian force and control. We must write, speak, teach, and organize to build a free society of equals.
If the forces of fascism and white supremacist terror are unleashed by the results of today’s election, they will find not an America driven into submission by learned helplessness and shattered by divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, but united in resistance against both the seduction of power and the state tyranny and terror of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Armed white supremacist terrorists in mock-military camouflage uniforms stand guard over our ballot drop offs in a campaign of vote suppression while assassins hunt our elected officials, as a plutocrat buys a yellow press in Twitter just in time to enable Trump to once more capture the state; welcome to America in the time of democracy’s greatest peril.
This was not in the mirror of remote history but two years ago, though the mechanics of totalitarian state terror and tyranny were codified by Trump’s idol Hitler long ago, and the social divisions exploited by both have been with us since Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar.
We are losing the battle for the soul of America and the future of humankind because we are playing a game by rules which no longer exist, as our opponents intend to subvert and destroy democracy as our terms of engagement.
Rules may be what make us the good guys, but good cannot win if evil has no rules but merely goals, and those of our subjugation to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and the centralization of power to authority and a carceral state of force and control.
Unless we too enter the space of play where there are no rules; for all Resistance is War to the Knife.
Our institutions of government are designed to balance forces which are both committed to the ideals, values, and structures of democracy; but this system functions only when democracy and a free society of equals founded on freedom, equality, truth, and justice are goals common to all, when we share a definition of terms.
What today is true, just, equal, and free? Our political tribes no longer mean the same things when they speak of these values and ideals. We have lost democracy as a Forum of Athens when we can no longer debate how to be human together.
This is the true goal of the Republican Party, in our elections now and since its 1980 capture by the Fourth Reich. And we must cede nothing to the enemy; no ground of struggle, no symbol, no history, no idea.
We must win our adversaries back to the debate as partners, for if we cannot democracy is lost and America fallen, and we devolve to an age of tyrants and centuries of war from which we humans may never emerge, if against all odds we survive.
We have an excellent example of the costs of failure in the anniversary of racist terror we remember today, the Ocoee Massacre. It is a future we must avoid at all costs.
So today I have two kinds of policy guidance to share with you as thesis and antithesis, for which we must find synthesis. First, who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none, and we must bring a Reckoning as war to the knife to those who would enslave us; and second, that we must avoid this fate and the Second Civil War and global civilizational collapse it will trigger by making democracy and our elections real, meaningful, just, and true.
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
As I wrote in my post of November 3 2020, One Hundred Years of Racist Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror: Anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre; This election has seen attempts at vote suppression unknown in our lifetimes; Trumps mission to subvert democracy includes intimidation by calling for armed white supremacists to deny nonwhite citizens access to the polls, an attack on Biden’s campaign caravan by the Trump Train mobile terror force, failed assassination attempts against Biden and other political figures, sabotage of the postal system, politization of the Justice department, and his farcical declaration of victory before the vote is counted, among his many treasonous crimes.
Today liberty and tyranny play for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
I spent some time today at a Trump rally trying to defuse a hate crime in the making. A hey rube went up that a rally staged in a parking lot between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery was becoming a violent mob; while others responded as a protection detail and placed themselves with great courage between potential perpetrators and their victims, I blended into the rally to assess and shape its development as an incubator of violence through dialog and negotiation.
Today these angry young men chose not to allow fear, rage, and hate to master and dehumanize them, nor provoke them into violence which would be the ruin of their lives; what will all of the other angry young men choose tomorrow?
I’d like to believe this incident is atypical and not being played out a thousand times over across America; but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tyranny weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear as an instrument of subjugation. And fascism has a primary strategy of power and the manufacture of consent to be governed in claiming to speak and act in the name of those they would enslave; so also with the perpetration of atrocities and unforgiveable crimes against humanity which makes us complicit and creates walls of identity controlled by authority. This we must resist, but unless we speak directly to those fears we cannot heal the divisions of our society which authority has so skillfully manipulated.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.” Sadly, we humans have often chosen stones when words would serve us better.
In all the madness of this election and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of theocratic-fascist state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; in the main we are voting and not shooting, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Nor is there anything new in the threat to democracy of vote suppression; today is the one hundred year anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre, the most terrible incident of racist vote suppression in the history of our nation since the Civil War. What may give us hope now that failed us then is the emerging consensus of racial equality and the mass coalition for racial justice won for us by the Black Lives Matter movement and the heroic citizens who have seized the streets of our cities in an unparalleled months long mass action.
Regardless of the election results, anyone who wishes to actually govern must do so at the head of these protests and not barricaded against the will of the people. This is the true meaning of this years seizure of power by our citizens, and it is a genie which cannot be returned to the prison of its lamp, for each of us is now a Living Autonomous Zone.
As written by Harmeet Kaur for CNN; “On November 2, 1920, African American residents of Ocoee, Florida, went out to cast their ballots in the presidential election — no small task at the time.
In the decades since Reconstruction, Florida politics had been dominated by White Southern Democrats, who fought to preserve slavery in the 1850s and had since obstructed African Americans from exercising their constitutional rights through violence, intimidation and legislation.
But in the run-up to the 1920 election, Black people in Ocoee were registering to vote in droves — a reality that threatened the grip of white supremacy, wrote Paul Ortiz, a history professor at the University of Florida, in a 2010 essay.
“State and local officials — along with the Ku Klux Klan — understood that white supremacy was in trouble,” Ortiz wrote. “They responded mercilessly.”
In an attempt to prevent Black people from voting, a White mob in Ocoee killed dozens of African Americans, set fire to their houses and drove them out of the community.
It was “the single bloodiest day in modern American political history,” Ortiz wrote.
It stemmed from one Black man’s attempt to vote.”
“According to several histories of the massacre, it started when Moses Norman, a prominent Black landowner in the Ocoee community, turned up to the polls and attempted to cast his ballot.
Norman was turned away by poll workers who told him that he hadn’t properly registered or paid the poll tax, according to a 2014 article in the Florida Historical Quarterly. So he took the issue to a prominent Orlando lawyer and Republican Senate candidate, who advised that Norman return and demand he be allowed to exercise his right to vote.
Norman returned, with some reports indicating that he had a gun with him as he went up to the poll workers and others saying that White people found the gun in his car. Ultimately, he was again driven away by White residents and went to take refuge at the house of his friend July Perry, another prominent Black man in the community.
A White mob formed and set out to find Norman, eventually arriving at Perry’s home, where a group of African American residents had assembled. It’s unclear who fired first, but violence broke out, leaving two White men dead and Perry injured, the authors of the Florida Historical Quarterly article wrote.
After the initial gunfight, the mob called in reinforcements and came back with a vengeance.
More than 250 White people, among them members of the Ku Klux Klan, torched rows of houses where African Americans lived, and set fire to other community buildings. Perry was lynched in Orlando. It’s not clear how many African Americans were killed, though estimates range from about 30 to as many as 50.
Despite their efforts to fight back, nearly all of the African Americans in Ocoee were driven out of town and didn’t return to live there for decades.”
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, autonomy, and the creation and ownership 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?
Three days remain before our elections, which will to a degree determine the course of human history and the fate of humankind as well as throw the switch between democracy and tyranny in America, a free society of equals or the endless prison of a theocratic patriarchal and white supremacist state of force and control wherein we are divided into masters and slaves, hierarchies of elite membership in hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege defined by authorized identities and fascisms of gender, blood, faith, and soil, and each of us must answer which future we will choose.
Among the myriad interdependent and recursive systems of oppression from which we must liberate ourselves and one another through Resistance, seizures of power, and revolutionary struggle, the historical and social construction of race and national identity, and its imposed conditions of struggle remains central to our personal and social identity and the central question of democracy; who chooses who we are and may become?
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 a Soviet University in 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 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.
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?
For literary examples of this unreciprocated claim of belonging I look to Jerzy Kosinski, a Polish Catholic possibly assassinated by the Polish state for telling inconvenient truths about the Holocaust in The Painted Bird, and Philip Roth, a Jewish American author declared an enemy of the Jewish people by Gershom Scholem for his once-scandalous portrayal of sexuality in Portnoy’s Complaint, though a nearer parallel in the interrogation of race, history, and identity as systems of oppression and themes in literature may be found in African American authors such as Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye and Colson Whitehead in The Underground Railroad.
Of my sister’s 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 and/or Asian 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 and near rice powder white skin 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, and whose skin was the mahogany of old railroad ties used on the British Cape to Cairo line over a century ago.
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 one of my father’s two brothers, blue eyed and blonde, 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, dark as was he, 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 these 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. A mere thousand years ago, we all have more ancestors than the total number of humans living at the time, at 30 generations distance; meaning many are convergent lines of descent due to pedigree collapse and that we are all interrelated ultimately. The mathematics of ancestry is interesting; somewhere around one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand years ago we reach the point of a single common ancestor. As written by Steve Olson in Nature magazine describing his research; ““No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”
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 and sorcerers during the start of an eighty year witchburning craze; Martin Luther called us Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon, which we adopted as a title. During this time we absorbed many of the pre Christian myths gathered as Grimms Fairytales, which was represented to me as a child as our family history. And still a half truth, as this tallies only my patrilineal descent, and nothing of the half of myself from my Austrian descended 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 was literate in Persian and 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, what is now classified as Louisiana Creole meaning 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, lost now on the seas of time like so much else, 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 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, we were Bavarian, generally 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?
Here in our celebration of the Day of the Dead my hopes and fears for the future of humankind become manifest and dance with us in the streets, and speak to us in our dreams of secrets and the silences of our history.
