In the wake of Trump acting as Putin’s puppet tyrant and attempting to threaten Ukraine into ceding areas under Russian Occupation and agreeing to refuse membership which would bind Europe to her defense, and Zelensky’s refusal to surrender the unity and sovereignty of Ukraine to these two war criminals who would be kings, comes the public remembrance of the last time Russia had the power to use Ukraine as she wished, Holodomor Remembrance Day.
The limits of the human are defined by the war crimes of Russia in her imperial conquest and dominion of Ukraine, a necessary first step in Putin’s plans to reconquer Eastern Europe and subjugate Africa and the whole of the Mediterranean.
This we must Resist, beyond hope of victory or survival, for if we do not unite in solidarity to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness before it swallows us all we will become dehumanized things owned by those who would enslave us, subjugated to an enemy who does not recognize us as fellow human beings and to whom our universal human rights mean nothing.
These are the true stakes in this moment, our humanity, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine not only imperils the national identity and liberty of the Ukrainians, but of all humankind.
As Ben Franklin said, gripping a bundle of arrows in his fists and referencing the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy Deganawida the Peacemaker; “What does it take to break a single arrow? Nothing! But bound together… unbreakable!” “One arrow is easily broken, but when many are bound together they are unbreakable.” A similar demonstration of unity and solidarity with arrows by Mōri Motonari, to get his three sons to work together, inspired Akira Kurosawa in his great film Ran.
My hope is that the principles of solidarity of action and a united front when meeting threats which can only be overcome together as guarantors of each other’s humanity and universal human rights are reawakened throughout the world as they were after the previous World Wars before it comes to that, and that Ukraine and civilization emerge victorious from this test of our humanity before we are all annihilated and become nothing.
If our species is to survive the centuries of war to come in an Age of Tyrants, if human civilization is to avoid Fall and collapse into barbarism, if Ukraine is to hold the gates of Europe, we must stand together.
In Holodomor we find a horrific example, and but one of many, of our fate should we fail.
As written in Euromaidan Press; “Good morning World! Good morning Ukraine!
On 22 November 2025, Ukraine observes Holodomor Commemoration Day, honoring the millions who perished during the 1932–33 famine deliberately created by the Stalin-led Soviet government. “Death solves all problems. No human, no problem,” said Joseph Stalin.
The Holodomor targeted Ukraine’s population and its national identity through state-imposed starvation, grain requisitions, and the criminalization of basic survival.
At the height of the famine, an estimated 28,000 people died every day—17 every minute, 1,000 every hour. Demographic studies place the overall death toll in Ukraine between 3 and 7 million, excluding Ukrainians outside the Ukrainian SSR who also starved, the hundreds of thousands deported during collectivization, and the many religious, cultural, and political leaders executed in the same period.
Despite holding substantial grain reserves and continuing to export agricultural products, the Soviet authorities denied the famine, rejected international aid, and enforced policies such as the “Law of Spikelets,” which punished starving people—including with execution—for gathering leftover grain in the fields.
For decades, the USSR suppressed all information about the Holodomor. The Russian Federation continues to deny or minimize this historical crime today.”
As I wrote in my post of February 27 2023, Holodomor: A True History of the Relationship of Russia and Ukraine in the Case of Stalin’s Genocidal Famine; A year ago today was Day Five of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, a first step in reclaiming the former Soviet empire heralded by Putin’s massive propaganda machine as re-unification of peoples divided by intrusive outside forces; as the ideological context and casus belli of the war, I thought I’d re-examine that claim.
What is the true history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine?
Here follows my essay on the subject from this day last year, which also reviewed the development of the war thus far.
On day five of the Invasion of Ukraine we witnessed fighting in the city of Kharkiv which has been bombed by Russia with great savagery, Russia attacked the port of Mariupol where fighting continues and blockaded Kherson on the Black Sea and the port of Berdyansk on the Azov Sea, but Turkey has shut down Russian shipping to the Mediterranean. Belarus has disavowed its non nuclear status and may be sending an army to support Russia in Ukraine, but mass protests and a revitalized democracy movement now call Lukashenko’s regime into question. Finally, Putin threatens the world with nuclear annihilation and is answered with a rare special meeting of the UN Security Council and the EU’s announcement of its newest member Ukraine, to which all of Europe will be sending armies as well as arms.
The hacker network Anonymous has declared its allyship with the liberation of Ukraine, independent elements of the Resistance and Antifa which are successors and survivals of their World War Two origins and are embedded within the military and intelligence organizations of many nations are active with Ukranian partisan units and their partners within Russian forces, International Brigades are marshalling to answer the call of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for volunteers, and lone wolf saboteurs and assassins with a blood debt against the oligarchs and authorities who are the beneficiaries of Putin’s regime and acts of war and terror, which now include over forty three million Ukrainians, a half million of whom are now refugees, have a new hero, a mechanic who attempted to sink the yacht of Alexander Mikheev, CEO of the Russian arms exporter Rosoboronexport, manufacturer of the rockets that destroyed his home in Kyiv. As written by Stephen Burgen in The Guardian, the unnamed saboteur said of this heroic action; “The owner of this yacht is a criminal who makes his living selling arms that are now being used to kill Ukrainians,” he told police when he was arrested.
Oligarchs and profiteers of war: there is no safe harbor for you anymore. We are your bodyguards and the servants who bring your food, the banks who control your wealth and the casinos where you launder it, the nanny who protects your children and the doctor who gives you your shots and prescriptions. No man is an island, and there is no hiding from the consequences of our interdependence.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
The world was willing to let sleeping dragons lie, so long as they do not try to eat us. Putin has changed this, and as direct consequences of the invasion Ukraine will become a key EU and NATO member, but the democracy revolution may also liberate Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia as well. Putin has doomed the empire he wished to restore.
What did such an empire as Putin wishes to restore look like?
Eighty-nine years ago, Stalin defined forever the relationship between Russia and Ukraine when he engineered a genocidal famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor. Designed as a final solution to the independence and cultural autonomy of Ukraine and part of a campaign of purges to erase the historical memory and identity of people, Stalin’s method of economic and cultural war horrifically became the model for others including Mao’s Great Famine of 1958–1962 and Cultural Revolution 1966-1976, and the 1975 to 1979 Killing Fields of Pol Pot.
As Putin has cast himself in the role of Stalin in his bizarre and unhinged address to the world, an apologetics of imperial conquest and state terror and tyranny intended to conjure the glories of a fallen empire which spins lies and illusions, falsified histories and an alternate reality wherein Ukraine was always Russian, I thought to revisit the true history of this conflict of national identities.
Herein we may read the world which Putin wishes to bequeath to us all, and to endless future generations of humankind. And to fascism, tyranny, imperialism, and crimes against humanity there is but one reply; Never Again!
What is Holodomor?
As written in the website of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium; “The term Holodomor (death by hunger, in Ukrainian) refers to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet policies. The Holodomor can be seen as the culmination of an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian peasantry, who resisted Soviet policies. This assault occurred in the context of a campaign of intimidation and arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, artists, religious leaders, and political cadres, who were seen as a threat to Soviet ideological and state-building aspirations.
Between 1917 and 1921, Ukraine briefly became an independent country and fought to retain its independence before succumbing to the Red Army and being incorporated into the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, Soviet central authorities, seeking the support of the populace, allowed for some cultural autonomy through the policy known as “indigenization.”
By the end of the 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decided to curtail Ukraine’s cultural autonomy, launching the intimidation, arrest, imprisonment and execution of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders, as well as Communist Party functionaries who had supported Ukraine’s distinctiveness.
At the same time, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture. The majority of Ukrainians, who were small-scale or subsistence farmers, resisted. The state confiscated the property of the independent farmers and forced them to work on government collective farms. The more prosperous farmers (owning a few head of livestock, for example) and those who resisted collectivization were branded kulaks (rich peasants) and declared enemies of the state who deserved to be eliminated as a class. Thousands were thrown out of their homes and deported.
In 1932, the Communist Party set impossibly high quotas for the amount of grain Ukrainian villages were required to contribute to the Soviet state. When the villages were not able to meet the quotas, authorities intensified the requisition campaign, confiscating even the seed set aside for planting and levying fines in meat and potatoes for failure to fulfill the quotas. Special teams were sent to search homes and even seized other foodstuffs. Starving farmers attempted to leave their villages in search of food, but Soviet authorities issued a decree forbidding Ukraine’s peasants from leaving the country. As a result, many thousands of farmers who had managed to leave their villages were apprehended and sent back, virtually a death sentence. A law was introduced that made the theft of even a few stalks of grain an act of sabotage punishable by execution. In some cases, soldiers were posted in watchtowers to prevent people from taking any of the harvest. Although informed of the dire conditions in Ukraine, central authorities ordered local officials to extract even more from the villages. Millions starved as the USSR sold crops from Ukraine abroad.
The USSR vigorously denied that the Holodomor had occurred. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, secret police, and government archives that have become accessible to researchers support the conclusion that the famine was caused by Soviet state policies and was indeed intentionally intensified by Soviet authorities.
Was the Holodomor a Genocide?
The famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine, called the Holodomor (a word coined in the late 1980s, meaning a famine deliberately initiated to cause suffering and death) can be considered genocide according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in light of Article 2 (c). This clause identifies as genocide deliberate actions that create conditions of life leading to the physical destruction in whole or in part of a national, ethnic, religious or racial group.
The famine in Ukraine began in late 1931 during the Soviet Union’s first Five-Year plan, which called for rapid industrialization and the forced collectivization of agriculture. During the collectivization drive that began in 1929, private farms were abolished, and in their place state-owned and collective farms were established. Ostensibly run by the collective farmers themselves, the collective farms were actually controlled and monitored by Soviet or Communist Party officials. At the same time, successful, well off-farmers, labelled kulaks (according to the Soviet regime, these were exploiters of poorer peasants), were persecuted, stripped of their possessions, arrested and deported. Many were sent to far-off lands, and some were even executed. In practice, any farmer opposed to collectivization, even if not well off, was often labelled a kulak or kulak supporter.
Most peasants (subsistence and small-scale farmers) in the Soviet Union were reluctant to give up private farming to join the new collectives. In Ukraine, which had a strong tradition of private farming, resistance was particularly strong. In some cases, Ukrainian peasants and urban dwellers resented collectivization and other policies that emanated from Moscow. Reaction to these policies reinforced sentiment for more autonomy or even independence for Ukraine. Ukrainians had established an independent state in 1918, but this attempt at achieving full-fledged statehood failed by 1920 owing mainly to military intervention from Communist Russia. In 1922 Ukraine became incorporated into the Soviet Union as a republic, retaining nominal forms of statehood and autonomy.
The establishment of state and collective farms in the Soviet Union was justified by its leaders as an essential part of building socialism. Soviet officials also considered them more reliable than individual farms as sources of surplus grain production, which was to fulfill compulsory state grain collection quotas. Grain collected by the state was used to feed the rapidly growing urban population, and for exports to finance purchases of machinery abroad to support the industrialization drive. However, the collectivization of agriculture led to chaos and a drop in farm production in Ukraine, which was a key grain-producing area in the Soviet Union. Despite this, the Soviet leadership maintained high quotas for Ukraine’s farmers to deliver grain to the state.
When famine broke out in Ukraine—triggered by confiscatory measures taken by Soviet officials to fulfill unrealistically high grain collection targets in the wake of the substantial drop in agricultural production—top Soviet Ukrainian government leaders informed the Kremlin of starvation, requesting aid and a reduction in the grain quota for the country. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, called instead for an intensification of grain collection efforts. He also voiced his distrust of Ukrainian officials, suspecting many of them as nationalists, and expressed fear that opposition to his policies in Ukraine could intensify, possibly leading to Ukraine’s secession from the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s response was catastrophic for Ukraine. Under his urging, the Soviet leadership passed draconian laws and adopted punitive and repressive policies, ostensibly to help meet the grain quota. Special teams were sent to the countryside, headed by Stalin’s top lieutenants, to collect more grain, even though farmers had little stored for the winter and spring months ahead. Even seed grain was taken, and fines in meat and potatoes were instituted for those who had not fulfilled the grain collection plan. Other foodstuffs were also confiscated by search squads.
Unsurprisingly, the situation in the Ukrainian countryside became desperate by winter. But the regime did not relent from its policies of confiscation, punishment and repression. On January 22, 1933, in response to large numbers of hungry Ukrainian farmers leaving their villages in search of food, primarily to Russia, the Soviet leadership issued an order prohibiting their departure from the republic. Around the same time, Stalin began replacing some of Ukraine’s leaders and changed state policy that had supported the development and use of the Ukrainian language. A campaign of persecution and destruction of many Ukrainian intellectuals and officials who were accused of being Ukrainian nationalists also began.
The famine in Ukraine subsided in summer 1933 as that year’s harvest was gathered. By that time, resistance in the countryside had been broken. Demographers estimate that close to four million residents of Ukraine, mostly Ukrainian peasants, perished as a direct result of starvation.
Any discussion of the famine as genocide should begin with a review of the ideas of Raphael Lemkin, a legal scholar who was the “father” of the UN’s genocide convention. In a speech delivered in 1953, he called the USSR’s policies toward Ukraine under Stalin “the classic example of Soviet genocide.” He viewed the famine in Ukraine as a key component of what he called the “Ukrainian genocide,” which he understood as a series of actions that also included the destruction and subjugation of Ukraine’s intellectuals and political elite, the liquidation of the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and the government-directed settlement of Ukraine’s farmlands by non-Ukrainians, which took place in the wake of the famine of 1932–33.
In assessing the charge of genocide, one should recognize that it carries legal and political implications, and thus could be controversial. Political figures and entities have sometimes made statements or offered opinions on specific cases where the question of genocide has been raised. This is true of the famine in Ukraine. In 1988, a special commission of the US Congress established to investigate the Ukrainian famine concluded that “Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932–33.” In 2006, Ukraine’s legislature, the Verkhovna Rada, adopted a law that called the Holodomor genocide. Some countries, like Canada, have adopted resolutions or statements recognizing the Holodomor as genocide. However, Russia’s national legislature, the Duma, stressed in a declaration that famine in these years was a pan-Soviet tragedy and denied that the Ukrainian situation was specific.
Controversy can also occur because of a lack of consensus among scholars. There is general agreement among scholars that the Holodomor resulted from the actions of Soviet authorities and was thus man-made and avoidable. However, some scholars as well as political figures have argued that the charge of genocide in Ukraine cannot be substantiated because famine occurred at the same time in other republics of the Soviet Union, including Russia. It has also been argued that the famine was used as a weapon aimed against peasants as a social group, and not against Ukrainians as an ethnic group. Two scholars of the Soviet Union, Robert E. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, have argued that the Soviet leadership caused the famine partly through “wrongheaded policies,” but that it was “unexpected and undesirable.” The famine, they argue, was “a consequence of the decision to industrialise this peasant country [the Soviet Union] at breakneck speed.”
The Italian scholar Andrea Graziosi, in support of the genocide interpretation, has argued that in assessing the issue one must take into account the extremely high mortality rate in Ukraine—triple the mortality rate in Russia. This was caused by the additional measures taken by Soviet authorities that intensified the famine in Ukraine. Graziosi also stresses Stalin’s understanding of the peasant and national questions as closely linked in largely peasant-based countries like Ukraine. He thus concludes that the Ukrainian villages were “indeed targeted to break the peasants, but with the full awareness that the village represented the nation’s spine.”
There are other arguments to be made in favour of the genocide interpretation. Grain exports continued during the worst months of the famine, and Soviet government reserves contained enough grain to feed the starving. When aid was first authorized in February 1933, it was selective, and not nearly enough grain was released to save millions from starvation. The mobility of Ukraine’s peasants was blocked through the January 22, 1933 decree depriving them of possible access to food in other regions of the Soviet Union. It is also clear that Stalin in 1932 was worried about losing Ukraine, tied the shortfall in grain collections in Ukraine to perceived failures of the republic’s leadership, and referred to this to justify removing some of Ukraine’s leaders when he replaced them with loyal followers. He also saw resistance in the Ukrainian countryside to grain collection as motivated by both class antagonisms and nationalism. If one considers the anti-Ukrainian measures he promoted, including authorizing persecutions of Ukrainian intellectuals and of the more nationally oriented political leadership, the overall anti-national thrust of Stalin’s decisions in 1932–1933 becomes more evident. Finally, news of the famine was suppressed in the Soviet Union, offers of outside aid were refused, and until the late 1980s the Soviet government denied that a famine had even taken place.”
Who are the people of Ukraine, and why is their relationship with Russia equivocal and fraught with conflicted motives?
Ukraine became a nation in 1648 when the Zaporozhian Cossacks, famous as warriors who defended Poland against Russia and saved Europe from invasion by the Ottoman Empire at Khotyn in 1621, won independence from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, their feudal lords from medieval times. This also bought them into the Russian orbit as an autonomous protectorate.
For a time, this relationship was mutually beneficial; uniting with several other tribes within Russia itself, the Cossacks of Ukraine and Russia together conquered all of Siberia and won control of the Volga and other rivers which were arteries of trade. During the 18th century Russia made them a special class of military aristocrats and used them as an instrument of imperial power in a series of conflicts; the Great Northern War versus Sweden, the Seven Years’ War, the Crimean War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Caucasus War, several Russo-Persian Wars, Russo-Turkish Wars, and the First World War. During the Russian Civil War, the Don, Kuban, and Ukrainian Cossacks declared themselves independent states and fought for the Czar against the Bolsheviks and the Red Army. Many Russians remember them as the terror troops of the Czar, others as the hammer of a glorious fallen empire.
Putin, like Stalin and the Czar before him, both idolized the Cossacks and feared their independence, and above all coveted them as an instrument of imperial power.
Ukraine also represents two tantalizing prizes which are irresistible to a would-be world emperor like Putin; first, a breadbasket able to feed all of Russia and sustain perpetual war and an industrial heartland from which the conquest of the world may be launched, the same reasons Japan invaded Manchuria as a launchpad for the conquest of the Pacific, second a warm water port and control of the Black Sea from which the entire Mediterranean can be seized and through the Romanian port of Constantia the whole Danube basin of Europe can be invaded, the same reasons Mithridates the Sixth of Pontus fought the Roman Empire and why the Battle of Gallipoli was fought in World War One over Crimea.
For Russia, Ukraine and the Black Sea are keys to the gates of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. And this is where we must stop Russia’s imperial conquest and dominion if the world is to remain free.
The future chosen for us by those who would enslave us:
20 Days In Mariupol film trailer
War as it is; brutal, cruel, horrific, and often absurd. But also
a ground of struggle in which our humanity is refined
and can be clawed back from the darkness.
2000 Meters To Andriivka – Official UK Trailer
This is the moment we now live in, and we must choose between solidarity and division, subjugation and dehumanization or our duty of care for each other, regardless of the cost. Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s humanity?
Klid, Bohdan, “Holodomor: Holodomor and UN Genocide Convention Criteria.” Modern Genocide: Understanding Causes and Consequences. ABC-CLIO, 2013. Web. 21 Nov. 2013. Reprinted courtesy of ABC-CLIO.”
Ukrainian
22 листопада 2025 року. Слава Україні! У День пам’яті жертв Голодомору!
Після того, як Трамп діяв як маріонетковий тиран Путіна та намагався погрозами змусити Україну поступитися територіями, що перебувають під російською окупацією, та погодитися відмовитися від членства в ЄС, а також після відмови Зеленського здати єдність та суверенітет України цим двом воєнним злочинцям, які мали стати королями, настає публічне згадування про останній раз, коли Росія мала владу використовувати Україну так, як вона хотіла, – День пам’яті жертв Голодомору.
Межі людського визначаються воєнними злочинами Росії під час її імперського завоювання та панування над Україною, що є необхідним першим кроком у планах Путіна відвоювати Східну Європу та підкорити Африку та все Середземномор’я.
Цьому ми повинні протистояти, незважаючи на надію на перемогу чи виживання, бо якщо ми не об’єднаємося в солідарності, щоб вирвати щось із нашої людяності з темряви, перш ніж вона поглине нас усіх, ми станемо дегуманізованими речами, що належать тим, хто хоче нас поневолити, підкореними ворогу, який не визнає нас як людей і для якого наші універсальні права людини нічого не значать.
Це справжні ставки в цей момент – наша людяність, а російське вторгнення в Україну ставить під загрозу не лише національну ідентичність та свободу українців, а й усього людства.
Як сказав Бен Франклін, стискаючи в кулаках зв’язку стріл і посилаючись на засновника Конфедерації ірокезів Деганавіду Миротворця: «Що потрібно, щоб зламати одну стрілу? Нічого! Але зв’язані разом… незламні!» «Одну стрілу легко зламати, але коли багато зв’язано разом, вони незламні». Подібна демонстрація єдності та солідарності зі стрілами Морі Мотонарі, щоб змусити своїх трьох синів працювати разом, надихнула Акіру Куросаву на його чудовий фільм «Ран». Я сподіваюся, що принципи солідарності дій та єдиного фронту перед зустріччю із загрозами, які можна подолати лише разом як гаранти людяності один одного та універсальних прав людини, пробудяться у всьому світі, як це було після попередніх світових воєн, перш ніж до цього дійде, і що Україна та цивілізація вийдуть переможцями з цього випробування нашої людяності, перш ніж ми всі будемо знищені та станемо ніщо.
Якщо наш вид має пережити століття війни, що настають в Епоху Тиранів, якщо людська цивілізація має уникнути Падіння та занепаду у варварство, якщо Україна має утримувати ворота Європи, ми повинні стояти разом.
У Голодоморі ми знаходимо жахливий приклад, і лише один з багатьох, нашої долі у разі нашої невдачі.
27 лютого 2022 року Голодомор: правдива історія взаємин Росії та України у справі сталінського геноцидного голоду
На п’ятий день вторгнення в Україну ми стали свідками бойових дій у місті Харків, яке сильно бомбила Росія, Росія напала на порт Маріуполь, де тривають бої, і блокувала Херсон на Чорному морі та порт Бердянськ на Азові. Море, але Туреччина закрила російське судноплавство до Середземного моря, Білорусь відмовилася від свого безядерного статусу і, можливо, посилає армію на підтримку Росії в Україні, але масові протести та активізований демократичний рух тепер ставлять під сумнів режим Лукашенка, а Путін погрожує Світ з ядерним знищенням і відповідає рідкісному спеціальному засіданні Ради Безпеки ООН і оголошенням ЄС про її нову членську Україну, до якої вся Європа надсилатиме армії та зброю.
Хакерська мережа Anonymous оголосила про союз зі звільненням України, незалежні елементи Опору та Антифа, які є спадкоємцями та пережитками їхнього походження Другої світової війни та вбудовані у військові та розвідувальні організації багатьох країн, діють з українськими партизанськими загонами. та їхні партнери в російських збройних силах, Міжнародні бригади збираються, щоб відповісти на заклик президента України Володимира Зеленського щодо добровольців, а також диверсантів-одинаків і вбивць із кровним боргом проти олігархів та влади, які є бенефіціарами режиму Путіна та військових дій. терор, до якого зараз охоплено понад сорок три мільйони українців, півмільйона з яких нині є біженцями, має нового героя, механіка, який намагався потопити яхту Олександра Міхєєва, генерального директора російського експортера зброї «Рособоронекспорт», виробника ракет, які зруйнував його будинок у Києві. Як написав Стівен Бурген у The Guardian, неназваний диверсант сказав про цей героїчний вчинок; «Власник цієї яхти — злочинець, який заробляє на життя продажем зброї, яку зараз використовують для вбивства українців», — сказав він поліції, коли його заарештували.
Олігархи та спекулянти війни: для вас більше немає безпечної гавані. Ми ваші охоронці і слуги, які приносять вам їжу, банки, які контролюють ваше багатство, і казино, де ви його відмиваєте, няня, яка захищає ваших дітей, і лікар, який дає вам уколи та рецепти. Жодна людина не є островом, і від наслідків нашої взаємозалежності не можна сховатися.
Бо нас багато, ми спостерігаємо, і ми майбутнє.
Світ був готовий дозволити сплячим драконам брехати, лише б вони не намагалися з’їсти нас. Путін змінив це, і як прямі наслідки вторгнення Україна стане ключовим членом ЄС і НАТО, але демократична революція може також звільнити Білорусь, Казахстан і Росію. Путін прирік імперію, яку хотів відновити.
Як виглядала така імперія, яку хоче відновити Путін?
Вісімдесят дев’ять років тому Сталін назавжди визначив стосунки між Росією та Україною, коли він організував голодомор в Україні, Голодомор. Сталінський метод економічної та культурної війни, розроблений як остаточне рішення щодо незалежності та культурної автономії України та частина кампанії чисток з метою стирання історичної пам’яті та самобутності людей, жахливо став зразком для інших, включаючи Великий голод Мао 1958 року – 1962 і Культурна революція 1966-1976, а також Поля вбивств Пол Пота 1975-1979 років.
Оскільки Путін виступив у ролі Сталіна у своєму химерному та безтурботному зверненні до світу, апологетика імперського завоювання, державного терору та тиранії має на меті викликати славу занепалої імперії, яка крутить брехню та ілюзії, фальсифіковані історії та альтернативу. реальність, де Україна завжди була російською, я думав повернутися до справжньої історії цього конфлікту національних ідентичностей.
Тут ми можемо прочитати світ, який Путін хоче заповідати нам усім і нескінченним майбутнім поколінням людства. А на фашизм, тиранію, імперіалізм і злочини проти людства є лише одна відповідь; Ніколи знову!
