Tag: books

June 14 2024 The Painted Bird, I: and a celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday June 14

     On this the birthday of Jerzy Kosinski, I reflect on and interrogate my personal relationship and history with his great novel, which I used as an intertext and mirror in healing from trauma during my teenage years, much as did he in reimagining his childhood therapy journal as he was psychosomatically mute for five years after Liberation by the Russian Army at the age of nine.

     I too created myself as revolutionary struggle during this crucial period of growing up, framed by my witness at the age of nine of Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, our nation’s most massive incident of police terror in which I was near or momentarily dead from the force wave of a grenade, and my near execution by a police death squad in Sao Paulo Brazil in  1974 during my direct actions with the Matadors to rescue the abandoned street children who were being bounty hunted in a state campaign of ethnic cleansing.

     Identity confusion and self-creation as freedom from authorized identities and imposed orders of being, meaning and value, from the boundaries of the Forbidden and other people’s ideas of virtue, the mark of Otherness conferred by death, Last Stands in defiance of authority and carceral states of force and control beyond hope of victory or survival, and the existential crisis of becoming human in liberation struggle against the systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization which arise from the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; in all of this I found reflection in Jerzy Kosinski’s embrace of our monstrosity and fearless gaze into the Nietzschean Abyss and what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness.

     The Painted Bird, I.

     As I have written in celebration of Jerzy Kosinski’s birthday:

     Identity, power, justice, the depravity and perversity of man and the origins of evil; these are the great themes which animate the works of Jerzy Kosinski.

     His unique brand of Catholic Existentialism, a Pauline Absurdism like that of Flannery O’Connor and referential to Camus and Freud as much as Augustine and the Bible, has never been widely understood. Nor has the influence of his training as a sociologist and historian in the Soviet university system of Poland behind the Iron Curtain, prior to his escape to political asylum in America.

    Jerzy Kosinski embraces the Infinite as the Absurd; though his works can create the effect of reading Samuel Beckett, Kobo Abe, or Thomas Ligotti, his intent is to tilt against Nihilism and the forces of disorder, not to endorse them. His episodes which reveal the depravity of humankind and the fallenness of political authority, like those of Jean Genet’s novels, are inversions of Catholic rituals intended as satires of the state as embodied violence.  

     In some respects he can be compared to de Sade, but only to a point; where de Sade was a satirist who wrote as a revolutionary act and campaign of destabilization against the authority of Church and State, Jerzy Kosinski plays the opposite side of the board, marshalling conserving forces to defend absolute and universal human values.

    For his novels, often thinly veiled autobiographies and referential to historical events, are manuals of survival in circumstances of overwhelming force, dehumanizing oppression, and existential terror as systems of oppression.

    Among these we may include his satires of American culture including Being There, and the magnificent nightmare of Europe under fascism, The Painted Bird. His finest nonfiction is The Future is Ours, Comrade, written within two years of his 1957 escape from Poland under Soviet dominion. All of his works bear the weight of his scholarship as a historian and sociologist.

     His novels are metafictional commentaries on the roles he played in life, both chosen and those forced on him by others. Perhaps only Philip Roth has struggled more as a writer for control of his own identity, when those whom he claimed he not in turn claim him, and few have suffered more. I believe that each of us has the right as human beings to reinvent ourselves, and to be who we choose.

      Being There is a precious and delicate confection of a fable, which transforms a universal myth into a new one for our time in spare language that a child might grasp. The film version starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine is also compelling and beautiful; I made a practice of watching it every month for years since I was at university, and rereading the novel which I taught in high school. It has become a part of who I am, this story, and I hope that you will love it as do I.  But before I can take you on a walk through this novel, we must understand its context in the novel for which it is a coda, The Painted Bird.

      The Painted Bird is an unforgettable paen of horrors as lived by the author as a child wandering alone in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, victimized and powerless, a figure of Europe, civilization, and all humanity.    

     I cannot say I advise anyone to open the lid of this particular box and look within; I cannot even say that it is good for you. Exposure to evil of this magnitude and festering malignity, raw and unanswerable, is a disruptive and  corrosive, destabilizing and subversive event, at once destruction and liberation, much like the history it describes. Here the boundaries of the human are charted.

    What has it done for me, this Pandora’s Box of a story? Perhaps only to help me find the will to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. For myself, this has been enough.

     I have lost count of such Last Stands during my decades of revolutionary struggle and resistance to fascism since that fateful day in 1982 Beirut during the siege, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance he had appropriated from that of the Foreign Legion in Paris 1940 and set me on my life’s path. I too have looked into the Abyss, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me, since Mariupol and possibly before, and I must now and always question my actions as a man without fear, mercy, or remorse.

     I am become as history has made me, a monster who hunts other monsters; with death the alternative to survival, with subjugation, falsification, and dehumanization pervasive and omnipresent existential threats on the one hand and those truths written in our flesh and to which we must bear witness, and our glorious liberty and uniqueness on the other, and with only solidarity and our faith in each other to heal the pathology of our disconnectedness and the divisions of authorized identities as elite hierarchies of otherness and belonging, love to redeem the flaws of our humanity, and hope to answer the terror of our nothingness and the brokenness of the world, we each of us must struggle to become human, even when we must trade fragments of our humanity for the hope of future possibilities of becoming human and for the lives of others, who may one day escape the shadows of history in which we dwell.

      Last Stands; naming these forlorn hopes so makes them sound grand and heroic, but they are nothing of the kind. Not acts of virtue bearing the force of redemption, but choices to remain Unconquered as a free and self-created being conferred by refusal to submit against unanswerable force and impossible odds; a human thing, and a power which cannot be taken from us. As Jean Genet said to me on that fateful day, in a burning house, in a time of darkness, in a lost cause; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

       Each of these Defining Moments has created unique imaginal spaces as mimesis which cannot be escaped; I will forever be crawling through tunnels of utter darkness covered in the blood of those I could not save while the earth trembles with impending collapse as I was in Mariupol 2022, and numberless other such moments. But as in Camus’ allegory of Sisyphus I bore the burden of my humanity onward and became Unconquered and free, and so can you. 

     This is what is important; to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as Genet’s Oath of the Resistance goes. What matters are not the horrors I have survived and which have shaped me to the thing that I am, a monster who hunts other monsters, and who has traded pieces of his humanity to do so and win a space of free creative play and time for others to discover and create new kinds of human being, meaning, and value which I may never find or dream; but that in refusal to submit I emerged from the darkness and despair into the light, and so can we all.

     We may not be able to escape the legacies of our history or the consequences of our humanity, nor find balance for the terror of our nothingness nor bring healing to the brokenness of the world; but we can refuse to submit and become Unconquered as free and unique beings, a power which cannot be taken from us and can return us to ourselves.

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

    Here follows my celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday:

    A novel translated from his native Polish and reconstructed from notes written while the author was psychosomatically mute for five years after his liberation by Russia at the age of nine, as a therapy journal, it is unique among the literature of madness and psychoanalysis. The Painted Bird is the voice of this traumatized child; its authenticity is incontestable even though the government of Poland has attempted to discredit it as the Witness of History as part of its policy of denial as regards complicity in the Holocaust.

      Of this I say: evil wears many masks. It can be massively destructive when given the authorized power of governments, armies, official papers and decrees, but this is not its exclusive domain, nor where it is born.

     For the tortures and abuse suffered by the narrator are not inflicted upon him by officials carrying out a policy or because he is a member of a persecuted group like the Jews, though he is sometimes mistaken for a gypsy, but by ordinary villagers simply because they can. Indeed, much of the novel is a series of episodic vignettes in which brutalized villagers commit unspeakable crimes against one another. These episodes form a journey of initiation and are organized as Stations of the Cross:  labyrinthine as is the symbolism of a great cathedral.

    The universality of evil and the depravity of man are the subjects of his great work, and this is what elevates it beyond the conditions of time and place. The Painted Bird affirms traditional values in that it cleaves to the interpretation of the Bible on which our government is based, derived from the idea of sin. In the absence of the restraining force of law, the most ruthless tyrant or criminal wins. As George Washington said, “Government is about force, only force.”

     True, the social use of force cuts many ways, especially when wielded by the juggernaut of governments; my point is that Jerzy Kosinski has written a very Catholic novel which offers an apologetics of law and order any government might welcome. That this is not generally understood may be due to no one having thought to compare him to Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, or other fellow Catholic authors with whom he belongs.

      Indeed, The Painted Bird has been misunderstood as Holocaust literature and originally misrepresented by the publisher as nonfictional testimony, which backfired as it made the author and his work vulnerable to the lies of his political foes.  He himself became a Painted Bird, ostracized and tormented by his fellows both as a child and as an author, and both functioning on the basis of a public denial of his identity as a Polish Catholic. The tribes he claimed did not in turn claim him, as his faith led him to identify evil as a universal human flaw and not the intrusive weapon of a despised enemy outsider.      

     The Painted Bird thematically recapitulates Measure For Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded. Jerzy Kosinski has organized and fictionalized his therapy journal along lines paralleling the Bard’s play, while reversing its revolutionary critique of authorized force.

     Running through all his novels are interlinked narratives supporting Freud’s theory that humans are polymorphosly perverse until they learn to control their animal nature,  and against Rousseau’s idea that the natural man is not bound by social contracts made prior to his birth or without his consent and participation, and may without concern disregard such laws, which is the legal basis of the American Declaration of Independence and a keystone of the Supreme Court’s rulings on the Constitution. And so we have the doctrine of Natural Law, a startling bit of anarchy at the founding of our nation, which goes directly to the heart of Jerzy Kosinski’s theme of power relations and defense of a universal and imperative moral order. By moral order I mean human rights as an absolute and universal principle, independent of tribe and tradition; the classic conservative critique of ethical and cultural relativism.

      The logical extension of this line of reasoning denies the legitimacy of the American state, and aligns with the British claim that our revolution, at its origin anticolonial and antiaristocratic, has no basis in law, and with the claim of all states to rule their citizens without their consent personally as a contract.

     Among the finest interrogations of this idea of moral order as  authoritarianism can be found in Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.

       In Jerzy Kosinski’s world, like that of William T. Vollman, moral order balances on a social contract guaranteed by force; a brutal and fallen world, but one in which true heroism is possible.

     Little wonder that, once he became rich and famous on the basis of this book, his subsequent novels were mainly elaborately constructed Baroque   fantasies of vengeance and the championing of the powerless. They also continue his exploration of Dante’s Inferno, displaying the consequences of sin and his role as an avenging angel. His work foregrounds personal sin as the origin of social evils; vanity and greed, materialism and the loss of communion as connection with others as well as the Infinite, sexual terror as a means of ownership and dehumanization, all the facades which abstract us from ourselves and one another. He wrote them to avenge the child he had once been, but also to shield others by exposing injustices.

