OCCASIONAL COMMENTS ON PSCHO-ANALYTIC MATTERS + CONTIBUTIONS fromMICHAEL ROLOFF Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html "MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce} "Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben]

Friday, May 15, 2015

SCREEN MEMORY # 2 – FIRST BOMBS



SCREEN MEMORY TWO – “FIRST BOMBS”
By Michael Roloff

 An unfamiliar roar, like continuous thunder, is waking me and I rear up in bed as two lightning bolts flash and strike, near simultaneously, followed near instant by peals of thunder, window glass shatters – had I been clutching the Steif monkey that I then let go off? or toss. At any event, I leap out of bed and rush to the window that looks out on the woods, open its two panels, shards all around, and hear Mara, the German Shepherd yowling hysterically in her enclosure, a yowling that turns into a keening, more and more high pitched and then ceases, throttled: the roar of planes disappearing in a north-westerly direction – Ah that’s what that was. I had heard talk of bombers.
Der erste Luftangriff auf Bremen erfolgte in der Nacht vom 18. zum 19. Mai 1940.
     It took me a long time to fall back asleep, hugging my Steif Monkey that my parent had brought back from one of their travels, I recall hanging on to it until one of its pink ears became moth-eaten.
   When I awake earlier than usual the following morning, earlier than anyone else, I sneak down the staircase and walk out onto the veranda and notice that the glass of all the large windows has shattered, the shards of glass looking like tear drops in the flower heads in the sun.
Walking  down the few steps of the veranda and turning right, out to Mara’s Zwinger [enforcer] enclosure on a section of the lawn not visible from the veranda - a square 100 by 100 foot shady area adjacent to the woods which bore the name “croquet” playing ground - I am shocked:  Mara is hanging by her collar from the highest part of the fence;  she committed suicide is a remembered thought of that moment.
Klinner, our foreman, came by about the same time and told me that two bombs had fallen near the riding rink, about 150 yards off, leaving two craters in the ground, “like graves” he said, that large and deep, right next to each other. The story went, so Klinner said, that the British bombers were afraid to actually penetrate the air-space over Bremen which was defended by dirigibles with razor wire sharp enough to cut the bomber wings, which is why they dropped their bombs at the outskirts of town.”
     This event is the inception of what I call my “Expulsion from Paradise,” in Spring 1940. As compared to the first screen memory, in this instance, of the first bombs, I realize that memory has edited the events, compounded them and rearranged them. I was indeed wakened by two bombs that fell simultaneously 100 some yards off in the Fir Place woods, but lightning strikes and simultaneous thunder derive from other experience, were projections of that moment to make sense of it, and signify the shock of the totality of this experience – the shattered windows, the suicidal dog, the expulsion from Paradise which the bombs elicited - the next day I and my governess were sent packing to an allegedly safer venue.
    Moreover, the flash of two 500 pound bombs exploding on the ground, at least one hundred yards away, in the woods, is not visible through a thick fir forest; no doubt the sound of thunder elicited a hallucinated lightning flash in my mind ex post facto. Fantasy has added its components, the most serious being m five-year-Old's assumption that the German shepherd Mara had committed suicide – leaving Fir Place elicited suicidal impulses in me, I hated leaving. The next time I recall feeling suicidal was when my father spanked me for being disobedient and going with Klinner to pick up coal in the horse and wagon during impending air raids in July 1944. {The 19th of July Section]
    The terrified, hysterical shepherd dog indeed strangled herself with her collar at an upper part of the fence of her enclosure [The Zwinger] but “Enforcer” also refers to my governess whose orders whose numerous “nos” elicited my resistance and fury; say, the fury of a stubborn Billy-goat; the dog’s fury also signified my near suicidal fury at having to leave paradise in company of my enforcer, my governess. In other words, the details have been, in the long meanwhile, over-emphasized, compacted, over-determined, and that is why these details most likely have been remembered all these many years, whereas other less emotionally determined recollections are not, or do not seem as accessible.
     The drops of dew in the flowers, not just the shattered shards of glass, also signify my tears; however, since I can be said to have been crying inside since I was taken from my mother at age nine months, those tears too are over-determined. Loss loss loss. There was a time during the many years that I carried this book with me that I was going to call the memoir “Irretrievable Losses.” This commentary, in other words, appears to be necessary in telling this event which elicited hectic activity of the inhabitants of the villa with the result that within a day my father’s chauffeur Schmidt and Maybach automobile takes me and my governess to the St. Magnus suburban station, a five-year-old, sad-looking boy and a dowdy spinster - image for a film!
However, before departing from my paradise it appears that I took one more 4 & ½ years old’s amble through the forest. If the clearing that you could see from my bedroom window was the first section of Fir Place to become laden with dream imagery - for the Billy goat chasing me up to the clearing in my first nightmare - the croquet area where Mara strangled herself in her terror, then became the second area to acquire an extra charge.
Soon after, the enclosure was dismantled as were the last remnants of playing croquet – the mallet, the wire goals, the colored balls – a big chopping block was placed there, and as “chopping block area” it would serve for a second huge event in my life a few years hence: the spot whence I witnessed the arrival of the first wagon load of refugees in Spring 1945 – the inception of a few idyllic years that ended with the inception of the Cold War in 1947.
    Forgetting momentarily about the significance of the pond and the willow-lined path between the pond and marshy meadow to the left - the third areas to be specifically laden with memories and fears  - were the two bomb craters near the riding rink, well on the other side of the road that skirted the pond before the road leads back up the chestnut alley to the house. It appears I made an expedition to the bomb site and looked at the two grave-length bomb beds is what they looked like more than funnels or craters, as though the two-some had landed as a pair, sideways. When I made my first awkward colored pencil drawings – in another year or so - it was of the most awkward bombers tossing sausage-like bombs. By then I was secreted away in the far south-eastern part of the then still expanding Reich and must have got heard r or even seen in that Bavarian village what village boys did by throwing shit at each other which is what bombers appeared to do in my drawing, long sausages filled with brown! at the stage of sadist anality for sure, or is it monkeydom that village boys reside in at that stage of their life. So if bombers threw shit, the two bomb craters or graves were what??? I kept thinking of them, and that they were so near to the fox holes the side of the riding rink that had been cut out of the slope.