August 24 2025 The Unconquerable Human Will to Freedom: Ukraine’s Independence Day in the Shadow of War
Glory to Ukraine!
Zelenskiy in his speech today on the 34th Independence Day of Ukraine offered partnership with Europe and all those who love liberty, where ever men hunger to be free; “We are not a victim, we are a fighter. Ukraine does not beg — it offers partnership and the strongest army in Europe.”
They are words to be considered carefully, in the light of history; Russia’s only claim to Ukraine is that Ukrainian Cossacks conquered Siberia for the Czar in exchange for becoming a special class of warrior aristocracy, after helping save Europe from conquest by the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Vienna in 1683.
“Handy fellows to have around in a fight”, as was said of the Dead Men of Dunharrow in Return of the King, and if Europe stands aside while Russia cannibalizes Ukraine, they will be facing Russian imperial conquest and dominion without them.
We should have all learned long ago that when a tyrant says “This is my last territorial demand”, that is the time to unite and destroy him, before he gathers enough force to destroy us.
That day comes closer with every day we delay. Like it or not, the fate of Europe is now tied to the fate of Ukraine, as the fate of democracy in America is tied to capture of the state by Russia’s puppet tyrant.
If you’re looking for people to stand with you in a fight, you look for people who won’t stay down, won’t tap out, and refuse to submit. Europe, democracy, and civilization need look no further than Ukraine.
In Ukraine, to live is to be victorious; Unconquered in the face of horrors and the ruthless brutal conquest by an enemy who does not regard us as fellow human beings and wages a campaign of terror, genocide, and erasure against a whole people.
We celebrate on this day the independence of Ukraine from Russia, but also the liberty and independence of all humankind, and the solidarity of all who stand together to resist oppression.
The glorious defiance and unity of purpose of Ukraine has reminded us all of a great truth; of the precarious, ephemeral, transitory, and fragile nature of our existence as imposed conditions of struggle to become human together.
We are become a precariat of all humankind under threat of nuclear annihilation, and as this theatre of World War Three threatens to engulf the whole of Europe in a Total War of destruction and civilizational collapse, any who believed themselves safe must reconsider the human condition and what it means, for only solidarity of the international community and of peoples as a United Humankind, a free society of equals and our universal human rights, can stand against the darkness of the global Fourth Reich which threatens to devour and enslave us.
For a vision of our future and our world should our solidarity and duty of care for others fail us, we need only look to Mariupol.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You can not reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
Why is it important to resist our dehumanization and those who would enslave us, and to reply to the terror of our nothingness with refusal to submit and solidarity with others, regardless of where or when such existential threats arise, who is under threat or any divisions of identitarian politics weaponized by conquerors to isolate their victims from help?
As I wrote in my post of April 20 2022, What is the Meaning of Mariupol? Address to the Volunteers in Warsaw; As we gather and prepare to take the fight to the enemy in direct action against the regime of Russia itself, against Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs and elites who sit at the helm of power and are now complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity both in Ukraine and her province of Crimea in the imperial conquest of a sovereign and independent nation and in Russia in the subjugation of their own citizens, and in the other theatres of this the Third World War, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and in the capture of the American state in the Stolen Election of 2016 which put Putin’s treasonous and dishonorable agent and proxy Donald Trump, Our Clown of Terror, in the White House to oversee the infiltration and subversion of democracy by the Fourth Reich, we are confronted with countless horrific examples of the future that awaits us at the hands of Putin’s regime, and we have chosen Resistance as the only alternative to slavery and death.
As we bring a Reckoning for tyranny, terror, and the horrors of war, in the crimes against humanity by Russia in Ukraine which include executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories to produce military rations, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design and at the orders of Putin and his commanders, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities, we are become a court of last appeal in the defense of our universal human rights and of our humanity itself.
The Russian strategy of conquest opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
In this war which is now upon us, Putin’s goal is to restore the Russian Empire in the conquest of the Ukraine and the Black Sea as a launchpad for the conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; but he has a parallel and far more dangerous purpose in the abrogation of international law and our universal human rights. The true purpose of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Vladimir Putin in this war is to make meaningless the idea of human rights.
This is a war of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil against democracy and a free society of equals, for the idea that we all of us have meaning and value which is uniquely ours and against enslavement and the theft of our souls.
Within the limits of our form, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, we struggle to achieve the human; ours is a revolution of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning repair of the world which refers to our interdependence and duty of care for each other as equals who share a common humanity.
I’m sure all of us here know what Shlomo Bardin meant when he repurposed the phrase from the Kabbalah of Luria and the Midrash, but what do I mean by this?
There are only two kinds of actions which we human beings are able to perform; those which affirm and exalt us, and those which degrade and dehumanize us.
We live at a crossroads of history which may define the fate of our civilization and the future possibilities of becoming human, in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and between solidarity and division, and we must each of us choose who we wish to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
As you know, my friends and I come to you from the Siege of Mariupol, a battle of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of solidarity against division, of love against hate, and of hope against fear.
Here, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which we celebrated yesterday, the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
In Mariupol now as in Warsaw then, we affirm and renew our humanity in refusal to submit or to abandon our duty of care for each other. The Defenders of Mariupol who have sworn to die together and have refused many demands for surrender make their glorious Last Stand not as a gesture of defiance to a conqueror and tyrant, or to hold the port to slow and impede the Russian campaign in the Donbas now ongoing and prevent the seizure of the whole seaboard and control of the Black Sea, though these are pivotal to the liberation of Ukraine, but to protect the hundreds, possibly thousands, of refugees who now shelter in the tunnels of the underground fortress at the Azovstal and Ilyin Steel and Iron Works, especially the many children in makeshift hospitals who cannot be moved.
This is the meaning of Mariupol; we stand together and remain human, regardless of the cost. This is what it means to be human, how it is achieved, and why solidarity is important. Among our values, our duty of care for others is paramount, because it is instrumental to everything else, and all else is contingent on this.
To paraphrase America’s Pledge of Allegiance not as an oath to a nation but as the declaration of a United Humankind; We, the People of Earth, pledge ourselves to each other, as one humankind, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This brings us to my purpose in speaking to you today, for one of you has asked a question which is central to our mission of the Liberation of Russia and Ukraine, and to the solidarity of the international community in this our cause; how can ordinary people like ourselves hope for victory over the unanswerable force and overwhelming power of tyranny, terror, and war?
There are two parallel and interdependent strategies of Resistance in asymmetrical warfare; the first and most important is to redefine the terms of victory. This is because we are mortal, and the limits of our form impose conditions of struggle; we must be like Jacob wrestling the angel, not to conquer this thing of immense power but to escape being conquered by it. We can be killed, imprisoned, tortured; but we cannot be defeated or conquered if we but refuse to submit.
Power without legitimacy becomes meaningless, and authority crumbles when met with disbelief. This is why journalism and teaching as sacred callings in pursuit of truth are crucial to democracy, and why the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
What of the use of police in brutal repression by carceral states? The social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. When the police are an army of Occupation and the repression of dissent, they can be Resisted on those terms; my point here is simply that victory against unanswerable force consists of refusal to submit.
Who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered and is free. This is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
Second is our strategy for survival against an enemy who does not regard us as human, and will use terror to enforce submission through learned helplessness. By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X.
In Mariupol I began referring to this in its oldest form, war to the knife. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
The question to which I speak today in reply intrigued me, because it was nearly identical to a line which sets up one of the greatest fictional military speeches in literature, Miles Vorkosigan’s speech to the Maurilacans in The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold.
In this story, Miles has just led a mass prisoner of war escape, from a prison which like all fascist tyrannies is fiendishly designed to produce abjection, as described by Julia Kristeva in her famous essay, in circumstances of horror such as those which my friends here and I have just survived, and in which we now find ourselves like the Marilacans having achieved an army, and about to take the fight to the enemy on his own ground.
One of the volunteers says, ”The defenders of Mariupol had those crazy Cossack warriors, swearing an oath to die rather than surrender, professional mercenaries from everywhere, all of them elite forces and utterly fearless. We just can’t fight on those terms; its been seventy years since we fought a total war of survival, and most of us here are professionals and university intellectuals. Poland is civilized, maybe too civilized for what’s coming our way.”
To this I answer with Miles; “Let me tell you about the defenders of Mariupol. Those who sought a glorious death in battle found it early on. This cleared the chain of command of accumulated fools.
The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win and win and win. And for whom nothing, not comfort nor security, not family nor friends nor their immortal souls, was more important than victory.
They were not supermen or more than human. They sweated in confusion and darkness.
And with not one half the resources Poland possesses, Ukraine remains unconquered. When you’re all that stands between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death, between a people and genocide, when you’re human, there is no mustering out.”
To this wonderful speech of a fictional hero who simply refuses to stay down to the fictional survivors of the very real horror of being held captive and powerless by a tyrant, whether as prisoners of war or citizens of an occupied city, I must add this; how if Poland and Ukraine stand together, with all of Europe and America united in Resistance?
And if you are telling me you could not today fight a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this I do not believe. Nor would you do so alone, for during this Passover as the Jewish community remembers the story of the Exile, the world also remembers; we watch it in our news every day, enacted once again in Ukraine. This, too, is a Haggadah, in which all of humankind can share, and which yet again teaches us the necessity of our interdependence and solidarity.
As written by Alan Moore 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.”
Here is a truth to which all of us here today can bear witness.
But there is a thing which tyrants never learn; the use of force and violence obeys the Third Law of Motion, and creates resistance as its own counterforce. And when the brutality and crimes against humanity of that force and violence are performed upon the stage of the world, visible to all and a history which cannot be erased, part of the story of every human being from now until the end of our species, repression finds answer in reckoning as we awaken to our interdependence and the necessity of our solidarity and duty of care for each other.
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet on that fateful day in 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, after we refused to surrender; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
An unusual fellow, but behind the concealment of his literary notoriety he remained the Legionnaire he had once been, and after spying on the Nazis in Berlin in 1939 had returned to Paris to make mischief for her unwelcome guests, and there in 1940 repurposed the oath of the Foreign Legion for what allies he could gather. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
My hope is that I have lived and written at the beginning of the story of humankind, and not at its end.
What is the meaning of Mariupol?
Here we may look to its precedents as Last Stands, battles, and sieges; Thermopylae, Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, Gallipoli, Stalingrad, and its direct parallel the Siege of Sarajevo. Moments of decision wherein the civilization of humankind hung in the balance, and with it our future possibilities of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
April 10 2022 Crimes Against Humanity in the City of Ghosts, Mariupol: A Witness of History
March 6 2022 How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? An Interrogation of the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence
And no history of the Third World War now ongoing can be complete without an account of the American Front of Russia’s mad imperial conquest and dominion of the world, because it explains why Trump is a Russian tyrant who is a co conspirator in the invasion of Ukraine
July 7 2025 The KGB’s Parthian Shot: On July 4 1987 in Moscow Trump Becomes An Enemy Agent and Decides to Run For President
Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education in the discipline of history asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, and the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries to be interrogated in open debate in a public forum; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Among his many lies and crimes in the subversion of our democracy, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, proclaimed a triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. We must disavow and ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets of this anniversary and instead make the public debate and interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Herein I do not wish or intend to diminish the achievements of the past or of one’s ancestors, regardless of their stories; I am a direct patrilineal descendent of a Revolutionary War veteran who crossed the Delaware with Washington and a collateral line descendent of the founders of Jamestown; my partner Dolly is a Mayflower descendent through a collateral line. But neither would I wish or intend to marginalize and erase the stories of anyone else’s people, no matter who they were. Nor to valorize any one of us above the others; to be an American means to regard and treat each of us as equal to all other human beings, and to cherish our differences as a treasure in a diverse and inclusive free society of equals in which we are guarantors of each other’s humanity and universal rights.
History, friends, is a sacred calling to pursue the truth, through witness, remembrance, and questioning.
Neither angels nor devils, we; but beings who create each other in struggle against systems of oppression in which we are embedded.
Of our histories, stories, mimesis, and identities, ambiguous, ephemeral, relative, possibly illusions and falsifications which capture, assimilate, and distort like funhouse mirrors, and a ground of struggle; there are those we must keep, and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
And our histories change with us as instruments of self-construal versus authorized identities as an imposed condition of struggle. So, whose stories shall we claim?
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil combine viciously in our triumphalist narratives of the Puritans as founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21 1620, its celebrations have been historically promoted through our schools as a year round ongoing campaign and glorification of the Conquest, and the idea that American identity is founded in the Puritans as an iconography of racial and religious superiority. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
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.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
The Idea of Thanksgiving and American Identity, a reading list
Legacies of America’s Founding Fascist State: Slavery
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, by Nikole Hannah-Jones
History, memory, identity, the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others including those who would enslave us, who are and can become and who decides; all of this is a ground of struggle against systems of oppression, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and often a shifting ground, constructed of relative truths as a Rashomon Gate of human being, meaning, and value.
As I write these words Brazil is reeling from the worst incident of police terror and mass murder in its history; even in Brazil of Lula, socialist and champion of the people and of worker solidarity regardless of race, the system of state racist terror and systems of oppression perpetuates itself as police brutality and a rigged justice system enforce racialized elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Only love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, from hierarchies of belonging and otherness, and from systems of white supremacist terror, subjugation, and dehumanization. Disarming and abolishing police as a caste of overseers and slavecatchers would also be useful.
In 1974 I fought police bounty hunters and death squads in the streets of Sao Paulo, the summer before I began high school, and despite the glorious victory oner Bolsonaro’s fascist regime little has changed on the ground for the poor and the nonwhite. Over fifty years of liberation struggle, and what have we achieved?
Herein the history and heroes authorized by the state and valorized as exemplars of the human ideal become important; representation matters, symbols bear power, and the ownership of our own stories as witness, remembrance, and aspiration all confer transformative force as seizures of power.
Brazil’s embrace of a national holiday on the date of the great slave revolt leader Zumbi’s death in glorious battle at the hands of colonialist forces is a case study of what I term the Narrative Theory of Identity, in which self construal is a form of revolution and the primary defining act of becoming human.
Celebrate with us the great warrior, King, and figure of liberation Zumbi and his defiance unto death of those who would enslave us, and the free republic of Palmares he led in anticolonialst revolution and a century long war of independence against vast forces of imperial conquest and dominion and systems of white supremacist oppression and terror, whoever he may have been and whatever rebel kingdom he championed, for all that truly matters is that he holds an imaginal space we each of us may step into and become, no matter the wretchedness of our initial conditions.
That a man lived and was real who refused to submit is enough for us to remember and dream into being, for each of us may become that man who we dream.
As written by Tiago Rogero in The Guardian, in an article entitled Brazil celebrates Black Consciousness Day as national holiday for first time: Legacy of African Brazilians honored on 329th anniversary of resistance leader Zumbi’s death by Portuguese forces; “During the more than 350 years during which slavery was legal in Brazil, harsh conditions prompted a string of uprisings, often resulting in the establishment of quilombos – independent communities formed by escaped Africans who were formerly enslaved, and their descendants.
None were more prominent than the one known as Palmares, where, in the 17th century, as many as 11,000 people lived in a string of communities across parts of the north-eastern states of Alagoas and Pernambuco.
But the roughly 100-year history of what historians regard as the most significant resistance movement against slavery in Brazil began to unravel on 20 November 1695, when its most famous leader, Zumbi, was captured by Portuguese colonial forces and killed.
Three hundred and twenty-nine years later, the date will for the first time be marked as a national public holiday: Black Consciousness Day, which has been a longstanding demand of Black movements that still face attacks from the far right.
A series of events – including at least 38 in São Paulo alone – will mark the date nationwide, celebrating Zumbi, Palmares and the ongoing fight for racial equality.
“Palmares was the largest quilombo in the Americas, both in terms of its longevity and population,” said Danilo Luiz Marques, a historian and professor at the Federal University of Alagoas.
Some researchers have described Palmares – whose first records date back to 1590 – as the earliest form of a republic to emerge on Brazilian soil. Marques, however, argues that it was a Bantu kingdom, reflecting the central-African language family to which most Africans brought to Brazil belonged.
Black movements in Brazil have celebrated the names of Zumbi and Palmares since the early 20th century at the earliest, but it was only in 1971 that 20 November became a key date.
Activists had sought a date to contrast with another historically associated with Black people: 13 May, the day slavery was abolished in 1888.
Rather than celebrating Black individuals, however, 13 May had traditionally been used to exalt the white princess who signed the abolition decree: Isabel, then the regent of the Brazilian empire.
“The princess was glorified as if she had granted a favour to the enslaved people; as if she were a heroine,” said Deivison Campos, a historian and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul.
“The Palmares group sought to counter this narrative, proposing 20 November as a way to honour the collective struggle for the inclusion of Black people in Brazilian society,” he said.
Today, 13 May is still celebrated, with Black activists arguing it cannot be ignored since abolition was primarily the result of Black resistance. However, 20 November has become so popular that November is now informally known as Brazil’s Black Consciousness Month.
The law to make Black Consciousness Day Brazil’s 10th national holiday – signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in December 2023 – was passed amid significant resistance from conservatives.
During the presidency of far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, Sérgio Camargo, the then head of the Palmares Foundation – a federal body established in 1988 to promote African-Brazilian culture – harshly criticised the 20 November holiday, labelling it the Day of Black Victimisation, the Day of the Black Mind Enslaved by the Left or the Day of Resentment for the Past.
Some within the far-right even doubt the existence of Palmares or its most famous leader despite extensive historical evidence. “Falsehoods have always been used to attack Black history,” said Marques.
Brazil’s largest television network, Rede Globo, will mark the date with a 50-minute primetime special focusing on the wrongful imprisonment of Black individuals based on photographic identification – a widespread issue in the country.
“In Brazil, Black people continue to be imprisoned, deprived of freedom, a healthy life and the chance to realise their dreams simply because they are Black,” said the special’s creator and presenter, Clayton Nascimento.
“It’s important that 20 November is, for the first time, a public holiday because it allows us to pause and reflect on Brazil’s Black history. We were the ones who built this nation,” he added.”
As written in 2019 by Laurence Blair in The Guardian, in an article entitled History of free African strongholds fires Brazilian resistance to Bolsonaro: Quilombo dos Palmares – founded by Africans who escaped slavery – maintained its independence for 100 years and has become a touchstone for a new generation; “Apalm-fringed ridge rises above the plains of Alagoas in north-east Brazil. Just a few replica thatched huts and a wall of wooden stakes now stand at its summit, but this was once the capital of the Quilombo dos Palmares – a sprawling, powerful nation of Africans who escaped slavery, and their descendants who held out here in the forest for 100 years.
Its population was at least 11,000 – at the time, more than that of Rio de Janeiro – across dozens of villages with elected leaders and a hybrid language and culture.
Palmares allied with indigenous peoples, traded for gunpowder, launched guerrilla raids on coastal sugar plantations to free other captives, and withstood more than 20 assaults before falling to Portuguese cannons in 1695.
“Hundreds threw themselves to their deaths rather than surrender,” said local guide Thais “Dandara” Thaty at the historical site in Serra da Barriga. In her telling, those killed included Dandara – her adoptive namesake – captain of a band of warrior women, whose husband Zumbi is similarly shrouded in myth as a fearless Palmarian commander.
About 5 million enslaved Africans were brought across the Atlantic to Brazil between 1501 and 1888. Many escaped, forming quilombos, or free communities.
Three centuries later, the remarkable saga of Palmares is being seized on once more as a symbol of resistance against Brazil’s rightwing president and the country’s pervasive racism towards its black and mixed-race majority.
A pair of new television and Netflix documentaries, screened in late 2018 and this June, have examined the legacy of Palmares. In March, the victorious carnival parade of Mangueira samba school highlighted Dandara among a lineup of overlooked black and indigenous heroes. Later that month, Brazil’s senate voted to inscribe Dandara in the Book of Heroes in the Pantheon of the Fatherland, a soaring, modernist cenotaph in Brasília.
Angola Janga, a graphic novel charting the rise and fall of Palmares, has won a string of awards. “Many people want an alternative view, to try to escape the one-sided, one-dimensional vision of our history imposed by the Portuguese and Brazilian elite,” said author Marcelo D’Salete, whose painstakingly researched book, including maps and timelines alongside striking monochrome illustrations, has been widely used in classrooms.
“Quilombos in general are very big right now,” said Ana Carolina Lourenço, a sociologist and adviser to one recent documentary on Palmares. Young Afro-Brazilians have even coined a verb, she added – to quilombar – meaning to meet up to debate politics or simply celebrate black music, culture and identity.
This renewed prominence coincides with a sharp rightward turn in Brazilian politics. Jair Bolsonaro has denied that Portuguese slavers set foot in Africa, and vilified the roughly 3,000 quilombos dotted across Brazil today – poor and marginalised Afro-Brazilian communities, often descended from fugitive slaves – branding their residents “not even fit for procreation”.
The president has sought to erode the landholding rights of quilombo communities in favour, critics argue, of the powerful agribusiness sector. Police killings, mainly of Afro-Brazilians, in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have also risen sharply in 2019 with Bolsonaro’s encouragement.
Earlier this month, footage of supermarket security guards whipping a bound and gagged black teenager for allegedly shoplifting, prompted reflections on the lasting legacy of slavery.
For centuries, writers portrayed Palmarians merely “as runaway blacks and outlaws who rebelled against the crown”, said the Alagoas historian Geraldo de Majella.
It was only in the mid-20th century that historians began to reconstruct its story via Portuguese archives, often in Marxist terms. Meanwhile, “black militant movements took up the flag of Palmares as a movement of national liberation,” De Majella explained. The largest guerrilla group during the 1964-85 military dictatorship – the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard – counted former president Dilma Rousseff among its members.
Lula, the former president, simultaneously bolstered recognition of Palmares and the legal rights of present-day quilombos. 20 November – the date the Palmarian leader was killed – was officially adopted as the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness in 2003.
In the same year, public schools were legally required to teach Afro-Brazilian history.
But limited archaeological evidence and the absence of Palmarian sources has encouraged freewheeling interpretations. Today, perhaps drawing on the historical presence of advanced metalworking at the site, some compare Palmares with Wakanda, the hi-tech, Afrofuturist utopia of Marvel’s Black Panther.
But the inclusion of Dandara – whose first written mention occurs in a 1962 novel – in the Pantheon divided opinion. “I absolutely defend creative freedom in the way people look at our history,” said D’Salete. “But we need to take care to differentiate between fact and fiction.”
Fernando Holiday, an Afro-Brazilian YouTuber and conservative activist, has noted that Palmarian society had monarchical elements and also kept captives. “I’m sorry to disappoint leftist and black leaders, but today we’re commemorating a farce,” Holiday said in a video. “Zumbi wasn’t a hero of abolition.”
But Palmares and other examples of revolt and resistance, D’Salete argued, “are important as other ways of understanding our history … so people can imagine and build another kind of society that is very different to one just based on violence and oppression”.
That legacy of violence is apparent in Tiningu, a remote quilombo in Pará state. The community has battled to receive legal recognition, threatened by the ranchers and landowners who have cut down much of the surrounding rainforest. One resident was murdered by a rival soybean farmer on the eve of Bolsonaro’s election. Here, Palmares is not merely history but a source of hope.
“Zumbi was the beginning of everything,” said local teacher Joanice Mata de Oliveira, whose school is daubed with the names of African nations. “He was the one who began our fight.”
As I wrote in my post of January 12 2023, A History of the Revolution in Brazil and Fascist Counter-Revolution: Liberty Versus Tyranny, Lula Versus Bolsonaro; In the wake of the collapse of Bolsonaro’s fascist counter-revolution and coup attempt in Brazil, Lula’s swift reaction in the mass arrests of the treasonous brownshirts who stormed the offices of the government in imitation of Trump’s failed January 6 Insurrection, itself modeled on Trump’s idol Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, and the stunning nationwide repudiation of Bolsonaro and his failed capture of the state by the victorious peoples of Brazil, has now begun a new phase of struggle with the manhunt for those who fund and organize fascist tyranny, much like that ongoing now in America for two years.
An insidious and far reaching conspiracy against democracy linking the Trump and Bolsonaro crime families and the forces of reaction in America and Brazil begins to emerge, mixing familiar malefactors and Fourth Reich apologists like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson with unknown freaks of nature like Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Braganza, who seeks a return to the throne of Brazil through Trump and Bolsonaro as proxies and is now scuttling from beneath his rock like the ravenous and vile crawling thing all aristocrats are beneath their gold paint, conspiracies which widen to engulf whole networks of white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, plutocratic and oligarchic theft of public wealth as terminal stage capitalism seeks to free itself from its host political system, and the xenophobic and self-righteous carceral states of force and control which they spawn as instruments of elite wealth, power, and privilege.
Our great enemy is the global Fourth Reich, which transforms itself ceaselessly and adapts to the conditions of whatever nation it targets for subversion and capture, and the interconnections between regimes of fascist tyranny are manifold and subtle. Fascism wears many masks, and like an ambush predator in nature moves among us behind mirages of lies and illusions, rewritten histories and stolen voices, images which capture and distort. Here is a ground of struggle in which we all of us must fight, if we are to seize control of our own identity under falsification and division as imposed conditions of struggle.
As written in the Netflix series Wednesday, episode three Friend Or Woe:
“Principal Weems, bracing Wednesday in her office for sabotaging the celebration of the Pilgrim leader who burned the original Outcasts alive and built the town on their stolen land and graves, a story repeated endlessly in our all too real history; “You’re a trouble magnet.”
Wednesday: “If trouble means standing up to lies, decades of discrimination, centuries of treating outcasts like second-class citizens or worse…”
Principal: “What are you talking about?”
