collective trauma
Posted on: March 3, 2024
We all live in our own filter bubble curated by algorithms, resilient to any form of criticism that would shake our belief system. Some bubbles are admittedly less sealed and airtight than others, and some people are more open minded and willing to subject themselves to different beliefs than others, but overall, we are all shaped by this confirmation bias drive deeply embedded in our psychology and we all fall for the need to have our beliefs reinforced by other people. Solipsism meets tribalism in an attempt to save itself.
Every now and then something highly divisive surfaces the vast pool of ideas or events and makes people gather round and cluster together in antagonistic tribes. Slavery. Monarchy. Church Reform. Voting rights for women. White supremacy. Environmentalism. Gay rights. Gender equality. Jews. Guns control. Capitalism. Vietnam. Climate change. Trump. Freedom of speech. Abortion. Brexit. Systemic racism. Vaccines. Migration. And so on and so forth. Recently there’s another hot topic that polarizes our world into two factions who hate each other’s guts: Zionism and the creation of Israel as a colonial state in Palestine. One tribe cheers the creation of an ethnostate founded by definition on the exclusion and destruction of the native population. The other tribe decries the violence contained in such a colonial project. I belong to the later. While I think the concept of a safe haven state for Jews was legitimate, the founding principle as a colonial state was not. Every instance of injustice and hardship suffered by the Palestinians that took place after 1948, no matter how big or small (every dead Palestinian, maimed child, every forced eviction, deportation, harassment, house demolished, discrimination, bullying, abuse, illegal settlement, unlawful imprisonment etc) can be traced back to this notion of ethnocracy and colonialism, that is part of Israel’s founding narrative.
After the horrible event of October 7, I find myself, once again, tethered to a bubble where I watch in horror, day in, day out, unfolding in plain sight, one of the greatest crimes of our age, played out in real time and broadcast live on our TVs and phones. What happened on the 7th of October was brutal. Death of civilians as a political means is never justified. But what’s been happening since that day to the Palestinian civilians is not only thousands of times more brutal but the narrative that surrounds all the killings is surreal. The horrifying atrocities perpetrated by Israel are mirrored by a conspiracy of silence and deceit of the western governments and western media. The brazen lies, the gaslighting, the smearing, the shameless denials, the complicity etc turns everything you know on its head. It’s like witnessing a mass hypnosis, where half of the world is under a spell and lost any trace of humanity and reason. It’s like living in a Kafkaesque topsy-turvy reality, where lying through your teeth reigns and the rules of reality disappear. Truth, sense, logic are completely butchered in an attempt to exonerate Israel’s unimaginable war crimes. The impunity granted to Israel has created a monster that can no longer be contained. History repeats itself like in a grotesque farce. The dehumanized is now the dehumanizer. The only thing that is missing is the gas chambers. Everything else is right there. The dehumanization, the concentration camp, the deportation, the ethnic cleansing, the incarceration, the mass killing, the starvation, the genocidal intent to erase their cultural footprint (universities, schools, hospitals, churches, mosques), the white supremacy etc. Shaun is perfectly right in his video essay: suffering doesn’t make you a better person, it just makes you suffer.
Like I said, I live in a bubble where the supply of depictions of what’s been done to the Palestinian people seems to have no end. At times I ration the content or even turn my back on it for a while out of desperation. Nothing of this sort in the other bubble, the pro-Israel one, where the killings are cheered on with enthusiasm or justified with a shrug. There’s only so much one can take. The tribe I follow is beaten, in shock, emotionally drained, given in to despair, destitute of words. I notice, more and more often, in their voices and on their faces a sense of a collective trauma, born out of this strange condition where you are made to witness horrific crimes against a group of people without being able to put an end to it. And where, to make it even worse, everyone else seem to be part of a conspiracy supporting or denying what’s happening. It’s bound to induce depression, helplessness, despair and even madness. More than 15.000 children have been slaughtered in Gaza. Not 200, not 460, not 870, not 1400, not 3200, not 5600. More than 50.000 children have been wounded, maimed, disfigured, scarred for life and rendered orphaned. Not being able to prevent any of these horrors can take an immense personal toll on you. And being vilified for wanting the slaughter to stop is one of the most depressing and bizarre things one can experience in their life.