Bombs, bombers, sirens and bombing traumas of various kinds  - bomb and ack ack shrapnel - marked the remainder of WW II as well as man subsequent experiences.
        The “Otis Media” {Middle Ear Infection-Tonsillitis] section plays in May 1944 while I am having my tonsils removed in an above-ground bunker hospital in Bremen while the city is under attack and this beton bunker as well as everything inside is tremoring. During a visit to my parent’s Budapester Strasse apartment in 1943 I either fantasize or hear the animals in the near-by zoo screaming during a night time raid – I tend to think this is a hysteri- induced fantasy, but it pursued me for years and into a story I wrote in 1955. The final, the Alaska chapter of Screen Memories, features my first night forest fire-fighting near the Yukon with P-38s bombing fire retardant onto the line-fighters! Terror creates the most distinct memories it seems. I hear sirens from the greatest distances!






  

 

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

FIRST SCREEN MEMORY FROM "screen memories"

=C=
I always loved the ingenuity with which Freud solved some conundrums, such as "A Child is Being Beaten" or the Mystical Experience of the Wriging Pad & the Acropolis and here I am laboring with a major screen memory!

The Catastrophe Explicated

A: The scene is the following: a four year old child is ploppped into the middle of an oval electric toy railway network. At one end sits the child's father who manipulates the electric controls; at the other end, adjacent the toy railway tunnel, the child's maternal grandfather, stretched out on the floor all seven feet of him in leather hunting knickers with black splotches of dried blood. The object of the exercise, the exhibition demonstration - the wish - is to get two trains to pass through the tunnel in opposite directions simultaneously.