Wednesday: “Jericho. Why does this town even have an Outreach Day?
Don’t you know its real history with outcasts? The actual story of Joseph Crackstone?”
Principal: “I do. To an extent.”
Wednesday: “Then why be complicit in its cover up? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Principal: “That’s where you and I differ. Where you see doom, I see opportunity. Maybe this is a chance to rewrite the wrongs, to start a new chapter in the normie-outcast relations.”
Wednesday: “Nothing has changed since Crackstone. They still hate us. Only now they sugarcoat it with platitudes and smiles. If you’re unwilling to fight for truth…”
Principal: “You don’t think I want the truth? Of course I do. But the world isn’t always black and white. There are shades of gray.”
Wednesday: “Maybe for you. But it’s either they write our story or we do. You can’t have it both ways.”
Here is a History of the Revolution in Brazil as I have lived it;
As I wrote in my post of October 30 2022, Victory in Brazil: “We are going to live new times of peace, love and hope” vows Brazil’s New President Lula as He Begins the Restoration of Democracy; We celebrate a Forlorn Hope vindicated and become glorious in the victory of the peoples of Brazil and their champion Lula, with dancing in the streets and running Amok beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden.
A monster and tyrant has been driven from his castle, and this is always cause for celebration. We will always have this moment of triumph, and the hope it holds for our future, regardless of the trials to follow. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse is up to each of us to live and make real; but things are now possible which yesterday were not, and this I call victory.
With the words of Glinda to Oz I congratulate Lula and the peoples of Brazil; ‘We’ve waited a long time for you, Wizard.” And we really need you to be the Wizard we hope you are.
A great work now begins, as like we once hoped Biden would in America before our recapture by the Fourth Reich, Lula in Brazil leads the Restoration of Democracy in a nation whose systems, structures, institutions, values, and ideals have been damaged by fascist subversion, disruption, and fracture, but whose people emerge from the crucible of their forging unconquered and renewed.
One day we will be a United Humankind and a free society of equals, and Lula like Biden and all our flawed and failed champions of liberty will be remembered for as long as there are human beings as among the founders of a new humanity and civilization or who could have been, whose vision will or can yet shape our being, meaning, and value, inform our choices about how to be human together for millennia, and motivate our discover of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us each do what we can to make the dream of democracy real.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2021, Brazilians Seize the Streets to Demand the Resignation of Bolsonaro; The horrific death toll of Bolsonaro’s inept and corrupt handling of the Pandemic, the campaign of ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the plunder of public wealth and natural resources by a plutocratic elite, the vast precariat of a nation poised on the edge of collapse; all these and one thing more have brought the people of Brazil into the streets this week to demand the resignation of the tyrant Bolsonaro; the brutal repression of a kleptocratic fascist regime of force and violence.
The use of force and violence fails at the point of resistance and refusal to submit, and power is a fragile and hollow illusion which may be dispelled by exposure and challenge of authority, for who cannot be controlled is free. Regardless of the death squads and sexual terror, of the enormous military might of the government of Brazil as a host structure of racist elite hegemony, a people who do not recognize the authority of the state and who meet repression with disobedience cannot be subjugated.
Every Brazilian in the streets today who challenge and defy state terror has won their freedom, for they cannot be enslaved by those who would be our masters. So begins the end of tyranny in Brazil; we can help the people of Brazil liberate themselves and establish a true democracy as a free society of equals by shaping our policy to such ends.
The people of Brazil have spoken; how shall we answer them?
As I wrote in my post of March 11 2021, Brazil Reclaims Its Heart: the Return of Lula da Silva, Champion of the People; Lula da Silva, Champion of the People, has had the false corruption charges against him overturned and is now free to challenge Bolsonaro for the Presidency of Brazil once again.
This is a historic example of class war, which pits labor leader da Silva directly against capitalist kingpin Bolsonaro, whose regime creates wealth for elites by the de facto enslavement of Blacks and the precariat and the plunder of resources from indigenous peoples, and whose government is controlled from within by a network of some six thousand military officers who enforce his kleptocracy with brutal repression.
Racism, patriarchy, oligarchic and plutocratic wealth, de facto military rule; Brazil today meets all the criteria of fascist tyranny. I look now to Lula to change the balance of power and restore democracy in Brazil.
Of my connection with Brazil and her peoples, stamped into my soul by the trauma of my near-execution by police while rescuing abandoned street children whom they were bounty hunting for the wealthy aristocratic elite, who like America’s homeless are terrorized by the carceral state and the hegemonic elites its serves not merely because they are unsightly but because their existence gives the lie to capitalism as a system of oppression, I have written in my post of July 15 2022, Let Hope Overcome Fear: Lula 2022; Among my personal role models in antifascism and revolution is the fictional character of Harry Tuttle played by Robert de Niro in the film Brazil, whose line “we’re all in this together,” echoes through forty some years of my life and adventures.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen, in the summer of 1974, to train with some fellow fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there, though later the venue was moved to Mexico. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy my age I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial and equestrian sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, like for horse racing. This was how the elites of Brazil had chosen to solve the problem of abandoned street children, fully ten per cent of the national population. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we do not challenge and defy tyranny and unjust systems.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a traumatic near death experience, similar to the mock executions of Maurice Blanchot by the Nazis in 1944 as written in The Instant of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czar’s secret police in 1849 as written in The Idiot; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was reflexive and a decision of instinct beneath the level of conscious thought or volition, where the truths our ourselves written in our flesh are forged and revealed. Asked to let someone die to save myself, I simply said no. When thought returned me from this moment of panic or transcendence of myself, I asked how much to let us walk away, whereupon he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, infamous for avenging his mother’s savage murder by killing his father and eating his heart, who had been arrested the previous year after a spectacular series of one hundred or more revenge killings of the most fiendish and monstrous of criminals, powerful men beyond the reach of the law or who were the law who had perpetrated atrocities on women and children. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, with the words; “You are one of us, come with us” and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
“We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge”; so they described themselves to me, and this definition of solidarity as praxis or the action of values remains with me and shadows my use of the battle cry Never Again! As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene I; “If you wrong us, shall we not avenge?”
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased; all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth.
Join us, for a United Humankind cannot be enslaved, conquered, dehumanized, falsified, or commodified, nor can tyranny stand against liberty when the people refuse to submit.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Brazil celebrates Black Consciousness Day as national holiday for first time
Legacy of African Brazilians honored on 329th anniversary of resistance leader Zumbi’s death by Portuguese forces
History of free African strongholds fires Brazilian resistance to Bolsonaro:
Quilombo dos Palmares – founded by Africans who escaped slavery – maintained its independence for 100 years and has become a touchstone for a new generation
20 de novembro de 2025 O Brasil celebra sua herança de resistência negra, revoltas de escravos, repúblicas negras livres e luta de libertação
História, memória, identidade, as histórias que contamos sobre nós mesmos e aquelas contadas sobre nós por outros, incluindo aqueles que nos escravizariam, que são e podem se tornar e que decidem; tudo isso é um terreno de luta contra sistemas de opressão, falsificação, mercantilização e desumanização, e muitas vezes um terreno mutável, construído de verdades relativas como um Portão Rashomon do ser humano, significado e valor.
A adoção pelo Brasil de um feriado nacional na data da morte do grande líder da revolta de escravos Zumbi em uma batalha gloriosa nas mãos das forças colonialistas é um estudo de caso do que chamo de Teoria Narrativa da Identidade, na qual a autoconstrução é uma forma de revolução e o principal ato definidor de se tornar humano.
Celebre conosco o grande guerreiro, rei e figura da libertação Zumbi e seu desafio até a morte daqueles que nos escravizariam, e a república livre de Palmares que ele liderou na revolução anticolonial e uma guerra de independência de um século contra vastas forças de conquista e domínio imperial e sistemas de opressão e terror da supremacia branca, quem quer que ele tenha sido e qualquer reino rebelde que ele defendeu, pois tudo o que realmente importa é que ele detém um espaço imaginário em que cada um de nós pode entrar e se tornar, não importa a miséria de nossas condições iniciais.
Que um homem viveu e foi real que se recusou a se submeter é o suficiente para nos lembrarmos e sonharmos em ser, pois cada um de nós pode se tornar aquele homem que sonhamos
12 de janeiro de 2023 Uma História da Revolução no Brasil e da Contra-Revolução Fascista: Liberdade Versus Tirania, Lula Versus Bolsonaro
Na esteira do colapso da contra-revolução fascista de Bolsonaro e da tentativa de golpe no Brasil, a rápida reação de Lula nas prisões em massa dos camisas marrons traidoras que invadiram os escritórios do governo em imitação da fracassada Insurreição de 6 de janeiro de Trump, ela mesma modelada em seu ídolo O Golpe da Cervejaria de Hitler e o repúdio nacional impressionante a Bolsonaro e sua captura fracassada do estado pelos povos vitoriosos do Brasil, agora começou uma nova fase de luta com a caçada para aqueles que financiam e organizam a tirania fascista, muito parecido com o que está em andamento agora na América por dois anos.
Uma conspiração insidiosa e de longo alcance contra a democracia, ligando as famílias criminosas de Trump e Bolsonaro e as forças da reação na América e no Brasil, começa a emergir, misturando malfeitores familiares e apologistas do Quarto Reich como Steve Bannon e Tucker Carlson com aberrações desconhecidas da natureza como Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Braganza, que busca um retorno ao trono do Brasil através de Trump e Bolsonaro como procuradores e agora está fugindo de debaixo de sua rocha como a coisa rastejante voraz e vil que todos os aristocratas são sob sua tinta dourada, conspirações que se ampliam para engolir redes inteiras de terror supremacista branco, terror sexual patriarcal teocrático, roubo plutocrático e oligárquico da riqueza pública e os estados carcerários xenófobos e hipócritas de força e controle que eles geram como instrumentos de riqueza, poder e privilégio da elite.
Nosso grande inimigo é o Quarto Reich global, que se transforma incessantemente e se adapta às condições de qualquer nação que vise para subversão e captura, e as interconexões entre regimes de tirania fascista são múltiplas e sutis. O fascismo usa muitas máscaras e, como um predador de emboscada na natureza, move-se entre nós por trás de miragens de mentiras e ilusões, histórias reescritas e vozes roubadas, imagens que capturam e distorcem. Aqui está um terreno de luta no qual todos nós devemos lutar, se quisermos assumir o controle de nossa própria identidade sob falsificação e divisão como condições de luta impostas.
Conforme escrito na série da Netflix quarta-feira, episódio três Friend Or Woe:
A Diretora Weems, preparando-se na quarta-feira em seu escritório por sabotar a celebração do líder peregrino que queimou vivos os Párias originais e construiu a cidade em suas terras e túmulos roubados, uma história repetida infinitamente em nossa história real; “Você é um imã de problemas.”
Quarta-feira: “Se problemas significam enfrentar mentiras, décadas de discriminação, séculos tratando párias como cidadãos de segunda classe ou pior…”
Diretora: “Do que você está falando?”
Quarta-feira: “Jericó. Por que esta cidade ainda tem um Dia de Divulgação?
Você não conhece sua história real com párias? A verdadeira história de Joseph Crackstone?
Diretora: “Sim. Até certo ponto.”
Quarta-feira: “Então por que ser cúmplice em seu encobrimento? Aqueles que esquecem a história estão fadados a repeti-la.”
Principal: “É aí que você e eu diferimos. Onde você vê desgraça, eu vejo oportunidade.
Talvez esta seja uma chance de reescrever os erros, de começar um novo capítulo nas relações normie-párias.
Quarta-feira: “Nada mudou desde Crackstone. Eles ainda nos odeiam. Só que agora eles adoçam com platitudes e sorrisos. Se você não está disposto a lutar pela verdade…”
Diretor: “Você não acha que eu quero a verdade? Claro que eu faço. Mas o mundo nem sempre é preto e branco. Existem tons de cinza.”
Quarta-feira: “Talvez para você. Mas ou eles escrevem nossa história ou nós. Você não pode ter as duas coisas.
30 de outubro de 2022 Vitória no Brasil: “Vamos viver novos tempos de paz, amor e esperança” promete o novo presidente Lula ao iniciar a restauração da democracia
Celebramos uma Esperança Desamparada vindicada e nos tornamos gloriosos na vitória dos povos do Brasil e de seu campeão Lula, dançando nas ruas e correndo descontroladamente além dos limites do Proibido.
Um monstro e tirano foi expulso de seu castelo, e isso é sempre motivo de comemoração. Sempre teremos esse momento de triunfo e a esperança que ele reserva para o nosso futuro, independentemente das provações que virão. Se tal esperança é uma dádiva ou uma maldição, cabe a cada um de nós viver e tornar real; mas agora são possíveis coisas que ontem não eram, e isso eu chamo de vitória.
Com as palavras de Glinda a Oz felicito Lula e os povos do Brasil; ‘Esperamos muito tempo por você, feiticeiro. E nós realmente precisamos que você seja o Mago que esperamos que você seja.
Um grande trabalho começa agora, como Biden na América, Lula no Brasil lidera a Restauração da Democracia em uma nação cujos sistemas, estruturas, instituições, valores e ideais foram danificados pela subversão, ruptura e fratura fascistas, mas cujo povo emerge do cadinho de seu forjamento invicto e renovado.
Um dia seremos uma Humanidade Unida e uma sociedade livre de iguais, e Lula como Biden será lembrado enquanto houver seres humanos entre os fundadores de uma nova humanidade e civilização, cuja visão moldará nosso ser, ou seja, e valor, informar nossas escolhas sobre como sermos humanos juntos por milênios e motivar nossa descoberta das possibilidades ilimitadas de nos tornarmos humanos.
Vamos cada um fazer o que pudermos para tornar o sonho da democracia real.
7 de setembro de 2022 Brasil comemora seu bicentenário de independência, e Bolsonaro o usa para armar o patriotismo a serviço de seu regime em um comício Trump-Nuremberg
Nesta gloriosa e jubilosa celebração de dois séculos de Independência do Brasil, que significam a libertação do colonialismo imperial e da aristocracia feudal, as sombras de nossa história ameaçam ressurgir e nos tomar mais uma vez em uma tirania de poder desigual sistêmico e hegemonias elitistas de riqueza e privilégio.
E a isso devemos resistir. Demos à tirania fascista a única resposta que ela merece; Nunca mais.
Bolsonaro citou Richard Nixon em seu comício Trump-Nuremberg; “Eu não sou bandido.”
Como em todas as grandes mentiras, um criminoso é exatamente o que é.
Da minha ligação com o Brasil e seus povos, estampada em minha alma pelo trauma de minha quase execução pela polícia ao resgatar meninos de rua abandonados que estavam caçando recompensas para a rica elite aristocrática, escrevi em meu post de 15 de julho de 2022, Deixe a esperança vencer o medo: Lula 2022; Entre meus modelos pessoais no antifascismo e na revolução está o personagem fictício de Harry Tuttle interpretado por Robert de Niro no filme Brasil, cuja frase “estamos todos juntos nisso”, ecoa por quarenta e poucos anos de minha vida e aventuras.
Deixe-me colocar isso no contexto; O Brasil foi minha primeira viagem solo ao exterior, voando para São Paulo quando eu tinha quatorze anos, no verão de 1974, para treinar com alguns colegas esgrimistas para os Jogos Pan-Americanos que estavam planejados para lá, embora mais tarde o local tenha sido transferido para México. Eu tinha um pouco de português de conversação recém-aprendido, um convite para ficar na casa de um menino da minha idade que eu conhecia do circuito de torneios de esgrima com quem eu poderia descobrir as travessuras locais e visões de festas na praia.
Foi assim que entrei em um mundo de maneiras corteses e criados de luvas brancas, anfitriões graciosos e brilhantes que eram luminares locais e deram um magnífico baile formal para me apresentar, e um amigo com quem eu compartilhava uma paixão louca por esportes marciais e equestres , mas também um mundo de muros altos e guardas armados.
Minha primeira visão além dessa ilusão veio com os sons de tiros de fuzil dos guardas; quando olhei da minha sacada para ver quem estava atacando o portão da frente, descobri que os guardas estavam atirando em uma multidão de mendigos, a maioria crianças, que assaltaram um caminhão que transportava os mantimentos semanais. Naquele dia fiz minha primeira excursão secreta além das muralhas.
Que verdades estão escondidas pelas paredes de nossos palácios, além das quais é proibido olhar? É fácil acreditar nas mentiras da autoridade quando alguém é membro da elite em cujo interesse eles alegam exercer poder e deixar de questionar seus próprios motivos e posição de privilégio. Mentiras terrivelmente fáceis de acreditar quando somos beneficiários de hierarquias de alteridade excludente, de riqueza e disparidade de poder e desigualdades sistematicamente fabricadas e armadas a serviço do poder, e de genocídio, escravidão, conquista e imperialismo.
Sempre preste atenção no homem atrás da cortina. Pois não existe autoridade justa, e como Dorothy diz no Mágico de Oz, ele é “apenas um velho farsante”, e suas mentiras e ilusões, força e controle, não servem a nenhum interesse além dos seus.
Sendo um menino americano ingênuo, senti que era meu dever relatar o incidente; mas na delegacia tive dificuldade em me fazer entender. Eles achavam que eu estava ali para apostar na minha guarda em um concurso mensal em andamento para o qual policial pegasse o maior número de crianças de rua; havia um quadro-negro na parede da estação para isso. Foi assim que as elites do Brasil escolheram resolver o problema das crianças de rua abandonadas, dez por cento da população nacional. Outro jogo de apostas chamado “o Grande”, foi aquele em que o policial chutou a barriga das mais grávidas e ficou entre as dez maiores causas de morte no Brasil para adolescentes, invariavelmente vivendo em zonas de favelas que abrigam as mais pobres e negras do mundo. cidadãos; isso em uma cidade fundada por escravos africanos fugidos como uma república livre.
Aprendi muito nas semanas que se seguiram; sobretudo aprendi quem é o responsável por essas desigualdades; somos, se não desafiarmos e desafiarmos a tirania e os sistemas injustos.
Durante as noites de minhas aventuras além dos muros e ações para ajudar os bandos de mendigos infantis e obstruir as caças de recompensas da polícia, tive uma experiência traumática de quase morte, semelhante às execuções simuladas de Maurice Blanchot pelos nazistas em 1944, conforme escrito em The Instant de Minha Morte e Fiódor Dostoiévski pela polícia secreta do Czar em 1849, conforme escrito em O Idiota; fugindo da perseguição por um labirinto de túneis com uma criança ferida entre outros e presos a céu aberto por dois fuzileiros da polícia que tomaram posições de flanco e apontaram para nós enquanto o líder pedia rendição além da curva de um túnel. Fiquei na frente de um menino com uma perna torcida que não podia correr enquanto os outros espalhavam uma e escapou ou encontrou esconderijos, e se recusou a ficar de lado quando ordenado a fazê-lo. Isso foi reflexivo e uma decisão do instinto abaixo do nível do pensamento consciente ou volição, onde as verdades que nós mesmos escrevemos em nossa carne são forjadas e reveladas. Pediram para deixar alguém morrer para me salvar, eu simplesmente disse não. Quando o pensamento me fez sair desse momento de pânico ou transcendência de mim mesmo, perguntei quanto nos deixaria ir embora, e então ele ordenou que seus homens atirassem. Mas houve apenas um tiro em vez de uma demonstração de fogo cruzado, e isso foi um grande erro; ele teve tempo de perguntar “O quê?” antes de cair no chão.
E então nossos socorristas se revelaram, tendo se aproximado da polícia por trás; os Matadors, que podem ser descritos como vigilantes, uma gangue criminosa, um grupo revolucionário, ou todos os três, fundados pelo notório vigilante e criminoso brasileiro Pedro Rodrigues Filho, famoso por vingar o assassinato selvagem de sua mãe matando seu pai e comendo seu coração, que havia sido preso no ano anterior após uma série espetacular de cem ou mais assassinatos por vingança dos criminosos mais diabólicos e monstruosos, homens poderosos fora do alcance da lei que haviam perpetrado atrocidades contra mulheres e crianças. Nessa temível irmandade fui acolhido, com as palavras; “Você é um de nós”, e nas ruas de São Paulo naquele verão nunca mais fiquei sozinho.
“Não podemos salvar a todos, mas podemos vingar”; assim eles se descreveram para mim, e essa definição de solidariedade como práxis ou ação de valores permanece comigo e obscurece meu uso do grito de guerra Nunca Mais! Como Shakespeare escreveu em O Mercador de Veneza, Ato III, cena I; “Se você nos ofender, não devemos nos vingar?”
A partir do momento em que vi os guardas da família aristocrática com quem eu era hóspede atirando contra a multidão de crianças sem-teto e mendigos que fervilhavam o caminhão de alimentos no portão da mansão, nus e esqueléticos de fome, cheios de cicatrizes, aleijados e deformados com doenças desconhecidas a qualquer povo para quem os cuidados de saúde e a alimentação básica sejam gratuitos e pré-condições garantidas do direito universal à vida, desesperados por um punhado de alimentos que possam significar mais um dia de sobrevivência; naquele momento eu escolhi o meu lado, e meu povo são os impotentes e os despossuídos, os silenciados e os apagados; todos aqueles a quem Frantz Fanon chamava de miseráveis da terra.
Junte-se a nós, pois a Humanidade Unida não pode ser escravizada, conquistada, desumanizada, falsificada ou mercantilizada, nem a tirania pode se opor à liberdade quando o povo se recusa a se submeter.
Pois somos muitos, estamos observando e somos o futuro.
Brazil, a reading list
History
Brazil: A Biography, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Heloisa Murgel Starling
Today is the anniversary of the execution of Joe Hill, iconic poet-warrior of the Industrial Workers of the World, convicted on false charges of killing a policeman in a trial orchestrated by a mining company in which all the records disappeared, whose songs will inspire resistance and the solidarity of workers so long as the dream of liberty lives; freedom from coercion and the social use of force, but also equality and fairness in our share of the products of our labor, which is nothing more than a reckoning of the value of our time.
Ideologies of human relations, societies, political institutions, systems, and structures, especially those anchored to economic theories, can be a vast rabbit hole from which little of practical use emerges, but for this; how shall we assign values to our time?
This question is the Occam’s Razor I use to simplify the issue of who will do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us, and at what cost. To me an hour’s work is an hour’s work, no matter who is doing it. And no matter what that work is; the time of an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer is of no more intrinsic worth than that of a janitor or any other worker; all are equally human and all are using the same span of time.
There can be no basis or justification for assigning different values to different persons or tasks, and the achievement of a free society of equals requires equal shares in the wealth of our society. A just society would mandate one universal wage.
But this is not the great lesson of the life of Joe Hill; a life of Resistance and Solidarity, and of speaking truth to power, but also one of creating beauty to balance the horror of an unjust world and its systems of oppression and unequal power, of bringing joy to banish fear, love to break the bonds of the Ring of Power, and hope to balance the terror of our nothingness.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
Here are the lyrics of one his songs, written in 1914:
Primal fairytales and narratives of revolutionary intent; Margaret Atwood is a goddess of Liberty who comes bearing ax and torch to free us from our cages.
While teaching her books I always referred to her as the greatest writer of the 20th century because her novels recapitulate and transform the whole history of civilization, though in this she is not unique.
Working from the deepest stratum of our collective psyche, Margaret Atwood’s reimaginations of Grimm’s fairytales and other sources offer a Socratic criticism of the forces operating from those texts, an art of protest and of empowerment.
If you need a wrecking crew to smash the patriarchy, Margaret Atwood’s novels should be in your toolkit. Let’s unpack her sources and references a bit; for greater detail see Sharon Rose Wilson’s The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.
Cat’s Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson’s Snow Queen and Grimm’s Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson’s Ice Maiden and Grimm’s Girl Without Hands.
Fearful door images echo Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird; Risley’s dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood’s vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.
Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story. Maat is a dual aspected Egyptian goddess of motherhood but also a lioness and fierce hunter in her form as Sekmet.
Thematically Cat’s Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood’s driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.
Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson’s Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde’s Salome, Dante’s Inferno, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It’s a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.
Interlunar reimagines Cocteau’s Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel. I have used it as a sacred text and source of ritual immersion in dreams and poetic vision for our modern Orphic festival on Mad Hatter Day, not entirely as satire.
The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid’s Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher’s bride.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess and thew civilizational shift to Patriarchy as a theocratic system of oppression at the dawn of mass slave agriculture, priest-kings, and city-states following the Maria Gimbutas theory as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.
Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.
Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important telenovela ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot of liberation struggle, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.
It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of authority as patriarchy and tyranny, sexual and racial terror institutionalized as religion and state, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party in 1980 around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and the coming Age of Tyrants as threats to global democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.
And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict with the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.
Margaret Atwood carries forward the pioneering work of Angela Carter in the feminist revisioning of fairytales and restoring history’s silenced female voice which founded one of the most exciting and diverse subgenres of literature, as the standard bearer of a generation of authors.
Her subversion and provocation of Authority in her chosen role as the Jester of King Lear, Promethean guardian of humanity and thief of the sacred fire is magnificent and epic; through her politicized literary performances and rebellions she became a figure of the goddess of Liberty who by the seizure of power restores the balance of the world.
These are fine and meritorious victories to have won; future generations of girls who expect to be the heroes of their own stories and become women who bear the torch of freedom in their turn may count Margaret Atwood among the ancestors and protectresses who first discovered a way through the Labyrinth to a self-owned and self-creating identity. But to me her greatest achievement is neither literary nor political, but in her third sphere of action; that of psychology.
