cell913blog.com #16

 For Nelson Mandela, there was no ambiguity as to the ‘target’ of his life’s work: the elimination of the policy, practices, laws and history of apartheid. His band of freedom fighters knew that they operated within the borders of South Africa, and saw the white supremacist governments of that nation as their immediate and indisputable enemy.

In calling for a new generation of freedom fighters, in 2024, however, the issues seem much more diffuse, ambiguous, almost ethereal and elusive in their definition, implications, and in the manner in which recruit of allied freedom fighters is far more complex, if even feasible.

We can all ‘feel’ or ‘sense’ or ‘intuit’ or even ‘imagine’ a kind of pall, a cloud, a darkness that hangs over each and every day of our lives. How we perceive and define and relate to that ‘cloud’ may differ; its existence, however, is the subject of conversations at the water cooler, in the lecture hall, in the sanctuaries, in the corporate board room, the government committee rooms and the newsrooms of every media outlet on the planet. Pervasive, if not actually invasive, a sense of doom and gloom, worry and angst, fear and trembling have become a constant ‘character’ in the panoply of characters that haunt our imaginations, our dreams, our hopes and our prayers.

In his unique and memorable attempt to understand, and to help others grasp the difference between the inner world of the spirit and the outer world of ethics and aesthetics, Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, focuses on the time between the injunction to sacrifice his son Isaac, to Abraham, and the time of the envisioned event.

“Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made the movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith….There comes a moment in a person’s life when immediacy is ripe, so to speak, and when the spirit requires a higher form, when it wants to lay hold of itself as spirit….Once Abraham became conscious of his eternal validity he arrived at the door of faith and acted according tohis faith. In this action he became a knight of faith. In other words, one must give up all his or her earthly possessions in infinite resignation and must also be willing to give up whatever it is that he or she loves more than God. (wikipedia.org.)

In a much more recent piece of writing, in The Hollow Men, by T. S. Eliot, we find these words, also about that ‘in between’ angst. In interestingliterature.com,  Dr. Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) writes:

One of the most famous poems by T.S. Eliot is The Hollow Men. One of the most famous sections of poetry in all of T.S. Eliot is the fifty and final section…which contains the famous lines, which state that ‘between the ideas and the reality falls the shadow’…The ‘Hollow Men’ of the poem are themselves trapped in some sort of between-world, a limbo or purgatory between life and death, existence and nothingness, light and darkness….(For) ‘between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow’, critics such as Christopher Ricks (in his excellent T.S. Eliot and Prejudice) have suggested, is an allusion to Brutus’ words in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council: and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.’…And something falls between conceiving an action and actually going through with it: this mysterious ‘Shadow’….What is being described here? O
ne possible interpretation is that Eliot is talking about that other interim state between death and life—not at the end of our lives, but at the beginning. Between conception and the creation—what is a baby after it has been conceived but before it has been born….(However), perhaps we would be better off bearing in mind Brutus rather than foetuses, and think of Eliot’s chain of idea-reality-motion-act-conception -creation-emotion-response as referring to the complex relationship between our desires or aims and our actions and behaviour….The Hollow Men find themselves between the idea of escaping their existence and the reality of actually succeeding, but between that idea and longed-for reality, the ‘Shadow’ falls which will prevent them from seeing their way to achieving their aim.

Not long ago, I answered a question about the meaning of the ‘alchemy of the in-between’ (borrowing from James Hillman’s notion of the soul):

What comes to mind (are) the multiple ‘voices’ or ‘images’ that emerge in and through the active, open and curious imagination in an attentive focus on the ‘moment’ seems at least somewhat analogous to the ‘alchemy’ that attends that ‘energy’ and process’…

In a piece entitled ‘The Alchemy of Angst’ (on project-syndicate.org) Elif Shafak, after carefully noting and detailing the depth and ubiquity of both anger and a sense of hopelessness, writes these words:

At the end of the day, is there is one thing that is far more destructive than any emotion, it is the lack of all emotion: Numbness. Indifference. Lethargy of the spirit. The moment we become so desensitized to the deluge of information (and the multiple threats and dangers we face) that we barely register what is happening in another part of the world, or just next door, is the moment we are completely severed and disconnected from each other. And that is a far more dangerous threshold. The decisions that we make today will have long-lasting consequences for the planet, for our societies, and for our individual and collective mental health. This might be the Age if Angst, but from here to the Age of Apathy is but a short and fateful step. We need to make sure we don’t take it.

