by Phil Rockstroh / September 25th, 2012
Weltschmerz (from German; from Welt (world) + Schmerz
(pain) delineates the type of sadness experienced when the world
revealed does not reflect the image of the world that one believes, or
has been led to believe, should exist. The corporate/consumer state (as
well as, its scion, the present day presidential election cycle) has
brought us, as a people, into a wilderness of Weltschmerz.
Confronting the stark contrast between life imagined and life
revealed can prove to be a daunting task. It is an endeavor that has
proven particularly difficult for political partisans, both professional
and rank and file, who seem unwilling or unable to grasp the sense of
futility experienced by significant numbers of their fellow citizens
regarding political participation, on any level, including the act of
voting under the corrupted to the core structure of the current system.
Such reactions are understandable. Exercises in futility prove
enervating.
Disenchanted, sizable and increasing numbers of voters have
tuned out and walked away from the process, due to the abject refusal of
the political class to be responsive to the needs of the populace
beyond the elitist-ridden New York/DC nexus of privilege and power.
Yet, rank and file political partisans, all too often, resist gaining
awareness of the extent of their powerlessness. This is understandable
as well. Feelings of powerlessness can engender despair. To avoid
despair, one feels as though one must remain active in order to avoid
sinking into the muck and mire borne of chronic hopelessness. True
enough. But activity towards what end? Does the activity, such as voting
along partisan lines, reinforce states of powerlessness by serving the
forces of one’s oppression?
Despite all the cultural cues that we have internalized, one cannot
consume, medicate, buy on credit, receive a promotion, vacation, vote,
hope, affect a pose of hipster irony, tithe to the church of your
choice, receive a hundred FaceBook friendship requests, hit the winning
lottery number, support the troops, nor be the recipient of a VIP swag
bag in order to stumble your way back to possessing a sense of control
and power.
All too often, we incarcerate ourselves in a prison of expectation —
expectation forged and constructed by the material of past events, both
traumatic and triumphant. We mistake this prison for the whole of
ourselves and for the sweep and detail of the world. We go through life
convinced our agendas are our own, rarely pondering what circumstances
and experiences formed our perceptions. Are my goals and convictions my
own, or have those notions been foisted on me by forces of dehumanizing
power?
Daily, power kicks us in the gut, and demands our gratitude for
having done so, even terms us deviant when we cry out in pain or we rage
from within the confines of our powerlessness.
There exist billions of us who feel this way. Multitudes feeling alone among lonely multitudes.
What keeps us from grasping our common plight?
Often, the obsession for gaining and possessing happiness itself, as
marketed to us by the propagandist of the consumer state, leads us away
from the realm of common communion.
Paradoxically, most unhappy people are simply striving to be happy.
Their days are comprised of wrongheaded, self-perpetuating actions in
the desperate pursuit of chimerical goals towards that end. They lie,
self-medicate, exploit, steamroll over others. They merely hold notions
of what life should be — as opposed to having a life.
Rarely, do our agendas reflect our true nature. Yet, such pursuits
devour our days. The same phenomenon comes into play between the
monstrous acts of an empire and its people in the homeland. After a
time, tragically, the two forces merge. One cannot honestly claim one’s
life as being one’s own. Where does my complicity with the actions of
the state end and where do I begin? How do I sort things out? Making a
start of it is imperative, for devoid of the inclination, I have lost my
soul.
No one can maintain a lie over an extended length of time — not even
empires are that powerful. Empires are maintained by illusions; the
noxious fiction that the greater good is served by codes of dominance
and plunder. Towards empire’s end the populace suffers escalating levels
of unease, as the fabric of the collaboratively woven lie begins to
unravel.
Embrace, hold close, and dance to the exquisite music of grief that
arrives at the end of things. This is an honest, piercing sound. The
pain that grief brings to the heart can serve as a compass, set to aid
in navigating a wasteland of weltschmerz.
Because we mourn the loss of those things we love, we should never
stop grieving over the follies of humankind and the sorrows of the
earth. To cease grieving is too give up on love.
By a refusal to grieve, by lapsing into a host of manic evasions, one
risks becoming a monster — a being devoid of empathy that, in an
attempt to avoid experiencing suffering, will wound, demean, and exploit
the things of the world.
In collective terms, we know this state as the agendas of empire.
Conversely, to embrace one’s humanity, one must accept being shattered
by grief, yet restored by love, simultaneously. Being in unashamed
possession of a heart, both broken and whole, serves to mitigate the
compulsion to act in the manner of a monster.
The price of self-deception (e.g., political partisanship,
monomaniacal careerist striving, compulsive consumerist distractions) is
not worth the palliative relief provided. To endure the undoing of
illusion, one is tempted to retreat from life into a bubble of isolation
or partisan group-think.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, one can become convinced the life
that, as imagined in one’s entitlement-addicted mind not the byproduct
of an ongoing, humility-shepherding dialog with the world, must be made
manifest by relentless deed and actions, no matter how dishonest and
ruthless. In this way, an individual is prone to becoming an
exploitation maintained empire of one, a walking analog of the state
that sired, weaned, and socialized him. How could it not be so?