In works which parallel those of the classicist James Hillman, she reimagines Jungian archetypal psychology in ways which treat persons as stories, a complex and shifting dynamism of motivating and informing sources, as texts which shape our histories and ourselves and become the key relation between memory and identity. And she does this while questioning the second-order relations, sociopolitical forces and structures.
So, a radical new psychology of liberation which operates by poetic and mythic rules, stewardship of a new literature which describes those rules and provides stories as case studies, and a praxis or action of her values which formulates the political consequences of her ideology as a holistic system of Humanist philosophy which extends that of Simone De Beauvoir. Her triadic configuration of psychology, politics, and literature, each reinforcing and interdependent with the others, is a unique, brilliant, and powerfully transformational theory of identity, art, and the meaning and value of being human.
The Handmaid’s Tale series trailer
Moments in History That Inspired The Handmaid’s Tale
We humans construct ourselves and each other through multiple layers of Defining Moments; the self or soul is a work of art and a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation and change, images in juxtaposition which unify and cohere when seen through different lenses.
In this fourth essay written for the occasion of my birthday to pursue the truth of myself and the informing, motivating, and shaping forces that created me, I interrogate the books which in reading have written me.
Literature is a Mirror of Becoming, an instrument through which we discover, reimagine, and transform ourselves as we wish to become.
Herein I offer a history of myself through my reading, with an appendix of links to celebrations of my favorite authors on their birthdays, 160 or so critical essays which discuss their works as a whole and their major books, written with the hope of inspiring others to read them.
For this story I chose one author to represent myself as I was from eighth grade through senior year of high school; Nietzsche, Joyce, Carroll, Kosinski, and Jung. These luminaries were of course not alone in living in my imagination as they did successively; Nietzsche was preceded by Plato and shaped my understanding of Burroughs, Joyce concurrent with Wittgenstein, Carroll embedded within my years-long obsessions with Surrealist film and literature and the occult which ended only with my failure to read the Zohar in its original cryptodialect of Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, Kosinski’s The Painted Bird together with Robert G.L. Waite’s foundational multidisciplinary study of Hitler The Psychopathic God helped me process the trauma of my near-execution by a police death squad in Brazil the summer before high school and inspired me to choose the origins of evil as my field of study at university, and Jung danced with Lovecraft in aberrant splendor.
And all through high school I read the entire Great Books of the Western World series, and the whole Encyclopedia Britannica, in a mad quest to eat the whole of the past and hold it pristine and entire in my mind like a Platonic Ideal of human being, meaning, and value.
Before all of this came my reading of Frasier’s Golden Bough in sixth grade, my literary first love of Hesse in seventh grade, from seventh grade through my senior year studied French language and literature, and from the age of nine for ten years I studied Zen Buddhism and Chinese and to a lesser extent Japanese literature and languages, along with martial arts and the game of go.
On the other bookend of time around my five years of growing up ending with high school, I should mention that I studied Jung from day one at university, immersed myself in Shakespearean theatre to the point where I spoke only in iambic pentameter for months, went through periods of enthusiasm for Arthurian Romance and then the British Romantics, and adopted the poetry of William Blake as a faith of poetic vision.
Why is any of this important, to anyone other than myself or those interested in how I have constructed myself in growing up, and what does it mean that we might use as general principles of action?
First as a study in how we are written by what we read, for identity is metafictional; second is the method of archeology of the soul. In the excavation of our intertexts as informing, motivating, and shaping forces and what Heather Clark called The Grief of Influence in her work on Sylvia Plath, we may question our choices and purposes in the instruments we have chosen with which to construct ourselves, the best selves we were aiming to realize in doing so, and the usefulness, survival value, and wisdom of our ideals of persona and the figures toward which we reach as we adapt to change over time in becoming human.
This is not a process limited to individuals, but one which is generalized throughout whole societies, cultures, and civilizations, for it is about the material basis of human being, meaning, and value as memory, history, and identity, mimesis and praxis; the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. Our narratives function as scripts in the performance of ourselves, just as the canon of literature is nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
If we are to reimagine and transform ourselves and how we choose to be human together, we must surface and explore our stories and how they have created us, and learn to dream better dreams.
Eighth grade: Friedrich Nietzsche
October 15 2025 Songs of Liberation From Theocratic Terror: In Celebration of Nietzsche
Nietzsche who awakens, Nietzsche who challenges, Nietzsche who illuminates and inspires; these are the three Nietzsche’s who have been my companions throughout life, my guides and muses, and whom I offer you as a Song of Orpheus and Ariadne’s Thread whereby to find your way through the labyrinth of life.
As the world rips itself apart at the point of fracture between theocratic tyranny and democracy as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and co-owners of the state in the bifurcated realities of Democratic and Republican America and its mirror Israel and Palestine as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history, and those who would enslave us weaponize fear in service to power and act with amoral brutality in committing crimes against humanity as interpreters of the will of death gods, the illumination of Nietzsche and his songs of liberation become newly relevant.
Protean in his forms, he may take whatever shape is needed in your quest; and will play his roles as befitting at different stages of the journey. There are many Nietzsche’s, who like an endless series of dancing Schrodinger’s Cats offer possibilities which echo and reflect those of his readers as an inkblot test. Who is Nietzsche to me?
Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a space in my life and imagination like no other shaping, motivating, and informing source, because my discovery of him in the year before I began high school was the final break of the Great Chain of Being which bound me to the will of authority and my fellow schoolmates ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty in a theocratic, patriarchal, and racist society aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and set me free to create myself in a universe without imposed meaning or value; then helped me to process a primary trauma which became a Defining Moment as I joined the liberation struggle of a foreign land whose glittering citadels of splendor concealed horrible truths.
Nietzsche it was who helped me to balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
We will need such balance all of us, as we confront our complicity in systems of oppression both in America’s sponsorship of our imperial colony Israel and its seventy years of Occupation of Palestine, and throughout the world and history, for we are all caught in the gears of a machine of elite wealth, power, and privilege, and systems of oppression which are special to nothing, though conflicts often illuminate the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
When I speak of the enforcement of normality as an evil to be resisted, it is with the voice of the old woman burned alive in her home as a witch by a mob which included fellow children I grew up with. To fully understand Nietzsche, you must inhabit the historical space of liberation from systemic tyranny which his anti-authoritarian iconoclasm represents. Much of our world still lives in such darkness, and many of its evils originate in theocratic sources.
There is always someone in a gold robe who claims to speak for the Infinite, and with this false and stolen authority of lies and idolatry transfers the true cost of production of the wealth he appropriates to himself while others do the hard and dirty work. The particulars of such claims are meaningless; only the fact of unequal power and systems of oppression are real.
I grew up in such a world, a premodern world bound to the laws of a cruel and implacable Authority of alien and unknowable motives and those who would enslave us and claim to speak in his name as a tyranny of the Elect, whose hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege rely on our commodification as weaponized disparity and theft of the commons, falsification through lies and illusions, subjugation through learned helplessness and divisions of exclusionary otherness, fear as an instrument of the centralization of power by carceral states of force and control through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and faith weaponized in service to power as theft of the soul.
Such atavisms of barbarism hold dominion still over much of humankind and possess us as legacies of our history, bound by embedded tyrannies of many kinds, a world America was founded to replace as a free society of equals. Ours is a very fragile civilization, defined by its ability to question itself but threatened always by chasms of darkness which surround us and with relentless, pervasive, and systemic enemies in fascist tyranny, patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, the fetishism of death and violence in identitarian nationalism and its police states and imperial militarism, and dehumanization. This we must resist, and I read Thus Spake Zarathustra as a luminous song of resistance.
Among the great loves of my literary life, I first discovered him after reading through all the works of Herman Hesse in seventh grade, in whom I found resonance with the Taoist poetry and Zen riddles which were among my subjects of formal study, then abandoning fiction after the nightmare of Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties and its implied erotic horror, which I had chosen after reading his stunning novel of my favorite game after chess, The Master of Go, and turned thereafter to Plato whom I adored, and read voraciously all his works throughout my eighth grade year. The Trial of Socrates founded our civilization as a self-questioning system of being human together, and in the dialectics of Socratic method offered me tools of self-construal and reinvention which became central to my identity.
My father, who was a theatre director as well as my English, Drama, and Forensics teacher, Debate Team coach, and my Fencing Club coach throughout high school, and who taught me fencing and chess from the age of nine, suggested I might like the discussion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche’s vision of civilization as a struggle between passion and reason, chaos and order, conserving and revolutionary forces, which interlinks with that of Kawabata and of Herman Hesse in The Glass Bead Game to form a unitary vision of a process of becoming human, and informs my reading of literature, politics, and all human activity, to this day.
So it was that during the summer of my fourteenth year before I began high school I discovered with unforgettable joy and recognition a book written by someone who spoke for me, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Wedded in my imagination to the context of my encounter with his work was the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division of under 16, as I had been in the under 14 and remained through high school in the under 20 division. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, and I have been living beyond the walls ever since.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, like for a horse race, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true mission of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol from March 22 to April 18 2022 and at Panjshir in Afghanistan from the last week of August til September 7 2021, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Throughout all of this, Nietzsche’s great song of liberation pulled me into its heart and ignited in me a will and vision to transgress beyond our boundaries into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons.
I thereafter read all his works, though Thus Spake Zarathustra remained a kind of sacred text to me; I used to quote it in refutation to my fellow students who quoted the Bible to me as an instrument of subjugation to authority.
Redolent with the cadences of poetic oratory and a phraseology which echoes that of the beautiful King James Bible, pervasive in my town of Reformed Church stalwarts whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, it was both familiar and utterly strange, an empowering work of liberation proclaiming the death of Authority and the limits of the Forbidden. How I cherished it, this treasure and marvel; by summer’s end I could recite it entirely by memory so many times had I read it.
May we all find such books, which illuminate our imagination and offer to us the Promethean fire.
Read therefore the immortal classics of Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, and Ecce Homo.
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen provides an insightful overview.
Maurice Blanchot’s lifelong engagement with Nietzsche can be illuminating and wonderful; The Step Not Beyond, a reply to Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which references Deleuze, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Infinite Conversation all center on his reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as an Existentialist principle in which the negation of presence is a path of total freedom. In the pivotal 1945 essay On Nietzsche’s Side, Blanchot reimagines Karl Jaspers’ seminal thesis on Nietzsche; thereafter his works interrogate Nietzschean themes including the Will to Power, the nature of time, ecstatic vision and the Dionysian principle, the Death of God as symbol and metaphor of the emptiness of tyranny and the illusion of authority, and the relativity of meaning and value.
A student of the philosopher Henri Bergson, Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis “Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State” interrogates the reimagined doctrine of Original Sin as the innate Depravity of Man, which is the basis of all our law and an apologetics of authoritarian power which both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis made a life mission of overthrowing, a theme which catalyzed his heroic Resistance to the Nazi Occupation of Greece and continued to inform Kazantzakis throughout his life and is central to understanding his unique brand of Existentialism. In large part his works explore the implications of the Nietzschean conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as personal and social struggle.
Do read also C.G. Jung’s work Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake. An engagement with Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-gospel and Zarathustra as a figure of Liberation like Milton’s rebel angel, as for both Jung and myself, will lead you as it did me to the works of William Blake and his rebel figure Los; Milton, Nietzsche, and Blake form a line of transmission which unfolds gloriously in Jung’s Red Book.
Last of all I must cite the influence which prefigured and later reinterpreted the meaning of Nietzsche for me, the great storyteller of my childhood William S. Burroughs, whose own ideology was shaped by his friend Georges Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche. Bataille’s On Nietzsche brilliantly interrogates the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us to free ourselves from them, in a fearless reimagination of the will to power as a will to transgress. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, compiles the secret documents of his occult circle, disciples of Nietzsche who attempted to reimagine civilization and whose ritual transgressions echo those of de Sade and Jean Genet.
The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated. Burroughs derived his Anarchist Trilogy, The Wild Boys, The Cat Inside, and the Revised Boy Scout Manual, from Bataille’s synthesis of Nietzsche, de Sade, and Freud, though its central premise, The Algebra of Need, references Marx.
This is the Burroughs with whom I found connection as a teenager; the anarchist philosopher for whom the Wolfman was a figure of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, whose novel on the subject, The Wild Boys, was written during the period of his visits at our home in the early 1970’s and possibly influenced by my father’s tales of our family history.
For Burroughs, writing was conjuration; an act of chaos magic and liberation struggle in which the tyranny of authorized identities and orders of human being, meaning, and value can be destabilized as fracture, disruption, and delegitimation, and created anew through poetic vision.
In this mission William S. Burroughs was the successor and reinterpreter of of Bataille and of their shared model Nietzsche, as ritual transgression, the delegitimation of authority and seizures of power as liberation struggle, poetic vision and ecstatic trance as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Burroughs also believed himself to be the literal successor of Nietzsche as the possessed avatar of a chthonic underworld god, a Shadow figure in Jungian terms which represents his animal nature and inchoate desires as a beast with a beast’s soul, unconquerable and free, in reference to the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and that Burroughs’ Welsh nanny had cursed him with as a child. Burroughs spoke of this as Tsathoggua, in reference to Lovecraft. A powerful guardian spirit and Underworld guide to be embraced as a figure of one’s own darkness, as did I in reciting together the line with which Burrough’s often ended his bizarre versions of Grimm’s fairytales, a line written by Shakespeare in The Tempest for Prospero, who says of Caliban; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
So the circle of meaning returns to swallow its own tail like an Ouroboros or an infinite Mobius Loop in the embrace of our darkness as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and of the balance we must find for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of total freedom in a universe without imposed meaning, wherein the only being, meaning, and value that exists are those we create for ourselves, even if we must seize them from those who would enslave us.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a reading list
Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography, by Lesley Chamberlain
Freshman year of High school; Joyce and Wittgenstein
February 2 2025 James Joyce, On His Birthday: the Quest For A Universal Language and Transpersonal Human Consciousness As Reimagination and Transformative Change
We long to reach beyond ourselves and the flags of our skin, to find connection, inhabit the lives of others as possible selves in becoming human, to find healing for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world in the redemptive power of love, hope to balance the terror of our nothingness, and the vision to bring reimagination and transformative change to our limitless futures.
Of such strategies of processing trauma and disruptive events, James Joyce and Ludwig Wittgenstein offer us allegories of rebirth and self-creation in the quest for a universal language, a hidden order and implicit structure in grammar as rules for constructing meaning, and transpersonal human consciousness which underlies all being.
Rules for constructing meaning; and possibilities of becoming human among a vast treasure house of languages, numberless as the stars, each illuminating a uniqueness in chiaroscuro with unknown chasms of darkness. And all of them equally true, for language is a Rashomon Gate of identities both authorized and transgressive relative to one’s origins and angle of view.
Truths which propagate exponentially from the palette of vocabularies, negotiated informing, motivating, and shaping forces of identity controlled by word origins and history as they move through time and memory.
Mimesis, self-construal and personae, and the doors of perception which are also funhouse mirror images of imaginal realms of being. Filters which distort, grotesque or compelling, possess us as the legacies of history or are possessed by us as seizures of power, echoes and reflections unmoored in time as conflicted pasts and futures, and signs of the ongoing struggle to become wherein falsification and authenticity play for the unknown spaces between ourselves and others; boundaries which may become interfaces.
Our original language, like our source identity, is an imposed condition of struggle; but it is also a boundary which may become on interface through which we can shape ourselves and each other.
What is important here in the subject of languages as possible selves is that learning the languages of others builds bridges instead of walls, and offers us a free space of creative play into which we may grow, a process of seizing control of our own evolution by intentionally changing how we think. Who do we want to become, we humans?
Language, then, embodies both order and chaos, authority and autonomy, histories which we cherish and despise, belonging and otherness, conserving and revolutionary forces, those we must keep to remain who we are and those we must escape to become who we wish to be.
And if we are very lucky, they are not always the same.
As I wrote in celebration of his birthday in my post of James Joyce, on his birthday February 2; “Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!” so wrote James Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
Wonderful, hilarious, illuminating writing, still beyond the leading edge after nearly a century. A visionary and masterful wordsmith, James Joyce’s stories are compelling, intriguing verbal puzzles. New ideas unfold every time you read them.
His reinvention of language and the methods of storytelling birthed the modern world. In partnership with Gertrude Stein and drawing on a vast well of other resources, influences, and references, his unique creative genius and vision unified and transformed all that had come before in literature.
He lived with his wife in Trieste from 1905 to 1915, where he taught English at the Berlitz school and where their children were born, and again in 1919-20, his most famous pupil being the author Italo Svevo who was the model for the character of Leopold Bloom, and Triestino Italian remained the Joyce family language at home. Moreover he was a classicist with a Jesuit education who had grown up reading Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, and Shakespeare among others; James Joyce was well suited to his great work of reinventing language and humankind when he took it up in the writing of Ulysses.
A reimagination of Homer’s Odyssey in which he forged his stream of consciousness and interior monologue methods, it is also his response to the great catastrophe of his age, the fall of western civilization in World War One.
In this he reflects his mirror image T.S. Eliot, who played the opposing side of the board as the conservative to James Joyce’s revolutionary. Both wanted to renew humanity and rebuild civilization, one by reclaiming the past which has allowed us to survive millennia of unforeseen threats and cataclysms, the other by adaptive change and imagining a new path to the future and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; both are necessary to the survival of civilization and humanity itself.
Ulysses may be reduced as a text from its 700 page length by reading only the last chapter, one of the world’s most celebrated bits of writing. Episode 14, a superb parody of the great English authors, can stand alone as a subject of study.
And then there is Finnegan’s Wake, designed as a labyrinth of transformation to forge a new humankind.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order and power from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.
Plato and his successors in western mysticism and in Romantic Idealism had already established a historical tradition which took this idea in other directions, as a religion and philosophy of the Logos to the alchemical faith of the sapientia dei which found full expression in Jung and through NeoPlatonism itself to the philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and was in the process of forming Surrealism as an art of ecstatic trance and poetic vision, but Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.
And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English is my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised.
Traditional Chinese was my second language from the age of nine, in the context of a decade of formal study of martial arts which included Zen Buddhist and Taoist disciplines, inkbrush calligraphy, bamboo flute, the strategy game of Go, and conversation with my great mentor whom I called Dragon Teacher or Long Sifu, a mischievous and wily old rascal who spoke, in addition to superb English and Japanese, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as the official Mandarin, having served in the Chinese military from 1923 through the Second World War., of which he told wonderful stories.
As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school, as I was sent not to seventh grade English class but to French class at the high school. Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though a brief study limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.
It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.
From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as universal principles of creating meaning and instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.
James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek.
All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth.
You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.
Curious and curiouser; it is also a recursive and nonlinear Surrealist dream journal, a Dadaist compilation of notes which disdains all narrative conventions, and displays a growing obsession with the arcane and the obscure.
I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe.
He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.
Yet enter here, and abandon not hope.
Of Finnegans Wake: forget that it’s a Great Book, that scholars find it intimidating; that’s only if you try to parse meaning from every sentence like it’s an operating manual for becoming human. Yes, that’s exactly what he intended to write, but don’t let that make work out of your joy. Just read it for the sheer exhilarating fun, and let his timeless Irish magic set you free.
Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.
We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
A “Finnegans Wake” Lextionary: Let James Joyce Jazz Up Your Voca(l)bulary, Riverrun to Livvy: Lots of Fun Reading the First Page of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”, by Bill Cole Cliett
January 28 2025 I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love: Lewis Carroll, on his birthday
I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly to identify my religion, particularly by authorities with badges and guns, I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision and to poetic and metaphorical truth, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and truth allow us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
To Lewis Carroll, Surrealist and philosopher of poetic vision, we are indebted for his primary insight which reconciles the transcendent truth of Keats and Romantic Idealism as developments of the western mystery tradition from Plato with the immanent truths written in our flesh.
His great book Alice in Wonderland, like Mozart’s Magic Flute, encodes this mystery tradition, for which his primary sources are Plato, the Biblical Book of John the Evangelist which forges a faith of the Logos, and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination; but he also attempted to write a Summa Theologiae which can unfold itself within the mind of its readers as transformation and transcendence.
Dense with word games of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety and mathematical-philosophical puzzles which are satirical metacommentary on the great thinkers of his time, Alice in Wonderland is intended to transmit the whole of a classical education, but is also a Socratic dialog which questions the premises of our civilization. Few such total reimaginations have ever been attempted.
I discovered Wonderland through the brilliant work of the mathematician Martin Gardner, which has been updated as The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, when as a sophomore in high school I joined a reading group at the local university, carried along in the wake of my best friend, four years older than myself and a former Forensics student of my father, Doc (given name Brad) Hannink.
This occurred during my teenage James Joyce-Ludwig Wittgenstein fandom and immersion in medieval magic, both related to a love of languages, logic, and math as hidden systems of meaning and universal principles of being. These enthusiasms of my youth foundered by my senior year of high school on my failure to learn Kabbalah, as it is written not in accessible Hebrew for whom teachers and conversational partners can be found, but in a coded scholar’s Aramaic and Andalusi Romance.
But as a fifteen year old steeped in the iconography of Surrealist film and the esotericism of Finnegan’s Wake and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and very much still processing the trauma of my summer of resistance to police terror in Brazil, I loved that Alice always questioned authority and regarded her as an anarchist hero and a figure of Socrates, and this remains the primary meaning of the work for me. Alice enacts parrhesia, what Foucault called truth telling, and I saw in her someone I wished to become.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Kobo Abe takes tea at the Mad Hatter’s of an afternoon; Gogol has set his words on fire and is made of a holy light which is used in place of a chandelier, Kafka elicits squeals of delight from Alice with his hideous Gregor Samsa form, Klimt’s giant apelike Typhoeus and his daughters desire, madness, and death run amok in ecstatic Bacchic dance while Lovecraft tries to put something with tentacles back in its box.
There is always an empty chair for you.
Lewis Carroll, a reading list
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland #1-2) by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner (Introduction and notes), John Tenniel (Illustrator)
June 14 2025 The Painted Bird, I: and a celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday
On this the birthday of Jerzy Kosinski, I reflect on and interrogate my personal relationship and history with his great novel, which I used as an intertext and mirror in healing from trauma during my teenage years, much as did he in reimagining his childhood therapy journal as he was psychosomatically mute for five years after Liberation by the Russian Army at the age of nine.
I too created myself in revolutionary struggle during this crucial period of growing up, framed by my witness at the age of nine of Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, our nation’s most massive incident of police terror in which I was Most Sincerely Dead momentarily from the force wave of a grenade, and my near execution by a police death squad in Sao Paulo Brazil in 1974 during my direct actions with the Matadors to rescue the abandoned street children who were being bounty hunted in a state campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Identity confusion and self-creation as freedom from authorized identities and imposed orders of being, meaning and value, from the boundaries of the Forbidden and other people’s ideas of virtue, the mark of Otherness conferred by death, Last Stands in defiance of authority and carceral states of force and control beyond hope of victory or survival, and the existential crisis of becoming human in liberation struggle against the systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization which arise from the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; in all of this I found reflection in Jerzy Kosinski’s embrace of our monstrosity and fearless gaze into the Nietzschean Abyss and what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness.
The Painted Bird, I.
As I have written in celebration of Jerzy Kosinski’s birthday:
Identity, power, justice, the depravity and perversity of man and the origins of evil; these are the great themes which animate the works of Jerzy Kosinski.
His unique brand of Catholic Existentialism, a Pauline Absurdism like that of Flannery O’Connor and referential to Camus and Freud as much as Augustine and the Bible, has never been widely understood. Nor has the influence of his training as a sociologist and historian in the Soviet university system of Poland behind the Iron Curtain, prior to his escape to political asylum in America.
Jerzy Kosinski embraces the Infinite as the Absurd; though his works can create the effect of reading Samuel Beckett, Kobo Abe, or Thomas Ligotti, his intent is to tilt against Nihilism and the forces of disorder, not to endorse them. His episodes which reveal the depravity of humankind and the fallenness of political authority, like those of Jean Genet’s novels, are inversions of Catholic rituals intended as satires of the state as embodied violence.
In some respects he can be compared to de Sade, but only to a point; where de Sade was a satirist who wrote as a revolutionary act and campaign of destabilization against the authority of Church and State, Jerzy Kosinski plays the opposite side of the board, marshalling conserving forces to defend absolute and universal human values.
For his novels, often thinly veiled autobiographies and referential to historical events, are manuals of survival in circumstances of overwhelming force, dehumanizing oppression, and existential terror as systems of oppression.
Among these we may include his satires of American culture including Being There, and the magnificent nightmare of Europe under fascism, The Painted Bird. His finest nonfiction is The Future is Ours, Comrade, written within two years of his 1957 escape from Poland under Soviet dominion. All of his works bear the weight of his scholarship as a historian and sociologist.
His novels are metafictional commentaries on the roles he played in life, both chosen and those forced on him by others. Perhaps only Philip Roth has struggled more as a writer for control of his own identity, when those whom he claimed did not in turn claim him, and few have suffered more. I believe that each of us has the right as human beings to reinvent ourselves, and to be who we choose.
Being There is a precious and delicate confection of a fable, which transforms a universal myth into a new one for our time in spare language that a child might grasp. The film version starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine is also compelling and beautiful; I made a practice of watching it every month for years since I was at university, and rereading the novel which I taught in high school. It has become a part of who I am, this story, and I hope that you will love it as do I. But before I can take you on a walk through this novel, we must understand its context in the novel for which it is a coda, The Painted Bird.
