Goethe and the Existential Life of Modernity

Ginko Biloba, a poem by Goethe

Who are ye that thus rudely banish slumber from my eyes? What mean these vague and insolent glances? Why this fearful procession? With what dream of horror come ye to delude my half awakened soul? Goethe's Egmont, Opening lines of Act V. Scene IV. 

A play about liberty under the thumb of oppression, my preliminary inkling about the Egmont drama is that it forecasts the oppressive momentum that lives within, and supports, heroic independence. I have been contemplating the uniquely liberating present that I experience with my love. American and Vietnamese, we are from two countries whose people, not long ago, brutally killed each other. I wonder sometimes about our extended family relations. How is it possible that the same blood now joined today by love, once was spilt by hatred. As Goethe writes in the poem illustrated above, "Is it but one being single / Which as same itself divides? / Are there two which choose to mingle / So that one each other hides?"

Read my Letter to the Editor "Embracing Diversity" on BlackCoffeePoet 

& See a Collaborative Interview & Essay "Busking and Creative Ecology" by Vi An and myself on In Stereo Press

Previous Post on Goethe: To Dream in Red is to Uncover the Veil of Consciousness

________

I sat under the opaque cloudy open. A dark rain hovered in the misty atmosphere. The pressures of a battered mind fill my eyes with a salivating remorse. I've since exiled myself from a gathering in my city's core. Restless, I fill my mind with blank unease, ass wedged against the wintry pavement of a curb. This area is one of neglect and rage.

Street in Venice by John Singer Sargent

Checking my phone, I have a text. I'm to be on CBC Radio. A talk show host tells me my words are acid and wry. I'm paid. We've settled. The night lingers. I wade in thoughts of a lonely walk. I kill time, staring into the light of my phone. What's it come to? What's the noise? Why do I do this? After raising the question, I feel light enough to carry on. I stand up, and walk. I am a question.

_________

"Falling as a failed lilting feather from a broken wing

Clinging to the unforgiving cold mechanical dawn

Still dreaming an entire civilization

And how illusory, how ultimately disillusioned I am by my youth

Drained of all wicked savagery and raw earth

Into a vegetable gladness

Thawing next to a lone rock

Cracked by a lightning strike from the changeless ice age broth of sky

Almost infinitely long ago, and now rinsed, overly purified by the fresh rains

...

Fathers and mothers in my cultural upbringing
The writers, artists and musicians
Spouting intelligent insanity

From within forms called the book, record, image
All a lie before the transcendent spontaneity of creation from newfound inspiration
To be and do what feels harmonious and complete
...

Finger-pointing to stars and storm clouds
Washing away mud with a healing presence,
A profound humbling that presents power and at once feigns innocence

In departing from all with humility
Yet a fearless flesh-traded mastery over the air,
Stares eyeless into the stoned intuitive rendering"

excerpts from "Contemplation's Itch"

Making a Home with an Identity of Conflict

JUAN GONZALEZ: And his attachment is obviously to the Middle East. He spent so much time there. You, yourself, were born in Beirut. The conversations between you about the importance of what he was doing at this particular time and in this incredible upsurge of the Arab Spring and these popular revolts all around the Middle East, the conversations he must have had with you about the importance of his work?

NADA BAKRI: He felt very lucky that he was witnessing these uprising, that he was covering it, that he was part of this moment. He felt like, you know, this is a dream coming true for every journalist covering the Middle East. You know, after covering it for so many years—oppression and dictatorships and wars and conflicts and violence—it was finally—you know, finally, there was a—something is changing, and something positive and optimistic. He felt like it was going to take a while, but it was at least happening, you know, the change that people had for so long aspired for.

- Interview on Democracy Now!

