By Edward Curtin
February 25, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - It’s hard to say where
things begin, but they do, as do we, and we are
somehow in them and they in us, and a story begins.
Then the story gets silently disclosed as we live
it, even though most of us don’t tell it until
later, if we can find our tongues. But when we tell
it we are in another story, often nostalgic for the
future but finding the creative past pulling us back
down and deep to illuminate the present.
Life is dangerous; we can end at any time. We
can also be swallowed by the inarticulate, find
ourselves tongue-tied in the face of simple truth,
especially the personal kind and how our small-world
stories are intertwined with the larger social ones.
How there is no escaping that.
There are many, of course, for whom the bell
tolls before they end. As Bob Dylan sings it so
beautifully in
Chimes of Freedom, a song about being
caught in a thunder and lightning rain storm:
In the wild cathedral evening the rain
unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring
their thoughts
All down in taken-for granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the
mute
For the mistreated, mateless mother, the
mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated
by pursuit
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom
flashing.
We are now living in a world where freedom’s
flashing lightning bolts have been replaced by dim
grim grimaces of widespread depression and
resignation as the shroud of solicitous neofascism
descends on much of the world.
Human freedom is under widespread assault. Free
speech is being attacked. Censorship is widespread
and growing. Flesh and blood life is being sucked
into a whirlpool of what John Steppling calls “a
universe of disembodied data.” Mediated reality is
replacing physical reality as the world’s elites
attempt to sell their packaged and commodified
stories to publics ensnared and enamored by the
technology that is entrapping them. All tradition,
the good and the bad, is gutted out by elites
determined to create chaos and digital dementia as
they coordinate their power under the banner of the
“reasonable center” as distinct from the left and
the right. It’s an old story that many can’t hear
because they can no longer listen.
No Advertising - No Government
Grants - This Is Independent Media
But lightning never dies since it is only in
flashing that it exists, like us, and here and there
you can still see and hear its messages of freedom
and revolt. It comes unexpectedly. Out of the
blue. It lurks in the shadowy clouds as an
invisible force, always ready to strike. You have
to be alert and know where to look. Listen. You have
to want to see it, to catch its energy.
A year ago, right before the world was
locked-down into a devastating hell, my then
eleven-year-old granddaughter Sophie, who is a
writer, starred in the lead role of a big production
of Matilda, the play based on the book of
the same name by the mischievous writer Roald Dahl,
who wrote so many books extolling freedom for
children – aka adults. Matilda is about a girl who
refuses to be bullied by the headmistress of her
school or her parents. When Sophie stepped forward
boldly and defiantly looked at the audience and sang
her first solo, Naughty, a shiver went down
my spine, what Coomaraswamy called “the aesthetic
shock.” Bold and fearless, she sang these words
that flashed like Dylan’s chimes of freedom to a
rapt audience wondering who this Matilda might be:
Like Romeo and Juliet
T’was written in the stars before they even met
That love and fate, and a touch of stupidity
Would rob them of their hope of living happily
The endings are often a little bit gory
I wonder why they didn’t just change their
story?
We’re told we have to do what we’re told but
surely
Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty
As the historian Howard Zinn has said: Our
greatest problem is civil obedience.
Zinn tried to change the story but few have heeded
his advice. The American story is the embrace of
endless war and violence, often justified under the
alibi of “the lesser of two evils,” as if lesser
evil were not evil. Such evil is always presented as
reasonable, the center between two extremes.
A hundred years ago, D. H. Lawrence wrote of
Americans that “All the other stuff, the love,
the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort
of by-play. The essential American soul is hard,
isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet
melted.”
In their wish to obey, so many, unlike Matilda,
accede to endings that are very gory, echoing
Melville’s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick:
“Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under
orders,” sometimes not knowing that they are
doing so but finding comfort in their obeisance
since the leaders and experts and authority figures
know what’s best – just do what you’re told, as a
current sage recently said. Obey orders.
Yes, these experts are the light-bringers, like
Prometheus and his brother Lucifer, they bring the
fire. Under orders from Lucifer whom he embodies,
Ahab insanely hunts Moby Dick for three days until
the great white whale rises from the depths and
drags him down to hell, “and the great shroud of the
sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years
ago.” So it goes. It’s an old story worth
remembering, whether the whale be huge or
invisible. To resist, you have to be a little bit
naughty, and brave, for we are on a journey without
maps and are now in a very dark place.
Our stories enclose one another, the largest
being the story of the social world we always live
within, a big story that usually eludes our
understanding or focus until one day we realize it
has always been the womb we have been swimming in
all our lives. We are always inside one whale or
another, but the biggest whale is the social story
about external “realities” told by those who control
the media that encloses all our smaller tales. It
is crucial to understand this story through
discernment and not to let the media monsters
convince us of their versions, for they are not our
friends. They lie for their masters.