shalloWEST
Posted on: November 9, 2023
The little faith I had in humanity is now completely shattered. There wasn’t much faith left to begin with, but I did believe our civilization had outgrown mass murder. I was wrong. It seems humankind will always find a way to justify murder and accommodate genocide. The remorse will invariably come, I’ll give them that, but so the relapse into mass murder. We are nothing but a genocidal species, a murderous junkie unable to escape the cycle of murder – remorse – relapse. The truth of the matter is that genocide can happen to anyone. You may live in places where is less likely to happen, but nobody is fully protected and there’s no guarantee against it anywhere in the world. Ten thousand civilians have been killed in just one month before our very eyes and you won’t find a single major western leader to raise his voice against it and say: ”ENOUGH”. Not a single one. Joe Biden. Emmanuel Macron. Rishi Sunak. Olaf Scholz. Georgia Meloni. Keir Starmer. Victor Orban. Bernie Sanders. Nancy Pelosi. Ursula von der Leyen. etc They have all equated Israel’s right to defence to mass murder. The blood of thousands innocent children is on their hands. They are all complicit in the slaughter of thousands of civilians with their unlimited and unconditional support for Israel. At this rate every 10 mins a child is murdered in Gaza. Even now there are hundreds of civilians and children still alive under the rubble who will suffer a slow horrifying death. Buried alive under debris and our indifference. Now that much of Gaza has been carpet-bombed and flattened by 10.000 bombs the most one can hear from our glorious Judeo-Christianity is a call for a humanitarian … pause. In other words, give them some water and then kill them again. Give them a loaf of bread and then you can carry on destroying their homes, schools, hospitals. Let them take a breather before their death. We are not barbarians like them animals, right? Bombing the crap out of somebody on an empty stomach is not kosher after all.
I was never naïve about our human nature or about politics. There will always be a level of corruption, self-interest, falsity that will erode our better selves and our political endeavours. There will always be a difference between what is said and what is done or between what is said publicly and what is said behind the scenes. I expected the usual routine with the West paying lip service to our humanity.: “Palestinian lives matter”, “Every loss of innocent civilians is unacceptable”, “We urge Israel to show restraint and protect non-combatant civilians” etc while looking the other way at some of Israel’s missteps. What I didn’t expect was for the West to openly embrace evil and unreason. To offer unrestricted support for Israel even when they went fully genocidal. One of the difficulties historians and politicians face when it comes to distinguishing between mass killing and genocide is to prove intent and motivation. Now the case for a genocide was made simple by Israel’s own admission of their intent and motivation (the president, the prime minister, high ranking officials, the IDF). They turned Gaza into a textbook case. The documents leaked pointed in the same direction. No building or place is off limits. The emphasis is on maximum damage, not precision. The indiscriminate carpet-bombing of everything in Gaza (houses, roads, hospitals, schools, shops, mosques, churches, markets, bakeries, refugee camps etc) makes it clear those statements weren’t just angry words, mere venting, but it meant business. There’s the plan and there’s its implementation.
The response of the West to all this? A complete surrender to Israel’s narrative. To their aggressive lobby. Blank check to do whatever they want, with no redlines and with complete impunity. Blatant denial of Israel killing civilians on purpose. Full unconditional support. Sending financial and military aid to Israel. And then descending into full dystopianism. Like banning pro-Palestinian protests. Smearing the marches who call for peace and for a ceasefire as … hate movements. Framing any criticism of Israel as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. Firing and cancelling any official who won’t fall in line. Rationalizing mass killing. Giving surreal statements that Israel makes everything they can and beyond to avoid civilian casualties. Mudding waters. Twisting words and logic to accommodate Israel’s narrative. The enlightened West, praising itself as the beacon of light, as the peak of civilization, went mask off revealing its hypocrisy and shallowness. As far as I am concerned, I am done with our Judeo-Christian supremacy. I don’t want to ever hear western democracies lecture the rest of the world on human rights ever again. Even when they are better on that front, they are no longer in the position to lecture others. If you scratch the surface, you will find the same self-centred barbarians as everywhere.
Even though I am deeply troubled and shaken by the loss of my hope and faith in humanity there is a strange sense of relief. As if I no longer have any skin in the game. As if there’s no bigger ideals to defend and fight for after all. For instance, the idea that Trump might get back for another four years term, with his toxicity and the regressiveness of his followers, was horrifying to me. Not anymore. Now I no longer care who runs the hypocritical charade. In fact, I want Biden to lose. He is obviously better than Trump, but still a monster. And a better monster is hardly reassuring. Yes, some political systems and individuals are better than others. But if none of them cannot make sure I am not killed with impunity in a mass killing then I won’t hold any in high regard. Better is not enough. Better doesn’t protect you from being evicted from your home, from being subjected to apartheid, from being oppressed and ultimately killed. Different does.