I hope we are at the beginnings of our story of becoming human, and not at its end. I fear that our historical legacies may become traps, falsifications, assimilative and colonizing narratives wherein tyrannies of authorized identities may steal our souls. This is the problem of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen; we are lost in a world of distorted images, captured echoes, fragmented identities, and dangerous illusions.
Divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, including those of race, gender, class, nationality, faith, and the tyranny of history, not only subjugate us to authority through the pathology of our disconnectedness from others but also alienate us from ourselves.
Authorized identities, rewritten histories, and the performance of our honored ancestors as subversions of imposed orders of being and meaning work like the discontiguous timelines of alternate histories and realities; there are myriads of such universes, and they are all right here, layered one within another. Here is a ground of struggle between falsification and authenticity, subjugation and liberation as ownership of ourselves. What has always interested me are the interfaces and boundaries between them as belief systems, and the possibilities of unknown silences and empty spaces.
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.
How may we grow into the Unknown spaces and discover, create, reimagine, and transform our true and best selves in becoming human, and in how we choose to be human together?
This is one of the true purposes and functions of our celebration of our ancestors; seizure of power as reclaiming our histories. With this is its interdependent and parallel praxis of social action; emergence from the legacies of our history as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma, among these harms and systems of oppression being racism, patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism.
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.
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, our identities shaped by memory and history and the echoes and reflections of our ancestors. Disrupt or falsify this continuance and we become unmoored from our anchorages and set adrift; while this can be used intentionally to seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, it can also be used by others as an instrument of conquest and subjugation.
As examples we may look to the Pandemic and the generalized and overwhelming fear it unleashed, when weaponized by elite interests as a tool of division, repression, erasure, and colonization as in our border with Mexico which weaponizes disparity to create a vast underclass of exploitable labor, or one of fascism and tyranny as in America, as used by Trump and the amoral plutocracy of a theocratic, patriarchal, white supremacist, kleptocratic, and totalitarian police state he represents against humankind to centralize wealth and power.
The first day of the Dia de los Muertos festival is sacred to all children as holy innocents, whose lives are seeds like the dragon’s teeth sown by the Phoenician prince Cadmus in the earth from which warriors arise, and may bear forward and realize our dreams of liberation struggle against regimes of unequal power. Herein I honor as I have for far too many years now the migrant children stolen from their parents by order of Traitor Trump for his unspeakable perversions and those of his Epstein circle and still missing; now also do I remember the children of Ukraine abducted into slavery and torture brothels by the Russian military and the Butterfly Collectors syndicate, and the mass murder of Palestinian children in Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide ongoing in Gaza. These three regimes of tyranny and terror together represent the abandonment of our humanity and collapse of our civilization, and define the limits of the human; but sadly are far from unique in human history.
We grieve, but in this public ritual of grieving let us hold fast in solidarity to the purpose of remembrance and witness. For the dead and the past we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the future that must be redeemed.
The world does not need our grief; the world needs our solidarity of action.
As long ago, in an America which now seems remote, I wrote to Kamala Harris on the occasion of her visit to the concentration camps we maintain at our border as instruments of racist state terror and colonial exploitation;
Dear Vice President Harris,
As long as you’re going to look into the faces of our victims, whose nations we have devastated economically, ecologically, and politically and left in the wake of our greed as a shattered postapocalyptic region of blighted doom, then left abandoned to the mercies of a Mexico whose government is powerless before its criminal syndicates, you might as well end our program of genocide and enslavement, tear down the Wall, disarm and repurpose the Border Patrol to provide humanitarian aid and help refugees reach the safety of our shores, rebuild democracy, the sacrosanct rights of humankind, the inviolability of unionized labor, and the material basis of wealth in the ecologies of the Dry Corridor of Central America, enact citizenship by declaration, and restore to our nation our heart.
Very Truly Yours, Jay Lale
To this I received no reply.
We are all of us engaged in the great struggle of our time between authority and autonomy, waged in the streets and in our hearts, which will define what is human and either dehumanize and enslave us or liberate us and the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Authority will use lies and illusions to deceive us, but their true motives cannot survive exposure, nor their legitimacy survive disbelief, nor their power withstand disobedience.
On this and every day let us remember who we truly are, dance the ghosts of those who made us possible and helped create us as informing, motivating, and shaping forces, recite and perform their stories, and renegotiate the boundaries of human being, meaning, and value which they offer us.
LA MARTINIANA | Canción de día de Muertos
‘See death in a different way’: The history of Day of the Dead and how to celebrate this year
1 de noviembre de 2025, Día de los Muertos: En honor a nuestros ancestros
En esta celebración del Día de los Muertos, mis esperanzas y temores por el futuro de la humanidad se manifiestan y danzan con nosotros en las calles, y nos hablan en nuestros sueños de secretos y silencios históricos.
Espero que estemos en los albores de nuestra historia de humanidad, y no en su fin. Temo que nuestros legados históricos se conviertan en trampas, falsificaciones, narrativas asimilacionistas y colonizadoras donde la tiranía de las identidades autorizadas robe nuestras almas. Este es el problema del espejo roto del Duende Verde en La Reina de las Nieves de Anderson; estamos perdidos en un mundo de imágenes distorsionadas, ecos capturados, identidades fragmentadas e ilusiones peligrosas. Las divisiones de la alteridad excluyente y las jerarquías de pertenencia, incluidas las de raza, género, clase, nacionalidad, fe y la tiranía de la historia, no solo nos subyugan a la autoridad mediante la patología de nuestra desconexión con los demás, sino que también nos alienan de nosotros mismos.
Las identidades autorizadas, las historias reescritas y la representación de nuestros venerados ancestros como subversiones de los órdenes impuestos del ser y el significado funcionan como las líneas temporales discontinuas de historias y realidades alternativas; existen miríadas de tales universos, y todos están aquí, superpuestos unos dentro de otros. Aquí reside un terreno de lucha entre falsificación y autenticidad, subyugación y liberación como propiedad de nosotros mismos. Lo que siempre me ha interesado son las interfaces y los límites entre ellos como sistemas de creencias, y las posibilidades de silencios desconocidos y espacios vacíos.
Como aprendemos de John Cage en la música, Harold Pinter en el teatro y Piet Mondrian en el arte, son los espacios en blanco los que definen y ordenan el significado. Y en la historia, son las voces silenciadas y borradas a las que debemos escuchar con mayor atención, pues en ellas el vacío nos habla del poder oculto y de las funciones y relaciones clave que la autoridad debe encubrir para mantener su hegemonía.
¿Cómo podemos adentrarnos en lo desconocido y descubrir, crear, reimaginar y transformar nuestra verdadera esencia, nuestra mejor versión, al humanizarnos y al elegir ser humanos juntos?
Este es uno de los verdaderos propósitos y funciones de nuestra celebración de nuestros ancestros: la toma del poder como reivindicación de nuestra historia. A esto se suma su praxis interdependiente y paralela de acción social: el surgimiento de los legados de nuestra historia como trauma epigenético y multigeneracional, entre cuyos daños y sistemas de opresión se encuentran el racismo, el patriarcado, la esclavitud y el colonialismo.
Siempre persiste la lucha entre las máscaras que otros nos imponen y las que nos imponemos nosotros mismos; esta es la primera revolución en la que todos debemos luchar. Somos las historias que contamos sobre nosotros mismos, a nosotros mismos y a los demás; nuestras identidades se moldean por la memoria, la historia y los ecos y reflejos de nuestros ancestros. Si se interrumpe o falsifica esta continuidad, nos desarraigamos y quedamos a la deriva. Si bien esto puede usarse intencionalmente para apropiarnos de nosotros mismos y reinventarnos, también puede ser utilizado por otros como instrumento de conquista y subyugación.
Como ejemplos, podemos observar la pandemia y el miedo generalizado y abrumador que desató, cuando fue instrumentalizada por intereses de élite como herramienta de división, represión, invisibilización y colonización, como en nuestra frontera con México, donde se instrumentaliza la desigualdad para crear una vasta subclase de mano de obra explotable, o una de fascismo y tiranía, como en Estados Unidos, utilizada por Trump y la plutocracia amoral de un estado policial teocrático, patriarcal, supremacista blanco, cleptócrata y totalitario que representa, para centralizar la riqueza y el poder contra la humanidad. El primer día del Día de los Muertos es sagrado para todos los niños, considerados inocentes, cuyas vidas son semillas como los dientes de dragón sembrados por el príncipe fenicio Cadmo en la tierra, de las cuales surgen guerreros que pueden seguir adelante y hacer realidad nuestros sueños de lucha por la liberación contra regímenes de poder desigual. En este día, honro, como lo he hecho durante demasiados años, a los niños migrantes arrebatados de sus padres por orden del traidor Trump para sus indescriptibles perversiones y las de su círculo de Epstein, y que aún permanecen desaparecidos; recuerdo también a los niños ucranianos secuestrados y convertidos en esclavos y torturados en burdeles por el ejército ruso y el sindicato de los Coleccionistas de Mariposas, y el asesinato en masa de niños palestinos en la campaña de limpieza étnica y genocidio que Israel lleva a cabo en Gaza. Estos tres regímenes de tiranía y terror representan juntos el abandono de nuestra humanidad y el colapso de nuestra civilización, y definen los límites de lo humano; pero, lamentablemente, no son casos únicos en la historia de la humanidad. Nos afligimos, pero en este ritual público de duelo, mantengámonos firmes en solidaridad con el propósito de recordar y dar testimonio. Por los muertos y el pasado no podemos hacer nada; es a los vivos a quienes debemos vengar, y al futuro al que debemos proteger.
El mundo no necesita nuestro dolor; el mundo necesita nuestra solidaridad y acción.
