Death Reversal? (8)
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In this short series of blogbuster blogs that
begin with post 191/ 1
“Capitalist Radicals?”, and makes mild fun of the sometimes radical posts at one of the more informative sites about the state of finace and business on the internet, I begin with a quate from “Looking away” by philosopher Slavoy Žižek. Žižek, who writes (p 78): “…love is an exemplary case of what Jon Elster calls ‘states that are essentially a by-product’ an innermost emotion that cannot be planned in advance or assumed by means of a conscious decision.
What if I replace the word ‘love’ with the
word ‘death’? Might not ‘death’ also be “an exemplary case of what… is ‘essentially
a by-product’ of an innermost emotion that cannot be planned in advance or
assumed by means of conscious decisions?”
So, how do we arrive at the ‘essential
by-product’? I have to resort to a rather personal dream and story in which
‘it’ manifests itself as death and as ‘nothing’ and as ‘love’.
Dream: the space I find myself in is
black-and-white. I come into this space as if by a door into a room. I am
gripped by a feeling of terror that comes from no one or specific place. But it
appears to me to be a more than real presence. I am not sure if my fear is of
death or something unknown that is generated by the ‘within of myself’.
I slowly move deeper into the room, when
peripheral vision lets me see behind me an ambulatory bed. If it has a sheet,
it is not white, but a dark dark red. In front of me and the bed there also
appears a person, whom I guess to be a doctor. I look at him—still filled with
dread—and he returns my look with a humiliating smirk on his face.
Nevertheless, I make a plea for help. And ‘help’ he does.
We shift our positions to a right angle left,
where the ‘doctor’ stands directly in front of me and I have retreated from him
a step or two. Out of nowhere there appears before the ‘doctor’ a man, somewhat
young by appearance. The man is unresisting, a bit like a doll, and his head
comes up to about the chest cavity of the doctor. The ‘doctor’ then places both
of his hands with the forefingers on the man’s throat about where the carotid
arteries are. He presses his fingers down, and the man collapses as if dead.
Dread however stills fills me, and again I
ask the ‘doctor’ to help me. Again he does. He picks up the limp man by his
shoulders, while I pick him up by his feet, and both of us, with me moving
backward, move for the door that leads out of the house and is behind me.
We walk down the steps of the house with the
‘corpse’ held by its shoulders and feet, and move across the yard to a brown
wood board fence and hedge, which stands about ten yards from the door of the
house. We place the body behind the hedge and beside the wood fence, then
return to the house.
Once inside the house, the ‘doctor’ and
ambulatory bed have disappeared. Nevertheless, I am still filled if not with
dread, but great anxiety as I look to the other end of the room, where there is
a floor to ceiling window with a bed to its right. Before the window stands a
great guerilla like black shadow; but in the bed, her knees drawn up in a fetal
position and her chin tucked to her chest lies my ‘love’.
I awaken with a hollow feeling in my stomach
and ask myself: “What was that about?” still vividly recalling the sense of
terror that I apparently held but a few moments ago. The question lingers with
me for a few days, but no interpretation comes until I read the word ‘nothing’
somewhere. Suddenly, I realize that the shadow is Nothing. It was this Nothing
who made this incursion in the dream within me. It was death itself that had
come visiting.
Questions, still remain however. Or I should
say there are yet facts which have to come and contribute to the
interpretation. One fact that I have not mentioned yet is that I dreamt the
dream about two weeks before my eightieth birthday. Another fact is that I have
fallen in ‘love’ with a woman not yet thirty. Some may be tempted to say the
word ‘playboy’, unfortunately, far from so. A third fact is that I am single,
financially down to the basics, which allows my eye row without guilt, because
I know that not only can I not pay for what my eye likes, but am forced by circumstances
to remain frugal and then some. The fourth factor is that the young woman in
the dream who lies in a fetal position is the young woman to whom I am attracted
by desire or, if you wish, ‘love’.
Because the black shadow stands just at the
foot of the bed and appears to looks out the window, this may suggest that the
young woman has drawn her legs into her lap out of fear of it. On the other hand,
it may be that she is in the position she is, because she feels no less dread
than I do, but this is because of an entirely different reason--because I may
have proposed (symbolically) to her. If I were a man of means, I indeed would
do so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laBTtJJxCnw. Yet because of my age, and because I may shortly die, ‘love’ is a deadly
experience for both of us. ‘Love’ becomes the curtain in front of a tabernacle
for both of us
And the space before the tabernacle becomes
the stage in front of which the dream performs-demonstrates to me the
impossibility of my desire.
When I realize the meaning of it all, I
understand and become rather contrite. I regret the circumstances for, both,
me and her. Yet whoever may read this, there are yet a couple of other
factors within which the unconscious dreamer, the Nothing, dreams. One is that
I am on my eleventh day of a water and juice diet protesting the stone face of
the government under which I live. Two is that the young woman is planning to
shortly work at a nursing home.
Regarding the
government which I protest: it practices what the leader of the opposition calls
shadow politics, which he describes thus: “…when it comes to evaluating
questions regarding the future of the nation, the commentators are always state
bureaucrats or paid government advisers.”
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