bad faith
Posted on: October 19, 2023
What do you do when words have lost their meaning? When someone speaks to you in bad faith? When someone abuses the language to such an extent that remaining engaged in a conversation is pointless? If you can, you leave and disengage. If you can’t, you resort to nonverbal forms of communication. One of them is violence. It’s wrong but arguing in bad faith, dishonesty is always one of the main culprits that takes people there. Dishonesty is violence and it breeds more violence.
western values
Posted on: October 18, 2023
To say it’s surreal is an understatement. Pro-Palestinian protests are banned and outlawed across the western world. In France. In Germany. In Austria. In Australia. In the UK they want to criminalize waving a Palestinian flag. What the fuck happened to this world? To its highly regarded western values? The flashback to the moral confusion and the complicity of the German population in the second world war, when they turned a blind eye to those atrocities, in the same way the Western world has been doing for decades with what’s happening to the Palestinians at the hands of Israelis, is unavoidable. I live once again on edge, in shock, tense like a coiled spring, overanxious and getting triggered by all these news that, time and time again, fall in line with the Israeli narrative (Palestine bad – Israel good, Hamas attack bad – Israeli war crime good). I spend half of the time, horror-struck, reading eagerly depictions of war crimes and genocidal rhetoric coming from Israel and its western allies, and half of the time, withdrawn, showing avoidance behaviour, trying to run away from any news coverage and avoid the exposure to that toxicity and insanity. Torn between the need to know and the need to keep myself sane. The framing of what’s happening in Gaza by the western media is horrific. BBC reported the peaceful pro-Palestinian protests in London as … pro-Hamas. Have they lost their mind? Any attempt to criticise the collective punishment of Palestinians, forbidden by the Geneva Convention and by Israel’s own laws, is shrugged off as irrelevant. The criticism of Israeli military actions, in total disregard to the Palestinian civilians, is framed as antisemitic. The killing of more than 724 Palestinian children by the Israeli military’s relentless bombardment is framed as legitimate self-defence. The calls for restraint coming from public figures who are sympathetic to the oppressed are framed in media as controversial. For the love of God can someone explain to me what is controversial, for instance, in what Eric Cantona said? If truth, common sense and call for freedom of an oppressed people is nowadays controversial in the western civilization then we are doomed. Western values my ass.
one-sided outrage
Posted on: October 11, 2023
If you open the TV right now there’s an overwhelming barrage of commentators, journalists, politicians, pundits, officials etc outraged by the appalling attack perpetrated by Hamas, and as a consequence, expressing their support for Israel’s right to defend itself. How is it though that you NEVER hear these people EXTENDING the right of self-defence to Palestinians? Never. Every time violence spirals out of control I have to put up with this nauseating hypocrisy of the West where they defend the right to self-defence of the… OCCUPIER. What the actual fuck? Not even once have I heard them mentioning the right to resist and to self-defence of the occupied.
The same people who feel outraged at the occupation and annexation perpetrated by Russia of Ukrainian territories never express indignation over Israel’s occupation and anexation of the lands that belong to Palestinians. Where is the outrage of the West for the ethnic cleansing, for the evictions and deportations, for uprooting and stealing Palestinians’ homes and lands, for the illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinians’ soil? Turning a blind eye to the apartheid regime and Israelis’ daily atrocities against Palestinians is one of the most shameful and bizarre lapses and derelictions of duty of the West. What Hamas did is appalling and unjustified by any means. Calling them out and calling the Palestinians out for rejoicing at these murders is the right thing to do. But failing to address and recognize that THE ROOT of this never-ending cycle of violence is the OCCUPATION perpetrated by Israel is hypocritical and shameless. Until the West won’t stop giving Israel a pass for their atrocities and put pressure on them to stop the occupation nothing will change.
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nu exista prosti inocenti
Posted on: September 2, 2023
Am avut intotdeauna o atitudine magnanima fata de prosti. Pentru ca am realizat de timpuriu ca prostia, ca si inteligenta, este o fatalitate. Te nasti cu ea in acelasi fel in care te nasti cu ochi albastri si nu negri. Iti poti imbunatati putin lotul in care ai fost instalat, poti sa devii mai inteligent sau mai putin prost decat esti, insa niciodata suficient cat sa faci un salt de la o categorie la alta. In acelasi fel in care nu poti sa te ridici de jos tragandu-te de par in sus, upgrade-ul de la o categorie la alta, de la prostie la astutie, din simpla volitie, nu e posibil. You are what you are. Period. Esentialism dezolant dar greu de refutat in viata de zi cu zi.