Hace mucho tiempo, en una América que ahora parece lejana, le escribí a Kamala Harris con motivo de su visita a los campos de concentración que mantenemos en nuestra frontera como instrumentos de terror estatal racista y explotación colonial;
Estimada Vicepresidenta Harris:
Ya que va a mirar a los ojos a nuestras víctimas, cuyas naciones hemos devastado económica, ecológica y políticamente, dejando tras de sí, fruto de nuestra codicia, como una región postapocalíptica desolada y abandonada a merced de un México cuyo gobierno es impotente ante sus sindicatos criminales, bien podría poner fin a nuestro programa de genocidio y esclavitud, derribar el muro, desarmar y reconvertir a la Patrulla Fronteriza para que brinde ayuda humanitaria y ayude a los refugiados a llegar a la seguridad de nuestras costas, reconstruir la democracia, los derechos humanos fundamentales, la inviolabilidad del trabajo sindicalizado y la base material de la riqueza en los ecosistemas del Corredor Seco de Centroamérica, promulgar la ciudadanía por declaración y devolverle a nuestra nación su esencia.
Atentamente, Jay Lale
No recibí respuesta. Todos estamos inmersos en la gran lucha de nuestro tiempo entre autoridad y autonomía, librada en las calles y en nuestros corazones, que definirá nuestra humanidad y que o bien nos deshumanizará y esclavizará, o bien nos liberará y nos abrirá las infinitas posibilidades de la humanidad.
Prestemos siempre atención a quien está detrás de la cortina. La autoridad usará mentiras e ilusiones para engañarnos, pero sus verdaderos motivos no pueden sobrevivir a la exposición, ni su legitimidad a la incredulidad, ni su poder a la desobediencia.
Hoy y siempre, recordemos quiénes somos en realidad, honremos la memoria de quienes nos hicieron posibles y contribuyeron a nuestra formación como fuerzas inspiradoras, motivadoras y transformadoras, recitemos y representemos sus historias, y redefinamos los límites del ser humano, el significado y el valor que nos ofrecen.
On this Halloween let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the four primary duties of a citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, our society, and the systems and structures of our civilization.
Let us bring the Chaos.
What will you be for Halloween? For the rest of your life? If we can dance our true and secret selves before the stage of the world on this night, why not every night?
Celebrate with me Halloween as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of hierarchies and systems of force and control, and the violation of norms.
Normal doesn’t live here anymore.
Norm, not our old family retainer and master of curious devices but a literary figure of my invention here representing normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, is downstairs in the game room tied to an electric chair from the old McKay Carnival I call the Throne of the Sublime, because it is a forge of making angels, though wrathful ones. And it is possessed by the monstrous and deranged souls it has unleashed as an instrument of the Law and the carceral regime of torture and the repression of dissent which it symbolizes, and from which it was liberated decades ago by an Industrial Workers of the World direct action team in a raid on a prison.
Once this was an instrument of state terror, the ultimate resort of institutions of power empty of legitimacy and with only force and violence to control, silence, and erase all who refuse to submit and all Others who are excluded from circles of the elite and the god-authorized Elect, but now serves different purposes in seizures of power and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, set free in exaltation, rapture, and vision, as we are sublimed in the electric arclight of captured bolts from the heavens.
As a carnival game it was converted from terror to joy and from pain to ecstasy as an erotic electro-stimulation device, much like the reference to the game of Gentlemen, Start Your Engines in Neil Gaiman’s telenovela Lucifer, season 2 episode 11.
Is any of this story true? Maybe, maybe not. The dialectics of revolutionary struggle and state tyranny and terror in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force are a Schrodinger’s Cat problem wherein many things are both true and false at once, as Rashomon Gate Events of ambiguous and relative truths.
Such questions we must ask America, who like our ideas of what is normal is now being transformed in the crucible of our darkness and the consequences of the January 6 Insurrection and the capture of the state by a fascist cabal in America with the Second Trump Regime and by our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, both now nightmare realms of derelict antiquities from whose historical shadows of authorized identities we must emerge.
This year I have made a game of masquerading as an ICE agent, blending in among them and making mischief as I may, and vanishing like a rumor of gremlins who sabotage the machine of power which they serve.
In the immortal words of Mario Savio; “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Last year in 2024 I was costumed as an Israeli soldier spattered with the blood of numberless innocents who have been butchered with aberrant glee in Palestine for over two years now, where American tax dollars buy the deaths of children and of our civilization. No more terrible and horrific figure of the limits of the human exits than this, the Israeli enforcer of tyranny and state terror authorized to commit genocide by a monstrous god of theocratic violence and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil as imperial conquest and dominion, nor that of his American co-conspirators in crimes against humanity.
For the Beast Netanyahu has a showman, Trump, Rapist In Chief, idiot, madman, slave of Moloch the demon of Lies, and who puts him through his paces as an entertainment for the hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege as defined and anointed by theocratic authority as an Elect, just as Israel is a mirage of American imperialism, and as Trump dances to the tune of his puppetmaster in the capture of the state as Vichy America, the subversion of democracy, and the fall of civilization, his old KGB handler from the simple days when Trump was merely a Soviet agent, human trafficker, and money launderer for crime syndicates, Vladimir Putin.
I find it illuminating how the meaning of our monsters changes with the context of their signs; last year I wore this costume of protest against state terror, cruelty, and dehumanization to a neighborhood barbeque, like the Red Death at the Masque in Poe’s story, drawn by the music to a backyard full of Trump signs and men adorned with guns as preposterous masculine jewelry, and everyone ran away, even the bikers. I congratulate you, O Israel; if you intended to become a symbol of terror and horror, you have succeeded.
The seduction of power as security is something I understand all too well; but security is an illusion. And it comes with a price.
Some things, however, are certain and unavoidable; first among them the violence of the birth of new possibilities of becoming human and the agony of liberating ourselves from divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As Trotsky teaches us, the violence of the slave master cannot be compared to the violence of the slave in breaking his chains.
And the second? Normality is deviant. Normal is half our nation voting for treason, subjugation to Russia, theocracy, patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and the subversion of our Constitution and the values of the Enlightenment on which it and the whole of western civilization is founded.
To fascist tyranny and theocratic terror let us say with the glorious rebel Ahab in Moby Dick; “To the end I will grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I stab at thee, I spit my last breath at thee.”
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2020, Using Chaos and Transgression as Revolutionary Acts to Transform Law and Order Into Liberty and Equality; I am against law and order because law serves power and order appropriates and divides us into hierarchies of elite power and categories of exclusionary otherness, whereas chaos autonomizes and empowers and transgression and the violation of norms and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty liberates and seizes power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. Law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
Rejoice with me in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us dance our best and secret selves on the stage of the world, forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves and transform the systems and structures of oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.
Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
As I wrote in my post of October 25 2024, A Hymn to Chaos; Tonight a window opens beyond our universe, letting angels through, or devils; and I welcome them both, figures of the twin sides of our nature and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, forces trapped within our flesh in titanic struggle or truths written in our flesh as transformative harmony.
Herein is a liminal time in which we may shape ourselves anew, reimagine our lives and grow beyond the boundaries and limits of our horizon, explore unknowns in the unclaimed empty spaces of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value marked Here Be Dragons, discover new Best Selves and be reborn, become enraptured and exalted beyond ourselves as we ascend through the gaps of the heavens to embrace the wonder and terror of our total freedom in a universe bound by no Law and without any being, meaning, or value other than our own which we ourselves create.
On Halloween night in 2020 I put a curse on Donald Trump and all who voted for him in that election after four years of subversion of democracy and sabotage of America as a Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, robber baron capitalism and ecological disaster which may include the extinction of humankind for the ephemeral profit of elites, tyranny and state terror in the brutal and criminal police repression of the Black Lives Matter protests, and a relentless multifront campaign against our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and the institutions which serve them including a secular state, an independent and impartial judiciary, and a press free from propaganda and disinformation, especially that of authorities and their carceral states of force and control, free from hate speech, conspiracy theories, rewritten histories, alternate realities; an open public forum of debate free from identitarian politics as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and of fear and division weaponized in service to power, and an education system which produces citizens rather than slaves as a precondition of democracy.
Curses and wishes give form and direction to vast imaginal forces of poetic vision as reimagination and transformation, and may change the balance of power in the world and the fate of humankind as an unfolding of our intention and the will to become. This one has been reasonably successful from my point of view; presaging the Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency, a brief holding action against the tide of fascist tyranny and terror but one which bought us time to organize a Total Resistance, and the exposure and purging of our betrayers from among us in the largest manhunt in our nation’s history as we bring a Reckoning to the fascist infiltrators of the January 6 Insurrection and their financiers, apologists, and puppetmasters, and to all those who would enslave us.
This year as I did last, and on every Halloween to come, for evermore, I shall perform the rituals of Cursing the Tyrants and the Casting Out of the Unclean Fascists that it may become final and eternal, propagating outwards into infinity as a wave of change and gathering force as it grows, like revolutionary struggle unstoppable as the tides, and I ask all of you to do the same; but I will balance it as well with wishes of blessing, protection, and good luck for all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and those champions who stand with them in solidarity and for a free society of equals.
In this moment, with half the tens of thousands dead in Gaza and throughout Palestine being women and children as well as civilians helpless before the bombs of vengeance as blood sacrifices to fear, rage, and hate, I know who my people are, and with whom I stand even if it is only to die with them.
I will be sixty six years old in a couple weeks, November 14 2025, and have been fighting throughout the world and in Palestine and Lebanon since the summer of 1982, and I must question how many more fights I have left in me, especially ones which cannot be won. Far too many such lost causes and forlorn hopes, yet I cannot leave Last Stands unfought. I intend to go down fighting; when you’re all that stands between a people and genocide, between resistance and dehumanization, between liberty and slavery, there is no mustering out.
