dagblog - Comments for "Visions of Oppenheimer’s Afterlife"

This is an ambitious,

Watt Childress — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 17:37:51 +0000

In reply to Visions of Oppenheimer’s Afterlife

This is an ambitious, insightful, and eloquent piece.

Well, good-o, then. I got it

we are stardust — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 10:22:03 +0000

In reply to In a conscious attempt not to

Well, good-o, then. I got it wrong here, but I gave it my best shot. And I think the triangulation concept comes from Transactional Analysis. Useful for interpersonal dynamics, for sure. But Dagblog as therapy? Yikes!

Peace to you, too.

(I tried to delete this now that you've read it, but I find I can't.)

In a conscious attempt not to

Elusive Trope — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 03:34:24 +0000

In reply to But see? LOL! You allowed

In a conscious attempt not to write a whole chapter, I would say that during the time I was reading Etty's diaries and doing intense journaling, I was also (reluctantly) going throwing Reiki therapy which sounds basically similiar.

At the same time I was doing serious meditation. And for most us, one way to know you're actually doing it right is that you're intense pain, as all the "knots" in ones body, where one holds one's "stress" try unknot themselves.

One inside joke to myself: I am just a Gordian Knot looking for my Alexander.

And the first time I heard of triangulation was many decades ago as half way house mental health counselor (blind leading the blind?) regarding family dynamics, where there is the victim, the victimizer, and the rescuer. And all the "energy" goes into maintaining the dynamic, including the blantant denial of the reality in front of everyone involved. Your sister seems to be the added facet of the distraction: see that, don't look at this.

And one final comment: I wouldn't be here, suffering whatever flames I might suffer, if I didn't want to open up more. In a sense, you all are my therapy. Whether you like it or not.

Peace.

(This piece of Freda's

we are stardust — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 03:22:55 +0000

In reply to Visions of Oppenheimer’s Afterlife

(This piece of Freda's deserved poetry instead; we'll let this one accompany it, too.)

URANIUM 235 / WHAT GOD SAID -- Sydney Vilen

What they remember is the light
Those scientists in the desert night
Ghostly iridescence, unearthly light
No color, merely shades of white.
Trinity Test at Alamogordo
Three...Two...One...Zero
Instantly into the still dark land
The light grew over the sand
Galactic secrets in the predawn night
Galactic secrets in atomic rite

And the light grew
Brighter than the light of twenty noons
And still it grew
An x-ray of the testing crew.
Trinity Test at Alamogordo
Three...Two...One...Zero
Shiva Yahweh Buddha Zeus
Father Son and Holy Goose
Humanity with its head in the noose
Glimpsed its form as god.

When the light subsided and the shadows rose
Some, returning from that light
Tried to live again as merely human
But others, those few
Unable to deny or to return
Knew we had become as gods in power
And could not turn again.

We have the power that once was god's
Shiva's power, the power of fire
The power to turn our earth into a star
The power of Zeus' lightning rod
To incinerate the earth maiden his bride.

She remembered a pale, sharp, silent light
Before darkness turned day to night
Then woke, as in a dream
Her mother, swirled in smoke
Framed by the lintel
Standing
Arms outstretched
Hair raised skyward
On winds of fire
Like a protecting goddess
Burned to pure white bone.

The bombardier who guided the Enola Gay
The last two minutes on her way
Who eyed the Aioi Bridge in his sight
He too remembers the light
All who have seen it remember the light
And the rainbow sparkling cloud that follows.
Earth the maiden asked her bridegroom
To appear before her in his form as god
And the god of lightning rose on earth
In the light of twenty suns

...pastels and crystals...pastels and creams
...pastels and crystals...pastels and dreams
i can no more separate
the dream form the reality
than I can separate myself from you
it is the dream that keeps reality alive
in these suicidal days

...pastels and crystals...pastels and dreams...

Atomic fission in the brain
The sudden evolving leap of awareness
Luminous clarity in the heart.

But see? LOL! You allowed

we are stardust — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 02:34:42 +0000

In reply to I started this day with the

But see? LOL! You allowed yourself to enter the realm of distraction, of contest, of the absurd, really. Enough with all the serious, soul-changing shite! I have a wager on; therefore, I LIVE!!! Too great an illustration. But back to your mind attempting to answer Quinn's (and others of ours) charges that you present yourself as though you seem to have no emotional life, and distance yourself far too far.

I think it's so. At least that you present yourself that way. In the same way that you insist my sister has a moral yardstick, you have an emotional life, but you are so untrusting of it, and so uncomfortable with its veracity or usefulness, that you have learned that speaking edgewise to it through academic/philosophical/theatrical devices or constructs serves to stand in for what you're really feeling, and I can see how you might feel they are a close approximation, but what the average intuitive/feeling reader might see is an attempt at superiority, or head-stuff substituting for heart-stuff or gut-stuff. I can see why you say you detachment is wrapped up around your despair, but I think you may be too afraid of despair, but it's just an opinion, and I may full totally full of shit.