De la ideea legitima ca prostul nu e responsabil pentru prostia lui poti trage insa concluzia ca e inocent si in expresia ei. In modul cum isi gestioneaza prostia. Ceea ce nu mai e la fel de adevarat. Ca sa folosim o metafora potrivita, prostia este similara unei priviri defecte. Prostia e o forma de miopie epistemica iar prostul e visually impaired sau uneori orb de-a binelea. Exegeza lui este gresita. Vede stramb si interpreteaza gresit datele realitatii. Vede ca prin pacla niste umbre si e convins ca sunt oameni cand sunt in realitate copaci. Nu este de vina pentru neadevarurile privirii lui insa este de vina cand nu-si constientizeaza si accepta handicapul. Nu e de vina cand vede monstruos insa e de vina cand isi considera vederea integra, nealterata de cecitate. Cand isi lanseaza diagnoza in lume si o considera legitima, la paritate cu a celor cu vederea neafectata. Cand refuza sa-si corecteze reprezentarile gresite in urma confruntarii cu cineva care vede.
Teoretic vorbind ne putem inchipui o lume ideala in care prostia, oricat de dezolanta ocurenta ei, poate fi neutra si inofensiva. In care reprezentarile mioape nu au pretentii de legitimitate si nu intra in conflict cu celelalte. In care prostia si inteligenta sunt intr-un permanent deadlock, separate printr-un pact de neagresiune. In care prostul stie si accepta ca e defect. In realitate insa lucrurile nu stau asa. Pentru ca prostul nu sta niciodata in banca lui. In lumea reala prostul nu are niciodata indoieli si stie intotdeauna mai bine. Nu din prostie, pentru ca asta l-ar exonera si l-ar face inocent, ci din aroganta, din defect de caracter.
E adevarat ca prostul are un defect structural de supraevaluare (Dunning-Kruger effect), pentru care nu e responsabil, dar nici un prost nu e atat de prost cat sa nu stie, in relationarea cu cineva inteligent, ca e prost. Exista intotdeauna un moment de revelatie cand intelege ca oamenii nu au totusi crengi si ca imaginea returnata pe retina lui este inselatoare. Ca lentilele prin care vede realitatea sunt opace.
Comparatia cu vederea se opreste insa aici. Daca in lumea reala, vazatorii si nevazatorii pot trai in armonie este pentru ca nevazatorii isi accepta handicapul si nu isi impun reprezentarile realitatii ca fiind echivalente. Prostul e insa un miop in denial. Un orb pe autostrada, conducand pe contrasens. Un orb care refuza sa accepte ca are vederea defecta. Acesta este motivul pentru care nu exista prosti inocenti si inofensivi. Pentru ca nu prostia in sine este problema. Ci faptul ca prostul nu accepta ca e prost si ca expertiza lui este defectuoasa. Prostul nu de prostie e vinovat, ci de mandrie, de aroganta nejustificata. Iar mandria transforma miopia si prostia in violenta.
w.ok.e
Posted on: March 22, 2023
These days you can use a new heuristic shortcut to identify stupidity and separate the wheat from the chaff. The anti-woke testing kit. If you come across someone uttering indignantly that something has gone woke then you know it’s quite likely he is an idiot who follows along with the herd like a lemming. Out of ten instances when you hear this new pet word, seven times it’s used as a nonsensical slur, as a weapon, parroting the right-wing hysteria, two times it’s used in a neutral metareferential way and only once the term (in its current, twisted, hijacked usage) is used for legitimate reasons, as a valid criticism of something otherwise good that went too far. The lunatics have taken over the political asylum once again and they are shouting from the rooftops their anti-woke sentiments. Jordan Peterson decries the wokeness and tyranny (wtf) of a harmless reasonable sign that nudges people into recycling and into discouraging toilet paper waste (talk about snowflakes and getting easily triggered). Horia Roman Patapievici and Gigi Becali managed to finally put aside their differences over patriotism and whatnot to denounce the LGBT oppressive regime that straight people have to suffer across a Europe that rejects religious tradition and embrace wokeness. Ben Shapiro cries foul at yet another woke Hollywood creation, the HBO’s videogame adaptation of “The last of us”, for having too many strong, feminist, independent females or gay protagonists and not enough zombies. Ron DeSantis, who signed his “Stop Woke Act” into law last year, accuses historiography of going woke for mere referencing racial systemic injustices throughout American history and wants such demoralizing ideas banished from academia and those books banned from libraries and schools (talk about cancel culture). Donald Trump and numerous other Republican pundits, in an attempt to make themselves look even more ridiculous, blame the crash of Silicon Valley Bank not on its funds mismanagement but on lefty senior bankers pushing a woke agenda (reaching out to Black entrepreneurs, workplace diversity programs, LGBT events). Fox News lambasts Microsoft for succumbing to wokeness because their Xbox consoles have (oh, the horror) a green saving energy feature and by doing so they actually try to covertly recruit kids into climate politics and make them environment conscious at an early age (which is completely bonkers, since Xbox had always a saving power mode, like many other “woke” devices we own – tv set, computer, smartphone etc). And so on and so forth.
