The Land Of Bursting Bubbles
The definitive work of American art isn’t Gatsby. It is the roadrunners cartoons. If Coyote keeps running, he can run over air. It is only when he looks down that he falls. (Stephen Marche, writer)
What Am I Truly For?
Don’t you know what you stand for? What’s the matter with you? Well, the fact of that “matter” is that it has not been so easy, at least for me, to answer this question in my own mind with a degree of certitude that I suppose I was looking for or maybe expecting.
Perhaps it’s merely the gathering decrepitude? But possibly life gets, in some ways, just a little more complex as you arrive at the “sunset” years, contrary to those vacuous corporate advertisements in the United States showing smiling seniors surrounded by hoards of happy grandchildren and an endless supply of magical pharmaceuticals with ridiculous names.
Sure I can fairly easily create a long list of what I’m against. That’s been especially easy over the past few months as an American watching the gathering, authoritarian storm unfold. Yeah, maybe at first I didn’t really want to look down for fear I too might fall. Just like that damn Coyote.
Dreaming Our Lives Away
Freedom is a burden; unfreedom comes as a relief. (Charlotte Beradt, 1907-1986)
The opening paragraph of the article, They Dreamed of Hitler, by Gal Beckerman, staff writer of The Atlantic: “The skull is a thin barrier against totalitarianism. The system is total because the brain itself is recruitable; every intimate space can be touched. Hannah Arendt once recorded the words of a Nazi official to that effect: ‘The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.’ But this is wrong. Sleep is exactly where the stress of living under such a terrorizing regime could reveal itself—in dreams.”
I think it’s safe to say that, for many of us, the dreams we’ve been having over the past few months, those anxiety induced kind, foreshadowing sometimes only vague unease, but remain with us and fall into that general category of phantasmagoria, what in the 19th century were called “magic lantern” shows where changing images, real and imaginary reflected on the wall, all this a precursor to modern cinema. The dancing images are clearly on the rise in America.
I’d never heard of Charlotte Beradt until I read Beckerman’s article. She was a journalist, and a Jew, based in Berlin. After Hitler came to power in 1933 Beradt began to awake after dreaming of being “hunted.”
She started her project discreetly and quietly, inquiring about other people’s dreams and nightmares, from a wide range of people both Jews and non-Jews, which she continued until fleeing Germany in 1939. She had smuggled her notes out of Germany starting in 1933. In 1966 Beradt published the book, The Third Reich of Dreams. The book went out of print but is being reissued this spring.
Charlotte Beradt was apparently no Freudian. The dreams were straight forward for her. They were about Nazism’s effect on the individual. I agree with Gal Beckerman when he says he was chilled by the sentence in Beradt’s diary: Freedom is a burden: unfreedom comes as a relief. To what degree is there a deep wish to conform among all of us. This is an article worth reading and thinking about. See below.
The Tear That I Felt For A Truth
Jane Goodell Releases Chimp in 2013
The Secret Of Course Is the Re-Imagining of America
I would recommend an excellent article by the Canadian journalist Stephen Marche entitled The America I Love Is Gone. No I don’t long for a return to some mythic past, empty of vaccines and science and searching the entrails of a goat to learn the truth.
But I certainly don’t desire a sick Trumpian future with clueless, idiotic billionaires, clawing Walmart specials or atomized individuals turning upon themselves until there is absolutely nothing to find.
Yes I do believe there is now a movement afoot in America, the land of bubbles, that is gathering steam, that is not searching for “unfreedom” in the hope that the nightmares will all disappear. I also believe that not all will reimagine a new United States and that is alright as well. Move forward and grow.
TO READ:
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