Keeping Our House From Being Divided Even If We Disagree

Against Trauma, Against Correctness--Tranströmer and Rosenberg to Calm Our Nerves

I don’t know if we are at the beginning or coming to the end.
The summing up can’t be done, the summing is impossible.
The summing up is the mandrake—
(See the encyclopedia of superstitions:                      
                       MANDRAKE
                             Miracle-working plant

which when torn out of the ground gave off such an appalling scream
a man would drop dead. A dog had to do it.)

—Tomas Tranströmer

Quoting from an essay:

Just getting near a sense of his own personhood makes Tranströmer tremble, but he even shows that trembling with an image. He’s not interested in “summing up” the world; he wants to open that world up. In “Golden Wasp” he says, “How I hate that expression ‘a hundred percent.’”

The Great Enigma includes a set of never-before-published haiku written by the poet when he was working at a prison for juvenile offenders, as well as a substantially larger set of haiku first published in 2004. Here are the last two of nine in the 1959 series, entitled Prison:

An enormous truck
rumbles past at night. The dreams
of inmates tremble.

*

The boy drinks his milk and
sleeps securely in his cell,
a mother of stone.

—Katie Peterson, Boston Review, 2012

(The year Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize in literature.)

Here’s another one, one of my favorites:

We got ready and showed our home. The visitor thought:

You live well. The slum is within you.
Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way to the Address. Who’s got the Address? Don’t know. But that’s where we’re going.

Tomas Tranströmer, The Scattered Congregation

I think of Bill Gates when I see this astonishing line:

“You live well. The slum is within you.”

That’s my translation by the way—I changed it from an online version which was:

“You live well. The slum must be within you.”

(Which do you prefer?)

What am I talking about, right now?

I don’t know.

Sadness, perhaps.

“A mother of stone.”

Who or what are we? I see us as siblings, orphans at a funeral with no sadness allowed. It’s gone on for two years now.

Few of us can cry, or even begin to comprehend what has been done to us, taken from us. Anger, sometimes, can cloak grief. Me, I get angry when I’m afraid. One way to manage it is to focus on who is a Hero, who is a Fraud, and so forth. It focuses the mind.

Who and what are we, poor humans, pushing against this “human 2.0” monstrosity? Who wants to know us? Are we going to be phased out? Well then, let’s tell them who were are. Were.

Unique. Flawed. Messy. Loud. Emotional. Tragic. Wrong.

Contradictory, strange, shimmering, repressed, loving, complex humans prone to sin, lighting up in sacrifice and capable of remorse.

Capable of remorse!

Won’t they miss us when we’re gone? When they’re stuck with their cold, miserable robots who always make perfect algorithmic sense and never drop anything—are more “productive?”

People need to give themselves more credit, for how good they are, including and maybe especially when they are “wrong.” (Or flawed. Or mistaken. Or late. or confused. Or, as it were, completely desperate.)

They will miss us when we’re gone. Even they.

None of their robots will fail to mask properly. But this won’t bring them happiness.

We humans (human 1.0) we also, I’m thinking, need to laugh at ourselves more readily. Maybe even, before it’s all over, love ourselves.*

(*No idea how.)

We’re not designed to be “perfect,” or morally spot-free— that would be the design of robots. Such a person would be a terror. Such a person is a terror. This is what “woke” is: Accusation without any other elements. No redemption possible, only death by accusation, which never ceases. Because, you see, secretly it is feeding a concealed Last Beast, which is on a strict diet composed of the flaws, faults, wrong words, and missteps of others. (Us, all.) In order for this beast (which R. Steiner said would incarnate as “Ahriman”) to stay alive, its guardians must keep it fed with all of our supposed moral failings. Ahriman would enter the earth, Steiner said, around 1998, through electromagnetism, and its nature would be “perfectly cold.”

Can you believe that?

Listen to Globalists words and you will hear the “perfectly cold.”

All I do now is distinguish “warm” from “cold,” as best I can.

Honestly, what real person uses a word like “unacceptable?”

Keep being “unacceptable,” so the beast can eat!

It has now begun to eat its own. What Whoopi Goldberg said about the Holocaust, that was not even breakfast, last week.

After writing that sentence, “such a person would be a terror…”I see in my mind the rage-afflicted face of young Greta Thunberg,* who believes that we can accuse our way to a cleaner, better “planet.” That hate and rage will lead to salvation and final solutions.

(*Greta was bullied as a child, very severely, so severely she became selectively mute and stopped eating.)

“Covid” is the Bolshevik revolution of “Woke.”

Since you can never be “safe” enough, even triple “jabbed,” triple masked, 6 feet away and “quarantined,” there is always a fractional reserve for more contamination accusation.

All of the above having been achieved, the Woke must also demand Spotify terminate Joe Rogan. Because he interviewed Robert Malone. And Peter McCullough.

This is part of the new Public Health mania/Covid mania, that extends indefinitely, by algorithm, as no “humans” are in the house to stop it. Only algorithms. Next they will outlaw The Interview as a tradition of journalism altogether. You know what an interview is? It’s a damned zoo, I tell you, where anything can happen!

Not safe. Ban it. End it.

(Rogan is a danger because he resurrected The Interview as a medium of free speech.)

Following two years of masks, lockdowns, shots, more masks, boosters, more lockdowns, “it” (woke beast/Ahriman) can no longer express itself.

It needs fresh prey. Food. Watch out.

Here is what it, then, predictably did: Demanded (from assumed moral authority over all of the culture) that all artists who don’t want the world to drop dead from “Covid” also remove their music from the platform. The beast gets hungrier all the time, as it is composed entirely of accusation parasites in its core. In the belly of the beast, only micro-beasts, never sated, no matter what the beast just swallowed.