The examples of misusing and overusing the woke trope are insane. Anything that a reactionary conservative individual doesn’t like or understand is apparently woke nowadays. Stupidity is unfortunately contagious and the anti-woke craze, like any intellectual virus, is spreading through the social body of a nation at crazy rates. People delegate their thinking and resort to mimicry and partisanship, parroting ready-made, tribal perspectives other people will put into their heads (e.g. cultural marxism, wokeism, gender indoctrination, grooming children into homosexuality, replacement theory etc) even though they are bogus concepts or hardly make any sense. Legitimate tropes like social justice, gender equality, care for environment, fair representation, inclusion, diversity etc are all lumped together and dismissed at the stroke of a derisive pen – woke.
There are 8 billion of people in the world and most of them are struggling with poverty, violence, discrimination, environmental disasters, racism, sexism, misogyny, war, intolerance, injustice, inequality etc When you look at all that it’s hard not to think that what we need is more wokeness not less. We made a lot of progress and we came a long way addressing social inequities and discrimination but there’s still a lot of room to improve in the rich North and a great deal to do in the poor South. And isn’t it funny that one of loudest anti-woke actors in this bizarre drama are Christians? How on earth is that even possible? Jesus was the epitome of wokeness, he was the most woke prophet in the world. If anything, woke should be your badge of honour not a stigma or a slur against other people. Your God is woke for crying out loud. Follow in his steps.
bereavement ramblings # 9
Posted on: November 3, 2022
We have a strange relationship with loss. We rarely experience it on its own. For too often loss comes accompanied by other strong emotions that somehow manage to take the stage completely and overshadow the sense of loss. Anger. Guilt. Outrage. Shock. Bewilderment. Regrets. Denial. Frustration. Vengeance. Helplessness. Resentment. Disbelief. My life has been marked by loss in so many ways, but I am yet to experience it pure, raw, unadulterated by any other affect. Ten years ago, when I lost my boyfriend, I was surprised to realize that, despite the emotional turmoil I went through, it wasn’t loss what I felt but outrage and a deep sense of injustice. The resentment over the way our relationship had ended shattered any sense of loss. When Tori died, for a period of time it was anger and rage over her cruel fate that took over while loss took a back seat. When my dad died guilt and disbelief were my main emotions. When I lost some friends recently the sense of loss, again, was lessened by disappointment and disillusionment. In all my experiences these secondary emotions took the reins, muddied the waters and made a mess of the emotional realm. They were supposed to be marginal, accessory, acting as backing vocals or sitting quiet in the background but they stormed the stage and took the lead. When I was a Christian, I used to think that this might be one of God’s ways of helping us deal with traumatic events of the sort. By throwing a red herring our way. Diverting our attention from loss to something more tolerable. Tricking us into suffering from a more lenient affliction. Because no matter how horrible these emotions are (anger, remorse, outrage, disgust, disappointment, bitterness, resentment etc) they are not as painful and devastating as the sheer sense of loss. Anything but that lingering ache of having lost something we had. Anything but that melancholic malaise eating at you. Now I no longer believe in God, but I still think this is a defence mechanism, our way of dealing with traumatic loss. Our way of deflecting the real drama. Juggling and trading off different pains. Playing tricks to dull our senses. Disguise. Camouflage. Substitution. Replacing loss with something akin to it but less horrendous.
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My dad is not dead, he is missing. Every time I think of him, I cannot find him in the appropriate drawer of my mind, where dead people usually end up. I don’t think I can put this down to a residual Christianity that survives in me, to the idea that we are actually immortals, that death is an illusion, since this misplacement doesn’t apply to other people. My mind doesn’t reject the label in itself, the category of dead people, for that compartment got well populated over the years. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends, pets, neighbours, you name it. It’s just that when it comes to my dad, I cannot visualize him as dead. He is just missing, absent, hidden from us, unavailable, somewhere to be found. But not dead. And this is one of the reasons why I feel that my mourning is lacking. You cannot properly mourn someone unless you give up hope and accept the finality of their death and their irreversible disappearance. Once the disbelief is shattered the grief can go full-on, unrestricted. You put everyone in their right boxes and the strange http 404 error is finally fixed.