B: Let me be methodical and take the items one by one. Let me recount the sequence of events once more in detail & since a screen memory is like a frozen dream each detail refers to the dreamer, to me, and the possibility that the memory changes in my telling of it, dwelling on it, is an entanglement whose consequences I will not be able to control or to fathom. I know I will be projecting into the interpretation - memories of earlier traumas will be discovered which are not necessarily all that prominently evident here. (1)

C-Father announces that he will send two train in the opposite direction in that they pass under and through a tunnel simultaneously. My father really crouches, squats, an intense expression on his face, at the controls, at the knobs that control the electricity that powers the toy engines that buzz like hornets or bumble bees on the large oval network, and later, at moments of intense involvement, I, too, assume a similar intense expression.

D: The intention is to impress, a feat is to be performed! The grandfather is stretched out near the tunnel's opposite end. (As I myself will later in life, prefer to be.)
The women hover around.
   However, this big generous Christmas gift, is my father’s toy more than it is mine who has been placed into the center of the oval, I don’t have a photo of what I look like in the oval, but looking at photos of myself at that age, sniffing flowers, in my sandbox I imagine myself dressed in the same kind of toddler wool pants, whose scratchiness I can more than imagine, they still scratch the memory of my baby thighs.

E: My father has taken command of the gift and does not even have his son participate in his engineering feats. Single-minded. This first element of the memory also appears to contain the message that I am envious of being a mere spectator, that I was not in control, but that my father was of the knobs, the flow of electricity.

E-The trains start forth on the oval. As the train that passes nearest to my grandfather passes him he reaches for a switch near the tunnel, his index finger flicks the switch and the two trains crash inside the tunnel, do not pass through it, producing the angry noise of frustrated electric motors. The result is the catastrophe of two toy-trains colliding head-on inside a make-believe papier-mache green and grey alpine tunnel; two angry toy train engines sparking, hissing, growling inside a tunnel, heat followed by cold.

F: The father exclaims "Oh Werner, look at what you have done," knowing at once it appears that it had been the famous joker, his father in law - in his leather hunting knickers with the laugh-lines around his eyes and the verschmiztes, the mischievous expression - who is responsible for the industrial mishap, the ruin of his best-laid plans and demonstration of his engineering skills. The tunnel is lifted, the two locs are on top of each other, the rest of the trains are an entangled mess.

G: Yes, it really happened like that, and it happened at Christmas 1940. The war had begun, the western half of it. The other half, the German, Hitler’s perfidious 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, is still to come. 1940 would be my most memorable Christmas, it became the exemplary one, because the whole family was present, especially my grandfather, on vacation from a concentration camp (a brief Christmas visit during which grandfather and grandchild link up; as I was, at the moment of being in the oval, apparentently freed from my governess, Ms. No's supervision while in the oval observing these events, yet the oval is also a fence, a further ambiguous detail.), a matter that was neither told nor explained to me, because if I had been told... there would have to have been an explanation, a long series of explanations. How do you explain politics to a four year old? Family situations: yes - but you don’t even need to explain those, children’s antennae pick them up, mine certainly were attuned, I seem to have picked up my mother’s disappointment in her successful husband - the general manager, that Christmas, of an extensive toy railway network; and her preference for her father. Was I disappointed in this father, too? Well, based on the first nightmare (2) and the screen memory, which includes that head-on crash of two locomotives, he and I were at loggerheads from early on - and we remained so throughout his life and through my memory of him. Ancient animal stuff, inexorable, biologically based. I even became more unrelenting, or at least as unrelenting as I grew older as he had been during my childhood while he softened. Yet there remained something missing, the unhappy fighting relationship left a gap, the gap expressed itself occasionally in a longing to rest upon the breast of a big solid reliable man who might back me up - this aspect is a comparatively straightforward component of this otherwise, I think, complex screen memory.

H: Perhaps the most important matter to keep in mind is that there is the actual occurrence and then what use it has been put intra-psychically to create a plausible story - the secondary revision as it were. After all, this is one of the two memories of that fourth year of my life extra-uterine. They are both extreme concentrations of my life then. There are the surface events that fit a psychic event, or a series of psychic events, and that is why the surface becomes symbolic, surface and psychic events, traumas seem to mesh. Even then fated to be the translator of Handke's Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld? - That is a joke of course.