     And this is what killed him:  his quixotic knight-errantry, truthtelling, and the authorial turning over of stones. Though his death was reported as a suicide, with a final note as proof, this is inconsistent with his obsessive survivalism, vigilante justice, secret identities, use of his public role as concealment, and his appropriation of intelligence tradecraft to evade enemies which included the Soviet Union he had escaped, and his personal mission of hunting evildoers. In life as in his fiction, Jerzy Kosinski was an avenging trickster who like the heroes of the messianic films The Magic Christian and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory constructed elaborate Dante-esque traps as purgatorial rituals. This is the author who became a role model for me as I worked through my trauma with his novel as my guide to becoming human; a Dark Knight and Avenger. He would have never abdicated his chosen role as a protector of innocents, for this is what sustained him and gave his tragedies and traumas meaning and made them bearable.

      Jerzy Kosinski died as his forebears did, when their lances shattered on the unstoppable tanks of the invaders in a final charge of traditional meaning and value against a nihilistic barbarian modernity, glorious and beautiful as was the defense of the Great Siege of Malta, and bearing to the last the only title that matters, that of Invictus.

    So we come to Being There, a deceptively simple story based on the fables of Krylov which retells the Biblical Fall of Man and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the return of Christ as the Second Adam from Exile as a redeemer.

      As does his work as a whole and The Painted Bird especially, Being There presents at once a path of spiritual rebirth which unifies Catholic sin and Existential freedom, a Freudian political theory of government as force, a Sartrean critique of identity as a social construction, and a theory of history which re-evaluates and diverges from both Biblical teleology and Marxism, and written by a man who was once the Soviet Union’s greatest sociologist with a deeply personal stake in the issues and themes of his work rooted in profound childhood trauma.

     First, it is a masterpiece, directly addressing the themes developed in The Painted Bird in the context of America, a new home where Jerzy Kosinski found celebrity, wealth, and power, (I would like to say safety, but these things cannot buy safety, and security is an illusion) but also a dehumanizing  commodification, superficial materialism, and implicit class system with which he was not wholly comfortable even though he had married into the apex of New York society.

    Both novels are meditations on Otherness; in one the bird which is painted to look different is pecked to death by his fellows, and in Being There someone who is truly different moves among us unhindered because he wears the colors of whatever flock he finds. Themes of concealment and illusion, identity and membership, the protection of assimilation or the danger and loneliness of being different are exhibited in both great books.

      Change the protagonist and we have the myth and horror story of the skinwalker, a monster or cannibal predator who walks among us in disguise, or the tragic figure of the Elephant Man, whose virtue and beauty are hidden behind a hideous mask of flesh. Or an anonymous hero, a Batman-like figure standing the night watch for us all, as was the author Jerzy Kosinski to the last.

     Second, Being There is powerful because it enacts a universal mythic pattern, and then breaks the pattern to create a new myth, maybe one more useful to us now.

     What follows are my lecture notes on Being There, which I would hand out to my classes of High School Juniors and Seniors in the Honors Program and AP English (AP courses being preparatory classwork for taking the AP subject exams which can earn college units if passed- like A levels in British schools)       and read aloud in parts as the class progressed through the book, stopping to ask questions and start discussions. I taught Being There as an introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; it can also be read as a companion text to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which shares its sources in Arthurian myth.

     The works of Jerzy Kosinski came into my life through the influence of my mother, Coleridge scholar and expert on religious symbolism in medieval art, a Catholic university trained psychologist, biologist, and English teacher who, at my insistence after some time of Kosinski being a presence of references in our home while she wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet hospital case notes of his childhood therapy as compared to his own notes written between the ages of nine and fourteen ending when he regained the power of speech and which later became the basis of his novel, gave me The Painted Bird to read when I was seventeen. As one can imagine, we talked about it a lot.

       I myself would not now do as she did then; its simply too disturbing and can cause real harm, though I was working though the trauma of battle and near execution by a police death squad in Brazil the summer before high school. If you are a survivor of private Holocausts, it can be useful; I might say the same of Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School, which I have taught to high school students who were survivors of sexual terror as was she.

     As to other influences on the text of my lecture notes, I wrote it during my first year of teaching high school, and while I used it without changes for many years as a discussion prompt it reflects my interests and understanding at the time; I was in my third year of university and taking courses in Celtic Literature and Arthurian Romance while I wrote it, and reading Emma Jung’s Grail studies. My interpretations are also shaped by deep and lifelong interests, sparked by reading Frazier’s Golden Bough in sixth grade, in Joseph Campbell and comparative mythology, fairytales, the archetypal psychology of Jung and Hillman, and a Great Books education through my teenage years. As I could count on no particular literary background among my students, to frame a discussion I had to tell the story; hence the brief retellings of references. 

          On Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There:  a reading guide

    Being There is a fable, a retelling of the story of the Original Man, and of his exile from Paradise and his redemption of the world as the Holy Fool. It parallels the story of Christ, the Fall of Adam and the return of the world to an Edenic state through the second Adam, the Innocent who goes shod in the temple. In Being There, the hero’s quest takes him to a citadel of Fallenness, where he must heal the wound of a Fisher King, in an initiation pattern found in Celtic pagan and Arthurian sources. 

    Early Christian legend says that Jesus was crucified on Calvary, the Mound of the Skull, where the skull of Adam is buried. He is depicted in early art as being hung from the Tree of Life rather than nailed to a cross, just as Odin hung from the World Tree Ygddrasil, a sacrifice to himself, in order to gain knowledge of the runes, universal organizing and informing principles. In the body of Jewish folklore and mystical gnosis called Cabala, the Tree of Life is a series of emanations from the Infinite called the sephiroth, worlds which form a ladder between our world and the Divine. Through astral projection and other practices, the cabalist reunites pairs of opposing principles within himself, just as the Redeemer of the Basilidians mounted through the planetary spheres to acquire their powers. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life were understood to be aspects of the same linking system.

    Many mythic systems trace humanity to an Original Man, actually an inner man in whom all participate and share in the human spirit. This is clearly true of Adam, but also of the Purusha in India and Chung Ko in China, among others.

    Parallel myths are structured on the idea of the Universal Monarch, such as Arthur, the Once and Future King. In both Christianity and Buddhism, the hero is a Holy Fool who forsakes the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer, just as Chance, incapable of relating to the world except as an innocent, will accidently become the President of America and restore the nation’s spirit.

     Chance is evicted from the Garden of Eden and is cast into a fallen world; in the film the fallen state of the world surrounding his home is more clearly contrasted with the idyllic garden than in the book. When Chance is introduced to the world during a television interview, he unknowingly proposes to govern as a gardener tends his garden, returning it to a state of order and harmony. Chance is the Redeemer bringing about the Kingdom of God.

    The lawyers who evict Chance are clearly Tempter figures; Chance defeats them when he declines to make a claim against the old man’s estate, as doing so would have kept him in Paradise and prevented him from fulfilling his role as Redeemer. While sitting under the Bo tree awaiting his vision of Enlightenment, Buddha is tempted by Mara in his terrible and seductive forms. Christ is also tempted, both to display his powers and to become World Monarch in a riddle match with Satan, prior to his vision of the Shekinah or Holy Spirit.  But the Holy Fool must descend into the fallen world if he is to redeem it, and so in Islam the serpent is revered as Iblis, the Instructor, a guide of the soul and faithful servant of the Infinite. In all his forms, the Holy Fool must reject the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer.

     People constantly misunderstand Chance; they misinterpret his words in their own context. He is both the sum of images he has internalized from television and the images others make of him; he is all mankind. He is a mirror; Jason kills the Medusa by polishing his shield to a mirror surface so that she sees herself and turns to stone. Chance has the power to transform others because he is the Inner Man in an innocent, unfallen state. Eve tells Chance, “You make me free. I reveal myself to myself, and I am purged.”

     After leaving the Garden, Chance comes by accident to live in another house, the mansion of a powerful financier, Mr. Rand, and his wife, Eve. The mansion is a Castle Perilous, a material and fallen cage for a Fisher King. Chance goes from the Garden to this second house, and from a triadic relationship with the Old Man and the maid, Louise, to another with Mr Rand and Eve.

     Both Mr Rand and the Old Man are dying; to understand the interaction between the major characters in Being There, let’s compare it to the mythic pattern in the Arthurian tale of Parsifal and the Grail Quest. Parsifal is an innocent, raised in seclusion as were Buddha and Chance. Parsifal goes into the world dressed as a fool or jester, riding an ass, and defeats his opponents in combat simply because he is too ignorant to be afraid and never hesitates to charge. He undertakes to find the Grail and bring it to Arthur, who is so sick he can’t get out of bed for seven years, during which time there is famine in the land. The period of the Wasteland is a representation of the fallen state of the world, which can only be healed through spiritual renewal. Parsifal reaches the Grail Castle, whose lord, the Fisher King, is in a position identical to Arthur’s; he is sick and his land is barren. The Fisher King is wounded through the thighs; just as Arthur fell ill when he lost Guinevere, the Fisher King fell ill when the virgin in whose lap his feet must rest was slain. Both rulers are cut off from the source of spiritual renewal and empowerment. Parsifal heals the Fisher King and gains a vision of the Grail by asking the question Buddha asked of his charioteer; “What is wrong with you?” Many other knights on the Grail Quest had failed to ask it, to much wailing and sorrow.

     Like Parsifal, Chance is a figure of the Holy Fool, the child who points out that the Emperor has no clothes. When Mr Rand tells Chance, “I’m not afraid of dying anymore. I’m ready to trade the Horn of Plenty for the Horn of Gabriel,” it is clear that in Chance he has found redemption.  

     From Garden to Wasteland and back again; Chance’s progression follows the quest of Dante for Beatrice, but without a transformative realization. Part of this initiation pattern can be seen in the tension of images between the Garden and the Wasteland.

     The image of the Garden has an interesting history; in the Koran it is called Hasht Bihesht, the Eight Paradises visited by Mohammed on his Night Journey.  Like the labyrinth-gardens of medieval Europe, the Islamic water garden reflected the order of a universe unfolding according to divine will, represented a plan of progress on the pilgrim’s journey toward the Infinite, and provided an immediate metaphor of rebirth in its cycles of decay and growth.

     Dante’s vision of a multileveled universe is similar to the Koran’s; they also share the concepts of a divine mercy and justice in the afterlife, a vision gained in an Otherworld journey, and conceptualize the Infinite as inclusive of the feminine, the Beloved.