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On his deathbed he never mentioned the fact that he was dying. The elephant in the room … had a scythe but nobody talked openly about that. Which I found to be odd since he was a man of faith. There were no wise words passing on to his children. No sermonic rambling or Bible quotations. No formal handover of our mum’s care to us, like Jesus did with his mum. No attempt to apologize, to settle accounts and emotional debts. The patriarch of the family went full French exit with his departure. Even though I was there at the time I was left with this strange feeling that we didn’t have a proper send-off and that we didn’t say goodbye to him.
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We all indulge ourselves at some point in counterfactual reasoning. Fantasizing about turning the clock back and removing a link in a chain of past events in order to fix mistakes we made or to change painful outcomes. So here an exercise to put yourself at the test, to see where your heart is (Matthew 6:21): if you were given a chance to counterfactually erase one single event from your past what would that be? I’m sure for all of us the competition would be fierce, for we all have tons of things we would alter if possible. From nasty things that happened to us to nasty things we did to other people. As far as I am concerned, erasing her death would be my first choice, without blinking an eye, without the slightest hesitation. There’s a long litany of horrors I would gladly change but her death tops everything. I would rather keep every instance of violence, bullying, abuse, disappointment, rejection, humiliation, betrayal, failure etc and save her. Nothing comes close to the pain of losing her. The longing to be reunited with her will never fade away in me.
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Why do I feel I am no longer whole since she died? Wasn’t I whole before her? Do the people we love become a part of us and alter our substance that much? For good? Do they rip out bigger pieces from us when they die and leave? If we love lots and they die on us can we be lessened to the point of inexistence?
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South Korea – 156 people crushed to death in Seoul at Halloween celebrations. Indonesia – 135 dead in a riot and stampede that broke out after a football match. Philippines – 98 dead in a heavy storm that hit the country. Turkey – 41 dead people in a coal mine accident. Somalia – 120 killed by a car bombing in the capital, Mogadishu. India – 182 dead in a bridge collapse, many of them children. You can find these headlines in the newspapers, right at this moment. Horrible disasters, taking place at the same time, in the span of a few days, not spread over a couple of months or a year. I used to agonize over such tragedies when I was a Christian, trying to reconcile them with the concept of a benevolent God. And it’s such a relief that now, as a nonbeliever, I am no longer subject to this mental torment, fuelled by a never-ending streak of tragedies. The easiness with which my fellow Christians dismissed the problem of theodicy was disturbing. “God works in mysterious ways” is such a nonsensical defence. There’s nothing mysterious about being crushed to death by a crowd on a street. Burned alive at a music venue. Raped and killed by a Russian soldier. Drowned in a river holding your child’s hand after the bridge under your feet collapsed. Torn into pieces by a bomb. If I were a parent and I would allow my kids to be burned alive I could never say “oh please, you don’t understand, I am being … mysterious”. And yet, this is our line of defence when it comes to God. We fill the gaps with this mysterious crappy matter. Being an atheist has a lot of downsides but not having to explain evil, death, pain etc is the main, if not the only, advantage you get. This doesn’t mean you are not saddened and flabbergasted at the view of these tragedies. The thread of life is so fragile, and it can get broken at any time. Witnessing all these disasters I got to the point where I am grateful for my life and for the years I lived so far. For I have lived longer than most of these people were allowed to. If I get to live more, I look at it as a bonus not as an entitlement. Not taking life for granted and knowing that life can be taken from you in such absurd, meaningless, petty, ridiculous ways and at any time should be in our minds constantly.
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Haunted by this image of my mum, sitting at his deathbed, broken-hearted, lost for words, hunchbacked, overwhelmed with sorrow, holding and kissing his hands for hours on end. The same hands that used to turn into fists and hurt her. What a strange thing is this redeeming love that forgets and forgives everything. “Love keeps no record of wrongs.” (1 Cor. 13:5)
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House of the Dragon. I watch the episode in which the king Viserys is dying in a state of horrified frenziness. The gruesome depiction of aging and the misery of death is haunting. A masterclass in cinematography. The decrepitude of his body and his mind takes me back to my dad’s when he was dying, and it fills me again with horror, shock and sadness. I watch Viserys’ demise and I relive all my dad’s degradation, his delirious agony and mental pain. I can’t for the love of me get over the misery and ugliness of our dying. Nothing shook me more to the core than watching Tori, my dad, and prior to them, a close neighbour, sinking into decrepitude and dying. For a while, death and life overlap, disputing the ownership of that body and mind. Witnessing first hand that fight between life and death is horrible and faith shattering. Nature is cruel. Death in itself, ceasing to exist, is already an outrage, a wound and a trauma to our existence. There’s no need to get there through a horrible process. The fact that most of us don’t die of sudden deaths but through a slow, painful, repulsive transition to death is adding insult to injury. We are punished for our sufferings; we are punished because we were punished.