The Painted Bird is an unforgettable paen of horrors as lived by the author as a child wandering alone in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, victimized and powerless, a figure of Europe, civilization, and all humanity.
I cannot say I advise anyone to open the lid of this particular box and look within; I cannot even say that it is good for you. Exposure to evil of this magnitude and festering malignity, raw and unanswerable, is a disruptive and corrosive, destabilizing and subversive event, at once destruction and liberation, much like the history it describes. Here the boundaries of the human are charted, in blood.
What has it done for me, this Pandora’s Box of a story? Perhaps only to help me find the will to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. For myself, this has been enough.
I have lost count of such Last Stands during my decades of revolutionary struggle and resistance to fascism since that fateful day in 1982 Beirut during the siege, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance he had appropriated from that of the Foreign Legion in Paris 1940 and set me on my life’s path. I too have looked into the Abyss, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me, since Mariupol and possibly before, and I must now and always question my actions as a man without fear, mercy, or remorse.
I am become as history has made me, a monster who hunts other monsters; with death the alternative to survival, with subjugation, falsification, and dehumanization pervasive and omnipresent existential threats on the one hand and those truths written in our flesh and to which we must bear witness, and our glorious liberty and uniqueness on the other, and with only solidarity and our faith in each other to heal the pathology of our disconnectedness and the divisions of authorized identities as elite hierarchies of otherness and belonging, love to redeem the flaws of our humanity, and hope to answer the terror of our nothingness and the brokenness of the world, we each of us must struggle to become human, even when we must trade fragments of our humanity for the hope of future possibilities of becoming human and for the lives of others, who may one day escape the shadows of history in which we dwell.
Last Stands; naming these forlorn hopes so makes them sound grand and heroic, but they are nothing of the kind. Not acts of virtue bearing the force of redemption, but choices to remain Unconquered as a free and self-created being conferred by refusal to submit against unanswerable force and impossible odds; a human thing, and a power which cannot be taken from us. As Jean Genet said to me on that fateful day, in a burning house, in a time of darkness, in a lost cause; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Each of these Defining Moments has created unique imaginal spaces as mimesis which cannot be escaped; I will forever be crawling through tunnels of utter darkness covered in the blood of those I could not save while the earth trembles with impending collapse as I was in Mariupol 2022, and numberless other such moments. But as in Camus’ allegory of Sisyphus I bore the burden of my humanity onward and became Unconquered and free, and so can you.
This is what is important; to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as Genet’s Oath of the Resistance goes. What matters are not the horrors I have survived and which have shaped me to the thing that I am, a monster who hunts other monsters, and who has traded pieces of his humanity to do so and win a space of free creative play and time for others to discover and create new kinds of human being, meaning, and value which I may never find or dream; but that in refusal to submit I emerged from the darkness and despair into the light, and so can we all.
We may not be able to escape the legacies of our history or the consequences of our humanity, nor find balance for the terror of our nothingness nor bring healing to the brokenness of the world; but we can refuse to submit and become Unconquered as free and unique beings, a power which cannot be taken from us and can return us to ourselves.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
Here follows my celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday:
A novel translated from his native Polish and reconstructed from notes written while the author was psychosomatically mute for five years after his liberation by Russia at the age of nine, as a therapy journal, it is unique among the literature of madness and psychoanalysis. The Painted Bird is the voice of this traumatized child; its authenticity is incontestable even though the government of Poland has attempted to discredit it as the Witness of History as part of its policy of denial as regards complicity in the Holocaust.
Of this I say: evil wears many masks. It can be massively destructive when given the authorized power of governments, armies, official papers and decrees, but this is not its exclusive domain, nor where it is born.
For the tortures and abuse suffered by the narrator are not inflicted upon him by officials carrying out a policy or because he is a member of a persecuted group like the Jews, though he is sometimes mistaken for a gypsy, but by ordinary villagers simply because they can. Indeed, much of the novel is a series of episodic vignettes in which brutalized villagers commit unspeakable crimes against one another. These episodes form a journey of initiation and are organized as Stations of the Cross: labyrinthine as is the symbolism of a great cathedral.
The universality of evil and the depravity of man are the subjects of his great work, and this is what elevates it beyond the conditions of time and place. The Painted Bird affirms traditional values in that it cleaves to the interpretation of the Bible on which our government is based, derived from the idea of sin. In the absence of the restraining force of law, the most ruthless tyrant or criminal wins. As George Washington said, “Government is about force, only force.”
True, the social use of force cuts many ways, especially when wielded by the juggernaut of governments; my point is that Jerzy Kosinski has written a very Catholic novel which offers an apologetics of law and order any government might welcome. That this is not generally understood may be due to no one having thought to compare him to Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, or other fellow Catholic authors with whom he belongs.
Indeed, The Painted Bird has been misunderstood as Holocaust literature and originally misrepresented by the publisher as nonfictional testimony, which backfired as it made the author and his work vulnerable to the lies of his political foes. He himself became a Painted Bird, ostracized and tormented by his fellows both as a child and as an author, and both functioning on the basis of a public denial of his identity as a Polish Catholic. The tribes he claimed did not in turn claim him, as his faith led him to identify evil as a universal human flaw and not the intrusive weapon of a despised enemy outsider.
The Painted Bird thematically recapitulates 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. Jerzy Kosinski has organized and fictionalized his therapy journal along lines paralleling the Bard’s play, while reversing its revolutionary critique of authorized force.
Running through all his novels are interlinked narratives supporting Freud’s theory that humans are polymorphosly perverse until they learn to control their animal nature, and against Rousseau’s idea that the natural man is not bound by social contracts made prior to his birth or without his consent and participation, and may without concern disregard such laws, which is the legal basis of the American Declaration of Independence and a keystone of the Supreme Court’s rulings on the Constitution. And so we have the doctrine of Natural Law, a startling bit of anarchy at the founding of our nation, which goes directly to the heart of Jerzy Kosinski’s theme of power relations and defense of a universal and imperative moral order. By moral order I mean human rights as an absolute and universal principle, independent of tribe and tradition; the classic conservative critique of ethical and cultural relativism.
The logical extension of this line of reasoning denies the legitimacy of the American state, and aligns with the British claim that our revolution, at its origin anticolonial and antiaristocratic, has no basis in law, as with the claim of all states to rule their citizens without their consent personally as a contract.
Among the finest interrogations of this idea of moral order as authoritarianism and the state enforcement of public virtue as tyranny can be found in Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
In Jerzy Kosinski’s world, like that of William T. Vollman, moral order balances on a social contract guaranteed by force; a brutal and fallen world, but one in which true heroism is possible.
Little wonder that, once he became rich and famous on the basis of this book, his subsequent novels were mainly elaborately constructed Baroque fantasies of vengeance and the championing of the powerless. They also continue his exploration of Dante’s Inferno, displaying the consequences of sin and his role as an avenging angel. In his moral universe, such avengers and enforcers are sin eaters. His work foregrounds personal sin as the origin of social evils; vanity and greed, materialism and the loss of communion as connection with others as well as the Infinite, sexual terror as a means of ownership and dehumanization, all the facades which abstract us from ourselves and one another. He wrote them to avenge the child he had once been, but also to shield others by exposing injustices.
And this is what killed him: his quixotic knight-errantry, truthtelling, and the authorial turning over of stones. Though his death was reported as a suicide, with a final note as proof, this is inconsistent with his obsessive survivalism, vigilante justice, secret identities, use of his public role as concealment, and his appropriation of intelligence tradecraft to evade enemies which included the Soviet Union he had escaped, and his personal mission of hunting evildoers. In life as in his fiction, Jerzy Kosinski was an avenging trickster who like the heroes of the messianic films The Magic Christian and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory constructed elaborate Dante-esque traps as purgatorial rituals. This is the author who became a role model for me as I worked through my trauma with his novel as my guide to becoming human; a Dark Knight and Avenger. He would have never abdicated his chosen role as a protector of innocents, for this is what sustained him and gave his tragedies and traumas meaning and made them bearable.
Jerzy Kosinski died as his forebears did, when their lances shattered on the unstoppable tanks of the invaders in a final charge of traditional meaning and value against a nihilistic barbarian modernity, glorious and beautiful as was the defense of the Great Siege of Malta, and bearing to the last the only title that matters, that of Invictus.
As I grew older and my ideals were broken upon the shoals of real missions of liberation struggle and as an avenger of wrongs, I began to see the flaws in his reasoning regarding the social use of force, and to regard the origins of evil as unequal power and systems of oppression; but as a teenager working through trauma and its implications for the nature of humankind and the purpose or order of the universe, the imaginal world of The Painted Bird and its protagonist with whom I closely identified provided a means to do so within an illusion of security and order, where good and evil are not ambiguous, relative, and figments of authoritarian subjugation and control. In this I recapitulated the historical stages of civilization, as I created myself through casting off a theocratic cosmos for one utterly without meaning or value other than what we ourselves create, wherein the terror of our nothingness is balanced with the joy of total freedom.
So we come to Being There, a deceptively simple story based on the fables of Krylov which retells the Biblical Fall of Man and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the return of Christ as the Second Adam from Exile as a redeemer.
As does his work as a whole and The Painted Bird especially, Being There presents at once a path of spiritual rebirth which unifies Catholic sin and Existential freedom, a Freudian political theory of government as force, a Sartrean critique of identity as a social construction, and a theory of history which re-evaluates and diverges from both Biblical teleology and Marxism, and written by a man who was once the Soviet Union’s greatest sociologist with a deeply personal stake in the issues and themes of his work rooted in profound childhood trauma.
First, it is a masterpiece, directly addressing the themes developed in The Painted Bird in the context of America, a new home where Jerzy Kosinski found celebrity, wealth, and power, (I would like to say safety, but these things cannot buy safety, and security is an illusion) but also a dehumanizing commodification, superficial materialism, and implicit class system with which he was not wholly comfortable even though he had married into the apex of New York society.
Both novels are meditations on Otherness; in one the bird which is painted to look different is pecked to death by his fellows, and in Being There someone who is truly different moves among us unhindered because he wears the colors of whatever flock he finds. Themes of concealment and illusion, identity and membership, the protection and subjugation of assimilation or the danger, loneliness, and freedom of being different are exhibited in both great books.
Change the protagonist and we have the myth and horror story of the skinwalker, a monster or cannibal predator who walks among us in disguise, or the tragic figure of the Elephant Man, whose virtue and beauty are hidden behind a hideous mask of flesh. Or an anonymous hero, a Batman-like figure standing the night watch for us all, as was the author Jerzy Kosinski to the last.
Second, Being There is powerful because it enacts a universal mythic pattern, and then breaks the pattern to create a new myth, maybe one more useful to us now.
What follows are my lecture notes on Being There, which I would hand out to my classes of High School Juniors and Seniors in the Honors Program and AP English (AP courses being preparatory classwork for taking the AP subject exams which can earn college units if passed- like A levels in British schools) and read aloud in parts as the class progressed through the book, stopping to ask questions and start discussions. I taught Being There as an introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; it can also be read as a companion text to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which shares its sources in Arthurian myth.
The works of Jerzy Kosinski came into my life through the influence of my mother, Coleridge scholar and expert on religious symbolism in medieval art, a Catholic university trained psychologist, biologist, and English teacher who, at my insistence after some time of Kosinski being a presence of references in our home while she wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet hospital case notes of his childhood therapy as compared to his own notes written between the ages of nine and fourteen ending when he regained the power of speech and which later became the basis of his novel, gave me The Painted Bird to read when I was seventeen. As one can imagine, we talked about it a lot.
I myself would not now do as she did then; its simply too disturbing and can cause real harm, though I was working though the trauma of battle and near execution by a police death squad in Brazil the summer before high school. If you are a survivor of private Holocausts, it can be useful; I might say the same of Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School, which I have taught to high school students who were survivors of sexual terror as was she.
As to other influences on the text of my lecture notes, I wrote it during my first year of teaching high school, and while I used it without changes for many years as a discussion prompt it reflects my interests and understanding at the time; I was in my third year of university and taking courses in Celtic Literature and Arthurian Romance while I wrote it, and reading Emma Jung’s Grail studies. My interpretations are also shaped by deep and lifelong interests, sparked by reading Frazier’s Golden Bough in sixth grade, in Joseph Campbell and comparative mythology, fairytales, the archetypal psychology of Jung and Hillman, and a Great Books education through my teenage years. As I could count on no particular literary background among my students, to frame a discussion I had to tell the story; hence the brief retellings of references.
On Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There: a reading guide
Being There is a fable, a retelling of the story of the Original Man, and of his exile from Paradise and his redemption of the world as the Holy Fool. It parallels the story of Christ, the Fall of Adam and the return of the world to an Edenic state through the second Adam, the Innocent who goes shod in the temple. In Being There, the hero’s quest takes him to a citadel of Fallenness, where he must heal the wound of a Fisher King, in an initiation pattern found in Celtic pagan and Arthurian sources.
Early Christian legend says that Jesus was crucified on Calvary, the Mound of the Skull, where the skull of Adam is buried. He is depicted in early art as being hung from the Tree of Life rather than nailed to a cross, just as Odin hung from the World Tree Ygddrasil, a sacrifice to himself, in order to gain knowledge of the runes, universal organizing and informing principles. In the body of Jewish folklore and mystical gnosis called Cabala, the Tree of Life is a series of emanations from the Infinite called the sephiroth, worlds which form a ladder between our world and the Divine. Through astral projection and other practices, the cabalist reunites pairs of opposing principles within himself, just as the Redeemer of the Basilidians mounted through the planetary spheres to acquire their powers. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life were understood to be aspects of the same linking system.
Many mythic systems trace humanity to an Original Man, actually an inner man in whom all participate and share in the human spirit. This is clearly true of Adam, but also of the Purusha in India and Chung Ko in China, among others.
Parallel myths are structured on the idea of the Universal Monarch, such as Arthur, the Once and Future King. In both Christianity and Buddhism, the hero is a Holy Fool who forsakes the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer, just as Chance, incapable of relating to the world except as an innocent, will accidently become the President of America and restore the nation’s spirit.
Chance is evicted from the Garden of Eden and is cast into a fallen world; in the film the fallen state of the world surrounding his home is more clearly contrasted with the idyllic garden than in the book. When Chance is introduced to the world during a television interview, he unknowingly proposes to govern as a gardener tends his garden, returning it to a state of order and harmony. Chance is the Redeemer bringing about the Kingdom of God.
The lawyers who evict Chance are clearly Tempter figures; Chance defeats them when he declines to make a claim against the old man’s estate, as doing so would have kept him in Paradise and prevented him from fulfilling his role as Redeemer. While sitting under the Bo tree awaiting his vision of Enlightenment, Buddha is tempted by Mara in his terrible and seductive forms. Christ is also tempted, both to display his powers and to become World Monarch in a riddle match with Satan, prior to his vision of the Shekinah or Holy Spirit. But the Holy Fool must descend into the fallen world if he is to redeem it, and so in Islam the serpent is revered as Iblis, the Instructor, a guide of the soul and faithful servant of the Infinite. In all his forms, the Holy Fool must reject the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer.
People constantly misunderstand Chance; they misinterpret his words in their own context. He is both the sum of images he has internalized from television and the images others make of him; he is all mankind. He is a mirror; Jason kills the Medusa by polishing his shield to a mirror surface so that she sees herself and turns to stone. Chance has the power to transform others because he is the Inner Man in an innocent, unfallen state. Eve tells Chance, “You make me free. I reveal myself to myself, and I am purged.”
After leaving the Garden, Chance comes by accident to live in another house, the mansion of a powerful financier, Mr. Rand, and his wife, Eve. The mansion is a Castle Perilous, a material and fallen cage for a Fisher King. Chance goes from the Garden to this second house, and from a triadic relationship with the Old Man and the maid, Louise, to another with Mr Rand and Eve.
Both Mr Rand and the Old Man are dying; to understand the interaction between the major characters in Being There, let’s compare it to the mythic pattern in the Arthurian tale of Parsifal and the Grail Quest. Parsifal is an innocent, raised in seclusion as were Buddha and Chance. Parsifal goes into the world dressed as a fool or jester, riding an ass, and defeats his opponents in combat simply because he is too ignorant to be afraid and never hesitates to charge. He undertakes to find the Grail and bring it to Arthur, who is so sick he can’t get out of bed for seven years, during which time there is famine in the land. The period of the Wasteland is a representation of the fallen state of the world, which can only be healed through spiritual renewal. Parsifal reaches the Grail Castle, whose lord, the Fisher King, is in a position identical to Arthur’s; he is sick and his land is barren. The Fisher King is wounded through the thighs; just as Arthur fell ill when he lost Guinevere, the Fisher King fell ill when the virgin in whose lap his feet must rest was slain. Both rulers are cut off from the source of spiritual renewal and empowerment. Parsifal heals the Fisher King and gains a vision of the Grail by asking the question Buddha asked of his charioteer; “What is wrong with you?” Many other knights on the Grail Quest had failed to ask it, to much wailing and sorrow.
Like Parsifal, Chance is a figure of the Holy Fool, the child who points out that the Emperor has no clothes. When Mr Rand tells Chance, “I’m not afraid of dying anymore. I’m ready to trade the Horn of Plenty for the Horn of Gabriel,” it is clear that in Chance he has found redemption.
From Garden to Wasteland and back again; Chance’s progression follows the quest of Dante for Beatrice, but without a transformative realization. Part of this initiation pattern can be seen in the tension of images between the Garden and the Wasteland.
The image of the Garden has an interesting history; in the Koran it is called Hasht Bihesht, the Eight Paradises visited by Mohammed on his Night Journey. Like the labyrinth-gardens of medieval Europe, the Islamic water garden reflected the order of a universe unfolding according to divine will, represented a plan of progress on the pilgrim’s journey toward the Infinite, and provided an immediate metaphor of rebirth in its cycles of decay and growth.
Dante’s vision of a multileveled universe is similar to the Koran’s; they also share the concepts of a divine mercy and justice in the afterlife, a vision gained in an Otherworld journey, and conceptualize the Infinite as inclusive of the feminine, the Beloved.
The English word “Paradise” has its roots in the Persian pairi, around, and deiza, wall; a walled garden. Its Greek form, paradeisoi, comes from Xeonophon’s Socratic discourse, the Oeconomics, a history of the Persian war of 400 B.C. Virgil referred to the sacred groves around Roman temples as a paradisus. The word first appeared in Middle English as paradis in 1175 in a Biblical passage” God ha hine brohte into paradis.”
The identification of Paradise with the Garden of Eden happened quite early, during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews from which they were released by Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C. During this time, Judaism assimilated the Sumerian-Babylonian Paradise, the Garden of the Gods, from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh describes his vision of the Garden: “In this immortal garden stands the Tree, with trunk of gold and beautiful to see. Beside a sacred fount the Tree is placed, with emeralds and unknown gems is graced.”
Thus, at the end of the human journey we are brought to the beginning again. From its earliest times, Indo-European myth has held the idea of the afterlife as a return to the source and origin of life.
In Being There, the Garden is contrasted with the Wasteland, the pervading economic malaise linked to the impotence and illness of both Mr Rand and the President as types of the Fisher King.
Arthur’s Wasteland is a divine punishment for his inhumanity; Arthur mab Uthr means not “son of Uther” but “the Cruel”. The Historia Brittonum records that he once hanged two dozen children; in another incident he cut off the noses of the female relatives of a man who disturbed his banquet. Geoffrey of Monmouth based the figure of Arthur on the historical Macsen Wledig, a Welshman who became Emperor of Rome in 383 with the support of the legions in Britain. His story is told in the Mabinogi, in the tale of Culwich and Olwen. The literature of early Arthurian romance was written largely by monks both as a criticism of the system of chivalry and to connect Christianity to the Celtic literary heritage.
Mythically, Arthur, a name meaning “the Bear”, is a figure of the Celtic Lord of the Animals. The usual pattern has him paired with a double-aspected Goddess who is both Mother and Bride, in Celtic terms Gog and Magog, literally son, son of Mother. Grendel and his mother are another example.
In Being There, Chance’s relationship with the black maid, Louise, is superceded by that of Eve, Mr Rand’s wife. The dynamics between Louise and Eve are understandable in terms of the Goddess figures in the original sources from which the story of Eden was drawn in Genesis.
Adams first wife was Lillith, a sensual black demoness who lived in a cave. An embodiment of the forces of nature, she is represented as a Trickster figure in medieval Jewish folklore. Adam, himself Lord of the Animals, both claimed them and completed their creation in naming them. Adam was born both male and female, a figure of wholeness split into the sexes when Eve was made from his female half.
Eve’s banishment from the Garden is an Underworld journey paralleled by the story of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone, daughter of Demeter as Eve is the Maiden aspect of Lillith, is abducted by Pluto, King of the Underworld, to reign as his queen during winter. Demeter descends to the underworld to rescue her, and wins her freedom for half of each year, during which the land is fruitful.
The transformation of Yahweh from King of the Underworld to an all-knowing, all-powerful creator was never complete in Judaism; until Roman times the Goddess was worshipped on a separate altar beside God. Even today, God’s wife, the Shekinah or Wisdom, is recognized in Jewish rituals such as the Lekha Dodi, which welcomes the Bride of God into the temple. In Christianity she became the Holy Spirit and Mary Theotikos, god-bearer or Mother of God. The Black Madonna found on many Catholic altars is a survival of Lillith, the Great Mother.
The Wasteland period in Arthurian romance begins when Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, is abducted by the mad Lancelot du Lac, a champion of the spirits, in Saxon called alven or elves, in Gaelic called sidhe. She is reclaimed in a cataclysmic war against the sidhe led by Morgan LeFay, the Faerie Queen. After his death, Arthur is sent drifting in a boat toward the Isle of Avalon, the realm of faerie, signifying his completion of the initiation process and return to the feminine source of being.
The Ramayana parallels major features of this initiation pattern. Rama is a Universal Monarch who wanders the jungle for nine years in a Wasteland period. His wife, Sita, who is a figure of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and wife of Vishnu the Incarnator, is abducted by Ravanna, King of the Demons. She is Tempted by Ravanna to become Queen of the Underworld, but remains faithful to Rama. Rama, acting as Lord of the Animals, gathers an army of six million monkeys and a number of bears and attacks Ravanna’s island. Together with Hanuman the Monkey King, he reclaims Sita in a battle which pits demons against men, beasts, and gods; rather like the war in Irish mythology of the Tuatha deDanaan against the demonic Fomorians who dwell beneath the sea.
The pivotal moment in Being There occurs when Chance fails to respond to Eve’s attempt at seduction. Incapable of sexual interest or Temptation, of initiation through assimilation of the feminine unconscious, Chance fails to unite with the Shekinah. The pattern of initiation, of internalizing projections or de-objectifying the Other, is disrupted. His mind, and the creative potential expressed by sexuality, is crippled by the wound of the Fisher King.
Kosinski leads the reader to expect a transformative event in this scene, and then diverges wildly from the expected. The jarring discontinuity alerts us to his real intent and contribution; the creation of a new myth, a modern myth in which man has no defining relationship to the world and must make his own.
The Temptation as an Underworld journey to reclaim the feminine creative force and emerge fully human, becoming an Original Man, is found in three sources which form a historical progression within a literary tradition. The direct antecedents of Being There are the story of Pwyll in the Mabinogi, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Wagner’s Parsifal.
In the first story of the Mabinogi, King Pwyll meets Arawn, King of the Underworld, while riding in the forest. They agree to trade places for a year; Arawn casts a spell which makes each look like the other. During this time, Pwyll is Tempted by Arawn’s Queen, but resists her. His initiation complete, Pwyll returns home to become a just and merciful king. The second half of the story articulates a linked myth, the Underworld journey of the goddess Rhiannon, which parallels that of Persephone.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a more sophisticated story, a synthesis of Christian and pagan Celtic elements. Gawain, linked to Parsifal in other stories as a contrasting-complementary character, is a development of the Irish hero Cuchulainn. The Green Knight is both Christ and the Green Man, Celtic god of vegetative rebirth whose leafy face can be seen as a decorative motif in English churches. A parallel trickster-initiator figure in Islam is the Green Genie Khidr.
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are feasting at Camelot when a strange knight enters the hall bearing an axe, a man made of vines and leaves in green armor. He issues a challenge, and by the laws of chivalry the request of a guest cannot be denied once he has been admitted to the hospitality of the castle; one of them must strike off his head, after which the Green Knight will return the blow. Gawain agrees, to avoid Arthur’s loss of honor. He chops off the Green Knight’s head, and the Knight picks up his head and speaks; “In one year you will come to my castle, and I will return the blow.”
Gawain sets out on his quest a year later, and comes to the Castle Perilous, where he is tempted by its Queen. He resists, and is given her magic lace girdle to wear. Dressed in the Queen of the Underworld’s clothes, he goes to meet the Knight at a cavern called the Green Church. The Green Knight swings but stops his blow, just nicking Gawain’s neck in an act of redemption. The Green Knight tells him that the Castle Perilous is his own, and its Queen the wife of the Green Knight.
Parallel elements include the Underworld journey and Castle, the Temptation by an Underworld Queen, an exchange of identities with an Underworld King, and a wandering or Wasteland period. The Beheading Game is a retelling of Cuchulainn’s contest for the kingship of Ulster in the epic Bricriu’s Feast.
Chance is sent on an Underworld journey to Mr. Rand’s house, is Tempted by Eve, and takes the place of the Fisher King. The seduction scene is where the story of Chance breaks the initiation pattern. Like the Old Man, Chance bears the wound of the Fisher King. In the first chapter we learn, “The soil of his brain, the ground from which all his thoughts shot up, had been ruined forever.”
