November 6 2024 Now is the Time of Monsters: Hope and Despair In the Wake of Our Elections

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” Thus goes the famous paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci, a lens through which this moment of shared public trauma and grief may be seen and understood.

Ours is also a time of chaos, disruption, and fracture of our norms and ideals, our values and our institutions of democracy, and of our history. As such it is also a measure of our adaptive potential, a liminal space between bounded realms which defines limits but also communicates as interfaces, and in which new possibilities of becoming human are created as old orders are destroyed.

When they come for us and for one another, as they always have and will, let them find not an America defeated in submission to terror and tyranny with learned helplessness, but united in solidarity as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights. Now is the time of monsters; but also of organizing resistance.

Let us speak, write, teach, organize, and act in solidarity for a free society of equals and a United Humankind; because silence is complicity.

As Alan Moore teaches us in V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”

Chaos is the great hope of the powerless, as Guillermo del Toro teaches us in his epic of migration and diversity Carnival Row. In this moment we can bring change, though we have lost our best chance to do so while voting and action within our system is possible and meaningful.

Do not despair. Evil prevails when good people do nothing. Use your fear and loathing and rage in refusal to submit.

In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.

As I wrote in my post of March 10 2023, On Hope and Despair: Surviving Life Disruptive Events; To a friend with suicidal ideation and facing multiple trauma, life disruptive events, and institutional catch 22s which include class and patriarchal oppression enforced by rentier capitalism and the political theft of our right to life through failure to provide the universal healthcare which is its precondition, I have written this brief message:

Now is the time to reach out, make connections, and build community. Isolation is dangerous in the extreme for you in this moment. A sea of fellow humans surrounds us, all of whom must wrestle with the flaws of our humanity as imposed conditions of struggle. I hear you in this message, and am afraid. Choose life, my friend, as precarious and filled with pain and fear as it may be; our stories can always change, regardless of the limits of our scope of action and agency.

It may now become possible to reclaim the life which has been stolen from you, and begin to heal and reinvent yourself. May you find peace and joy in this terrible world, my friend.

All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.

We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.

A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.

And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.

As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times, a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion.

History begins with us, or ends with us.

What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?

So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.

Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.

What is hope, and how is it useful?

Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.

Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.

Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.

These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.

How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three Last Stands which created and defined me; when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969, when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.

In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power.

First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global civilization under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”

One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?

Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.

True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols.

Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”

It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.

Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.

Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.

Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.

For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history.

This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.

As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it.

As the Wizard of Oz said of himself it’s a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

As we believe, so we may become.

Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flag of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy.

This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift.

Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.

As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020 Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; As a student of the origins of evil I studied everything, but especially the nexus of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, and wrote, spoke, taught, and organized always, for democracy and liberation from systems of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for our universal human rights and against dehumanization, tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for the values of a free society of equals; among them liberty, equality, truth, and justice. During vacations from graduate school and teaching English, Forensics, and Socratic seminars in various subjects through the Gifted and Talented Education program at Sonoma Valley High School and my practice as a counselor I wandered the world in search of windmills that might be giants at which to tilt.

One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.

It happened like this; one day I was driving from my day job teaching high school as a sacred calling to pursue the truth to my very elegant office in San Francisco where I practiced the repair of the world as a healer of the flaws of our humanity, things I loved but had begun to feel determinative of my scope of action, when the lightning of insight struck. In that moment of illumination I realized that I was literally in Hell, trapped in Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, for I had lived the same day more times than I could remember and was about to do so yet again. And I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this.

I recalled a line of poetry from a book on the game of Go, handwritten variously in Chinese, Japanese, and English which had mysteriously been left at the front door of our home when I was in seventh grade; “This is a message from your future self; I return from living fifty thousand years rapturous in sky, to find you living in a box. Seize the heavens and be free.”

We had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and all things had become possible. So I wondered, what if we brought down all the other walls, beginning with my own?

So I took a wrong turn to the airport and bought a ticket to the other side of the earth. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia I found a bus station with a map that showed all the routes ending in the mountains, which were an enormous empty space along the spine of the Malay Peninsula. There I boarded the Bus to the Unknown, among the incense and purple smoke of the Ganesh temple across the street and I believe now with his blessing on my journey, and got off where the road ended in a dirt trail leading into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and began walking into an unmapped wilderness.

So began a journey from which I have never truly returned, a Great Trek across Asia which may be described with the words of Obi Wan to Luke Skywalker as “some damn fool idealistic crusade.”

Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.

Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.

What if we told students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance before his capture and imprisonment by Israel, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.

It may have begun in Mariupol when the horror was given form as I spent hours in utter darkness crawling through partially collapsed tunnels after an artillery shelling, through the bloody piles of entrails and savaged parts of the dead among echoes of the sounds of the dying whom I could not help; this bothered me not at all, being far from the worst I have survived, but I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when later I discovered what the Russian Army was doing with some of the children it had stolen.

These days its mostly the oracle of a disembodied head that bothers me, in the wake of my expedition to Beirut from September 23 to the second week of October; when a family searching for a missing child found only his head, Israel having erased the rest of him with their bombs. It feels like a pomegranate in your hands, such a tiny head, and I fear what its seeds may one day bear. In my dreams it tells me things, and I do not like the truths it speaks.

Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have long forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, disobedience, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.

Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?

Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another last stand, there is hope.

And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.

Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as wild things who are masterless and free.

As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”

To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.

Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;

“Cowards die many times before their deaths.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.”

Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.

Postscript and Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad

I wrote this as guidance in direct action and general principles of Resistance to tyranny in antifascist action and revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters here in America and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action which became a moving street fight in over fifty cities for several months with forces of repression including deniable assets of state repression of dissent including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and other white supremacist cadre, and their co conspirators and infiltration agents within the police, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent and the Black Lives Matter movement through state terror and learned helplessness.

We Antifa networks of alliance are the only forces to have defeated the federal government of the United States in open battle on its own ground since Little Bighorn, in actions following the watershed event in which the counter revolutionary forces of state terror, including the most brutal criminals from our prisons and the most elite special operations hunter killer teams from our military and police merged into a national terror force of Homeland Security, broke and ran from us. This resulted after two months more of fighting in the articles of surrender offered us by President Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, and recognition of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones ceded to the people from the United States.

Friends, the Fourth Reich can be victoriously Resisted and defeated.

A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

V For Vendetta (2005) Official Trailer “The time has come for you to live without fear”

V For Vendetta, Alan Moore, David Lloyd (Illustrator)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5805.V_for_Vendetta?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_14

Carnival Row

Julius Caesar, Oxford School Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, Harold Bloom (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13006.Julius_Caesar?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_13

Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope, Gabriel Marcel

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5320482-homo-viator?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_51

Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, Rebecca Solnit

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25330235-hope-in-the-dark?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=KEKWEfDQGc&rank=1

Jane Goodall on the Meaning of Wisdom and the Deepest Wellspring of Hope

The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, Jane Goodall, Douglas Carlton Abrams, Gail Hudson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56268863-the-book-of-hope?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_16

Hermann Hesse on Hope, the Difficult Art of Taking Responsibility, and the Wisdom of the Inner Voice

If The War Goes On: Reflections On War And Politics, Hermann Hesse

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1525484.If_The_War_Goes_On?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11987.The_Myth_of_Sisyphus_and_Other_Essays?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=lDicwix1Dx&rank=1

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2165.The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_23

The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51330.The_Trial_of_Socrates?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_10

Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, Nikos Kazantzakis

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74004.Friedrich_Nietzsche_on_the_Philosophy_of_Right_and_the_State?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_37

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/396931.The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=SZHkvWGtrc&rank=1

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq, Stephen King (Introduction)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58374.H_P_Lovecraft?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=yNFyzH7rmj&rank=11

Prison Notebooks: Volume I, by Antonio Gramsci, Joseph A. Buttigieg (Translator) Columbia University Press

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85942.Prison_Notebooks

Prison Notebooks, Volume 2: 1930-1932, by Antonio Gramsci, Joseph A. Buttigieg (Editor) Columbia University Press

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85937.Prison_Notebooks_Volume_2

November 6, 2024 0

November 5 2024 The Patriarchy Strikes Back

We watch tonight the origin of a new disaster as Trump’s primary message and Theatre of Cruelty as patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror overwhelm Kamala’s message of hope and unity in upholding our Constitution and the rule of law, as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil conquer the dream of America as a free society of equals and a diverse and inclusive future, and to me the cause of this second capture of the state by the Fourth Reich is horrifically clear; significant numbers of nonwhite men joined white supremacists in voting to secure and hold unequal power over women, the primary kind of power which they share as patriarchs.

Seizure of power from a system of oppression at least two thousand seven hundred years old as written in Ulysses in the Hanging of the Maids scene which inspired Margaret Atwood to write a reply in the Penelopiad, and possibly dating to the collapse of the civilization of the great goddess as researched by Maria Gimbutas

Four years ago today was born the Big Lie with which Traitor Trump has tried ever since to recapture our nation, a lie whose conspirators, enablers, and apologists largely remain free to operate in treason against America.

No more dishonorable crime exists, yet we have not purged our destroyers from among us. And now we are their captives.

For this we must bring a Reckoning.

So too with the Stolen Election of 2016, engineered by Putin to win a free hand for the invasion of Ukraine. And now Trump and Putin together intend to bring down NATO and the solidarity of nations against imperial conquest and dominion by enemies of democracy for whom only power is real, and to whom institutions of government are nothing but a stage for the Theatre of Cruelty. And Ukraine is only the most visible theatre of a Third World War, which we are now losing on the American Front.

And most especially for the treasonous and dishonorable attack on our capital in the January 6 Insurrection, and the three previous coup attempts using deniable assets like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to disrupt and capture the narrative of the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of violence, arson, looting, and other provocations coordinated with the state terror of Homeland Security’s secret army in the abduction torture, and murder of protestors.

For all of this, and as our democracy has now been captured for a second time by a fascist tyranny which intends the subversion and destruction of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and our universal human rights, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, let us refuse to submit to the force and control of authority, bring a Reckoning to the enemies of liberty, and Resist in solidarity of action as guarantors of each other’s rights and our common humanity.

All Resistance is War to the Knife, and for us this means that those who would enslave us and respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none.

For we have lost the strange game of our elections, apportioned not by one citizen one vote democracy but by a complex set of rules, gerrymandering, and an Electoral College designed by our nation’s founders to keep illiterate and unpropertied underclasses from seizing power from hegemonic elites, in a world where women were property with no rights beyond that of livestock, a world which Trump and the Republican Party intend to return us to.

The horror and terror of theocratic-patriarchal systems of unequal power and oppression is expressed by Sylvia Plath in her poem, Pursuit.

PURSUIT

By Sylvia Plath

Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit.

– Racine

There is a panther stalks me down:

One day I’ll have my death of him;

His greed has set the woods aflame,

He prowls more lordly than the sun.

Most soft, most suavely glides that step,

Advancing always at my back;

From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:

The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.

Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,

Haggard through the hot white noon.

Along red network of his veins

What fires run, what craving wakes?

Insatiate, he ransacks the land

Condemned by our ancestral fault,

Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;

Meat must glut his mouth’s raw wound.

Keen the rending teeth and sweet

The singeing fury of his fur;

His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar,

Doom consummates that appetite.

In the wake of this fierce cat,

Kindled like torches for his joy,

Charred and ravened women lie,

Become his starving body’s bait.

Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;

Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;

The black marauder, hauled by love

On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.

Behind snarled thickets of my eyes

Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush

Bright those claws that mar the flesh

And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.

His ardor snares me, lights the trees,

And I run flaring in my skin;

What lull, what cool can lap me in

When burns and brands that yellow gaze?

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,

To quench his thirst I squander blood;

He eats, and still his need seeks food,

Compels a total sacrifice.

His voice waylays me, spells a trance,

The gutted forest falls to ash;

Appalled by secret want, I rush

From such assault of radiance.

Entering the tower of my fears,

I shut my doors on that dark guilt,

I bolt the door, each door I bolt.

Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

The panther’s tread is on the stairs,

Coming up and up the stairs.

As I wrote in my post of November 5 2020, Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure; As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.

We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried three times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed, just as he modeled the January 6 Insurrection on the Beer Hall Putsch and failed.

We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.

Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.

As reported in Huffpost by Josephine Harvey covering Anderson Cooper; “CNN’s Anderson Cooper shocked viewers on Thursday with a particularly vicious take after President Donald Trump railed against the legitimacy of the democratic process, spread conspiracy theories and claimed victory despite still-uncertain election results in a remarkably dishonest speech to media.

“That is the president of the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over,” Cooper said following Trump’s Thursday evening press conference.

“He just hasn’t accepted it and he wants to take everybody down with him, including this country.”

And as written by Ed Mazza in Huffpost reporting on Stephen Colbert; “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert delivered a largely joke-free first half of his monologue on Thursday night to call out Republicans in the wake of President Donald Trump’s outrageous speech.

The president attacked the democratic process and declared, without evidence, that he won the election, despite the fact that votes were still being counted across multiple states. But Colbert said he wouldn’t show any clips of the speech.

“We’re not going to show you a second of what that sad, frightened fraud said tonight,” Colbert said. “Because it’s poison, and I like you. He can suck silence.”

Colbert then challenged Republican lawmakers who were standing by Trump and those who have remained silent: “Donald Trump is a fascist ― and when it comes to democracy versus fascism, I’m sorry, there are not fine people on both sides. So you need to choose: Donald Trump or the American people. This is the time to get off the Trump train ’cuz he just told you where the train is going, and it’s not a passenger train. He’ll load you on it someday, too.”

Colbert said it was not just votes being counted. Americans were also keeping score.

“They’re going to count who was willing to speak up against Donald Trump trying to kill democracy,” Colbert said. “And they’ll count who will stay silent in the face of this desperate attack on the bedrock institution of this truly great nation.”

As our Elections now close the jaws of tyranny on America and sabotage the Restoration of our liberty as a free society of equals, there is one paramount issue I ask us all to consider, Republican and Democrat alike, as we choose our future; no matter where you begin with divisions of exclusionary otherness, identitarian politics of nationalism, and authoritarian fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.

And to this we must always reply, Never Again!

The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17645.The_Penelopiad?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=WgOcC6yFWC&rank=1

The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe, Marija Gimbutas

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/921334.The_Civilization_of_the_Goddess?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=F9NV7L3Nbj&rank=6

Sylvia Plath, a reading list

Primary Sources

Ariel: The Restored Edition, by Sylvia Plath, Frieda Hughes (Foreword)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11625.Ariel?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ZdJjQOQq1B&rank=44

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6514.The_Bell_Jar?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=1xHMFFEIUN&rank=1

The Spoken Word, all 17 poetry readings for the BBC by Sylvia Plath

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, by Sylvia Plath, Karen V. Kukil (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11623.The_Unabridged_Journals_of_Sylvia_Plath?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ZdJjQOQq1B&rank=1

Critical and Biographical works and readings

Sylvia Plath Inside The Bell Jar BBC documentary

Meryl Streep reads Morning Song

Meryl Streep Reads “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath

Zoe Keating reads Mushrooms

Mushrooms: Cellist Zoë Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, by Judith Kroll

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31427.Chapters_in_a_Mythology?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=55VH217MZZ&rank=1

Sylvia Plath: A Critical Guide, by Tim Kendall

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31408.Sylvia_Plath?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=kwBFi0RMz1&rank=1

The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath, by Anita Helle

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31409.The_Unraveling_Archive?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=DiPxH2uTTk&rank=1

Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters, by Erica Wagner

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11638.Ariel_s_Gift?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=gFCAwa2pEN&rank=1

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48721389-red-comet?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=nCXQrnzdFo&rank=1

The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, by Heather Clark

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8217416-the-grief-of-influence

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, by Kate Moses

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210301.Wintering?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ljsaIHAz4W&rank=1

Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, by Julia Gordon-Bramer

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19302284-fixed-stars-govern-a-life?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ziooPisubT&rank=1

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, by Janet Malcolm

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/147371.The_Silent_Woman?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ZdJjQOQq1B&rank=6

These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath, by Gail Crowther, Peter K. Steinberg

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34415976-these-ghostly-archives?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ZdJjQOQq1B&rank=41

Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, by Susan R. Van Dyne

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31429.Revising_Life?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ZdJjQOQq1B&rank=59

A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, by Pamela J. Annas

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/392165.A_Disturbance_in_Mirrors?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ZdJjQOQq1B&rank=98

Sophie Esther’s analysis of the poem Daddy

https://takeitfromamadwoman.blogspot.com/

References on The Big Lie

Stephen Colbert After Trump’s Heartbreaking Thursday Night Lie Fest November 5 2020 /CBS

American Myths Are Made of White Grievance—and the Jan. 6 Big Lie Is Just the Latest – Mother Jones

American Myths Are Made of White Grievance—and the Jan. 6 Big Lie Is Just the Latest

The Big Lie Is a Reality

The Big Lie Is a Reality

The Big Money Behind the Big Lie | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie

A timeline of Donald Trump’s election denial claims / ABC News

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/timeline-donald-trumps-election-denial-claims-republican-politicians/story?id=89168408

The Psychology of Election Denial

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/178552

The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020, Jonathan Lemire

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60584133-the-big-lie?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hqSUQvdRsx&rank=1

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/05/donald-trump-is-the-show-over-election-presidency?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/06/president-donald-trump-temper-tantrum-meltdown

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anderson-cooper-obese-turtle-trump_n_5fa49996c5b67c3259acb1c1

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-steal-protests-republican-operatives-far-right_n_5fa4a744c5b6600956983a3e

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/05/politics/donald-trump-election-2020/index.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pennsylvania-pro-democracy-protests-maga-stop-the-steal_n_5fa4e433c5b6600956986df9

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/05/politics/fact-check-trump-speech-thursday-election-rigged-stolen/index.html

November 6, 2024 0

November 4 2024 The Stakes of the Game

Tomorrow America chooses between theocratic sexual terror, white supremacist terror, and enslavement and dehumanization in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil under a mad idiot tyrant of deranged perversions and nonsensical but deadly pronouncements on the one hand, between the Fall of American and the and the Restoration of America as a democracy and a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights of citizens, between Traitor Trump the Russian spy, Nazi revivalist, rapist, felon, and would-be tyrant and Kamala Harris, figure of Lady Liberty and champion of the people who in defying and challenging Trump and the Fourth Reich has placed her life in the balance with all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

Who do we want to be, we Americans, we human beings everywhere and through all of time and history; masters and slaves, or equal partners in a diverse and inclusive society?

We cast now the dice, and choose.

As I wrote in my post of November 4 2020, Where does freedom lie now?; America is held in the grip of despair and fear in this election, like Humpty Dumpty at the tipping point of a fall which may or may not shatter our hopes and dreams into loss and ruin; America rides the crest of a wave of liberation with joy and triumph as we enter a transformational state at the dawn of a new humankind.