     The English word “Paradise” has its roots in the Persian pairi, around, and deiza, wall; a walled garden. Its Greek form, paradeisoi, comes from Xeonophon’s Socratic discourse, the Oeconomics, a history of the Persian war of 400 B.C.  Virgil referred to the sacred groves around Roman temples as a paradisus. The word first appeared in Middle English as paradis in 1175 in a Biblical passage” God ha hine brohte into paradis.”

     The identification of Paradise with the Garden of Eden happened quite early, during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews from which they were released by Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C. During this time, Judaism assimilated the Sumerian-Babylonian Paradise, the Garden of the Gods, from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

 Gilgamesh describes his vision of the Garden: “In this immortal garden stands the Tree, with trunk of gold and beautiful to see. Beside a sacred fount the Tree is placed, with emeralds and unknown gems is graced.”

     Thus, at the end of the human journey we are brought to the beginning again. From its earliest times, Indo-European myth has held the idea of the afterlife as a return to the source and origin of life.

     In Being There, the Garden is contrasted with the Wasteland, the pervading economic malaise linked to the impotence and illness of both Mr Rand and the President as types of the Fisher King.

     Arthur’s Wasteland is a divine punishment for his inhumanity; Arthur mab Uthr means not “son of Uther” but “the Cruel”. The Historia Brittonum records that he once hanged two dozen children; in another incident he cut off the noses of the female relatives of a man who disturbed his banquet. Geoffrey of Monmouth based the figure of Arthur on the historical Macsen Wledig, a Welshman who became Emperor of Rome in 383 with the support of the legions in Britain. His story is told in the Mabinogi, in the tale of Culwich and Olwen. The literature of early Arthurian romance was written largely by monks both as a criticism of the system of chivalry and to connect Christianity to the Celtic literary heritage.

     Mythically, Arthur, a name meaning “the Bear”, is a figure of the Celtic Lord of the Animals. The usual pattern has him paired with a double-aspected Goddess who is both Mother and Bride, in Celtic terms Gog and Magog, literally son, son of Mother. Grendel and his mother are another example.

     In Being There, Chance’s relationship with the black maid, Louise, is superceded by that of Eve, Mr Rand’s wife. The dynamics between Louise and Eve are understandable in terms of the Goddess figures in the original sources from which the story of Eden was drawn in Genesis.

     Adams first wife was Lillith, a sensual black demoness who lived in a cave. An embodiment of the forces of nature, she is represented as a Trickster figure in medieval Jewish folklore. Adam, himself Lord of the Animals, both claimed them and completed their creation in naming them. Adam was born both male and female, a figure of wholeness split into the sexes when Eve was made from his female half.

     Eve’s banishment from the Garden is an Underworld journey paralleled by the story of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone, daughter of Demeter as Eve is the Maiden aspect of Lillith, is abducted by Pluto, King of the Underworld, to reign as his queen during winter. Demeter descends to the underworld to rescue her, and wins her freedom for half of each year, during which the land is fruitful.

     The transformation of Yahweh from King of the Underworld to an all-knowing, all-powerful creator was never complete in Judaism; until Roman times the Goddess was worshipped on a separate altar beside God. Even today, God’s wife, the Shekinah or Wisdom, is recognized in Jewish rituals such as the Lekha Dodi, which welcomes the Bride of God into the temple. In Christianity she became the Holy Spirit and Mary Theotikos, god-bearer or Mother of God. The Black Madonna found on many Catholic altars is a survival of Lillith, the Great Mother.

     The Wasteland period in Arthurian romance begins when Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, is abducted by the mad Lancelot du Lac, a champion of the spirits, in Saxon called alven or elves, in Gaelic called sidhe. She is reclaimed in a cataclysmic war against the sidhe led by Morgan LeFay, the Faerie Queen. After his death, Arthur is sent drifting in a boat toward the Isle of Avalon, the realm of faerie, signifying his completion of the initiation process and return to the feminine source of being.

     The Ramayana parallels major features of this initiation pattern. Rama is a Universal Monarch who wanders the jungle for nine years in a Wasteland period. His wife, Sita, who is a figure of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and wife of Vishnu the Incarnator, is abducted by Ravanna, King of the Demons. She is Tempted by Ravanna to become Queen of the Underworld, but remains faithful to Rama. Rama, acting as Lord of the Animals, gathers an army of six million monkeys and a number of bears and attacks Ravanna’s island. Together with Hanuman the Monkey King, he reclaims Sita in a battle which pits demons against men, beasts, and gods; rather like the war in Irish mythology of the Tuatha deDanaan against the demonic Fomorians who dwell beneath the sea.

     The pivotal moment in Being There occurs when Chance fails to respond to Eve’s attempt at seduction. Incapable of sexual interest or Temptation, of initiation through assimilation of the feminine unconscious, Chance fails to unite with the Shekinah. The pattern of initiation, of internalizing projections or de-objectifying the Other, is disrupted. His mind, and the creative potential expressed by sexuality, is crippled by the wound of the Fisher King.

     Kosinski leads the reader to expect a transformative event in this scene, and then diverges wildly from the expected. The jarring discontinuity alerts us to his real intent and contribution; the creation of a new myth, a modern myth in which man has no defining relationship to the world and must make his own.

     The Temptation as an Underworld journey to reclaim the feminine creative force and emerge fully human, becoming an Original Man, is found in three sources which form a historical progression within a literary tradition. The direct antecedents of Being There are the story of Pwyll in the Mabinogi, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Wagner’s Parsifal.

     In the first story of the Mabinogi, King Pwyll meets Arawn, King of the Underworld, while riding in the forest. They agree to trade places for a year; Arawn casts a spell which makes each look like the other.  During this time, Pwyll is Tempted by Arawn’s Queen, but resists her. His initiation complete, Pwyll returns home to become a just and merciful king. The second half of the story articulates a linked myth, the Underworld journey of the goddess Rhiannon, which parallels that of Persephone.

     Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a more sophisticated story, a synthesis of Christian and pagan Celtic elements. Gawain, linked to Parsifal in other stories as a contrasting-complementary character, is a development of the Irish hero Cuchulainn. The Green Knight is both Christ and the Green Man, Celtic god of vegetative rebirth whose leafy face can be seen as a decorative motif in English churches. A parallel trickster-initiator figure in Islam is the Green Genie Khidr.

     Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are feasting at Camelot when a strange knight enters the hall bearing an axe, a man made of vines and leaves in green armor. He issues a challenge, and by the laws of chivalry the request of a guest cannot be denied once he has been admitted to the hospitality of the castle; one of them must strike off his head, after which the Green Knight will return the blow. Gawain agrees, to avoid Arthur’s loss of honor. He chops off the Green Knight’s head, and the Knight picks up his head and speaks; “In one year you will come to my castle, and I will return the blow.”

     Gawain sets out on his quest a year later, and comes to the Castle Perilous, where he is tempted by its Queen. He resists, and is given her magic lace girdle to wear. Dressed in the Queen of the Underworld’s clothes, he goes to meet the Knight at a cavern called the Green Church. The Green Knight swings but stops his blow, just nicking Gawain’s neck in an act of redemption. The Green Knight tells him that the Castle Perilous is his own, and its Queen the wife of the Green Knight.

    Parallel elements include the Underworld journey and Castle, the Temptation by an Underworld Queen, an exchange of identities with an Underworld King, and a wandering or Wasteland period. The Beheading Game is a retelling of Cuchulainn’s contest for the kingship of Ulster in the epic Bricriu’s Feast.

     Chance is sent on an Underworld journey to Mr. Rand’s house, is Tempted by Eve, and takes the place of the Fisher King. The seduction scene is where the story of Chance breaks the initiation pattern. Like the Old Man, Chance bears the wound of the Fisher King. In the first chapter we learn, “The soil of his brain, the ground from which all his thoughts shot up, had been ruined forever.”

     In Wagner’s opera Parzival, the theme of Redemption also hinges on a Temptation. Anfortas, the Fisher King, is wounded by the Spear of Longinus, which pierced Christ’s side at the Passion. Parzival’s experience with his objectified Other in the form of the sensual Kundry’s kiss triggers his despair and eventual redemption. The Holy Fool becomes Redeemer through unification with the unconscious.

     Chance’s tragic flaw prevents him from undergoing a transformative initiation; he is the Holy Fool as pure symbol. Kosinski uses the interruption of a mythic pattern as social critique; the mold of man is broken. Like Theseus, we must find our way through the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, but without Ariadne’s Thread to guide us. Like Mersault in The Stranger, Chance is the ultimate image of modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness. He is, perhaps, the only Redeemer we deserve.

     Or, perhaps Kosinski’s message is a more simple, hopeful one: First, we must recognize that we are on a journey toward becoming human. Second, we have no map of transformative process to guide us. Therefore, each of us must reinvent how to be human.

     Chance’s redemptive power rests on his innocence; he is the child who speaks truth to power, who knows the Emperor has no clothes, an Adamic man in his uncorrupted state, the Fool who can achieve a vision of the Infinite.

    Bodidharma, the founder of Zen, once had an interview with the Emperor of China.

     The Emperor said to him, ” I have donated money to the poor, I have built orphanages, hospitals, and monasteries. How much merit have I accumulated in heaven?”

     To which Bodidharma said, “None whatsoever.”

Being There film trailer

Being There, Jerzy Kosiński

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677877.Being_There?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_11

The Painted Bird – Official Trailer

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=the+painted+bird+movie+2019&docid=608047402167044183&mid=F0F36D2A2FC339280D07F0F36D2A2FC339280D07&view=detail&FORM=VIRE

The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosiński

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18452.The_Painted_Bird

Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller, Jerzy Kosiński, Barbara Tepa Lupack

 (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17120292-oral-pleasure

Being There in the Age of Trump, Barbara Tepa Lupack

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/116268099-being-there-in-the-age-of-trump

Peter Bart: The Trumpian Hero Of ‘Being There’ 40 Years Ago Built His Power Base On A Message He Never Understood

https://www.cineaste.com/fall2017/being-there

https://www.filmsite.org/bein.html

http://www.thecinessential.com/being-there/televising-reality

http://www.thecinessential.com/being-there/reflection

Being There

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-being-there-1979

Being There 1979 : Film Analysis/Review -Symbolism, Esoteric Paradigms, and the Creation of Reality

https://www.popmatters.com/being-there-hal-ashby-2495395173.html

The Green Knight (2021 Movie) Official Trailer

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Unknown, Bernard O’Donoghue

 (Translator)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/380544.Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=zzSKPsxyxs&rank=6

The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems, T.S. Eliot,

Christopher Ricks  (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27804254-the-poems-of-t-s-eliot-1?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=V1atmRdRTc&rank=60

The Grail Legend, Emma Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/572302.The_Grail_Legend?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=4o08ybsDIV&rank=3
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March 2 2024 Women’s History Month: Feminism as Revolutionary Struggle and a Reimagination of Humankind and our Historical Civilization

As we begin our annual celebration of Women’s History Month, I am struck once more with the vast and awesome task which the ancestresses and warrior matriarchs of our modern world set for themselves under the banner of Feminism; no less than the total reimagination of humankind and our historical civilization.