“Accusation,” my friend Richard Kotlarz once said to me, “is jet black.” As if he knew the exact palette of spiritual warfare. But he meant, for him.

And I thought: ‘Jet black?’ Always? What if it’s true. etc. Still, I shuddered, and agreed. I renewed my intention to stop accusing. That’s not the same as stop discerning.

I would say this to Stefan Lanka, Tom Cowan, Andy Kaufman et al: The spiritual shadow and essence of “virus” is accusation.

(Not assuming they don’t understand this, or that they don’t speak “spiritual warfare.” I’m sure they do. Cowan, I know, is a student of Steiner, which I’m not—I only know a few fragments.)

“Virus” feeds pre-existing accusation. You can’t “prove it’s wrong,” scientifically and expect Aristotelian“reversal and recognition,” as it is a spiritual attack at root: The dilemma of Goethe’s Erlkonig.

Was the Erlkonig (Forest King) real? Well…no!

What, then, killed the boy?

Hm.

Nobody knows.

Well, what kills accusation, then?

Love.

But how can we issue love when we have received so much violence?

Here’s what the Bible says.

I have issued a lot of accusation over my lifetime. It shows up as poison, in me. It never delivers me anywhere.

But what then, do I do, when I SEE THE WRONG?

[No idea! What do you think?]

Moral wrong. Factual wrong. Oh Lord, can we never speak of anything else?

I feel compelled to say that there are those in our midst unduly hostile to the error, which can, actually, be fruitful, or even life-giving. Indeed, errors are good, they are often our friends, we should not fetishize being overly correct. (Or, overly punctual. But that’s another essay.)

Men, I notice, can become possessed with being right. And women are even worse.

So what, you’re right? (Note to younger self.) It’s very overrated.

In this 2012 piece for Lapham’s Quarterly, I describe my love for Tomas Tranströmer’s writing based on, among other qualities, the absence of accusation in his poetry:

”Over the decades, Tranströmer has risen and risen not only for what he puts into his poetry but for what he has so steadfastly kept out: recrimination, political fire, self-pity of any kind. He is probably the most mild and forgiving writer who has ever received the prize. It is as if he has done away with the very wound that has seemed to fester at the heart of the literary world, forever. “There is one who is good. There is one who can see all without hating,” he writes in one poem, presumably a reference to a Christ, unmentionable in secular Sweden, but perhaps just as applicable to Tranströmer’s own role of as an innocent in the tortured, envy-driven world of literature.”

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/artist-north

New beginnings:

Let us all refrain from accusation in the comments section, from trying to make people we have never met feel somehow bad about their thoughts.

If we start fighting, we will eventually sink.

This happened at the original Truth Barrier website. I didn’t ban anybody and instead when a very bad fight broke out, the whole site ship demoralized as in a house of Divorce, and we just went under. I don’t even know how to ban people on Substack, and it goes against my nature, so please let’s just raise the vibe.

I apologize for seeming to be saying, last night, that pseudonyms are cowardly.

I do not take that position. At all.

“George Orwell” is a pseudonym. So is “William Shakespeare.” What I did mean to observe is that people who did use their names, even if they have as much money as Robert Malone, live forever after in a kind of Siberia. The only people there are other people who wonder where their “life” went. Half-ghosts. And people who see them, can’t really see them.

They, in turn, are tended to and saved by those who are not in the line of fire. Sacred fleets of angels—

It’s valid to “question” the so-called leaders of the Covid freedom revolution. (What are we calling it?)

If I say: “Don’t question! They’re helping us!” Then all I am doing is breeding more resentment and suspiciousness against these so-called leaders. Nobody owes anybody else their feelings, attitudes, or questions.

So we’re airing it all out, here.

“Say the need.”

—Marshall Rosenberg

Once “accusation” is in the room, things begin to change. This we all can attest to. We ALL get “infected.” We get defensive. We pick up stones and throw them. This is all entirely human.

It was my intention to hear all sides of the Malone matter, and to host a discussion about it. I believe this is healthy for all sides. I also believe that remorse, redemption, and transformation are the birth moments for us all.

What is “non-violent communication?”

It’s when we don’t accuse, or diagnose, Rosenberg says, for starters. Rosenberg was tough, he was not “soft.” But he insisted we listen with different ears to what is “alive in the other person” when they express something we might call “bad.”

When we play what Marshall Rosenberg calls “the game of who’s right?” we all lose.

This is worth every minute of your undivided attention.

How to judge. I agree with the author, how distorted the issue has become.

Thoreau famously instructed:

“Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

— Henry David Thoreau

At the same time, he relied on the charity of Emerson, who maintained a house—one that Thoreau could retreat to in times of peril, exhaustion, stress.

I feel adamant about this for some reason: I do not believe that everybody should use their real name and go running into social and economic firing squads. I advise against this strongly.

I learned the hard way, for example, to never encourage gay men who were “HIV positive” and perfectly healthy to go public.

They were in many cases killed.

May we all a) stay alive, b) keep hope alive, c) not entertain fantasies of Noble Warfare, but d) be open to miracles and e) be happy to be humans, not taking things all that seriously.

Lewis and Jack, Kerhonkson, NY, Feb 5, 2022.

One more Tranströmer:

Romanesque Arches

Inside the huge romanesque church the tourists jostled in the
half darkness.
Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.
A few candle-flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:
“Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be.”
Blind with tears
I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza
together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr. Tanaka and Signora Sabatini
and inside them all

vault opened behind vault endlessly.

—Tomas Tranströmer

Translated by Robin Fulton