I: Although the actual scene is sociologically and historically interesting I am more interested, right now, in the intra-psychic projections, on the details and events of the railway accident.

J:-A toy railroad, an oval. I find myself in the center of that oval, the center of my self, my grandiosity split off from what I am observing, eyes darting back and forth between father and grandfather. The collision in the tunnel constitutes a breach in that circle, a narcissistic injury.

K-There is the control knob or knobs, for the juice, the electricity, that makes the locomotives run. That indicates to me that I masturbated, a fervent early childhood masturbator - but not only for the sake of pleasure but to assuage fears, while engaging in what fantasies? Train fantasies perhaps, tunnel fantasies? The tunnel is a representation of the anal cavity.

L: The switch, which is flicked, an act that hurts my penis even now when I think of it - I am reminded of my Mexican village and kids and adults instantly, instinctively shielding their genitals when they are afraid, and are not yet socially trained not to do so.

M: The flicking of the switch is what leads to the crash, the head-on collision; the presumption is that if it had not been flicked the two locomotives would pass each other in the tunnel without colliding - after all, that was my father's (my) plan, which was sabotaged.
     So what actually switches intra-psychically? Well, my affection switches to my grandfather. But I am prevented from being a switch hitter, the bi-sexual wishes, tendency is disrupted - I recall that during analysis my left arm and hand and foot became as powerful as my right side! The homophobia, as well as associated fear of being dominated, like a woman, is as evident here as in the first nightmare.
    After my grandfather's conspiratorial glance catches my attention he will lead my glance to his hand that flicks a switch just as one of the two trains is about to enter the tunnel: a switch is a Weiche in German, a softness is its other meaning, it also means to avoid, as in ausweichen, to avoid, Eiche weiche, Buche suche is a German proverb that advocates seeking out Beech trees during thunderstorms and avoiding Oaks - who knows whether there is any truth to it, whether lightning prefers Oak trees to Beech trees if given a choice! Step aside, don’t confront, whereas what happened within seconds was that crash of two toy locomotives crashing head-on inside the tunnel, and sparks, short circuiting, the furious sound of electrical motors grinding in utter frustration, until there is deathly silence, and my father William speaks up: “Oh Werner look at what you have done.” What a mess you have made, what a Bescherung!

N: What is most puzzling in many ways is not why that evening is so memorable, the evening of the “Bescherung” as it is called in German, of the “big mess”, but that no other evenings of that period are recalled! or whole days, which is yet another reason why it was, is, became so memorable? What is puzzling is that nothing else of that day, but my mother gifting the mystic writing pad, is directly memorable, nor of the day before, or of the day after, even though I can provide a general idea of my life as a four year old, how he got about in the woods, that I was in a harness leads to the supposition that young I was an Ausreisser (an escape artist) as of early on, possibly I had explored the entire woods, all 100 + acres of them by age four? Trundled down to the pond and meadow and clambered up the clearing in the woods on the other side? It appears I knew the clearing - it appears in my first nightmare: I has been told not to be “bockig”, not to be like a Billy goat, also I had been told not to play with the Billy goat that was used to trim the lawns. In the nightmare a Billy goat transformed into the Unicorn of fables that have been read to me and whose picture I have been shown, pursues me down the path towards the pond and meadow, I rush across the path - inter urinam and feces - the pond on the left, the marshy meadow on the right, and up into the grassy clearing, the slit, I a little would-be mother-ficker at age four, and that theme is re-iterated when I am chased to the inter-section of two fences - to the V - the Billy goat unicorn pins, seeks to pinion me from behind and I wakes in terror.

