{"id":245186,"date":"2023-10-02T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=245186"},"modified":"2023-10-01T04:48:11","modified_gmt":"2023-10-01T03:48:11","slug":"waiting-for-an-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/10\/waiting-for-an-apocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"Waiting for an Apocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cMethod, Method, what do you want from me?\u00a0 You know that I have eaten of the fruit of the unconscious.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 \u2013 Jules Laforgue, Moralit\u00e9s l\u00e9gendaires<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

29 Sep 2023 – <\/em>The other day my wife attended an event at a well-appointed home in town where men in dark suits stood around to provide a sense of security that no harm would come to the visitors, even though the angel of death had visited this house on previous occasions, for it was a funeral home, well-steeped in boxing people up for the journey to the underworld.\u00a0 So to call it a \u201chome\u201d is really a misnomer; that might sound cozy, but it is really a way station for the dead.\u00a0 A layover.<\/p>\n

Mistakenly thinking that she was attending a traditional wake and the dead person\u2019s corpse would be there in a coffin, I suggested that she check out the casket and, if she liked its wood and the softness of its velvet liner, to inquire whether they had any sales going on, especially if they had a buy-one-get-one-free sale like the local supermarket often has for English muffins and other goodies.<\/p>\n

I think she forgot to ask, but she did tell me that the elderly woman who died had been cremated weeks ago and that her ashes were in a box on a table.\u00a0 Boxes, ah, little boxes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I have long wondered why so many people are enchanted by sunsets, why they travel to see them and gasp in wonder that the sun disappears and night comes on.\u00a0 Colorful yes, but not as glorious as the sunrise, the rosy-fingered dawn of every new day.\u00a0 Why celebrate the death of the day and our journey into the underworld of sleep and the cave of dreams rather than the dawn of our awakening and new life.\u00a0 Jokes aside, morbidity is not life-affirming.\u00a0 The true apocalypse \u2013 Greek apokalyptein<\/em>, uncover, disclose, reveal \u2013 is every dawn\u2019s epiphany when we can dream while awake and create.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In Apuleius\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em> there is the story of Cupid and Psyche, the former being a male god and the latter a female human.\u00a0 Psyche, who has lost her lover Cupid but wants him back, is tricked by the goddess Aphrodite who challenges her, if she wants Cupid back, to take the dangerous journey to the underworld to retrieve a box of beauty cream.\u00a0 Psyche goes and gets the box but is tempted to open it since it would enhance her already beautiful human appearance.\u00a0 When she does, she falls into a deathlike sleep.\u00a0 It\u2019s an old story, forever new.\u00a0 Switch the sexes if you wish.\u00a0 Take 200 vitamin pills a day as many billionaires and other assorted crazies do intent on becoming immortal gods.\u00a0 Good luck.\u00a0 Get uploaded or downloaded into a computer, whichever it is, and live forever.\u00a0 Maybe watch the sun set or perchance wake up.\u00a0 And although Psyche is given a Hollywood ending when she is saved by Zeus and made immortal with the other gods in Olympus, that\u2019s just an old movie.\u00a0 We live by facts these days, not myths.\u00a0 Ah, boxes.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The Boxer<\/strong><\/a> by Simon & Garfunkel<\/p>\n

I am just a poor boy, though my story\u2019s
\nseldom told
\nI have squandered my resistance for a
\npocketful of mumbles
\nSuch as promises
\nAll lies and jest
\nStill a man hears what he wants to hear
\nAnd disregards the rest, hmm<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

***<\/p>\n

Children love boxes within which they often hide their collections for safekeeping.\u00a0 Give a child a box with a lid and it will be filled in no time.\u00a0 Filled with little things that symbolize for children the vast infinity of secret space that is their hold on time.\u00a0 Children are born poets and philosophers who over time are usually dulled by adults around them from whom they learn to hide their secrets and the questions these secrets raise.\u00a0 The secrets often fester and die, only to live on in repressed lives.\u00a0 I knew a man who collected cigar boxes.\u00a0 They were everywhere in his house when he died.\u00a0 Most were empty.\u00a0 His wife outdid him with her collection of empty boxes: shoe boxes, jewelry boxes, every kind of box imaginable.\u00a0 All empty.\u00a0 Were they waiting to be filled?\u00a0 With what?\u00a0 Secrets? Another woman I knew had a box with an envelope inside marked, \u201cMy Father\u2019s Magic Envelope \u2013 AKA Miracles.\u201d\u00a0 It was empty.\u00a0 She pictured herself as a boxer in a sketch she drew, a child without a face with boxing gloves.\u00a0 I can only guess at the secrets she was fighting to remember or forget. The experimental method is based on repetition, but so too is trauma.\u00a0 Internment is not just for the dead.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Boxed in, boxed up, housed, enclosed. trapped, contained, caged , enveloped, bounded, penned, corralled, trapped: calling from my cell for help?\u00a0 The screen lights up with a concatenation of phantom images that seize the mind, what the Greeks called eidolon<\/em>.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s forget about Pandora\u2019s box, which was actually a jar in the original story.\u00a0 Its last content being hope.\u00a0 I once knew a girl named Hope.\u00a0 She was very seductive. But I sensed she was trouble and escaped when she started to open up about her secrets.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t very curious, just afraid.\u00a0 So long, Hope, \u201cit\u2019s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.\u201d\u00a0 Thanks, Leonard.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

There are countless political analyses of what drives the United States\u2019 ruling forces in their systematic, brutal, and remorseless wars of aggression around the world.\u00a0 The perpetual effort to expand an empire originally built on the blood of indigenous people<\/a>.\u00a0 The refusal to live in peace within national boundaries. \u00a0The pushing of NATO expansion up to Russia\u2019s borders.\u00a0 It seems insane, which of course it is.\u00a0 But what is behind such madness?\u00a0 The secret may be quite simple.\u00a0 Again the ancient Greeks come to mind as Roberto Calasso writes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, <\/em>quoting the historian Jacob Burckhardt, when he wrote of the secret of war-loving Sparta: \u201cBut the power of Sparta seems to have come into being almost entirely for itself and for its own self-assertion, and its constant pathos was the enslavement of subject peoples and the extension of its own dominion as an end unto itself<\/strong>.\u201d\u00a0 Power as an end in itself.\u00a0 Realizing this is apocalyptic in the revelatory sense, for it opens the box on the secret nihilism of the U.S. ruling elites.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I am waiting
\nto get some intimations
\nof immortality
\nby recollecting my early childhood
\nand I am waiting
\nfor the green mornings to come again
\nyouth\u2019s dumb green fields come back again
\nand I am waiting
\nfor some strains of unpremeditated art
\nto shake my typewriter
\nand I am waiting to write
\nthe great indelible poem
\nand I am waiting
\nfor the last long careless rapture
\nand I am perpetually waiting
\nfor the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
\nto catch each other up at last
\nand embrace
\nand I am waiting
\nperpetually and forever
\na renaissance of wonder<\/p>\n

\u2013 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, \u201cI Am Waiting,\u201d for jazz accompaniment<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Edward Curtin, Ph.D. <\/em>is a widely published author and a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>.<\/em> His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/em><\/a> – email: <\/em>edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finding Hope Living Outside the Box<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245186","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\/245186","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=245186"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245236,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245186\/revisions\/245236"}],"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=245186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}