{"id":54107,"date":"2021-02-26T03:16:52","date_gmt":"2021-02-26T03:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=113904"},"modified":"2021-02-26T03:16:52","modified_gmt":"2021-02-26T03:16:52","slug":"the-pine-eyed-boy-escapes-from-the-belly-of-the-dark-night-in-the-fishs-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/26\/the-pine-eyed-boy-escapes-from-the-belly-of-the-dark-night-in-the-fishs-tale\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pine-eyed Boy Escapes from the Belly of the Dark Night in the Fish\u2019s Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s hard to say where things begin, but they do, as do we, and we are somehow in them and they in us, and a story begins.<\/div>\n
\n

Then the story gets silently disclosed as we live it, even though most of us don\u2019t tell it until later, if we can find our tongues. \u00a0But when we tell it we are in another story, often nostalgic for the future but finding the creative past pulling us back down and deep to illuminate the present.<\/p>\n

Life is dangerous; we can end at any time.\u00a0 We can also be swallowed by the inarticulate, find ourselves tongue-tied in the face of simple truth, especially the personal kind and how our small-world stories are intertwined with the larger social ones. How there is no escaping that.<\/p>\n

There are many, of course, for whom the bell tolls before they end. As Bob Dylan sings it so beautifully in Chimes of Freedom<\/em><\/a>, a song about being caught in a thunder and lightning rain storm:<\/p>\n

In the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
\nFor the disrobed faceless forms of no position
\nTolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
\nAll down in taken-for granted situations
\nTolling for the deaf an\u2019 blind, tolling for the mute
\nFor the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
\nFor the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an\u2019 cheated by pursuit
\nAn\u2019 we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We are now living in a world where freedom\u2019s flashing lightning bolts have been replaced by dim grim grimaces of widespread depression and resignation as the shroud of solicitous neofascism descends on much of the world.<\/p>\n

Human freedom is under widespread assault. Free speech is being attacked. Censorship is widespread and growing. Flesh and blood life is being sucked into a whirlpool of what John Steppling calls \u201ca universe of disembodied data.\u201d\u00a0 Mediated reality is replacing physical reality as the world\u2019s elites attempt to sell their packaged and commodified stories to publics ensnared and enamored by the technology that is entrapping them.\u00a0 All tradition, the good and the bad, is gutted out by elites determined to create chaos and digital dementia as they coordinate their power under the banner of the \u201creasonable center\u201d as distinct from the left and the right.\u00a0 It\u2019s an old story that many can\u2019t hear because they can no longer listen.<\/p>\n

But lightning never dies since it is only in flashing that it exists, like us, and here and there you can still see and hear its messages of freedom and revolt. It comes unexpectedly.\u00a0 Out of the blue.\u00a0 It lurks in the shadowy clouds as an invisible force, always ready to strike.\u00a0 You have to be alert and know where to look. Listen. You have to want to see it, to catch its energy.<\/p>\n

A year ago, right before the world was locked-down into a devastating hell, my then eleven-year-old granddaughter Sophie, who is a writer, starred in the lead role of a big production of Matilda<\/em>, the play based on the book of the same name by the mischievous writer Roald Dahl, who wrote so many books extolling freedom for children \u2013 aka adults.\u00a0 Matilda is about a girl who refuses to be bullied by the headmistress of her school or her parents.\u00a0 When Sophie stepped forward boldly and defiantly looked at the audience and sang her first solo, Naughty<\/em>, a shiver went down my spine, what Coomaraswamy called \u201cthe aesthetic shock.\u201d\u00a0 Bold and fearless, she sang these words that flashed like Dylan\u2019s chimes of freedom to a rapt audience wondering who this Matilda might be:<\/p>\n

Like Romeo and Juliet
\nT\u2019was written in the stars before they even met
\nThat love and fate, and a touch of stupidity
\nWould rob them of their hope of living happily
\nThe endings are often a little bit gory
\nI wonder why they didn\u2019t just change their story?
\nWe\u2019re told we have to do what we\u2019re told but surely
\nSometimes you have to be a little bit naughty<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the historian Howard Zinn has said: Our greatest problem is civil obedience<\/strong>.\u00a0 Zinn tried to change the story but few have heeded his advice.\u00a0 The American story is the embrace of endless war and violence, often justified under the alibi of \u201cthe lesser of two evils,\u201d as if lesser evil were not evil. Such evil is always presented as reasonable, the center between two extremes.<\/p>\n