Clearly, and unabashedly drinking from the cup of courage, determination, hope, optimism and the warrior that was an integral psychic menu for Mandela, and inviting others to ‘share the same cup’ with the same ‘idealistic’ vision (not an addiction, as Jung warns against, but rather a determination for survival!), let’s look a little more closely at the signs that characterize this moment, our moment.

Writing on substack, January 22/24 in a piece entitled, Trump’s Brownshirts, Robert Reich (former Secretary of Labour in the Clinton Administration), after documenting the threats of violence and swatting  and dehumanizing tactics that have confronted Secretaries of State, for attempting to implement Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment that would disqualify trump as in insurrectionist from having his name of the ballot,  as well as death threats on Jack Smith, special counsel of federal prosecutions, noting that the Justice Department spent ‘more than $4.4 million providing security for Smith and his team’. Reich also notes the determination of trump ‘if you go after me, I’m coming after you’….the tape of Roger Stone uttering death threats to ‘either Congressman Eric Swalwell or Congressman Jerry Nadler prior to the 2020 election…’There is a direct and alarming connection between Trump’s political rise and the increase in political violence and threats of such violence in America.’ Reich also delineates the names of people who might have voted to impeach the former president, but for their fear for the lives of themselves and their families….and then Reich writes these words:

Political violence in an inherent part of facism. Hitler’s SA—the letters stood for Sturmabteilung or Storm Section, also known as the Stormtroopers or Brownshirts—who were vigilantes who did the Nazis’ dirty work before the Nazis took total power…
Last night in an abbreviated appearance on her own show, owing to a throat infection, Rachel Maddow, detailed the story of hundreds of thousands of German citizens in the streets of many German cities, in numbers that threated the safety of the protesters. These men and women, deeply resonant with memories of the Fascists of the Third Reich, and their deportation of immigrants, refugees, and undesireables, are demanding the removal as a political party of the AfD right-wing party in the upcoming German elections. Al Jazeera, in a story dated, January 21, 2024, reports:

The mass protests were triggered after an investigative media organization, Correctiv, released a report about the ‘undisclosed’ meeting near Berlin, where a proposal to deport millions of immigrants and refugees, including some with German citizenship, was discussed. Among the participants at the talks was Martin Sellner, a leader of Austria’s Identarian Movement, which subscribes to the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory that claims there is a plot by non-white migrants to replace Europe’s ‘native’ white population…..Since its founding, the party has continually moved to the right and gained support for its fierce anti-refugee and anti-immigration views.

The Guardian, in a report by ‘staff and agencies’ records, on January 20, 2024: Politicians, churches and Bundesliga coaches have all urged people to stand up against the AfD….Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who joined a demonstration last weekend…urged ‘all to take a stand for cohesion, for tolerance, for our democratic Germany..(AfD) popularity has risen again since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on the back of disgruntlement over high energy bills, food inflation, and what it sees as the high moral and financial cost of defending Ukraine.

Maddow’s analysis of the similarity of the threats facing the German electorate included references to proposals from trump and Steven Miller that immigrants, refugees and ‘others’ will be detained in internment camps in the United States, should trump be re-elected. The linkage between the American alt-right’s resistance to funding and supporting Ukraine cannot be overlooked in the light of the German protests, nor can the adherence to the ‘replacement theory conspiracy’ by men like Tucker Carlson, a close associate of the former twice-impeached president.

Is it becoming more clear, that together we face a moment of deep and authentic angst, from which we can become paralysed or out of which we can summon the strength, conviction, determination and commitment to engage in what is already a fight for the soul of the liberal, democratic, law-based, human-rights-based order in what the alt-right conceives as a fight for white supremacy and against all forms of tolerance, liberty and democracy?

Of course, we fear, and we tremble, and also of course, we can each ‘see’ a place for our voice in this current chapter of world tension.