Referring specifically to novelists, but by
extension to everyone since we are the novelists of
our own lives, George Orwell, in his essay “Inside
the Whale,” whose primary focus was the writing of
Henry Miller, wrote:
Get inside the whale – or rather, admit that
you are inside the whale (for you are, of
course.)
By which he meant the feeling that external
forces are out of control and that as society
disintegrates and the autonomous individual is
stamped out of existence, “the increasing
helplessness of all decent people” becomes a
widespread feeling. He was not endorsing such
quietism and resignation, but was describing it.
Such a feeling is clearly far more widespread
today, long after Orwell penned those words. He was
praising Miller for saying what regular people (his
phrase was “ordinary man,” a phrase he held was
accurate but “denied by some people” who believe all
generalizations are piffle) thought and felt despite
it being taboo to say it. It is why Miller’s books
were banned; they were too truthful. He dragged
“the real-politik of the inner mind into the open.”
The establishment always prefers refined bullshit
to the secret thoughts of regular people, those who
are fed up with the endless lies that that pour
forth from the official narrators’ mouths.
My entire life has been framed by the story of
America’s constant wars, their glorification and
justification. From the first detonation of the
nuclear device in the New Mexican desert,
blasphemously called “Trinity” by Robert
Oppenheimer, until this very day in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Libya, Yemen, etc., I could
not understand my story without situating it within
the belly of this beast called the U.S.A. This is
true for most people alive today. Stories within
stories.
Peel the American onion and at its heart you’ll
find a bomb. “Fat Man” or “Little Boy” or whatever
sick name you choose to give it.
Our smaller tales nestled in the private recesses
of our minds are seemingly sometimes boring to many
but illuminating to those telling them. They can
and often do appear when one is bored by the
repetitive nature of the screaming, fear-mongering
political headlines meant to reduce people to
quivering victims of false narratives.
“Boredom,” wrote Walter Benjamin in The
Storyteller, “is the dream bird that
hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the
leaves drives him away.”
Far more than a rustling, we are living in a
digital media world of cacophonous lies that drown
out the silence necessary for independent thinking
or dreaming.
So here I sit in the silence and try to conjure
up the Pine-eyed Boy.
The boy was five or six, he can’t remember which,
when his father took him to the movie theater to see
Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. Just the two of
them, a father with his only son, the boy’s five
sisters left at home. By the time two more sisters
had arrived, this intimate dream experience had
penetrated deep into him. His father followed up the
movie by entertaining the boy and lulling him to
sleep many nights by telling him improvised
Pinocchio tales, none of which the boy could
remember but could never forget. These stories
became the penumbra of his life.
He always remembered Thoreau saying that “it
is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless
to remember.” But while nodding assent to that
truth, he always felt Pinocchio was different.
Pinocchio must be remembered, not so much the Disney
version, but the stories his father told on the
theme; but more importantly, why he told them. He
knew that it is so easy to forget what is important
to remember, and that we often use our forgetteres
to do just that.
Like most small children or adults, the
complexity of this Disney film eluded him. He
remembered being mesmerized and frightened and
delighted in turn. The cricket, the whale, the
puppet maker, his pine-eyed creation, and the Blue
Fairy – all of these seemed so real to him, images
that would drift through his unknowing mind
unattached to words, like images in an inner
mirror. Fleeting and fascinating. Moving.
When the kidnapped boys were taken with Pinocchio
on the dark sea journey to Pleasure Island, he was
frightened. He had no words for it, but the
Coachman Barker, the kidnapper, seemed to ooze
menace. But his father’s large protective presence
in the aisle seat to his left seemed to enclose his
fear and tell him all would be fine. He felt
contained in his protective love. His father felt
like a counterweight to the satanic looking Barker
with the pedophile’s red laugh and demeanor. His
father was his protector.
The man the boy became spent decades meditating
on the meaning of his youthful encounter with
Pinocchio’s story. Or was it his relationship with
his father, or perhaps his relationship with his
father’s encounter with Pinocchio, or maybe his
father’s relationship with his father without
Pinocchio but with the feeling the boy must save his
father after the father wishes the boy to life and
his mother dies and leaves the father all alone,
trapped in the belly of a dark life.
My father’s father, my grandfather, was the
Deputy Chief of the New York Fire Department, which
was the highest rank for a uniformed firefighter.
He had battled many dangerous fires to save people’s
lives. Defeating the fire “devil” was his calling.