But here's where I'm coming from: my mother was a suicide, so suicide is a very er...viable option for children of suicides. Also, my job in my family was essentially to carry all the emotinal load that the family chose not to express. Ergo, i was overly sensitive, on constant alert, and the identified problematic one in the family, which was a pretty big load to bear at a tender age. I did drugs, wanting to erase myself, my fragility, the guilt and shame thrust upon me for no good reason except that I performed my designated job very well. What a bunch of shit! I was also the designated healer, parental confidante, parental rescuer, while my sister's life was designated 'too valuable and directed to interrupt', i.e., her success in college and as an MBA and whatever stupid-ass jobs she had had value, my lot was to help my parents, even in extremis. Feh!

Yeah, I spent a lot of time learning what the patterns were, and then helping others sort out their internalized family jobs and guilt and shame.

The most useful theory/practice I learned (besides learning to do great bodywork healing) was eventually called Hakomi Therapy by its originator, a man named Ron Kutrz, who did workshops at the school I attended. A person could get free work by being one of his guinea pigs (I'm sure there's a nicer term) in the workshops, so besides paying for sessions, I was often a guinea pig.

But essentially his theory went like this: When we are subjected to incredibly difficult emotional situations, either suddenly or over time our nervous systems protect us by contracting different muscle groups that aid in desensitizing us and preventing the overload of emotional sensation that might injure us, or kill us. Seriously. Imagine that a young child kept reaching out for a parent for help or nourishment and got truly or metaphorically pushed away. That infant/child might reasonably need to desensitize itself by continaully contracting the muscles around its heart to protect itself. Or learn to contract the muscles that would let it cry or wail; anyway, develop what Kurtz called 'muscular armoring',

Now he would allow us to try on various chronic armoring, and feel what our bodies felt like they were saying; it was astounding. In private sessions, he would take a look at us, and offer some gentle probes to get underneath those same defenses and armoring we had pretty much built our psychic lives around, and usualluy the verbal cue we were asked to repeat was a major Bingo! Eek; emotional meltdown and ensuing expression of hidden feelings. Seriously fun stuff, because it always felt so fucking good to get it out with so little yakka-doodle like in talk therapy, where you can bore yourself to fucking death! ;o)

Whoa; this is turning into a whole book chapter; sorry. But I wanted to answer well if I could, since you opened up a bit here...hope I'm doing okay; if not, shoot me...but after all, we are in this tiny cafe atmosphere, no one else is reading... ;o)

In all the years I did body/mind work with people, the one thing that impressed me the most was that the personal secrets they kept inside and guarded, the self-accusatins (that were, of course, really generated by others in their lives at the root) were almost laughably inconsequential once brought out and exposed to the light of day! Now I can't say always; some people do some dark things...but by and large: Not. And for me, I've learned that it's way better to get the sticks out of our asses, and not let the intellectual stuff act as insulation for our feelings. That stuff can act to explain how common the themes are, and be shorthand, like names for flowers can be shorthand, or chemical processes or whatever can be, in communicating. But they don't replace the feelings that are such an integral part of who we are, and who we will be on our deathbeds. And dear god; I want to feel it all, and know I have kicked the crap out of life before I die.

Oh--and despair and suicide. Oy. that's tougher. For me, it's not an option as long as I have kids who depend on me, and mine still do, even though they have their own kids. And I suppose there aren't any guarantees about what comes next, though there are days of pain where I figure a nice long rest would be pretty good; but then I almost always wake up the next day with something to be excited about, and some hope, or something to write about or express. Fuck; you must be getting bored, and my fingers are tired, and I need a soak in a hot tub.

Hope any of this speaks to you; if not, please feel free to ignore it at will but thanks so much for sharing a bit of your thinking. (Not even gonna proof it for typos, or I'd likely delete the whole frigging mess; I do that a lot, to say the truth. ;o)

p.s. The trick, IMO, is to learn when to protect ourselves, especially our hearts and our fear centers (solar plexes) with muscular tension, and when to open them to feel and let others have the benefits of our feelings, which are never right or wrong, they just are.

I started this day with the

Elusive Trope — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:39:45 +0000

In reply to Visions of Oppenheimer’s Afterlife

I started this day with the notion I would take a check-out, get all march madnessy, immersed in the superfluous and mind numbing (deadening) of college basketball. And yet somehow I can’t keep myself from coming to dagblog and suddenly I’m reflecting on Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Etty, that time when I was journaling everyday. Meanwhile the “Coalition” is dropping bombs on Libya. And all those people in absolute poverty still are. And Japan struggles to deal with everything that has been dropped in its lap.

One of the things the quote you provided made me think of was Farwell saying that Katrina was God’s punishment for the hedonism of the homosexuals. But there is something in the notion of ancestors that seems to resonate, just as setting one’s path while thinking of the seventh generation in the future does.

Yet, so does the notion that we need to just be in both the here and the now, to be fully present in the moment, which seems to negate looking backwards and forwards, because we can’t be in two places at once. Or so they tell us.

Thinking of your sister in all this, I would say we all have a moral yardstick, even if it is not more than to say we shouldn’t have a moral yardstick. Yet I would say there is some moral yardstick beneath the surface, which has something to do with the collective consciousness. Which means this might be the time to bring up Jung.

