{"id":117259,"date":"2018-08-27T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T11:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=117259"},"modified":"2018-08-23T14:57:14","modified_gmt":"2018-08-23T13:57:14","slug":"the-cell-phone-and-the-virgin-2018-a-montreal-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/08\/the-cell-phone-and-the-virgin-2018-a-montreal-odyssey\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cell Phone and the Virgin (2018): A Montreal Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAnd the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
\nAnd she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
\nThere are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
\nThey are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
\nWhile Suzanne holds her mirror\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 Leonard Cohen, \u201cSuzanne<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 Henry Adams, \u201cThe Dynamo and the Virgin\u201d (1900) in The Education of Henry Adams<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cThe voices blend and fuse in clouded silence; silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.\u201d
\n\u2013 James Joyce, <\/em>Ulysses<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first thing the writer noticed as he walked around downtown Montreal was the grotesque new architecture that was destroying the charming and humane ambience the city once embodied and that allowed for human thoughts and feelings. He had not been in the city for many years but remembered a more human scale that had entranced him.\u00a0 He wondered if his memory were playing tricks on him but realized it was not.\u00a0 Everywhere he looked, massive glass-skinned towers stood over the streets, sentinels for the financial, insurance, and real estate speculators, a post-modern world of abstractions.\u00a0 Looking deep into the construction sites that were everywhere, he marveled at the modern feats of engineering that would raise more glass cathedrals to the heavens. \u00a0The power of modern technology astounded him. The City of Saints had turned into the city of money, even while the streets maintained their saintly names and the beautiful churches held their ground despite dwindling worshippers.<\/p>\n

Curtin stood in front of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel, looking up at the Virgin glimmering in the afternoon sun.\u00a0 The old port.\u00a0 The sailor\u2019s church.\u00a0 Like Henry Adams, he thought of the powerful force of the Virgin throughout history.\u00a0 Her protection across life\u2019s tempestuous seas.\u00a0 And Leonard Cohen, the Montrealer, who as a young man would come to this chapel and sit in meditation and write his beautiful song, \u201cSuzanne,\u201d invoking \u201cour lady of the harbor.\u201d\u00a0 Leonard, who would stand in awe of the woman as protectress, as mother, as lover, as muse: \u00a0As in \u201cNight Comes On\u201d:<\/p>\n

I said, Mother I’m frightened
\nThe thunder and the lightning
\nI’ll never come through this alone
\nShe said, I’ll be with you
\nMy shawl wrapped around you
\nMy hand on your head when you go<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Curtin understood the fear, the protective power, and the creative inspiration of the Blessed Mother down through the ages. \u00a0He recalled the Miraculous Medal (the Medal of Our Lady of Graces) he wore as a teenager. Like so much, it had disappeared, and he didn\u2019t know where it went. Who had abandoned whom? While all around him tourists were using cell phones to capture the image of the Virgin\u2019s chapel, as if they could bottle the spirit and be on their way.\u00a0 He wondered if God had a cell phone; how far did wireless communications extend?\u00a0 He marveled at the way the owners of these devices \u2013 which seemed to be everyone but him \u2013 took for granted the power of the new technology that had \u201cconquered time and space\u201d and redesigned the world and their minds.\u00a0 Everywhere they went, they held these little rectangles in front of their faces repetitively trying in vain to capture something they were not sure of, including their own images.\u00a0 Their connection to these little boxes seemed anatomical, and the power they contained almost divine.\u00a0 He could hear the clashing of an unspoken war as he observed his surroundings.<\/p>\n