We are all Schrödinger’s Cat now, waiting to discover which universe chance has brought us to as the votes are counted. It is a national trauma, this collective anxiety and existential threat, and our Clown of Terror and his deniable forces of white supremacist terrorists are using fear to attempt to steal another election.

One of my friends posted in some alarm that they were offered a safe house to escape racist violence. It is indeed hard to believe our nation has come this far to degradation and collapse.

One of the comments cut directly to the true issue at hand. “Our ancestors huddled in safe houses on their way to freedom. Where does freedom lie now? In our hearts.”

To this I give a twofold reply; one which reaches outward through our connections with others to extend human consciousness into our material world in coevolution, and one which reaches inward to our possibilities of human being, meaning, and value. As Monet said, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”

We strange beings are a synthesis of immanence and transcendence; of truths written in our flesh and those we must create, of the stories which shape us as memory and history over vast epochs of time like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, and of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.

Freedom indeed lives in the secret chambers of our hearts, a condition achieved when we refuse to submit to authority and to force, for in resistance we become unconquered. As the great philosopher Max Stirner said; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”

Freedom also lies with our solidarity, interdependence, and refusal to abandon our brothers, sisters, and others to authoritarian force and control. We must write, speak, teach, and organize to build a free society of equals.

If the forces of fascism and white supremacist terror are unleashed by the results of today’s election, they will find not an America driven into submission by learned helplessness and shattered by divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, but united in resistance against both the seduction and the state tyranny and terror of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.

A second Trump term will threaten everything from freedom of the press and gun safety to foreign policy and climate change. The impact will be felt in many aspects of American life and across the world. From abortion to immigration, this is what’s at stake

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/nov/03/if-trump-wins-the-election-these-11-issues-will-be-under-threat?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawGWFcFle

November 4, 2024 0

November 3 2024 Echoes of the 1920 Ocoee Massacre: Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror in Our Elections

Armed white supremacist terrorists in mock-military camouflage uniforms stand guard over our ballot drop offs in a campaign of vote suppression while assassins hunt our elected officials, as a plutocrat buys a yellow press in Twitter just in time to enable Trump to once more capture the state; welcome to America in the time of democracy’s greatest peril.

This was not in the mirror of remote history but two years ago, though the mechanics of totalitarian state terror and tyranny were codified by Trump’s idol Hitler long ago, and the social divisions exploited by both have been with us since Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar.

We are losing the battle for the soul of America and the future of humankind because we are playing a game by rules which no longer exist, as our opponents intend to subvert and destroy democracy as our terms of engagement.

Rules may be what make us the good guys, but good cannot win if evil has no rules but merely goals, and those of our subjugation to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and the centralization of power to authority and a carceral state of force and control.

Our institutions of government are designed to balance forces which are both committed to the ideals, values, and structures of democracy; but this system functions only when democracy and a free society of equals founded on freedom, equality, truth, and justice are goals common to all, when we share a definition of terms.

What today is true, just, equal, and free? Our political tribes no longer mean the same things when they speak of these values and ideals. We have lost democracy as a Forum of Athens when we can no longer debate how to be human together.

This is the true goal of the Republican Party, in our elections in two days as it was on November 8 2022 and generally since its capture by the Fourth Reich. And we must cede nothing to the enemy; no ground of struggle, no symbol, no history, no idea.

We must win our adversaries back to the debate as partners, for if we cannot democracy is lost and America fallen, and we devolve to an age of tyrants and centuries of war from which we humans may never emerge, if against all odds we survive.

We have an excellent example of the costs of failure in the anniversary of racist terror we remember today, the Ocoee Massacre. It is a future we must avoid at all costs.

So today I have two kinds of policy guidance to share with you as thesis and antithesis, for which we must find synthesis. First, who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none, and we must bring a Reckoning as war to the knife to those who would enslave us; and second, that we must avoid this fate and the Second Civil War and global civilizational collapse it will trigger by making democracy and our elections real, meaningful, just, and true.

God Bless America; we’re going to need it.

As I wrote in my post of November 3 2020, One Hundred Years of Racist Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror: Anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre; This election has seen attempts at vote suppression unknown in our lifetimes; Trumps mission to subvert democracy includes intimidation by calling for armed white supremacists to deny nonwhite citizens access to the polls, an attack on Biden’s campaign caravan by the Trump Train mobile terror force, failed assassination attempts against Biden and other political figures, sabotage of the postal system, politization of the Justice department, and his farcical declaration of victory before the vote is counted, among his many treasonous crimes.

Today liberty and tyranny play for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.

I spent some time today at a Trump rally trying to defuse a hate crime in the making. A hey rube went up that a rally staged in a parking lot between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery was becoming a violent mob; while others responded as a protection detail and placed themselves with great courage between potential perpetrators and their victims, I blended into the rally to assess and shape its development as an incubator of violence through dialog and negotiation.

Today these angry young men chose not to allow fear, rage, and hate to master and dehumanize them, nor provoke them into violence which would be the ruin of their lives; what will all of the other angry young men choose tomorrow?

I’d like to believe this incident is atypical and not being played out a thousand times over across America; but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Tyranny weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear as an instrument of subjugation. And fascism has a primary strategy of power and the manufacture of consent to be governed in claiming to speak and act in the name of those they would enslave; so also with the perpetration of atrocities and unforgiveable crimes against humanity which makes us complicit and creates walls of identity controlled by authority. This we must resist, but unless we speak directly to those fears we cannot heal the divisions of our society which authority has so skillfully manipulated.

In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.” Sadly, we humans have often chosen stones when words would serve us better.

In all the madness of this election and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of theocratic-fascist state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.

Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; in the main we are voting and not shooting, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.

Nor is there anything new in the threat to democracy of vote suppression; today is the one hundred year anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre, the most terrible incident of racist vote suppression in the history of our nation since the Civil War. What may give us hope now that failed us then is the emerging consensus of racial equality and the mass coalition for racial justice won for us by the Black Lives Matter movement and the heroic citizens who have seized the streets of our cities in an unparalleled months long mass action.

Regardless of the election results, anyone who wishes to actually govern must do so at the head of these protests and not barricaded against the will of the people. This is the true meaning of this years seizure of power by our citizens, and it is a genie which cannot be returned to the prison of its lamp, for each of us is now a Living Autonomous Zone.

As written by Harmeet Kaur for CNN; “On November 2, 1920, African American residents of Ocoee, Florida, went out to cast their ballots in the presidential election — no small task at the time.

In the decades since Reconstruction, Florida politics had been dominated by White Southern Democrats, who fought to preserve slavery in the 1850s and had since obstructed African Americans from exercising their constitutional rights through violence, intimidation and legislation.

But in the run-up to the 1920 election, Black people in Ocoee were registering to vote in droves — a reality that threatened the grip of white supremacy, wrote Paul Ortiz, a history professor at the University of Florida, in a 2010 essay.

“State and local officials — along with the Ku Klux Klan — understood that white supremacy was in trouble,” Ortiz wrote. “They responded mercilessly.”

In an attempt to prevent Black people from voting, a White mob in Ocoee killed dozens of African Americans, set fire to their houses and drove them out of the community.

It was “the single bloodiest day in modern American political history,” Ortiz wrote.

It stemmed from one Black man’s attempt to vote.”

“According to several histories of the massacre, it started when Moses Norman, a prominent Black landowner in the Ocoee community, turned up to the polls and attempted to cast his ballot.

Norman was turned away by poll workers who told him that he hadn’t properly registered or paid the poll tax, according to a 2014 article in the Florida Historical Quarterly. So he took the issue to a prominent Orlando lawyer and Republican Senate candidate, who advised that Norman return and demand he be allowed to exercise his right to vote.

Norman returned, with some reports indicating that he had a gun with him as he went up to the poll workers and others saying that White people found the gun in his car. Ultimately, he was again driven away by White residents and went to take refuge at the house of his friend July Perry, another prominent Black man in the community.

A White mob formed and set out to find Norman, eventually arriving at Perry’s home, where a group of African American residents had assembled. It’s unclear who fired first, but violence broke out, leaving two White men dead and Perry injured, the authors of the Florida Historical Quarterly article wrote.

After the initial gunfight, the mob called in reinforcements and came back with a vengeance.

More than 250 White people, among them members of the Ku Klux Klan, torched rows of houses where African Americans lived, and set fire to other community buildings. Perry was lynched in Orlando. It’s not clear how many African Americans were killed, though estimates range from about 30 to as many as 50.

Despite their efforts to fight back, nearly all of the African Americans in Ocoee were driven out of town and didn’t return to live there for decades.”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/02/us/ocoee-massacre-100th-anniversary-trnd/index.html

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele, Angela Y. Davis (Foreword)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34964998-when-they-call-you-a-terrorist?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=NJf3D0UIGr&rank=1

Say Their Names: How Black Lives Came to Matter in America, Curtis Bunn, Michael H. Cottman, Patrice Gaines, Nick Charles, Keith Harriston

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57007964-say-their-names?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jn8QBVgbpl&rank=2

How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40265832-how-to-be-an-antiracist

How We Fight White Supremacy, Akiba Solomon & Kenrya Rankin (Editors)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40697594-how-we-fight-white-supremacy?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=UxK5Mt3LMU&rank=1

November 3, 2024 0

November 2 2024 Native American Heritage Month and the Hidden Costs of Unequal Power in the Falsification and Erasure of History as Authorized Identities: Day of the Dead Part Two, Case of the Phantom Ancestor

In contemplation of the echoes of our past as multigenerational history and of our ancestors as ghosts who possess us, literally as our DNA and metaphorically as family stories, I find intriguing the effects of falsified and erased history on self-construal and the creation of identity.

We bear the shape of our stories as a prochronism, a history expressed in out form of how we have made choices in adaptation to change across vast epochs of time, under imposed conditions of struggle.

How if intrusive forces impose conditions of struggle which interfere with this process as assimilation, silence and erasure, or internalized oppression?

Three days remain before our elections, which will determine the course of human history and the fate of humankind as well as throw the switch between democracy and tyranny in America, a free society of equals or the endless prison of a theocratic patriarchal and white supremacist state of force and control wherein we are divided into masters and slaves, hierarchies of elite membership in hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege defined by authorized identities and fascisms of gender, blood, faith, and soil, and each of us musty answer which future we will choose.

Among the myriad interdependent and recursive systems of oppression from which we must liberate ourselves and one another through Resistance, seizures of power, and revolutionary struggle, the historical and social construction of race and its imposed conditions of struggle remains central to our identity and the question of who chooses who we are and may become.

Here I have a ready example in the case of a phantom Native American ancestor substituted for an erased African one as internalized oppression under conditions of survival and resistance to slavery.

November is Native American Heritage Month, a subject shaped by vast historical forces of conquest and resistance and the ambiguous and often violent relationships between indigenous peoples and European empires as a ground of struggle which authorizes identity, here I shall begin the questioning of my own historical identity as an example.

As Virginia Woolf teaches us; “If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”

As I wrote in my post of January 25 2021, The Search for Our Ancestors and a Useful Past: Family Histories as Narrative Constructions of Identity; One of the great riddles of history is untangling the knots of meaning, often shaped by erasures, silences, lies, and misdirections, which arise from the motives of our sources.

Today is my sister Erin’s birthday; I sent her a greeting which referenced some of the Defining Moments of her personal history as I remember them; “I remember our family’s discovery when you were in seventh grade that you were writing poems and stories in some of Tolkien’s invented languages, had puzzled out his sources and taught yourself a working knowledge of several ancient languages in order to write in them (Old Norse, Old Welsh, Gothic, and Old English), when you gave the Valedictorian Address for the International College at UC Santa Cruz as a graduate in Soviet Foreign Policy and Russian Language. and then became Pushkin Scholar at a Soviet University in Moscow, when Rolling Stone called your reporting on the Fall of the Soviet Union the best political writing in America, and when we celebrated your six hundredth publication. I have always been glad that in writing and the world of literature you have found your bliss.”

Among the messages which followed Erin posted a photograph which symbolizes her search for belonging, membership, and connection through the family history of our ancestors, a typically American quest for meaning as many of us share a trauma of historical abandonment and displacement, and pathologies of identity falsification and disconnectedness from relationships with families and communities, anchorages which in traditional societies nurture wellness and growth. These maladaptive disruptions and obfuscations often result from intentional breaks with the past as liberation on the part of new immigrants who wish to create themselves in no image but their own; but often they are legacies of denial, silencing, and erasure by authority as well.

Our family history claimed Cherokee as the identity of an ancestor who we recently discovered was not a Native American but African, and probably a slave of the Cherokee, the descendants of which the tribe refuses to recognize as tribal members. As the only nonwhite General in the Confederate Army was a Cherokee, this erasure of disturbing history and inconvenient truths is unsurprising; and authorized lies can become truths when there are no counternarratives.

The truths with which authority is uncomfortable are the ones which are crucial to seizures of power and liberation, and it is to the empty spaces in our narratives of identity, the voices of the silenced and the erased, and to stories which bear the scars of rewritten history, to which we must listen most closely.

The Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Mock Authority, Expose Authority, and Challenge Authority.

Erin has claimed Native American Cherokee as her racial and historical identity since childhood, enthralled with the story of an Indian great grandmother, studied traditional drumming and made pilgrimages to pow wows, learned to the point of obsession what vestiges of Cherokee language and culture she could find, and as an adult went to the tribal archives in search of our ancestor.

There she hit a wall of silence; no records of such a tribal member exist. Worse, no living speakers of Sa La Gi could be found; when asked where the native language speakers were, the curator of the tribal historical archive pointed to an old vinyl record which held the voices of the last known bearers of an extinct language. All was dust, lost on the Trail of Tears.

No crime against humanity can be more terrible than the erasure of an entire people and civilization, as the United States of America perpetrated against many indigenous peoples both on our continent and throughout the world as imperial conquest and colonial dominion. Like slavery with which it is interdependent and parallel, colonial imperialism is a central legacy of our history for which we have yet to bring a Reckoning.

Like many tribes and peoples, the Cherokee had been eaten by our systems of unequal power as human sacrifices, and had no truths or songs of becoming human to offer. Here was an unanswerable tragedy of loss of meaning and belonging, which finds echo in our modern pathology of disconnectedness.

Or was deliberate obfuscation; what didn’t they want known?

Like many Americans, Erin pursued our elusive history and ambiguous identity for decades through genealogical research and recently the Pandora’s Box of DNA testing, where she struck gold; her test revealed no discoverable Indian ancestry, but instead an intriguing African heritage. Near her fifth decade of life, suddenly she was no longer Native American and Cherokee, a discovery which must have been a life disruptive event, but one balanced with the gift of an unlooked-for membership and belonging.

More importantly as regards race and other constructions of identity, who decides? And what happens if those you claim do not in turn claim you?

Of Non-European DNA; 1.2% sub-Saharan Africa, including: .9% Ghana / Liberia / Ivory Coast / Sierra Leone and .3% Senegambian and Guinean. There is also an Islamic Diaspora component; .7% North Africa, including: .2% Egypt and Levant and .5% broadly West Asia and North Africa, and .5% Central and South Asia including: .2% North India and Pakistan and .3% South India and Sri Lanka. These probably represent two different lines of descent, occurring at between five and eight generations of separation respectively.

Who were these mysterious and wonderful ancestors, and where was the cherished Native American heritage? Like much of nature, DNA is tricky; each generation is a total randomization of information potential, so you can inherit traits from ancestors anywhere in your history back to the dawn of humankind, in virtually any proportion of traits from any combination thereof.

On average, you will have a quarter from each grandparent at two generations of separation, and if grandmother only passes on 20%, grandfather must pass on 30%. Sometimes gene sequences are not passed on, so its possible for a known ancestor to be unconfirmable by a DNA test, and for siblings to have differences. I look like our mother, of Austrian family with hazel eyes though sadly I did not inherit her glorious red hair; my sister looks like our father whose black hair fell in tight wringlets around his shoulders.

At seven generations distance you will probably inherit less than one percent from each of the 128 ancestors in that generation, or be undetectable; the percentages are 12.5 for great grandparents at the third generation from you, 6.25 at the fourth, 3.12 at the fifth, 1.56 at the sixth, and .78 at the seventh.

DNA tests from cousins can be used with a family tree to triangulate and identify which DNA components came from which ancestors; a female cousin from one of my father’s two brothers tests as 70% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 19% Ireland and Scotland, 6% Sweden, and 5% Norway. A male cousin from my father’s second brother tests as 1% Benin and Togo and 1% Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu peoples, an approximate match with my sister’s Sub Saharan Africa descent, the remainder being 47% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 32% Norway, 11% Ireland & Scotland, and 4% Sweden. My sister’s European DNA tests as 44.7% French & German, and why these are scientifically identical boggles the imagination, 24.8% British & Irish, 19.5% broadly northwestern European, .2% Scandinavian, and 5.8% southern European, which includes 3.1% Italian and 1.1% Spanish and Portuguese.

Illustrative of the vagaries of inheritance are the differing proportions among three first cousins, two of whom inherit nothing from a paternal grandmother shared by all three, whose family came from Genoa Italy after the Napoleonic Wars. They were still living in an enormous stilt house in Bayou La Teche built from their ship, guarded by ancient cannon, when my mother visited them in 1962.

But the best way to discover our origins is through family history, which can be consistent over great epochs of time. So we come to the origin story of the photograph and of my family in America, well documented as Kentucky and Revolutionary War history whose dates can be confirmed precisely by public records, of how a mixed and diverse community of Revolutionary War survivors came to be living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

A direct patrilineal ancestor of mine, Henry, had been captured along with much of his family in the June 21 1780 British assault on Ruddle’s Fort during Bird’s Invasion of Kentucky. One hundred fifty British Regulars of the 8th and 47th Regiments, Detroit Militia, and six cannon of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, with one thousand or more warriors from the Shawnee, Huron, Lenape, and other tribal allies of Britain, compelled the surrender of the fort by cannon fire and a guarantee of status as British prisoners of war offered by Bird, who when the gates were opened broke his word and loosed the native troops to sack the fort and take slaves.

Over two hundred pioneers were killed in the attack; the remains of twenty of them were later put in iron caskets specially made in Philadelphia and sealed in a cave by a descendant of one of my family’s survivors who had moved back near the site of Ruddle’s Fort, where they remain today. The inscription on the stone archway on a cliff overlooking the Licking River reads, “Please do not disturb the rest of the sleeping dead, A.D. 1845”. I have often wondered what was so terrifying about ones own family that they needed to be entombed in iron and sealed in a cave, and why they are called “the sleeping dead’.