In Wagner’s opera Parzival, the theme of Redemption also hinges on a Temptation. Anfortas, the Fisher King, is wounded by the Spear of Longinus, which pierced Christ’s side at the Passion. Parzival’s experience with his objectified Other in the form of the sensual Kundry’s kiss triggers his despair and eventual redemption. The Holy Fool becomes Redeemer through unification with the unconscious.
Chance’s tragic flaw prevents him from undergoing a transformative initiation; he is the Holy Fool as pure symbol. Kosinski uses the interruption of a mythic pattern as social critique; the mold of man is broken. Like Theseus, we must find our way through the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, but without Ariadne’s Thread to guide us. Like Mersault in The Stranger, Chance is the ultimate image of modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness. He is, perhaps, the only Redeemer we deserve.
Or, perhaps Kosinski’s message is a more simple, hopeful one: First, we must recognize that we are on a journey toward becoming human. Second, we have no map of transformative process to guide us. Therefore, each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Kosinski beneath the illusion of a savage and nihilistic Absurdism like that of Samuel Beckett in his final form in the Malone Trilogy is a Catholic theologian of the Thomist school like Flannery O’Connor, who has lived a myth and can teach us how to witness horrors and survive without losing our humanity or our power to question authority.
Chance’s redemptive power rests on his innocence; he is the child who speaks truth to power, who knows the Emperor has no clothes, an Adamic man in his uncorrupted state, the Fool who can achieve a vision of the Infinite.
Bodidharma, the founder of Zen, once had an interview with the Emperor of China.
The Emperor said to him, ” I have donated money to the poor, I have built orphanages, hospitals, and monasteries. How much merit have I accumulated in heaven?”
July 26 2025 C.G. Jung, On His Birthday: Dreams As A Ground of Being and a Vision of Human Interconnectedness Within Our Universal Soul
Carl Gustave Jung has shaped myself and our civilization with his brilliant quest to forge a Grand Unified Theory of the processes of becoming human as a universal faith grounded in a science of the soul, and return medicine to its original function of healing the soul.
Through his vast library of writing across a lifetime of scholarship and the unwavering courage to embrace both our darkness and our light, this is what Jung proposes; we all of us own our uniqueness but exist in a limitless sea of Being in which we all share, and the negotiations between these boundaries and interfaces of self and other are where the art of psychology comes in as a guide of the soul.
The Collective Unconscious which unifies all humanity as a transhistorical colony organism below the surface of our personalities and awareness and referential to Platonic Idealism and the Logos, being human as a process of growth he called individuation and modeled on alchemy as a pancultural spiritual faith, synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle; personality as an organization of a quaternity of energy systems, archetypes as mythic figures who live and are real within each of us and are motivating and informing sources of ourselves and of human history; these and many more ideas are among the unique insights and radical mysticism of Carl Gustave Jung.
In any other age he would have been considered a magician; an interpreter of dreams who claimed to command the ka-mutef or spirit of a Pharaoh which he consulted with on difficult cases, a scholar of comparative alchemy, myth, and religion around whose tower in the Black Forest he wrote of fairies dancing at night. His wisdom was won through relationships with timeless and otherworldly figures and forces, that which is most ancient in us, and his books reclaim the humanity that the modern world has forgotten. In this his project is to redeem what Schiller called “the disgodding of nature”, and aligns with the holistic philosophy of Gregory Bateson; equally it can be considered a form of universal faith of the Sapientia Dei or Wisdom as Jung himself claimed.
What Jung did was to restore to religion its original function as medicine of the soul, universalize it as a syncretic faith, and forge an integrated and consistent method for becoming human with the rigor of scientific method. This method which he called Analytical Psychology echoes the dream incubation chambers of the temples of Asclepius, whose symbol of intertwined serpents is the emblem of the medical profession. Secondarily, it implies a political praxis or action of values as a United Humankind as embodied in the United Nations founded during his formative years as a guarantor of our universal human rights and an instrument of peace versus wars of imperial conquest and dominion. Third, it is also a form of Surrealism.
Surrealism is defined by twin characteristics; the quest to transcend ourselves, often in terms of religious mysticism, and the use of dreams as a door to the Infinite. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood is a Surrealist classic; Vladimir Nabokov, especially in Ada, is the other best example which immediately comes to mind for me, but many works either advance the Surrealist project of transformation or use dream images and symbols extensively. Jungian psychology can be described as Surrealism, also as syncretic mysticism, as he modeled it on alchemical philosophy and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination. Coleridge had in fact done the heavy lifting for Jung as a philosophical framework, though he built something quite different on its foundation.
Among Jung’s other sources, Tibetan Buddhism has the Bardo, and Islam the alam al mythal, as states of being and interfaces between life and death and the individual and the Infinite, an Infinite which for Jung is not divine but human; Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue is a stellar example of modern mysticism as Surrealism. Through the influence of Philip K. Dick, Surrealism has become pervasive in our culture, and both the science fiction and fantasy genres may be considered special forms of Surrealism with their own conventions.
There is much shared ground in Surrealism with Absurdism, though Absurdism does not always posit an Infinite Being to whom we are trying to reach, especially in its Nihilist form with Samuel Beckett, Thomas Ligotti, and Kobo Abe, but it can as the Pauline Absurdism in Flannery O’Connor’s Thomism or in Nicholas of Cusa, precursor of Kurt Gödel’s from whom I derive my epistemology of the Conservation of Ignorance. The line of transmission of Absurdist elements in Jung’s writing as literature originates with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka, develops with Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Witold Gombrowicz, and Albert Camus, and continues today in Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elif Shafak.
How can I say these outrageous things about Jungian psychology being a system of magic, a syncretic faith, and a school of art? Let me recount for you my relevant history; I have studied and been oriented to Jungian psychology since I was a teenager interested in myths and fairytales from the age of twelve when I read Frasier’s massive work on folklore, The Golden Bough, and then read the original Grimm’s Fairytales which had been presented to me in bizarre variations as our ancestral family history by my father and his Beatnik friend, William S. Burroughs, who practiced magic together.
I was made strange by a primary trauma in which I died and was reborn and experienced a moment of supraconsciousness out of time and beheld myriads of possible human futures, on Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969, when the police opened fire on a protest in People’s Park, Berkeley, the most massive and terrible incident of domestic terror ever perpetrated by our government since the Civil War.
Of the six thousand protesters at the scene, only 111 of the victims reached the safety of hospitals. There has never been a full accounting of Bloody Thursday.
I remember my mother smiling and reaching out to a policeman offering a handful of flowers, and he pumped and aimed a shotgun at her in reply. I have no explanation for how we survived the next few moments. I’d like to think he hesitated to murder for no reason a beautiful woman, with flaming red hair and skin pale as rice powder, fearless and kind and with imperious hazel eyes and a boy less than ten years old at her side, even that she had been identified and orders issued not to shoot a notable academic, surely the greatest scholar of Coleridge and symbolism in medieval religious art of her time and a psychologist and biologist as well as an author of children’s books. But no; chance intervened in the form of a policeman who at that moment threw a concussion grenade into the crowd. There was a flash of light and thunder, and all devolved into chaos and death. Time resumed as the crowd fled and policemen fired at our backs; still we escaped harm.
The moment of my true birth was that in which I stood outside of time, beyond death, and held the universe within me.
What happened next? Governor Ronald Reagan unleashed 2,700 soldiers of the National Guard, who joined the Alameda County Sheriffs, in effect a mercenary force who had donned Halloween masks and discarded their badges, in a two week campaign of repression that included bombing the entire city from helicopters with tear gas. When informed of the elementary school children who were hospitalized as a result, he said; “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides.”
Here I must share with you the other Defining Moment of my ninth year, in the context of my life mission to unravel the origins of evil as illnesses of power and violence, and of the consequences for me of growing up with three voices, English as my home language, Chinese from the age of nine, and French from seventh grade, and of spending ten years from fifth grade in near-daily study and practice of Zen Buddhist and Taoist disciplines.
How I met my teacher happened like this; during the first weeks of fifth grade I spent recess at school either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose.
This is how division, otherness, and disconnectedness escalate into war, and why interdependence, solidarity, and communication can restore the balance of peace when things begin to fall apart.
That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. Having escaped by chance the fate of becoming a nine year old mass murderer, I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?
Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong. Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.
What you need is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”
This was 1969 and he arranged for me to study with a scholar of traditional arts who had just escaped arrest during the Cultural Revolution in China.
I called him Sifu Long because of a story he told on the day we met, a version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with nuances of the Fall of the Angels from the Book of Enoch; I had been startled by the sudden fluid movement of his enormous shadow, like a flight of silent birds, in the still room of his study through moon gate doors which like a gaping mouth opened into the chasms of darkness of a gorgeous pillared temple illuminated only by the many incense sticks which glowed like eyes of fire. And I asked, “Why is your shadow so huge? And it moves.”
“Once we were dragons,” he began, “we were vast, without end or beginning, and we filled the universe. But when humans came there was no place for them, and they could not see us all at once; so we became small, lost our greatness, and found ways to share our world. We abandoned eternity and the rapture of the heavens for the stewardship of humankind, who insist on living in boxes from which they refuse to venture out and discover what lies beyond their boundaries.
But you can see me because your cage has not yet been built, and because we are alike in our powers of vision and illusion, to see the true selves of others. This suggests possibilities. So I will teach you how to fight as you wish, but also how to grow beyond your limits and find your greatness.”
These studies included arts from The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung’s primary reference on Taoist practices, Chan or Zen study, the game of Go, kung fu very like that of the television series with whose protagonist I identified, and possibly best of all Chinese and Japanese language, poetry, and inkbrush calligraphy. Here was a method of questioning oneself with a fabulous knowledge base, with which we may seize control of our own evolution, and which again set its mark of difference upon me as a bicultural person in my origins.
Fate handed me a Gordian Knot of problems to solve five years after this, in the summer before I entered High School, when I went to Brazil to train with a friend as a fencer in preparation for the Pan American Games, and I first escaped my gilded cage and was immersed into a bifurcated and discontiguous world of aristocratic privilege and the vast horrors of the surrounding slums of abandoned street children, beggars, garbage mound gleaners, quasi-slave laborers, and the ruthless and brutal police and gangsters who ruled them in partnership. Here I witnessed the true costs of our luxuries, and when the police came to murder children for the bounty placed on them by the rich, I fought in their defense.
These issues, unequal wealth, power, and privilege, became my subjects of study, and throughout the years since I have struggled to understand them as systems which produce evil, a Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force, and divisions of exclusionary otherness and elite hierarchies of belonging from which are born fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and subjugation to authority. When I speak of evil and its origins and functions, this is what I mean.
During Middle School and High School I read through the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World series, and became interested in the curious and the arcane and made a deep study of grimoires and the literature of ceremonial magic; Grimm’s Fairytales as a lost faith, the Kabala, the art of Hieronymus Bosch of which I made a collage on one entire wall of my bedroom as a gate of dreams, and shaped by the bizarre stories my father’s Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs would tell in the evenings after dinner; his journeys to other worlds, duels with magical beings, the art of curses and wishes, poetic vision as a path of reimagination and transformation, how to believe impossible things and transcend ourselves and the limits of our humanity.
Above all was the shadow work encoded in stories as magic rituals in which he passed to me the chthonic guardian spirit which possessed him as its avatar as the successor of Nietzsche; for all his stories ended with our repetition together of Shakespeare’s words from The Tempest; ”This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”. Thus I became heir to his powers of poetic vision as Jungian shadow work, and as the reimagination and transformation of the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
Also there were my conversations with my mother, a psychologist, biologist, and scholar of Coleridge who wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from Jerzy Kosinski’s childhood therapy journal and Soviet mental hospital records, weaving discussions of religious symbolism and The Painted Bird together as an exploration of the problem of evil, and led me through the nuances of symbolism using as a text Émile Mâle’s The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. From her I inherit a duality of vision, the symbolic and the psychological, which echoes Monet’s dictum, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks inward, the other looks outward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”
At this point during my last year of high school, I read a just-published book which fixed me on the origins of evil and its functions as a field of study, Robert G.L. Waite’s multidisciplinary work on Hitler, The Psychopathic God, and another which suggested intriguing possibilities and solutions, Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.
My Freshman year at university I designed a Jungian Studies course and talked a professor into meeting with me as a private weekly class for credits, and haunted the library at the Jung Institute of San Francisco, where they had beautifully written studies of my beloved operas and many other things. My initial special studies tutorial included Jung’s three volumes on alchemy as a mystery faith and the structural basis for his psychology as a path of reintegration of the self; Alchemical Studies, which contains his commentary on Secret of the Golden Flower, a primary text which was the basis for my traditional supervised meditation disciplines for a decade with Dragon Teacher and my point of entry into Jung’s world, Mysterium Coniunctionis, and Psychology and Alchemy. Later I made a close study of Aion, the final volume of his four works on alchemy, though I worked through the entire corpus of his works throughout my undergraduate studies.
During this time I was a student in the Nexus program of integrated arts and sciences in four main disciplines plus linguistics, which served my personal mission to explore the origins of evil and its functions through the intersection of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, as suggested to me by reading Waite.
My literary studies focused on Classical mythology and literature, Arthurian Romance, fairytales, and Shakespearean theatre in an attempt to reconstruct the lost faith of pre-Christian Europe as guided by Jacob Grimm, Ted Hughes, William Blake, Jung, James Hillman, Joseph Campbell, and Shakespeare, and I spent a number of glorious summers pursuing amateur theatricals at the annual Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Oregon and performing at the Renaissance Faire at Blackpoint Forest a short drive from my home in Sonoma. In graduate school I studied Comparative Literature as I developed my reading lists for teaching my high school AP English students including twenty world cultures plus Modern American Literature. And of course I traveled to the places I read and wrote about, to disrupt my own expectations as I do still.
As a boy I kept a journal in Enochian, greatly interesting as a foundation of ceremonial magic though not a true language, John Dee’s idea of an angelic language used by Aleister Crowley and taught to me by William S. Burroughs who claimed Crowley as his teacher; but its really more of a cypher derived from Gematria or mathematical decoding of Hebrew in Kabala and medieval occultism hidden within a unique orthographic script for Early Modern English, much like Tolkien’s invented languages, with a modified alphabet and around 200 unique terms. So I don’t count it as one of my languages.
Beyond this, my interest in dreams as a field of study has led me to explore three spheres of ideas wherein dreamwork is primary and which were influences on Jung; I have been a Buddhist monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order in Nepal, a member of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism in Kashmir, and since a teenager an enthusiast of Surrealist art, literature, and cinema; and I see the same interconnections and commonalities between them as Jung did.
Having properly situated my understanding of Jung in the topologies of my intellectual environment as I grew up, a crucial stage of investigation in any study of human identity as informed, motivated, and shaped by our historical adaptations, I now turn to the man himself and his work.
Jung spoke in metaphors, densely layered references, and multiple meanings; his psychology is literary and philosophical rather than scientific and medical, a Quixotic quest to map the human soul and to describe a universal process of becoming human.
Poet, historian, literary scholar and philosopher, whose project was surrealist and mystical; Carl Gustave Jung pioneered ideas which have been taken in multiple directions by others, his comparative mythology shaped into a new discipline by Joseph Campbell, his archetypal psychology forged into a new classicism by James Hillman. His massive work on psychological types formed the basis of the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator test; the Rorschach test is an equally famous tool which puts Jungian theory to work.
His last book, Man and His Symbols, is an excellent introduction to his ideas, intended for general readers and accessible enough to use in high school English classes to teach basic symbolism in literature as I did.
Anthony Storr’s The Essential Jung is a great follow-up and broad overview; beyond this I suggest reading Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Psychotherapy by Marie-Louise von Franz, and The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, continuing the study of all four authors together.
Of James Hillman, read next Dreaming the Dark, and thereafter The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, Kinds of Power, and Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung’s Red Book, A Terrible Love of War, Pan and the Nightmare, and We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World’s Getting Worse.
Of Joseph Campbell, read next Creative Mythology, Myths to Live By, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine edited by Safron Rossi, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-87, Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, the three volumes of the Masks of God series, Tarot Revelations coauthored with Richard Roberts, and The Mythic Image.
The works of Marie-Louise von Franz balance them as the fourth partner of the set; Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, and Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures, would begin my list.
Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung’s Psychology, by June K. Singer is still the finest state of the art text for both general readers and clinicians. Also read Singer’s Modern Woman in Search of Soul: A Jungian Guide to the Visible & Invisible Worlds.
His humanistic-existentialist works, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, The Undiscovered Self, and Answer to Job, are wonderful companion studies to the works of Sartre and Camus.
I do like the topical collections assembled from disparate essays in his collected works; Dreams, and also Jung on Active Imagination edited by Joan Chodorow.
His collaboration with Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, is a joint attempt to found a new science of mythology, and a launching point for both Campbell and Hillman.
I especially love Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake in eighth grade, as a 14 year old who for the first time had found a book by someone who spoke for me.
Do read the marvelous Aion: researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, which builds on his foundational studies of alchemy and is illuminating in terms of the Sartre/Merleau-Ponty debate.
His autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections was a treasured companion of mine for years, filled with wit and wisdom, strangeness, visions and occult weirdness. When I first read it I considered it a grimoire, magic having been an enthusiasm of mine throughout my teenage years, parallel and interdependent with my immersion in Surrealist film during weekend forays to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco where I was wont to run amok.
And then there is The Red Book, in which the genesis of his ideas is written, an extended interrogation of Herman Hesse’s Abraxis as described in the novel Demian, a reimagination and transformation of Gnosticism and the founding of a syncretic faith which touches the whole mystical tradition of humankind, which can be read as a journal of madness like Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or a crisis of faith comparable to Augustine’s Confessions. Jung’s autobiography which I read in high school, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is an except from the Red Book which leaves out the crazy ass parts. The thing is, I like the crazy parts best. Our universe, and humankind, are both irrational. Jung should have learned, with all his wisdom, to do as the humorist Gini Koch advises in her signature line; “Go with the crazy”.
On the subject of Jungian psychology:
A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, by Robert H. Hopcke.
Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, by Connie Zweig & Jeremiah Abrams.
The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man, The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion, by Edward F. Edinger.
Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts, Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life As an Elephant, by Daryl Sharp.
Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, by Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson.
Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C.G. Jung and James Hillman, Susan Rowland
Celebrations of My Favorite Authors On Their Birthdays; those of world-historical importance who merit your time to read and study throughout a lifetime as have I
Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium, so named in recognition of our home as a refuge for her music and my writing; my initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs each year and writing an appreciation. These celebrations, some one hundred sixty of them, include summaries of their whole body of work and its meaning for us, as well as interrogations of their books individually and reading lists of the major criticism.
These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. As with my reading lists of national and diasporic literatures, I chose them on the basis of quality alone as I see it; this begs the question, what is good? In a book, a song, a life, a society? For I believe that the beauty of a political system, a work of literature, or anything else may be judged by the same criterion, as truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature.
As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year.
Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams.
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 as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions.
The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience.
I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. I write, speak, teach, and organize liberation of the human from systems of oppression as an agent of Chaos, revolutionary struggle, and the reimagination and transformation of our future possibilities of becoming human, whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
But in escaping the legacies of our history and authorized identities of race, gender, class, and nationality, we must also bear witness and remember; this no less than the Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, Disobey and Disbelieve Authority, are crucial to writing as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, or to living as a human being.
May you find joy as have I in books as companions we have chosen to shape and create ourselves as we wish to become, as we choose our friends and lovers, and in the cultivation of authors across vast gulfs of time and geography as partners in the Great and Secret Game by which we construct ourselves, our civilization, and our future.
July 30 2025 A Mirror of Our Civilization and Its Perils: Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Its Parallel and Interdependent Text and Primary Source To Which It Was Written In Direct Reply, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and the Limits of the Human
June 21 2025 We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human: On Sartre’s Birthday, And A Eulogy
Among my treasures where live the voices of my cherished companions through life which rest bound in leather or cloth, gilded and illustrated and written in strange inks or simply printed on creamy paper and smelling of vanilla and old saddles, histories of our conversations across vast gulfs of time and space awaiting the moment I need them again, lies brooding a symbol of the unknowability of the Infinite and the Conservation of Ignorance, the Sefer ha-Zohar or Book of Splendor.
Heart of the Kabbalah written by Moses de Leon in Spain and first published about 1275, I discovered this single volume edition in our family library, wedged between Encyclopaedia Britannica and the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World series as a teenager while reading through both in their entirety over several years, and claimed it as my own.
This was during an enthusiasm which began as a high school Freshman for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his disciple James Joyce’s attempt to reinvent humankind through a new universal language in Finnegans Wake, and I recognized immediately that Kabbalah was a project of like intent, within the context of Tikkun Olam or Repair of the World.
Written in a secret language? And filled with bizarre and utterly ambiguous symbols and metaphors? Of course I loved it.
That it was a forgery written for profit by a charlatan and reimagined by a madman just made it better in my eyes. This is the real book fictionalized by Lovecraft as the Necronomicon.
But like the visions of the Infinite and the alam al mythal it contains, the Book of Splendor remained beyond my grasp, dancing in and out of my awareness like a shifting fire of darkness and light. That which fascinated, intrigued, and compelled also warded questioning and ultimately escaped me; printed as it was written not in Hebrew for which I might have found a teacher but in a coded scholar’s cryptodialect of Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, a precursor of Spanish and Portuguese which uses Arabic script, languages which remained opaque to me. And even if translated one must be thoroughly familiar with the symbolic system it references in the Talmud and Midrash before Kabbalah becomes comprehensible. This was the only thing I ever gave up on, entangled with the Moebius Loop of language like Ahab lashed to the whale by the lines of his harpoon in his mad quest to break through the mask to the Infinite; though I read Gershom Scholem’s foundational study Kabbalah when it was published during my Freshman year of high school in 1974.
Languages allow us to think the thoughts of others, to escape the limits of our histories, authorized identities, and the flags of our skin and to create new identities which become a library of possible selves; and mine form an atlas of myself and my travels beyond the boundaries and interfaces of my maps of becoming human into unknown realms of human being, meaning, and value, also a history and archeology of my becoming human. I have often written that a full accounting of my languages becomes ambiguous and problematic; but herein I now so attempt.
Let me stipulate at the outset of this project that I now recount successive waves of languages in which I became conversant or literate as I explored our world over a lifetime, and in no way claim to have been able to think in them all at once, but only a few at any time during my studies and travels.
Languages are a hobby of mine; I grew up with three voices, English, Chinese, and French, each a mask of identity bearing the liminal force of the circumstances in which I learned them and conferring their own persona and uniqueness.
My English is influenced by the King James Bible and the local Dutch community of my childhood hometown, whose speech was full of thee’s and thou’s. This was the culture of elite hegemonies of race and patriarchy authorized by theocracy against which I rebelled in claiming Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-text to the Bible, a Reformed Church community aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa. Here as a child I witnessed a witch burning, a cross burned on the front lawn of newlyweds whose union the town referred to as a mixed marriage, he being Dutch and she a member of the minority Swiss Calvinists, and both white Protestants speaking Germannic languages; during high school my fellow students began picking up stones to throw at a teenage couple from out of town at a ball game because they were kissing without being married, a public stoning which I just barely stopped.
How did I give answer to this?
At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, 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. “
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
Here I wish to make clear that my family were never part of any church whatsoever; we lived there because that was where my father got a job teaching English literature, Drama, and Forensics at the high school, where he also coached the Fencing and Debate clubs, and was my teacher in all of these. I describe my formative years growing up in Ripon California because it is helpful in understanding me to know that I grew up in a premodern world, the world the Enlightenment and its political form the American Revolution overthrew, though the Revolution remains incomplete in its realization and universalization both in America and throughout the world. This is what being an American means to me; to be a bearer of the Promethean Fire of liberation from systems of unequal power, where ever men hunger to be free.
Herein the question of home language as source identity becomes determinative; mine was English, though I inherit through my father the possessing ghosts of ancestors who were driven out of the Black Forest in 1586 at the start of decades of witch hunting hysteria. Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women. By modern constructions of race this makes me Bavarian, though my ancestry in the patriarchal line is equally Shawnee, from the marriage of Henry Lale and Me Shekin Ta Withe or White Painted Dove during the American Revolution.
My paternal grandmother was Italian; of the Noce family whose stilt house in Bayou La Teche Louisiana was built from the ship they sailed from Genoa in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the Jacobin Revolt of 1797 bringing the new revolutionary state into the Napoleonic Empire, its navigable approach guarded by ancient canon. My mother wrote a journal of a family visit with them in 1962; there was Quiller, a giant who could carry a railroad tie in each hand, all day long, the Silent Man who sat in his rocking chair for three days without saying anything, then whipped out a shotgun and fired into the swamp, and after several minutes of rocking declared; “Water moccasin,” a deadly poisonous snake. The women all wore pointy hats like cartoon witches, and I’ve never found any credible reference which might identify the ethnicity to which it belongs nor the origin of the pointed hat as a witch symbol.
Beyond this I am a direct patrilineal descendent of the ally of Scipio Africanus that Cicero wrote his treatise on friendship about, Laelius de Amicitia, in 44 B.C. We briefly ruled what is called the Gallic Empire in the mid second century A.D., what is now France, Spain, and the British Iles; my ancestors include a deified Roman general and shapechanger, origin of the Berserkers, for whom the Bear Dance is still performed in Romania.