     This subsumes cultural and ideological fields of Philosophy and its subset Political Science, of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Literary Theory, and Alternate Histories of patriarchal sexual terror, enslavement, dehumanization, commodification, falsification, and of resistance and liberation, as revolutionary struggle.

     Here are some reading recommendations on the subject of Feminist thought and Women’s History: 

     Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks is wonderful and engaging, and the first book I would recommend to a high school student or anyone new to the subject. Thereafter read her other works; Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation

     For the best general America history of the movement, read The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America by Ruth Rosen.

     Sex and Subterfuge: women writers to 1850, by Eva Figes is an excellent critical history of literature.

     Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant, erudite, and savagely satirical trilogy is by turns delightful and disturbingly horrific, and a must-read for everyone; Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters.

      Women & Power: A Manifesto, by Mary Beard has the finest writing on the subject of power and gender relations ever, by anyone.

     Camille Paglia’s notorious and incendiary Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson remains a glorious and strange theoretical work on the origins of culture in gender inequalities, authorized identities of sex and gender, interrogations of ontological gendered being in literature, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as a negotiated ground of struggle.

     From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock by Marina Warner together comprise a riveting and brilliant interrogation of the iconography of femininity and masculinity in our civilization.

     Women, Race & Class, by Angela Y. Davis is an excellent guide to the idea of intersectionality by an iconic figure of revolutionary struggle.

     Of course everyone should read the work that originated Feminism as a Humanist philosophy and a development of Existentialism in the new translation, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, H.M. Parshley (Translator & Editor), Deirdre Bair (Introduction).

     The Deepening Darkness: Loss, Patriarchy, and Democracy’s Future, and its sequel Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance

by Carol Gilligan, David A.J. Richards, together comprise the most relevant ideological framework for understanding and resisting patriarchal oppression yet written.

      I enjoyed Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison, by A.S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre.

     We may discover and explore the diverse literature and developmental and Hegelian epochs of Feminism through the great books which were its fulcrums of change;  Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer,      Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone.

     And then we have my two favorite authors on the subject, Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling.

     Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, Anne Fausto-Sterling

     Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, Undoing Gender, Senses of the Subject, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Precarious Life, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political, Judith Butler

     Beyond the subjects of Feminism as a philosophy, ideology, and alternate history, there is the subject of Women’s Literature in all its luminous and transformational diversity. As written by Judith Butler, “We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”

     Here is a short reading list of indisputable classics and masterpieces of world literature, and some newer discoveries:

      Orlando, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

     The Bell Jar, Ariel, Sylvia Plath

      The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson

     Tender Buttons, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Paris France, Picasso, How to Write, Gertrude Stein

     Collages, Henry and June, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, Anais Nin

     La Bâtarde, Mad in Pursuit, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, Violette Leduc

     Cat’s Eye, Life Before Man, Interlunar, The Edible Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

     Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

     The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, Stories of Eva Luna, Isabel Allende

     The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Nights At The Circus, The Magic Toyshop, Wise Children, The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter

     Sexing the Cherry, Art & Lies, The Passion, Written on the Body, The Poetics of Sex, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson    

    Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor

     Blood and Guts in High School, In Memoriam to Identity, Great Expectations,  Empire of the Senseless, Don Quixote, Body of Work, Kathy Acker

     Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn, Where The Stress Falls, On Photography, Susan Sontag

     The Faraway Nearby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Call Them By Their True Names, Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebeca Solnit

     Collected Stories of Collette

     The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

     Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

     Frankenstein, Mary Shelly

     Nightwood, Djuna Barnes

     Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier

     Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

     The Black Prince, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, A Word Child, The Sea, the Sea, Nuns and Soldiers, The Philosopher’s Pupil, The Good Apprentice, The Green Knight, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Mudoch

     Possession, Babel Tower, Angels and Insects, The Children’s Book, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, A.S. Byatt

     Light, Nelly’s Version, Eva Figues

     Geek Love, Katherine Dunn

     The Gray House, Mariam Petrosyan

     Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk

     The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Leonora Carrington

     The Hélène Cixous Reader, Cixous, Sellers ed, foreword Jacques Derrida

     You Don’t Love Yourself, Portrait of a Man Unknown, The Planetarium, The Golden Fruits, Here, Use of Speech, Nathalie Sarraute

     Memiors of Hadrian, The Abyss, Fires, That Mighty Sculptor Time, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, Dreams and Destinies, Marguerite Yourcenar

      The Fountains of Neptune, The Monstrous and the Marvelous, The Deep Zoo, The Cult of Seizure, Phosphor in Dreamland, Gazelle, The One Marvelous Thing, Netsuke, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition : A Novel of the Marquis de Sade, Brightfellow, Rikki Ducornet

    The Malady of Death, The War, The North China Lover, Marguerite Duras

     Serowe, Maru, A Question of Power, Bessie Head

     Dust, The Dragonfly Sea, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

     The Memory of Love, Ancestor Stones, Aminatta Forna

     Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus, We Should All Be Feminists, Dear      Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

     Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not, This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga

     Pet, Freshwater, The Death of Vivek Oji, Dear Senthuran, Akwaeke Emezi 

     The Secret River, Kate Grenville

     The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Drylands, Thea Astley

     The Octopus and I, Erin Hortle

     Prizes: the Selected Stories, Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water, The Edge of the Alphabet, Scented Gardens for the Blind, Intensive Care, Daughter Buffalo, The Carpathians, Janet Frame

      The Piano, Jane Campion

     Selected Stories, Katherine Mansfield

     Te Kaihau: the Windeater, The Bone People, Stonefish, Keri Hulme

     Monkey Beach, Son of a Trickster, Trickster Drift, Eden Robinson

      The Smaller Infinity, Patricia Monk

      Autobiography of Red, Eros the Bittersweet, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Glass Irony and God, Antigonick, An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Men in the Off Hours, Decreation, Float, Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae (contributor), Anne Carson

     Malina, Darkness Spoken: collected poems of Ingeborg Bachman

     The Piano Teacher, Wonderful Wonderful Times, Elfriede Jelinek

     Visitation, The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck

     Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, Medea, The Quest for Christa T., Accident: A Day’s News, Christa Wolf

    Conjurations: poems of Sarah Kirsch

    Empress and the Cake, Linda Stift

     Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Jane Austen

     Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, Ali Smith

      Piranesi, Susanna Clarke   

     The Liar’s Dictionary, Eley Williams 

     Bina, Anakana Schofield  

     The Mercies, Kiran Millwood Hargrave    

      Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell

     The Mermaids in the Basement, The Leto Bundle, Indigo, Murderers I have Known and other short stories, Fly Away Home, Marina Warner

     Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia

     Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

     Love Anger Madness: a Haitian Trilogy, Marie Vieux-Chauvet

     The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid

      Crossing the Mangrove, Windward Heights, Celine, Segu, Children of Segu, Tree of Life, The Last of the African Kings, What is Africa to Me?, Maryse Conde

     Prospero’s Daughter, Even in Paradise, Bruised Hibiscus, Elizabeth Nunez

     The Joy Luck Club, Hundred Secret Senses, Amy Tan

     The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, Maxine Hong Kingston

     Legacies: a Chinese Mosaic, The Middle Heart, Bette Bao Lord

      The Island of Sea Women, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, China Dolls, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, Dreams of Joy, Lisa See

     Red Azalea, Pearl of China, Becoming Madame Mao, Anchee Min

     Love in a Fallen CIty, Lust Caution: the story, the screenplay, and the making of the film, The Rouge of the North, The Book of Change, Eileen Chang

     Three Souls, Dragon Springs Road, The Library of Legends, Janie Chang

     The Night Tiger, The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo

     The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction, The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (with John Cusack, Daniel Ellsberg, and Edward Snowden), Azadi, India: A Mosaic, Arundhati Roy

     Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri

     Jasmine, The Holder of the Word, The Tree Bride, Desireable Daughters, Miss New India, Darkness, Bharati Mukherjee

     The Mistress of Spices, The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

     The Widows of Malabar Hill, The Sleeping Dictionary, Sujata Massey

      Fatma: a novel of Arabia, The Doves Necklace, Raja Alem

     The Fall of the Imam, God Dies By The Nile and other stories, The Innocence of the Devil, Walking Through Fire, Nawal El Saadawi

     The Moor’s Account, Laila Lalami

     Here There Was Once A Country, Venus Khoury-Gata

    Aria, Nazanine Hozar  

     The Iraqi Nights, Dunya Mikhail

     Scheherazade Goes West, Harem Within, Fatema Mernissi

     Equal of the Sun, The Blood of Flowers, Anita Amirrezvani

     Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Things I’ve Been Silent About, The Republic of Imagination, Azar Nafisi

     The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

     Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto

     Kabuki Dancer, The River Ki, Sawako Arioshi

     Masks, Fumiko Enchi

     The Adventures Of Sumiyakist Q, The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories, Yumiko Kurahashi

     Where the Wild Ladies Are, Matsuda Aoko

     Killing Kanoko, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Itō Hiromi

     The Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa

      The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt 

     36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics, The Dark Sister, Strange Attractors: Stories, Rebecca Goldstein

     Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch

     City of Many Days, The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East, Shulamith Hareven

     The Complete Stories, Near to the Wild Heart, The Apple in the Dark, The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector

     Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor  

     Texas: The Great Theft, Carmen Boullosa

     Leopoldina’s Dream, Thus Were Their Faces, The Promise, Silvina Ocampo

     Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve, Gioconda Belli

     Clara: Thirteen Short Stories and a Novel, The Lizard’s Tail, He Who Searches, The Censors: A Bilingual Selection of Stories, Symmetries, Bedside Manners, Luisa Valenzuela

     Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enríquez

     The Dark Bride, Laura Restrepo

     Mouthful of Birds, Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin

    The Obscene Madame D, Letters From a Seducer, With my Dog Eyes, Hilda Hist

     Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

     Tender Is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica

     Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik 

     The Storm, The Virtuoso, The Kreutzer Sonata, Margriet de Moor

     Threshold of Fire, In the Dark Wood Wandering, The Scarlet City, The Tea Lords, Hella S. Haase