No one should have to die alone, abandoned and erased from history by a fallen civilization for whom our universal human rights and solidarity as each other’s guarantors of our humanity no longer has meaning or value.
No Band of Brothers, we, but complicit in all evils we do not oppose or remain silent in witness of; especially we Americans whose taxes purchased the bombs of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Herein I claim both the peoples of Palestine and of Israel, versus the theocratic tyrants and terrorists on both sides who seek to subjugate them through fascist divisions of blood, faith, and soil and through fear weaponized in service to power. For the alt-right regime of Netanyahu has conspired with elements of Hamas in the October 7 attack for two purposes; first to stop the growing interdependence and mutual aid of the anticolonial Palestinian Independence movement with the Israeli democracy and peace movements which threatens authority in both Gaza and Israel and may yet emerge as a united and nonsectarian democracy, second to create a casus belli for Netanyahu’s conquest of the region including areas of Lebanon and Syria as a Second War of Independence, and third to delegitimize democracy as a guarantor of universal human rights by making its guarantor states complicit in unforgiveable war crimes in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians by America’s client state of Israel.
If America sends military aid to Israel rather than humanitarian aid to Palestine, the enemy regimes of Netanyahu and Hamas win, and the peoples of both states and our own lose.
To refuse to submit is to become Unconquered, and this is a victory and a kind of power which cannot be taken from us, and through which we may find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.
How do we create ourselves anew and emerge from the legacies of our histories?
As I wrote in my post of May 28 2023, The True and False Crows: a Fable; A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes.; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.
All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.
True and False Crows: a fable
Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies.
To this my sister replied, Such poetry!
This is as direct as I can be, o my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true identity, inscribe this therein.
I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.
What is important is to refuse to submit.
And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.
He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”
Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.
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 last spring in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, 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 this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and 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.
Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; 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; plus it contains a marvelous re-enactment of the myth of Persephone.
Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
My friends, please feel free to perform and enact this spell with me; A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression:
I invoke Chaos, freedom, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human against Order, Authority, and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
I perform acts of transgression by which to break the chains of law and illusion woven by those who would enslave us, to seize our power and our autonomy from hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, from authorized identities and divisions of exclusionary otherness, to create myself in the image of my own imagination and no other, and to shape human being, meaning, and value to the forms of my desires.
In this time of the turning of the tides I refuse and resist subjugation by force and control, I become Unconquered and free, I run amok and am ungovernable, and to Authority I reply with the Four Sacred Acts in pursuit of Liberty and Truth; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
By these invocations of Chaos and Transgression (Herein be free to make wishes, and to consecrate acts of defiance of tyranny, disruptions and subversions of good order and discipline, violations of normality, seizures of power, and celebrations of autonomy and living beyond all limits in the glorious embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves) I curse all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, patriarchy, state terror and tyranny, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and inequalities of power.
On this night of the renewal of the world in which the old order is consumed in fire and the spirit world moves among us and is unified with our own in its reimagination and transformation, I name to my brothers and sisters of Chaos these enemies of humankind as rightful prey; first, upon all tyrants and their forces of repression of dissent and enforcement of the Law, for order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just authority; second upon Donald Trump (herein please feel free to name tyrants whom you oppose and seek to cast down from their thrones; mine include Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others) and all who serve and support him and the cause of fascism, and all those who in voting for him in the Presidential election of November 3 2020 and in this coming election of November 5 2024 have signed the confession of their treason and allegiance to white supremacist terror, Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, and to the tyranny and terror of a police state.
So upon Trump, his puppetmaster Vladimir Putin, and all who claim him as their own do I place my curse and invoke ruin upon their fortunes and their lives and destruction upon their cause. May they be forgotten and become nothing.
This I balance with equal blessing, protection, and good luck upon the lives, fortunes, and causes of liberty and equality upon all who are powerless and dispossessed, marginalized by exclusionary otherness, falsified, commodified, dehumanized, silenced and erased, and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity as champions and bearers of the Torch of Liberty and a free society of equals.
Tonight our wildness will eat the moon and set it free.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 2 Episode 6 Halloween
Among the acts of violation and terror committed by Traitor Trump and his lunatic brownshirts, the attack of the Trump Train on the Biden campaign bus convoy on October 30 2020, abetted and enabled by co-conspirators within the security services whose sworn duty it was to protect all of our citizens and defend our free elections, remains a symbolic nadir of the depravity and brutality of the Trump regime.
What is the difference between free speech and assault? Like assault, hate speech is a form of violence. As written by AP of the trial; “The defense lost a bid last month to have the case ruled in their favor without a trial. The judge wrote that “assaulting, intimidating, or imminently threatening others with force is not protected expression.”
As we witness the depravities and violations of the Trump regime and his loathsome subversions of America, let us remember always the crimes for which he is yet to face a Reckoning; political assassinations such as this attempt to eliminate a rival and the lynchings and beheadings of members of Congress of both parties which he authorized in the January 6 Insurrection.
Remember, and bring a Reckoning.
As written by Diane McWhorter in The Guardian, in an article entitled How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history; “barely responded. History shows the fruits of such inaction;
The bane of raw intelligence – and history – is that you can always look back and find the signs, but you can’t necessarily look ahead and see where they’re pointing. Many questions remain about the intelligence failures that enabled an insurrectionist mob to lay siege virtually unimpeded to the US Capitol. But here’s one sign that’s been flashing in my head since 6 January 2021.
Four days before the 2020 election, a “Trump Train” of motorists swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. Kamala Harris would have been on the bus but for a last-minute schedule change, according to Wendy Davis, then a Texas congressional candidate and the campaign surrogate onboard. The videotaped vehicular harassment – tailgating, sudden braking, passing the bus within inches – got nationwide coverage, courtesy of participants’ back-slapping on social media and Donald Trump’s high-five in return. Though no one was hurt, it took little imagination to see how a 20-ton container of flammable fuel moving in heavy traffic could have turned into a highway bomb. But to the Trump Train, one of its founders, Steve Ceh, told me, the razzing of the Democrats was simply “fun” – “like a rival football game”.
No local arrests were reported, but the FBI in San Antonio confirmed it was investigating. Presumably (albeit against Trump’s tweeted wishes) it was still investigating two months later when the explosion came: a massive incarnation of the Trump Train rioting against President-elect Biden in Washington. It was then that I started getting flashbacks to another historic act of domestic terrorism, one also presaged by a difficult bus ride and lately back in the news.
Sixty years ago, on 15 September 1963, when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four Black girls attending Sunday school, the shock to the country exceeded the moral language to express it. Both President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr cast political blame on Alabama’s “Segregation forever!” governor, George Wallace. At the time he seemed a pariah, the only “vicious racist” King singled out in his I Have a Dream speech 18 days earlier, at the March on Washington. In fact, Wallace was the spearhead of a proto-Maga minority that more than half a century later captured the White House for Trump. And now political violence is so “normal” that we have a former southern governor, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (whose daughter, Trump’s former spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the current governor), effectively endorsing civil war should the prosecution of Trump over a violent coup attempt derail his return to power.
More often than not, though, the slope is slipperier than the cliff of depraved extremism over which Trump led a “conservative” political party. Instead, it is an inertial slide driven by institutional blind spots and choices that were professionally expedient in the moment. Thus it was, more than 60 years ago in Alabama, that the FBI turned a half-closed eye to harassers of a bus and wound up reaping shockwaves that killed children.
On Mother’s Day 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying a protest group of integrated Freedom Riders was chased down the highway by a caravan of white Alabamians, who managed to sideline the vehicle outside Anniston and firebomb it. Meanwhile, a second freedom bus headed toward a Ku Klux Klan ambush in Birmingham. FBI agents there had been told by their Klan informant – the eventually notorious double agent Gary Thomas Rowe Jr – that his klavern was coordinating the attack with local police and city hall. But the bureau did nothing to stop the bloody assault. Nor were any arrests made of Rowe’s Klan brothers, certainly not after a widely published news photo showed the informant himself joining in the bludgeoning.
When Rowe’s consorts bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church two years later, the FBI was so familiar with them that four or five prime suspects were identified within days. (Rowe was apparently not an active participant.) The first prosecution – of the suspected ringleader, by the Alabama attorney general – did not take place for 14 years and met with stonewalling if not resistance from the FBI. (A couple of decades later, the bureau provided “cooperation from top to bottom,” says Doug Jones, the federal prosecutor who won convictions against the last two living Klansmen in 2001 and 2002. He went on to become Alabama’s brief Democratic senator before losing in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, who recently said of white nationalists, “I call them Americans”.)
In contrast to the Freedom Rider attacks, which sent multiple victims to hospital, the buzzing of the Biden team had only one known instance of physical contact, a black pick-up videotaped bumping a campaign car in the bus’s wake. The owner of the pick-up was Eliazar “Cisco” Cisneros, a middle-aged, long-gun-toting San Antonian who had made news six weeks earlier by driving the same Trump-bedecked truck through a peaceful defund-the-police protest. He was not arrested then, but the FBI did talk to him about the Trump Train, according to his lawyer, the former Republican congressman Francisco Canseco. However, Canseco says it was his client who initiated the call, to complain that “his rights were being violated”, meaning the right of Americans “to demonstrate their support for a candidate”. Cisneros claimed the Biden car was the aggressor, despite having boasted on Facebook, “That was me slamming that fucker … Hell yea.” (The available videotape is not definitive, but the analysis by snopes.com contradicts Cisneros’s version.)