O: There is the bi-sexual conflict: on the one hand I am a would be mother-fucker, on the other I also am terrified of being fucked, in the behind, dominated, emasculated. In the screen memory the locs pile on top of each other, smash-up. That is why that Christmas became a screen memory from which the major fault lines, as in an earthquake, can be traced. It is a mother lode, a magnet for memories that I have carried with me all these years, a precious, deeply intriguing yet crude gemstone, an object that has not been smoothed out, no matter how much it has been worked over, this event - even after an analysis & an analysis of the anlysis, still produces associations, it is the richest of mines. So all this really happened and this sequence of events is one of the two events that I remember from that entire year, the other is of the bombs that will crash into the forest a few months hence, but for my first nightmare, and the smell of the flowers, but for the memories that those photos of me and my mother elicit. I recall this event as though it had occurred just now. From it I can reconstruct the house, the orchards, the lawns, the fir forest; all entirely idyllic, but what transpired that evening is not. It is a screen memory, or rather: it is a memory each of whose details are drenched, laden with significance. The details have been arranged into a story, a configuration, an event has accumulated significant details, which, once they are analyzed, tell a very different story, or stories. The event impressed itself... it itself was a minor mishap that was quickly repaired. What transpired intra-psychically in in me, and found its expression in the story of the railway catastrophe is catastrophic, irreparable.

P: I had not been in a railway crash. My railway adventures lay ahead of me, although not by too many months. Whenever given the opportunity to go near a locomotive when a train is halted inside the numerous stations that my trains stops at, or if the train is halted outside a city, waiting for the green light, I will do so. The locomotives hissing, their steaming, their impatience to go to work, so animate despite its inanimate steel hulk were infinitely fascinating. Machines yet organic, like horses in some way the way they snorted and heaved and were rearing to go, steel steeds. LOKOMOTIV SVERDLOSK/ DYNAMO DRESDEN!
     Whenever one of the many trains that I took with my overseer governess had to stop outside a city and wait for the all clear to be able to proceed, or for other, less dire reasons, I leaned out the window to keep an eye on the loc. Locomotives were the embodiment of power, of potency and of impatience, of frustration released; the future experiences with locomotives, steam locomotives was projected backwards onto my experience at Christmas 1940/1941. But what collided psychically inside me so that the collision of two toy locomotives would become so memorable? so representative? So concretely symbolic?

What if there had been no gift of a toy railroad and demonstation? Might there have been such a great summary of the essence of the earliest major events in my life?

1) ABORGINAL TRAUMA:
Let me hark back to my then two majo traumas. The first was the transfer at age nine months from my mother’s face and breast to the dried up teats and grizzled face of my governess. Perhaps other infants would not have been so wounded, so traumatized as I was at an experience that changed from heaven to hell in one day. It was a crushing event. I did not take it well, I became so feverish that I started to waste away; then I turned ice cold, the absence of the mother, of her beautiful young breast with the face superimposed on it. - It was an incomprehensible event - how does a mother tell her infant that there are things she has to do for which she must be free? Nine months of love did not suffice for me especially since the surrogate was experienced as ugly: not only was she experienced as ugly, from the very beginning she was experienced as Ms. No - everything was no: I could no longer shit into my diapers! I was being potty trained; that warmth was gone too. Not only was she Ms. No, she was also experienced as someone who took charge of my life; she wanted to put on my socks, comb my hair, I became the possession of someone who sought to tried to thwart the charging locomotive; although whether she actually flicked at my “little one” when I masturbated I cannot tell, it might be a projection of the psychic onto the physical, but is one reason why I object so strongly to the idea of circumcising infants. It certainly was not my grandfather who did: his flicking flipping the switch is what might be called a displacement, a switching from what the governess did onto him, even the idea of displacement is illustrated, someone also had to “turn the knob”, and that idea was then transferred onto my father: you can regard the sequence of events as an attempt to regulate my infantile sexuality, my bi-sexual nature. What a beautiful sequence of events, isn’ it? What a perfect sequence of events to acquire a load of current! To be charged with analogies and significance! It is as though I dreamed up the story to tell all kinds of matters simultaneously. Is that all there is? As with most dreams there is no way of telling whether you have comprehended everything that transpire in it, there is no way of telling whether I have coaxed every bit of meaning, every analogy from this story of a railway crash, of this aborted bi-sexual wish.