     Sleepwalker in a Fog, Tatyana Tolstaya

     Girls Against God, Jenny Hval

     Complete Poems, Kallocain, Karin Boye

     Krane’s Cafe: An Interior With Figures, The Leech, Cora Sandel

     Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset

     The Lowenskold Ring, Charlotte Lowenskold, Anna Svard, Selma Lagerlof

     The Third Hotel, Laura van den Berg

     The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

     Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, The Fresco, The Visitor, The Companions, The Margarets, Sherri S. Tepper

     Oblique Prayers, Denise Levertov

     The Dead and the Living, Arias, Sharon Olds

     Collected Poems: 1950-2012, Adrienne Rich

     Fried Green Tomatoes, Fannie Flagg

     Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

     Ballad of the Sad Cafe and other stories, Carson McCullers

     I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, and Then Again: a Zora Neal Hurston Reader, Alice Walker ed, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks On A Road, Collected Plays, Zora Neal Hurston

     The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor

     Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia E. Butler

      I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Complete Stories, Maya Angelou

     The Color Purple, Living by the Word, The Temple of My Familiar, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Alice Walker

     Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Collected Poems, The Collected Plays, Audre Lorde

     Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

     Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: an American Lyric, Citizen: an American Lyric, Just Us, Claudia Rankine

     Night Flying Woman, Ignatia Broker

     Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Storyteller, Turquoise Ledger, Leslie Silko

     Firesticks, Primer of the Obsolete, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha, Uprising of Goats, Designs of the Night Sky, The Mask Maker, Stories of the Driven World, American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, The Dance Partner, The Dream of a Broken Field, Diane Glancy

     Two Old Women, Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun, Velma Wallis

     Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz

      How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo!, In the Time of the Butterflies, In the Name of Salome, The Woman I Kept to Myself, Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA, Something to Declare, Julia Alvarez

     The Moths and other stories, Under the Feet of Jesus, Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena Viramontes

     So Far From God, Peel My Love Like an Onion, The Guardians, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, I Ask the Impossible, Ana Castillo

      The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollaring Creek and other stories, Caramelo, My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, Sandra Cisneros

     Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia

     I Hotel, Tropic of Orange, Through the Ark of the Rain Forest, Karen Yamashita

     Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, Tiger Writing , The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, Gish Jen

     Divakaruni :  The Mistress of Spices, The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee

     The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo

     Miracle Fruit, At the Drive In Volcano, Lucky Fish, Oceanic, Aimee Nezhukumatathil

      Dance Dance Revolution: Poems, Cathy Park Hong

     Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

     Inferno, Catherine Cho  

     The Awakening and Selected Stories, Kate Chopin

     Man Walks into a Room, The History of Love, Great House, Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss

     Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard

     The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova

     Averno, The Triumph of Achilles, Faithful and Virtuous Night, Proofs and Theories, American Originality, Louise Gluck                             

    The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman

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February 29 2024 A Leap of Faith Into Unknown Futures and Undiscovered Possibilities of Becoming Human

     On this Leap Day, which repeats only once every four years, we abide in a liminal time sandboxed from all the rest in a special way, for its memories which define us both here in the timelines of social media which construct our personae in reflection of the gaze of others, and in the chambers of our imagination, a chiaroscuro of our vast chasms of secret darkness and our realms of exaltation, rapture, and light; all this is surfaced but once in every four years.

     Such a weight of responsibility, such a limitless freedom of being, to be given this time in which to act without judgement, unanswerable to the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue or normality, to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and discover truths written in our flesh and those we ourselves create.

      We answer to no other, and this is the greatest of our powers and our freedoms, this secrecy, this privacy, this autonomy. 

     In this moment free from imposed or authorized history, memory, or identity, in which we are only who we wish to be, as Living Autonomous Zones and in Rashomon Gate Events like Leap Day which bring the Chaos to the rule-bound games of order of those who would enslave us, let us seize the day, and every day, to hit the reset button on who we are and how we choose to be human together.

     For only in this state of no rules and no masters may we truly become human as self-created and self-owned free beings.

     Such are my thoughts on the primary meaning of such Defining Moments as a free space of creative play and Chaos as the adaptive potential of systems; for its secondary meaning as a leap of faith into unknown futures and possibilities of becoming human, here are my thoughts as written in my post of

October 8 2023, Day Three of the Mad Hatter Festival: Madness As a Faith of Poetic Vision;  As I wrote in my celebration of Lewis Carroll on his birthday, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; but only in those truths which I myself create or claim, and which in turn claim me.

    This is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation, especially by men with badges and guns.

    Let there be total truth and absolute transparency between us, O my brothers, sisters, and others; for our word must be an inviolate force of nature if we are to mean anything, one which shapes, defines, motivates, and informs not only how we choose to be human together but also our own possibilities of becoming human. Lies dehumanize and falsify; therefore do I pursue a sacred calling to discover and live the truth.

     Having so defined the ground of struggle in my writing here as in all things, and with an awareness that this self-disclosure and public intimacy is terrifying to others in some cultures and part of my personal myth as it is for Kenzaburo Oe in Japan, for high self disclosure values can be used to create intimacy, what do I mean when I use the word faith?

     My intention is not to deceive in this or any regard; its simply that this is a complex, ambiguous, relative, dangerous, and highly fraught issue, one which bears the legacies of both my personal history and that of my family, and of our millennia of civilization.

     A full accounting and interrogation of my influences will not be brief and merits its own study; here I am primarily questioning its praxis as vision, described in the film Oz in reference to Thomas Edison as “the ability to look into the future and make it real.”

     In terms of personal history, I grew up with formal study and practice of Taoism and Zen Buddhism for ten years from the age of nine, and claimed Zen as my religion through my twenties, though influenced by my reading of Jung and his alchemical studies at university, by reading Frasier’s Golden Bough when I was twelve, and by the system of magic taught to me by William S. Burroughs as a young boy which synthesized his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche, Acephale, with his master Lovecraft’s reimagination of Crowley and western occultism, and Grimm’s Fairytales as a third influence.

     I seized upon Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in eighth grade as a counter text to the Bible, in high school during my enthusiasm for James Joyce and Ludwig Wittgenstein failed to learn the Kabala as its written in Andalusi Romance and a coded scholar’s Aramaic, and at university adopted the poetry of William Blake as a kind of sacred text.

      During my Great Trek across Asia I lived in Katmandu as a Dream Navigator of the Vajrayana Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism and in Srinagar as a scholar of the Naqshbandi order of Islamic Sufism. I have also studied Shaivism as a member of the Aghori brotherhood of warriors, unique as the only group in India who totally reject the idea of caste, and Tantra with a priestess of Kali.

    Like the chambers of a shell, growing with the passage of time, the layers of my relationships with the Infinite.

     Often I use the word faith as solidarity of action with others; as loyalty, allyship, and recognition of our interdependence and the universal nature of our humanity which connects us. But I also use this word faith as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, whatever the source or where it leads, an idea from ibn Arabi.

     So for myself, faith is a process of questioning, one which is antithetical to its usual use as submission to authority. Any who stand between ourselves and the Infinite serve neither. 

    Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision as symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical truth, as reimagination and transformation, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.

     Herein my ars poetica uses methods of literary criticism, history, psychology, and philosophy, an extension of the interdisciplinary methods pioneered in The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite which I read in high school during a time when I chose the origins of evil as my field of study, to interpret the meaning and direction of current events as they unfold in real time, and to change the balance of power in the world.

     Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.

     Poetic vision and imaginal truth allows us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.

     As I wrote in my post of January 3 2022, On Creativity and Poetic Vision as Revolution, Transformation, and Liberation; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” Keats

     My sister wrote of her recurring vision of the Night Mountain this morning, a vast and enormous city or structure of lights floating in the sky above the desert just before dawn, and it provoked memories of and reflections on my own many visions and encounters with the transcendent, especially those which became Defining Moments and shaped my becoming human; among them the Illumination of Our Beautiful Flaws as I crossed the Thar desert in Rajasthan by camel, the Games of Beauty and Vision as I sailed upon the Lake of Dreams in Srinagar, my Journeys through the Gates of Possibilities as a monk in Kathmandu, the Kiss of the Fallen Star which struck my hand in a meteor shower as I reached for the Impossible among the heavens, the Dream of the Toad transferred to me as a chthonic guardian spirit and guide of the soul by one of my father’s Beatnik friends, William S. Burroughs, in a line of succession from Nietzsche as its avatar, in the strange fairytales he told in the evenings of his visits as the coals of the fire burned low and darkness swallowed us in its endless chasms, and the moment of my Awakening and vision of  Possible Futures of Humankind when as a child at my mother’s side during a protest in People’s Park in Berkeley the police fired on the university students in the most terrible incident of state terror in American history, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969,  and I escaped my body and had a unitary moment of awareness outside of time.

     Like the dreams to which they are akin, such visions can be read as symbols, metaphors, and allegories; they are also stories woven into our lives which connect us with the universe and with other people, and through which we create ourselves. Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?

     I am looking at the scar on my hand from where a Fallen Star touched me one night during a cosmic event like tonight’s Quadrantid meteor shower, like the hand of a rebel angel bearing the stolen Promethean Fire, decades ago, when I reached up to pull the stars from the heavens and something reached down to enfold my hand in a nimbus of light, and for a moment I was sublimed and exalted in the Kiss of the Fallen Star, riding the light among the spheres, the earth  a vanishing orb, then lost among the solar system, a sea of stars, a whirling dance of galaxies, and return to the hill where I stood transfigured by the embrace of Infinite. Stunned not by our smallness next to a universal scale, but by the eternity and timeless immensity of Being in which we share.

     This meteor strike was witnessed by Jim Shafer, Jennifer Wendt-Damico, Kimberly Wine, Claud Gipson, and several others who had assembled on top of the old artillery battery overlooking the valley below Cavedale Road in Sonoma California in the 1980’s, with its awesome petroglyph caves hidden behind a waterfall, where a door to the Unknown was opened possibly thousands of years ago, letting beings of strangeness through.

     If ever I need to be reminded of our true nature, of the presence of the transcendent and the immanence in nature of truths written in our flesh, of the vast and limitless sea of being and consciousness of which we are part, I need only open my hand to see written there the signature of the Unknown Infinite and the sign of our hope, for from the moment I touched a star I have been without despair, fear, or doubt, a bearer of hope and the fire of liberation.

     I have been no stranger to what is strange; it has defined my Otherness and the kinship I feel with those others, however different from myself, who are marginalized, excluded, vilified, and oppressed, those whom Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth, the dispossessed and the powerless, the silenced and the erased; the monsters and the freaks whom I claim as my family and my tribe.

