“Auschwitz is not only behind us.”

“Auschwitz must be comprehended in the context of its historical past, be recognized when it happens in the present, and not be ruled out blindly for the future.”

Gunter Grass  “A Father’s Difficulties in Explaining Auschwitz to His Children”

“My children have their doubts. They say: You don’t believe in anything anyway. I admit to my unbelieving life, and tell them: As soon as belief gets ahead of reason you can count on the demise of both politics and literature. Examples include the belief in one God, the belief in Germany, and the belief in true Socialism.”

Gunter Grass “Literature and Politics”

I have been reading a lot about the early part of the 20th century in Germany and the events and effects of what occurred then and there.

W. H. Sebald “The Emmegrants”, Ursula Hegi “Stones from the River”, Gunter Grass “The Tin Drum”, Roberto Belano “2666″, and a graphic novel “Berlin”, as well as many works by Kafka have been giving me some understanding of the enmeshing social and cultural atmosphere that produced the horror that was Auschwitz and the whole nightmare of the Holocaust and the insuing costs that left scars on the world.

Fear is the common thread that weaves this tapestry of doom. Fear disseminated by people who want to control the destiny of a nation and use it to hypnotize people and by degrees convince them to accept inhumanity as the only appropriate measure to protect their way of life.

Every time Dick Cheney or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck speaks about what we should fear and why we must act on those fears. I am thankful that we have for the moment pushed them to side to focus on some of the pressing issues that face us as a nation. When they use the examples of Hitler and the Third Reich to paint the current political situation in blackest most fearful terms, they are actually using the methodology of the Nazi’s. I think we should fear unreasonable, unsubstantiated  fear and single minded devotion to blind faith in anything. Let’s think things through and look for evidence. Let’s keep our eyes and minds open to posibilities and continue to fill the air with our dreams for a world full of people who can discuss and celebrate differences without the shadow of unreasonable fear. Then Auswitz will be behind us, as well as Rawanda, and Vietnam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan and torture for freedom’s sake.

We do have a long way to go before we are far enough ahead of this thing that it can’t creep up and bite us in the ass again. Maybe we need better rearview mirrors, or maybe take turns looking out, but we have to know what the thing looks like in order to avoid it. When we are looking for a high-stepping, swastika resplendant mob it might sneak up on us in the form of some nice people concerned about morals, or anti-terrorist legislation to keep us safe. Your favorite relatives and best friends could be involved. That is how it gets in when we are afraid to disagree with nice people about their bad ideas and unreasonable fears. Fear is the monster that closes the mind to humanity: careful listening, respectful conversation, and diligent open-minded inquiry are the weapons that will slay it. These are the things that keep us  from reliving the horror of Auschwitz.

The Hidden Land

I worked on this all last week. I don’t know how I feel about it, but here it is.

I started with the light figure in the left center and worked out in a very random way. It was like drawing a poem.

A Failed Experiment: A New Plan

I started out this week intent on focusing on the light and got lost in a dense gray fog of fatigue and indifference ending in a black funk. I have no idea how things happen this way. This all ended with my lovely Mary telling me I had to make a plan for what I was going to do with my life because this isn’t working for anyone. She is, as usual, right, but making long range plans is not one of things I have never been good at. I tend to just take life as it comes, and living out a scripted plan makes me feel like I am on the gray road to the end without surprises or bright spontaneus  flowers of inspiration that bloom by accident on a less planned route. But then I have been thinking that maybe by not planning I have looked at all the possible roads and have spontaneusly moved myself down smaller and smaller roads until I have run up against this dead end. Maybe if I look at a larger map, I can plan a route with the option of taking unplanned turns.

I need to pull back my perspective so I can see the options available to me. For five years I have been working with people myopically focussed on what they can objectively quantify. I know that this is not the only approach to education or life. I have experienced places and people who are not confined to the clinical academic roads that trap life into boxes of jargon and numbers. I need to find a community based on ever opening vistas of human experience and creativity. I need to make a plan that opens out into broad roadless fields and rugged wilderness of unknown adventures. Maybe my plan will be to construct an offroad vehicle that will take me to places I haven’t been before. I have little bits of my mind that I can spare from my work and class focussed brain,  busily nibbling away, gathering bits and pieces, with mouselike energy constructing a plan for such a vehicle. I see the progress in my dreams and my attitude. Today I am full of hope even though I still have to face the almost overwhelming wall of small thinking each day. I have the power of creativity, synthesis, poetry, and the magic language of dreams working tirelessly to make a me sized hole in that wall. I will see the light of a new life of my own making.

What can I do now? That is the question at this point. I can write each day, which I didn’t last week. Writing frames my world in possibilities and allows me to exorcise my dark demons of despair. I need to put ideas into words every day that will at least save a little bit of my sanity until I can devote more time to my escape plan. It keeps the door open just a crack so the light can leak in. It is really impossible to get any quality work done in the dark.