2) Aboriginal Nightmare (ctd from main text): The clearing is the brightest spot in the woods, at all times of day and night, from my room on the second floor of our house I could look down the path and up to the clearing, which is called a “Schneise” in German, a word that sounds a lot like schneiden, to cut. And that is the feeling I had that morning, as though a knife had cut into my brain, benumbed. My entire life, I will periodically be cut down in that fashion. It is the kind of dream from which you might never recover, like the dream of the three wolves that cut down the Wolfman: A billy goat in the form of a unicorn chases me to the Scheise and beyond to the interesection where the Fir Place fences form a V - I am pinned, there is no escape in that ambiguous V, and I wake up in terror. That dream respeats itself about a year or two later after I have seen a dancing bear in Vornbach am Inn, and it is a bear who chases me into a spot of no escape. Living in Billy the Kid country in the mid-eighties, in the Sacramentoes, with a black bear in a nearby cave I buy myself a Bear tag, but the bear is frightened off by some Texas bear hunters before I can excercise the license that the tag provides; however, I manage to wrestle my two darling milk goats to the ground when they become too ornery, and am frightened to death to for them at the sight of the Billy Goat at the goat farm where I have taken them to be "serviced".

3) Asking myself the question whether the toy railroad was the only gift I received that Christmas it occurs to me that it must have been the same Christmas at which I received the magic reading tablet from my mother. After all, it is the last Christmas the family spends together for many years, and I, I will be a reader by springtime when I and my governess set out on our travels... There is that pensive moment when my mother introduces me to the magic of reading.

4) I found himself to be in cahoots with his grandfather, a famously conspiratorial person I would read his being described later in life, I found out early what complicity could be, The seductiveness of a gleam in an eye!

5) I clamber around the woods, around the flower beds, I have photos, and sniffing flowers has been a constant throughout life, what he looked like in his sandbox I know from photos: I can extrapolate from that magnet: I am with my governess, I is wearing a kind of wide-brimmed, floppy child’s sun-hat and look miserable... I assume because I am with my governess, an assumption I make based on my recollection that not for a single moment was I happy in her company during the seven years that she was in charge of me, into whose charge I kept being abandoned, only of her absence.


Saturday, May 2, 2015

THE Charlie Hebdo CONTROVERSY & P.E.N.

http://www.understandingcharliehebdo.com/

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/190694/pen-boycott#BHyTUrBWcleJEZQb.01

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/190749/paris-pen-boycott

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/if-you-don-t-speak-french-how-can-you-judge-if-charlie-hebdo-racist

http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/alain-mabanckou-remettra-le-prix-liberte-d-expression-de-pen-a-charlie-hebdo_1676505.html


http://www.wsj.com/articles/charlie-hebdo-is-heir-to-the-french-tradition-of-religious-mockery-1420842456

http://www.steamthing.com/2015/04/charlie-hebdo-and-the-previous-question.html

http://www.lemonde.fr/actualite-medias/twitter/2015/05/06/liberte-d-expression-le-pen-american-center-recompense-charlie-hebdo_4628309_3236.html




http://www.vice.com/read/we-spoke-to-seven-french-muslims-about-the-pencharlie-hebdo-controversy-535



http://www.france24.com/fr/20150506-charlie-hebdo-new-york-prix-liberte-expression-gala-pen-recompense

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/27/read-letters-comments-pen-writers-protesting-charlie-hebdo-award/


http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/5/pen-america-charlie-hebdo-and-the-virtue-of-self-restraint.html




La lotta continua

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121753/risks-siding-french-secularism?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=TNR%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%20-%205%2F11

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/01/europe_s_confused_debate_about_islam_and_terrorism_europeans_are_both_too.html

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/27/read-letters-comments-pen-writers-protesting-charlie-hebdo-award/

http://www.thenation.com/blog/205897/charlie-hebdo-deserves-its-award-courage-free-expression-heres-why


https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/on-pen-and-charlie-hebdo/


https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/against-cosmo-conscientiousness/


 http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/04/30/403266819/more-than-90-writers-join-protest-of-free-speech-award-for-charlie-hebdo


http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/how-and-why-6-writers-denounced-pen.html


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/27/pen-writer-protest-charlie-hebdo-award_n_7149656.html


http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/pen-has-every-right-to-honor-charlie-hebdo


http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121748/arrested-development-and-aesthetic-failure-charlie-hebdo?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=TNR%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%20-%205%2F8%2F15



