9th July
Human life is an endless ferrying of people from battleground to battleground.
A battle has an anatomy. What defines it more than anything else is the transition from uncertainty to certainty. Or if there is dispute about the outcome, a transition to a new battle over how to interpret the outcome of an old one.
Trivial as it may sound, these metamorphoses shape our entire awareness, the melody of our mind.
When we pass the gates of petrification, we never notice the cloud of potentiality vaporise. A revolution on the horizon is a harbinger of dreams.
A revolution played out is a filthy monster with crimes and mistakes committed on all sides. With our faith in the violent innocence of dreams shaken forever and all the dreams rewritten in vulgar language.
Impatient to add distance to the events we seat ourselves on the ferry of history and close our eyes for as long as we can.
When (or indeed if) we open them again, the roar of the battle is only a soft thumb on our eardrum.
To our consternation, it has not been forgotten. Wave after wave of cultural regurgitation transforms the phenomenon we witnesses first hand, making us doubt what we saw.
What follows is the age of revisionism.
But we were there, on the ground, witnessing the death, lurking in the operation room, receiving artillery fire, sitting by the deathbed.
We were not alone. The air was thick with ferrymen diligently and secretly shuffling the ether of reality while we were descended into a raging, torrential river of reflexes.
After the battle: Silence.
No silence is so loud as the one you find when taking a stroll over the battle field the day after the fire died down.
“What have I done!”, “what have you done!”, “what did we do!”. The clamours of the dead reverberate inside the hull of the mind.
We commemorate, erect memorials, swear never to forget, and we don’t. We do something far worse. The story is retold over and over until it gains a new significance.
Long since the angels of despair has left the stage, the goblins of revenge and hate walk alongside our own creation par excellence: The myth.
10th July
I have started a long journey through history. My hope is to understand if there is such a thing as mass psychology and how it functions, if indeed it is in any way different from individual psychology.
My understanding is that I have to understand the human being on both a personal and a cultural level. The cultural rock formations that we inhabit are created by large swaths of individuals and historical phenomena entangled.
Did history accelerate in the industrial age, with the explosion of newspapers? Did the common man gain an influence (“agency”) which he did not have in earlier centuries?
Or were we always an ocean of opinions exerting a huge influence on the ruling elite through the threat of riots and public disturbances lest we were fed and secure?
There is only one way to do it, and that is to plow through human history. I have 12000 pages ahead of me.
11th July
Yesterday I wrote how the threat of riots put pressure on the ruling classes to make sure the population were well fed and safe.
Perhaps that particular historical force has shaped the mentality woven into the Protocols, when they preach how it was always better for the mob when the aristocracy kept them well fed. As they say, it was in their own (the aristocracy’s) interest as well as that of the populace.
They had stability, but not dignity. Now they have freedom and dignity, but no stability.
And if they finally gain stability, it is because a historically new kind of ruling elite has replaced the absolute monarch.
The fabled Jewish Council.
It is obviously absurd, and anyone who reads the Protocols page by page will quickly learn to spot the euphemism.
The confusing part is to understand what the Jewish/Masonic council was a symbol for.
12th July
A fairytale.
- The People wanted freedom from the evil King.
- They prepared themselves for revolution by advancing their own version of history.
- Pamphlets were circulated inciting and arousing The People who slowly reimagined themselves in new ways. The age of New Ideas had begun.
- New leaders arose from The People, of The People. They were different from the Evil King. They promised to fight for these New Ideas, to be the personification of New Ideas.
- A new dynamic had been born. The People invented the ideas, and leaders were obliged to personify those ideas.
- When leadership failed, they could not blame the ideas.
- Scapegoating became popular. Amongst the commoners: Racism. In politics: Factional wars.
The many-headed beast in the Protocols is socially speculative science and its counterpart, liberalism, free-market capitalism and anything at all that professes to freedom but in reality constitutes a playground where occult forces can reign unhindered.
13th July
The French Revolution was mercilessly bloody. Contentiously one can say that while the American Revolution was mild, it was only so because it postponed the underlying conflicts of interest another eighty years.
The industrial North against the rural South. Progressiveness versus tradition. The new bourgeoisie versus the old liberalised aristocracy.
Amidst it all, the smirking demon of democracy revelling in the ceaseless bickering and fighting. Once the fire dies down, no winner will be announced.