Near the site of the burial chamber was The Cedars, a stone home rebuilt in 1825 at a cost of $40,000 by Charles Lair, a Ruddles Fort descendant using one of the many variants of our family name. The Cedars burned in 1930; it had fifteen rooms including six bedrooms and two kitchens, a drawing room with a carved mantel, dining room, library, and a hall with a staircase.

Henry and his brothers George Jr and Peter were listed among the 49 men of the Ruddle’s Fort garrison, and many had their families with them. Survivors were marched with those of other raided forts, four hundred seventy in all, to the heartland of the Shawnee nation in Ohio and to villages of their captors along the way, though Bird still had 300 prisoners with him when he reached his base at Fort Detroit, six hundred miles from Kentucky; some were then sent another 800 miles to Montreal. Britain did not release its prisoners until fifteen years after the war, and many never found their families again.

Henry was held as a slave and/or prisoner of war until he married into the tribe four years later, making him fully Shawnee under tribal law though he was by modern constructions of race an ethnic European. His story is interwoven with that of his childhood friend and neighbor Daniel Boone, and he was among those with whom Boone discovered a route through the Cumberland Gap and explored Kentucky. I like to imagine Henry as the hero in the film Last of the Mohicans, a fictionalization of the July 14 1776 abduction and subsequent rescue of Boone’s daughter Jemima and two daughters of Colonel Richard Callaway, Elizabeth and Frances, from Chief Hanging Maw of the Overhill Cherokee, leading a mixed band of Cherokee and Shawnee.

Henry joined George Washington’s army, possibly during the retreat from the Battle of Long Island in the fall of 1776, fought in the Battles of Trenton and Princeton that December, at Brandywine on September 11, 1777, and in the victory at the Second Battle of Saratoga on October 7 1777 which nearly ended the war and brought help from France.

Among the family members at Ruddle’s Fort were Henry’s two brothers. Peter, who was killed in action, his wife Mary who was captured with their two daughters, of whom Katarina was rescued in 1786 and another is mentioned as married and living in Sandwich Canada in an open letter written by Mary published in the Kentucky Gazette on April 7 1822 to their third child Peter, who vanished after the battle and whose fate is unknown. It reads in part; ”I was taken at Fort Licking commanded by Captain Ruddle, and was brought into upper Canada near Amherstburgh (Fort Malden) where I now live having been 16 years among the Indians. Your eldest sister is now living in Sandwich, but the youngest I could never hear of. Now, my dear son, I would be very glad to see you once more before I die, which I do not think will be long, as I am in a very bad state of health, and have been this great while. I am married to Mr Jacob Miracle (fellow captive from Ruddle’s Fort Jacob Markle) for whom you can enquire.” These are the words of a woman who had been coerced into marrying one of her captors by torture and had a son by him whom she raised with her youngest daughter by a husband who died defending her and their children from capture, two of whom had vanished in the cauldron of war and whose fates she never learned, though her youngest daughter was safe with George Jr’s family.

Also present were Henry’s second brother George Jr and his wife Margaret, who were captured and later freed, and their children Johnny, George III, Eva, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Johnny, 1776-1853, four years old when captured, was raised with Tecumseh and fought at his side as a British ally through the War of 1812. He married Mary Williams in 1799; they had eight children. Of Margaret we know only that she survived to marry Andrew Sinnolt in 1793. Eva, captured when 14 years old and taken to Canada, ran the gauntlet to win her freedom after six years of enslavement and two years later in 1788 married fellow Ruddles Fort survivor Casper Karsner.

Elizabeth Lale, 1752-1832, eldest of the children at 28, escaped from the Shawnee capitol city of Piqua on the Great Miami River in Ohio and survived a solo trek of hundreds of miles through the wilderness back to the colonies, then with Washington and Jefferson planned and guided General Clark with 970 soldiers in a raid which liberated many of the other prisoners of war held as slaves at the Battle of Piqua, August 8 1780. With her was Daniel Boone, who had also been held captive at Piqua by Blackfish, Great Chief of the Shawnee, between his capture at the Battle of Blue Licks on February 7, 1778 and his escape six months later in June. In 1783 Elizabeth married John Franks; they had two children.

And George III, 1773-1853, captured when seven years old, was taken in 1781 to a camp in Cape Girardeau Missouri, base of a Shawnee trade empire from which the entire Mississippi basin could be navigated, becoming the first white pioneer in the region, near the land which in 1793 was granted by Baron Carondelet to the Black Bob Band of the Hathawekela Shawnee.

Nearby was a Spanish land grant awarded to Andrew Summers for service in the Cape Girardeau Company of the Spanish-American Militia by Governor Lorimier, during a six week campaign in 1803. Andrew Summers had married Elizabeth Ruddle, daughter of Captain George Ruddle and granddaughter of Isaac Ruddle; Andrew and Elizabeth moved with their family to their land in Cape Girardeau after the War of 1812; later her father joined them, as did George Lale III and his wife Louisa Wolff. George and Louisa’s seven children were born there; the old Summers cemetery where George III is buried lies two miles SW of Jackson Missouri.

Many of my family who survived the Revolutionary War moved to Cape Girardeau where the families of George III Lale and Andrew Summers had established a community of pioneers and former slaves of Indians, apparently both African and European, and the Indians they had fought alongside and against, been captured by and intermarried with. In the end I think they understood each other better than those who had not survived the same collective trauma and shared history.

Our great grandmother Lilly Summers could claim direct patrilineal descent from the Summers family of Fairfax Virginia, descended from Sir George Summers, who commanded the Sea Venture, one of the ships which brought over the Jamestown colony in 1607, through the first settler in Alexandria, John Summers, who lived from 1687 to 1790 and had at the time of his death four generations of descendants, including some four hundred individuals. Lilly was equally descended from her mother, M.B. Croft who is listed as Dutch which probably means German, and her father John William Summers, of English lineage but designated as Cherokee in family records, which we now know is a fiction describing descent from a probable African slave of the Cherokee.

It is also possible that this ancestry came into the Summers line from fellow soldiers who served with them during the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, among them free Black militia companies which pre-existed the war, including slaves promised freedom and armed by Andrew Jackson as the first Black company of the American army, a former Spanish colonial Black militia with whom Andrew Summers had served alongside against France, and Major D’Aquin’s Battalion of Free Men of Color from Haiti who were elite professional revolutionaries and soldiers who had once been part of the French army. The origin of this DNA can be no nearer than Lilly’s paternal grandmother, at five generations separation from my sister and I.

Among the documents of my genealogy and family history research I have a daguerreotype from the 1840’s of Elizabeth Lale, named for her ferocious aunt, daughter of parents from opposing sides of the Revolutionary War, Me Shekin Ta Withe (White Painted Dove) of the Shawnee and Henry Lale.

Born in 1786, Elizabeth had four sisters and two brothers including my ancestor George Washington Lale, named for the future President with whom Henry crossed the Delaware, and whose battle cry at Trenton in 1776, Victory or Death, Henry adopted as our family motto on our coat of arms.

My sister and I are the fifth generation from Henry, and sixth from the original immigrant Hans George Lale who arrived with his family in Philadelphia in 1737 on the ship Samuel, sailing from Rotterdam.

As our family history and myth before coming to America is beyond the subject of my inquiry here, epigenetic trauma and harms of erasure and internalized oppression in the case of a phantom ancestor in the context of relations between indigenous and colonial peoples, I will question this in future essays.

Here are the generations of our family in America; my parents A.L. Lale and Meta (Austrian), Enoch Abraham Lale and Gertie Noce (Italian), Andrew Jackson Lale 1840-1912 and Lilly Summers, George Washington Lale 1790-1854 and Elizabeth Ross, Henry Lale 1754-1830 and White Painted Dove, and Hans George Lale 1703-1771 and Maria Rudes.

But its never as simple as that, each of us a link in a chain of being which encompasses the whole span of human history; migrations, wars, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Often our ideas of identity as nationality and ethnicity would have been incomprehensible to the people we claim membership with.

Take for example my family name; its original form is on Trajan’s Column in Rome, and Cicero wrote his great essay on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia, about an ancestor of mine; Gaius Laelius, whose political and military career as an ally of Scipio Africanus spans the Iberian campaign of 210- 206 BC where he commanded the Roman fleet at New Carthage, the African campaign of 204-202 commanding the cavalry at Zama, enjoyed two terms as praetor of Sicily from 196 and was granted the province of Gaul about 190, and in 160 BC met the historian Polybius in Rome, becoming his eyewitness source for the Second Punic War in The Histories.

Here I signpost that all of us are connected with the lives of others across vast millennia of history, often in surprising ways. If I accounted my identity and ethnicity as where my ancestors immigrated to America from, I would be German and not Roman, but it would not be the whole truth. We lived in Bavaria for generations until 1586, when we were driven out as werewolves during the start of an eighty year witchburning craze; Martin Luther called us

Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon, which we adopted as a title. During this time we absorbed many of the pre Christian myths gathered as Grimms Fairytales, which was represented to me as a child as our family history. And still a half truth, as this tallies only my patrilineal descent, and nothing of the half of myself from my Austrian descended mother, whose stories I will tell another time.

As events become more remote in time and memory, the boundary between historical and mythopoeic truth becomes ambiguous, interdependent, and co-evolutionary with shared elements which reinforce each other. This is true for narratives of national identity as well as self-construction in the personal and family spheres, in which such processes may be studied in detail. Stories are a way of doing exactly thing; both creating and questioning identity.

Often with family history we are confronted with discontiguous realms of truth as self-representation and authorized identity, always a ground of struggle as a Rashomon Gate. Such stories are true in the sense that we are their expressions as living myths, but are these narratives we live within and which in turn inhabit us also history?

Who are we, we Lales?

Native American, yes, if to a lesser degree and from different sources than we had previously imagined as an authorized identity and historical construction, Shawnee rather than Cherokee and generations more distant.

Indian also in the sense of an ancestor from Mughal India over three hundred years ago, great grandmother of Henry the revolutionary, and that complex. Who this grand and mysterious ancestor and source of our Indian and Eqyptian-Levantine DNA was remains an open question, though she was literate in Persian and claimed to have once been a courtier of the Mughal princess and poet Zeb-un-Nissa which is another story. And in the place of the phantom Cherokee great grandmother, an African voice among the cacophony of multitudes sings of liberation.

In retrospect, that my father practiced Voodoo as the traditional family faith should have been an enormous clue to his ethnicity, Louisiana Creole of mixed European-African-Native American ancestry. He described himself as Cajun, which means French speaking and is a cultural and historical claim.

Of my father who is my link to this history of the founding of America as a reborn Rome with all of its shifting ideas of nationality and identity, who in this our Day of the Dead I honor among my ancestors, I say this; he was my high school English, Forensics, and Drama teacher, who taught me fencing and chess and took me to martial arts lessons from the age of nine, gave me a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in eighth grade which became a counter text to the Bible for me, and was an underground theatre director who collected luminaries like William S. Burroughs who told fabulous stories after dinner and Edward Albee whose plays he directed while I sat beside them as a child and listened with rapt attention to their conversations. He it was who taught me the principle of action; “Politics is the art of fear”. For one day he was arguably the greatest swordsman in the world, having defeated all the national champions at an international reclassification tournament, and went on to become a coach of Olympic fencers. He grew up fencing and playing the treasured family Stradivarius, and his favorite story from childhood was how he got his nickname, Gator Bait; grandpa used to tie a rope around his waist and throw him in the swamp to splash about and attract alligators to shoot. One story he never told but his friend from the Korean War did, was that they had escaped a North Korean POW camp with three others, one of whom died in the breakout, and the four survivors carried the dead soldier all the way back to South Korea. His last years were spent in seclusion flyfishing on a remote wilderness mining claim in Montana.

Before immigration to America, we were Bavarian, generally European, and originally Roman, unquestionably; along the way from Gaius Laelius and the conquest of Carthage to myself, our family once briefly ruled what is now France, Germany, Spain, and the British Isles, in the Gallic Empire of 260-274 A.D. As a university student influenced by classical studies I responded to questions about my historical identity, nationality, and ethnicity in this way; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.”

I did so once to the wife of a poetry professor, who immediately whipped out a notebook and thereupon began taking notes on our conversations; this was Anne Rice, who based her character of Mael in Queen of the Damned on me as I was in my junior year at university, over forty years ago now, before the summer of 1982 which fixed me on my life course as a hunter of fascists and a member of the Resistance.

Its always interesting to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we are transformed by their different angles of view; such changes and transforms of meaning are the primary field of study in history and literature as songs of identity and a primary ground of revolutionary struggle.

Anne Rice’s idea of Mael as the caretaker of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a comment of mine about the dead white men whose books created our culture for both good and ill during a discussion of the canon of literature; There are those who must be kept, and those from whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.

Who are we, we Americans, we humans?

Identity, history, memory, which includes changing constructions of race and nationality; these hinge on questions which often have no objective answers.

We are as we imagine ourselves to be; the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and the groups and historical legacies in which we claim membership, and who claim us in return.

Family history is always a personal myth of identity, though it may also be history. We bear within us thousands of other lives, in multiple states of time across vast gulfs of history, possessed by the ghosts of our ancestors literally as DNA and metaphorically as stories; we are legion.

As with all history, as narratives of authorized identities and in struggle against them as seizures of power, autonomy and self-ownership, and self-creation, a Rashomon Gate of relative and ambiguous truths, the most important question to ask of a story is this; whose story is this?

Last of the Mohicans film

https://ok.ru/video/967004064409

Henry Louis Gates Jr on the myth of the Indian ancestor in modern Black culture

https://www.theroot.com/high-cheekbones-and-straight-black-hair-1790878167

DESTRUCTION OF RUDDLE’S AND MARTIN’S FORTS

IN THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR

Click to access DestructionofRuddlesandMartinsFort.pdf

RUDDLES FORT AND THE BRITISH INVASION OF KENTUCKY

A talk to the Bourbon County Historical Society

https://www.frontierfolk.net/ramsha_research/beansite.html

The Kentucky Kidnappings and Death March: The Revolutionary War at Ruddell’s Fort and Martin’s Station, by Russell Mahan

Ruddell’s Fort Captives List

https://www.frontierfolk.net/ramsha_research/captivesite.html

Lale/Lail Family Ruddle’s Fort Survivors

https://www.frontierfolk.net/ramsha_research/Lail.html

The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America,

Stephen Warren

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17779133-the-worlds-the-shawnees-made?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=4mMU6pQevX&rank=14

Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870, Sami Lakomaki

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18723453-gathering-together?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=4mMU6pQevX&rank=26

Boone: A Biography, Robert Morgan

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097676.Boone?ref=rae_2

Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation,

Peter Cozzens

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49829876-tecumseh-and-the-prophet?ref=rae_5

The Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43758.The_Queen_of_the_Damned?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=HJO5km4XU7&rank=1

references on the origins of my family

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Laelius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Laelius_Sapiens

Laelius, on Friendship and the Dream of Scipio, by Marcus Tullius Cicero), J.G.F. Powell (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/400300.Laelius_on_Friendship_and_the_Dream_of_Scipio?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=6qAgid4JSl&rank=3

Gallic Empire: Separatism and Continuity in the North-Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, Ad 260-274

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15616858-gallic-empire

On Fairytales As Our Origin Stories, a reading list

Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version, Philip Pullman

(Editor), Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13554713-fairy-tales-from-the-brothers-grimm?ref=rae_8

The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Maria Tatar, A.S. Byatt (Introduction)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8437687-the-grimm-reader?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=QXia3DawcW&rank=277

Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales, Valerie Paradiž

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/110745.Clever_Maids?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=QXia3DawcW&rank=97

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, Marina Warner

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/365940.From_the_Beast_to_the_Blonde

Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye, Madonna Kolbenschlag

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/291163.Kiss_Sleeping_Beauty_Good_Bye?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_56

The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/110746.The_Hard_Facts_of_the_Grimms_Fairy_Tales?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hcP3XOsHis&rank=1

Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale, Betsy Hearne

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/402049.Beauty_and_the_Beast?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_72

Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale, Catherine Orenstein

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/114476.Little_Red_Riding_Hood_Uncloaked?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_89

The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters,

Maria Tatar

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51579341-the-fairest-of-them-all

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tales, Marina Warner

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21920805-once-upon-a-time?ref=rae_17

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/444388.The_Uses_of_Enchantment?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_84

Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Marie-Louise von Franz

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1269427.Shadow_and_Evil_in_Fairy_Tales?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_54

Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales,

Ruth B. Bottigheimer

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/542773.Grimms_Bad_Girls_and_Bold_Boys?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=QXia3DawcW&rank=131

November 2, 2024 0

November 1 2024 Dia de los Muertos: In Honor of Our Ancestors

Here in our celebration of the Day of the Dead my hopes and fears for the future of humankind become manifest and dance with us in the streets, and speak to us in our dreams of secrets and the silences of our history.

I hope we are at the beginnings of our story of becoming human, and not at its end. I fear that our historical legacies may become traps, falsifications, assimilative and colonizing narratives wherein tyrannies of authorized identities may steal our souls. This is the problem of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen; we are lost in a world of distorted images, captured echoes, fragmented identities, and dangerous illusions.

Divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, including those of race, gender, class, nationality, faith, and the tyranny of history, not only subjugate us to authority through the pathology of our disconnectedness from others but also alienate us from ourselves.

Authorized identities, rewritten histories, and the performance of our honored ancestors as subversions of imposed orders of being and meaning work like the discontiguous timelines of alternate histories and realities; there are myriads of such universes, and they are all right here, layered one within another. Here is a ground of struggle between falsification and autonomy, subjugation and liberation. What has always interested me are the interfaces and boundaries between them as belief systems, and the possibilities of unknown silences and empty spaces.

As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.

This is one of the true purposes and functions of our celebration of our ancestors; seizure of power as reclaiming our histories. With this is its interdependent and parallel praxis of social action; emergence from the legacies of our history as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma, among these harms being racism, patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism.

Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight.

We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, our identities shaped by memory and history and the echoes and reflections of our ancestors. Disrupt or falsify this continuance and we become unmoored from our anchorages and set adrift; while this can be used intentionally to seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, it can also be used by others as an instrument of conquest and subjugation.

As examples we may look to the Pandemic and the generalized and overwhelming fear it unleashed, when weaponized by elite interests as a tool of division, repression, erasure, and colonization as in our border with Mexico which weaponizes disparity to create a vast underclass of exploitable labor, or one of fascism and tyranny as in America, as used by Trump and the amoral plutocracy of a theocratic, patriarchal, white supremacist, kleptocratic, and totalitarian police state he represents against humankind to centralize wealth and power.

The first day of the Dia de los Muertos festival is sacred to all children as holy innocents, whose lives are seeds like the dragon’s teeth sown by the Phoenician prince Cadmus in the earth from which warriors arise, and may bear forward and realize our dreams of liberation struggle against regimes of unequal power. Herein I honor as I have for far too many years now the migrant children stolen from their parents by order of Traitor Trump for his unspeakable perversions and those of his Epstein circle and still missing; now also do I remember the children of Ukraine abducted into slavery and torture brothels by the Russian military and the Butterfly Collectors syndicate, and the mass murder of Palestinian children in Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide ongoing in Gaza.