More than a century before at the Great Exposition in Paris, Henry Adams had stood and also wondered; he, about the Branly coherer, the first radio wave detector used widely for radio communications. The first wireless.\u00a0 Being an American, Adams knew that technology and gadgets would take preference over the Virgin when help was needed. And he felt torn himself.\u00a0 After all these years, Curtin also knew that if most people wanted help, they would turn to their phones, the little gods they carried everywhere.\u00a0 Notre-Dame-de Bon Secours (Our Lady of Good Help) was only for sailors of old, men afraid of drowning, and sophisticated moderns did not think like the shipwrecked, those who Ortega y Gasset said were the lost ones, who have recognized that to live is to be lost, and realizing that \u201cwill look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his [their] salvation\u201d will lead them not to embrace a machine, but the spirit of all life.\u00a0 Leonard Cohen sang to Curtin as he stood there musing:<\/p>\n

\u00a0And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
\nAnd he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
\nAnd when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
\nHe said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
\nBut he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
\nForsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But no one else heard the singer, for what are a dead poet\u2019s words remembered by heart\u00a0 \u00a0worth in an age when one can \u201cgoogle it\u201d?\u00a0 Just standing, looking, and listening seemed so out of date, like the Virgin looking down upon the tourists as they scurried next store to the Bonsecours Market, a large commercial hall where rather than receive the good help of spiritual sustenance, they could buy apparel and accessories in the church of commerce.\u00a0 Tourists swam safely through the place, finding help and salvation in a buyer\u2019s paradise, the current wisdom.<\/p>\n

So he turned and walked away, climbing the crosstown streets that would take him to the neighborhood around McGill University.\u00a0 In The Word<\/em> bookstore, he spent an hour looking through the used books and talking with the owner Adrian.\u00a0 Here he felt at home, greeted as he was by a black and white framed photo of Leonard Cohen that welcomes all poets and dreamers who frequent this intimate storefront housed in a unprepossessing nineteenth century brick building.\u00a0 He overheard a woman ask Adrian for directions, and his reply gave Curtin reason to hope.\u00a0 Adrian said to the woman, \u201cWell, you can always get lost and see what you find.\u00a0 That may be more interesting.\u201d \u00a0And he chuckled. \u00a0But the woman wanted the straight way, the road more traveled, nothing serendipitous; getting lost was not on her agenda.\u00a0 And after a few minutes, she went outside the store to wait for her companion who was still looking at books.\u00a0 The woman was studying something on her cell.\u00a0 Curtin imagined it was the bars.<\/p>\n

The way the bookstore was arranged seemed to mirror his mind, a mind that seemed out of tune with the times.\u00a0 For his mind moved from one category of thought to another, as the books on the shelves moved from art to poetry to philosophy without signs signifying a change.\u00a0 They flowed into each other. He knew, of course, that all thought was one continuous stream fed by tributaries, and even many of the tributaries couldn\u2019t be found since they ran underground.\u00a0 It was only the modern mind that wished to categorize and control, the instrumental reasoning mind that had come to dominate the Western world and had proclaimed that humans were machines, that wished for signs declaring separable categories of life and thought.\u00a0 He knew that the best writers in the books that surrounded him wrote so many of their truest words when they thought they were writing something else.\u00a0 This inadvertent way of living seemed to make the woman looking for directions nervous.<\/p>\n

Curtin often got lost, for he didn\u2019t have a smart phone to give him directions.\u00a0 A colleague he had met for lunch laughed when he told him that.\u00a0 These phones are really indispensable, he had said; you really should get one.\u00a0 And then he showed him photographs he had stored on the machine.\u00a0 He had hundreds.\u00a0 Its power was awe inspiring, a small device that allowed world-wide communication in a flash anywhere you were. You could capture the past with it; travel the world in an ethereal instant without moving; never be out of \u201ctouch\u201d without being touched. \u00a0It made him wonder: Where does true power lie?\u00a0 Was he out of touch?\u00a0 What did he want to touch?<\/p>\n