We hail that as progress.
14th July
In the context of Voltaire versus Rousseau, enlightenment versus romanticism, Sir Horace Walpole’s “The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel” is of particular insight.
As I am island hopping my way to a hospital on the mainland, we have to temporarily wait for suitable tides before the small ferry can enter some of the lesser ports. We possess meagre means here in the periphery of the Kingdom.
Tidal forces are an inspiration.
Has the world ever been about anything but ebb and flow between rationality and emotion?
No, forget that. Emotions are short, violent, without history. What about nationalism? Half emotional, half intellectual.
An awakening of an identity that was shaped over decades if not centuries by forces of history.
We look at a particular flower and its entire history is folded up in its colours and shape, making it distinct from every other flower. We cry if it becomes extinct or endangered. Exactly because of its long journey and long struggle through the ages, it has become a leaf on the grand tree. We cannot become or replace that flower, for we have followed a different trajectory.
Where in that description of the journey lies rationality and where emotion?
Nowhere. A story elicits feelings and thinking. Every story has a certain uniqueness about it. A national story is just one such tale. So is The Enlightenment.
We always try to preserve what matters to us. Most of us anyway. Some have taken on themselves the cold, penetrating light of an enlightened age, until they themselves are ensnared by their own past as a glorious story of a group of philosophers freeing themselves from obscure thinking. Another story.
If the bonds that tie us to the world become too heavy, we see them as shackles. This opens the stage for the revolutionary to enter and sever the connection.
Did the revolution set us free or did it cauterise the blood vessels that connected us to the past?
Perhaps the story simply became too convoluted as each generation added a new chapter. Perhaps the inevitable exploitation which festers on parents bound to their children, worshipers bound to a religion, anybody bound to anything, perhaps that exploitation got too suspicious, too heavy.
Perhaps the story which once set us free ended up being a new chain.
“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains” said Rousseau, but what are those chains?
A story.
15th July
It was a long journey to get to the mainland, and when I saw my old aunt at the hospital, she could no longer speak.
Age was catching up on her fast now.
Should we count each day in good health with which we are blessed? I mean, should we plant a tree each day or chalk a line somewhere, something physical and real? So when we turn around, we can see our existence as a tangible being. Perhaps.
She looked at me, eyes swimming with the loneliness of the sick, the drowning in corporeal misery that characterises illness. Around her stood family members who had no idea what was at stake.
The only thing I could console her with was my own weary glance echoing another kind of loneliness.
The doctors struck me as workers in a mental massage parlour soothing our modern consciences with authoritative speak. Aunt had lived a long life, her organs just gave up. She was likened to an old car that worked, but was out of gas.
It worked. The family accepted and said goodbye to aunt.
I gave up on the doctors and turned to my aunt, hauled out a chair and sat until they had all left the room.
We knew it was the end of a life. Of all life in so far as life fights for the survival of life, and we gave up fighting. Over her head, I saw a million sentences swirling around, unfinished and crucially important to our century’s understanding. A life of participation in battles and controversies was about to be abruptly cut off.
Max Planck said “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …”.
I am witnessing that right now.
I started pacing the floor in the little room while rambling about the importance of not giving up.
Aunt smiled a little and looked with her amazing voiceless eyes.
Eyes speak, but they don’t have voices that lingers and spellbinds with meaning and coercion. They are the true escape hatch for life.
Words stain. Eyes do not.
16th July
Her body is resilient. It still breathes, her heart still pounds energetically. We can see the throbbing in her veins.
I try to feed her and nurse her, but to no avail. She struggles to sleep and be awake. Her body opens her eyes when she wants them closed and closes them when she wants them opened.
17th July
What could be more worthy of admiration than the medical staff and the family’s acceptance of death? You live, you die. You are given a number of days. Humbly accept the game of life.
Only it would have been prudent if the grandiosity of that thought shone through in their everyday lives:
If your heart only beats a few billion beats in a lifetime, why don’t they struggle like madmen against lost time? Where is their fear of a day wasted?
18th July
Most of the time I can only sit and read.
A pendulum is a wrong analogy for history. Something entered history that had no previous analogy. Scientific clarity elevated to an entire outlook on life.
My organs are in a turmoil over sitting here and awaiting the entrance of the grim reaper. Hope is grasping for straws, but every time I ask the nurses or the doctors, they smack hope in the floor. They look at me like an evil sadist desiring to prolong a painful death by attempting to keep someone alive.
