There was a subtle sent of dust in the room. The shelf lined the wall beside my desk as its contents loomed over the proceedings, expelling its intimidating vastness over my scrambling thoughts searching for linguistic melodies. The heart of the person was in the mind they resided but the future in humanity rested in war, with himself and the world outside.
I sat down with Sigmund Freud today to have a cup of tea. It was a beautiful day outside as we looked at each other, wondering what the other thought of the other. There was a slight morning breeze but that was okay because of the monumental company I couldn’t feel a thing. Freud didn’t go too deeply into his psychoanalytical legacy but spoke about how neurology and what we do in the world exists on opposing frequencies. He told me his work was not a failure but the lands he crossed to understand it, led him to deserts where ideas were consumed by the unknowing nature of reality. He said what we want and what there is can never coexist. He also assured me that what he was saying was not cynical or pessimistic, he said it was…. inevitable.
Freud lifted his tea cup to his lips and looked past the frame of his glasses into my eyes. This man was well aware that my mind required breathing time to compute his last insight. As we sat there and talked I noted his ability to converse as a trained skill, developed over many scrutinizing years of his wanting to understand what other people thought in their minds, contrasting what he thought in his. He was quite specific about what words he chose to say and what time it required in between them to translate in the mind of the person he was speaking them to.
He packed his pipe and lit it with such ease and smoked it with complete consideration of the people around him. I saw him as a propped up repaired version of the patients he’s spent so long trying to cure. He was aware that he too was a victim of circumstance and I think this is why he was probably the most conscientious person I ever met.
Freud looked up and saw Albert Einstein walking toward our table. He stood and shook Einstein’s hand as my mind froze that image. These men in my company, breathing the same air, I know both men would not enjoy the celebrity I placed on them but I couldn’t help it. Einstein put a plate of croissants and donuts in the middle of the table then stating that we might be random in the universe but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy ourselves. While eating a croissant, Einstein told Freud that he greatly admired his passion to ascertain the truth and that he too sees that passion in himself and how it has come to dominate all areas of his thinking.
Einstein slouched a little in his chair while wearing a heavy plain wool sweater appearing far more relaxed than Freud, who himself was sitting upright, perfecting the earned stage of Darwin’s evolution. Seeing them both side by each, you could see that Freud was far more self-conscious than Einstein.
Einstein stated that war is yet upon us again as if it never had its own desire to stop. War is like the madmen that Freud often psychoanalyzed as a sickness for attention and recognition of power. Einstein said to Freud that he has convincing arguments that manifest his deep devotion to the great goal of internal and external liberation of man from the evils of war. He said how convinced he was that almost all great men who, because of their accomplishments, are recognized as leaders, even of small groups, share the same ideals. But they have little influence on the course of political events. It would almost appear that the very domain of human activity most crucial to the fate of nations is inescapably in the hands of wholly irresponsible political rulers. Politics is the division of ideas, it’s the manipulating of conversation, it’s the rewriting of discourse and this is the state we live in.
Freud told Einstein that when he heard that he wanted to invite him to a mutual exchange of views he was naturally cordially assented. He said that he was aware as a psychologist that Mr. Einstein’s physicist thought processing could add to the analytical approach from his own angle, to meet at last on common ground, though setting out from different premises. What is to be done to rid mankind of the war menace? Freud went on to say as he puffed on his pipe, that you begin with the relations between might and right, and this is assuredly the proper starting point for this inquiry. But, for the term might, he said he would substitute a tougher and more telling word: violence. In right and violence we have today an obvious antimony. It is easy to prove that one has evolved from the other and, when we go back to origins and examine primitive conditions, the solution of the problem follows easily enough. Conflicts of interest between man and man are resolved, in principle, by the recourse of violence. It is the same in the animal kingdom, from which man cannot claim exclusion.
At no point did these men argue, they both had a mutual respect for each other’s fields of interest and study. We sat there for hours in complete comfort discussing the merits and lack thereof of the motivation behind the bastion for war. I noticed Freud looked down at Einstein’s hands folding and unfolding his napkin. Whether Einstein was aware that he was doing this, he was folding his napkin into a triangle then a smaller triangle then smaller and smaller until he couldn’t fold it anymore. He would then unfold it all and repeat the same process except this time he’d make squares.
Einstein said to Freud, if it is possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness? Here, he said, he was thinking by no means only the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called “intelligentsia” that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw but encounters it in its easiest, synthetic form – upon the printed page…but…here we have the best occasion of discovering ways and means to render all armed conflicts impossible.
I thought despite of what these two great men are speaking about; war continues and the reason for this I couldn’t imagine is lost on either of them. Both of these men are realists and fantasy plays its part in their lives but they both seem keenly aware of this. They know that as long as all international conflicts are not subject to arbitration and the enforcement of decisions arrived at by arbitration is not guaranteed, and as long as war production is not prohibited we may be sure that war will follow upon war. Unless our civilization achieves the moral strength to overcome this evil, it is bound to share the fate of former civilizations: decline and decay.
