This was my initial reaction, other than weeping, to the events of 9-11. What we call heaven contains all the positive memories of the human race; hell the opposite.
I have been held in this Mediterranean fortress for the last eleven years. My apartment is appointed with paintings of the local terrain—all hillsides and empty beach scenes. I can’t tell where I am. I have forgotten something vital to European security and my jailers and I have been attempting to find what I have lost. A nuclear device is buried somewhere in Europe.
I was an undercover agent working with the DIA when an explosion in Tunis, Tunisia effectively shattered my memory of all preceding events. My cell had been targeted by the CIA. A classic fuck-up. We know the implanted device is real from a cable I sent to the DIA a good two months before. I was the only survivor.
For the last eleven years I have been given drugs, watched endless film and video; my jailers even gave me a girlfriend. I’ve read and re-read my diaries. All the research, all the prodding, and I don’t know who I am. I can’t imagine being the person they say I was. Tonight my jailers throw a farewell party for me.
I read the last entry in my diary: “Feb. 18: People are mad. Each believes in their own fantasy. Sanity is for those who see this—the way it is: writhing and terrifying. People are mad for they remain oblivious to the power of the unconscious. I think people have always been afraid of me.” When I was a child I would tell adults, “It’s all in your mind.” I infuriated them.
“You know nothing about it.” “Wait till you grow-up,” they would say. Now here I am. My freedom is all in my mind and I can’t find it.
The very last note in the diary (the morning before the CIA attack) reads: “Large spirits tend toward domination. For those spirits to become great they must refine themselves and their desires. Concentration and restraint are the watchwords of dominating spirits.” What could I have been thinking?
Roger, one of my guards, comes in. He stands inside my door looking like the languid Christ he is.
“Anything?” He asks plaintively.
“You know me. I gave up a long time ago. I can’t live my life for them.” His long face leans toward me.
“A lucky guess could postpone the party.”
“Ah, I had not thought of that. Would you mind not disturbing me until perhaps a pot of coffee at four?”
“Okay Einstein,” he says politely and retreats.
My parents had been notified years ago of my MIA status. Hannibal was from Tunis. Carthage, to be exact. In ancient times it was famous as a place for human sacrifice. They were also the perfectors of the mosaic. O Exquisite world, which I’m sure I never loved enough, why can’t I see you?
– 1 –
Creative writers assemble worlds. In their own minds they are god-like, absorbers who transform life.
I came of age in a Western world that worshipped the creative writer. My own path led me to criminals, disaffected intellectuals and poets both forlorn and courageous. People who lived the experienced life on its many levels were my friends and teachers.
My father was a middleman in the Jersey mob. A crooner, a charmer, he enjoyed punching out black men who wandered into his all-white bar. Siring me became one of the worst days of his life for I was born an egalitarian, a believer in the world of free souls. I went my own way as did millions of my generation. We worshiped the courage and beauty of a people who had broken out of slavery and had transformed themselves into a power in the land of the free. Such expressions being of the highest order I came to love the freedom to grow, to sing the most meaningful songs, to read the most powerful books and to laugh at adversity. Unfortunately, the levers that controlled my society’s direction were clogged with patronage and a condescending hatred for the aesthetic intellect. To paraphrase a line in Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas, “Those who seek great power against themselves conspire and shun the cure they most desire.”
– 2 –
The Ideal is the enemy of the Real. Since 1700 B.C. or so people began traveling in a realm called the Ideal. It is manifested in the oneness, the singularity, platonic philosophy, Indian nations of withdrawing into the ONE (the divine), and the desire to mold the other in one’s own image. Each discipline sifts through the debris – seeking that unimaginable hope in which man resides.
I find this kind of thinking to be props for the expansion of the God of Self-Interest and the prevailing need to heap the ideal on the other. We are the victims of this befuddled and muddled policy. The staggering intellectual creations of men like Rousseau and Hegel (two polar opposites) amount to fictions no different but certainly less elegant than Prof. Dodgson or Jonathan Swift, but Rousseau and Hegel do not possess the beauty of Reality. They are in fact looking for it – the essence, the eye without boundary, a gorgeous bauble which others admire. Watch hamster, meditate upon the dream. All the slicing and dicing about the sad state of affairs the Enlightenment followers have brought us is based on loss – must missed it, as if the great books of the Western world ever did anything but grow individual egos, the impenetrable egos, which freed them to continue the slicing and dicing while maintaining the scaffolding of Empire.
In the end all analysis is entertainment until the work results in the discovery of a new world (Pasteur, Einstein, Jonathan Swift, Matilda Gage). For all the talk about the current lack of political leadership or any semblance of a long term economic policy the brute fact about the West is to quote Allan Bloom, “The crisis of the West is a crisis of belief – in the justice of our principles.”
During the 1991 Gulf War a Moroccan female scholar is reputed to have said: “The enemy is no longer just on earth; he occupies the heavens and the stars and rules over time. He seduces one’s wife, veiled or not, entering through the skylight of television. Bombs are only an incidental accessory for the new masters. Cruise missiles are for greater occasions and the inevitable sacrifices. In normal times they nourish us with software, advertising messages, teenage songs, everyday tech info, courses for earning diplomas, languages and codes to master. Our servitude is fluid, our humiliation anesthetizing.”
This was my initial reaction, other than weeping, to the events of 9-11. What we call heaven contains all the positive memories of the human race; hell the opposite.