I struggle insanely against a foregone conclusion, most of all fearing that such prejudices cause the outcome rather than predict it.
Frankly, while I am aware of my own limited understanding of reality, I have even less confidence in that of my fellow man.
During my days here at the hospital, I have seen cringing examples of nurses and doctors explaining by way of dubious example and next to no data. From my perspective, it felt like they grabbed whatever they could to justify what they already had decided upon.
Now I sit here in fear that we are systematically killing this wonderful spirit. Killed by consensus of the inevitable outcome.
A dignified death over a dehumanising struggle to survive.
The body is a sackful of blood pumping muscle and other simple organs. Nothing about it is dignified. It fights with all its strength against dissolution into its constituent parts. Life has always something more to do.
If evolution had given up as easily as we do in the modern hospital, the planet would have been inhabited by bacteria only today.
19th July
Yesterday’s despair got me thinking.
Did our romance with science make us conclude too much?
Why do I think it was science as an abstract denominator for all scientific procedure? Wasn’t it rather economics? That special thinking which applies to all walks of life.
The revolution: Strip away all awareness that does not directly attribute to the solution of a formula. We are being economic with our mental resources.
I would venture that we have mistaken cynicism for science. Over the years it became a competition. Who were the most levelheaded and how much superstition can you throw on the bonfire?
But the opposite of hope is not cynicism. And cynicism is no closer to science than hope.
Science is to cut out the middle man which is not needed: Us. Free markets rely on rational actors, and those are the religious relics of the cynic.
20th July
Aunt is no longer conscious, but breathing deep and heavily in a very unhealthy way. They tell me that her organs are shutting down.
There is beauty in the way that nature can shut us down when the time comes. We produce endorphins against pain, the blood is filled with waste products no longer filtered by the kidneys, and they sedate us. We lose consciousness, and eventually, the heart just stops.
But the spirit fights. It is all it knows how to do.
It takes a whole life of endless warfare to arrive at the big sunset full of days.
The rest of us either resigns from the struggle to gain existence or we roar in the face of oblivion.
21st July
In the early morning she stopped breathing without anyone noticing it. It occurred to me at a later moment.
Beauty has died, and I cannot forgive myself for not fully grasping what has happened.
Something that renders the discussion between Rousseau and Voltaire meaningless. Like the naive theorising between Maurice Joly’s Montesquieu and Machiavelli, and even the deepest underground river of the 19th, 20th and 21st century: The irreconcilability between freedom, equality, brotherhood and religion.
Power and politics in the end cannot save a single human life.
Salvation is in becoming an actor on the world stage. But saving anybody? Leave that to fate.
22nd July
I have started the journey back.
My limbs are faint and my heart feels hollow.
Few days ago they were brimful of a defiant determination to beat death. Now that it is all too late, my ghost seems to have left my body. I feel as dead as the lifeless carcass which had been scarred by the struggle with death.
23rd July
Here off the coast with the mainland no longer in sight, I can feel life slowly returning to my veins.
Why do the world of our peers penetrate so effortlessly?
Were they or I guilty of abandoning the will to live on someone else’s behalf?
In the shadow of the enlightenment, I cannot help but thinking that we have been rendered defenceless against cynicism.
24th July
I feel just as anachronistic as the Jew in the Protocols or Machiavelli clinging to a lost cause.
For all their nostalgic longing, their place in the world has been forever lost. The aristocracy quietly squandered it away.
No, wait. They didn’t. Their obsolete values were swept away just like my own insistence on fighting for life has been swept away by the humane slaughter of animals and the dignified euthanasia of the unwanted.
25th July
The Protocols satirise their implicit bitter irony over the complete devaluation of old virtues in the cold, analytic light of speculative science.
From that point of view, the humane slaughter of six million Jews was a freak accident: The mob turned out to behave exactly as predicted by the Protocols.
And yet, nothing has been proved.
The cold all seeing eye of enlightenment still turns mountains of faith into ash heaps of dust.
Nothing can protect against optimisation, against sound economic principles.
26th July
Two nautical miles out and the waves are high. The wind is really picking up strength.
God’s own radio static is turning louder as I increase distance to the cold, penetrating light of reason.
27th July
I miss my island.
PARADISE LOST