On he walked through the City of Saints, passing McGill University, where he noticed the innocent appearance of students walking to and fro.\u00a0 He wondered what it must be like to be beginning one\u2019s studies.\u00a0 Did they learn anything about what had gone on at their university? \u00a0Did they learn about the deep currents that informed history, the true nature of current affairs, or were their professors spouting superficial nonsense that kept them safe in cushy positions? From his experience in academia, Curtin knew that the university had been co-opted by the state and now functioned as an appendage of the war makers.\u00a0 Liberal arts now meant neo-liberalism and political correctness.\u00a0 Dissent meant dismissal, and so he realized that only those students who might browse through used bookstores like The Word<\/em> might serendipitously discover the truth about their world. \u00a0Most would be brainwashed.\u00a0 But they won\u2019t know it.<\/p>\n

He had no phone, but Curtin could hear the screams and groans coming from McGill, the people screaming no, no, no from Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron\u2019s \u201cSleep Room,\u201d as he fed hallucinogens and electrical shocks to \u201cpatients,\u201d the victims of his notorious CIA MKUltra mind control experiments in which he wiped the brain clean of so-called negative thoughts and replaced them with \u201cgood ones.\u201d He was not dreaming.\u00a0 He heard Val Orlikow screaming, as the good doctor, the President of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations, made her mind a blank slate by erasing any memory of her husband and reducing her to toddler status. She thought she was being treated for post-partum depression. The sounds of torture rattled his mind, the sounds of human desperation and the sounds of Cameron\u2019s taped messages fed to almost comatose patients in what he called \u201cpsychic driving.\u201d\u00a0 The prototypical experiments for the age of digital dementia.\u00a0 Black sites. He saw Cameron smile, his legacy secure.<\/p>\n

Curtin felt immensely sad as he saw a young college student cross in front of him.\u00a0 She seemed to be in a trance and almost bumped into him. \u00a0She was beautiful, and her ears were plugged with ear buds, and when he turned to see her walk away, he noticed her backpack had a small pink teddy bear hanging from it.\u00a0 And he remembered the concluding lines to Cohen\u2019s \u201cSuzanne\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And you know that you can trust her<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For she\u2019s touched your perfect body with her mind<\/em><\/p>\n

Walking brought memories, associations, reveries, and thoughts.\u00a0 Drugs and technology could erase them. \u00a0He realized that there was as much worth forgetting as remembering, as both were arts that opposed the sick science and technology that had overtaken so much of society.\u00a0 But what to remember and what to forget?\u00a0 Was that student trying to remember or forget something with that teddy bear that hung as a talisman?\u00a0 Were those earbuds drowning out memories or dangerous thoughts?\u00a0 Who had touched her mind?\u00a0 Thoreau had said it\u2019s very hard to forget what\u2019s worse than useless to remember. \u00a0And Curtin realized that he had honed his own forgettery to rid his mind of all the useless data the corporate mass media were pumping out, data used to create chaos and confusion, when much was so obvious if one just opened one\u2019s eyes to the truth.\u00a0 If he had a cell phone, he mused, he might never have to remember or forget.\u00a0 The secret to communication might be solved.\u00a0 Maybe someday he could be downloaded or uploaded into a phone, whichever it is, and all his problems would be solved.<\/p>\n

\u201cCome here, I want to see you,\u201d Alexander Graham Bell said to Watson in the first telephone call.\u00a0 Watson remembered it differently.\u00a0 He recalled Bell saying, \u201cCome here I want you.\u201d\u00a0 So much wanting and forgetting and remembering made Curtin\u2019s head spin.\u00a0 So much desire for the presence of the absent other.\u00a0 But whom to call?\u00a0 How?\u00a0 Or was it the absence of the present other?\u00a0 Could one turn and say, \u201cWhat is it you want?\u201d<\/p>\n

He and his wife kept walking toward the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where there was an exhibit of Picasso\u2019s use of African art and artifacts: \u201cFrom Africa to the Americas: Face-To-Face Picasso, Past and Present.\u201d Picasso, a believer in magic and the occult, was notoriously opposed to reason and logic and understanding.\u00a0 He once said that \u201cpeople who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.\u201d\u00a0 Curtin and his wife had once attended a gala opening of a large Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.\u00a0 The galleries were filled with celebrities, their masks intact, oohing and ahhing at the art work.\u00a0 At the time he wondered what they would say if he asked them how they understood this or that piece. Did they just stand or understand? Would they say, \u201cWhat a genius; he had the magic touch?\u201d<\/p>\n