Perhaps the FBI had bigger Maga fish to fry than the Trump Train, even though the San Antonio paper reported weeks before the election that the group’s raucous Thursday-night parades 30 miles up I-35 in New Braunfels had featured a man dragging a Black Lives Matter flag behind his pick-up. (A social-media post of his surfaced from a few years earlier: “I’m not apart of the kkk … just hate black people.”) Some African American residents were reminded of the 1998 white supremacist dragging murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr, 300 miles east in Jasper. But by the time the New Braunfels Trump Train caught up with the Biden bus on 30 October, the bar for actionable political intimidation had been set pretty high. Earlier that month in Michigan, the FBI along with state authorities arrested 14 Maga men in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
Way back in segregated 1961, within hours of the freedom bus burning, the Kennedy justice department found a statute allowing for a politically neutered prosecution: 18 U.S. Code § 33, covering the destruction of motor vehicles engaged in interstate commerce. A paragraph conceivably pertinent to what happened in Texas – on a federal highway – penalizes one who “willfully disables or incapacitates any driver … or in any way lessens the ability of such person to perform his duties as such”. At any rate, when even symbolic federal charges failed to materialize, the Biden bus driver, Wendy Davis and two others filed a civil suit against (ultimately) eight Trump Train members, including Cisneros and Ceh, under the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They sued the San Marcos police department separately, as the only force along the route that the complaint says ignored SOS calls – though its alleged abdication was more like “we can’t help you” than the Birmingham police’s promise to give the Klan 15 minutes to work over the Freedom Riders.
Davis et al filed their suits six months after January 6. While hastening to say that “we can’t begin to compare what happened on the bus to that violence”, Davis calls it “part and parcel of the same trend”. It was intimidating enough to cause the campaign to cancel the rest of the tour. A trial date for the Trump Train case has been set for next year. Two defendants settled separately in April 2023 and have been removed from the suit.
Among the plaintiffs’ exhibits included in a court filing on Friday is the transcript of a text chain from late December 2020 about “the March in dc”, in which a message purportedly coming from Cisneros’s phone discusses delivery dates for bear mace and a collapsible baton. Two other defendants, Ceh and his wife, Randi – named in the complaint as leaders of the New Braunfels Trump Train – were among the faithful in Washington on January 6. Steve Ceh told me they did not enter the Capitol but watched “antifa thugs in black breaking windows” and “people in Trump hats telling them to stop”. When I asked if he thought the hundreds of people arrested for their role in the riot were antifa (including a former FBI agent from New Braunfels), he said: “I’m not saying that some people weren’t pretty emotional.”
Ceh says the FBI contacted him after he was fired from his job (as a supervisor for a large Texas construction firm) in the aftermath of January 6. “There are a lot of liberals, a lot of Satanists, in this town,” he told me, explaining that they “doxxed” him. Ceh says he invited the FBI man who questioned him (“a very good guy”) to attend the “relevant church” he recently founded. He says the bureau did not seek him out after the Trump Train episode, not even for one of its unofficial “knock and talks”, and in their later interview about the Capitol riot, he says, the Biden bus “never came up”.
The FBI office in San Antonio declined to make Ceh’s interviewer available for comment and, in response to my request for a Biden bus update, said the bureau did not either confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, apparently even one it previously confirmed. That’s not the worst policy in the world, as then FBI director James Comey painfully demonstrated in 2016 when he violated justice department guidelines with public statements in the Hillary Clinton emails case, arguably giving us President Donald Trump and thereby helping normalize terrorism the bureau is mandated to prevent.
John Paredes, one of the many civil rights lawyers representing the bus plaintiffs, says he does “not read anything into [federal officials’] determination not to bring a prosecution”. The US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas emailed its refusal to comment on “the existence or non-existence of investigations”. Still, I have a sneaking feeling that the FBI’s reaction to the vehicular threat on I-35 would have been a little different if, say, those road warriors had been Muslims rather than white Christians.
Sixty years ago, the Birmingham church bombing helped unify the country around a consensus that state-sponsored racism had to end and, along with the assassination of President Kennedy two months later in Texas, eased the posthumous passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation. Since the domestic terrorism of January 6, though, the partition of hate has only widened. And so, I got a little jolt of hope and change from Ceh’s surprise answer to my pro forma question about whether he was supporting Trump in 2024.
“I’m waiting,” he said. “We have transitioned.”
I wish I could say the quote ended there, but he went on to talk about how the issue is no longer “about what man’s in there”, because “we’ve got to turn to God”. If I had to interpret those signs, I would take them to mean that things could get worse. Apocalyptic, maybe.”
And what this means for our future, both as a nation and globally, was summarized in an article of 2020 by Lois Beckett as written in The Guardian, entitled Scholars warn of collapse of democracy as Trump v Biden election looms: Dozens of experts on fascism warn of global danger, calling for action from ordinary people: ‘It is not too late’; “y is extremely fragile and potentially temporary, requiring vigilance and protection,” the scholars wrote in the letter released on Sunday. “It is not too late to turn the tide.”
More than 80 signatories, including professors and other scholars at universities in the US, Canada, and Europe, do not agree on whether to label Donald Trump a “fascist”. The fragility of democracy worldwide, they write, will continue to be an issue “irrespective of who wins the American presidency”.
“Whether Donald J Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond 3 November 2020,” the scholars write, referring to election day on Tuesday, when Trump will face Joe Biden at the polls.
However, the historians warn, particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, “the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever”. They suggest citizens must be ready not only to defend democracy at the ballot box, but “if necessary, also through non-violent protests in the streets”.
“That’s the lesson, to not be complacent in moments like this,” said Jennifer Evans, a professor of German history at Carleton University in Canada and one of the lead organizers of the open letter. “This is a very dangerous time, and we all have a responsibility to prop up democracy.”
Among the many warning signs that democracy is at risk, the historians argue, are the spread of disinformation, inequality, the “politics of internal enemies” and politically motivated violence.
“We need to reveal and denounce any and all connections between those in power and those vigilante and militia forces using political violence to destabilize our democracies,” the letter urges.
Evans said she was particularly disturbed by the evidence of “the infiltration of the far right” in police and military organizations around the world, including in the US, Germany, and Canada.
Signatories to the letter include several authors who have commented on authoritarianism and fascism during Trump’s presidency, including Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University, and Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works.”
Here follows the letter, How to Keep the Lights On in Democracies: An Open Letter of Concern by Scholars of Authoritarianism: “Regardless of the outcome of the United States’ election, democracy as we know it is already imperiled. However, it is not too late to turn the tide.
Whether Donald J. Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat, or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond November 3rd, 2020.
While democracy appeared to be flourishing everywhere in the years following the end of the Cold War, today it seems to be withering or in full-scale collapse globally. As scholars of twentieth century authoritarian populism, fascism, and political extremism, we believe that unless we take immediate action, democracy as we know it will continue in its frightening regression, irrespective of who wins the American presidency in early November.
In contrast to the hollow proclamations of economic and political liberalism’s “inevitable” triumph over authoritarianism in all its iterations, studying the past demonstrates that democracy is extremely fragile and potentially temporary, requiring vigilance and protection. Scholars of race, colonialism, and imperialism have further deepened our perspectives by reminding us of how the myths of national “greatness” were and continue to be written on the backs of largely silenced, marginalized and oftentimes enslaved or unfree, “others.”
We study the conditions that have historically accompanied the rise of authoritarian and fascistic regimes. In nearly every case, we have observed how profound social, political, and economic disruptions, including the ravages of military conflicts, depressions, and the enormous pressures caused by globalization, deeply shook people’s confidence in democracy’s ability to adequately respond to their plights, or even provide basic forms of long-term security.
We have seen all of these patterns in our study of the past, and we recognize the signs of a crisis of democracy in today’s world as well. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed profound inequalities of class and race across the globe. As the last four years have demonstrated, the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever.
To meet the challenge at hand, there are several things we must do.
We must boldly and unapologetically safeguard critical thinking based on evidence. This includes demonstrating the virtues of entertaining a wide array of positions and perspectives, and support, both in word and deed, for investigative journalism, science and the humanities, and freedom of the press. We need swift and tangible commitments from corporate media organizations and governments to tackle the dangers of misinformation and media concentration. We must encourage coalitions organized across differences of race, class, gender, religion and caste, while respecting the perspectives and experiences of others. We need to reveal and denounce any and all connections between those in power and those vigilante and militia forces using political violence to destabilize our democracies. Much like the active democratic movements across the globe from Nigeria to India, Belarus to Hong Kong, we must be prepared to defend pluralism and democracy against the growing dangers of communal violence and authoritarianism at the ballot box but, if necessary, also through non-violent protest in the streets. We must defend the integrity of the electoral process and ensure the widest possible voter turnouts, not just in this election but in every election large and small in all of our hometowns. And we must re-commit to a global conversation on support for democratic institutions, laws, and practices both within and between our respective countries. This includes directly confronting the unfettered greed that drives global inequality, which has unleashed geopolitical rivalries over access to resources, international migrations, and collapsed state sovereignties all over the world.
We need to turn away from the rule by entrenched elites and return to the rule of law. We must replace the politics of “internal enemies” with a politics of adversaries in a healthy, democratic marketplace of ideas. And above else, we need to work together to find ways to keep the light of democracy shining in our countries and all over the world. Because if we don’t, we will indeed face dark days ahead.”
