Waiting For Godot: A Realization About The Meaning Of Freedom

Good News Ahead—And An Adjustment Long Overdue

Vladimir: Say something!

Estragon: I’m trying.

[Long silence.]

Vladimir: [In anguish] Say anything at all!

Estragon: What do we do now?

Vladimir: Wait for Godot.

Estragon: Ah!

[Silence.]

Vladimir: This is awful!

Estragon: Sing something.

—Waiting For Godot,

Samuel Beckett

“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”

—Walt Whitman

”These are the days that must happen to you.”

—Walt Whitman

I need urgently to clarify, correct, something I wrote last night that was written in haste, low mood, trauma etc. in this melancholic post: “What Is A Friend?”

Many of you perceived, (because I wrote it, not because you don’t perceive well,) that I in some way held Donald Trump responsible for the fact that we’ve been acting like the Lord of The Flies children without parents or civil code.

The phenomenon (2016-2024) is somewhat inadequately named “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or TDS.

I want to re-state it like this: The malignant electromagnetic force* of unknown origin used him, as a “polarizing figure” to issue this destructive splitting between us all.

I don’t think he is “divisive.” He’s a lightning rod for the rage of the America-killers, when they see him want to put the America back in America. We’re caught in the crossfire.

One Nation Under God

“Social engineering” and “mass hysteria” have feasted upon him, and us, in ways that are literally mind-boggling. I’ve tried to sand bag and counter it, as have we all, and last night, it got the better of me.

I want to make a renewed commitment not to let TDS affect me so much, and if it does affect me, I don’t want to take it out on you all.

It makes me despair.

Despair is unacceptable. I used to think it was a way to reconcile and address interior dread.

My phone has been ringing today, and the telephoning friends all said: “You said friends call each other at random times…” And I thanked them, for not punishing me, despite me being a little victim-ey, and I said: “I also have not picked up the phone. Not knowing why. I get to the point where I don’t even try to “get my needs met,” but instead go into selective mutism, don’t call, don’t say anything, don’t make a sound, just recoil and “survive.”

Maybe it’s a new trend. We’re all making commitments to call each other at random times and for no reason and maybe not even to send links, just to talk, liked we used to.

So my victim-ey misery bore fruit.

But there’s more.

One friend, my friend Håkan in Sweden, called and said: “I saw that you said friends should call each other at random times.”

“Trend brott!” I said. That means “trend break,” in Swedish. Håkan taught me that word. My Swedish need updating.

“I didn't mean it as an accusation!” I said.

“I meant it as a need.”

Actually, they are entwined.

He said he didn’t take it as an accusation.

But our teacher, Marshall Rosenberg, God rest his soul, taught us that un-expressed needs lay the foundation for “violence,” because when they have gone un-met long enough, they turn into flaming arrows—precisely the kind of behavior that causes people to abandon us.

He said all bad behavior is just unmet needs making what he called a “suicidal attempt” to get met. And his mantra was:

”Say the need.”

But we really don’t like to.

Now—Håkan had called me last night and been subject to this ultra black mood that was upon me.

“Oh my God, Trump is a trap, Elon is a fraud and a trap, the enemy is only going to punish us worse now, we can’t ever get out of this thing, we were crazy to be hopeful…Elon’s gonna chip our brains…”

Håkan said he had never heard me like this. I was ashamed but dug myself in deeper, wailing and complaining and making a case for negative and pessimistic “realistic” interpretations of everything.

Then I had to go feed my friend’s cat, Shams, and so we signed off.

I was soaked in shame, frustrated like a toddler. Storming down the street, in what Anna Runkle would call “C-PTSD dysregulation,” hating myself, I asked myself how I might “regulate.” The answer that came to me was that I would get a pizza, (carbs as consolation) and to heck with carnivore or any other diet, and I would read my book. Not Don Quixote this time, because somehow I can’t find it, but South From Granada by Gerald Brenan. A great book.

I sat at my corner table and ordered and started reading, until I was no longer hearing my miserable self talk, but was instead transported to the Andalucían town of Yegen, in the year 1920, seen through the eyes of a funny British man who decides to move to a very small Spanish town, to recover from the war.

I was somewhat stabilized when I got home.

But then I wrote that post: “What Is A Friend?” that came from all the unexpressed grief, not what others had done to me, but how I myself became in response to all the abuse, rejection, and erasure.

I’d become armored, reclusive, and almost entirely non communicative since the cascading shocks that befell us in 2020.

Who could I blame?

I would surely find a perfect target, as it could not be me. Just needed time to figure out who to blame.

When Håkan called today, I said: “I don’t exactly want to apologize but…I want to acknowledge I was in a beastly mood last night.”

I was thinking I never want to think about US politics again and I don’t want to have to have opinions about anything that has happened or could happen. Don’t ask me about all these people. I don’t know how to interpret larger than life people. They’re inscrutable!

I was weirdly angry. Very aware of not having a clue about anything and this feeling made me more angry. Waiting For Godot kind of anger.

I was digging myself quite a trench.

The matter of “living” came up.

“I think you’re hiding behind your C-PTSD,” Håkan said. “As an excuse not to live.”