We grieve, but in this public ritual of grieving let us hold fast in solidarity to the purpose of remembrance and witness. For the dead and the past we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the future that must be redeemed.

The world does not need our grief; the world needs our solidarity of action.

As I wrote to Kamala Harris on the occasion of her visit to the concentration camps we maintain at our border as instruments of racist state terror;

Dear Vice President Harris,

As long as you’re going to look into the faces of our victims, whose nations we have devastated economically, ecologically, and politically and left in the wake of our greed as a shattered postapocalyptic region of blighted doom, then left abandoned to the mercies of a Mexico whose government is powerless before its criminal syndicates, you might as well end our program of genocide and enslavement, tear down the Wall, disarm and repurpose the Border Patrol to provide humanitarian aid and help refugees reach the safety of our shores, rebuild democracy, the sacrosanct rights of humankind, the inviolability of unionized labor, and the material basis of wealth in the ecologies of the Dry Corridor of Central America, enact citizenship by declaration, and restore to our nation our heart.

Very Truly Yours, Jay Lale

To this I received no reply.

We are all of us engaged in the great struggle of our time between authority and autonomy, waged in the streets and in our hearts, which will define what is human and either dehumanize and enslave us or liberate the infinite possibilities of becoming human.

Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Authority will use lies and illusions to deceive us, but their true motives cannot survive exposure, nor their legitimacy survive disbelief, nor their power withstand disobedience.

On this and every day let us remember who we truly are, dance the ghosts of those who made us possible and helped create us as informing, motivating, and shaping forces, recite and perform their stories, and renegotiate the boundaries of human being, meaning, and value which they offer us.

LA MARTINIANA | Canción de día de Muertos

‘See death in a different way’: The history of Day of the Dead and how to celebrate this year

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/celebrity/see-death-in-a-different-way-the-history-of-day-of-the-dead-and-how-to-celebrate-this-year/ar-AA1j9mmn

Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond, Stanley Brandes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/593535.Skulls_to_the_Living_Bread_to_the_Dead?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=rtUbJid3Nh&rank=93

This Party’s Dead: Grief, Joy and Spilled Rum at the World’s Death Festivals,

Erica Buist

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56230790-this-party-s-dead?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Uu36i4APS2&rank=1

Tales of the Plumed Serpent: Aztec, Inca and Mayan Myths, Diana Ferguson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/273934.Tales_of_the_Plumed_Serpent?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=bDNiA8KsxM&rank=1

Mesoamerican Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs of Mexico and Central America, Kay Almere Read, Jason J. Gonzalez

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/895450.Mesoamerican_Mythology?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=CyFrvKTtY6&rank=5

November 2, 2024 0

October 31 2024 A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression: Halloween

On this Halloween let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the four primary duties of a citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, our society, and the systems and structures of our civilization.

Let us bring the Chaos.

What will you be for Halloween? For the rest of your life? If we can dance our true and secret selves before the stage of the world on this night, why not every night?

Celebrate with me Halloween as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of hierarchies and systems of force and control, and the violation of norms.

Normal doesn’t live here anymore.

Norm, not our old family retainer and master of curious devices but a literary figure of my invention here representing normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, is downstairs in the game room tied to an electric chair from the old McKay Carnival I call the Throne of the Sublime, because it is a forge of making angels, though wrathful ones. And it is possessed by the monstrous and deranged souls it has unleashed as an instrument of the Law and the carceral regime of torture and the repression of dissent which it symbolizes, and from which it was liberated decades ago by an Industrial Workers of the World direct action team in a raid on a prison.

Once this was an instrument of state terror, the ultimate resort of institutions of power empty of legitimacy and with only force and violence to control, silence, and erase all who refuse to submit and all Others who are excluded from circles of the elite and the god-authorized Elect, but now serves different purposes in seizures of power and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, set free in exaltation, rapture, and vision, as we are sublimed in the electric arclight of captured bolts from the heavens.

As a carnival game it was converted from terror to joy and from pain to ecstasy as an erotic electro-stimulation device, much like the reference to the game of Gentlemen, Start Your Engines in Neil Gaiman’s telenovela Lucifer, season 2 episode 11.

Is any of this story true? Maybe, maybe not. The dialectics of revolutionary struggle and state tyranny and terror in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force are a Schrodinger’s Cat problem wherein many things are both true and false at once, as Rashomon Gate Events of ambiguous and relative truths.

Such questions we must ask America, who like our ideas of what is normal is now being transformed in the crucible of our darkness and the consequences of the January 6 Insurrection in America and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, both now nightmare realms of derelict antiquities from whose historical shadows of authorized identities we must emerge.

This year I am costumed as an Israeli soldier spattered with the blood of numberless innocents who have been butchered with aberrant glee in Palestine for over a year now, where American tax dollars buy the deaths of children and of our civilization. No more terrible and horrific figure of the limits of the human exits than this, the Israeli enforcer of tyranny and state terror authorized to commit genocide by a monstrous god of theocratic violence and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil as imperial conquest and dominion, nor that of his American co-conspirators in crimes against humanity.

I find it illuminating how the meaning of our monsters changes with the context of their signs; today I wore this costume of protest against cruelty and dehumanization to a neighborhood barbeque, like the Red Death at the Masque in Poe’s story, drawn by the music to a backyard full of Trump signs and men adorned with guns as preposterous masculine jewelry, and everyone ran away, even the bikers. I congratulate you, O Israel; if you intended to become a symbol of terror and horror, you have succeeded.

The seduction of power as security is something I understand all too well; but security is an illusion. And it comes with a price.

Some things, however, are certain and unavoidable; first among them the violence of the birth of new possibilities of becoming human and the agony of liberating ourselves from divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As Trotsky teaches us, the violence of the slave master cannot be compared to the violence of the slave in breaking his chains.

And the second? Normality is deviant. Normal is half our nation voting for treason, subjugation to Russia, theocracy, patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and the subversion of our Constitution and the values of the Enlightenment on which it is founded.

To fascist tyranny and theocratic terror let us say with the glorious rebel Ahab in Moby Dick; “To the end I will grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I stab at thee, I spit my last breath at thee.”

Let us run amok and be ungovernable.

As I wrote in my post of November 25 2020, Using Chaos and Transgression as Revolutionary Acts to Transform Law and Order Into Liberty and Equality; I am against law and order because law serves power and order appropriates and divides us into hierarchies of elite power and categories of exclusionary otherness, whereas chaos autonomizes and empowers and transgression and the violation of norms and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty liberates and seizes power.

Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. Law serves power, and there is no just Authority.

Rejoice with me in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us dance our best and secret selves on the stage of the world, forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves and transform the systems and structures of oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.

Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.

As I wrote in my post of October 25 2024, A Hymn to Chaos; Tonight a window opens beyond our universe, letting angels through, or devils; and I welcome them both, figures of the twin sides of our nature and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, forces trapped within our flesh in titanic struggle or truths written in our flesh as transformative harmony.

Herein is a liminal time in which we may shape ourselves anew, reimagine our lives and grow beyond the boundaries and limits of our horizon, explore unknowns in the unclaimed empty spaces of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value marked Here Be Dragons, discover new Best Selves and be reborn, become enraptured and exalted beyond ourselves as we ascend through the gaps of the heavens to embrace the wonder and terror of our total freedom in a universe bound by no Law and without any being, meaning, or value other than our own which we ourselves create.

On Halloween night in 2020 I put a curse on Donald Trump and all who voted for him in that election after four years of subversion of democracy and sabotage of America as a Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, robber baron capitalism and ecological disaster which may include the extinction of humankind for the ephemeral profit of elites, tyranny and state terror in the brutal and criminal police repression of the Black Lives Matter protests, and a relentless multifront campaign against our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and the institutions which serve them including a secular state, an independent and impartial judiciary, and a press free from propaganda and disinformation, especially that of authorities and their carceral states of force and control, free from hate speech, conspiracy theories, rewritten histories, alternate realities; an open public forum of debate free from identitarian politics as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and of fear and division weaponized in service to power, and an education system which produces citizens rather than slaves as a precondition of democracy.

Curses and wishes give form and direction to vast imaginal forces of poetic vision as reimagination and transformation, and may change the balance of power in the world and the fate of humankind as an unfolding of our intention and the will to become. This one has been reasonably successful from my point of view; presaging the Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency and the exposure and purging of our betrayers from among us in the largest manhunt in our nation’s history as we bring a Reckoning to the fascist infiltrators of the January 6 Insurrection and their financiers, apologists, and puppetmasters, and to all those who would enslave us.

This year as I did last, and on every Halloween to come, for evermore, I shall perform the rituals of Cursing the Tyrants and the Casting Out of the Unclean Fascists that it may become final and eternal, propagating outwards into infinity as a wave of change and gathering force as it grows, like revolutionary struggle unstoppable as the tides; but I will balance it as well with wishes of blessing, protection, and good luck for all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and those champions who stand with them in solidarity and for a free society of equals.

In this moment, with half the tens of thousands dead in Gaza and throughout Palestine being women and children as well as civilians helpless before the bombs of vengeance as blood sacrifices to fear, rage, and hate, I know who my people are, and with whom I stand even if it is only to die with them.

I will be sixty five years old in a couple weeks, and have been fighting throughout the world and in Palestine and Lebanon since the summer of 1982, and I must question how many more fights I have left in me, especially ones which cannot be won. Far too many such lost causes and forlorn hopes, yet I cannot leave Last Stands unfought. I intend to go down fighting; when you’re all that stands between a people and genocide, between resistance and dehumanization, between liberty and slavery, there is no mustering out.

No one should have to die alone, abandoned and erased from history by a fallen civilization for whom our universal human rights and solidarity as each other’s guarantors of our humanity no longer has meaning or value.

No Band of Brothers, we, but complicit in all evils we do not oppose or remain silent in witness of; especially we Americans whose taxes purchased the bombs of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Herein I claim both the peoples of Palestine and of Israel, versus the theocratic tyrants and terrorists on both sides who seek to subjugate them through fascist divisions of blood, faith, and soil and through fear weaponized in service to power. For the alt-right regime of Netanyahu has conspired with elements of Hamas in the October 7 attack for two purposes; first to stop the growing interdependence and mutual aid of the anticolonial Palestinian Independence movement with the Israeli democracy and peace movements which threatens authority in both Gaza and Israel and may yet emerge as a united and nonsectarian democracy, second to create a casus belli for Netanyahu’s conquest of the region including areas of Lebanon and Syria as a Second War of Independence, and third to delegitimize democracy as a guarantor of universal human rights by making its guarantor states complicit in unforgiveable war crimes in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians by America’s client state of Israel.

If America sends military aid to Israel rather than humanitarian aid to Palestine, the enemy regimes of Netanyahu and Hamas win, and the peoples of both states and our own lose.

To refuse to submit is to become Unconquered, and this is a victory and a kind of power which cannot be taken from us, and through which we may find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.

How do we create ourselves anew and emerge from the legacies of our histories?

As I wrote in my post of May 28 2023, The True and False Crows: a Fable; A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.

As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes.; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”

It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.

All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”

Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.

Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies.

To this my sister replied, Such poetry!

This is as direct as I can be, o my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly as my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true identity, inscribe this therein.

I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.

What is important is to refuse to submit.

And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”

In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.

He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.

As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”

I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”

Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.

With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did last spring in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.

In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and claim our truths, and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.

Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.

My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.

We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling; plus it contains a marvelous re-enactment of the myth of Persephone.

Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

My friends, please feel free to perform and enact this spell with me; A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression:

I invoke Chaos, freedom, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human against Order, Authority, and the boundaries of the Forbidden.

I perform acts of transgression by which to break the chains of law and illusion woven by those who would enslave us, to seize our power and our autonomy from hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, from authorized identities and divisions of exclusionary otherness, to create myself in the image of my own imagination and no other, and to shape human being, meaning, and value to the forms of my desires.

In this time of the turning of the tides I refuse and resist subjugation by force and control, I become Unconquered and free, I run amok and am ungovernable, and to Authority I reply with the Four Sacred Acts in pursuit of Liberty and Truth; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

By these invocations of Chaos and Transgression (Herein be free to make wishes, and to consecrate acts of defiance of tyranny, disruptions and subversions of good order and discipline, violations of normality, seizures of power, and celebrations of autonomy and living beyond all limits in the glorious embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves) I curse all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, patriarchy, state terror and tyranny, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and inequalities of power.

On this night of the renewal of the world in which the old order is consumed in fire and the spirit world moves among us and is unified with our own in its reimagination and transformation, I name to my brothers and sisters of Chaos these enemies of humankind as rightful prey; first, upon all tyrants and their forces of repression of dissent and enforcement of the Law, for order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just authority; second upon Donald Trump (herein please feel free to name tyrants whom you oppose and seek to cast down from their thrones; mine include Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others) and all who serve and support him and the cause of fascism, and all those who in voting for him in the Presidential election of November 3 2020 and in this coming election of November 5 2024 have signed the confession of their treason and allegiance to white supremacist terror, Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, and to the tyranny and terror of a police state.

So upon Trump, his puppetmaster Vladimir Putin, and all who claim him as their own do I place my curse and invoke ruin upon their fortunes and their lives and destruction upon their cause. May they be forgotten and become nothing.

This I balance with equal blessing, protection, and good luck upon the lives, fortunes, and causes of liberty and equality upon all who are powerless and dispossessed, marginalized by exclusionary otherness, falsified, commodified, dehumanized, silenced and erased, and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity as champions and bearers of the Torch of Liberty and a free society of equals.

Tonight our wildness will eat the moon and set it free.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 2 Episode 6 Halloween

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5valfb

Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling

Lucifer, Season 2 episode 11

A Crow Confronts His Image

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10160502756145941&set=gm.3446505235624849&idorvanity=1464145827194143

Ring of Power: Symbols and Themes Love Vs. Power in Wagner’s Ring Circle and in Us: A Jungian-Feminist Perspective, Jean Shinoda Bolen

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/451808.Ring_of_Power?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_13

Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/touchyfeelingsmaliciousobjects/Kristevapowersofhorrorabjection.pdf

Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/266034.Miracle_of_the_Rose?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=GYwP2xLhA8&rank=1

The Music of the Night – Gerard Butler | Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera Soundtrack

Masquerade scene – 2004 Film The Phantom of the Opera

Camille Saint-Saëns – Danse Macabre – Sefa Emre İlikli

The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66933.The_Wretched_of_the_Earth?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=b7giOEuckM&rank=1

The Beast proclaims a Second Holocaust: Netanyahu declares a ‘second war of independence’ as fears for Gazans grow

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/28/netanyahu-declares-a-second-war-of-independence-as-fears-for-gazans-grow

Final Thoughts

Bury me at sea, for I belong to the world

Send me out in flames, for this is how I have lived

Not silent but incandescent in the night

An agent of change and illumination, like fire itself

October 31, 2024 0

October 30 2024 On This Kali Puja, A Song in Celebration of Death

I sing of the goddess of Death and Rebirth, Transformation, Magic, Chaos, Darkness and Dreams, Battle and seizures of power as Liberation, twin of my demon lover Desire who define each other as negative spaces and inhabit our bodies as forces and instincts and the endless chasms of our souls as archetypes, myths, symbols, metaphors and allegories of the oceanic vastness of the unconscious.

Myriads of such primal forces exalt us beyond ourselves as motivating, informing, and shaping sources which arise from and dwell within the collective unconscious of humankind as transpersonal interconnectedness, an immense component of ourselves and our personae which float upon its surface like flotsam on a vast sea of being.

Our greater being lives not within the surfaces of our forms and the flags of our skin, but as networks of consciousness and abstract information distributed throughout the universe beyond the gates of Time. Our universe is a system of signs, and we among the dreams of the Infinite.

We are illusions, transitory and ephemeral, stories, histories, memories, always in motion as processes of change, which arise from our true ground of being and to which we will one day return.

Death is a terrible destroyer but also a liberator, who frees us from the limits of our flesh.

Our celebration of Kali, in 2024 from October 30 through November 2, occurs during the five days of Diwali, the Festival of Lights wherein we celebrate the triumph of hope over fear, love over hate, and faith in each other as solidarity over division.

Diwali is a celebration rooted in the founding myth and epic of India, the Ramayana, of the liberation of humankind from the tyranny of our demons as the victory of Rama and Hanuman, man and his animal nature, over the demon king Ravanna, to reclaim his wife or female half Sita, an allegory of unitary wholeness and the birth of consciousness from the realm of dreams as well as of the emergence of the human from the animal, and an underworld journey which finds echoes in the myth of Orpheus and in Dante’s quest to free Beatrice in The Divine Comedy.

Herein goddesses as archetypal figures regulate ritual enactments and processes of transformation and act as gatekeepers and guides through the labyrinth.

The third day of the Festival of Light honors Lakshmi, who appears as the figure of Fortune in our tarot cards, goddess of random chance, wealth, and fate whom we invoke as Lady Luck in gambling, games of probabilities, and actions involving risk.

In honor of Lady Luck and the Liberation of Humankind through unification with our animal nature in this Festival of Lights, I offer you a game of chance and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; for which you will need only a six sided dice, pen, and paper.

Write down six characters as identities you would like to perform, from literature or film; these may be three male and three female roles as is traditional but need not be so unless you wish it. Then cast the dice to discover which of them you will live as for the day. No matter who you perform today, you have five other selves in reserve, and tomorrow is another day, in which we may wear a different mask.

As to whose voice I hear in my head when I write, and characters on whom I model my performance of myself, that would be Patrick Stewart’s Jean Luc Picard and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes.

Happy festival of hope, chance, and liberation, and may you find joy in the discovery of your best self.

But with the sunset all this is changed, for the night belongs to Kali.

The third night of Diwali becomes Kali festival with the moonrise, and through the day which follows; herein we celebrate the goddess of death, time, darkness, magic, sex, rebirth, and transformation; a warrior protectress of all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth. We place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, with all who are outcasts as their allies and champions. As a figure of liberation and empowered femininity she has many guises; Liberty herself in New York Harbor among them, a guardian shared by both America and India as an archetype of revolutionary and anticolonial struggle against a common historical enemy, the British Empire.

Her warrior brotherhood fought the British Raj with ferocious tenacity and guile, pervasive now throughout the Indian diaspora as a secret society of guardians of the powerless very like the chasseurs of Haitian Voodoo, and interdependent with the cult of the Rakshasas or were tigers / lions whose founding progenitor she rides into battle.

Herein I write as a member of the Kali Aghora or Brotherhood, which in Hinduism is unusual in its total rejection of caste, having studied with a priestess of Kali.