Curtin had admired a goat sculpture that spoke to him. \u00a0He can\u2019t remember what it said, but he remembered wondering if he were the goat surrounded by brilliant minds who could decipher art far beyond his pedestrian ability. \u00a0Now he wondered what Picasso might communicate to him with his African inspired works. Should he try to understand them, or was that too plebian?\u00a0 Was there some esoteric trick to it all?\u00a0 Could Picasso shed light on the enigma that perplexed Adams and Curtin? \u00a0Or was there nothing to understand?\u00a0 Was it all just a mystery beyond comprehension?\u00a0 Beyond explanation?\u00a0 Beyond communication? \u00a0Was it simply art appreciation or magic?<\/p>\n

He hoped that maybe before his odyssey around Montreal was over he would discover the answer to the dilemma that perplexed him: Was it in the cell phone or the Virgin that true power lay?\u00a0 Digital or sacred force?\u00a0 Adams never truly resolved it; maybe he could.\u00a0 Or had a century and more made it more difficult?\u00a0 Impossible?<\/p>\n

He knew that from photography and the phonograph to the computerized cell phone, memory had achieved a strange jailbreak from the body that made writing seem like a crude form by comparison. Could visual art reveal the truth?\u00a0 Picasso?\u00a0 McGill\u2019s Dr. Cameron and his CIA accomplices had mastered the black arts of disassociating the personality (as Picasso had done with art), of erasing memories and implanting new ones, of using drugs, technology and the occult to materialize the psychic and control volition and memory \u2013 they were masters of the electronic mind-body interface and worldview warfare that their Nazi friends had bequeathed to them.\u00a0 They had taken the lessons of black magic and the machine god adored by the fascist Marinetti and his \u201cFuturism\u201d art movement, with its superstitious occult roots hidden behind its pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, and made it their own.\u00a0 They had conjured up a satanic brew of technology and hallucinatory drugs and rituals to promote the idea that the supernatural machine ruled mankind and they controlled the machine, and no one could defeat them. They considered themselves the spearhead of the new colonial imperial powers, who colonized the minds of the masses. It seemed to Curtin that at some unconscious level all the people he saw with cell phones had been disassociated but didn\u2019t know it.\u00a0 They were victims of the latest version of MKUltra on a vast scale.\u00a0 They had been invaded by \u201cspecial forces.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here he was on a few days\u2019 vacation, and his mind whirled with all these perplexing thoughts.\u00a0 He needed to communicate, and he wondered who would hear him if he cried out, if he spoke to the air. \u00a0Rilke\u2019s words came to him:<\/p>\n

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic<\/em>
\nOrders? And even if one were to suddenly<\/em>
\ntake me to its heart, I would vanish into its<\/em>
\nstronger existence. For beauty is nothing but<\/em>
\nthe beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,<\/em>
\nand we revere it so, because it calmly disdains<\/em>
\nto destroy us. Every Angel is terror.<\/em>
\nAnd so I hold myself back and swallow the cry<\/em>
\nof a darkened sobbing.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But he held his tears and walked on, resolved to solve the enigma before the day was up.<\/p>\n

When they arrived at the museum, Curtin was again struck by the thought that museums were very strange places.\u00a0 He always felt as though he were entering a graveyard, where art was isolated from the living.\u00a0 This funereal quality was amplified by the required silence, as if one were in the presence of ghosts or gods who required adoration.\u00a0 Museums seemed to him to be temples of the rich where the art was their war booty on display, the victims of their conquests antiseptically absent. \u00a0He felt half-dead when in them.<\/p>\n