      Of all the gifts and wonders life has given me, this I cherish most of all; that with all the numberless and unimaginable horrors to which I have been witness, in Mariupol and Sarajevo and the crimes and atrocities whose names become an endless litany of woes which define the limits of the human as a fragile and ephemeral quality among chasms of darkness, I have emerged from the legacies of our history Unconquered as in Henley’s poem Invictus, with the ability to bond, empathize with, and inhabit the lives of others as the bearer of sacred wounds which open me to the pain of others. I cherish my pain, for like the Abyss which I have embraced and wrestled with it has made me human.

     If I can do this, so can we all. This is my faith as solidarity, hope, and love.

     This above all else defines what is human; our ability to transcend the limits of our flesh and of our differences, to share and learn from the lives of others, across vast gulfs of time and space, through the civilization we create as partners in a Great Conversation. Much of who we are is stored potential in the form of our most precious resource, the written word, which is created by our historical community and belongs to the commons; this is both its power as a shaping force and its danger as a limitation of our uniqueness and autonomy.

     Such are my thoughts on creativity and poetic vision as revolution, transformation, and liberation; but I did not invent the language with which I create them, nor the millennia of historical antiquity which informs my ideas; rather they are instruments with which I create myself. Who then owns the artifacts of my thinking? To this I must answer with a line from the great film Il Postino; “Poetry belongs to those who need it.”

     In reverence for the gifts and guidance I have been given I have tried, however poorly and within my limitations, to understand the meaning and significance of such moments of insight, to enact them in my life as a fulcrum of change and to use poetic vision as leverage with which to transform the balance of power in the world.

     Regardless of how we name and taxonomize the Source of our reality and the sea of our being in attempts to rationalize and control life, it remains wild, irrational, uncontrollable, and also very real. The wonder and terror of vision and immersion in what Coleridge called the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, Ibn Arabi the Ālam al-Mithāl, and is termed the Bardo in the Tibetan classic which I translate as The Book of Liberation, in the contexts of four lineages of ideology in which I may claim membership, has inspired some of the greatest achievements of civilization and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and some of the most fearsome terrors of our historical atrocities, madness, and degradation.

     The liminal bears creative and destructive forces in equal measure, and not reductive to the interplay of darkness and light, but ambiguous, contingent, and relative. We who are its witnesses and bearers of poetic vision are the arbiters of this power among humankind and of its consequences for the material universe and the order and fate of the cosmos. Who bears the fire of the gods becomes an agent of transformation, insight, and the reshaping of human being, meaning, and value; this is true of all art and of creativity in general.

     Revolutions are born of such insight, in sciences and arts of understanding as well as in politics as choices we make about how to be human together, and in our ongoing creation of ourselves. With this inner fire and vision we may forge new truths, and in this mission I offer guidance and warning as you sail into the unknown; transgress boundaries, violate norms, abandon limits, and seize your power to create yourself anew, for nothing is Forbidden and all Authority is illusion and lies; but always know what you are trying to achieve, for force always operates in both directions at once.

     Act without fear, and in action be fearless; but with awareness of the consequences of your actions. Life and liberty, as well as good and evil, may depend on the smallest of changes in our lives and our world, both for ourselves and for others.

     Best wishes, and may you find joy, freedom, healing, and love in your reimagination of yourself and our possibilities of becoming human.

     As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.

      On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”

    To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”

    “Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”

     “That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”

     Just so.

     As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?

    I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.

     Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.

     All true art defiles and exalts.

      Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.

      I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch figures and images I called my Dream Gates; William S. Burroughs would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heaven and hell, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.

     This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in discomfort and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.

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

     This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Godels Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.

     If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.

     Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.

     As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021, Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memiors: the Case of Facebook;  Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.

     As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?

    This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or a truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?

     As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.

     Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.

     Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.

    As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?;  We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?

     I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.

     We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.

     The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight. 

      As written by Helena de Bresis, author of author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.

     When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.

     You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.

     What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:

     This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

     What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.

     A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.

     The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.

     Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.

     That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.

    To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.

     But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.

     Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”

     As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.

     Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded.

     Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.

     If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.

      We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge   authority whenever it comes to claim us. There is no just authority.

     Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.

     Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.

     Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.

Six Impossible Things: Slaying the Jabberwocky

          Faith as poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation; a reading list

A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries,

by Susan J. Wolfson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60254935-a-greeting-of-the-spirit

The Essential Rumi – New Expanded Edition 2020: Translations By Coleman Barks with John Moyne, Jalal Al-Din Rumi

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55129687-the-essential-rumi—new-expanded-edition-2020?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CkmTLKsLpt&rank=4

Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos As Unifying Principle, by Mary Ann Perkins

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1898852.Coleridge_s_Philosophy?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=P1bVqSKavy&rank=197

The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6454477-the-red-book?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=d9wXRI4nKC&rank=1

Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite,

Rudy Rucker

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/274050.Infinity_and_the_Mind?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Mu5r39Yrga&rank=1

    Surrealist topologies of the Unknown dreamlands, a reading list for journeys beyond the gates of death

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/722667.The_Dream_Quest_of_Unknown_Kadath?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=WBuHQQXNy9&rank=1

The Western Lands, by William S. Burroughs

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/257506.The_Western_Lands?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=CQQCEvrbJu&rank=1

Psicomagia, by Alejandro Jodorowsky

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56230.Psicomagia?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=sMEigT1hU7&rank=6

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, Padmasambhava, Karma Lingpa, Chögyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle translators

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208135.The_Tibetan_Book_of_the_Dead

Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Francesca Fremantle

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208126.Luminous_Emptiness

            On Method

https://psyche.co/ideas/in-defence-of-memoirs-a-way-to-grip-our-story-shaped-lives?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=14354f8cdb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_10_04_01_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-14354f8cdb-70485193

The Psychopathic God, Robert G.L. Waite

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/500773.The_Psychopathic_God?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=IZEGCitPeV&rank=1

Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe,

Hayden White

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/329877.Metahistory?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=QYcrWoupWh&rank=1
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February 24 2024 Anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine; Symptom, Consequence, and Trigger Event of the Fall of Human Civilization In Recursion

      Vast and immense tidal forces of history here collide and shape each other in strange and bizarre ways; chasms of darkness as a divided humankind abandons democracy and human rights and an Age of Tyrants begins, versus the luminous exaltation of solidarity as our guarantorship of each other’s humanity and co-ownership of the state in a free society of equals at the dawn of a United Humankind.

      Ukraine remains imperiled in this moment as we choose our future, the horrors of Russia’s invasion at once symptom, consequence, and trigger event of the fall of human civilization throughout the world in recursion and causal processes of change which are circular or more complex.

      Among the many things this means, one is most important and can never be forgotten, for it acts as a controlling metaphor of the human story and is determinative as an informing, motivating, and shaping force in all else that we do; anyone, at any time, can bring change to systems which are immensely more powerful than ourselves, and larger on a scale of geological time and celestial magnitude. We are embedded in many such systems, but they do not create us; we create them.

      Here in my journals I often speak of freedom and human agency as refusal to submit to authority, because it is a primary human act by which we create ourselves and seize our power, a power which cannot be taken from us and is inherent to human being. It is also a power which can liberate us from tyranny and the empire of fear; for the great secret of power is that it is hollow and brittle, and collapses into nothingness like the illusion it is when met with disobedience and disbelief.

     Here is a ground of struggle in which we cannot be defeated, for to resist is to become Unconquered and victorious.

      Slava Ukraine!

      As I wrote on this day last year; In the Ukrainian theatre of the Third World War which has captivated the world with its horrific and lurid crimes against humanity by Putin’s regime, the tide of war begins to turn with the victorious reconquest of occupied territories by the defiant and unconquered people of Ukraine and the slow awakening of the sleeping dragons of Europe and America to the existential threat of Russia’s tyranny and terror in imperial conquest.

     Russia has replied with savage reprisals against the civilian population as their campaign of terror and genocide dictates; first annihilate everything useful to survival by bombing, second unleash mass torture and sexual terror to subjugate the population through learned helplessness, and third kill or enslave all who are not ethnic Russians.

     Liberty and tyranny, hope and fear contend in Ukraine for the soul of humankind.

     As I wrote in my post of March 22 2022, When You Are Hammer, Strike: This Is the Moment to Enact the Restoration of America; History and the disruptive event of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has unified America and reawakened NATO and Europe, has handed us a hammer, and we must use it to forge the Restoration of America as a free society of equals.

     As western civilization rouses itself like a sleeping dragon to confront once again its great nemesis fascist tyranny, this is the moment not only to challenge Putin, deliver a coup de grace to his brutal regime and save the people of Ukraine, and those of the other theatres of the Third World War Russia, Belarus, Syria, Libya, Africa, Kazakhstan, and Nagorno-Karabakh, before all of Europe and America is in flames and ruins, but also to win a better future for America in revolutionary legislation and electoral politics such as enactment of the Green New Deal, and above all to purge our nation of white supremacist terror and treason and our world of fascism and tyranny.

     This is the moment to enact the Restoration of America and the systemic reimagination and transformation of our nation and of humankind. Now, while our nation unites politically to save Ukraine and to stop Russia’s imperial conquest and dominion of Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean while we can, before we are fighting not only in the streets of Kyiv, but also in the streets of New York.

    What of the Green New Deal, our last, best hope for a free society of equals and for the survival of humankind and the earth? I have already declared for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the next Presidential Election, a champion of the people with the vision we need in the reimagination and transformation of our nation and our civilization.

     We must also avoid the perils of ideological fracture which historically destroyed the hope of the Social Democrats of Germany as a consequence of the peace movement during the First World War and which removed the blocking force for the emergence of fascism, of the parallel demise of the Industrial Workers of the World here in America, of the post Second World War fracture of the intellectual Left as embodied in the falling out of Sartre and Camus which opened the way for the Cold War and the McCarthy era, of the Students for a Democratic Society and other liberation movements which fragmented resistance to the infiltration and subversion of our democracy by the Fourth Reich and its puppet FBI, as signaled with the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by Gideonite fundamentalists, Confederate-Nazi revivalists, and plutocratic robber barons as capitalism began to free itself of its host political system.

      Such are the origins of the Fourth Reich in America and of the Third World War now in progress in the imperial Russian Invasion of Ukraine; authorization of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror beginning with the savage misrule of Ronald Reagan and its apotheosis in Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. 

    And what of the sweeping and visionary American Rescue Plan which Biden championed as the primary goal of his Presidency?