But when my father was eighteen years old, his
mother died, and my grandfather was left alone. I
never asked him, but I am wondering now if my
father, then aged 18, felt it was his duty to save
his father from the monster of loneliness, the
feeling of being shipwrecked, abandoned by God. And
if that sense of obligation was connected to
Pinocchio’s story, where the puppet boy is first
nearly killed by putting his finger into a candle
flame but is saved by his father, Geppetto, the
wife-less toy maker, who puts out the fire with
water, and then at the end, in a role reversal, when
Pinocchio saves his father from the belly of Monstro
the whale by using fire to make the whale sneeze
them up to the shore.
Such an ending evokes the terrible heavy burden
felt by any child whose “cricket” tells them that
they must save a parent. Such role reversal exacts
a heavy price.
In the Biblical story, Jonah surely felt
obligated that way after he was spit up on the shore
by the great fish whose belly had saved him. He did
not want to do his father Yahweh’s will and tell the
people of Nineveh that they must repent their ways.
So he fled, only to find himself thrown overboard
but saved by the God he didn’t obey.
I once asked my father to tell me about his
father, whom I knew as a young child, but my
memories were few and scattered and he died when I
was ten-years-old. This was after my father had
sent me many letters describing in detail his
father’s and mother’s relatives, what some might
call genealogy but which were actually mini-short
stories. To my father and to me, it was the stories
that counted, not the bloodline; exquisite writer
that he was, my father knew that it was the gift of
stories that would allow me to shape my own, and
that he was, to use Benjamin’s words, starting a
“web which all stories form in the end.”
Despite these detailed epistles about our family
history, my father seemed hesitant to describe his
father. I kept pressing him. He finally wrote that
he would get the bio sketch of Pop in the works for
me. “I’m afraid,” he wrote, “it will
be like the closing words of St. John’s Gospel
though: ‘And many other things did Dennis of
Woodlawn do that are not written in this book; but
these are written so that reading you may believe
that Dennis was quite a man.”
My father knew his Bible, for these are the
closing words of John’s Gospel: “There were many
other things that Jesus did; if all were written
down, the world itself, I suppose, would not hold
all the books that would have to be written.”
He never said another word about his father. I
knew the comparison to Jesus was farfetched, but
beside that, I was left in the lurch, except to
realize that my father idolized his father, and I
had learned from experience that idolization was not
good, for it leads to blind obedience. I had
idolized my own father, but it was only until I knew
his human weaknesses and faults that I came to love
him even more and idolization turned to deeper
gratitude.
Ever since my father’s death and up until
recently, I have felt that this missing piece of his
story was a result of my father’s fear to convey the
full truth about his father, despite my repeated
requests to him to do so. I have changed my literal
mind. I now see it as a brilliant extension of the
improvised Pinocchio stories he told me as a child.
Just as they always left me wondering why they never
had a clear ending as I fell sleeping into the belly
of the night, I see this absence of his father’s
story as a present, a gift like a fairy tale.
“The fairy tale tells us,” wrote Benjamin,
“of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to
shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed
upon its chest.”
One such myth, the one that I have long felt true
and that has informed much of my life is that I
could save others. It is sheer arrogance. It is
violence. It is a mythic nightmare that I have
carried on my chest. Fr. Walter Brown, S.J., who
was a guiding light in my life, once told my parents
when they were visiting my high school for parents’
night: “Eddie will be fine once he gets the
world off his shoulders.” And Fr. Brown didn’t
know the half of it, but, being an artist of deep
intuition, knew enough.
All my efforts to “save” others in the personal
realm have failed, as I should have expected. No
one really wants advice or counsel; to be saved;
they want to be free to create or destroy their own
stories.
I have also written and published many things
trying to convince people through logic and facts
that this is true and that isn’t; that they need to
change their beliefs. I have tried to light a fire
in the belly of Monstro the whale to save others
from the descending shroud of solicitous neofascism
that is upon us. To alert others to the overarching
American story of violence that is consuming us.
In all of this, I was missing the story in the
story. The absence that is the present. The
transformative gift that keeps circulating because
it is freely given to us by the spirit to pass on in
the telling.
“It is half the art of storytelling to keep a
story free from explanation as one reproduces it,”
said Benjamin. I have tried.
Or as Nietzsche said of the chorus in Greek
tragedy:
With this chorus, the profound Hellene,
uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and
deepest suffering, comforts himself, having
looked boldly right into the terrible
destructiveness of so-called world history as
well as the cruelty of nature, and being in
danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of
the will. Art saves him, and through art –
life.
It’s still the same old story, especially when
you know what’s missing.
Edward Curtin is an
independent writer whose work has appeared
widely over many years. His website is
edwardcurtin.com
and his new book is
Seeking Truth in a Country of
Lies