A hundred years ago, D. H. Lawrence wrote of Americans that \u201cAll the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

In their wish to obey, so many, unlike Matilda, accede to endings that are very gory, echoing Melville\u2019s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick<\/em>: \u201cFool! I am the Fates\u2019 lieutenant; I act under orders,\u201d<\/em> sometimes not knowing that they are doing so but finding comfort in their obeisance since the leaders and experts and authority figures know what\u2019s best \u2013 just do what you\u2019re told, as a current sage recently said. \u00a0Obey orders.<\/p>\n

Yes, these experts are the light-bringers, like Prometheus and his brother Lucifer, they bring the fire. \u00a0Under orders from Lucifer whom he embodies, Ahab insanely hunts Moby Dick for three days until the great white whale rises from the depths and drags him down to hell, \u201cand the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.\u201d\u00a0 So it goes.\u00a0 It\u2019s an old story worth remembering, whether the whale be huge or invisible.\u00a0 To resist, you have to be a little bit naughty, and brave, for we are on a journey without maps and are now in a very dark place.<\/p>\n

Our stories enclose one another, the largest being the story of the social world we always live within, a big story that usually eludes our understanding or focus until one day we realize it has always been the womb we have been swimming in all our lives.\u00a0 We are always inside one whale or another, but the biggest whale is the social story about external \u201crealities\u201d told by those who control the media that encloses all our smaller tales.\u00a0 It is crucial to understand this story through discernment and not to let the media monsters convince us of their versions, for they are not our friends. They lie for their masters.<\/p>\n

Referring specifically to novelists, but by extension to everyone since we are the novelists of our own lives, George Orwell, in his essay \u201cInside the Whale,\u201d whose primary focus was the writing of Henry Miller, wrote:<\/p>\n

Get inside the whale \u2013 or rather, admit that you are inside the whale (for you are, of course.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By which he meant the feeling that external forces are out of control and that as society disintegrates and the autonomous individual is stamped out of existence, \u201cthe increasing helplessness of all decent people\u201d becomes a widespread feeling.\u00a0 He was not endorsing such quietism and resignation, but was describing it.<\/p>\n

Such a feeling is clearly far more widespread today, long after Orwell penned those words.\u00a0 He was praising Miller for saying what regular people (his phrase was \u201cordinary man,\u201d a phrase he held was accurate but \u201cdenied by some people\u201d who believe all generalizations are piffle) thought and felt despite it being taboo to say it.\u00a0 It is why Miller\u2019s books were banned; they were too truthful.\u00a0 He dragged \u201cthe real-politik of the inner mind into the open.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The establishment always prefers refined bullshit to the secret thoughts of regular people, those who are fed up with the endless lies that that pour forth from the official narrators\u2019 mouths.<\/p>\n

My entire life has been framed by the story of America\u2019s constant wars, their glorification and justification.\u00a0 From the first detonation of the nuclear device in the New Mexican desert, blasphemously called \u201cTrinity\u201d by Robert Oppenheimer, until this very day in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Libya, Yemen, etc., I could not understand my story without situating it within the belly of this beast called the U.S.A.\u00a0 This is true for most people alive today.\u00a0 Stories within stories.<\/p>\n

Peel the American onion and at its heart you\u2019ll find a bomb. \u201cFat Man\u201d or \u201cLittle Boy\u201d or whatever sick name you choose to give it.<\/p>\n

Our smaller tales nestled in the private recesses of our minds are seemingly sometimes boring to many but illuminating to those telling them.\u00a0 They can and often do appear when one is bored by the repetitive nature of the screaming, fear-mongering political headlines meant to reduce people to quivering victims of false narratives.\u00a0 <\/em>\u201cBoredom,\u201d<\/em> wrote Walter Benjamin in The Storyteller<\/em>, \u201cis the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.\u00a0 A rustling in the leaves drives him away.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Far more than a rustling, we are living in a digital media world of cacophonous lies that drown out the silence necessary for independent thinking or dreaming.<\/p>\n