     As I wrote in my post of March 12 2021, Triumph and Transformation in Biden’s Restoration of America: the American Rescue Plan; America celebrates today its survival and resilience under the leadership of our champion and savior Joe Biden, who has cast himself in the role of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the great task of navigating America and humankind through the Scylla and Charybdis of the same existential threats of economic collapse and fascist tyranny and terror and the subversion of democracy as we faced then.

    This Nietzschean recurrence is no accident, but a result of our historical blindness and a vacuity abetted by the lies and illusions of the Party of Treason whose mask our Fourth Reich conceals itself behind, and of our failures to escape capture by the Ring of fear, power, and force which Wagner warned us of in his magnificent opera, Der Ring des Nibelungen, wherein the ally and role model of his youth, the anarchist Bakunin, is cast as the hero Siegfried in a reimagination of pagan mythology funded and influenced by his lover King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria.

     Biden has centered his Presidency on the call for unity and his historic role as a leader of bipartisan politics; but unity alone will not save us. We must also transform America through our political system, including the Democratic Party as the vestige of a failed neoliberal order like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature.

     And we know exactly where to look for historical parallels to the moment we live in today and the choices we face about human being, meaning, and value, and who we wish to become; the Third Reich and the Weimar era which saw the rise of fascism. For guidance in this I look to Hannah Arendt and Thomas Mann among others; especially to his two great classics of world literature, The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice.

    The Magic Mountain recasts Plato’s Dialogues as a forum of modern ideologies in a hospital ward for the dying, a kind of Congress of Possible Nations. Herein Thomas Mann diagnoses and explores the malaise and rebirth of civilization. His major influences include Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Tolstoy. In his 1939 Princeton lecture Thomas Mann discussed the idea that his novel belongs to a quest tradition, which makes its hero a type of the Grail Knight, Parsifal; and suggests an awareness of Emma Jung’s work on the subject.

     As in the tale of the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Wasteland period of Lancelot’s madness and his recovery and regeneration of the land, and the Grail Quest itself, The Magic Mountain, like T.S. Eliot’s reimagination of the myth in The Wasteland which Mann references, is an allegory of the fall and rebirth of civilization and of humanity.

     We too in America have suffered madness and degeneration under the puppet regime of Traitor Trump, an obscene and disruptive figure who echoes the mad emperor in Artaud’s Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, but it need not signal the fall of civilization; such chaos can also become a free space of creative play wherein the reimagination and transformation of humankind can be forged, if we unite in liberation struggle and do the work to make it real.

     In Death in Venice the progress of the plague mirrors that of the narrator’s moral degeneration and psychological dissolution as he becomes unmoored by an impossible Beauty and begins to drift away. It is a hauntingly beautiful elegy of the Ideal and a critique of Utopianism and the Platonic Idealism and Romanticism in which it is rooted; Nabokov took up its themes and devices for his great novel Lolita, an allegorical denunciation of the political idealism that led to his father’s execution by the communists.

     Together Eliot, Mann, and Nabokov are among our civilization’s finest conservatives, in the best sense of conserving the values and ideas that have enabled us to adapt to changes and survive. For Beauty as an ideal, expressed so unforgettably by Keats, is here corruptive of its own values, consuming itself as a leprous disease as Venice, like America today, is consumed by the plague of its lost glory. And all ends in decadence and in death.

    How very Wagnerian- yet there is hope. Once all the evils have escaped Pandora’s Box, there is a last gift left inside, an unexpected surprise, and from this source do all things awaken renewed.

     To behold the Impossible is a shattering, transformative event, described in Latin literature and referenced by the theologian Rudolf Otto as fascinans et tremendum or wonder and terror, but also one which connects us with the Infinite and with one another. The quest of Thomas Mann to find a path forward to the rebirth of civilization, to resolve as synthesis and transcend the internal paradoxes and dichotomies of history which led to its destruction and the subversion of democracy by fascist tyranny and communist totalitarianism, offers its own solution; life requires not stability, but growth. And especially not “permanent revolution” as centralized authority and power in totalitarian states of force and control, but the limitless possibilities of becoming human, the joy of total freedom, and the boundlessness of a free society of equals.

      We require a dynamically unstable, chaotic and living system, multiplying possibilities and reflecting alternatives infinitely; order, but as a child of chaos and within the context of adaptation and change. A conserving force, and a revolutionary force; what Nietzsche writing in The Birth of Tragedy called the Apollonian and the Dionysian as a primal dyad.

    We live within the dying Venice of Thomas Mann, the Wasteland of T.S. Eliot, and the opera of Richard Wagner; ours too is a madness conferred by the sin of avarice and unequal power, a compulsion to possess, dominate, and control which destroys the thing we desire like the antiheroes of Nabokov and Mann, allegories of capitalist cannibalism of the earth and each other which is driving humankind to extinction. We are the lost souls trapped on Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa; a small reproduction of which hangs by my desk as a reminder of the stakes for which we fight.

    I hope that we may yet escape the fires of our destruction, and like a phoenix emerge from this time of trial and forge of our humanity reborn.

    As written by Tobias Boes in Jacobin, What Thomas Mann Can Tell Us About Defending Democracy; “German novelist Thomas Mann spent most of World War II rallying the American people against Nazism and exhorting them to stand up for democratic values. Yet he also understood that no democracy can survive by culture alone — it also needs social justice to thrive.

     When President Biden began his inaugural address by asserting that “today we celebrate the triumph . . . of a cause, the cause of democracy,” he sought to put an end to four years of anxious debates about the stability of the American political order. His triumphant proclamation may well turn out to be wishful thinking — for if democracy prevailed, it did so by a hair’s breadth. One shudders to imagine what might have happened if Republican election officials in Georgia or Arizona had buckled under the pressure exerted by their own party, or if the election had wound its way to a Supreme Court stacked with Trumpian appointees. In light of this narrow escape, even the mainstream press is now devoting column space to ways in which our political system might be made more robust: abolishing the filibuster, imposing term limits on federal judges, or even getting rid of the Electoral College.

     Already in December 2016, Daniel Bessner and Udi Greenberg commented in Jacobin on the recent tendency among op-ed writers to compare the United States to the Weimar Republic, and to worry about the threat that Trumpism posed to the foundations of American democracy. Yet, as Bessner and Greenberg point out, attempts to “tyranny-proof” democratic systems carry their own dangers. In the German context, the experience of the Weimar years bred a new postwar generation of technocrats that was profoundly mistrustful of the masses, and eager to carry out the work of governing while shielded from public scrutiny.

     President Biden seems unlikely to repeat this precedent. Although he served as vice president in what was arguably the most technocratic administration ever to govern this country, he is also proud of his folksy image as “Joe from Scranton,” and has supposedly instructed his closest advisors not to approach him with policy proposals that they couldn’t explain to their mothers. His inaugural address lacks even the slightest touch of wonkishness, and instead obsessively circles around emotional calls for national unity as the only remedy for what presently ails us.

     “Unity,” according to Biden, is the sole “path forward” — but also, somewhat paradoxically, the very thing that has always characterized the United States as a nation. He explicitly cites the Civil War, the Great Depression, the World Wars, and 9/11 as moments in which “enough of us came together to carry all of us forward.” This is, to put it mildly, a tendentious argument. The United States has never moved forward in unison: not during Reconstruction, not during Jim Crow, not during the economic upheavals of the Great Depression, and not even after 9/11, when airlines got huge bailouts while first responders with lung carcinomas were left to fend for themselves.

     Biden knows that he was elected primarily for his perceived capacity to facilitate “healing,” not because of his policy proposals. But appeals to unity aren’t enough on their own. In this sense, attempts to restore our collective faith in democracy might well take a lesson from a survivor of the Weimar years not examined by Bessner and Greenberg: the Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann. In the late 1930s, Mann rose to great fame in the United States as a prophet of democracy, indeed at a time when fascism seemed on an unstoppable rampage. He insisted that democracy must rely not just on culture but on the fight for social justice.

     Unity Isn’t Enough: Mann had been forced to flee his native Germany in 1933, after Adolf Hitler took power. He first spoke to a US audience on questions of democracy in 1937, when he addressed the North American Aid Committee for Spanish Democracy at the New York Hippodrome. But his main period of activity began in 1938, when he resettled in this country and began the process of pursuing citizenship. For the next decade, Thomas Mann was one of the most visible and articulate defenders of democracy in the United States. He toured the country on lecture trips that reached hundreds of thousands of people, gave radio interviews, wrote essays and letters to the editor, addressed Washington insiders at the Library of Congress, and was twice invited to the White House.

     Mann’s importance wasn’t based on specific policy proposals — but, in marked contrast to most of his émigré compatriots, he held the entire German nation responsible for Nazism and, consequently, fully supported the Allies’ punitive military strategy. His speeches were vague on particulars, but highly effective at promoting the defense of democracy as a moral duty and as a matter of conscience.

     Like Biden, Mann regarded democracy as a fundamental part of American identity. His 1938 lecturer script, published as the book The Coming Victory of Democracy, even calls the United States “the classic homeland” of this form of governance. Also like Biden, Mann proposed that the threat of fascism had created an urgent need “for democracy to take stock of itself . . . for its renewal in thought and feeling.” The list of challenges that Mann rattles off sound familiar to our ears as well: the threat of propaganda as “an instrument of cynical contempt for humanity,” the “denial and violation of truth in favor of power,” and the way in which fascist dictatorships erect corrupt “pseudo” versions of social ideals.

     Unlike Biden, however, Mann did not believe that the need for democratic renewal might be satisfied by a return to some mythical unity that had always held the country together. What characterizes democracy, according to him, is its “inexhaustible store of potential youthfulness,” its miraculous power for change and innovation so far removed from the youth cult by which fascism seeks to propagate itself.

     A Healthy Democracy Is a Social Democracy

     Mann’s emphasis on the youthful nature of democracy is unsurprising, for he himself came from a country in which democracy had taken hold only belatedly. Indeed, up through the end of World War I, Mann had billed himself as an “unpolitical” defender of the German Empire. He made a public about-face only in 1922, rising to become one of the most prominent enemies of the Nazis over the following years. Throughout this time, his message to his countrymen remained consistent: they should regard parliamentary democracy as the latest and most novel expression of spiritual values that had been latent in German culture since the time of the romantics.

     This emphasis on democracy as an organic entity — something with a timeless core that nevertheless perennially changes as it adapts to new challenges — is what differentiates Mann’s from Biden’s understanding of it as an established fact that simply needs a good dusting off. It also makes his message difficult for classic liberal interpreters like David Brooks to summarize. In a 2017 column for the New York Times, Brooks spoke admiringly of The Coming Victory of Democracy as a foundational text in the “canon of liberal democracy.” Yet, he ignores completely the part of the book in which Mann writes: “Europe and the world are ripe for the consideration of an inclusive reform of the regulation of natural resources, and the redistribution of wealth.” Nor does Brooks comment on the passage in which Mann argues that “a reform of freedom is necessary which will make of it something very different from the freedom that existed and could exist in the times of our fathers and grandfathers, the epoch of bourgeois liberalism.”