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abuse # 8 – mis(s)inference
Posted on: June 1, 2022
In Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard drama we find the full range of domestic violence (physical / non-physical, verbal / non-verbal) one can expect in a tumultuous, passionate, volatile marriage like theirs. From both sides. We may never know the complete truth of the abuse they inflicted on one another, but one thing is certain: she is not the victim she portrays herself to be. Writing an article to speak up against domestic violence and turning herself into a public figure representing domestic abuse, while being an abuser as well, was a blunder and a bad move. I love Johnny Depp and he seems to be a genuine kind of guy, a real sweetheart, but I also know how easily someone can project a different edulcorated image about themselves, divorced from their real self, so in marital disputes it’s somehow wiser to sit on the fence and remain neutral, unless you are privy to everything that was going on between the two.
However, what can easily sway me against her, if I were to take sides, is one particular kind of abuse I talked about in my blog before (here and here), one that permeates any human interaction and in which she seems to be particularly masterful: inferential abuse. I described at length this kind of abuse and the people who causes it. They are epistemic walls. Bricks. Concrete. No logic and argument can permeate them. Teflon people. Nothing sticks, no matter how sound, simple and obvious your argument is. You just cannot corner them and make them concede territory, let alone admit defeat. They will dodge your questions, move the goalposts continuously, change the meaning and usage of words, take their words back, flip back and forth, deflect, lie, double down, gaslight, deny, flip-flop, project, strawman you. You cannot win and the problem you face when you come across someone so dishonest intellectually is that you are powerless and can do shit about it. It’s rage inducing and maddening. The only thing you can do is just to disengage yourself from future interactions with them or to expose them to a third party, to an audience. The latter is something that Camilla was able to do, as a lawyer, given the circumstances of a public trial. But it’s not something we can all easily pull off and I pity Johnny Depp for all these years of epistemic abuse and mental torment where she would distort reality, lie blatantly, change semantics on a whim to accommodate her views and break any rule of reasoning with impunity. Her obvious lie and unwillingness to admit such a simple truth when cornered into a tight spot (i.e. she did not donate the money she had pledged, period) is telling for what the poor guy had to go through over the years.
As base animals we act out and express our cruelty through physical violence. But as superior animals, endowed with language, we verbalise our cruelty and manifest our vile nature through language. Either overtly by verbal abusing our peers or covertly by engaging in fallacious reasoning and intellectual dishonesty. The violence that comes through language and from slaughtering truth and honesty in our mundane interactions, when our misguided pride gets in the way, is no less damaging and heart-breaking than physical violence. God knows how battered and bruised I am left after arguing with big-headed idiots. I’d rather take a punch than their doolally reasoning.
bereavement ramblings # 8
Posted on: March 18, 2022
My father didn’t really know me. At all. He didn’t know what makes me tick, what I am made of, how damaged or brilliant I can be. To my shame, he wasn’t even privy to my mundane self since most of the time he had no idea what’s going on in my life. There’s always this huge gap between parents and their offspring that I find horrifying. Some parents manage to bridge the gap and cross it, but most of them remain in the dark. To give birth to something that is not you, that is so different, so foreign to you is a terrifying experience that all parents have, but to be clueless about what you brought into life, to raise someone who eludes you completely, to not know your own child takes this to another level. I don’t blame him though, since, like I said, it’s more like a structural fracture that emerges between parents and kids and less a parenting failure on his part. But it’s horribly sad. The thought that I could have a kid and that my understanding of him would be skin-deep, stopping at the surface, that I would be in the dark about the way he feels, the way he navigates through the difficulties of his life, his anxieties, his fears, his mental torments, his coping mechanisms, his thoughts, his pleasures, his likes, his desires, his dreams, his hopes etc makes me shiver with horror. If he could now have a look at who I am, from the inside, he would be dumbstruck. Who is this stranger he called his son for all this time?
*
When someone we love dies our mind tries to apprehend their disappearance. In the same way we try to understand what’s behind a magical trick performed on us, when something vanishes into thin air in front of our eyes. But I find that with death our mind gives up quite hastily. Because we have a name for it, because we have assigned a word for their magical disappearance (death), even though the word does not explain anything, our mind stops even trying. We just accept it. Death. We sigh. We shrug. We move on. No further inquiry.