Signed,
Zoltán Ádám | Associate Professor of Economics, Corvinus University of Budapest (Hungary)
Giulia Albanese | Professor of History, Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy)
Anjali Arondekar | Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Director of the Center for South Asian Studies, University of California-Santa Cruz (United States of America, USA) *
Kai Arzheimer | Professor of Political Science, University of Mainz (Germany) *
Luis Herran Avila | Assistant Professor of History, University of New Mexico (USA)
Jonathan Bach | Professor of Global Studies, The New School for Social Research (USA) *
Luca Baldissara | Associate Professor of History, University of Pisa (Italy)
Shelley Baranowski | Distinguished Professor Emerita of History, University of Akron (USA)
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Michele Battini | Professor of the Intellectual and Political History of Modern Europe, University of Pisa (Italy)
Heike Bauer | Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History, Birkbeck, University of London (United Kingdom, UK)
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat | Professor of History and Italian Studies, New York University (USA)
Waitman Wade Beorn | Senior Lecturer of History, Northumbria University (UK)
Mabel Berezin | Professor of Sociology, Cornell University (USA)
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Pascale Rachel Bos | Associate Professor of German Studies, Jewish Studies, Gender Studies, European Studies, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
Marco Bresciani | Research Fellow of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence (Italy)
Benjamin Brower | Associate Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
Christopher R. Browning | Frank Porter Graham Professor Emeritus of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA)
Hubertus Buchstein | Professor of Political Theory, Greifswald University (Germany)
Darcy Buerkle | Associate Professor of History, Smith College (USA)
Renato Camurri | Professor of History, University of Verona (Italy)
Mauro Canali | Professor of Contemporary History, University of Camerino (Italy) *
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James Casteel | Associate Professor of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University (Canada)
Laura Cerasi | Associate Professor of History, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy)
Andrea Chandler | Professor of Political Science, Carleton University (Canada)
Sarah Churchwell | Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities, School of Advanced Study, University of London (UK)
Howard Chiang | Associate Professor of History, University of California-Davis (USA)
Rebecca Clifford | Associate Professor of History, Swansea University (UK)
Joshua Cole | Professor of History, University of Michigan (USA)
Mark B. Cole | College Associate Lecturer, Cleveland State University (USA)
Tim Cole | Professor of History, University of Bristol (UK)
Paul Corner | Professor of European History, Università di Siena (Italy)
Mark Cornwall | Professor of Modern European History, University of Southampton (UK)
Antonio Costa Pinto | Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Raymond Craib | Professor of History, Cornell University (USA)
Brian E. Crim | Professor of History, University of Lynchburg (USA)
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Kate Davison | PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne (Australia) *
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Elizabeth Drummond | Associate Professor of History, Loyola Marymount University (USA)
Hilary Earl | Professor of Modern European History, Nippissing University (Canada)
Michael Ebner | Associate Professor of History, Syracuse University (USA) *
Sean Eedy | Lecturer in History, Carleton University (Canada)
Greg Eghigian | Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University (USA)
Geoff Eley | Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History and German Studies, University of Michigan (USA)
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Andrew Evans | Associate Professor of History, State University of New York at New Paltz (USA)
Jennifer Evans | Professor of History, Carleton University and Member, College of New Scholars, Royal Society of Canada (Canada) *
Christopher Ewing | Assistant Professor of History, Virginia Commonwealth University (USA)
Daniel Fainstein | Dean and Professor of Jewish Studies, Universidad Hebraica (Mexico)
Federico Finchelstein | Professor of History, The New School for Social Research (USA) *
Tiffany N. Florvil | Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico (USA)
Filippo Focardi | Professor of Contemporary History, Università di Padova (Italy)
Moritz Föllmer | Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
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Nancy Fraser | Henry A and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science, The New School for Social Research (USA)
Jane Freeland | Research Associate, German Historical Institute London (UK)
Norbert Frei | Professor of History, University of Jena (Germany)\
Karin Friedrich | Chair in Early Modern European History, University of Aberdeen and Chair, German History Society (UK)
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Mary Fulbrook | Professor of German History, University College London (UK)
Valeria Gallimi | Assistant Professor, Università degli Studi di Firenze (Italy)
Diana Garvin | Assistant Professor of Mediterranean Studies, University of Oregon (USA) *
Eagle Glassheim | Professor of History, University of British Columbia (Canada)
Svenja Goltermann | Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich (Switzerland)
Peter Gordon | Amabel B. James Professor of History, Harvard University (USA)
Udi Greenberg | Associate Professor of History, Dartmouth University
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Brian J Griffith | Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar in European History, University of California-Los Angeles (USA) *
Atina Grossmann | Professor of History, The Cooper Union (USA)
Sara F. Hall | Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois-Chicago (USA)
Anna Hájková | Associate Professor of Modern European Continental History, Warwick University (UK)
Shireen Hassim | Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics, Carleton University (Canada) *
Dan Healey | Professor of Modern Russian History, University of Oxford (UK)
Valerie Hébert | Associate Professor of History, Lakehead University Orillia (Canada)
Elizabeth Heineman | Professor of History, University of Iowa (USA)
Dagmar Herzog | Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate Center, CUNY (USA)
Benjamin Carter Hett | Professor of History, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY (USA)
Erin Hochman | Associate Professor of History, Southern Methodist University (USA)
Peter Holquist | Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Erika Hughes | Academic Lead in Performance, University of Portsmouth (UK)
Samuel Clowes Huneke | Assistant Professor of History, George Mason University (USA)
Stefan Ihrig | Professor of History, University of Haifa (Israel)
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Gayle Levy | Associate Professor of French and Director of Honours College, University of Missouri-Kansas City (USA)
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Carolyn Kay | Professor of History, Trent University (Canada)
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References
How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history
Who is this Absurd fellow Lovecraft, with his gorgeous phraseology and peculiar allegiance to British rather than American English, his Surreal strangeness, bizarre Sadeian transgression, Freudian horror, and poetics of fear?
The Lovecraft Mythos remains an iconic study in fear as the organizing principle of an invented mythology of Absurdist Nihilism; it also reveals how we use fear to shape ourselves and others. What are its methods and purposes in Lovecraft, and in horror literature in general? Why do we need fear as an instrument of identity creation?
Above all in this age of political polarization and historical culture and identity as a ground of struggle, how are we to understand him?
Is he a fascist? Nowhere in literature will you find a more useful case study of fascist psychology, and in nonfiction only the book I discovered while a senior in high school in the wake of studies of Holocaust literature and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which led me to a lifelong study of the origins of evil through the intersections of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, a multidisciplinary analysis of Hitler entitled The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite, is more illuminating.
Lovecraft is a conflicted author who mocked Hitler as a clown but also admired his performances as a hybrid form of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Pirandello’s Theatre of the Grotesque; many Americans thought of Trump in this way as parallel figures of public spectacle. Hitler’s famous maxim “Politics is the new art” marks the turning point of an unknown artist into a monstrous tyrant, and of our civilization to an age of darkness. From this moment on, image has replaced content and public life has been a nihilistic theatrical performance wherein values are irrelevant.
Lovecraft’s paranoid delusions of alien conspiracies and ancient cults can be read as antisemitic allegories derived from propaganda like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of which Umberto Eco wrote so beautifully in Prague Cemetery, but for the fact that he was a madman who believed them to be literally true; humanity is a tenuous and illusory quality for Lovecraft, whose world is filled with monsters wearing human masks who might reveal themselves at any moment, a precarious reality under constant threat.
His only known romantic relationship was his brief marriage to a Jewish woman, to whom he incessantly muttered dark imprecations, poisonous metacommentary, and racist characterizations about virtually everyone they passed on the streets of New York as monsters from his stories in disguise, as he did in his hundred thousand letters to his literary proteges.
He is not a fascist, which requires submission to authority and the abandonment of all meaning other than power and all value other than wealth. Fascism weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power and operates as tyranny; Lovecraft’s work is filled with elite hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness as images and figures which may be read as racist, and he shares many of the obsessions of fascism, but nowhere does he long for authority or imposed meaning; instead he signposts and calls it out as cruelty without meaning or value, and his narratives are driven by existential dread and terror of authority.
His is a poetics of rebellion and nihilism like that of Camus in a universe wherein the gods are not merely dead as in Nietzsche’s reimagination of the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us, Thus Spake Zarathustra, but are actively hostile to humankind, mad idiot superbeings whose motives are utterly alien and predatory, who created humankind as slaves and food, a radical nihilistic atheism like that of late Samuel Beckett which has its political form as anarchy. The Anarchist slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World, “No gods, no masters”, coined by the socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui in 1880 and popularized by Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent in 1907, might have been written for him.
Is he a racist? Yes and no, as we may say of fellow Surrealists Djuna Barnes and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His fears of otherness, miscegenation, contamination, devolution to an animal state, and of the monstrosity of others is often expressed in racist terms, but he neither begins nor ends with unselfcritical racism. It remains ambiguous whether he is calling it out or employing such tropes to advance his themes; the first interpretation ascribes intentionality and self awareness which is unprovable but aligns with his themes, the second miscasts him as a Warhol like mocker of expectations whose images are deliberately discontiguous and unaligned, or a fabulist without a cause which he was not.
He was instead a profoundly wounded and savaged soul who fears his own monstrosity most of all, and this is why he is useful to us. In the literature of madness only the works of Akutagawa and Philip K. Dick are true equals, both authors who like Lovecraft were fighting a losing battle against madness, and aware of the degeneration of their skill and artistic control. We may say of him as Renfield says of himself in Dracula; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.”
Why should we read Lovecraft now?
Like the Hanging of the Maids in Homer’s Ulysses, the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, his writing becomes meaningful for us when it is relevant to problems we face in our own lives, and literature is useful when it helps us solve problems of adaptation and change, such as confronting and interrogating implicit privilege as patriarchy and racism. What else is literature for? Purge it of its power to disturb, incite, and provoke, and it becomes meaningless and worthless.