So here I sit in the silence and try to conjure up the Pine-eyed Boy.<\/p>\n

The boy was five or six, he can\u2019t remember which, when his father took him to the movie theater to see Walt Disney\u2019s Pinocchio<\/em>. Just the two of them, a father with his only son, the boy\u2019s five sisters left at home.\u00a0 By the time two more sisters had arrived, this intimate dream experience had penetrated deep into him. His father followed up the movie by entertaining the boy and lulling him to sleep many nights by telling him improvised Pinocchio tales, none of which the boy could remember but could never forget. These stories became the penumbra of his life.<\/p>\n

He always remembered Thoreau saying that \u201cit is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 But while nodding assent to that truth, he always felt Pinocchio was different.\u00a0 Pinocchio must be remembered, not so much the Disney version, but the stories his father told on the theme; but more importantly, why he told them. He knew that it is so easy to forget what is important to remember, and that we often use our forgetteres to do just that.<\/p>\n

Like most small children or adults, the complexity of this Disney film eluded him.\u00a0 He remembered being mesmerized and frightened and delighted in turn.\u00a0 The cricket, the whale, the puppet maker, his pine-eyed creation, and the Blue Fairy \u2013 all of these seemed so real to him, images that would drift through his unknowing mind unattached to words, like images in an inner mirror.\u00a0 Fleeting and fascinating.\u00a0 Moving.<\/p>\n

When the kidnapped boys were taken with Pinocchio on the dark sea journey to Pleasure Island, he was frightened.\u00a0 He had no words for it, but the Coachman Barker, the kidnapper, seemed to ooze menace.\u00a0 But his father\u2019s large protective presence in the aisle seat to his left seemed to enclose his fear and tell him all would be fine. He felt contained in his protective love. His father felt like a counterweight to the satanic looking Barker with the pedophile\u2019s red laugh and demeanor.\u00a0 His father was his protector.<\/p>\n

The man the boy became spent decades meditating on the meaning of his youthful encounter with Pinocchio\u2019s story.\u00a0 Or was it his relationship with his father, or perhaps his relationship with his father\u2019s encounter with Pinocchio, or maybe his father\u2019s relationship with his father without Pinocchio but with the feeling the boy must save his father after the father wishes the boy to life and his mother dies and leaves the father all alone, trapped in the belly of a dark life.<\/p>\n

My father\u2019s father, my grandfather, was the Deputy Chief of the New York Fire Department, which was the highest rank for a uniformed firefighter.\u00a0 He had battled many dangerous fires to save people\u2019s lives. Defeating the fire \u201cdevil\u201d was his calling. But when my father was eighteen years old, his mother died, and my grandfather was left alone.\u00a0 I never asked him, but I am wondering now if my father, then aged 18, felt it was his duty to save his father from the monster of loneliness, the feeling of being shipwrecked, abandoned by God. And if that sense of obligation was connected to Pinocchio\u2019s story, where the puppet boy is first nearly killed by putting his finger into a candle flame but is saved by his father, Geppetto, the wife-less toy maker, who puts out the fire with water, and then at the end, in a role reversal, when Pinocchio saves his father from the belly of Monstro the whale by using fire to make the whale sneeze them up to the shore.<\/p>\n

Such an ending evokes the terrible heavy\u00a0 burden felt by any child whose \u201ccricket\u201d tells them that they must save a parent.\u00a0 Such role reversal exacts a heavy price.<\/p>\n

In the Biblical story, Jonah surely felt obligated that way after he was spit up on the shore by the great fish whose belly had saved him.\u00a0 He did not want to do his father Yahweh\u2019s will and tell the people of Nineveh that they must repent their ways. So he fled, only to find himself thrown overboard but saved by the God he didn\u2019t obey.<\/p>\n