In balance with this aspect of Time as Death is that of Desire; shakti or life force and transformative rebirth, for Kali is central to the arts of Tantra, especially as transgression of the Boundaries of the Forbidden, violations of normality, the embrace of the monstrous, and the pursuit of truths of ourselves immanent in nature and written in our flesh.

Both of her forms as Death and Desire represent unlimited feminine power free of any patriarchal systems of oppression, though in Shiva whose dance creates the universe she does have a male partner, especially in his form as Bhairava. For those like myself who invite possession as an avatar of the Bhairav during Kali Puga or as battle magic, I have some thoughts on death and desire, the wildness of ourselves and the wildness of nature, truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature, and the embrace of our monstrosity.

Herein I offer you a song in celebration of Death and an invocation of its power of reimagination and transformation, part of the great rite with which I honor the destruction and recreation of the universe each year. It is a ritual which reflects the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Chod, the offering of one’s body as a sacrifice to our demons as the legacies of history which falsify and enslave us but once seized as our own instruments of self creation can also free us from the ideas of others to reclaim our true selves as exaltation, and the atavisms of instinct and degradation which once embraced as ours can reveal truths written in our flesh as illumination and rapture, and embodies Death as a kind of tulpa in a form of immortality magic as described by Oscar Wilde in his anarchist codex of liberation from authorized identities, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Each of us has our own

Angel of death

As a secret partner,

Negative spaces of each other

Which define the limits of our form

The boundaries of which are interfaces

Liminal realms of being

Filled with powers of reimagination and transformation;

Unknowns among the limitless possibilities

Of becoming human

places marked Here Be Dragons

on our maps of being, meaning and value

Here is the world where I live,

Among the Dragons,

In the unknown spaces

Of our topologies of becoming human,

Beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden

And the tyranny of normality

Here is the rapture and terror of the Infinite;

that which defiles and exalts us

beyond the limits of ourselves

Death has been my partner in this dance for so long now

you’d think we would be on better terms,

But Death is a rough lover

To whom our flesh is a sacrifice

That our dreams and wishes may take flight

And become real, eternal, and true.

As I wrote in my post of June 1 2021, Death is a Secret Twin; Death is a secret twin which shares our face but not our dreams which lift and exalt us beyond the limits of our flesh, so Death must steal the echoes and reflections of ours, a thing of shadows filled with secret histories, unspoken truths, unsworn oaths, thousands of myriads of loyalties to private loves and desires betrayed by our failures to make them live and become real by action.

Death is the terror of all that we may have been but did not become, the loss of our disconnectedness and the emptiness of meaning in a world where love cannot redeem us, the grief for beauty which loses context when it is no longer shared and is lost with the fragments of memories which like the genie of perfume escape their bottle to trigger moments out of time and then evanesce like the ghost of a beloved hand which no longer grasps ours back.

We are tattered and broken things, our secret shadows and ourselves, who live in the incandescent now with these repositories of our beautiful dreams and our terrible nightmares, bearing them on into eternity; for this is the great secret of being, that our best selves are formed of all we would deny and keep hidden, and which live beyond us as figures of our glorious sins.

Death is an ambush predator made of our histories, memories, and identities, which must steal these things to become real in the moment of our awakening into its realm of beautiful and terrible dreams, a realm of true being beyond the illusions of our lives which bears names including the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism and the alam al mythal in Islam, called by Coleridge the Primary Imagination, the Logos in neo-Platonic philosophy and the Gospel of John, and by Jung the Collective Unconscious, and waits to seize us unawares and carry us off to eternity while it replaces us like a faery changeling with the image of our unrealized hopes and unexpressed desires.

Death is a unique and personal demon created by our denial of ourselves, such denial acting as a parasite which destroys its host and operates through a process of falsification like the distorted and captured images in a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, but it can become instead a symbiote, a terrible and monstrous guardian spirit and a guide of the soul which speaks from within our greatest darkness with Forbidden wisdom, like a remora borne by a shark on its journeys through chasms of the unknown not as its nemesis and conqueror but as a servant which grooms from us that which we must cast down from the thrones of our hearts; we humans and our silent and unseen partners the angels of our deaths whom we must wrestle not for victory, for everything in life is more powerful than we are, but to become Unconquered in resistance and free.

Thus may we bear without breaking the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, become greater and more real and alive than we were born, transcend the limits of our form, and become sublimed as figures of our truths in Sartrean total freedom and authenticity as an art of life, for all true art defiles and exalts.

Here is a faith which asks us to renounce nothing and embrace our true selves, to reimagine and transform ourselves; and offers a path of working with grief process and death transcendence not of control of our passions and dominion of nature, but as seizure of power and autonomy, of the embrace and celebration of our wildness as beings of nature and of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.

Let us embrace our monstrosity and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.

As I wrote in reflection on my mother’s death, now years ago; Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.

To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?

Hindi

12 नवंबर 2024 इस काली पूजा पर, मृत्यु के जश्न में एक गीत

मैं मृत्यु और पुनर्जन्म, परिवर्तन, जादू, अराजकता, अंधेरे और सपने, लड़ाई और मुक्ति के रूप में शक्ति की जब्ती की देवी के बारे में गाता हूं, जो मेरे दानव प्रेमी इच्छा के जुड़वां हैं जो एक दूसरे को नकारात्मक स्थानों के रूप में परिभाषित करते हैं और हमारे शरीर में शक्तियों और प्रवृत्तियों के रूप में निवास करते हैं और अचेतन की समुद्री विशालता के आदर्शों, मिथकों, प्रतीकों, रूपकों और रूपकों के रूप में हमारी आत्माओं की अंतहीन खाइयाँ।

ऐसी असंख्य आदिम शक्तियाँ हमें प्रेरित करने, सूचित करने और आकार देने वाले स्रोतों के रूप में खुद से परे ले जाती हैं, जो मानव जाति के सामूहिक अचेतन से उत्पन्न होती हैं और ट्रांसपर्सनल इंटरकनेक्शन के रूप में उसमें निवास करती हैं, हमारे और हमारे व्यक्तित्व का एक विशाल घटक जो एक विशाल समुद्र की तरह इसकी सतह पर तैरता है। प्राणी।

हमारा महानतम अस्तित्व हमारे रूपों की सतहों और हमारी त्वचा के झंडों के भीतर नहीं रहता है, बल्कि समय के द्वार से परे पूरे ब्रह्मांड में वितरित चेतना और अमूर्त जानकारी के नेटवर्क के रूप में रहता है। हमारा ब्रह्मांड संकेतों की एक प्रणाली है, और हम अनंत के सपनों में से हैं।

हम भ्रम हैं, क्षणभंगुर और क्षणभंगुर, कहानियां, इतिहास, यादें, परिवर्तन की प्रक्रियाओं के रूप में हमेशा गति में रहते हैं, जो हमारे अस्तित्व की वास्तविक जमीन से उत्पन्न होती हैं और जिस पर हम एक दिन लौट आएंगे।

मृत्यु एक भयानक विध्वंसक होने के साथ-साथ एक मुक्तिदाता भी है, जो हमें हमारे शरीर की सीमाओं से मुक्त करती है।

काली का हमारा उत्सव दिवाली के पांच दिनों के दौरान मनाया जाता है, रोशनी का त्योहार जिसमें हम भय पर आशा की जीत, नफरत पर प्यार और विभाजन पर एकजुटता के रूप में एक-दूसरे पर विश्वास की जीत का जश्न मनाते हैं।

दिवाली भारत के संस्थापक मिथक और महाकाव्य, रामायण में निहित एक उत्सव है, जो हमारे राक्षसों के अत्याचार से मानव जाति की मुक्ति के रूप में राम और हनुमान की जीत, मनुष्य और उसके पशु स्वभाव, राक्षस राजा रावण पर, पुनः प्राप्त करने के लिए है। उनकी पत्नी या अर्धांगिनी सीता, एकात्मक पूर्णता का एक रूपक और सपनों के दायरे से चेतना का जन्म और साथ ही जानवर से मानव का उद्भव, और एक अंडरवर्ल्ड यात्रा जो ऑर्फ़ियस के मिथक और दांते के मिथक में गूँज पाती है द डिवाइन कॉमेडी में बीट्राइस को मुक्त कराने की खोज।

इसमें आदर्श आकृतियों के रूप में देवी-देवता अनुष्ठान अधिनियमों और परिवर्तन की प्रक्रियाओं को नियंत्रित करते हैं और भूलभुलैया के माध्यम से द्वारपाल और मार्गदर्शक के रूप में कार्य करते हैं।

प्रकाश उत्सव का तीसरा दिन लक्ष्मी का सम्मान करता है, जो हमारे टैरो कार्ड में फॉर्च्यून की आकृति, यादृच्छिक अवसर, धन और भाग्य की देवी के रूप में दिखाई देती है, जिसे हम जुए, संभावनाओं के खेल और जोखिम से जुड़े कार्यों में लेडी लक के रूप में बुलाते हैं।

रोशनी के इस त्योहार में लेडी लक और हमारी पशु प्रकृति के साथ एकीकरण के माध्यम से मानव जाति की मुक्ति के सम्मान में, मैं आपको मौका का एक खेल और मानव बनने की असीमित संभावनाओं की पेशकश करता हूं; जिसके लिए आपको केवल छह तरफा पासा, पेन और कागज की आवश्यकता होगी।

साहित्य या फिल्म से छह पात्रों को पहचान के रूप में लिखें जिन्हें आप प्रदर्शित करना चाहते हैं; पारंपरिक रूप से ये तीन पुरुष और तीन महिला भूमिकाएँ हो सकती हैं, लेकिन जब तक आप न चाहें, ऐसा होना ज़रूरी नहीं है। फिर यह पता लगाने के लिए पासा फेंकें कि आप उस दिन उनमें से किसमें जीवित रहेंगे। इससे कोई फर्क नहीं पड़ता कि आप आज कौन सा प्रदर्शन करते हैं, आपके पास आरक्षित रूप में पांच अन्य स्वयं हैं, और कल एक और दिन है, जिसमें हम एक अलग मुखौटा पहन सकते हैं।

आशा, अवसर और मुक्ति का शुभ त्योहार, और आपको अपने सर्वश्रेष्ठ स्व की खोज में आनंद मिले।

लेकिन सूर्यास्त के साथ यह सब बदल जाता है, क्योंकि रात काली की होती है।

दिवाली की तीसरी रात चंद्रोदय के साथ काली उत्सव बन जाती है, और उसके बाद पूरे दिन; यहां हम मृत्यु, समय, अंधकार, जादू, सेक्स, पुनर्जन्म और परिवर्तन की देवी का जश्न मनाते हैं; उन सभी की एक योद्धा रक्षक, जिन्हें फ्रांत्ज़ फैनन ने पृथ्वी का मनहूस कहा था। हम अपना जीवन उन लोगों के साथ संतुलन में रखते हैं जो शक्तिहीन और वंचित हैं, खामोश हैं और मिटा दिए गए हैं, उन सभी के साथ जो बहिष्कृत हैं, उनके सहयोगी और चैंपियन हैं। मुक्ति और सशक्त नारीत्व की एक मूर्ति के रूप में उनके कई रूप हैं; उनमें से न्यूयॉर्क हार्बर में स्वयं लिबर्टी भी शामिल थीं, जो एक साझा ऐतिहासिक दुश्मन, ब्रिटिश साम्राज्य के खिलाफ क्रांतिकारी और उपनिवेशवाद-विरोधी संघर्ष के आदर्श के रूप में अमेरिका और भारत दोनों द्वारा साझा की गई संरक्षक थीं।

उनके योद्धा भाईचारे ने ब्रिटिश राज से क्रूर दृढ़ता और छल के साथ लड़ाई लड़ी, जो अब पूरे भारतीय प्रवासी में हाईटियन वूडू के पीछा करने वालों की तरह शक्तिहीनों के संरक्षकों के एक गुप्त समाज के रूप में व्याप्त है, और राक्षसों के पंथ के साथ अन्योन्याश्रित या बाघ/शेर थे जिनके संस्थापक पूर्वज वह युद्ध में उतरती है।

इसमें मैं काली अघोरा या ब्रदरहुड के सदस्य के रूप में लिख रहा हूं, जो हिंदू धर्म में जाति की पूर्ण अस्वीकृति में असामान्य है, मैंने काली की एक पुजारिन के साथ अध्ययन किया है।

समय के इस पहलू के साथ संतुलन में मृत्यु इच्छा का पहलू है; शक्ति या जीवन शक्ति और परिवर्तनकारी पुनर्जन्म, क्योंकि काली तंत्र की कलाओं का केंद्र है, विशेष रूप से निषिद्ध सीमाओं का उल्लंघन, सामान्यता का उल्लंघन, राक्षसी का आलिंगन और पीछा करना

प्रकृति में अन्तर्निहित और हमारे शरीर में लिखित स्वयं के सत्यों के बारे में।

मृत्यु और इच्छा के रूप में उनके दोनों रूप उत्पीड़न की किसी भी पितृसत्तात्मक व्यवस्था से मुक्त असीमित स्त्री शक्ति का प्रतिनिधित्व करते हैं, हालांकि शिव में, जिनके नृत्य से ब्रह्मांड का निर्माण होता है, उनका एक पुरुष साथी है, खासकर उनके रूप में भैरव के रूप में।

इसमें मैं आपको मृत्यु के जश्न में एक गीत और उसकी पुनर्कल्पना और परिवर्तन की शक्ति का आह्वान प्रस्तुत करता हूं, जो उस महान संस्कार का हिस्सा है जिसके साथ मैं हर साल ब्रह्मांड के विनाश और मनोरंजन का सम्मान करता हूं। यह एक अनुष्ठान है जो चोद की तिब्बती बौद्ध प्रथा को दर्शाता है, इतिहास की विरासत के रूप में हमारे राक्षसों को बलिदान के रूप में अपने शरीर की पेशकश जो हमें धोखा देती है और गुलाम बनाती है लेकिन एक बार आत्म निर्माण के हमारे अपने उपकरणों के रूप में जब्त होने से हमें इससे मुक्ति भी मिल सकती है। दूसरों के विचारों को हमारे सच्चे स्वयं को उत्थान के रूप में पुनः प्राप्त करने के लिए, और वृत्ति और पतन की नास्तिकताएं जो एक बार हमारे रूप में अपनाई जाती हैं, वे हमारे शरीर में लिखी सच्चाइयों को रोशनी और उत्साह के रूप में प्रकट कर सकती हैं, और अमरता के जादू के रूप में मृत्यु को एक प्रकार के तुल्पा के रूप में प्रस्तुत करती हैं। ऑस्कर वाइल्ड द्वारा अधिकृत पहचानों से मुक्ति के अराजकतावादी कोडेक्स, द पिक्चर ऑफ डोरियन ग्रे में इसका वर्णन किया गया है।

हममें से प्रत्येक का अपना है

मौत का दूत

एक गुप्त साथी के रूप में,

एक दूसरे के नकारात्मक स्थान

जो हमारे स्वरूप की सीमाओं को परिभाषित करते हैं

जिसकी सीमाएँ इंटरफ़ेस हैं

अस्तित्व के सीमांत क्षेत्र

पुनर्कल्पना और परिवर्तन की शक्तियों से भरा हुआ;

असीमित संभावनाओं के बीच अज्ञात

इंसान बनने का

यहां चिह्नित स्थान ड्रेगन बनें

अस्तित्व, अर्थ और मूल्य के हमारे मानचित्रों पर

यहीं वह दुनिया है जहां मैं रहता हूं,

ड्रेगन के बीच,

अज्ञात स्थानों में

मानव बनने की हमारी टोपोलॉजी में,

निषिद्ध की सीमाओं से परे

और सामान्यता का अत्याचार

यहाँ अनंत का उत्साह और आतंक है;

वह जो हमें अशुद्ध और ऊंचा करता है

खुद की सीमा से परे

इस नृत्य में मृत्यु इतने लंबे समय से मेरी भागीदार रही है

आपको लगता होगा कि हम बेहतर शर्तों पर होंगे,

लेकिन मौत एक कठोर प्रेमी है

जिसके लिए हमारा मांस बलिदान है

कि हमारे सपनों और इच्छाओं को उड़ान मिल सके

और वास्तविक, शाश्वत और सत्य बन जाओ।

जैसा कि मैंने 1 जून 2021 की अपनी पोस्ट में लिखा था, मृत्यु एक गुप्त जुड़वां है; मृत्यु एक गुप्त जुड़वां है जो हमारे चेहरे को साझा करती है लेकिन हमारे सपनों को नहीं जो हमें हमारे शरीर की सीमाओं से परे उठाती और ऊंचा उठाती है, इसलिए मृत्यु को हमारी प्रतिध्वनियों और प्रतिबिंबों को चुरा लेना चाहिए, गुप्त इतिहास, अनकहे सत्य, अनकही शपथों से भरी छाया की चीज़ , निजी प्रेम और इच्छाओं के प्रति हजारों असंख्य निष्ठाएं उन्हें जीवित रखने और कार्रवाई द्वारा वास्तविक बनाने में हमारी विफलताओं के कारण धोखा खा गईं।

मृत्यु उन सभी चीजों का आतंक है जो हम थे लेकिन नहीं बने, हमारे वियोग की हानि और एक ऐसी दुनिया में अर्थ की शून्यता जहां प्यार हमें छुटकारा नहीं दिला सकता, सुंदरता के लिए दुःख जो संदर्भ खो देता है जब इसे अब साझा नहीं किया जाता है और है यादों के टुकड़ों के साथ खो गया है जो इत्र के जिन्न की तरह समय के क्षणों को ट्रिगर करने के लिए अपनी बोतल से बाहर निकलता है और फिर एक प्यारे हाथ के भूत की तरह लुप्त हो जाता है जो अब हमारे हाथ को वापस नहीं पकड़ता है।

हम फटी-पुरानी और टूटी हुई चीजें हैं, हमारी गुप्त परछाइयाँ और हम स्वयं हैं, जो अपने सुंदर सपनों और अपने भयानक दुःस्वप्नों के भंडार के साथ अब गरमागरम में रहते हैं, उन्हें अनंत काल तक ले जाते हैं; क्योंकि यह अस्तित्व का महान रहस्य है, कि हमारा सर्वश्रेष्ठ स्वयं उन सभी से बना है जिन्हें हम अस्वीकार करेंगे और छिपाकर रखेंगे, और जो हमारे गौरवशाली पापों के आंकड़ों के रूप में हमसे परे रहते हैं।