The tragic flaw of Lovecraft is also that of our civilization; a blindness to our own privilege and a failure to embrace our monstrosity and otherness. Such lines of fracture can be read in our borders with their concentration camps of migrants and our prisons whose purpose is the re-enslavement of Black people as contract forced labor, in our wars of ethnic cleansing in partnership with the state of Israel as a proxy of imperial conquest and sectarian division through it Apartheid policies and the Occupation of Palestine which give the lie to our claims of universal human rights, and in our democracy which has been infiltrated and subverted by fascists and transformed into a carceral state of imperial force and control, though the casting out of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and the subsequent Restoration of America has begun a counterforce of democracy to fascist tyranny.
We must claim our monstrosity, and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
Any serious scholarship of Lovecraft begins with Michel Houellebecq’s stunning debut and manifesto, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, whose chapter titles suggest the ars poetica of Lovecraft; “Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness. Then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnamable architecture of time”.
Next comes the definitive biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volumes 1 & 2, by S.T. Joshi, Joshi’s An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, and the volumes he edited in the Black Wings series of Lovecraftian horror anthologies. Finally there is Thomas Ligotti’s manifesto The Conspiracy against the Human Race, and his darkly luminous fictions.
How has the influence of Lovecraft shaped me as an informing and motivating source, what are my origins in successorship from him, and what is our relationship now?
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2025, Gods of My Father: Father’s Day Act Two; Let us claim and embrace our monstrosity, the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves: the Beast as Nietzsche’s Toad;
Here is a nested set of puzzles like the evils of Pandora’s Box or gateways to otherness opened by Clive Barker’s Lament Configuration, bearing wonders and terrors in equal measure, and we can never grow wise enough to truly say which is which.
Can we open the secrets of human being, meaning, and value without angels and demons, potentialities of darkness and light, reflections of each other, escaping together into our lives?
How can we explore the numinous within us, unless we embrace both dimensions of our wholeness? All true art exalts and defiles.
Herein I look to the figure of the werewolf in Burrough’s novel The Wild Boys as controlling metaphor of our wildness as beings of nature, and like nature anarchic, chaotic, and utterly free. In a universe without meaning other than that which we ourselves create, the terror of our nothingness is balanced with the joy of total freedom.
The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization through systems of Control but which also has the power to redeem and liberate us, the final part of Burroughs’ Anarchist Trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature, an extension of Rousseau’s Natural Man and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil.
He did claim to be possessed by the Toad as a chthonic spirit, identical with Nietzsche’s Toad which the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra, a novel I later adopted as a counter-text to the Bible, feared he must swallow as a symbol of our animal nature. Burroughs claimed to be Nietzsche’s successor on this basis, as avatar and priest of all that is reviled, disgusting, loathsome and bestial within us, which he identified with Lovecraft’s Tsathoggua and transferred to me as a successor and avatar.
As I never conceptualized or ascribed negative qualities to my own shadow self, this containing nothing which is not me, I experienced this simply as a seizure of power as an avatar and not as possession by a malign entity; exactly as practiced in Voodoo and in the Shaivite-Tantric cult of the Bhairav as I explored it in Nepal during my time as a monk and Dream Navigator of the Vajrayana Kagu order of Tibetan Buddhism. For myself, from childhood and in a family utterly free from the consequences of Freud’s father as lawgiver or from Abrahamic ideas of God as Authority, I imagined nature as truth and freedom, and nothing to be feared.
The magic Burroughs and my father practiced was based equally on his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche called Acephale, the mythos of his model H.P. Lovecraft, and elements of shamanism, traditional ritual magic from grimoires, and the occultism of Aleister Crowley. A decade and more later, Burroughs would be claimed by admirers as a founder of Chaos Magic, and his host of invented literary methods designed to destroy systems of control represented an ars poetica which was also a personal faith, including the cut-up method, playback, dreams, out of body travel, mandalas and gates to alternate realities, ecstatic trance and vision, curses, demonology, tarot; I still have the deck of tarot cards he gave me and taught me to use. To this my father brought the family Voodoo, werewolf mythology, ancestral history interwoven with versions of Grimm’s fairytales, and his brilliance as a theatre director; he directed some of Edward Albee’s plays, and I grew up from the age of four listening to them discuss drama during rehearsals from a center front seat in the theatre, which often interrogated Albee’s direct influences and references among his fellow Absurdists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter, but included sources in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, and Eugene Ionesco.
As Burroughs wrote The Wild Boys during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from my father’s ideas and the claim of our family history that we are not human but werewolves, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon, and we were driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions. He was writing it during the Stonewall Riots, which may be a more direct context as a fictionalization of the witness of history. Like much of his fiction, it is also filled with episodes both historical and imagined and set in mirror worlds of exotic locations like Mexico and Morocco transformed as Orientalist fantasies or gateways to underworld realms.
When I asked him, at the age of ten or so, if I was in his book and what he was writing about, he said; “Freedom, nature as truth and civilization as addiction to wealth and power and theft of the soul, and how our pasts get mixed up with our futures.”
The Wild Boys reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, of which fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar and a source for Burroughs, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is its direct model H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, references Octave Mirbeau, Bataille, Genet, and extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint or binding and limit of our nature which he called libido control. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; wildness as nature and freedom here mingle and intertwine.
All the works of William S. Burroughs are masterpieces of anarchist liberation and transgression, Surrealism and occult mysticism, even if difficult because they are told in collages of random and nonlinear episodes which he described as vaudeville turns, with an iconography that is bizarre and obscene. In spite and possibly because of this, they remain among the great classics of world literature, revealing endless chasms of darkness and infinite possibilities of rapture and illumination.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Go ahead; swallow the toad.
The Toad is summoned by performance of that which is loathsome to you; as embodiment of disgust, horror, degradation, and what Freud called the Uncanny. Jung described possession by the Shadow as a theriomorphic figure, the Beast, as “A manifestation of the Beast Within which seizes the soul with nameless shuddering; in that moment one becomes transformed and exalted six thousand feet beyond good and evil.”
It is a type of the Guardian of the Gates of Dreams who must be eaten to transform it into a Guide and ally or protector in underworld journeys. In the Dreaming one may assume its two Battle Forms, the Grendel-like water dragon and the chiropteran raptor as depicted in the film Dracula, and as a chthonic figure of underworld illumination confers powers of insight into others secret desires similar to Lucifer’s power in the Netflix series which fictionalizes the great question of Lacan, What do you desire?, as well as the ability to enter the dreams of others as does Freddy Kruger in the Nightmare films based so faithfully on the cult of the Bhairav in Tibetan Buddhist-Shaivite Tantric faith. I discovered much parallelism between the magic of my childhood and that of the Vajrayana Buddhist Kagyu order of monks in Kathmandu of which I was once a Dream Navigator.
Burroughs had a whole pantheon and system of magic worked out from Lovecraft and Crowley, but that is a different story. What I find interesting is that like Crowley’s mirror image angels and demons who are really the same being, Burroughs’ reimagination of Lovecraft’s mythos has his Others as both good and evil, like wrathful and beneficent aspects of Tibetan gods.
In the end all that matters is what you do with your fear, and how you use your power.
Why is Lovecraft relevant to us now?
H.P. Lovecraft investigates the failure of our civilization to protect us from our animal nature, the shadow which grants us depth and limitless passion; the purpose of our invention of civilization according to Camille Paglia’s magisterial Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
His writing is filled with images and themes which have been misread as racist, but his intent is the reverse; to name and disempower the forces which destroyed civilization in World War One as fear of otherness, exactly as did his model T.S. Eliot. Together with Vladimir Nabokov, they are the greatest, and perhaps the last, of our true conservatives.
But this, too, is ambiguous, for he is equally a revolutionary; Lovecraft’s vision of Western civilization is that of a colony of ants mining the waning power of a dead god’s carcass, a horror without purpose. He shares the critique of Idealism with Eliot, Nabokov, and especially Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, but also of traditional society as structural and systemic tyranny and authoritarian force and control with his fellow Absurdists and Surrealists, to some degree of normality as a basis of the power of church and state with de Sade as a literary provocateur and the valorization of transgression as liberation from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and above all of formal power itself with the great visionary for whom he was a direct model with Genet and Bataille, William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and Jacques DeMolay.
Anyone who has read my literary criticism or my political commentary will be aware that I despise and abjure fascism above all else. Why, then, do I love and admire conservative authors as a treasure, and acclaim any quixotic defense of Idealism against the onslaught of atavistic barbarism and dehumanized modernity?
Let me clarify; fascism is an intrusive force of destruction and no part of the Western Civilization which I champion, born as self-criticism in the Forum of Athens. Conservatism in America or indeed any free nation founded on the values of the Enlightenment begins with a free society of equals, a secular state, objective and testable truth, and a system of justice which is impartial to class, race, or gender, founded on the Rights of Man, scientific rationalism, and Humanism.
Any philosophy of totalitarian authority which centralizes power to a state of force and control, either monarchist-aristocratic, communist, or fascist, is anathema to myself and to democracy and freedom. I am an American and a bearer of the Torch of Liberty. This is why I am on the side of rebellion, revolution, anarchy, chaos, and the frightening of the horses.
Regarding the themes of existential dread of otherness and the terror of alien civilizations, of being overrun by a zombie apocalypse of mindless cannibal brutes which has always been a metaphor of nonwhite immigration, H.P. Lovecraft explored this territory of fear as a cause of the collapse of our civilization. He interrogates rather than valorizes the causes of monarchy and fascism as forms of colonial imperialism.
Lovecraft asked a simple question; what happens to humankind and to human being, meaning, and value without Freudian control of our animal instinctive nature? Throughout his works he recapitulates and extends Nietzsche’s thesis in The Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist critique of state power based on a legal reformulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin; that without the restraining force of law man devolves into a subhuman condition and the most ruthless and amoral wins and becomes king, originally formulated to limit the divine right of kings and crucial to the Enlightenment project and the birth of modern secular democracy.
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded, is luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism and Freudian horror.