I once described myself to the wife of a poetry professor as Roman with the words; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.” This was Anne Rice, whose poem about the revenge of the broken dolls will haunt my dreams forever, and who modeled the character of Mael in her novels on me as I was in the early 1980’s. Her idea of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a reference of mine to the classics of western civilization and the Dead White Men of our history; “We are all bearers of those who must be kept and those from whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.”
In the line of matrilineal descent I am a direct successor to my great grandmother, whose story I told in my post of May 9 2023, A Legacy of Freedom Shared By Us All: Jewish American Heritage Month; Because the personal and the political are interdependent, and we are made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, I offer here a story from my family history as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved our family, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.
Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny to her name or a word of English. A stranger, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had put her on a ship to escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of her whole town so far as we now know.
She wandered the port of Seattle asking for help, in her five languages and in descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death lost and alone among strangers, Yiddish.
This like a magic spell summoned a crowd, by happy chance not one armed with torches and axes. So a stranger was taken in and raised by Jewish people, a family of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community and people.
This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.
She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide, and died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, like a warrior princess.
I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; incarnated truths written in our flesh.
Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the maternal line knew Yiddish makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, and she was raised as a member of the Jewish community, though my mother never claimed so and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.
My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced Schönbrunner Deutsch of the imperial court. This was the home language of my mother’s family, though grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian and its Triestino dialect, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
As a teenager immersed in Holocaust literature while working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?
To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to overcome our fear of otherness, while embracing our uniqueness.”
My Second Voice from the age of nine was Traditional Chinese; inkbrush calligraphy, the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, and the Wu Dialect of Shanghai. During my decade of formal study of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese martial arts, and the game of Go I studied in both Chinese and Japanese.
This was through Sifu Dragon, who also spoke a very British English full of Anglo-Indian words and phrases which shaped my English through our conversations; my great teacher of martial and other arts he was, with whom my father arranged for me to study after I had retaliated against my fifth grade class for putting gum on my chair by poisoning everyone, only by chance without causing any harm to anyone beyond a brief nausea. Horrified that I might have become a nine year old mass murderer when my fellow students began throwing up, I told my father about it that night, to which he said; “You have discovered politics. Politics is the art of fear, and fear and power are the true basis and means of human exchange. Fear precedes power. Fear is a terrible master and an untrustworthy servant. So, whose instrument will it be? What you need is a way to use fear and power that restores balance instead of imposing dominion, and when confronted by enemies you must demonstrate you do not fear them in order to take their power.”
My Third Voice from the seventh grade is French, a legacy of having been sent to six years of French classes at the high school because I was beyond grade level in English, which I enthusiastically embraced along with Surrealist film and literature.
This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Japanese I count as my fourth language as it developed over the years, becoming a greater passion at university when I was obsessed with Japanese poetry to the extent that I walked some of the Basho Road to see where he had written his masterpieces, and I claimed Zen as my religion on official forms through my twenties.
I learned some conversational Brazilian Portuguese from the summer before I began high school, Sao Paulo being the scene of my first Last Stand during the weeks of my campaign to rescue abandoned street children from the police bounty hunters and the trauma of my near-execution, in which I find echo and kinship with that of Maurice Blanchot by the Gestapo in 1944 as written in he Moment of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czarist secret police in 1849 as described in The Idiot, from which I was saved by the Matadors, who welcomed me into their fearsome brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
Though Arabic is my Sixth Voice, it has long become a natural language for me since first learning some Levantine Arabic in the summer of 1982, during the Siege of Beirut. This was when Jean Genet set me on my life’s path by swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance he had created in Paris 1940 from that of the Foreign Legion, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” And he gave me a principle of action by which I have now lived for over forty years; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
My Seventh Voice is Spanish, as fast upon my Baccalaureate graduation came the horrific Mayan Genocide and other atrocities of the monstrous Reagan regime, and the heroic Resistance of indigenous peoples to America’s imperial conquest of Central America which collapsed with the Iran-Contra Scandal. This theatre of revolutionary struggle includes that of the Zapatistas in the Yucatan; though later I formally studied Spanish from Argentine professors in one of my many graduate school programs, Spanish is a second or trade language for the people with whom I aligned myself, mostly speakers of Yucatec in Mexico or Quiche in the Guatemalan Peten among the Mayan group of over twenty languages, who were rebelling against the Ladino or Spanish speaking elites. So while I am literate in Spanish, I am conversant in two forms of Mayan.
Russian is my Eighth Voice, being the language of international solidarity at the time and of the Soviet advisors with whom I sometimes worked. I had some familiarity with it from my sister Erin, who began high school when I began teaching it, and used Russian as I had Chinese; as a second soul into which to grow as a self-created being, free from the legacies of our history. She studied for four years in high school with Lt Col Sviatislav Shasholin, USAF, who translated during the Nixon-Brezhnev talks and handled Soviet defectors, then went to UC Santa Cruz where she studied Russian language and Soviet Foreign Policy, graduating as Valedictorian of the Oaks International Studies School, then went to the Soviet Union as Pushkin Scholar at the University of Kallinin, a couple years before the Fall of the Soviet Union. Her first languages beyond English were Old Norse, Gothic, and Old Welsh, which she taught herself in seventh grade while researching Tolkien’s invented languages, so she could write poetry in them.
I currently write and publish in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Zulu, Hindi, Urdu, Persian and since the invasion in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and recently Italian and Dari, Afghanistan’s major language and like Urdu derived from Persian, all three of which are mutually intelligible. This list changes ceaselessly, as do human identities; ephemeral, impermanent, performative and a ground of struggle.
Including dead languages with no broad communities of native speakers but of scholars of ancient literatures, those of my Buddhist and Islamic scholarship include Classical Tibetan from my time as a monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order of Buddhism in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I waged a revolution against the monarchy, and from my studies as a member of the Naqshbandi Order of Sufis in Srinagar, Kashmir, where I fought for independence against the invasion by India; Classical Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and the exception to the dead languages of scholarship classification as a universal language of Islamic faith in which one must be literature to be considered fully Muslim, Classical Quranic Arabic.
So, my literacy includes twenty three languages if we count Latin, which I’ve taught in high school; basic Latin is crucial if you are a new student in America whose native language is not English, especially for university-bound students and solving unknown scientific and technical terms. If you know Latin root words and conjugations, you will master English twice as fast.
My languages of conversational proficiency serve also as an atlas of my history; as Sir Richard Francis Burton says; “Where ever you go, learn the language; it’s the key to everything else.” We now leave the regions of literacy and explore the Atlas of my journeys in terms of conversational level proficiency.
During the 1980’s I was involved in liberation struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, which ended with the great victory in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988, in which I fought in my usual role of scout or reconnaissance. Here I learned some Zulu and Afrikaans, a fascinating Dutch hybrid language invented by the Cape Malay community using Jawi Arabic script, which incorporates elements of indigenous Khoisan and Bantu African languages and influenced by the Malay-Portuguese trade language Kristang.
From my time behind the Iron Curtain with the Romani my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change.
Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland as Standard German. During this time I made mischief with a crew led by Bluey, an Irish gypsy from London who spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.
From my time in the Golden Triangle and Shan States I learned Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, the Singpho language of the Kachin Confederation of northern Burma and India, and the Sino-Tibetan language of the Konyak Naga. This charts the midcourse of my original Great Trek across Asia; one day I was driving to work in San Francisco and realized that I was going to live the same day I had more times than I could remember, that I was living in Nietzsche’s Hell of Eternal Recurrence, and I broke the pattern and took a wrong turn. I found myself at the airport and bought a ticket for an unknown destination; I just asked for a flight to the other side of the planet.
This I discovered upon landing was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; on day three I realized everyone in its elegant business district was doing things I could have done at home in San Francisco if I had wanted to, so I decided to do what no one else was doing. I found a bus station with a map where all the roads ended in the Cameron Highlands, rode a bus nine hours into the empty spaces on the map, got out when the road became a dirt trail into the jungle, and began my journey. I crossed from Malaysia into Thailand, Burma, and India before coming to live alternately in Nepal and Kashmir for some while.
In Nepal my role as a monk of the Buddhist Kagyu Vajrayana order required literacy in Classical Tibetan, conversational Gorkali or Nepalese as it is the official language and spoken by half the population, Newari which is the language of Kathmandu Valley where I lived, Gurung which is a tribal language of the Annapurna region and a major language of my key allies the Gurkha military and the horse nomads with whom I operated across the border between Nepal and Kashmir, and some Hindi.
In Kashmir my scholarship of Sufism required literacy in Classical Quranic Arabic, which I had been studying for years already, Classical Persian, and Ottoman Turkish; the official language Urdu which is Hindi written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and conversational use of the Kashmiri language Koshur.
This period in the early 1990’s coincides roughly with the Siege of Sarajevo of which I am a witness, where I learned some Croatian written in Latin script, mutually comprehensible with Bosnian as they evolve from the same source.
From my voyages and treks in South Asia on a later journey, where I sailed out of Georgetown on the island of Penang as a home port, I Iearned Malay in which I am literate and so count among my Voices, this being the major language of the region, of sailors, and of my initial scholarship of Naqshbandi Sufism which is a pan-Islamic warrior brotherhood synonymous with the martial arts of silat, and Buginese which is the language of the Bugis people of the Sultanate of Sulawesi who are the primary shipbuilders and navigators of South Asia, where half of all shipped freight is still by sail, and of the pirates with whom I waged an antislavery campaign led by our Captain Starfollower.
Then came the Minangkabu of Sumatra where I studied the martial art of Raja Harimau, briefly I learned what I could of one of the many languages of the Mentawai Islands where I was castaway in a storm at sea and with an indigenous tribe built an outrigger or Oceanic Proa over a couple months to sail ten hours across open seas to the mainland of Sumatra at Padaung, Iban which is a language of the indigenous Dayak peoples of Borneo, and Hokkien Chinese in its Penang and Singaporean variants which is understood throughout the Peranankan or Straits Chinese communities.
Of windows into the other ways of being human I count twenty four languages of conversation, including Hokkien Chinese, Iban, Mentawai, Minangkabu, Buginese, Croatian, Koshur, Gorkali, Newari, Gurung, Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, Singpho, Naga, Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, Hungarian, Shelta, Afrikaans, Yucatec, and Quiche, and twenty seven of literacy, a total of fifty one.
Thus far I have learned much about human diversity as well as the things which unite us, but nothing whatever of a great key which will unlock our infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Yet in the questioning of our languages as tools of creating our identities, of human being, meaning, and value, and of emergence from the legacies of our history and systems of oppression, we may transcend our limits and boundaries of otherness and belonging, and become exalted.
Will the next language offer the clues needed to decode the secrets of our liberation and self ownership, of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and how we choose to be human together? As my mother used to say to students who asked for some pronouncement or authorization, juggling possibilities with her hands; “Maybe, maybe not”.
This I wrote originally as a Postscript to my essay of September 8 2023, International Literacy Day: What is a Library For?
It became its own work when I realized I had never tried to fully count my languages nor assess the meaning of languages as having multiplicities of selves as masks to perform in reserve at any moment, nor as revolutionary acts which may change boundaries into interfaces.
May all the Voices of your languages build bridges and not walls. But how precisely can we do that?
Is there a universal language behind all our languages and personae, a code like DNA in our consciousness and a meta-grammar or innate rules as Chomsky argues by which we create and order human being, meaning, and value?
What truly lies beneath the surfaces of our illusory and impermanent selves, images like ephemeral jetsam which conceal a unified field of being, Infinite in extent? Can learning languages truly allow us to operate directly on our own consciousness and seize ownership and control of our own evolution, to inhabit the imaginal souls of others, abandon our divisions and pathologies of disconnectedness, and become exalted in our participation in the being of others and of all humankind?
What becomes of us, when we transcend ourselves through immersion in what Ibn Arabi called the alam al mythal, Coleridge the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, and the ancients called Logos?
I am a man who has many souls, one for every language I am literate in, in which I can think and dream and compose, and like James Joyce I have discovered few answers, but many questions regarding our possibilities of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and humankind.
For this mad quest to become human, to breach the event horizons of our culture, the legacies of our history, and the limits of our authorized identities, obeys the principle of the Conservation of Ignorance, in which the Infinite remains vast and unknown regardless of what we know or how much we learn.
Only this I have learned; it is not the kinds of thoughts we are able to have which make us human, but how we use them in our actions toward others, to harm or heal.
Among all of these voices of possibilities of becoming human stands the Zohar in its silence, voice of the Infinite, and it says; “I bear secrets; open me.”
And I with Ahab reply; “To the end I will grapple with thee.”
First, the book through which I fell down the rabbit hole of language in the mad quest to be able to think the thoughts of the Infinite and discover or create the secret grammar by which we construct human being, meaning, and value, universal principles of becoming human able to transcend the limits of our flesh and forge us all into one humankind beyond divisions of authorized identity and fascisms of race, faith, and nationality, and discovered Joyce, Wittgenstein, and the Kabbalah;
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski
A “Finnegans Wake” Lextionary: Let James Joyce Jazz Up Your Voca(l)bulary, Riverrun to Livvy: Lots of Fun Reading the First Page of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”, by Bill Cole Cliett
Like the spiral chambers of a seashell, we each of us are made of stories which extend ourselves into the material world as processes of growth and adaptive change; systems of history, mimesis, and identity which I call Defining Moments.
How shall I count mine?
By Last Stands, in which I defied unanswerable and overwhelming force beyond hope of victory or survival.
First among them is the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, the summer before my freshman year at high school, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first grand adventure, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division, as I was through high school. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the morning food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, and I have been living beyond the walls ever since.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, and to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of Awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true purpose and design of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar to though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender from beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol from March 22 to April 18 2022 and at Panjshir in Afghanistan from the last week of August til September 7 2021, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Eight years later, and after spending much of my high school years working through the trauma of these events and choosing the origins of evil as my field of study, came my second Last Stand, which fixed me on my life’s path in Antifascist action and revolutionary struggle as a member and inheritor of the Resistance.
During the summer of 1982 before my senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. Possibly this is all we truly own. It’s a poor man who loves nothing worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.
He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as compared to that of Jung, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.
With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, who had set fire to our cafe and other buildings and were calling for surrender and blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all. I have lived by it for thirty-nine years now.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
Five years after the Siege of Beirut, I fought in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest battle ever fought in Africa, even more vast than El Alamein.
In a massive campaign which broke the grip of Apartheid on South Africa and liberated Angola and Namibia, involving over 300,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers between December 1987 and March 1988, in coordination with Angolan and other indigenous forces, international volunteers like myself, and with Soviet aid and advisors, defeated the far larger and technologically superior South Africa and their UNITA and American allies and mercenaries in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which South Africa had failed to capture with five waves of assaults. The results included the independence of Namibia, the withdrawal of South African troops from Angola, the replacement of the racist Prime Minister Botha by de Klerk in South Africa and his negotiations with the African National Congress, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and the end of apartheid.
While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu, which was encircled by Apartheid forces. After reporting what I knew of the area to the command group and a brief conference in several languages, an old fellow who had heretofore been silent stood up from the shadows of the tent, whose shirtless form displayed a fearsome and magnificent scar from a lion’s claws, and said; “We are surrounded and outnumbered with no ammunition and worse, no water, and no one is coming to help us. We must attack.”
The sergeant smiled at this as if he had been given a marvelous gift, strode outside, and gave the order which if you are lucky you will never hear; “Fix bayonets!”
And the men about to die erupted in song. “Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile!” “My spear is thirsty”, that last.
Like the generations of struggle which liberated South Africa from Apartheid and colonial slavery, this nameless fight in the enormous Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was won against impossible odds because of things common to any liberation struggle; solidarity of action, the embrace of death as seizure of power, and the definition of victory as refusal to submit.
For the great secret of force and control is that it is hollow, brittle, and shatters when confronted with disobedience, and the great secret of authority and legitimacy is that it is an illusion of smoke and mirrors which vanishes utterly when disbelieved.
Believe nothing which is untested, for there is no just authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Strategies of division along lines of faith, race, and national identity are a primary weapon of fascism and tyranny in the subjugation of a population in whose name authority claims to act and speak, in the centralization of power, and in the manufacture of consent through abjection, despair, and learned helplessness, as well as in the creation of hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and these processes and systems of oppression are universal to humankind.
Yet war and ruin are not inevitable, for the chaos which seized South Africa as revolutionary struggle is also universal; the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce. As both an existential threat to ossified and failing systems, structures, and institutions, here a three-part harmony of failed political, economic, and social systems, and also as a window of opportunity for revolutionary struggle and transformative change.
Chaos is not simply disorder; chaos destructures order and creates new possibilities of adaptation. Chaos is a force of revolution and liberation, and a measure of the potential for change of a system.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimages Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Leveraging Chaos for change defines revolutionary and liberation struggle, but why is it necessary to bring the Chaos to restore balance to systems of unequal power as a fulcrum of change?
Those who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none. When carceral states of force and control, tyranny and terror, reach the stage of totalization of power to authority and become engines of dehumanization, they enter my world, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, and it is on this ground we must resist them.
All Resistance is war to the knife. Because the choice is between freedom as refusal to submit or abandon others, and the surrender of our universal human rights and of the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
We resist tyranny and terror and all systems of oppression not to enforce virtue, but as each other’s guarantors of our human rights that we may each be free to find our uniqueness; and to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
In my very long life of such struggles defined by many Last Stands, I think of two among them which represent the limits of the human in their horror and atrocities; Sarajevo and Mariupol.
The Russian genocide and erasure of Mariupol was characterized by its organized mass murders, rapes, and tortures of civilians, the mobile factories of cannibalism which turned people into army rations, the use of a new hyperbaric terror weapon as crematoriums to hide their crimes, and the abduction and enslavement of children. All of this the world and I have seen before and doubtless will again; nor was I truly disturbed by being buried in a tunnel collapse under bombardment and crawling out for several hours, through the remains of the dead and among the lost voices of the dying whom I could not help. But I spent a few days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russian Army and their partners, a crime syndicate called the Butterfly Collectors, were doing with some of the stolen children and young girls brought into special facilities on military bases far way in Russia; torture brothels whose spectacles were broadcast to the world on the dark web in shows which I hope you cannot imagine.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
He said he got the idea from the Byzantine Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he defeated and leaving one man in ten with eyes to guide the others home, as a warning to crush resistance by terror.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
As a jailbreak this was to my knowledge unique; I had asked the guards at the gate to see the commander, bearing gifts I knew he wanted greatly in trade for a prisoner whose value he did not know; making a game of it was his idea, which became several days of conversations. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
Here is my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted as I crossed into Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul to defend Panjshir and before joining the fight at the Azovstal Steelworks in Mariupol.
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
A cinematic kaleidoscope of memories dances before me on my birthday, spiraling back through time like the whirlpool which opened before Edgar Allen Poe and cast him into worlds unknown, wonderful and strange, fictionalized in his 1845 story A Descent Into The Maelstrom, which prefigures chaos theory, Jungian psychology, and Surrealism and references the historical literature of a universal field of being and forge of existence in dreams; the Logos of John the Evangelist and Neo-Platonic philosophy, Ibn Arabi’s Alam al Mythal, Coleridge’s Primary Imagination.
In this respect Poe like Emerson and the Transcendentalists is an American consequence of British Romantic Idealism, which unfolds from Goethe and Schiller, who harkens back to Emerson’s direct model Hawthorne to explore a world which lives behind the world we see, whose endless chasms of darkness and light are filled with ancient terrors and nameless horrors which give the lie to our fragile illusions of law and order by which we seek to control the chaos of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as well as moments of beauty and wonder made of wishes and dreams as Keats teaches us. Fascinans et tremendum, rapture and terror conjoined, as Otto Rudolf names the exaltation and defilement of immersion in the Infinite and encounters beyond the illusion of the world. “Break through the mask” as Melville’s glorious Ahab declares.
I am a child of the Nights of Falling Stars, born as our world passes through the Leonid meteor trail each year. On the palm of my right hand is a scar where an infinitesimal meteor passed through it; I had reached up to catch one, standing on the rock above a ravine on Cavedale Road overlooking Sonoma where during World War Two an artillery battery sat to defend against an invasion that never came, above secret caves inscribed with hieroglyphs from a lost antiquity, an event witnessed by friends including Jim Shafer, Jennifer Damico-Wendt, Kimberly Wine, and others, and something reached down to embrace my hand, engulfing me in a nimbus of light. Ahab’s harpoon I became in that moment, lit with St Elmo’s Fire. From this moment I have never despaired nor abandoned hope, for upon my flesh is written the signature of the Infinite.
Death has now fastened her talons hard upon my flesh, flesh become a tapestry of lamentations, lost causes, forlorn hopes, and nameless loves, nor can I escape the horrors I have witnessed in dreams wherein they live again, in whispers of disturbing truths and ghosts which shadow my joy like things out of their proper time, past and future and now all jumbled together like a snow globe shaken by unknown forces, as I become a kind of Tralfamadorian, lost in time among unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Such is the palace of memory, history, and identity, the Well of Time, the Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams which is terrifyingly ambiguous with the Wilderness of Mirrors as surfaces which reflect, capture, distort, and falsify can also open as gates of the Unknown, the flaws of our humanity and these forms our bodies in which we must live as an imposed condition of struggle.
In this there is nothing to fear; as I said to my mother when I returned from death, Most Sincerely Dead from the pressure wave of a police grenade which hurled me from my body, in her arms as police opened fire on the students, Bloody Thursday 1969 Peoples Park Berkeley, and I a child of nine bearing a vision of our myriad possible futures from a moment of supraconsciousness outside of time; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but Awakening from an illusion.”
And so we shall journey into the Unknown together, Death and I, singing.
I will not go quietly, old tiger that I am.
Of dreams and our possibilities of becoming human I sing, a sea of transpersonal consciousness and potentialities which in classical Platonic philosophy and its reimagination in the Biblical Book of John the Evangelist and subsequent neo-Platonism including that of Iris Murdoch is called the Logos, found strange forms in Gnosticism and the alchemical faith of the Sapientia Dei on which Jung constructed his psychology and called the Collective Unconscious, Coleridge the Primary Imagination, Ibn Arabi the Alam al-Mithal, and in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, especially the work which I translate from Tibetan as the Book of Liberation rather than of the Dead, is called the Bardo, to name a few of the informing and motivating sources and historical lineages in which I may claim membership and represent herein.
My life has been a grand journey into such states of transpersonal being and imaginal realms of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, of which I am become a cypher shaped in the forge of Time. We each of us bear such marks without number, signs of our journeys to discover possible selves; I call these sacred wounds Defining Moments, in which we may read the history of our forging like the beautiful flowing lines of a Damascus sword or as the calligraphy of our souls, and of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Our lives are charted by our Defining Moments; history, memory, identity, the protean self in constant processes of adaptation and change, and the dynamic creative tension between the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and of humankind in titanic revolutionary struggle and seizures of power versus the boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of normality and of other people’s ideas of virtue, of the masks that others make for us and those we create for ourselves.
How do I count them?
By Visions of Reimagination and Transformation, of truths which awaken and change us when realized, truths which like all true art exalt and defile us in the ecstasy of rapture and terror, fascinans et tremendum as Rudolf Otto named them.
But these are different stories for other days, and herein my subject is poetic vision as a primary human act of self-creation and seizure of power, as the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and of human being, meaning, and value as an answer to the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
We are all made of these things and many more; their categories are arbitrary and relative, and change over time as do we. What matters is to recognize the kinds of things that matter to us, and to cherish and hoard them as our treasures.
Of Visions wherein I was taken up into the gaps and beheld wonderful things, terrible things; here I speak of poetic vision and the realm of the liminal.
Before all else my Awakening and Vision of Possible Futures of Humankind as a nine year old survivor of Bloody Thursday, Berkeley 1969, as the police fired on student protestors which included my mother, as she sang of peace and offered flowers to a policeman who pumped and aimed a shotgun at her in reply, saved by the sudden chaos of a grenade thrown into the crowd by the police who then opened fire, and as we fled and the pressure wave of the blast hurled me from my body I escaped the limits of my form and had a unitary moment of awareness outside of time.
Yes, by this I mean Most Sincerely Dead and without signs of life according to my mother, before my eyes refocused and fixed this world in place as an image among endless unspooling loops of possible worlds. “Don’t be afraid” I said to her; “Death is nothing, nothing but an awakening from illusions.”
In such moments we are destroyed and recreated, to reference the mad doctor’s line in The Fly; “You’re just afraid to be destroyed and recreated”. Let us embrace Chaos and our monstrosity, and not fear it. For change is ongoing always, and the trick is to use it as seizures of power, autonomy, liberation, and self-creation.
Though I have struggled to create meaning and value from the life disruptive event of my death and rebirth on that day at the age of nine, I speak to you now not as the bearer of any special wisdom tradition but merely as a man who has been dead; death is nothing more or less terrible and wonderful than liberation from the limits of our form.
So also for grief, despair, and fear, the trauma of loss, the torment of loneliness, and the guilt of survivorship; the realm of our darkest and most negative passions immerses us in atavistic states with totalizing and tidal force.
Life disruptive events can destabilize identity and realign personality, transform meanings and values, send shockwaves through our network of relationships, shift our worldview and unmoor us from the anchorages of our ideological paradigms and historical contexts.
Such traumas confront us with the unfiltered face of our shadow self as a healing process, a transformative journey filled with dangers but also with the limitless possibilities of rebirth.
Among the chiaroscuro of darkness and light of which we are shaped as negative spaces of each other, I turn now to the wisdom of our darkness.