Defensive bats flew out and I had flashbacks, like a life review—every encoded soul murder, torment, degradation, all pulsing, wanting to be known and understood, like ghosts rattling lamp fixtures. They want to be heard because they keep me from living, and half the time I come to their defense, because we’re all so close. We all inhabit this strange ship, never sailing.

Was this all because nobody called me to celebrate Trump’s victory?

I had such a meager willingness to see the light, but I needed for this not to be my fault.

It all felt like a “nervous breakdown,” where hope meets hopelessness, and collapses in on an interior void, of how to even think, anymore. I was sickened by the vertigo of listening to this one and listening to that one. Who exactly would show up and dress our wounds, make things ok, restore us? When would being right translate into even five minutes of not feeling wrong and weird?! How could I control all this distasteful negativity? Whose fault was it?

Anybody?

I saw Alexander in the kitchen window and snapped a photo, still not willing to concede I owed God any thanks. Just taking a picture.

And then Håkan said something that changed everything.

“You know what Barbro said to me today?”

Barbro is a ship of knowledge and wisdom about the war between evil and good playing out right now, and she never falters, that everything is going in the right direction. One has to see God in it, is her perspective, or one sees nothing at all.

“What did Barbro say,” I said.

I wanted to be more like Barbro, and was eager to hear what she said.

“She said: “‘If it’s not hopeful, it’s evil.’ “

A parachute unfolded.

I was no longer plummeting.

“Wow,” I said. “That is so good. I think it is true. Let me think for a second.”

Silence.

“Yes, it’s absolutely correct. It’s correct. Thank you. I can’t argue and I won’t. It’s a perfect thing.”

If it’s not hopeful, it’s evil.

In Swedish it sounds like this:

”Om det inte är hoppfullt så är det ondskefullt.”

It is not right to deprive a person of hope, though it is right to issue concrete warnings of tangible danger that people can guard against.

They’re different.

Darkness wants to argue:

“But what if one sees all kinds of monstrous things on the horizon and one needs to set people straight about how horrendous it all is gonna be? You want to peddle hopium?”

I want to not weaken my team.

Not weaken myself.

Not express “worry” and pretend I’m not pleasing the devil himself when I do so. Because we do not know—no matter how bleak things can look. And even if we did “know” it would still be an act of cruelty to project: “We’re doomed.”

Worse, it’s actually an expression of Godlessness, and I believe in God—yet I “peddle” way too often, the poison tonic of his enemy when I project pessimism, worry, or despair, in the name of having my eyes wide open.

We would not do this to our children. We would always tell them things are going to be ok, as an act of protective love, not as a print-out of “reality.”

Athletes imagine winning every game; They don’t say: “I don’t know. My opponent is pretty good. I will probably lose. We’ll see.”

They say: “I am going to win.” And they picture it. And they serve it.

I think Christianity is a religion of hope—a reassuring religion, at heart.

And I think Christianity’s opposition, atheism/Marxism, covets and sanctifies hopelessness. It rewards pessimism. Auto-poisoning dressed up as realism.

“I have to admit you are right, Barbro is right,” I said. “I have been claiming to be a Christian but the journalist jumps up and starts cataloging all the evils and sort of side-stepping the spiritual responsibility to speak hope and faith over every moment.”

Maybe journalism is no good.

Father Zosimas, and Dana, told me about some saints, they were related to the Romanovs but I don’t remember who they were exactly. The Bolsheviks threw them down into wells to die and they started singing hymns. They could be heard singing so beautifully, from down there, until finally, they fell silent. They died singing.

I remember thinking: “That’s Christianity? You gave to be that strong? But I’m not. How could anybody be that strong? They didn't even cry, or scream, or complain? They sang?”

“I’m going to try to express only strength in my words,” I said.

“Trying isn’t good enough,” Håkan said.

“Ok,” I said. “I’m going to just do it.”

”I forget too,” he said.

“It’s a practice,” I said. “We’re so indoctrinated to speak doom and reality and dark facts.”

”Yes, we are.”

I occurred to me that this is the modern way—the secular way. It was my way too, mostly.

If you were extremely traumatized as a child and also as an adult, you produce cortisol in excess. You eventually go into dopamine collapse, because dopamine is depleted by cortisol.

But what if my “dopamine quest” could start with my own words, created to serve hopefulness?

”I used to be hopeful and positive,” I said. “Before everything…”

Excuses again.

Or are they?

They are delays, hedges, negotiations with an encounter I feel not ready for. Or maybe, more accurately, not deserving of.

I decided to look up the word “transfiguration.” Always liked the word since I re-disovered it in The Battle Hymn Of The Republic.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,^[16]
While God is marching on.

—Julia Ward Howe

Why do my eyes fill with tears?

If you see me writing more hopefully, as we carry on, it’s because I see my error.

I don’t care anymore, about being “right,” I care about being hopeful.

I owe an apology of sorts, for not understanding this sooner.

We don’t sit around like eggs waiting for Elon or Trump to deliver to us a fixed, just, repaired world.

We do our part.

We have much to rejoice over.

Being, for example, alive.

“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.”

—Walt Whitman

*Rudolf Steiner said that a being would incarnate around 1998 which he called “Ahriman.” This being would enter the world through “electromagnetism,” and his influence would be to harden all human impulses and relations, his nature being “perfectly cold.” I don’t know if he was right but that was his prophecy.