मृत्यु हमारे इतिहास, यादों और पहचानों से बना एक घात शिकारी है, जिसे हमारे जागने के क्षण में सुंदर और भयानक सपनों के दायरे में वास्तविक बनने के लिए इन चीजों को चुराना होगा, हमारे जीवन के भ्रम से परे सच्चे अस्तित्व का एक क्षेत्र जो तिब्बती बौद्ध धर्म में बार्डो और इस्लाम में आलम अल मिथल सहित कई नाम हैं, जिन्हें कोलरिज ने प्राइमरी इमेजिनेशन कहा है, नव-प्लेटोनिक दर्शन में लोगो और जॉन के गॉस्पेल और जंग ने कलेक्टिव अनकांशस कहा है, और हमें अनजाने में पकड़ने का इंतजार करता है और हमें अनंत काल तक ले जाता है, जबकि यह हमारी अवास्तविक आशाओं और अव्यक्त इच्छाओं की छवि के साथ एक परी परिवर्तन की तरह हमारी जगह ले लेता है।

मृत्यु एक अनोखा और व्यक्तिगत दानव है जो हमारे खुद को नकारने से निर्मित होता है, ऐसा इनकार एक परजीवी के रूप में कार्य करता है जो अपने मेजबान को नष्ट कर देता है और फ़नहाउस दर्पणों के जंगल में विकृत और कैप्चर की गई छवियों की तरह मिथ्याकरण की प्रक्रिया के माध्यम से संचालित होता है, लेकिन इसके बजाय यह एक बन सकता है सहजीवी, एक भयानक और राक्षसी अभिभावक आत्मा और आत्मा का मार्गदर्शक जो निषिद्ध ज्ञान के साथ हमारे सबसे बड़े अंधेरे के भीतर से बोलता है, जैसे कि एक शार्क द्वारा अज्ञात की खाई के माध्यम से अपनी यात्रा के दौरान अपने शत्रु और विजेता के रूप में नहीं बल्कि एक सेवक के रूप में। जो हमसे वह तैयार करता है जिसे हमें अपने हृदय के सिंहासन से उतार देना चाहिए; हम इंसान और हमारे खामोश और अनदेखे साथी हमारी मौत के देवदूत हैं जिनसे हमें जीत के लिए नहीं, बल्कि जीवन में हर चीज हमसे अधिक शक्तिशाली होने के लिए कुश्ती लड़नी चाहिए, बल्कि प्रतिरोध में अजेय और स्वतंत्र बनने के लिए लड़ना चाहिए।

ऐसा हम भी कर सकते हैं

हमारी मानवता की खामियों और दुनिया की टूटन को तोड़े बिना सहन करें, हम जितना पैदा हुए थे, उससे कहीं अधिक वास्तविक और जीवंत बनें, अपने रूप की सीमाओं को पार करें, और सारत्रियन में हमारी सच्चाई के आंकड़ों के रूप में पूर्ण स्वतंत्रता और प्रामाणिकता के रूप में उदात्त बनें। जीवन की कला, सभी सच्ची कलाओं के लिए अपवित्र और उत्कृष्टता।

यहां एक विश्वास है जो हमें कुछ भी त्यागने और अपने सच्चे स्वरूप को अपनाने, खुद की फिर से कल्पना करने और बदलने के लिए कहता है; और दु:ख की प्रक्रिया और मृत्यु के साथ काम करने का एक मार्ग प्रदान करता है, न कि हमारे जुनून पर नियंत्रण और प्रकृति पर प्रभुत्व के रूप में, बल्कि शक्ति और स्वायत्तता की जब्ती के रूप में, प्रकृति के प्राणियों के रूप में हमारे जंगलीपन के आलिंगन और उत्सव के रूप में और प्रकृति में निहित उन सच्चाइयों के रूप में। और हमारे शरीर में लिखा है.

आइए हम अपनी राक्षसीता को अपनाएं और इस गुप्त जुड़वां के बारे में कहें जो कोई सीमा नहीं जानता और स्वतंत्र है जैसा कि प्रोस्पेरो विलियम शेक्सपियर के द टेम्पेस्ट के एक्ट वी, दृश्य 1 में कैलीबन के बारे में कहता है; “अंधेरे की इस बात को मैं अपना मानता हूं।”

हम मृत्यु और अपनी शून्यता के आतंक का उत्तर कैसे देंगे? आइए हम ऐसी मौत को चुनौती दें और चुनौती दें, और जब यह एन्ट्रॉपी और अनसुलझे समय के अपने ठंडे हाथों से हम पर दावा करने की प्रतीक्षा कर रही है, तो हमें अपनी छाया और बनने की लालसा के गुप्त जुड़वां को पकड़ना और हिला देना चाहिए, निषिद्ध की सीमाओं का उल्लंघन करना चाहिए और अपना सर्वश्रेष्ठ प्रदर्शन करना चाहिए , हमारी आशाएँ और हमारी इच्छाएँ, दुनिया के मंच पर पहचानों के एक गुरिल्ला रंगमंच के रूप में, निडर भव्यता में, और मानव बनने की असीमित संभावनाओं के बीच कुछ भी खोने या अप्राप्य न रहने दें।

आइए हम मौत को अराजकता और परिवर्तन लाने वाले के रूप में जवाब दें, और अपनी दुनिया और मानव जाति को हमारे शरीर में लिखी सुंदर, भयानक सच्चाइयों की चीज़ बनाएं, और हमारे सपनों और बुरे सपनों को एक बहादुर नई दुनिया बनाएं।

जैसा कि मैंने वर्षों पहले अपनी माँ की मृत्यु पर चिंतन करते हुए लिखा था; तो फिर हम कौन बनें? हमसे उन सतहों, छवियों और मुखौटों के बारे में पूछता है जो हर पल दूसरों के साथ हमारी सीमाओं पर बातचीत करते हैं।

जिस पर हमारा गुप्त स्व, अंधकार और जुनून का स्व, वह स्व जो दर्पण से परे रहता है और कोई सीमा नहीं जानता, समय और स्थान से असीमित और संभावनाओं में अनंत है, उत्तर देता है; आप कौन बनना चाहते हैं?

Aghori / episode of The Believer with Reza Aslan

The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70912.The_Dice_Man?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=wyMcuXdKZz&rank=1

Kali: The Goddess of Destruction

Tibetan Buddhist afterlife

Here’s a Comic Book Guide to the Bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist Afterlife

Here’s a Comic Book Guide to the Bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist Afterlife

How to Feed Your Demons; a manual on the practice of Chod

https://usermanual.wiki/Pdf/Tulpamancy20Guide20Into20the20Strange20and20Wonderful.1558794621

The Ramayana, a reading list

Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God, Jonah Blank

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/170759.Arrow_of_the_Blue_Skinned_God?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=mMLYVOBUv1&rank=1

The Ramayana: A Modern Retelling of the Great Indian Epic, Vālmīki, Ramesh Menon

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/141153.The_Ramayana?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_57

The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic, R.K. Narayan (Translator), Pankaj Mishra (Introduction)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/129876.The_Ramayana?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_65

Ramayana Unravelled: Lesser Known Facets of Rishi Vālmiki’s Epic, Ami Ganatra

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61419158-ramayana-unravelled?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=3VIpWj0xwg&rank=26

Kali, a reading list

Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence and Worship of the Goddess Kali,

Sarah Caldwell

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2618069-oh-terrifying-mothe

Encountering Kali, Rachel Fell McDermott, Jeffrey J. Kripal (Editors)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1405091.Encountering_Kali

Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, Elizabeth U. Harding

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/597877.Kali

Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, Georg Feuerstein

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/137529.Tantra?ref=rae_3https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5f/2b/a9/5f2ba94b665d3d97fc164da47cf8e9d3.jpg

October 30, 2024 0

October 30 2024 Anniversary of the Trump Train Attack on the Biden Campaign Bus Convoy

Among the acts of violation and terror committed by Traitor Trump and his lunatic brownshirts, the attack of the Trump Train on the Biden campaign bus convoy on October 30 2020, abetted and enabled by co-conspirators within the security services whose sworn duty it was to protect all of our citizens and defend our free elections, remains a symbolic nadir of the depravity and brutality of the Trump regime.

What is the difference between free speech and assault? Like hate speech, it is a form of violence. As written by AP of the trial; “The defense lost a bid last month to have the case ruled in their favor without a trial. The judge wrote that “assaulting, intimidating, or imminently threatening others with force is not protected expression.”

As we watch the trials of Trump and his failed subversions of America, let us remember always the crimes for which he is yet to face a Reckoning; political assassinations such as this attempt to eliminate a rival and the lynchings and beheadings of members of Congress of both parties he authorized in the January 6 Insurrection.

Remember, and bring a Reckoning.

As written by Diane McWhorter in The Guardian, in an article entitled How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history; “barely responded. History shows the fruits of such inaction;

The bane of raw intelligence – and history – is that you can always look back and find the signs, but you can’t necessarily look ahead and see where they’re pointing. Many questions remain about the intelligence failures that enabled an insurrectionist mob to lay siege virtually unimpeded to the US Capitol. But here’s one sign that’s been flashing in my head since 6 January 2021.

Four days before the 2020 election, a “Trump Train” of motorists swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. Kamala Harris would have been on the bus but for a last-minute schedule change, according to Wendy Davis, then a Texas congressional candidate and the campaign surrogate onboard. The videotaped vehicular harassment – tailgating, sudden braking, passing the bus within inches – got nationwide coverage, courtesy of participants’ back-slapping on social media and Donald Trump’s high-five in return. Though no one was hurt, it took little imagination to see how a 20-ton container of flammable fuel moving in heavy traffic could have turned into a highway bomb. But to the Trump Train, one of its founders, Steve Ceh, told me, the razzing of the Democrats was simply “fun” – “like a rival football game”.

No local arrests were reported, but the FBI in San Antonio confirmed it was investigating. Presumably (albeit against Trump’s tweeted wishes) it was still investigating two months later when the explosion came: a massive incarnation of the Trump Train rioting against President-elect Biden in Washington. It was then that I started getting flashbacks to another historic act of domestic terrorism, one also presaged by a difficult bus ride and lately back in the news.

Sixty years ago, on 15 September 1963, when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four Black girls attending Sunday school, the shock to the country exceeded the moral language to express it. Both President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr cast political blame on Alabama’s “Segregation forever!” governor, George Wallace. At the time he seemed a pariah, the only “vicious racist” King singled out in his I Have a Dream speech 18 days earlier, at the March on Washington. In fact, Wallace was the spearhead of a proto-Maga minority that more than half a century later captured the White House for Trump. And now political violence is so “normal” that we have a former southern governor, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (whose daughter, Trump’s former spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the current governor), effectively endorsing civil war should the prosecution of Trump over a violent coup attempt derail his return to power.

More often than not, though, the slope is slipperier than the cliff of depraved extremism over which Trump led a “conservative” political party. Instead, it is an inertial slide driven by institutional blind spots and choices that were professionally expedient in the moment. Thus it was, more than 60 years ago in Alabama, that the FBI turned a half-closed eye to harassers of a bus and wound up reaping shockwaves that killed children.

On Mother’s Day 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying a protest group of integrated Freedom Riders was chased down the highway by a caravan of white Alabamians, who managed to sideline the vehicle outside Anniston and firebomb it. Meanwhile, a second freedom bus headed toward a Ku Klux Klan ambush in Birmingham. FBI agents there had been told by their Klan informant – the eventually notorious double agent Gary Thomas Rowe Jr – that his klavern was coordinating the attack with local police and city hall. But the bureau did nothing to stop the bloody assault. Nor were any arrests made of Rowe’s Klan brothers, certainly not after a widely published news photo showed the informant himself joining in the bludgeoning.

When Rowe’s consorts bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church two years later, the FBI was so familiar with them that four or five prime suspects were identified within days. (Rowe was apparently not an active participant.) The first prosecution – of the suspected ringleader, by the Alabama attorney general – did not take place for 14 years and met with stonewalling if not resistance from the FBI. (A couple of decades later, the bureau provided “cooperation from top to bottom,” says Doug Jones, the federal prosecutor who won convictions against the last two living Klansmen in 2001 and 2002. He went on to become Alabama’s brief Democratic senator before losing in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, who recently said of white nationalists, “I call them Americans”.)

In contrast to the Freedom Rider attacks, which sent multiple victims to hospital, the buzzing of the Biden team had only one known instance of physical contact, a black pick-up videotaped bumping a campaign car in the bus’s wake. The owner of the pick-up was Eliazar “Cisco” Cisneros, a middle-aged, long-gun-toting San Antonian who had made news six weeks earlier by driving the same Trump-bedecked truck through a peaceful defund-the-police protest. He was not arrested then, but the FBI did talk to him about the Trump Train, according to his lawyer, the former Republican congressman Francisco Canseco. However, Canseco says it was his client who initiated the call, to complain that “his rights were being violated”, meaning the right of Americans “to demonstrate their support for a candidate”. Cisneros claimed the Biden car was the aggressor, despite having boasted on Facebook, “That was me slamming that fucker … Hell yea.” (The available videotape is not definitive, but the analysis by snopes.com contradicts Cisneros’s version.)

Perhaps the FBI had bigger Maga fish to fry than the Trump Train, even though the San Antonio paper reported weeks before the election that the group’s raucous Thursday-night parades 30 miles up I-35 in New Braunfels had featured a man dragging a Black Lives Matter flag behind his pick-up. (A social-media post of his surfaced from a few years earlier: “I’m not apart of the kkk … just hate black people.”) Some African American residents were reminded of the 1998 white supremacist dragging murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr, 300 miles east in Jasper. But by the time the New Braunfels Trump Train caught up with the Biden bus on 30 October, the bar for actionable political intimidation had been set pretty high. Earlier that month in Michigan, the FBI along with state authorities arrested 14 Maga men in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

Way back in segregated 1961, within hours of the freedom bus burning, the Kennedy justice department found a statute allowing for a politically neutered prosecution: 18 U.S. Code § 33, covering the destruction of motor vehicles engaged in interstate commerce. A paragraph conceivably pertinent to what happened in Texas – on a federal highway – penalizes one who “willfully disables or incapacitates any driver … or in any way lessens the ability of such person to perform his duties as such”. At any rate, when even symbolic federal charges failed to materialize, the Biden bus driver, Wendy Davis and two others filed a civil suit against (ultimately) eight Trump Train members, including Cisneros and Ceh, under the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They sued the San Marcos police department separately, as the only force along the route that the complaint says ignored SOS calls – though its alleged abdication was more like “we can’t help you” than the Birmingham police’s promise to give the Klan 15 minutes to work over the Freedom Riders.

Davis et al filed their suits six months after January 6. While hastening to say that “we can’t begin to compare what happened on the bus to that violence”, Davis calls it “part and parcel of the same trend”. It was intimidating enough to cause the campaign to cancel the rest of the tour. A trial date for the Trump Train case has been set for next year. Two defendants settled separately in April 2023 and have been removed from the suit.

Among the plaintiffs’ exhibits included in a court filing on Friday is the transcript of a text chain from late December 2020 about “the March in dc”, in which a message purportedly coming from Cisneros’s phone discusses delivery dates for bear mace and a collapsible baton. Two other defendants, Ceh and his wife, Randi – named in the complaint as leaders of the New Braunfels Trump Train – were among the faithful in Washington on January 6. Steve Ceh told me they did not enter the Capitol but watched “antifa thugs in black breaking windows” and “people in Trump hats telling them to stop”. When I asked if he thought the hundreds of people arrested for their role in the riot were antifa (including a former FBI agent from New Braunfels), he said: “I’m not saying that some people weren’t pretty emotional.”

Ceh says the FBI contacted him after he was fired from his job (as a supervisor for a large Texas construction firm) in the aftermath of January 6. “There are a lot of liberals, a lot of Satanists, in this town,” he told me, explaining that they “doxxed” him. Ceh says he invited the FBI man who questioned him (“a very good guy”) to attend the “relevant church” he recently founded. He says the bureau did not seek him out after the Trump Train episode, not even for one of its unofficial “knock and talks”, and in their later interview about the Capitol riot, he says, the Biden bus “never came up”.

The FBI office in San Antonio declined to make Ceh’s interviewer available for comment and, in response to my request for a Biden bus update, said the bureau did not either confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, apparently even one it previously confirmed. That’s not the worst policy in the world, as then FBI director James Comey painfully demonstrated in 2016 when he violated justice department guidelines with public statements in the Hillary Clinton emails case, arguably giving us President Donald Trump and thereby helping normalize terrorism the bureau is mandated to prevent.

John Paredes, one of the many civil rights lawyers representing the bus plaintiffs, says he does “not read anything into [federal officials’] determination not to bring a prosecution”. The US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas emailed its refusal to comment on “the existence or non-existence of investigations”. Still, I have a sneaking feeling that the FBI’s reaction to the vehicular threat on I-35 would have been a little different if, say, those road warriors had been Muslims rather than white Christians.

Sixty years ago, the Birmingham church bombing helped unify the country around a consensus that state-sponsored racism had to end and, along with the assassination of President Kennedy two months later in Texas, eased the posthumous passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation. Since the domestic terrorism of January 6, though, the partition of hate has only widened. And so, I got a little jolt of hope and change from Ceh’s surprise answer to my pro forma question about whether he was supporting Trump in 2024.

“I’m waiting,” he said. “We have transitioned.”

I wish I could say the quote ended there, but he went on to talk about how the issue is no longer “about what man’s in there”, because “we’ve got to turn to God”. If I had to interpret those signs, I would take them to mean that things could get worse. Apocalyptic, maybe.”

And what this means for our future, both as a nation and globally, was summarized in an article of 2020 by Lois Beckett as written in The Guardian, entitled Scholars warn of collapse of democracy as Trump v Biden election looms: Dozens of experts on fascism warn of global danger, calling for action from ordinary people: ‘It is not too late’; “y is extremely fragile and potentially temporary, requiring vigilance and protection,” the scholars wrote in the letter released on Sunday. “It is not too late to turn the tide.”

More than 80 signatories, including professors and other scholars at universities in the US, Canada, and Europe, do not agree on whether to label Donald Trump a “fascist”. The fragility of democracy worldwide, they write, will continue to be an issue “irrespective of who wins the American presidency”.

“Whether Donald J Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond 3 November 2020,” the scholars write, referring to election day on Tuesday, when Trump will face Joe Biden at the polls.

However, the historians warn, particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, “the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever”. They suggest citizens must be ready not only to defend democracy at the ballot box, but “if necessary, also through non-violent protests in the streets”.

“That’s the lesson, to not be complacent in moments like this,” said Jennifer Evans, a professor of German history at Carleton University in Canada and one of the lead organizers of the open letter. “This is a very dangerous time, and we all have a responsibility to prop up democracy.”

Among the many warning signs that democracy is at risk, the historians argue, are the spread of disinformation, inequality, the “politics of internal enemies” and politically motivated violence.

“We need to reveal and denounce any and all connections between those in power and those vigilante and militia forces using political violence to destabilize our democracies,” the letter urges.