Only a kid would try to deconstruct our unsatisfactory answer and look further.
– Where did grandpa go mummy?
– He died.
– What do you mean he died? What do you mean by that?
– Pause.
*
The shocking stiffness of their body. In death our flesh loses not only its warmth but also its softness and plasticity. We turn into cold, hardened objects. I had some idea about stiffness but not about the stonelike sensation and the alienation that comes with it when you touch them. The shock you have when you hold into your arms the hardened body of someone you love is something else and nothing can prepare you for it.
*
Resurrection is a collective dream mankind has got since the beginning of time. A Jungian archetype I follow faithfully. Since he died, I dreamed about him three times and in all of these dreams he was resurrected. Not just alive, as if nothing had happened, as if the setting was before his death and we were oblivious to it. He did die and we all knew it, but through some bizarre interventions (in one my mum gives him some CPR, incredulous of his actual death) he was brought back to life. He is now weak, fragile, unwell but we are all happy he’s got another shot at life. I wake up in a state of frenziness, overwhelmed by this mixture of joy that he is alive and the disappointment that is not true. Schizoid is my middle name.
*
You can’t replicate with humans the bond you have with an animal. There’s an intensity to it that humans cannot provide with the same continuity. Because animals are simpler creatures, the bond with them is stronger and almost indestructible. Until death do us part is better matched by our animal friends than by the bond between humans, which are fragile and fickle and rarely survive the wear of time. The imprinting mechanism, that in most cases, sits at the core of their attachment to us cannot be written off. We are their world, their life, their gods, their mothers, their fathers, their kids, their lovers, their everything. Who on earth can possibly match that? What human can compete with that level of faithfulness and religious devotion? When we lose them to death, we lose access to the purest form of unconditional love and loyalty we can get, matched only by the bond between a mother and her child.
*
Guilt-ridden. For not putting her to sleep. For not releasing her from suffering sooner. For not humanely killing her. For not being able to look into her eyes while she would take her last breath into my arms. As regrettable as it might sound, I owe my sanity to this weakness. I have no doubts that putting her down would have tipped me over the edge to sheer madness. I would have lost it completely. With my dad is the other way around. I carry a sense of guilt for not pushing him harder, for not going the extra mile to buy him more time. Guilt is indeed a nasty companion of death.
*
Even now, six months later after his demise, dad’s shirts and pants are hanging in the same places. As if nothing happened. I am seated at the kitchen table, in my parents’ home, eating, while from some hangers on the wall his shirts are staring back at me, making me uneasy. In one of his pants you can see the pocket is full, bursting with stuff he used to collect obsessively (wires, keys, pieces of paper, money, corks etc). Once or twice I buried my head in them shirts and wept like a child. Leaving things untouched after someone’s death, in an attempt to freeze time, is a clear sign of depression. But I wouldn’t challenge my mum on this since, when it comes to dealing with death, I’m not much different. I procrastinate. I linger. I dwell on it. Anything but admitting the finality of death.
*
La capela, dupa predica, lumea se grupeaza in bisericute. Catching up as usual. Copii, pandemie, joburi, nepoti, inflatie, nunti, botezuri, sfaturi despre muraturi, vaccinuri, concedii, you name it. Nimeni nu vorbeste despre tata. In afara de mama nimeni nu pare sa stie de ce se afla acolo. Nu stiu ce e mai trist, sa nu vina nimeni la priveghiul tau sau sa ai un priveghi care sa nu fie despre tine. Ca un politist de pompe funebre, incerc constiincios sa il aduc pe tata la propriul lui priveghi, sa il introduc in subiectele de discutie. Bag vreascuri pe foc dar simt mereu ca fara inputul meu focul se stinge repede de fiecare data.
Exista intotdeauna o prejudecata pe care o avem fata de cei carora le moare cineva. Credem ca e dureros si stanjenitor sa vorbim despre cei morti cu cei indoliati. Ca e de preferat sa trecem totul sub tacere. Sa nu stingherim cu indiscretia noastra. Cand dimpotriva, reflexul pe care il avem cand ne mor cei dragi e sa vorbim intruna despre ei. Sa-i netacem. Sa-i nemurim vorbind despre ei. Sa nu-i lasam inghititi de uitare. Dureros pentru cel indoliat nu e sa vorbeasca ci sa nu vorbeasca despre cel pierdut. Un priveghi in care esti injurat e de preferat unuia in care nu esti pomenit.
*
nolongerinbetween 