Here are Lovecraft’s primary sources and references; Shakespeare and classical Greek theatre which are common sources, Nietzsche, and Freud. What he did with them, however, was utterly unique and a luminous work of genius which interrogated the failure and collapse of our civilization in World War One from its internal contradictions and forged from his vision an ars poetica of Absurdist-Surrealist Nihilism which prefigured Existentialism.
This line of transmission originates with Dostoevsky and Gogol, was codified by Kafka, and finds realization in Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Kobo Abe, and Thomas Ligotti as Absurdist Nihilism and in William S. Burroughs, Jorge Borges, Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Andre Breton, Philip Lamantia, Allen Ginsburg, Jonathan Carroll, Jeff Vander Meer, and others as Surrealism.
It is his Surrealism for which I love him; Lovecraft’s principal stories form an
Initiation cycle of Jungian shadow work and the confrontation with ones own darkness as the Other, like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood or Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, culminating in his reimagination of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, William S. Burrough’s model for his own final masterwork The Western Lands. Fellow Surrealist Vladimir Nabokov articulated the principles of poetic vision and dreams as transcendent imaginal journeys through time and other dimensions to seize control of our own evolution in his great novel Ada, Jung models them in the Red Book, and Philip K. Dick was consumed by them, but Surrealism as a transhumanist project to become a god or to unite with the Infinite draws on myriads of esoteric, mythic, occult, and mystery traditions, many of which inform Lovecraft’s work. Like Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Lovecraft can be read as a summa theologica and codex of the whole Western mystery tradition.
Like his models and sources, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and those for whom he became a model and reference in turn, Jung, Nabokov, Burroughs, Lamantia, and Philip K. Dick, and aligned with the works of Akutagawa in Kappa, Leonora Carrington, Djuna Barnes, and Jerzy Kosinski in The Painted Bird, the works of Lovecraft are also a therapy journal which documents his struggles with madness.
Like Baudelaire he realizes it is the world and not himself who is mad; but he is also mad, and his great works chart the course of his degeneration and unmooring from consensus reality which was also a liberation of the spirit and of the imagination, a madness and rapture which transformed him into an angelic figure, combining in one being illumination and darkness, depravity and exaltation.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As a figure of Orpheus and Milton’s Rebel Angel Lovecraft struggled to escape the limits of the human and the legacies of his history, his madness a consequence of unresolved internal conflicts and the massive trauma of being an emotionally abandoned child whose parents both died of madness in an asylum, a madness which he shared and feared he could not escape, which made strange his vision as a unique genius but also marked him with a sign of otherness, robbed him of self control and reason at times and crippled his ability to bond or even socialize in person with others, making him a reclusive hermit without sexual interest of any kind.
Lovecraft bore the wound of the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; he married at age 34 having never even kissed anyone before, and his wife remarked that she had to initiate sex as he was uninterested; the failure of their marriage is unmysterious in this light. This and lack of interest in eating which may have been attempts to starve himself to death and resulted in his Nosferatu-like gauntness make me suspect that he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who hated his body and feared his desires. He may also have been held prisoner in isolation during his formative years, under the strict regime of his mother and female guardians, and the tortures he survived are described in symbolic and allegorical form in his works.
Here is a great secret of the mechanism of unequal power as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma and internalized oppression; the son is shaped and deployed as the vengeance of the mother, and the victim by the abuser who is a tyrant and also a survivor of powerlessness and victimhood, and so the system of oppression perpetuates itself. Patriarchy and racism are persistent because they create some of us as monsters with which to subjugate the rest of us.
Lovecraft suffered from what I call Dr Moreau syndrome, fear of devolution to an animal state; also of ones own animal nature, like the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and could not and which William S. Burroughs gloried in being possessed by, which he claimed as a lineage and as the successor of Nietzsche.
This coupled with the xenophobic fear of being overwhelmed by representations of parental authority as an ancient and superior civilization which renders our own insignificant, and robs us of culture as a control mechanism of our id or shadow self. Hence the existential horror of the Western scholar confronted by elder and superior alien civilizations such as Eqypt, as in the Randolph Carter stories which were brilliantly reimagined in The Mummy films starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.
As regards his style; Lovecraft extends Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and like his model Burroughs reimagines the nihilism and transgressive eroticism of Georges Bataille as Surrealism harnessed to the project of Romantic Idealism; to paraphrase the words of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, to break through the mask of our material existence and seize the Reality it conceals. That the quest of Ahab was also his is quite evident; “to the end I shall grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I strike at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” as Ahab declaims to the White Whale, figure of authoritarian tyranny who stands in for God and for his abusers. Whether he was able through his stories to leave us a map of the journey to the unknowns which lie beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden is another matter, proven only in the doing.
As to the stylistics of his rhetoric and ars poetica, Lovecraft has lost his adjectives, which are running amok and taunting their substantives. His howls of desolation are a cause of great merriment among the several grammars he employs, and this is the only thing on which they are in agreement.
His words are formed of scrabble pieces, randomized by being shaken in a dice cup in a game against the gods of madness and the ravening dark, the future of our emerging humanity wagered against the barbarism of our past.
What can be saved, and what dreamed anew? For the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu is once again revealed as an illusion, a palace of memories and lies which in their dance of chaos cannot be limited by their classification and taxonomies of value, but frangible and hollow do betray us.
Mirrors and false images which capture, distort, and falsify us, a wilderness of lost meanings which steal our souls, sound and fury signifying nothing but which seizes and shakes us with the terror of our nothingness like a rag doll in a lion’s mouth, and the signifying monkey who lives at the Buddha’s foot to denote the inherent animal nature of all humankind as a theriomorphic representation has harnessed and is riding him like a pony.
Sometimes our demons must be let out to dance.
What can we learn from Lovecraft now?
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 or a Lovecraftian one, referential to classical sources which include Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign and hostile to humanity, rests with our solution to the paradox 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 directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen, of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith as did T.S. Eliot. 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 before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bears the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation. Hope in this context is subjugation to authority.
Let us embrace the Hell of total freedom, for nothing is there which does not live within us. “No gods, no masters” as Auguste Blanqui described it in the title of his newspaper in 1880.
The terror of our nothingness, meaninglessness, and powerlessness in a hostile universe wherein the gods are mad and depraved monsters, a universe empty of imposed meaning or value, may also become the joy of total freedom, autonomy, authenticity, self-ownership and self-creation, as it was for Sartre; a universe in which the mould of man is broken and we are utterly without authorized identities.
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, 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 interdependence. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history. Much of our sorrows originate in the conflicts between the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, nature and nurture, the historical and social informing, motivating, and shaping forces of identity.
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.
Is Lovecraft such a figure of heroic struggle against authority, like Icarus, Milton’s Rebel Angel, or Victor Frankenstein, fallen but great, a tragic bearer of the Torch of Liberty?
Great authors are a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, which like the fragmented images of the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror in Anderson’s Snow Queen reflect and reveal aspects of ourselves and come alive in their readers; which Lovecraft shall I describe?
The poet of chaos whom I adore, of madness and the existential terror of our nothingness in a universe of dethroned authority, a visionary and tragic hero?
The survivor of abandonment and abuse who forged beauty from their trauma, a flawed and very human man whose fear of otherness was expressed in allegories of dysmorphia, dehumanization, and degradation which are horrifically filled with racist figures and images and can be read as illuminating case studies of fear and of the dyadic origins of evil in overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized by authority in service to power and the systemic inequalities of power and privilege in hierarchies of elite belonging and otherness?
Lovecraft understood the principle of dancing ones demons; the monstrous figures he describes as shuggoths can be read as racist metaphors, but are also unflinching descriptions of actual childhood night terrors, manifestations of sexual abuse, which invaded his dreams and his flesh to “tickle” him awake. It is this relentless engagement with his fear and darkness, with the legacies of his victimization, this willingness to see the abominable and not look away, and to witness the truth as an author, like Camus to refuse to submit, which makes him useful to us and places his work among the literature of madness and therapy journals, with Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Leonora Carrington, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Jerzy Kosinski, Philip K. Dick, and Kathy Acker. Foucault called this truth telling, and this parrhesia as a sacred calling to pursue the truth as a witness of history, which I claim as my faith, lies at the heart of Lovecraft’s bizarre invented mythos.
How does this help us forge our future as antifascists and antiracists, citizens of a free society of equals and bearers of the Torch of Liberty?
We must speak directly to that fear which is the origin of evil; to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, and we do this best by bearing sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others. How can we engage in liberation struggle from systems of oppression if we cannot embrace our own darkness?
In the words of Karl Popper; “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not wish to adopt a rational attitude.” Let us embrace instead the irrational, our Shakespearean taxonomies of passion as motive forces, of rapture and terror, in the great work of reimagination and transformation of humankind and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
We may say of Lovecraft what is said of Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who; “He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of the world; no one had ever done it before, perhaps no one will ever do it again. To my mind, that strange, wild man was not only among the world’s greatest artists, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.”
What is greatness? What does it mean to be a great author or creative genius of any kind, a great human being, in this or any time?
For myself, greatness does not require us to overcome the limits of our histories, only to engage them in authentic struggle. Like Jacob wrestling the angel, everything in life is more powerful than we are; victory lies not in defeating the forces which shape us, but in refusal to submit to them, and in reaching beyond our limits. And in this Lovecraft emerges as a tragic hero, who can teach us how to struggle with our own darkness in our journey toward becoming human.
From the darkness of the unknown and the Forbidden, our demons call to us with siren songs which echo and thunder among limitless chasms of our possibilities, and whisper secrets in our dreams; and they say, Come dance with us.
Come dance with us.
The Lighthouse
The Mummy
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq, Stephen King (Introduction)
Torch of Liberty 