Monday, February 7, 2022
6:25 a.m. Many things stirring together.
- Spanish-language documentaries, one on survivors of the Franco era, seeking any kind of justice from the law, the other the survivors of Columbia’s 60-year civil war, trying to knit the country back together. As the photographer/narrator says, he can no longer tell who was Cain and who was Abel.
- Realizing that I, my health being improved so much, may face decades more here, not just a year or two, which among other things would mean having to watch our own society continuing to dissolve, prior to whatever reconstruction would eventually follow.
- Thinking how little any of the people whose lives I have been watching would relate to the reality I live. It would seem mere words to them, I imagine.
- Watching favorite films like “Passengers,” basically a love story, as well as a science-fiction story; again, the story proceeds entirely without reference to the non-3D.
And what does all this amount to? Why consider it all together? I think the common denominator is the concept of the external world as shared subjectivity within a 3D existence that is more dream than it is objects bumping around in space.
- My new acquaintance Mike Marable wants me to fil out a questionnaire in connection with a book he is writing on consciousness exploration. The questions on my own experience don’t particularly interest me, but he asks about why the earth experience exists, what happens after we die, and, in short, why it all came to be, and who if anyone created it. And those are precisely the questions you have been answering for me for the past 21 years. But I don’t know how easy it will be to summarize it. In fact, isn’t that our problem – my problem, anyway – with putting it all into books?
- Plus – hard to put into words – there is the fact that life goes on, and external life surely has its own validity in and of itself; it isn’t just private individuals in the billions, trying to balance their accounts – though apparently it is that too, if I understand you correctly.
I don’t even have a specific question around all this; I leave it to you to find the thread to pull. Setting my switches, and over to you.
Between the lines, we see remnants of your old angst as to whether your exploration was practical, or was mere escapism. In other words, “Does all this really amount to anything?” We recognize that you have mostly resolved this on a conscious level, but traces remain below that level, for of course not all the souls you extend to shared or would share your view of the world.
I hadn’t thought of that, but I see your point. We are subject to dissent from other lives, aren’t we? That is one more way in which we have to try to reconcile contraries.
Yes it is. And by the way your summary of things going on in your mind left out a couple of things. One is that struggle among values. What happens when you bring the torturers under your control, for instance. What should you do? Shoot them? Imprison them, in the name of justice? Forgive them, when they may take that as merely a sign of weakness?
Yes, I was thinking of both Spain and Columbia. It is maddening, how all the power of the state tends to protect past wrongdoers, if only by dragging its heels when it comes to inquiry. But vengeance merely leads Abel to mimic Cain, if only mentally, spiritually – and yet decades of living with uncorrected injustice leads to cynicism and all the consequences of unpurged emotion. I thought of Anselmo, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, telling Robert Jordan his idea of how society would have to reconstruct itself after the war by people doing voluntary penance for what they had had to do – killing, for instance – and by reeducating the oppressors so hey would understand.
To you, that association of ideas was mostly a stray thought. Can you see that a lifetime of such stray thoughts can itself be an influence on others? And of course we don’t mean just you: Everybody is a reservoir of such thoughts, though of course they somewhat contradict one another.
Why do you want me to tell of Primo de Rivera’s quip? At least, I assume it is your prompting, and not – to coin a phrase – merely a stray thought.
Just tell it.
Primo de Rivera was dictator of Spain for a few years before the revolution of 1930 that threw out the monarchy. When he was asked why he was setting up a dictatorship, he made a nice play on words. Not “dictadura,” he said (which translates to “hard word”); “dicta blanda.” (Soft word.”)
A very different attitude from the military men of 1936 and thereafter, who reveled in frightfulness.
Yes, quite a difference. And I’m hearing you saying that one reason for the difference is what had happened in the meantime: The right-wing forces had gotten a scare: first the revolution, the abolishing of the monarchy, then several years of political strife, then the Popular Front. They didn’t feel themselves to be securely seated as they had always been, and it made them bloodthirsty.
Fear, and the longing for vengeance. Everyone, everywhere, has excuses for crying for vengeance and it always leads to more of the same. So this is to remind you of another major thread you were forgetting to mention.
Oh yes, the culture war between left and right, and how they are egging each other on to greater excesses. You’re talking about the Lewis and Clark statue, in particular.
Well, we’d say you are talking about it in particular.
Well, I am. The whole rewrite-the-past thing makes me sick. It’s just “I’ll prove I’m pure by casting stones at everyone else,” like downgrading Washington and Jefferson because they were slaveholders. It is a sort of self-righteousness competition, that always goes too far and then competes to go even farther.
I don’t object to removing statues of confederate soldiers; in fact, I approve of it. They never should have been put up in the first place, and anyone who wants to know knows that they were mostly erected in the 1920s in emotional connection to the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. But Lewis and Clark have nothing to do with slavery, or racism, or warfare. That monument celebrated on amazing accomplishment, a two-year expedition that revolutionized their society’s knowledge of geography, ethnology, plant and animal life, etc. They didn’t fight their way across country subduing Indians; instead – as anyone can know by reading their journals – they came as a promise of peace for many of the tribes that were living in fear of stronger tribes; they did what they could with their medicines, often getting surprising cures; the result of their expedition was friendship with the natives, not warfare (and this continued for a generation and more, until white settlers wanted it all, beginning in the 1940s or so, 40 years later).
Sacajawea, the wife of a French Canadian trapper, was invaluable to them as translator. And why? Because she had been stolen as a child in a raid by other Indians, and sold. That is to say, she does not fit into the convenient narrative any more than the actual facts of Lewis and Clark do, but the statue that commemorates the beginning of that epic journey is gone.
But does all this lead us somewhere?
It may remind you that people’s political opinions reflect internal strife. That is, what expresses in 3D pre-existed in non-3D, and had to come out sometime. If not today, tomorrow. And, on the plus side, because yesterday, not necessarily today or tomorrow, not the same way.
I have thought, sometimes, that maybe we already went through Armageddon, the age of Hitler and Stalin and Mao, culminating in World War II and its long aftermath. Everyone assumes that on the day after Armageddon everything would be peaches and cream, but I can’t see how that would even be possible. Battles leave scars. The winners, no less than the losers, have done things that they will need to be able to atone for, as Anselmo intuited. The 3D is always going to have unfinished business, but maybe we have been living the happy ending. Certainly it could have been worse!
Maybe that will be your conclusion when you leave 3D life: “It could have been worse.” There are worse summaries.
So what was today’s theme, assuming we had one?
Oh, we had one, but it emerged rather than was pre-planned, as happens often enough. Call it “Life in 3D complication,” perhaps. Or perhaps “Seeming realer than it is.”
Neither of these seem right. Again?
“The shared subjectivity as we experience it.”
That’s not bad. Okay, well, today I feel like instead of saying “Thanks for all this,” I ought to say, “Thanks for listening.”
We smile. As you sometimes say, “A sus ordenes.”