by Uncle $cam
lifted from a comment
Where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such, unsupported by the distorting forces of power and opinion, become a political factor of the first order. Where everybody lies about everything of importance the truthteller, whether he knows it or not, has begun to act.
~Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’
A Question of Two Truths?* (pdf)
Michel Foucault’s last works tell us that parrhesia is the act of fearlessly speaking the truth. To engage in parrhesia is never, however, a ‘neutral’ act. Parrhesia simultaneously incorporates aesthetic and ethical dimensions. The parrhesiast is someone whose fidelity to the truth becomes the pivot of a process of self-transformation. [For themselves and others, I might add].
Looking for God’s eye I found only a socket—
Huge, pitch dark, and bottomless. Such night
Seethes there it seeps into this world, deepening always;And around this pit arches a strange rainbow,
The sill of Old Chaos. The void is a mere shadow
Of that vortex devouring our worlds and days!
Best we submit, give up our will, make ourselves tasty, salt ourselves for fates ravenousness hunger. The Eye of Brahma grooms us with appetition.
rgiap’s abyss speaks of looking back, but what does a rabbit see while being devoured by the white wolf …
Does a mango feel pride at the lips of insatiable greed?
I remember the night one of my fathers died, more vividly than kissing my mothers corpse. And to this day still feel a twinge of guilt, because I didn’t feel anything the night I pressed my lips to her cold lifeless cheek. I was not there when my mother died but arrived soon after. Rationally, I know looking back, it was because I was in shock.
He died of brain cancer in a make of weeks. One sky blue day at the doctor, gone two weeks later. Surprising how fast we submit. But etched in my soul is the night he died. So drugged on morphine he was catatonic. His body functions were slowly shutting down, I massaged his feet. He was a good man, a hard working man. He was an ink setter for a printing company who worked 70/80 hours a week just to make ends meet. I suspect his company killed him. Poisoned him, as they had others, but alas, that is a different story.
All he could manage to do on his off hours –which were few– was sit in front of the box, the tit. That became his world, his world view, all he could manage tired and torn down as his was, from working so much for shit pay; his world became small. Sad, but hardly unexpected, in todays times. But I digress, the night before he died I had had a heated scene, an exchange with his pretentious doctor. I had not known that the man was terminal. Doctor X had stopped feeding him two or three days before I got into town, however, Doctor X didn’t bother to tell the family that pop was a gonner and didn’t have the need?
When I found out he had not been fed, even intravenously, I went into a rage! Not knowing AMA protocol for a terminal human. Within what seemed like hours afterwards, but was only minutes, they fed him at my request, more like demand. I didn’t have the wherewithal at the time to understand that the tube in his arm wasn’t food, but high doses of drip morphine. I was completely aghast, in my stupor all I could think was that this man was dying and they were denying him at least the precious gift of food, life affirming water; in my mind not only was he doped beyond the pail, I kept thinking, what if underneath, somewhere that we don’t know about yet, or talk about, what if he knew he was dying and more, if he would rather not be drugged.
Anyone who has gone through these kinds of life/death ordeals knows of the crazy thoughts that goes through ones mind. I kept thinking, he can’t talk, he is to drugged to talk, what if he wants to talk, to communicate in some way, one last time. Visions of what it must be like being trapped or buried alive ran through my head. Does he feel like that? Would he rather go not in a drugged induced state? As I said above, I massaged his feet, I didn’t know what else to do.
At some point, as time seamed to sit still, though I continued to rub his feet, it occurred to me to pinch the inner arch of his right foot, there was a reaction, he could feel it! I gripped it harder, not out of meanness, or cruelty, but, well, I don’t really know why, it was like the proverbial pinching oneself to see if your real .. to see if your dreaming this … why was I PINCHING HIM AND NOT MYSELF? What if he wants to talk, but can’t, trapped under man’s opium. The other synthetic God. I remembered writing a paper in school about the opium wars, the trade wars, the building and financing of Princeton, the West tends to forget the atrocities and pain of death it has done to other countries, the East never does …
"quinine for malaria, hartshorn for snakebites … and opium and whiskey for everything else." (Haun 1996)
Is this all we can do, bake (Chemo-thearpy) and dope them? Is this our medical practice? Is this how far humanity has advanced?
Can he recognize me? Does he know where he is at? Does he know he’s dying? what if, what if … it was maddening. But the thing, that got me, the thing that will forever be imprinted on my soul, was looking up and realizing that his lips were dry, it dawned on me in that way that snaps you out of one trance and into the liminal state before another, he can’t even drink. O’ what cruelty of death, and of life, I thought. I moved to his side, thinking, how many days, hours, minutes has he lain here without water. His parched lips, were magnified in my reeling mind. My mother, walked in about that time, turning, I asked, "mother, how how has it been since he’s had a drink"? She replied, ‘son he can’t drink’. I burst into tears.
It was like being hit with a hammer in the face. Goddamn, Goddamn you God! I moved to his side table there was water there, it was within reach, what if he wanted water but couldn’t reach it. My mind was on fire, I was screaming inside my head, what if he’s thirsty? What if he’s thirsty, what if he’s … and can’t even reach for water, thoughts tumbling upon other unfinished thoughts, to be that close to water and not be able to even drink! It was beside his head! On the table beside his head. Imagine not even being able to … the things we take for granted.
I looked back at his dry cracked and parched lips, there was spittle in the corners of his mouth, but the rest of his lips were white and chalky. I picked up his water cup, there was a dabber sponge on a stick in it, I slowly and gently put it to his lips, tears flowing from my eyes, this man, this man was 6’6, a huge bear of a man, he moaned a sound like a coo of a baby, an infant, an silent organism and then a sigh. He suckled on the dabber stick sponge like it was the last thing he would ever do. It was. I cried for hours and days, the waves of that night washed over me again and again, deeper it went each time, in the days afterward and even as I write this, it comes, it envelops me like the air I still breath. It is painful, yet I am grateful for it.
And if the great agora (αγορά) does fall another will take his place and another … such is the world.
I have said before, "AMERICA FEELS LIKE IT’S UNRAVELING…" Because it is. To see it, –It seems– one must look back at it. It seems one must look (read: see) with the eyes of an MC Escher; this impossible chessboard. It is being unraveled. A POLARIZATION method of the grand shellgame. "Suicidally beautiful."
Many can’t see, most will not even look, And here we are, with one and a half political parties dividing up the spoils, pushing the empire ever outwards, apologizing for constant collateral damage, justifying jail and worse for dissenters, claiming citizenship itself is a revocable privilege of good behavior. We are watching the American sun come up on Oskar’s view.
Through Oskar’s eyes, there could be no illusion of salvaging or steering the situation in certain directions. Just the certainty of waiting it out, getting through the day, week and month. Acting no longer as a participating citizen of a state or society but as a roving soul seeking only to stay on its feet until the storm passed, until the madness burned
out.
A view he did not choose, or think up, or convince himself to hold. It came to him when he opened his eyes. It was there one morning.
America can no more back down from conquering the Middle East than give up the American way of life, the American seat atop the human pile. This madness of our nation will continue to burn until it burns out. No amount of discussion will derail it. The world is being taken step by step into total war, by America.
We are all Oskar now.
*Us or them. Our house made of dawn.