     Mann’s flirtation with socialism originated in the hectic months following the end of World War I. Although it was never grounded in the actual study of Marxist texts, it remained a constant part of his political thought for the rest of his life. In 1932, at a time when Nazism was a clear and present danger not only to German society as a whole but also to Mann personally, he nevertheless took it upon himself to address a gathering of Viennese workers on socialist topics. The following year, shortly after Hitler’s seizure of power, he wrote a “Commitment to Socialism” at the behest of the Social Democratic Party of Germany politician Adolf Grimme.

     It’s an even earlier text, however — his 1927 essay on “Culture and Socialism” — that proves most enlightening in the present context. In it, Mann justifies his commitment to socialism not on economic grounds, but rather on spiritual ones, having to do with the future shape of human communities. The German people, he argues, withdrew from political reason into a veneration of culture for the longest time, because throughout the nineteenth century, culture alone still gave them the sense of cohesion provided by the “cultic” in earlier ages. Amid the ever-greater social divisions of the twentieth century, however (Germany had just recovered from a period of devastating inflation), contemporary appeals to culture had themselves been exposed as a cynical ploy of reactionary politics. True communal cohesion could henceforth only come from a common struggle for social justice.

     The United States is not Weimar Germany. But we would do well to remember that when we reduce American identity to our supposedly proven capacity to “stand united,” we commit a similar error to 1920s conservative thinkers when they reduced German identity to a shared cultural inheritance while closing their eyes to the social contradictions of their own day. We abstract from the dynamic deliberative processes that actually shape national identity and seek refuge in a timeless conception of what has always defined us.

     By doing so, however, we find ourselves on ground that has already been lost to the enemy. One of the core principles of Trumpism — and indeed of all populism, as the political scientist Jan-Werner Müller has argued — is that it turns the call for national unity into one of the “pseudo” concepts so memorably described by Mann in The Coming Victory of Democracy. The American people, according to this populist logic, are always already unified, for to hold dissenting views means that one isn’t part of the true people at all.

     Mann understood that in moments of crisis, democracy cannot fall back upon the terms that have defined it in the past. It needs to give new meaning to these terms if it wants to shield them from the forces of cynical reaction. If Biden wants to stake the legitimacy of his presidency on national unity, then he will have to offer a novel vision of what such a unity might look like in 2021. To combat the politics of white supremacist resentment with which the mobs of Charlottesville and Washington, DC, hijacked the terms “we” and “us,” he cannot simply look back fondly to assertions of “We the People.” Democracy, ever youthful and vigorous, requires a new articulation. A commitment to greater social justice would be a good starting point, as Thomas Mann already pointed out in the 1930s.”

The Green Knight film

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1843249177?playlistId=tt9243804?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/396931.The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ahfq49QVRt&rank=3

The Coming Victory of Democracy, Thomas Mann

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5040493-the-coming-victory-of-democracy?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=kAypKILf9O&rank=165

Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters,

Tobias Boes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49661944-thomas-mann-s-war?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=kAypKILf9O&rank=39

The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88077.The_Magic_Mountain?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xzHy6dK2Kp&rank=2

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53061.Death_in_Venice?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Op6GfhQhUd&rank=3

The Basic Bakunin, by Mikhail Bakunin, Robert M. Cutler

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7420.The_Basic_Bakunin?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=YujYQ1QEsJ&rank=1

Bakunin: The Creative Passion, by Mark Leier

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/305573.Bakunin?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=YujYQ1QEsJ&rank=7

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

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/451808.Ring_of_Power?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=MG0LNVIoBj&rank=1

The Grail Legend, by Emma Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/572302.The_Grail_Legend?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=V4RBridolV&rank=3

Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work,

by Russell Elliott Murphy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1326902.Critical_Companion_to_T_S_Eliot

The Birth of Tragedy / The Case of Wagner, by Friedrich Nietzsche

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/568047.The_Birth_of_Tragedy_The_Case_of_Wagner?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=FI7h3kptEc&rank=14

Dionysus After Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought, by Adam Lecznar

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48813332-dionysus-after-nietzsche?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=FI7h3kptEc&rank=4

Reading the New Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, the Gay Science, Thus Spoken Zarathustra, and on the Genealogy of Morals, by David B. Allison

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/94583.Reading_the_New_Nietzsche?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=FI7h3kptEc&rank=1

The Raft Of The Medusa: Gericault, Art, And Race, by Albert Alhadeff

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1361290.The_Raft_Of_The_Medusa?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=s6WURPBjbV&rank=2

Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, Antonin Artaud

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75887.Heliogabalus_or_the_Crowned_Anarchist?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=bokf1SMMpQ&rank=1

      News On the Second Anniversary

The Guardian view on Ukraine, two years on: exhaustion at home, fatigue abroad, but the fight continues | Editorial

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/23/the-guardian-view-on-ukraine-two-years-on-exhaustion-at-home-fatigue-abroad-but-the-fight-continues

‘Not losing’ is not enough: it’s time for Europe to finally get serious about a Ukrainian victory

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/22/europe-ukrainian-victory-alexei-navalny-vladimir-putin?fbclid=IwAR21r5JhNSjKuMmO7aoaHN1cskCCFe5IJ2WANjwLkRSIbPMfjdGIgugYYlM

Year three of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be Zelenskiy’s toughest yet

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/25/year-three-of-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-may-be-zelenskiys-toughest-yet?fbclid=IwAR2CXavHMfP8PJjyuoCk7fY9bsR_ETBP2rwZ0zIcvS9Z5DrQIPryYUW2L8c

                     News on the First Anniversary

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/feb/24/a-year-of-war-in-ukraine-as-witnessed-by-guardian-photographers-photo-essay?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2023/feb/24/anniversary-russia-war-ukraine-marked-around-world-in-pictures?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/24/grief-and-defiance-in-kyiv-on-first-anniversary-of-war-in-ukraine?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-war-ukraine-changed-europe_n_63e0af59e4b0c8e3fc85fac1?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/23/the-guardian-view-on-war-in-ukraine-reshaping-the-world?CMP=share_btn_link

News of  2022

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/22/opinions/syria-aleppo-doctor-russia-hospitals-ukraine-al-kateab/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2022/mar/22/horrors-mariupol-new-danger-sarajevo-balkans-eu-serbia

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/22/mariupol-important-russian-forces-moscow-port-city

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/22/ukraine-begs-putin-civilians-escape-ruins-mariupol-russia

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-ukraine-war-mariupol-battle_n_62397a2fe4b019fd81321019?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/thomas-mann-joe-biden-unity-democracy

  Ukrainian

  24 лютого 2024 р. Річниця російського вторгнення в Україну; Симптом, наслідок і тригерна подія падіння людської цивілізації в рекурсії

       Величезні та величезні припливні сили історії тут стикаються та формують одна одну дивними та химерними способами; безодні темряви, коли розділене людство відмовляється від демократії та прав людини, і починається епоха тиранів проти яскравого піднесення солідарності як нашої гарантії людяності один одного та співволодіння державою у вільному суспільстві рівних на зорі Об’єднане людство.

       Україна залишається під загрозою в цей момент, коли ми обираємо наше майбутнє, жахи російського вторгнення одночасно є симптомом, наслідком і пусковою подією падіння людської цивілізації в усьому світі в циклічних і причинно-наслідкових процесах змін, які є циклічними або більш складними.

       Серед багатьох речей, які це означає, одна є найважливішою, і її ніколи не можна забувати, оскільки вона діє як керуюча метафора людської історії та є визначальною як інформуюча, мотивуюча та формуюча сила в усьому іншому, що ми робимо; будь-хто в будь-який час може внести зміни в системи, які є набагато могутнішими за нас і більшими за шкалою геологічного часу та небесної величини. Ми вбудовані в багато таких систем, але вони не створюють нас; ми їх створюємо.

       Тут, у своїх щоденниках, я часто говорю про свободу та свободу волі людини як про відмову підкорятися владі, тому що це первинний людський акт, за допомогою якого ми створюємо себе та захоплюємо свою владу, владу, яку ми не можемо відібрати і яка притаманна людині. . Це також сила, яка може звільнити нас від тиранії та імперії страху; адже велика таємниця сили полягає в тому, що вона порожниста й крихка, і руйнується в небуття, як ілюзія, коли зустрічається з непокорою та зневірою.

      Ось поле боротьби, в якому нас неможливо перемогти, бо опиратися означає стати Нескореним і переможцем.

       Слава Україні!

Russian

24 февраля 2024 г. Годовщина российского вторжения в Украину; Симптом, последствие и пусковое событие падения человеческой цивилизации в рекурсии

       Огромные и огромные приливные силы истории здесь сталкиваются и формируют друг друга странным и причудливым образом; пропасти тьмы, когда разделенное человечество отказывается от демократии и прав человека и начинается Эпоха тиранов, против яркого возвышения солидарности как нашей гарантии человечности друг друга и совместного владения государством в свободном обществе равных на заре Объединенное Человечество.

       Украина по-прежнему находится под угрозой в данный момент, поскольку мы выбираем свое будущее, ужасы российского вторжения одновременно являются симптомом, следствием и триггером падения человеческой цивилизации во всем мире в рекурсивных и причинных процессах изменений, которые носят циклический или более сложный характер.

       Среди множества вещей, которые это означает, одна является наиболее важной и никогда не может быть забыта, поскольку она действует как управляющая метафора человеческой истории и является определяющей как информирующая, мотивирующая и формирующая сила во всем остальном, что мы делаем; любой и в любое время может внести изменения в системы, которые намного более мощны, чем мы сами, и больше в масштабах геологического времени и небесных величин. Мы встроены во многие такие системы, но не они нас создают; мы создаем их.

       Здесь, в своих дневниках, я часто говорю о свободе и человеческой деятельности как об отказе подчиняться власти, потому что это первичный человеческий акт, посредством которого мы создаем себя и захватываем нашу власть, силу, которую нельзя отнять у нас и которая присуща человеку. . Это также сила, которая может освободить нас от тирании и империи страха; ибо великий секрет власти состоит в том, что она пуста и хрупка и превращается в ничто, как иллюзия, когда она встречается с непослушанием и неверием.

      Это почва борьбы, на которой нас невозможно победить, ибо сопротивляться – значит стать непобежденным и победителем.

       Слава Украина!           

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