Later on that day I helped Franz Kafka move his furniture around in his small bedroom as he told me about his caged existence here in Prague, as well as living with such a controlling father. Kafka saw firsthand the adverse effects of the war man had within himself thus displacing that battle upon the world. Like Freud, he was well aware of the conflicts man had with himself. He told me that we are all born gods or kings but must live as peasants. Life he told me, as we moved his heavy desk from beside the window to a dark corner of his room, was finally realizing that you are a bug among men, that what you say and what you do often leads nowhere.
Kafka was all too knowing when it came to the prison of the mind and the manipulation that one executes to live in the world, how he thinks of how he’s being thought of by others. He told me that the world is designed by men and that design is designed to fail them. He told me that the world is too big for the thoughts of men so men complicated it by controlling their environments. This he says is where exclusion comes from. This is where one group supremes over another, how they achieve greatness through war.
I must admit that Kafka was a bit depressing to be around but I did notice that in spite of himself, that depression was generated through light. He was nakedly aware of the chain of command in modern society. He was aware that the fantasy of equality was a farce for the church breeders. The reality of the world was grounded in control and I think the real revolution for Kafka was; how is it possible to have it any other way? The ideology of harmony existed in the minds of the hopeful, not the world of breathing men. What Kafka saw as the pages of dogmatic immortality peeled away, was a small group of fiends demonizing the rest of us.
I realized that day as we moved his furniture around his room, only to arrive at the end with them back where we first found them was, Kafka saw the world as it is and not how we portray it to be and the toll of that weighed on him, like the mass of a mountain that his father leaned on as he looked upon a man that hated the world, hated himself.
Speaking of
fathers, Soren Kierkegaard told me about an interesting experiment his father
put him through as a young man. His
father Michael instructed young Soren to become second best while attending
school. We both stood on Øresund
Bridge in Copenhagen eating an ice cream cone, looking
over the edge as the water passed us by.
I was quite curious as to why his father would impose such an odd task
onto his son. Soren talked to me about
choice and freedom and Hamlet. He felt
that Hamlet was caught on the edge of a terrible choice: whether to kill his
uncle or leave his father’s death unavenged thus demonstrating the anxiety of
true freedom of choice.
He told me as the
summer heat pounded down on us as we quickly ate our ice cream before it melts,
that our lives are determined by the actions we make and that our choices are critical
to our lives. He told me that we have a
choice whether to drop our ice cream into the river or not. The resulting effect is whether we have ice
cream to enjoy or not. We have a choice
to jump off this bridge of not as well and that anxiety carries throughout our
lives.
The dizziness of
freedom weighs us down and haunts our lives throughout, he told me as he licked
his ice cream as it melted that, if you marry, you will regret it; if you do
not marry, you will also regret it,…whether you marry or do not marry, you will
regret both. Laugh at the world’s
follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will regret that; laugh at the
world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both… His father he told me imposed his rule to guarantee
that young Soren would learn the necessary psychology to navigate through the
world with the knowledge of the other, the opposer and the opponent.
Frederich Nietzsche looked at me with disgust or did he? I couldn’t tell if he liked me or wanted to rip my face off my skull and step on it. He was a man that looked like he was in pain. It turned out he was in pain and my previous assumption about him ripping my face off, I later discovered that it was in fact his own face he wanted to rip off. Not because of self-loathing but because the man was in a constant state of physical suffering. His face and sinuses was causing him to experience an everlasting migraine that he told me bleed into his work like lava in the ocean.
This serious man found it hard to joke around as we looked off a balcony facing the mountains in Switzerland. He told me about what it was to be more than a man. He told me that was the goal of man, to rise and surpass himself. Before I never thought of this but now that I looked at him, with snow-peaked mountains in his background and a bushing celebrated mustache in his foreground, I realized that this man was not scary. What I ended up seeing is a man that was devoted, a man that has isolated himself here in the hills of paradise to think but in the sense of calm. I realized he wanted what the Buddha wanted, he wanted people to know the truth about the world but most importantly, he wanted to know the truth about the world. By doing so, he wanted us to be more than what we are, like the Buddha, he wanted us to be in a perpetual state of transcending ourselves, being better than what came before, becoming……..super.
Nietzsche directed my attention to the mountains, pointing to the snow caps, stating that the wills of men are assumed to exist at the tops of those mountains when in actuality they exit at the bottom. The psychology of this man as well as Freud, is to learn about the bottom that made the mountain what it is today. Nietzsche felt that once one understood the workings of the man and world around the man from the ground up, then the man could feel a form of completeness that isn’t experienced by the majority of the people on this planet.
Arthur Rimbaud initially looked carefree, like his poetry was not of his conscious doing but rather a libertine passenger within him that fed through his ink-stained fingertips. But after spending the day in Charleville with this energetic young man I could finally see wrinkles behind his smooth baby face. I could see rings around his pupils that old men weathered. He wasn’t one of those New Aged Indigo kids but rather a man wise beyond his young years. His poetic fathers were Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire and the world was his playground, a glass ceiling that Baudelaire helped him build. His youthful eyes saw a darkness and bleakness in the world but they also saw a beauty that is rarely ever matched.