This particular exhibit came to be because the European colonial powers had looted their colonies for art and artifacts that they brought back to their home countries and locked up in museums and in the homes of the rich.\u00a0 Spoils of war.\u00a0 It happened that in 1907 Pablo Picasso visited a dusty museum in Paris, the Muse d\u2019Ethnographie du Trocad\u00e9ro, where he was startled by the African art and artifacts he saw there. He later said:<\/p>\n

The greatest artistic emotion I have felt was when I was suddenly struck by the sublime beauty of the sculptures carved by anonymous artists in Africa. Passionately religious, yet rigorously logical, these works are the most powerful and most beautiful things ever produced by the human imagination. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then he proceeded to appropriate the appropriated art, and some of the results lined the walls of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Curtin couldn\u2019t help noticing Picasso\u2019s doubling down on rigorous logic in his opportunistic \u201cborrowing.\u201d\u00a0 But the \u201cpassionately religious\u201d nature of the artist\u2019s work that graced the gallery escaped him, unless the museum had become the new cathedral. This seemed quite probable. \u00a0He doubted that Picasso shared Adams\u2019 lofty assessment of Chartres Cathedral, since Picasso considered African sculpture \u201cthe most beautiful things produced by the human imagination,\u201d and his attitude toward the \u201creligious\u201d was colored by its foreign and exotic qualities, elements absent from the European Christian or Islamic heritage of his homeland of Spain, or from France and Europe as a whole.<\/p>\n

Picasso did most of this African-inspired work between 1906 and 1909, before turning to what has been called his Cubist period, which only lasted until the \u201cWar to End All Wars\u201d ended the lives of over 20 million people, while wounding even more. Like Picasso\u2019s African and Cubist work, the war surely offered a different perspective. \u00a0It was all so logical and technological, the height of modern efficiency, yet seemed conjured up from the darkest pit of hell. It gave one a different understanding of time and space, and relativized plenty of bromides. Curtin remembered reading with sardonic amusement the words of Freud, who was so disappointed by the great white man\u2019s betrayal of his highest \u201cideals\u201d by waging the First World War:<\/p>\n

We had expected the great world-dominating nations of white race upon whom the leadership of the human species has fallen, who were known to have world-wide interests as their concern, to whose creative powers were due not only our technical advances towards the control of nature but the artistic and scientific standards of civilization – we had expected these people to succeed in discovering another way of settling misunderstandings and conflicts of interest.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This memory of the great white father\u2019s racist thoughts so discombobulated his mind that for a few minutes he had to find a seat and close his eyes in meditation. He remembered that Freud, the atheist, had his consulting room filled with hundreds of ancient figurines of gods and goddesses that created the effect of an eerie sacred chamber where religious rites were performed.\u00a0 Like a temple or a museum, he meant this room to suggest that this art and these artifacts from other times and places and the land of memory could effect magical cures on those who came for the cure of their souls.\u00a0 For a minute he thought he was in Freud\u2019s consulting room and was free-associating.\u00a0 Then he opened his eyes to see Picasso\u2019s mask staring down at him.<\/p>\n

Curtin mused about these connections as he read the anthropological wall plaques explaining how, over a century or more, \u201cthe decolonization of the colonial gaze\u201d has been taking place.\u00a0 He thought this very good, and was looking forward to the parallel exhibit \u2013 \u201cHere We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art\u201d \u2013 that was meant to exhibit this change.\u00a0 He wondered if the artists who created this new art of the decolonized gaze grasped the nature of the new colonialism, if they knew of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) and NATO countries\u2019 military penetration of the African continent, of the World Bank\u2019s and the International Monetary Fund\u2019s control, of the NGO\u2019s work with the CIA and USAID and foundations that were masks to hide the true nature of continued Western control without the use of the term \u201ccolonies.\u201d \u00a0Taking back the gaze was but a first step.<\/p>\n