Palomar and Another Snowy Bus Ride

Palomar

I just finished Gilbert Hernandez “Palomar” a complete collection of his comic written and drawn in 80’s and 90’s. Wow! What a different universe he lives in. Most writer/artists who create serious comics seem to approach life from a perspective outside the mainstream. This is no Calvin and Hobbes or Doonesbury, which are great strips but are cleaned up for mass consumption. They appeal to a wider audience. Gilbert Hernandez is obviously not worried about offending people, which leaves his work wide open and fascinating. This book is not for the sheltered or prudish. He shows a world full of sex and violence, but along with that he shows of people struggling to maintain relationships and stay connected with each other. How do you hold a community together when in the end every person in that community is an individual. People come and go,  help and use and hurt and abuse each other. How do you stay tied to a community with all the pain connected to it. Ugly stuff happens in life and Gilbert Hernandez shows the ugly and how it sometimes leads to beauty. He shows the value as well as the problems with interdependence and the bonds of family centered culture. He looks on it all with a neutral eye that accepts all things as worthy of observation and depiction. Some of it shocks, but mostly taken as a whole it is a good example of art that gives insight into our own lives, and expands the world of the reader. But, like I said before you will have to get past the shock. He does not put his ideas in a candy coated shell for just anyone to consume. He is looking for those who will dig in the dirt to find the rare and beautiful.

Another Snowy Bus Ride

I am writing with big black yarn covered fingers.

I am remodeling the house that contains my life, which is now called white ice world. I am constructing  bus route hallways as my usual car and road hallways are useless.White Ice World includes many more people I will never know, or even see again, but it is warm in the bus part of hallway that with short walks slippery trudges through the gaps leads to rooms that I need to get to.

I am realizing that when White Ice World fades. I will want to use these hallways as well as the old ones that will clear in time. The gaps in the hallway will become pleasant pieces of the structure of my life house. Maybe in the spring I will start work on my bicycle hallway. Who knows my life house could grow to fill all the spaces between here and the places I travel to each day. For now this rattly, bouncing passage filled with strangers will do, and even provide interesting building material for the life house I am constantly constructing and remodeling in my mind.

Dreams are Stories without Endings: Here are 2 More

Jealousy

I watch him possessively as he readies himself for a night out away from me. I know in my heart he would not leave me, but fear lurks in the shadows of doubt at the edges of my thoughts. I resolve to follow him. At first this is easy. I remain about 20 feet behind just out of his peripheral vision. We move through crowded streets into the heart of the city. He turns down an alley. When I get there I see only garbage cans and fire escapes and puddles of unknown liquids. I follow the alley to an empty dark street. The newspaper office stands silent with bits of paper drifting in a cold breeze. I walk to the doors and find them locked. I walk around to the loading dock which is empty. No trucks or newspapers to deliver.

I wander back to the street.  On the opposite sidewalk some slouching, lazy looking characters scuffle. Their harsh voices and scraping shoes echo in the canyon of the street. One of the smaller one notices me and says, “Hey what’s this,” in a slow drawl. The other heads come up and their shadowed forms turn slowly in my direction. I know enough not to run. They move across the deserted street in a spreading “V”, The one in front sizing me up as the others circle around.

“What should we do with this little kitty?” he says eying me to see what kind of sport I might provide. “Shall we eat it? Or just play with it a little?”

I am in a constant state of assessment. Should I run? Stand my ground and try not to betray my fear? Or should I simply collapse and curl into a ball and shut my eyes? I know that running is not a good option.

The Ancient Explorer

Captain Haratio Zanzibar rose from his couch. A feeling of utter exhaustion of the soul enveloped him. His body felt old. He looked in an oval looking glass surrounded by an elaborate golden frame. He saw an old man, white maned with sad eyes. He tried to recall the dream that just left him, but only the vision of white tents puffing gently in a warm breeze that drifted across a vast dunes of tawny sand. He knew the place well. In his youth he had explored the region and made his name their.

“Meredith!” He shouted with a sudden impulse.

“Yes dear what is it?” her voice drifted in from the adjoining room where she was reading a book of poetry.

“I think it’s time to see the desert again.”

“Do you my dear?”

“High time. I’m growing old here,” he spoke decisively as he moved hands clasped behind his back toward his wife.

“Well if you say so, dear. I am up for just about anything.”

“Jolly good!”

“You had better have Perkins ready the tents and make the arrangements, dear”

The Captain bustled out of the room to do just that.

The next day the Captain stood before the long almost black wooden crate that held the bright canvas tents rolled like unwritten parchments. As he looked them over he had a thought that this would be his last expedition. He would never return to this place. He was growing younger with each order he gave or item he inspected. By the time everything was prepared he would be a young man again ready to surmount any obstacle or deal with any sticky situation that might arise.