The Dream of the Toad, Nietzsche’s Toad which he feared he must swallow and could not, a spirit which had possessed William S. Burroughs since childhood, cursed by his Welsh nanny, and been transferred to me as a lineage of succession through his storytelling as rituals of initiation and transformation, from Nietzsche to Bataille to Burroughs interwoven with a secondary successorship of transmission from Crowley to Lovecraft to Burroughs, and from Burroughs to myself, what Jung called shadow work in which I embraced my darkness and became whole. As Shakespeare said of Caliban in The Tempest, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”; the quote with which Burroughs’ ended many such ceremonies.
This was the signal event of my year during eighth grade, when I read the entire works of Plato and then discovered someone who spoke for me in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra; years earlier through his stories the man I called Uncle Bill, among my father’s circle of counterculture artists and writers, created a personal connection for me with my chthonic Underworld guardian and guide Tsathoggua, and with its previous bearers and avatars. Together we change boundaries into interfaces, we human beings with our ephemeral persona adrift upon the endless seas and chasms of darkness of our limitless unconscious selves, as a dual or bicameral consciousness and unitary field of being which extends through the dreaming and waking realms; I who deny nothing and the timeless and oracular daemon who speaks for those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
What was William S. Burroughs to me? A trusted and kind family friend who helped me to process my trauma of Bloody Thursday, in which I awakened to a highly contingent and meaningless world in which death can come at any time and for no reason whatever, and wherein Authority, especially that of the state and its instruments of force and control the police whose purpose is to protect the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and those who would enslave us, and like the mad rapacious gods of Lovecraft, is not merely a Nietzschean one who has abandoned us or been dethroned but an existential threat of utterly alien motives.
Here also was my apprenticeship as a storyteller, for by seventh grade I had covered one entire wall of my bedroom with a collage of nightmare images from Hieronymus Bosch and others as gateways into other worlds. This was my Dream Gates wall, which functioned as mandalas for me throughout my teenage years, passages into imaginal realms I call the Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams. Through them I explored myriads of possible universes, futures, and alternate histories as revealed to me on Bloody Thursday in the moment of my death and rebirth.
William S. Burroughs used to draw figures on it during his visits and make it even more strange and bizarre; through this art, his stories which reimagined Grimm’s fairytales as a mythology, and his ceremonial magic and demonology as an initiation cycle referencing Crowley and medieval sources, Nietzsche and his friend Bataille’s cult of Acephale, his model Lovecraft, and influences from my father’s Gordian Knot of Voodoo, lycanthropy, and family history coded as fairytales by the Brothers Grimm, he and my father together forged an Absurdist faith of Chaos. One day I intend to write a book entitled Gods of My Father: the Art of Fear.
Such was the context in which I discovered the works of my literary first love Herman Hesse during seventh grade, and his hybrid Gnostic-Buddhist faith which uses as its symbol and controlling metaphor the dual-gendered figure of Abraxas in the novel Demian, appropriated by Jung in The Red Book and systematized according to his studies of alchemy as a universal faith and psychology, and described gloriously by Virginia Woolf in Orlando. From this basis my teenage obsession with magic coalesced, and my studies of Jungian psychology at university.
Among his many useful methods, Burroughs taught me to read Tarot cards as reordering, creating, and destroying possible realities and selves; I have and greatly treasure the deck he gave me in seventh grade with the words; “With these you can see truths and futures, but you can also create them.”
So for darkness, and now for light, rapture, transcendence, illumination.
Sailing the Lake of Dreams in Srinagar, where I studied Sufism as a scholar of the Naqshbandi order which as a warrior brotherhood spread Islam and martial arts of silat throughout south Asia, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and my Journeys through the Gates of Possibilities in Kathmandu as a Dream Navigator of the Kagyu Vajrayana Buddhist order. Here were parallel systems of dreamwork, sharing many elements, and having assimilated elements of Hinduism as yoga in Sufism and as Tantra in Buddhism, which I studied together during a sabbatical between graduate programs as I entered my thirties and began my decade long Great Trek, complex philosophies written in different languages, Classical Tibetan on the one hand and Classical Quranic Arabic, Classical Persian, and Ottoman Turkish on the other, but whose techniques could be used interdependently in the context of Jungian psychology and dreamwork.
Like the dreams to which they are akin, such visions can be read as symbols, metaphors, and allegories; they are also stories woven into our lives which connect us with the universe and with other people, and through which we create ourselves. Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
I am looking at the scar on my hand from where a Fallen Star touched me one night during a meteor shower, decades ago, when I reached up to pull the stars from the heavens and something reached down to enfold my hand in a nimbus of light, and for a moment I was sublimed and exalted in the Kiss of the Fallen Star, riding the light among the spheres, the earth a vanishing orb, then lost among the solar system, a sea of stars, a whirling dance of galaxies, and return to the hill where I stood transfigured by the embrace of Infinite. Stunned not by our smallness next to a universal scale, but by the eternity and timeless immensity of Being in which we share.
If ever I need to be reminded of our true nature, of the presence of the transcendent and the immanence of truths written in our flesh, of the vast and limitless sea of being and consciousness of which we are part, I need only open my hand to see written there the signature of the Infinite Unknown and the sign of our hope, for from the moment I touched a star I have been without despair, fear, or doubt, a bearer of hope.
So many adventures down the rabbit hole that a full narrative would fill volumes; but one especially do I wish to share here.
Humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them. This teaching was given to me by a tribal elder while crossing the Thar desert in a camel caravan near Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, India. There was a huge clay pot given pride of place in a dark tent, unremarkable and worthless, and shown to me by these penniless nomads with the absurd claim that it was the great treasure of their people. Then someone put a lamp inside, and illuminated the thousands of hairline fractures through it, and began to recite the history of the tribe following its lines, not only beautiful and a symbol of the immanence of the Infinite as truths written in our flesh, but also, like the songlines of the Australian aborigines, a map of tribal history and migrations reaching back hundreds of years, each with its own stories, like our bodies a mnemonic instrument of oral history. I call this vision the Illumination of Our Beautiful Flaws.
From this primary insight I forged my Narrative Theory of Identity; we are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. And the first question we must ask of them is; Whose story is this?
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.
What general principles can we learn from the creative processes of poetic vision as reimagination and transformation?
First, that no matter how much we learn, the unknown remains as vast and infinite as before; this I call the Conservation of Ignorance. For further explication, see Nicholaus of Cusa’s De Docta Ignorantia, and Rudy Rucker’s magisterial study of Godel’s Theorem, Infinity and the Mind.
Second, the universe is fundamentally irrational and Absurd, and moreover is ephemeral, transitory, subjective, and relativistic, characterized by processes of change. Being, meaning, and value defy universalization and our attempts to impose order on living systems which are chaotic, uncontrollable, and wild, including ourselves.
Third, human attempts to abstract us from nature birth monsters, pathologies of control and disconnectedness. The wonder and terror of vision and immersion in the realm of the liminal and the transpersonal has inspired some of the greatest achievements of civilization and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and some of the most fearsome terrors of our historical atrocities, madness, and degradation.
The liminal bears creative and destructive forces in equal measure, and not reductive to the interplay of darkness and light, but ambiguous, contingent, and relative. We who are its witnesses and bearers of poetic vision are the arbiters of this power among humankind and of its consequences for the material universe and the order and fate of the cosmos. Who bears the fire of the gods becomes an agent of transformation, insight, and the reshaping of human being, meaning, and value; this is true of all art and of creativity in general.
Revolutions are born of such insight, in sciences and arts of understanding and in our creation of ourselves. With this inner fire and vision we may forge new truths, and in this mission I offer guidance and warning as you sail into the unknown; transgress boundaries, violate norms, abandon limits, and seize your power to create yourself anew, for nothing is Forbidden and all Authority is illusion and lies; but always know what you are trying to achieve, for force always operates in both directions at once.
Act without fear, and in action be fearless; but with awareness of the consequences of your actions. Life and liberty, as well as good and evil, may depend on the smallest of changes in our lives and our world, both for ourselves and for others.
Best wishes, and may you find joy, freedom, healing, and love in your reimagination of yourself and our possibilities of becoming human.
In the gathering darkness which attends my birthday tomorrow in the year of the Fall of America as a democracy and a free society of equals and the recapture of the state by the Fourth Reich under the Second Trump Regime, and in the midst of great horror and cruelty as the ICE white supremacist terror force perpetrates ethnic cleansing in America and the federal Occupation of our sanctuary cities, and of the Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians, blood sacrifices of the innocent to state power authorized by an America made complicit as our taxes buy the deaths of children and other civilians and the institutional rape and torture of prisoners, I return to thoughts regarding hope and its role in revolutionary struggle and Resistance, such as that now unleashed in the many theatres of World War Three which include America, Palestine, and Ukraine.
As I wrote in my post of August 23 2022, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Allegories of Hope and the Ambiguity of Love and Desire in Games of Power; Last night I saw episode five of the Netflix series The Sandman, wherein a mad god seizes a diner as its tyrant and dooms everyone in his quest for a world in which there are no lies, and only truths are spoken. A project very like my own in the valorization of truth telling, which I regard as the defining characteristic of faith as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth; but here the liberator and the tyrant are the same, and as Dream points out humans live by hope and the stories they tell about themselves, as living fictions which are not the same as lies though they share some characteristics.
I had forgotten how beautiful Gaiman’s interrogation of the necessity of hope, the ambiguity of truth, and the nature of human being as living stories is.
The ambiguity of desire as a moral force is a major theme of Gaiman’s works; all of his works. He first signifies the vast categorial differences between love and desire; both are kinds of madness which can reveal the truths written in our flesh, but where love exalts, desire can defile, objectify, brutalize as well as confer rapture as a form of poetic vision, for desire is wholly selfish, and a space of free creative play without limits. As a thing which lives beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, topologies of The Good, of authorized identities, of normality, and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, desire is a force of liberation. But it can also be shaped and motivated by the legacies of our history and by systems of oppression as imposed conditions of struggle, and so remains a primary ground of struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
Desire, like Order, appropriates; Love, like Chaos, autonomizes. Desire takes where loves gives. Love creates where Desire destroys. Both are forces of liberation and oppression, depending on how they are used.
Love is a redemptive force which exalts us, a negative space of the gaze of Medusa whose power appropriates that of the Male Gaze, for to love is to see the truth of others and set them free. Desire, however, is always transgressive as a glorious surrender to forces beyond ourselves, violations of boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of normality and virtue.
Love autonomizes; Desire totalizes. Yet they are interdependent as creative and destructive powers of our humanity, and we cannot escape them or the consequences of their actions as motives and shaping forces.
Truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh are both forces of liberation and an imposed condition of struggle.
Just so. What unites the powers of creation and destruction is power; and seizures of power are at the root of the origins of evil in unequal power and the use of social force and violence in liberation struggle and its antithesis, tyranny.
This is why utopian idealism so often becomes authoritarian tyranny, and why it is the central problem humankind faces as we choose how to be human together.
It is doing so now, in the atrocity which is like no other called ethnic cleansing and genocide, as Israel butchers tens of thousands of civilians as if they were nothing, and more to come, and dehumanizes both their own citizens and the people they demonize as enemies. Precisely as Israel was founded to offer refuge and safety to its own people from.
Why is becoming the tyrants we have overthrown a predictable phase of liberation struggle, and how can we escape the legacies of our history?
As the character of John Dee is described by Marco Vito Oddo in Collider, in an article entitled The Sandman’s John Dee Explained: Dreams Do Come True.
And so do nightmares; “After decades of heavy medication and being lied to about the Dreamstone’s existence and powers, John developed a pathological aversion to any kind of lies. Of course, as we all know, lying is part of adult life and an important tool to use in everyday life. Unable to understand this, John uses the Dreamstone to remove lies from the waking world. And that, of course, leads to humans giving into their deepest desires without thinking about the consequences, which in turn leads to a lot of destruction.
Removing every kind of lie from the world also removes dreams. So, John’s childish visions of truths and lies result in the disappearance of hope, fantasy, and wishful thinking. It’s no wonder he becomes one of Morpheus’ greatest enemies, as the King of Dreams’ responsibility is to ensure people in the waking world can keep dreaming, so that life can be bearable.”
The character of John Dee, who like H.P. Lovecraft suffers disfiguration of the soul by being raised in isolation as a prisoner of his mother to keep him safe and innocent in a childlike state, as what Jung called a puer aeternus, and unlike the Surrealist author stole the power to recreate reality and used it to free humankind from lies, especially those of authority which falsify us as theft of the soul, has been compared in the FB group Sandman to the magnificent Hannibal Lecter.
As figures of the psychopathy of the state as embodied violence and the debasement and nihilism of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as the origin of evil and the generative engine of fascism, I would also compare him to the character of Martin Chatwin in the Netflix series The Magicians, and to his historical parallels Adolf Hitler as described in Robert G.L. Waite’s magisterial work The Psychopathic God and to Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, as analyzed in Trump on the Couch by Dr Justin Frank.
Of all these figural studies of fascism and tyranny only those who define the limits of the human like Hitler and Trump, Hannibal Lecter and Gaiman’s John Dee are truly useful to us, for they are monsters in whom we can see ourselves as in a dark mirror; Hannibal because he is an avenger, Dee because he is pathetic as well as terrible, victim as well as perpetrator.
I cheered when Hannibal escaped at the end of the great film, at its premiere so many years ago, not because he is a Nietzschean superman but because like myself he is a monster who hunts other monsters, an avenger of injustice in a world which has replaced morality with law. Hannibal has as its primary theme the critique of authority written by Nikos Kazantzakis in his thesis on Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Right and the State, which interrogates the historical claim that man is evil and broken, and that without the restraining force of law devolves to a subhuman state and a world where the most ruthless wins. Its the basis for all our laws, this reimagination of the doctrine of Original Sin, and like Kazantzakis I believe this fig leaf for the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control must be abandoned along with the use of social force.
Recall that Hannibal begins as a doctor into whose care the state has given monstrous criminals who are too wealthy and powerful to punish justly, a primary strategy of tyranny and Authority being co-optation. Law serves power and the hegemony of elites, and there is no just authority. So Hannibal, like Dee and so many of history’s liberators who become tyrants by seizures of power in revolutionary struggle, ventures beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and the law in defense of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased; but in doing so such avengers become devoured by the power they have seized and the violence they must use. Here is a central theme of Neil Gaiman’s more fully worked out in the series Lucifer, but also present in his tales of the Sandman.
It is a dichotomy which he embodies personally, exemplar of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force, Neil Gaiman the brilliant author who champions the human transcendent and imaginal in fictions which also interrogate the consequences of violence and the nature of power, and here has set the two sides of himself in stark relief and titanic struggle to become human as Dream versus Dee with admirable self-awareness, and whose career foundered on the shoals of revelations concerning his sexual enslavement of a homeless fan.
In a final confrontation between the messianic and tragic figure of a mad god who would condemn us to be free in Sartrean authenticity and Sadeian transgression, and save humankind from its lies, illusions, falsifications, and leave us revealed in the truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, bearer of a sacred wound which opens him to the pain of others but also creates the fatal flaw and illusion of moral equivalence of good and evil in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, the Original Lie of the tyrant that only power and fear have meaning and are real, and his adversary the Lord of Dreams, who champions the fictions by which we reach beyond ourselves, the legacies of our history, and the limits of the human, a figure of poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value as an inherent capacity of self-creation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, Neil Gaiman gives us a chiaroscuro of darkness and light, truth and lies, and a dialectics of becoming human which is ambiguous, relativistic, changing, and negotiates seizures of power as revolutionary struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others, between liberty and tyranny.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Here I find a mirror of my conversations with myself whenever I must choose a course of action and make another Last Stand, as I did in Mariupol Ukraine April 2022, Panjshir Afghanistan September 2021, in the defense of Al Aqsa May 2021, and in so many other times and places I cannot list them all, and will in future.
John Dee speaks his cruel truth, in reference to de Sade, Nietzsche and Bataille, Artaud and Pirandello, Beckett and Kobo Abe; “I offered you a world where you could be yourselves without having to suffer for it, but it seems you enjoy your suffering. And if that is your truth, then perhaps your suffering will set you free.
The truth is a cleansing fire… which burns away the lies we’ve told each other… and the lies we’ve told ourselves So that love and hate, pleasure and pain……can all be expressed… without shame. Where there is no good or bad… there is only the truth.”
To which Morpheus asks; “What is it you think you’re doing?”
“Saving the world from its lies. This is the truth of mankind.”
“No. You’re wrong.”
“This is the truth of mankind. They’re lying to themselves. It’s all lies.”
“Not lies, John. Dreams. Their dreams kept them alive. But if you rob them of their dreams, if you take away their hope, then… yes, this is the truth of mankind.”
For if the fictions of those who would enslave is can capture our souls, the stories of our own creation which belong to us can make impossible dreams become real and true.
Here are some of my previous interrogations of the idea of hope, which I preface with a brief history of the praxis or action of the value of hope in my life mission to discover and engage the origins of evil and in the reimagination and transformation of myself and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value as transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, seizures of power from authority, violations of normality, and freedom from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.
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 human 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 like Lucifer I escaped from Hell and took a wrong turn to the airport where I bought a ticket to the Unknown; the agent asked me where I wanted to go, and I said the other side of the world. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where in its glittering business district the possibilities were ones I could have explored at home in San Francisco had I wished, I once again found a Forbidden Door to the Unknown in a bus station beside a temple of Ganesha with a map that showed where all the roads ended in nothingness, an enormous empty space along the spine of the Malay Peninsula. I took a bus there and got off at the end of the road, where a dirt track led into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and with nothing but whatever happened to be in my pockets began walking into an unmapped wilderness.
So began a journey from which I have never truly returned, 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 of our humanity might 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 in refusal to submit 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 crawling through partially collapsed tunnels after 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, having survived far worse and more desperate chances, 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 2024 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 sometimes 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, 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.
As to my art of war and revolutionary struggle, in a very long life lived in many fields of battle, grounds of struggle, and arenas where there are no rules, I have found two truths and principles of action regarding winning fights; first, who achieves surprise wins regardless of all else, and second, never staying down also wins fights.
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.”
Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.
Summer of Fire 2022 Letter to a Suicide Squad
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.
Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad
I wrote this as guidance and general principles of Resistance to tyranny, 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 in some fifty cities which became a moving street fight with forces of repression, 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.
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.”
As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; With this Inauguration Day comes the return of hope as a fulcrum of resilience and renewal; now begins the great work of reimagining America and ourselves.
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 flags of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact solidarity, altruism, mercy, and compassion.
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.
What do I hope for now, watching the Inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as love triumphs over hate and diversity and inclusion over racism as national policy? I hope that the ideals and values we have embraced today as symbols will in time become real.
And I hope that the peaceful transfer of power and the viability and resilience of democracy will never again be threatened or called into question by any act of treason, tyranny, or terror.
Regarding that I have a story to share with you about a previous election, during which the Cambodian refugees, who had been assigned for acculturation to my mother as a high school English teacher with a facility for languages, all vanished overnight from the town. They returned to her classroom in family groups two to three weeks later, and she asked them where they went. One of them answered; “To the hills. New President, soldiers come now.” She told them that can’t happen here, and the reply was “That’s what we thought before Pol Pot.” I imagine that’s what most of us thought, before Trump.
Like President Biden before, Harris has promised us a Restoration of democracy and our Constitution as the Rule of Law, which I hope will include universal human rights and standing with the people of Palestine against genocide by Israel through BDS, disarmament, regime change, and bringing Netanyahu and other war criminals to trial, and to work toward unity and healing the nation. In this historic cause let us work together with her to restore honor to our nation and create a free society of equals built on objective and testable truth, impartial and fair justice, liberty, equality, and a secular state.
Let us raise again the fallen cause of the American Revolution, and bear it forward into the future.
Amanda Gorman, America’s National Youth Poet Laureate, a cum laude graduate of Harvard in Sociology, delivered a brilliant and visionary inaugural address in which hope is a major theme with her poem, The Hill We Climb. In an NPR interview she said she studied the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Winston Churchill in writing it, and has signposted her references to the play Hamilton on Twitter, a poem completed on the most terrible night of our history, when Trump unleashed a mob of white supremacist terrorists under a Confederate battle flag to seize our capitol and execute our representatives in the January 6 Insurrection;
“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
It can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust.
For while we have our eyes on the future,
History has its eyes on us.”
Her article in Harper’s articulates her major source and reference as she describes herself writing The Hill We Climb in terms of occupying the same historical space as Emily Dickenson did in writing her great meditation on hope as the Civil War began in 1861, “Hope” is the thing with feathers”; “I’ve come to realize that hope isn’t something you give to others. It’s something you must first give to yourself. This year has taught us to find light in the quiet, in the dark, and, most importantly, how to find hope in ourselves. 2020 has spoken, loud and clear as a battle drum. In 2021, let us answer the call with a shout.”
Here is the text of her poem This Place (An American Lyric):
“There’s a poem in this place—
in the footfalls in the halls
in the quiet beat of the seats.
It is here, at the curtain of day,
where America writes a lyric
you must whisper to say.
There’s a poem in this place—
in the heavy grace,
the lined face of this noble building,
collections burned and reborn twice.
There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square
where protest chants
tear through the air
like sheets of rain,
where love of the many
swallows hatred of the few.
There’s a poem in Charlottesville
where tiki torches string a ring of flame
tight round the wrist of night
where men so white they gleam blue—
seem like statues
where men heap that long wax burning
ever higher
where Heather Heyer
blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.
There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant
of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising
its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—
a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,
strutting upward and aglow.
There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas
where streets swell into a nexus
of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,
where courage is now so common
that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.
There’s a poem in Los Angeles
yawning wide as the Pacific tide
where a single mother swelters
in a windowless classroom, teaching
black and brown students in Watts
to spell out their thoughts
so her daughter might write
this poem for you.
There’s a lyric in California
where thousands of students march for blocks,
undocumented and unafraid;
where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom
in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.
She knows hope is like a stubborn
ship gripping a dock,
a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer
or knock down a dream.
How could this not be her city
su nación
our country
our America,
our American lyric to write—
a poem by the people, the poor,
the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,
the native, the immigrant,
the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,
the undocumented and undeterred,
the woman, the man, the nonbinary,
the white, the trans,
the ally to all of the above
and more?
Tyrants fear the poet.
Now that we know it
we can’t blow it.
We owe it
to show it
not slow it
although it
hurts to sew it
when the world
skirts below it.
Hope—
we must bestow it
like a wick in the poet
so it can grow, lit,
bringing with it
stories to rewrite—
the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated
a history written that need not be repeated
a nation composed but not yet completed.
There’s a poem in this place—
a poem in America
a poet in every American
who rewrites this nation, who tells
a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth
to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—
a poet in every American
who sees that our poem penned
doesn’t mean our poem’s end.
There’s a place where this poem dwells—
it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell
where we write an American lyric
we are just beginning to tell.”
As written by Iana Murray in GQ, in an article entitled The Sandman’s diner episode is a disturbing masterpiece: “When David Thewlis walked into a diner in “24/7”, the fifth episode of Netflix’s latest smash hit The Sandman, fans of Neil Gaiman’s source material knew exactly the nightmare the next hour had in store. The grisly episode is the show’s masterpiece: a small-scale chamber piece that dials up the depravity slowly until it boils over. As all the best horror stories conclude, people are just as wicked as the monsters themselves.
At the beginning of the series, dream lord Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) is captured by an occultist aristocrat and has his magical artefacts stolen: a pouch of sand, his helm and a ruby. The latter lands in the hands of John Burgess (David Thewlis), the maniacal illegitimate son of Morpheus’ captor, who uses its manipulative power to control others. Settling into a diner booth, he enacts his plan to create a “more honest” world by preventing its patrons from lying for the next 24 hours. But his noble intentions only grow more corrupt when faced with the reality that the truth isn’t always pretty.
In a series of pure maximalism – in presentation and stakes – the microcosmic world of the diner is a refreshing departure back to (relative) basics. Under the control of the stolen ruby, the truth unravels without inhibition. It’s like the Stanford Prison Experiment on steroids – and rampant hormones. Secrets best kept hidden are unwittingly revealed, and then the horned-up diners hook up with each other until they meet their violent ends.
It all plays out through the eyes of Thewlis, who delivers perhaps the show’s standout performance. The actor tones down Burgess’s creepy demeanour with a gentleness that makes him unassuming. At first glance, he appears frail and vulnerable – a villain who is deceptively, frighteningly normal.
This adaptation is, admittedly, somewhat lighter – while violence doesn’t erupt until the final minutes, the comic sees John Burgess force the diners to commit increasingly horrifying acts as the hours tick by. The sex is more extreme, limbs are mutilated, and humanity is reduced to its most primal instincts. It makes it something of an outlier in a comic series that doesn’t lean so hard on horror. “What was nice is I never had to go that dark again,” Gaiman told Entertainment Weekly. “The readers always knew that I was capable of it, and that things could get dark.”
What makes “24/7” so fascinating, then, is what it achieves by eschewing the comic’s most disturbing elements, and simply exploring what happens when people can’t lie. “The truth is a cleansing fire which burns away the lies we’ve told each other, and the lies we’ve told ourselves,” John Burgess says as the diner descends into chaos. In the end, the fire is far more destructive. As time goes by, the confessions escalate in degeneracy, but even uttering those unspeakable thoughts is enough to send chills. When one regular – a snarky queer woman escaping from an argument – candidly admits she wishes her partner was dead, the cold realisation is just as disturbing as any of the actual violence. In this hour-long thought experiment, The Sandman finds that the true horror is in discovering what humans are capable of when rid of pleasantries. The truth is uncomfortable – sometimes leaving it unsaid is necessary to survive.”
Torch of Liberty 