Curtin\u2019s primary odyssey, however, was to try to unmask the true font of power in the contemporary world.\u00a0 The world had suffered a series of radical breaks with historical continuity and loss of identity with place, starting shortly after Adams was born in the mid-nineteenth century.\u00a0 Space and time had been contracted by the new technology. Adams had contemplated the dynamo. The computerized cell phone was its current symbol, and its evil twin the concentrated power of nuclear weapons. \u00a0The modern mind had suffered severe dislocation and confusion.\u00a0 All the ruins, antiques, and artifacts of the past that were collected and commodified over the last 150 years could no more restore lost identities than could the prolific growth in museums in the same period.\u00a0 The museums were the mausoleums of societies dying from within. \u00a0\u00a0As he walked around the exhibit, he realized that Picasso, for all his obvious talent, and especially with the works that comprised this show, had no solution.\u00a0 He was a symptom of the depth of the problem, the neurotic symptom that allowed for an ersatz solution, which was, of course, no solution.\u00a0 Like a neurotic who goes for help with his symptoms that have squeezed the life out him but help him hide from his true problems, Picasso\u2019s masks, distortions, and play-acting art were impotent.\u00a0 Seemingly potent and wildly celebrated, they hid the \u201cextinction of living inner religiousness,\u201d as Spengler put it, that was disappearing from so much of the world, particularly Europe and the United States, the countries that have embraced militarism and war-making as their nihilistic modi operandi.\u00a0 Even the women that populate so much of Picasso\u2019s work \u2013 \u201cFor me there are only two kinds of women,\u201d he said, \u201cgoddesses and doormats.\u201d \u2013 these women of all shapes and poses, do not offer us a true clue to the power of the Virgin Adams was contemplating alongside the dynamo.<\/p>\n

As an only brother with seven sisters, Curtin had grown up among women.\u00a0 He learned that they, like him, were complex, surely neither goddesses nor doormats.\u00a0 \u00a0One of his sisters had been an artist of rare power.\u00a0 She wished to live as a liberated woman before society sanctioned this.\u00a0 Her art couldn\u2019t save her.\u00a0 She died by her own hand, terribly torn between a depraved and distorted religious orthodoxy and dreams of spiritual and artistic freedom.\u00a0 She seemed to him to be a genuine symbol of the nature of modern life, where people yo-yoed back and forth between equally false solutions without grasping the larger cultural and social forces at work. He sensed her tragedy was the tragedy of so much history, where a reactionary cycle seemed to operate. Technology, colonialism, industrialization, the relativization of thought and religion preceded Picasso\u2019s grasping of African art and what was perceived as its magical qualities.\u00a0 France for years had been abuzz with the occult, esoterica, magic, trances, etc. Madame Blavatsky and her ilk were celebrated as liberators.\u00a0 Then came the Cubist revolution that ended in France in 1914.\u00a0 The war that brought such vast physical suffering and death ushered in a death in the soul, what John Berger called \u201cinverted suffering,\u201d that created vast confusion in people\u2019s minds as they became lost within themselves trying to comprehend the absurdities that ensued and what it all could possibly mean.\u00a0 Logic had been turned on its head where it remains, but technology has triumphed.\u00a0 Or so it thinks.<\/p>\n

Curtin was exhausted.\u00a0 He grasped Adams\u2019 disillusionment.\u00a0 For years he had diligently studied and written about the three political assassinations that had marked his life: JFK, MLK, and RFK.\u00a0 Doing so had become a spiritual necessity for him.\u00a0 He knew why and how they were killed.\u00a0 He knew the culprit: the CIA, the masters of the dark arts.\u00a0 And he knew that the killers had used all the tricks and masks in the magician\u2019s playbook to confuse and confound the American public.\u00a0 They had used technology and drugs and art and artists and writers and culture and the mass media to sow bewilderment, to disassociate the minds of average people already confused by the unraveling of history and identity that started in Adams\u2019 day.\u00a0 It had been a long century and a long day.<\/p>\n

He wished to report his findings, and thought of ending with the following paragraph, that while true, was not a very definitive ending, surely not an answer to the enigma that the day\u2019s wandering had brought him:<\/p>\n