_______

It all started in a filthy office garage, a shed built from cement, looking something like an old jailhouse before the invention of bars. A large, heavyset woman engulfs herself in a literal blood bath, drinking warm bodily fluids over her red-dyed dress in wolfish fashion. She’s on a diet, she says. Blood is her way out. With a few siblings and friends we fire off onto the desolate rural highway. Snow and ice feed the sky in a formidable crown of gleaming silver. The earth hibernates absolutely. As the road ices up and the snow piles impassably, I get out, finding two pistols in the trunk. They are caked in snow, perfectly, as to disguise handprints on the metal. We fire off a round as we burn the snow off the pavement on our way, speeding. On the road, blood is our subsistence. We drink of it fluidly and richly. Our decadence is spelled in animal murder. Back at our family house, my siblings gather across the yard. My feet are swollen, painful as hell as I meander ever so slightly across the rough grass and hard-packed, unleveled soil. I am almost to them, yet fading and neglectful, I traverse the domestic plain solo.

_______

Blood

"It is the life-giving, vital part of our physiology and it may symbolize our strengths and weaknesses and our physical and mental health. If you are currently experiencing a very difficult time in your life, you may have dreams with bloody and frightening images. Don't worry, you may be venting your fears! Some believe that when you see blood in your dream, the distressing situation in your life which is at the root of the dream has come to an end, and the worst is over."

_______

“Is it possible to question the natural progression of ages?

where cycles, are caused not by epidemics,

but through a revivification of our human path on this earth,

whereby some aspects of ourselves must be shed to give way

to other ways of being and living in relation to ourselves as a living host

to the experience that is this universe through the medium of earth?”

“No.

Such epidemics, as have outlasted humanity

have shifted our course

into a malformed search for objects,

a fantasy mirage of unending lust

that consumes and overtakes the only worthy pleasure

of being alive

for a scant mockery of human expression.

This is the age of the Aahtzmi.

Our enemy is…inside us.

The only way to overcome such an obstacle

and press on into a completely reversed progression of cyclic ages

is to enact compassion, through love.”

- excerpt from "Deadly Vision Part II"

A String of Unforgettable Dreaming

Passage of the Iron Gates in Algeria, 18. October 1839 by Adrien Dauzats

Dream Memory 1

I see a map attached to what looks like a conference board display in a war room of sorts. The map has impressions which remind me of old wood stamp envelope seals, however they are marked in a fashion as to resemble blood forced into an array of impassioned fervor, an explosion of red paint or wax fixed on deliberate points on the map. I see the largest impression, which my eyes are drawn to first, is on Indonesia, next on Southeast Asia, there is an very large impression on Chile, on Japan, on Turkey, and then I realize these imprints represent shockwaves and their traces of carnage. Earthquakes and tsunamis are scaled with an imprint of blood on the map. I look closely at the geographic place where I am, in North America, and I see small traces of red. Is this a forecast I wonder?

Dream Memory 2

I am walking through a densely wooded road with my cousins and family friends. We find our way to a cliffside. One of my older cousins, about my age, decides to be risky. He begins walking alongside the cliff very close. I try to one up him, and so I slink on down the side of the cliff, letting myself hang on an overhanging root. I become quite frightened by the implausibility of survival if I were to slip and fall from such heights. My cousin then does me in by lowering himself to a rocky outcrop far beneath our feet at the cliff's edge. I am frightened for him. I can feel his vertigo. Then he falls. It is as if I fall with him. We all act as if he is now dead. After some time passes, I am a presence, with him, though he can not see me. He is lying on his side at the bottom of the cliff. A black man finds him. This man seems to resemble more of an African character than American. Soon, however, we are in what appears to be a gang-ridden neighborhood in Southern California. There is great risk, as people surround us with guns. The rest is clouded.

Dream Memory 3

I am in a Chinese grocery store. It reminds me somehow of the city of Vancouver. I find to my great delight a whole bunch of good items to purchase, however I don't leave the shop for two days. I am in their rummaging through all of the items, without much sense of purpose, and suddenly as I am working on the tile floor, trying to fix it, the owner of the shop points me out. She takes my to go box of orders and begins throwing them out, telling me they have gone bad. I plead with her while each piece of delicious food is bit into, prodded and thrown into the trash. She then kicks me out.