We sat in a café as he was telling me that the rainy day needed light and if the world wasn’t going to provide such a light it fell to us to instigate it. He ordered us absinthe, which I have heard of but have never tried. The café owner poured the green liquid into aperitif crystal glasses. He placed a spoon over each with a cube of sugar. He lit them both on fire as Rimbaud told me of the debauchery of tourism. He has travelled but not as a traveler, he said that the palette of the world was a canvas unpaintable. He said that tourists see into blind rooms that are decorated with false figures.
The café owner poured a little water into our drinks and then Rimbaud lifted his glass waiting for me to follow suit. He said as he clinked my glass, ’to people who impetuously conform to cheering traditions’ we drank and then he laughed. He ordered two more absinthes while we talked. He told me that the night before was met with a form conformity that could sink a vessel. He spoke of a man talking of the world as if it were flat and not round. The ideas of the man, he said, spelt into the geography of the land he believed he inhabited, flat.
Rimbaud hit my glass to his as we drank yet another absinthe. He ordered two more as he looked into my eyes, waiting for the effects he knew was coming. He started to talk about deserts as I looked up and saw, what looked like Pablo Picasso, dipping a paint brush into Rimbaud’s back and then applying it to the wall behind us. Rimbaud smiled at me, acknowledging the hallucinating effects of the wormwood onto the mind, looking into the world and carrying its dreams with it.
Henry Miller held onto Rimbaud’s head with his left hand as he wrote, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware….with his right hand on the wall beside Picasso’s brush strokes. As Henry disappeared Bob Dylan could be heard and I asked Rimbaud if he could hear that music. “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.” Rimbaud told me of impassive rivers, dancing waves and lighthouses; he spoke of serpents being devoured by bedbugs as Allen Ginsberg howled against the bowels of war and Jim Morrison echoed in the room, bouncing off the windows that led to the world.
I watched them all dip their quells into Rimbaud’s back as he tried to describe a place outside of this world, a place where ideas flourished and thoughts were welcomed, but he did conclude that would happen but not today…….maybe tomorrow.
Jackson Pollack had me hold a bucket of red paint for him as he stood over a long canvas on his shed floor. Ashes from his cigarette flickered and fell onto the canvas.
His wife was cooking what he called a monumental stew up at the house. He said that I am welcome to join as he stopped dripping paint and sat on the floor. He encouraged me to sit with him but not before I grab two beers from his cooler box. The shadow of Picasso lingered as he told me that meaning in art and life are the same thing. He said that the art of definition was a failed proposition; he said that the undefinable was the route to thinking and also was unable to be thought with the musical notes of the mind.
Pollack picked up a brush and a pint of black paint and walked over to his painting, he started to drip the paint onto the canvas creating complex artistic circuitry without ever realizing it. He was transcending the world; he was creating something beyond his own purview to paint. He was painting a portrait of the world outside the world that society has painted with religious and political brushes.
We did go in and eat a glorious stew with his wife and enjoyed a conversation filled with beer and the politics of war. His wife kept company as Jackson lost himself in a drunken daze of pushing his fork along the outside of his plate dragging stew sauce. He formed swirls and off-putting lines before excusing himself, leaving me and wife with his awkward air to breathe.
Shakespeare’s
political insights into the world were astounding. We sat there in a London pub with two pints
of lager in front of us as I could see the weight of the world collapse on his
head. He was a man of multiverses, a man
with insights and understandings that remain suspect to this day. He was a renaissance man of the quill, he
wrote his worlds and he used these worlds to help him understand. We walked the streets of London as he talked
about Freud, Nietzsche, Zizek and Beckett.
Samuel
Beckett painted a place with no direction in his play, ‘Waiting for Godot’, a place
where characters applied meaning but yet remained hollow, a place where existentialism
resided, wondering as modernity does into voids and dead-ends. I told Shakespeare about Freud and the
unconscious, the ever intruding super-ego and Nietzsche’s superman. Shakespeare pulled me into another pub and
sat us at the bar. He took a quill and
paper from his bag and wanted me to tell him more about the areas of the mind
that this Freud person spoke of.
I sat there
looking at the world from the view of my bedroom and wondered; what do I really
know about me? What do I really know
about this world that I live in with so many others? Books have provided me with the best window
into the vastness of existence but yet I still wonder. And then it struck me that these books are not
there for answers but are there to provide questions. They are not destinations but rather
insightful stops along the way to incompleteness. Hobbes says, ‘Why should we be governed?’ The answer to that is we have to be because
man needs to be controlled as a result of his un-education. He needs to be managed because he is taught
that he is unable to manage himself, thus creating corporate dependency. These books are medicine against the notion of
being born a god and living in the world as a man, a man that lives in reality,
they are humblers in the fantasy of existence.
The anchors of the world that enlighten through elevation while maintaining
a firm grip on the soil of the earth.
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