America has always taken tragedy lightly.\u00a0 Too busy to stop the activity of their twenty-million-horse-power society, Americans ignore tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the world learns to regard assassinations as a form of hysteria, and death as neurosis, to be treated by a rest cure.\u00a0 Three<\/em> hideous political murders, that would have fattened the Eumenides with horror, have thrown scarcely a shadow on the White House.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No doubt it would have made an eloquent conclusion, but since these were Adams\u2019 words, written in 1902, he thought best of it.\u00a0 The words are still true, and sent a shiver down his spine when he remembered them.\u00a0 But he knew they would not satisfy his restless, conspiratorial mind or anyone who might read it.\u00a0 He reminded himself that all his study had led him to the conclusion that life and history are far more obvious than the world prefers to believe.\u00a0 The problem is that people prefer unbelief to belief, mirages to water.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world is becoming a giant military base,\u201d wrote the great Latin American writer, Eduardo Galeano, \u201cand that base is becoming a mental hospital the size of the world.\u00a0 Inside the nuthouse, which ones are crazy?\u201d<\/p>\n

Curtin was standing in the middle of the gallery lost in thought.\u00a0 An attendant came up to him and tapped him on the shoulder.\u00a0 \u201cSir,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s closing time.\u201d<\/p>\n

So out of the museum Curtin and his wife walked.\u00a0 They found a little French restaurant where they ate a delicious meal accompanied by fragrant wine.\u00a0 All his dilemmas disappeared for the nonce.\u00a0 He forgot the purpose of his long odyssey around town.\u00a0 While walking back to their hotel under a resplendent full moon, he was at peace.\u00a0 The world was beautiful, as he knew it was.\u00a0 As they undressed, he promised himself he would dream the answer to his quest and in the morning would visit our lady of the harbor and tell her his dream.<\/p>\n

But morning came with no breakthrough. But he had promised the lady a last visit, at least to apologize and to ask forgiveness for his ignorance.\u00a0 He walked to Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours. He glanced at his watch and realized he had first arrived here exactly twenty-four hours before. He was back where he started. \u00a0He felt had gone in a circle and had no great insight to show for it.\u00a0 He glanced up to Our Lady a bit ashamed and entered the chapel. \u00a0It was empty and silent.\u00a0 Curtin sat in a pew half-way down and let the silence envelop him as he meditated. He listened.\u00a0 Would she speak to him?\u00a0 \u00a0Minutes passed, when he was startled by the sound of the door behind him opening.\u00a0 He heard footsteps as someone walked down the aisle. It felt like an intrusion, and he was irritated. \u00a0A man slipped into the aisle next to him.\u00a0 It was the dead Leonard Cohen.\u00a0 He gave Curtin a wry smile.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t look any different.\u00a0 He said nothing and looked straight ahead. Then he started singing his angelic song, and Curtin knew he had arrived at an answer beyond explanation, but one that went so deep it didn\u2019t need one.\u00a0 The power of song; that was it.\u00a0 Curtin had long felt but never expressed that nothing moved and unsettled him more than songs, and so he had both fled and embraced them in an alternating cycle of futility down his days. \u00a0Now his tears were tears of joy that overwhelmed him as he listened to Leonard sing \u201cSuzanne.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wishes to share with you such beauty, and wonders what Henry Adams would think.\u00a0 No doubt our lady of the harbor, Notre Dame, was enchanted.<\/p>\n

Ladies and Gentlemen, here is Leonard Cohen, alive and well, singing<\/p>\n

Suzanne<\/a>.<\/h3>\n

______________________________________________________<\/u><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Curtin\u2019s primary odyssey was to try to unmask the true font of power in the contemporary world. The world had suffered a series of radical breaks with historical continuity and loss of identity with place, starting shortly after Adams was born in the mid-nineteenth century. Space and time had been contracted by the new technology. Adams had contemplated the dynamo. The computerized cell phone was its current symbol, and its evil twin the concentrated power of nuclear weapons. The modern mind had suffered severe dislocation and confusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}