 Jesusl I find the HEBDO cartoons so over the top that I consider anyone who cannot laugh their head off at them to be he worst of dunces. So the question of dissonance between intent and effect does not arise for me. And if they changed as Jeff suggests they do the way Crumb & other American cartoonists changed I think they would lose the ability to make me laugh., The question of political correctness - HEBDO is beyond that! Well, as to senstitivities: what makes Islamists so hyper-sensitive to the slightest of slights? Perhaps HEBDO has not done a good enough job in getting them to laugh at themselves?
They ought to be got to laugh so hard that they implode instead of massacre cartoonits etc.

 http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/05/05/eliot-weinberger/a-new-hero-for-pen/



http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/new-charlie-hebdo-issue-skewers-pen-critics/?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/books/charlie-hebdo-award-at-pen-gala-sparks-more-debate.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Charlie Hebdo

Religion has been defined as “the opium of the masses” & it appears and it has been said that within the context of homo {allegedly) sapiens's development from the dawning questioning of the whys and wherefores of existence religion served a palliative narrative function, and it did so, invariably by elevating immediate, family relations into a godly status, into supernal realms. That stage allegedly constituted the infancy of reason and it produced priests who served to maintain the various truth claims & ensure obedience to various rules and rituals, and did so for the powerful who had and continue to have vested interests in uniformity of belief.
(The need for “belief” in this context can be regarded as a form of “addiction.”)
Retrospectively, these elevations, in the form of revered images & architecture & music & texts & practices are regarded as having artistic value, enticements, embellishments – i.e. attend Mass at the Cathedral of Burgos on Todos Santos and how can you not be (at least secretly) an addict to Catholicism for the rest of your life!
Focusing on the three sectarian-prone major strains of the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity & Islam – it becomes evident that no matter their common ancestry (and what commonalities they continue to share) each of them makes the claim to be the only true and valid one; indoctrinate their children in their beliefs & oppose any divergence from these norms, and tend to be vengeful when its claims are attacked, and when a split occurs, most famously currently the one between Shiites & Sunnis: in other words each religion exhibits certain all too human-beastly qualities, one of which is narcissistic sensitivity. Judaism, except until very recently, until the founding of Israel (that is within the time span of intra-religious warfare of these three strains) has not been in the position to commit the kinds of conversion slaughter that, historically, marks the spread of Christianity & of Islam and of the sectarian warfare within Christianity and Islam, although Judaism, too, is marked by differentiations into sects.
Recent history would make one believe that the adherents of Islam are especially hyper-sensitive to any form of disrespect of their beliefs, and indeed it seems to takes little to get masses of them to mount outraged demonstrations, let us just think back to the split that produced the states of India and Pakistan; historically, Christianity & Hinduism, however, have proved equally sensitive. So it is not a matter of which or what religion but of human identification with one or the other of them that appears to be at stake, and critique, lack of respect, of the slightest kind can elicit the most violent response by those whose apparently fragile identity is threatened. The volatility of the issue is evident from the reaction of the one LIVING expansionist religion within secularized Europe (and of course a hundredfold more in the region that stretched from the Far to the Near East and farther West). Nationalism can serve the same identity-forming purposes and critiques of it elicit the same ferocious responses; fundamentalisms of various kinds are as tetchy as ever to burn witches.
Within that historical context and within the context of French history the very existence of an equal opportunity offender satirical magazine like Charlie Hebdo & its marvelously puerile ENTIRELY OVER THE TOP caricatures is unique: after all, you can be formally sentenced to death for far lesser forms of lack of respect in many an Islamic state and, informally, murdered en masse by ISIL & its LARGE variety of similar manifestations of fundamentalist Islam.
The Islamist reactions to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons thus show deadly humorlessness, although I wonder whether certain sitting Israeli ducks, subjected to the same treatment, would be welcomed with the same laughter.




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MICHAEL ROLOFF http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name exMember Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html "MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce} "Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben] contact via my website http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html