Evans said she was particularly disturbed by the evidence of “the infiltration of the far right” in police and military organizations around the world, including in the US, Germany, and Canada.

Signatories to the letter include several authors who have commented on authoritarianism and fascism during Trump’s presidency, including Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University, and Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works.”

Here follows the letter, How to Keep the Lights On in Democracies: An Open Letter of Concern by Scholars of Authoritarianism: “Regardless of the outcome of the United States’ election, democracy as we know it is already imperiled. However, it is not too late to turn the tide.

Whether Donald J. Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat, or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond November 3rd, 2020.

While democracy appeared to be flourishing everywhere in the years following the end of the Cold War, today it seems to be withering or in full-scale collapse globally. As scholars of twentieth century authoritarian populism, fascism, and political extremism, we believe that unless we take immediate action, democracy as we know it will continue in its frightening regression, irrespective of who wins the American presidency in early November.

In contrast to the hollow proclamations of economic and political liberalism’s “inevitable” triumph over authoritarianism in all its iterations, studying the past demonstrates that democracy is extremely fragile and potentially temporary, requiring vigilance and protection. Scholars of race, colonialism, and imperialism have further deepened our perspectives by reminding us of how the myths of national “greatness” were and continue to be written on the backs of largely silenced, marginalized and oftentimes enslaved or unfree, “others.”

We study the conditions that have historically accompanied the rise of authoritarian and fascistic regimes. In nearly every case, we have observed how profound social, political, and economic disruptions, including the ravages of military conflicts, depressions, and the enormous pressures caused by globalization, deeply shook people’s confidence in democracy’s ability to adequately respond to their plights, or even provide basic forms of long-term security.

We have seen all of these patterns in our study of the past, and we recognize the signs of a crisis of democracy in today’s world as well. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed profound inequalities of class and race across the globe. As the last four years have demonstrated, the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever.

To meet the challenge at hand, there are several things we must do.

We must boldly and unapologetically safeguard critical thinking based on evidence. This includes demonstrating the virtues of entertaining a wide array of positions and perspectives, and support, both in word and deed, for investigative journalism, science and the humanities, and freedom of the press. We need swift and tangible commitments from corporate media organizations and governments to tackle the dangers of misinformation and media concentration. We must encourage coalitions organized across differences of race, class, gender, religion and caste, while respecting the perspectives and experiences of others. We need to reveal and denounce any and all connections between those in power and those vigilante and militia forces using political violence to destabilize our democracies. Much like the active democratic movements across the globe from Nigeria to India, Belarus to Hong Kong, we must be prepared to defend pluralism and democracy against the growing dangers of communal violence and authoritarianism at the ballot box but, if necessary, also through non-violent protest in the streets. We must defend the integrity of the electoral process and ensure the widest possible voter turnouts, not just in this election but in every election large and small in all of our hometowns. And we must re-commit to a global conversation on support for democratic institutions, laws, and practices both within and between our respective countries. This includes directly confronting the unfettered greed that drives global inequality, which has unleashed geopolitical rivalries over access to resources, international migrations, and collapsed state sovereignties all over the world.

We need to turn away from the rule by entrenched elites and return to the rule of law. We must replace the politics of “internal enemies” with a politics of adversaries in a healthy, democratic marketplace of ideas. And above else, we need to work together to find ways to keep the light of democracy shining in our countries and all over the world. Because if we don’t, we will indeed face dark days ahead.”

Signed,

Zoltán Ádám | Associate Professor of Economics, Corvinus University of Budapest (Hungary)

Giulia Albanese | Professor of History, Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy)

Anjali Arondekar | Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Director of the Center for South Asian Studies, University of California-Santa Cruz (United States of America, USA) *

Kai Arzheimer | Professor of Political Science, University of Mainz (Germany) *

Luis Herran Avila | Assistant Professor of History, University of New Mexico (USA)

Jonathan Bach | Professor of Global Studies, The New School for Social Research (USA) *

Luca Baldissara | Associate Professor of History, University of Pisa (Italy)

Shelley Baranowski | Distinguished Professor Emerita of History, University of Akron (USA)

Deborah Barton | Assistant Professor of History, Université de Montréal (Canada)

Michele Battini | Professor of the Intellectual and Political History of Modern Europe, University of Pisa (Italy)

Heike Bauer | Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History, Birkbeck, University of London (United Kingdom, UK)

Cristina A. Bejan | Adjunct Professor of History, Metropolitan State University of Denver (USA)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat | Professor of History and Italian Studies, New York University (USA)

Waitman Wade Beorn | Senior Lecturer of History, Northumbria University (UK)

Mabel Berezin | Professor of Sociology, Cornell University (USA)

Andrew Stuart Bergerson | Professor of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City (USA)

Anna Berg | Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania (USA)

Paul Betts | Professor of Modern European History, University of Oxford (UK)

Frank Biess | Professor of History, University of California-San Diego (USA)

Stephen Bittner | Professor of History, Sonoma State University (USA)

James Björk | Reader in Modern European History, King’s College London (UK)

Monica Black | Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee-Knoxville (USA)

Adam A. Blackler | Assistant Professor of History, University of Wyoming (USA)

Vivian Blaxell | Professor of History and Politics, Marlboro College (USA)

Richard Bodek | Professor of History and Director of European Studies, College of Charleston (USA)

Pascale Rachel Bos | Associate Professor of German Studies, Jewish Studies, Gender Studies, European Studies, University of Texas at Austin (USA)

Marco Bresciani | Research Fellow of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence (Italy)

Benjamin Brower | Associate Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin (USA)

Christopher R. Browning | Frank Porter Graham Professor Emeritus of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA)

Hubertus Buchstein | Professor of Political Theory, Greifswald University (Germany)

Darcy Buerkle | Associate Professor of History, Smith College (USA)

Renato Camurri | Professor of History, University of Verona (Italy)

Mauro Canali | Professor of Contemporary History, University of Camerino (Italy) *

Raul Carstocea | Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Leicester (UK)

James Casteel | Associate Professor of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University (Canada)

Laura Cerasi | Associate Professor of History, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy)

Andrea Chandler | Professor of Political Science, Carleton University (Canada)

Sarah Churchwell | Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities, School of Advanced Study, University of London (UK)

Howard Chiang | Associate Professor of History, University of California-Davis (USA)

Rebecca Clifford | Associate Professor of History, Swansea University (UK)

Joshua Cole | Professor of History, University of Michigan (USA)

Mark B. Cole | College Associate Lecturer, Cleveland State University (USA)

Tim Cole | Professor of History, University of Bristol (UK)

Paul Corner | Professor of European History, Università di Siena (Italy)

Mark Cornwall | Professor of Modern European History, University of Southampton (UK)

Antonio Costa Pinto | Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (Portugal)

Raymond Craib | Professor of History, Cornell University (USA)

Brian E. Crim | Professor of History, University of Lynchburg (USA)

Mikkel Dack | Assistant Professor of History, Rowan University (USA)

Kate Davison | PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne (Australia) *

Carlos De La Torre | Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida (USA)

Sandra Mcgee Deutsch | Professor of History, University of Texas at El Paso (USA)

Yoav Di-Capua | Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin (USA)

Audra Diptee | Associate Professor of History, Carleton University (Canada)

Lindsey Dodd | Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Huddersfield (UK)

Elizabeth Drummond | Associate Professor of History, Loyola Marymount University (USA)

Hilary Earl | Professor of Modern European History, Nippissing University (Canada)

Michael Ebner | Associate Professor of History, Syracuse University (USA) *

Sean Eedy | Lecturer in History, Carleton University (Canada)

Greg Eghigian | Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University (USA)

Geoff Eley | Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History and German Studies, University of Michigan (USA)

Catherine Ellis | Associate Professor of History, Ryerson University (Canada)

Andrew Evans | Associate Professor of History, State University of New York at New Paltz (USA)

Jennifer Evans | Professor of History, Carleton University and Member, College of New Scholars, Royal Society of Canada (Canada) *

Christopher Ewing | Assistant Professor of History, Virginia Commonwealth University (USA)

Daniel Fainstein | Dean and Professor of Jewish Studies, Universidad Hebraica (Mexico)

Federico Finchelstein | Professor of History, The New School for Social Research (USA) *

Tiffany N. Florvil | Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico (USA)

Filippo Focardi | Professor of Contemporary History, Università di Padova (Italy)

Moritz Föllmer | Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)

Claudio Fogu | Associate Professor of History, University of California-Santa Barbara (USA) *

Oz Frankel | Associate Professor of History, The New School for Social Research (USA)

Richard Frankel | Associate Professor of Modern German History, University of Louisiana at Lafayette (USA)

Nancy Fraser | Henry A and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science, The New School for Social Research (USA)

Jane Freeland | Research Associate, German Historical Institute London (UK)

Norbert Frei | Professor of History, University of Jena (Germany)\

Karin Friedrich | Chair in Early Modern European History, University of Aberdeen and Chair, German History Society (UK)

Maximiliano Fuentes | Professor of History, Universitat de Girona (Spain)

Mary Fulbrook | Professor of German History, University College London (UK)

Valeria Gallimi | Assistant Professor, Università degli Studi di Firenze (Italy)

Diana Garvin | Assistant Professor of Mediterranean Studies, University of Oregon (USA) *

Eagle Glassheim | Professor of History, University of British Columbia (Canada)

Svenja Goltermann | Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich (Switzerland)

Peter Gordon | Amabel B. James Professor of History, Harvard University (USA)

Udi Greenberg | Associate Professor of History, Dartmouth University

Neil Gregor | Professor of Modern European History, University of Southampton (UK)

Brian J Griffith | Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar in European History, University of California-Los Angeles (USA) *

Atina Grossmann | Professor of History, The Cooper Union (USA)

Sara F. Hall | Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois-Chicago (USA)

Anna Hájková | Associate Professor of Modern European Continental History, Warwick University (UK)

Shireen Hassim | Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics, Carleton University (Canada) *

Dan Healey | Professor of Modern Russian History, University of Oxford (UK)

Valerie Hébert | Associate Professor of History, Lakehead University Orillia (Canada)

Elizabeth Heineman | Professor of History, University of Iowa (USA)

Dagmar Herzog | Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate Center, CUNY (USA)

Benjamin Carter Hett | Professor of History, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY (USA)

Erin Hochman | Associate Professor of History, Southern Methodist University (USA)

Peter Holquist | Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania (USA)

Erika Hughes | Academic Lead in Performance, University of Portsmouth (UK)

Samuel Clowes Huneke | Assistant Professor of History, George Mason University (USA)

Stefan Ihrig | Professor of History, University of Haifa (Israel)

Chinnaiah Jangam | Associate Professor of History, Carleton University (Canada)

Martin Jay | Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California-Berkeley (USA)

Jennifer Jenkins | Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto (Canada)

Peter Jelavich | Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University (USA)

Rachel Johnston-White | Assistant Professor of European Politics and Society, University of Groningen (Germany)

Sara Jones | Professor of Modern Languages, Birmingham University (UK)

Pieter M. Judson | Professor of History, European University Institute (Italy)

Kathryn Julian | Assistant Professor of History, Westminster College (USA)

Gayle Levy | Associate Professor of French and Director of Honours College, University of Missouri-Kansas City (USA)

Michelle Lynn Kahn | Assistant Professor of History, University of Richmond (USA) *

Marion Kaplan | Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History, New York University (USA)

Carolyn Kay | Professor of History, Trent University (Canada)

Gema Kloppe-Santamaria | Assistant Professor of History, Loyola University Chicago (USA)

Melissa Kravetz | Associate Professor of History, Longwood University (USA)

Thomas Kühne | Strassler Colin Flug Professor of Holocaust History, Clark University (USA)

Eric Kurlander | William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History, Stetson University (USA)

Dominick LaCapra | Bowmar Professor Emeritus of History, Cornell University (USA)

Paul Lerner | Professor of History, University of Southern California (USA)

Simon Levis Sullam | Associate Professor of History, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy)

Alison Lewis | Professor of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne (Australia)

Michael Löwy | Research Director Emeritus, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)

Stefan Ludwig-Hoffmann | Associate Professor of History, University of California-Berkeley (USA)

Elissa Maïlander | Associate Professor of History, Sciences Po (France)

Andrea Mammone | Lecturer in Modern European History, Royal Holloway-London (UK)

Laurie Marhoefer | Associate Professor of History, University of Washington (USA)

Tracy Matysik | Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin (USA)

Sandra McGee Deutsch | Professor of History, University of Texas at El Paso (USA)

Gladys McCormick | Associate Professor of History and Jay and Debe Moskowitz Chair in Mexico-US Relations, Syracuse University (USA)

Daniel McIntosh | Associate Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania (USA)

Sofian Merabet | Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin (USA)

Sabine von Mering | Professor of German and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University (USA)

David A. Messenger | Professor of History and Chair of the History Department, University of South Alabama (USA)

Daniel E. Miller | Professor of History, University of West Florida (USA)

Jennifer A. Miller | Professor of History, Southern Illinois University (USA)

Michael L. Miller | Associate Professor of Nationalism Studies, Central European University (Austria & Hungary)

Caroline Moine | Associate Professor of History, University of Paris-Saclay (France)

Johannes von Moltke | Professor of German Studies and Film, TV, and Media, University of Michigan (USA)

Leslie Morris | Professor of German, University of Minnesota (USA)

A. Dirk Moses | Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor in Global Human Rights History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA)

Yael Ben Moshe | Fellow Researcher at the Faculty of Humanities, Haifa University (Israel)

David Motadel | Associate Professor of International History, London School of Economics (UK)

Michelle Moyd | Associate Professor of History, Indiana University-Bloomington (USA)

Nauman Naqvi | Associate Professor of Comparative Liberal Studies, Habib University (USA)

Nancy P. Nenno | Professor of German Studies, College of Charleston (USA)

Odilon Caldeira Neto | Associate Professor of History, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (Brazil)

Raffaele Nocera | Associate Professor of History, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” (Italy)

Xosé M. Núñez Seixas | Professor of History, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain)

Eric Oberle | Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University (USA)

Jon Berndt Olsen | Associate Professor of History, University of Massachusetts-Amherst (USA)

Andrea Orzoff | Associate Professor of History, New Mexico State University (USA)

Katrin Paehler | Associate Professor of History, Illinois State University (USA)

Anna Parkinson | Associate Professor of German, Northwestern University (USA)

Sarah Panzer | Assistant Professor of History, Missouri State University (USA)

Robert O. Paxton | Mellon Professor Emeritus of the Social Sciences, Columbia University (USA)

Leandro Pereira Gonçalves | Adjunct Professor of Contemporary History, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (Brazil)

Heather R Perry | Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina-Charlotte (USA)

John Person | Associate Professor of Japanese Studies, University at Albany (USA) *

Pablo Piccato | Professor of History, Columbia University (USA)

Stanislao Pugliese | Professor of Modern European History and Queensboro UNICO Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian-American Studies, Hofstra University (USA)

Sven Reichardt | Professor of History, Universität Konstanz (Germany)

Ned Richardson-Little | History Research Group Leader, University of Erfurt (Germany)

Jennifer Rodgers | Research Assistant Professor of History, California Institute of Technology (USA)

Mark Roseman | Pat M Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor in History, Indiana University-Bloomington (USA)

Sophia Rosenfeld | Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania (USA)

Gavriel Rosenfeld | Professor of History, Fairfield University (USA)

Eli Rubin | Professor of History, Western Michigan University (USA)Metropolitan

Alexandria Ruble | Assistant Professor of History, Spring Hill College (USA)

Lutz Sauerteig | Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities, Newcastle University (UK)

Leonard Schmieding | Curator of Education, Berlin State Museums (Germany)

Natalie Scholz | Assistant Professor of Modern History, University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)

Steven Seegel | Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian History, University of Northern Colorado (USA)

Sherene Seikaly | Associate Professor of History, University of California-Santa Barbara (USA) *

Jennifer Sessions | Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia (USA)

Eugene R. Sheppard | Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University (USA)

Daniel Siemens | Professor of European History, Newcastle University (UK)

Helmut Walser Smith | Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History, Vanderbilt University (USA)

Matthew Specter | Adjunct Professor of History and Global Studies, University of California-Berkeley (USA)

Jason Stanley | Professor of Philosophy, Yale University (USA)

Paul Steege | Associate Professor of History, Villanova University (USA)

Richard Steigmann-Gall | Associate Professor of History, Kent State University (USA)

Michael P. Steinberg | Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History and Music and Professor of German Studies, Brown University (USA)

Philipp Stelzel | Associate Professor of History and Graduate Director McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, Duquesne University (USA)

Lauren Stokes | Assistant Professor of History, Northwestern University (USA)

Nathan Stoltzfus | Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies, Florida State University (USA)

Marla Stone | Professor of History, Occidental College and President, Society for Italian Historical Studies (USA) *

Frances Tanzer | Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies and Modern Jewish History and Culture, Clark University (USA)

Julia Adeney Thomas | Associate Professor of History, University of Notre Dame (USA)

Annette Timm | Professor of History, University of Calgary (Canada)

Robert Deam Tobin | Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Clark University (USA)

Lisa Todd | Associate Professor of History, University of New Brunswick (Canada)

John Torpey | Professor of Sociology and History, Graduate Center, CUNY (USA)

Enzo Traverso | Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University (USA)

Nadia Urbinati | Kryiakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory, Columbia University (USA)

Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia | Assistant Professor of History, Texas State University (USA)

Eleni Varikas | Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Université de Paris 8 (France)

Yannick Veilleux-Lepage | Assistant Professor of Terrorism and Political Violence, Leiden University (Netherlands)

Angelo Ventrone | Professor of History, University of Macerata (Italy)

Fabian Virchow | Professor of Political Science, University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf (Germany) *

Anika Walke | Associate Professor of History, Washington University in St. Louis (USA)

Janet Ward | Professor of History, University of Oklahoma and President Elect, German Studies Association (USA)

Thomas Weber | Professor of History and International Affairs, University of Aberdeen (UK) *

Robert D. Weide | Assistant Professor of Sociology, California State University-Los Angeles (USA)

Jonathan Wiesen | Professor of Modern European History, University of Alabama (USA)

Christiane Wilke | Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University (Canada)

Andrew Woolford | Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba and Former President, International Association of Genocide Scholars

Benjamin Zachariah | Senior Research Fellow, Research Centre for Europe, University of Trier (Germany)

Eli Zaretsky | Professor of History, The New School for Social Research (USA)

Barbie Zelizer | Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Associate Dean for Research, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania (USA)

Moshe Zimmerman | Professor Emeritus of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)

Karin Zitzewitz | Associate Professor and Interim Chairperson, Department of Art, Art History, and Design, Michigan State University (USA)

References

How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/trump-train-attack-biden-bus-january-6?CMP=share_btn_link

Democrats cite Ku Klux Klan Act in suits over ‘Trump Train’ Texas bus incident

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/26/trump-train-texas-bus-lawsuit-kkk-act-democrats

FBI investigating Trump supporters who swarmed Texas campaign bus

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/01/biden-harris-bus-highway-texas-trump-train

Scholars warn of collapse of democracy as Trump v Biden election looms

Dozens of experts on fascism warn of global danger, calling for action from ordinary people: ‘It is not too late’

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/01/democracy-fascism-global-trump-biden-election

A ‘Trump Train’ convoy surrounded a Biden-Harris bus. Was it political violence?

https://apnews.com/article/texas-trump-train-trial-ff999a0289a0f5d98d23539c390e274d

How to Keep the Lights On in Democracyhttp://newfascismsyllabus.com/news-and-announcements/an-open-letter-of-concern-by-scholars-of-authoritarianism/

October 30, 2024 0

October 29 2024 On Fear as the Basis of Exchange and the Terror of Our Nothingness as the Forge of Our Humanity: the Case of Lovecraft

Who is this Absurd fellow Lovecraft, with his gorgeous phraseology and peculiar allegiance to British rather than American English, his Surreal strangeness, bizarre Sadeian transgression, Freudian horror, and poetics of fear?