Of course, by his callous disregard of the humanity of others, he
makes miserable all that he touches. By his hollow ambitions, he demeans
himself, and the happiness that he seeks becomes ever more elusive,
and, caught in a self-resonating circuitry of self-defeating actions, he
will eventually bring to ruin all near him.
This is how empires fall, and this is the means, on an individual basis, how its citizens move it along towards the precipice.
Conversely, it proves propitious to face the twilight of treasured
convictions, to survive the collapse of the empire within, a decision
that can provide practice in surviving the collapse of its collectively
constructed, outward analog.
Often, events in life can play out badly. Painful as it is, we must
not flee from reality. When one becomes prone to acts of habitual
evasion, there is little chance to exist with one’s dignity intact; it
becomes impossible to live with a sense of grace.
Rationalizations are by nature ugly: They are the disingenuous face
of desperate souls who have come to fear others and hold a contemptuous
dread of life itself. In this way, you can mistake your defense
mechanisms deployed against grief and dread as comprising a large
portion of your personality.
Take a moment to contemplate what an awful circumstance it is to
incessantly pass by your true self, sans recognition, in a similar
fashion to the manner one regards an anonymous stranger passed on a
teeming boulevard.
The dilemma involves, to paraphrase Rilke, how will you spend the
days of this finite life? Will you give into the compulsion to build a
construction of ghostly artifice — life lived as a self-perpetuating lie
that you are in control, that the caprice you conjure to ward off
feelings of despair, regarding your powerlessness over the coursing flow
of events, is an accurate description of your true nature? Will you
create a bristling fortification of convenient cynicism, allowing you to
remain ensconced within a dead womb of bile and ashes?
Or will you risk being the midwife of your own tale, grasping that
there exist forces within you, when in dialog with the soul of
existence, that are greater than the sum of your assumptions, that exist
deeper and beyond life-negating banalities, such as winner and loser,
shame and pride, and grief and happiness?
“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you
larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do.
You must think that something is happening within you, and remember
that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not
let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any
uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work
they are accomplishing within you?” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
Slightly more than eleven years ago, on September 11, 2001, my wife
and I awoke to the blaring of sirens, one following the next. Our air
conditioning unit was broken and our windows were open. The air carried
an acrid odor.
I checked my email and stacked in my inbox was an avalanche of
messages, all inquiries bearing a unifying theme: “Are you alright?”
I called out to my wife to plug in an old black and white television
set, because something terrible, it seems, was happening here in New
York.
The television roused itself to life just at the moment of the collapse of the North Tower.
This was before the image was fetishized in the American imagination,
was exploited by two U.S. presidential administrations to justify
thousands of acts of military aggression on people of distant lands who
only share one trait in common — they were born of the Islamic faith.
This was before George W. Bush played dress-up in military costumes
and pranced about at military bases and the decks of naval vessels. This
was before President Obama’s brandishing of kill lists, his
normalization and codification into law of Bush era war crimes and
constitutional and human rights violations.
This was when the archetypal image of a collapsing tower seized the
mind, engendering an analogous collapse of one’s mooring and verities.
The quotidian touchstones of daily life had vanished, as did alienation.
We needed each other. Empathy and generosity replaced self-absorption
and the illusionary urgency of urban life… vanished were, monomaniacal
commercial agendas and compulsive distractions. The streets were gauzy
with veils of smoke; the veils had been removed from our hearts.
A feeling akin to love allowed us to face horror and take ambulatory refuge in compassion and beauty.
Cell phones and bottled water were proffered to strangers. As night
fell, candles flickered in public squares; there was the sound of
sobbing and impromptu singing. The scene seemed like a cross between the
London Blitz and Woodstock. One was fully alive in the realm of death.
It would have been lovely if that had been the lesson we carried
forth from that day, a decade and a year ago. Alas, the political
agendas of militarist imperium carried the day. Tribalism trumped the
universal exigencies of our common humanity.
Our leaders behaved despicably, and continue to, and we allow it to
happen e.g., Democrats boast of Obama “getting Bin Laden” in a
reprehensible attempt to gain political leverage from the tragedy,
actions that Democratic partisans would have, rightly, shamed a
Republican president for attempting to exploit.
Yet the sublime of that day is available to us still. Providentially,
there is no need for actual towers to fall…only one forlorn, interior
tower to which we have exiled our humanity. No one needs to die…other
than the entity within who induces us into habitual denial and
exclusively self-serving pursuit.
“[R]eexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any
book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh
shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency […]” — Walt Whitman,
from the 1855 preface to
Leaves of Grass.
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