I once asked my father to tell me about his father, whom I knew as a young child, but my memories were few and scattered and he died when I was ten-years-old.\u00a0 This was after my father had sent me many letters describing in detail his father\u2019s and mother\u2019s relatives, what some might call genealogy but which were actually mini-short stories. To my father and to me, it was the stories that counted, not the bloodline; exquisite writer that he was, my father knew that it was the gift of stories that would allow me to shape my own, and that he was, to use Benjamin\u2019s words, starting a \u201cweb which all stories form in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite these detailed epistles about our family history, my father seemed hesitant to describe his father.\u00a0 I kept pressing him.\u00a0 He finally wrote that he would get the bio sketch of Pop in the works for me.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m afraid,\u201d <\/em>he wrote, \u201cit will be like the closing words of St. John\u2019s Gospel though: \u2018And many other things did Dennis of Woodlawn do that are not written in this book; but these are written so that reading you may believe that Dennis was quite a man.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

My father knew his Bible, for these are the closing words of John\u2019s Gospel: \u201cThere were many other things that Jesus did; if all were written down, the world itself, I suppose, would not hold all the books that would have to be written.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

He never said another word about his father. I knew the comparison to Jesus was farfetched, but beside that, I was left in the lurch, except to realize that my father idolized his father, and I had learned from experience that idolization was not good, for it leads to blind obedience. I had idolized my own father, but it was only until I knew his human weaknesses and faults that I came to love him even more and idolization turned to deeper gratitude.<\/p>\n

Ever since my father\u2019s death and up until recently, I have felt that this missing piece of his story was a result of my father\u2019s fear to convey the full truth about his father, despite my repeated requests to him to do so. I have changed my literal mind. I now see it as a brilliant extension of the improvised Pinocchio stories he told me as a child. Just as they always left me wondering why they never had a clear ending as I fell sleeping into the belly of the night,\u00a0 I see this absence of his father\u2019s story as a present, a gift like a fairy tale. \u201cThe fairy tale tells us,\u201d<\/em> wrote Benjamin, \u201cof the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

One such myth, the one that I have long felt true and that has informed much of my life is that I could save others.\u00a0 It is sheer arrogance. It is violence.\u00a0 It is a mythic nightmare that I have carried on my chest. \u00a0Fr. Walter Brown, S.J., who was a guiding light in my life, once told my parents when they were visiting my high school for parents\u2019 night: \u201cEddie will be fine once he gets the world off his shoulders.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 And Fr. Brown didn\u2019t know the half of it, but, being an artist of deep intuition, knew enough.<\/p>\n

All my efforts to \u201csave\u201d others in the personal realm have failed, as I should have expected.\u00a0 No one really wants advice or counsel; to be saved; they want to be free to create or destroy their own stories.<\/p>\n

I have also written and published many things trying to convince people through logic and facts that this is true and that isn\u2019t; that they need to change their beliefs.\u00a0 I have tried to light a fire in the belly of Monstro the whale to save others from the descending shroud of solicitous neofascism that is upon us. To alert others to the overarching American story of violence that is consuming us.<\/p>\n

In all of this, I was missing the story in the story.\u00a0 The absence that is the present.\u00a0 The transformative gift that keeps circulating because it is freely given to us by the spirit to pass on in the telling.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it,\u201d<\/em> said Benjamin.\u00a0 I have tried.<\/p>\n

Or as Nietzsche said of the chorus in Greek tragedy:<\/p>\n

With this chorus, the profound Hellene, uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and deepest suffering, comforts himself, having looked boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature, and being in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will.\u00a0 Art saves him, and through art \u2013 life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s still the same old story, especially when you know what\u2019s missing.<\/p>\n<\/div>The post The Pine-eyed Boy Escapes from the Belly of the Dark Night in the Fish\u2019s Tale<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard to say where things begin, but they do, as do we, and we are somehow in them and they in us, and a story begins. Then the story gets silently disclosed as we live it, even though most of us don\u2019t tell it until later, if we can find our tongues. \u00a0But when [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post The Pine-eyed Boy Escapes from the Belly of the Dark Night in the Fish\u2019s Tale<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54108,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54107\/revisions\/54108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}