The Lovecraft Mythos remains an iconic study in fear as the organizing principle of an invented mythology of Absurdist Nihilism; it also reveals how we use fear to shape ourselves and others. What are its methods and purposes in Lovecraft, and in horror literature in general? Why do we need fear as an instrument of identity creation?

Above all in this age of political polarization and historical culture and identity as a ground of struggle, how are we to understand him?

Is he a fascist? Nowhere in literature will you find a more useful case study of fascist psychology, and in nonfiction only the book I discovered while a senior in high school in the wake of studies of Holocaust literature and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which led me to a lifelong study of the origins of evil through the intersections of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, a multidisciplinary analysis of Hitler entitled The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite, is more illuminating.

Lovecraft is a conflicted author who mocked Hitler as a clown but also admired his performances as a hybrid form of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Pirandello’s Theatre of the Grotesque; many Americans thought of Trump in this way as parallel figures of public spectacle. Hitler’s famous maxim “Politics is the new art” marks the turning point of an unknown artist into a monstrous tyrant, and of our civilization to an age of darkness. From this moment on, image has replaced content and public life has been a nihilistic theatrical performance wherein values are irrelevant.

Lovecraft’s paranoid delusions of alien conspiracies and ancient cults can be read as antisemitic allegories derived from propaganda like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of which Umberto Eco wrote so beautifully in Prague Cemetery, but for the fact that he was a madman who believed them to be literally true; humanity is a tenuous and illusory quality for Lovecraft, whose world is filled with monsters wearing human masks who might reveal themselves at any moment, a precarious reality under constant threat.

His only known romantic relationship was his brief marriage to a Jewish woman, to whom he incessantly muttered dark imprecations, poisonous metacommentary, and racist characterizations about virtually everyone they passed on the streets of New York as monsters from his stories in disguise, as he did in his hundred thousand letters to his literary proteges.

He is not a fascist, which requires submission to authority and the abandonment of all meaning other than power and all value other than wealth. Fascism weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power and operates as tyranny; Lovecraft’s work is filled with elite hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness as images and figures which may be read as racist, and he shares many of the obsessions of fascism, but nowhere does he long for authority or imposed meaning; instead he signposts and calls it out as cruelty without meaning or value, and his narratives are driven by existential dread and terror of authority.

His is a poetics of rebellion and nihilism like that of Camus in a universe wherein the gods are not merely dead as in Nietzsche’s reimagination of the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us, Thus Spake Zarathustra, but are actively hostile to humankind, mad idiot superbeings whose motives are utterly alien and predatory, who created humankind as slaves and food, a radical nihilistic atheism like that of late Samuel Beckett which has its political form as anarchy. The Anarchist slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World, “No gods, no masters”, coined by the socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui in 1880 and popularized by Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent in 1907, might have been written for him.

Is he a racist? Yes and no, as we may say of fellow Surrealists Djuna Barnes and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His fears of otherness, miscegenation, contamination, devolution to an animal state, and of the monstrosity of others is often expressed in racist terms, but he neither begins nor ends with unselfcritical racism. It remains ambiguous whether he is calling it out or employing such tropes to advance his themes; the first interpretation ascribes intentionality and self awareness which is unprovable but aligns with his themes, the second miscasts him as a Warhol like mocker of expectations whose images are deliberately discontiguous and unaligned, or a fabulist without a cause which he was not.

He was instead a profoundly wounded and savaged soul who fears his own monstrosity most of all, and this is why he is useful to us. In the literature of madness only the works of Akutagawa and Philip K. Dick are true equals, both authors who like Lovecraft were fighting a losing battle against madness, and aware of the degeneration of their skill and artistic control. We may say of him as Renfield says of himself in Dracula; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.”

Why should we read Lovecraft now?

Like the Hanging of the Maids in Homer’s Ulysses, the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, his writing becomes meaningful for us when it is relevant to problems we face in our own lives, and literature is useful when it helps us solve problems of adaptation and change, such as confronting and interrogating implicit privilege as patriarchy and racism. What else is literature for? Purge it of its power to disturb, incite, and provoke, and it becomes meaningless and worthless.

The tragic flaw of Lovecraft is also that of our civilization; a blindness to our own privilege and a failure to embrace our monstrosity and otherness. Such lines of fracture can be read in our borders with their concentration camps of migrants and our prisons whose purpose is the re-enslavement of Black people as contract forced labor, in our wars of ethnic cleansing in partnership with the state of Israel as a proxy of imperial conquest and sectarian division through it Apartheid policies and the Occupation of Palestine which give the lie to our claims of universal human rights, and in our democracy which has been infiltrated and subverted by fascists and transformed into a carceral state of imperial force and control, though the casting out of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and the subsequent Restoration of America has begun a counterforce of democracy to fascist tyranny.

We must claim our monstrosity, and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”

Any serious scholarship of Lovecraft begins with Michel Houellebecq’s stunning debut and manifesto, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, whose chapter titles suggest the ars poetica of Lovecraft; “Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness. Then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnamable architecture of time”.

Next comes the definitive biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volumes 1 & 2, by S.T. Joshi, Joshi’s An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, and the volumes he edited in the Black Wings series of Lovecraftian horror anthologies. Finally there is Thomas Ligotti’s manifesto The Conspiracy against the Human Race, and his darkly luminous fictions.

Why is Lovecraft relevant to us now?

H.P. Lovecraft investigates the failure of our civilization to protect us from our animal nature, the shadow which grants us depth and limitless passion; the purpose of our invention of civilization according to Camille Paglia’s magisterial Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.

His writing is filled with images and themes which have been misread as racist, but his intent is the reverse; to name and disempower the forces which destroyed civilization in World War One as fear of otherness, exactly as did his model T.S. Eliot. Together with Vladimir Nabokov, they are the greatest, and perhaps the last, of our true conservatives.

But this, too, is ambiguous, for he is equally a revolutionary; Lovecraft’s vision of Western civilization is that of a colony of ants mining the waning power of a dead god’s carcass, a horror without purpose. He shares the critique of Idealism with Eliot, Nabokov, and especially Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, but also of traditional society as structural and systemic tyranny and authoritarian force and control with his fellow Absurdists and Surrealists, to some degree of normality as a basis of the power of church and state with de Sade as a literary provocateur and the valorization of transgression as liberation from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and above all of formal power itself with the great visionary for whom he was a direct model with Genet and Bataille, William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and Jacques DeMolay.

Anyone who has read my literary criticism or my political commentary will be aware that I despise and abjure fascism above all else. Why, then, do I love and admire conservative authors as a treasure, and acclaim any quixotic defense of Idealism against the onslaught of atavistic barbarism and dehumanized modernity?

Let me clarify; fascism is an intrusive force of destruction and no part of the Western Civilization which I champion, born as self-criticism in the Forum of Athens. Conservatism in America or indeed any free nation founded on the values of the Enlightenment begins with a free society of equals, a secular state, objective and testable truth, and a system of justice which is impartial to class, race, or gender, founded on the Rights of Man, scientific rationalism, and Humanism.

Any philosophy of totalitarian authority which centralizes power to a state of force and control, either monarchist-aristocratic, communist, or fascist, is anathema to myself and to democracy and freedom. I am an American and a bearer of the Torch of Liberty. This is why I am on the side of rebellion, revolution, anarchy, chaos, and the frightening of the horses.

Regarding the themes of existential dread of otherness and the terror of alien civilizations, of being overrun by a zombie apocalypse of mindless cannibal brutes which has always been a metaphor of nonwhite immigration, H.P. Lovecraft explored this territory of fear as a cause of the collapse of our civilization. He interrogates rather than valorizes the causes of monarchy and fascism as forms of colonial imperialism.

Lovecraft asked a simple question; what happens to humankind and to human being, meaning, and value without Freudian control of our animal instinctive nature? Throughout his works he recapitulates and extends Nietzsche’s thesis in The Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist critique of state power based on a legal reformulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin; that without the restraining force of law man devolves into a subhuman condition and the most ruthless and amoral wins and becomes king, originally formulated to limit the divine right of kings and crucial to the Enlightenment project and the birth of modern secular democracy.

Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded, is luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism and Freudian horror.

Here are Lovecraft’s primary sources and references; Shakespeare and classical Greek theatre which are common sources, Nietzsche, and Freud. What he did with them, however, was utterly unique and a luminous work of genius which interrogated the failure and collapse of our civilization in World War One from its internal contradictions and forged from his vision an ars poetica of Absurdist-Surrealist Nihilism which prefigured Existentialism.

This line of transmission originates with Dostoevsky and Gogol, was codified by Kafka, and finds realization in Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Kobo Abe, and Thomas Ligotti as Absurdist Nihilism and in William S. Burroughs, Jorge Borges, Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Andre Breton, Philip Lamantia, Allen Ginsburg, Jonathan Carroll, Jeff Vander Meer, and others as Surrealism.

It is his Surrealism for which I love him; Lovecraft’s principal stories form an

Initiation cycle of Jungian shadow work and the confrontation with ones own darkness as the Other, like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood or Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, culminating in his reimagination of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, William S. Burrough’s model for his own final masterwork The Western Lands. Fellow Surrealist Vladimir Nabokov articulated the principles of poetic vision and dreams as transcendent imaginal journeys through time and other dimensions to seize control of our own evolution in his great novel Ada, Jung models them in the Red Book, and Philip K. Dick was consumed by them, but Surrealism as a transhumanist project to become a god or to unite with the Infinite draws on myriads of esoteric, mythic, occult, and mystery traditions, many of which inform Lovecraft’s work. Like Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Lovecraft can be read as a summa theologica and codex of the whole Western mystery tradition.

Like his models and sources, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and those for whom he became a model and reference in turn, Jung, Nabokov, Burroughs, Lamantia, and Philip K. Dick, and aligned with the works of Akutagawa in Kappa, Leonora Carrington, Djuna Barnes, and Jerzy Kosinski in The Painted Bird, the works of Lovecraft are also a therapy journal which documents his struggles with madness.

Like Baudelaire he realizes it is the world and not himself who is mad; but he is also mad, and his great works chart the course of his degeneration and unmooring from consensus reality which was also a liberation of the spirit and of the imagination, a madness and rapture which transformed him into an angelic figure, combining in one being illumination and darkness, depravity and exaltation.

All true art defiles and exalts.

As a figure of Orpheus and Milton’s Rebel Angel Lovecraft struggled to escape the limits of the human and the legacies of his history, his madness a consequence of unresolved internal conflicts and the massive trauma of being an emotionally abandoned child whose parents both died of madness in an asylum, a madness which he shared and feared he could not escape, which made strange his vision as a unique genius but also marked him with a sign of otherness, robbed him of self control and reason at times and crippled his ability to bond or even socialize in person with others, making him a reclusive hermit without sexual interest of any kind.

Lovecraft bore the wound of the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; he married at age 34 having never even kissed anyone before, and his wife remarked that she had to initiate sex as he was uninterested; the failure of their marriage is unmysterious in this light. This and lack of interest in eating which may have been attempts to starve himself to death and resulted in his Nosferatu-like gauntness make me suspect that he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who hated his body and feared his desires. He may also have been held prisoner in isolation during his formative years, under the strict regime of his mother and female guardians, and the tortures he survived are described in symbolic and allegorical form in his works.

Here is a great secret of the mechanism of unequal power as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma and internalized oppression; the son is shaped and deployed as the vengeance of the mother, and the victim by the abuser who is a tyrant and also a survivor of powerlessness and victimhood, and so the system of oppression perpetuates itself. Patriarchy and racism are persistent because they create some of us as monsters with which to subjugate the rest of us.

Lovecraft suffered from what I call Dr Moreau syndrome, fear of devolution to an animal state; also of ones own animal nature, like the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and could not and which William S. Burroughs gloried in being possessed by, which he claimed as a lineage and as the successor of Nietzsche.

This coupled with the xenophobic fear of being overwhelmed by representations of parental authority as an ancient and superior civilization which renders our own insignificant, and robs us of culture as a control mechanism of our id or shadow self. Hence the existential horror of the Western scholar confronted by elder and superior alien civilizations such as Eqypt, as in the Randolph Carter stories which were brilliantly reimagined in The Mummy films starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.

As regards his style; Lovecraft extends Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and like his model Burroughs reimagines the nihilism and transgressive eroticism of Georges Bataille as Surrealism harnessed to the project of Romantic Idealism; to paraphrase the words of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, to break through the mask of our material existence and seize the Reality it conceals. That the quest of Ahab was also his is quite evident; “to the end I shall grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I strike at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” as Ahab declaims to the White Whale, figure of authoritarian tyranny who stands in for God and for his abusers. Whether he was able through his stories to leave us a map of the journey to the unknowns which lie beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden is another matter, proven only in the doing.

As to the stylistics of his rhetoric and ars poetica, Lovecraft has lost his adjectives, which are running amok and taunting their substantives. His howls of desolation are a cause of great merriment among the several grammars he employs, and this is the only thing on which they are in agreement.

His words are formed of scrabble pieces, randomized by being shaken in a dice cup in a game against the gods of madness and the ravening dark, the future of our emerging humanity wagered against the barbarism of our past.

What can be saved, and what dreamed anew? For the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu is once again revealed as an illusion, a palace of memories and lies which in their dance of chaos cannot be limited by their classification and taxonomies of value, but frangible and hollow do betray us.

Mirrors and false images which capture, distort, and falsify us, a wilderness of lost meanings which steal our souls, sound and fury signifying nothing but which seizes and shakes us with the terror of our nothingness like a rag doll in a lion’s mouth, and the signifying monkey who lives at the Buddha’s foot to denote the inherent animal nature of all humankind as a theriomorphic representation has harnessed and is riding him like a pony.

Sometimes our demons must be let out to dance.

What can we learn from Lovecraft now?

One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre or a Lovecraftian one, referential to classical sources which include Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign and hostile to humanity, rests with our solution to the paradox of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?

Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen, of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith as did T.S. Eliot. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bears the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation. Hope in this context is subjugation to authority.

Let us embrace the Hell of total freedom, for nothing is there which does not live within us. “No gods, no masters” as Auguste Blanqui described it in the title of his newspaper in 1880.

The terror of our nothingness, meaninglessness, and powerlessness in a hostile universe wherein the gods are mad and depraved monsters, a universe empty of imposed meaning or value, may also become the joy of total freedom, autonomy, authenticity, self-ownership and self-creation, as it was for Sartre; a universe in which the mould of man is broken and we are utterly without authorized identities.

Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt Awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”

It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.

For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history. Much of our sorrows originate in the conflicts between the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, nature and nurture, the historical and social informing, motivating, and shaping forces of identity.

Is Lovecraft such a figure of heroic struggle against authority, like Icarus, Milton’s Rebel Angel, or Victor Frankenstein, fallen but great, a tragic bearer of the Torch of Liberty?

Great authors are a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, which like the fragmented images of the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror in Anderson’s Snow Queen reflect and reveal aspects of ourselves and come alive in their readers; which Lovecraft shall I describe?

The poet of chaos whom I adore, of madness and the existential terror of our nothingness in a universe of dethroned authority, a visionary and tragic hero?

The survivor of abandonment and abuse who forged beauty from their trauma, a flawed and very human man whose fear of otherness was expressed in allegories of dysmorphia, dehumanization, and degradation which are horrifically filled with racist figures and images and can be read as illuminating case studies of fear and of the dyadic origins of evil in overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized by authority in service to power and the systemic inequalities of power and privilege in hierarchies of elite belonging and otherness?

Lovecraft understood the principle of dancing ones demons; the monstrous figures he describes as shuggoths can be read as racist metaphors, but are also unflinching descriptions of actual childhood night terrors, manifestations of sexual abuse, which invaded his dreams and his flesh to “tickle” him awake. It is this relentless engagement with his fear and darkness, with the legacies of his victimization, this willingness to see the abominable and not look away, and to witness the truth as an author, like Camus to refuse to submit, which makes him useful to us and places his work among the literature of madness and therapy journals, with Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Leonora Carrington, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Jerzy Kosinski, Philip K. Dick, and Kathy Acker. Foucault called this truth telling, and this parrhesia as a sacred calling to pursue the truth as a witness of history, which I claim as my faith, lies at the heart of Lovecraft’s bizarre invented mythos.

How does this help us forge our future as antifascists and antiracists, citizens of a free society of equals and bearers of the Torch of Liberty?

We must speak directly to that fear which is the origin of evil; to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, and we do this best by bearing sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others. How can we engage in liberation struggle from systems of oppression if we cannot embrace our own darkness?

In the words of Karl Popper; “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not wish to adopt a rational attitude.” Let us embrace instead the irrational, our Shakespearean taxonomies of passion as motive forces, of rapture and terror, in the great work of reimagination and transformation of humankind and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.

We may say of Lovecraft what is said of Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who; “He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of the world; no one had ever done it before, perhaps no one will ever do it again. To my mind, that strange, wild man was not only among the world’s greatest artists, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

What is greatness? What does it mean to be a great author or creative genius of any kind, a great human being, in this or any time?

For myself, greatness does not require us to overcome the limits of our histories, only to engage them in authentic struggle. Like Jacob wrestling the angel, everything in life is more powerful than we are; victory lies not in defeating the forces which shape us, but in refusal to submit to them, and in reaching beyond our limits. And in this Lovecraft emerges as a tragic hero, who can teach us how to struggle with our own darkness in our journey toward becoming human.

From the darkness of the unknown and the Forbidden, our demons call to us with siren songs which echo and thunder among limitless chasms of our possibilities, and whisper secrets in our dreams; and they say, Come dance with us.

Come dance with us.

The Lighthouse