And once I came to dagblog, I felt compelled to go and continue on my next blog, which is basically my response to quinn’s response to my post-structualist blog (and some comments on another blog), which in part deals with the accusation that I am (emotionally) detached. And so while working on that, bringing up Etty Hillesum, just going over some of her quotes, I can feel the tears well up (and feeling self-conscious about it because I am in a cafe), like this one:

A desire to kneel down sometimes pulses through my body, or rather it is as if my body has been meant and made for the act of kneeling. Sometimes, in moments of deep gratitude, kneeling down becomes an overwhelming urge, head deeply bowed, hands before my face.

Is this sadness that such a soul such as Etty is too rare in this world, or gratitude that she was on this Earth and the hope that we humans might be redeemable afterall? Or that it brings up how I have fallen too short of my own ideals? Some mix of all that and something else? Such as the detachment that is there (and we all are detached to some extent because if we let all of suffering in our “hearts” would implode) has grown too much.

Yet this leads me, of course, to Herbert Blau. In The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto in his explanation of his struggles to his production of King Lear:

As I conceived our production, its problems resembled those at the beginning of the film Hiroshima Mon Amour (which I saw later). As Marguerite Duras wrote in her screenplay, the initial exchange of the man and the woman—waking after “the ashes, the dew, of atomic death”—is allegorical. “In short, an operatic exchange.” This does not mean it isn’t played with the intensest realism. Operatic because predicated on something almost unspeakable, because the cause is not really—as meets the eye—trivial, but almost beyond containment by the rational imagination [see the poem you posted above]. “Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima. The knowledge of Hiroshima being stated a priori by an exemplary delusion of the mind.” What seems to be historical fact cannot be adequately documented; neither can that cause in Lear; not as our historians and our sociologists customarily think of documentation. The only way to document some things truly is to re-enact them in some way—as the Eichmann trial re-enacted the experience of the incinerators [and somehow Hiroshima brings up back to the Holocaust again]...

….After Hiroshima, what could you believe in? And not only Hiroshima. Gloucester, his eyes gouged out, is thrown out at gates to smell his way to Dover. After Belsen, what benediction?

The aim of the film was “to have done with the description of horror by horror….but make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and ‘wonderful,’ one that will be more credible than if it had occurred anywhere else in the world, a place that death had not preserved.

….

In such a play [as Lear]—as with Hiroshima—motives oscillate between two questions: how did this happen? why in heaven did we do it?

In my effort to elaborate upon quinn's comment about my detachment, which is wrapped up in despair, I went to my avatar as does Blau later in the next paragraph:

But when Gloucester, smelling his way to Dover, asks the madman to lead him to the cliffs, he is posing the problem which Camus said [at the same time Hillesum was writing in diary] was the “one truly serious philosophical problem” of our century [and now our century]: given the rational barbarity, the civilized reduction of men to things; given our common complicity—why not suicide? If the gods kill us for sport, certain generations forget about it more easily than others. In our time, it became possible to ask again about the death of Cordelia, not why should she die? but why should she want to live?

As I write this, however, San Diego State, who I have winning it all, has a three point lead on Temple in the second half so there is hope, a reason to live.

Update: SDSU won! In freakin double OT. And Butler is ahead of Pitt! (even though I have Pitt advancing I am in Indiana, so I'll take the blow)

because of its length, I

Elusive Trope — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 23:36:36 +0000

In reply to All people are made up of

because of its length, I posted my response below.

Certainly the arguments still

we are stardust — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 21:45:18 +0000

In reply to Your title, "Visions of

Certainly the arguments still roil as to the justification for dropping the bombs; so arcane are the arguments that the number of soldiers predicted to die in an assault on Japan are hotly debated! Crazy shit! Especially if we then think they freaking dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki!!

Did you click the 'Mokusatsu' hyperlink? It might give you some shivers; did me, anyhoo. Arrggh.

At its simplest, karma seems to mean cause and effect, and I gather different religions explain it differently, as to accumulating it, shedding it, being born to it through ancestors, and so forth. I think we can't know any of it, and have to find our own way through the minefields of (hopefully) examined lives.

Queer, but I spent a lot of hours over a few days reading about all this, and then plenty of time, once I had decided to channel Oppy, sunk in silence imagining being him, or one of the others, in the afterlife. What I read about Hinduism was probably over-simplified for a Western mind, but still I got it tangled up. And I hadn't meant, really, to channel him as in any way penitent, not really knowing, but it seems my head stuff intruded on his. A mistake, perhaps, according to the commenter at docudharma I mentioned above.

In writing, like life, maybe we just choose an angle, a hook, and run with it as I did here, knowing there isn't much way to know if we got it right, or if there is a right, just what sings to a reader.

Thanks for sharing your personal considerations; you too, Trope.

I was actually just looked it

Elusive Trope — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 21:40:18 +0000

In reply to I will check out Etty. ;o)

I was actually just looked it up on google books This was the editon i had and the introduction is very good at putting the book into context.

I will check out Etty. ;o)

we are stardust — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 21:27:07 +0000

In reply to On that last topic, it

I will check out Etty. ;o)