39

Patrick’s Endgame When Words Fall on Deaf Ears

Edward Curtin

“I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent.”
Samuel Becket, Endgame

Before he went to Rockaway Beach to bury himself in sand up to his neck, Patrick said to me: “People ask me where I’ve been, and I tell them I’ve gone within to a place that’s so damn dim I can’t see them anymore. Then listen up, they tell me, to what’s going down these days, but my ears are blocked, yet they won’t stop, their tongues just flop like socks.”

He worried me, and I told him so, but he just smiled and added, “Up in the tower the cuckoo strikes his fist to stop the chiming of the bells.”

I told him it is was all very poetic but strange as hell. Why was he talking like that and why was he going to bury himself in sand?

He laughed and said, “Why not? There’s something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head. You’ve heard that one before?”

Inspired by his Irish compatriot, Samuel Becket, he wanted to make a point. What it was he wasn’t sure, only that it required a symbolic statement fitting for this Halloween season at a time of historical grotesqueries.

In some place in his mind he thought of his Aunt Winnie, who was always saying it was too late for her to change her life. She had been saying that ever since Patrick came over from Ireland decades ago. Hearing her, Patrick would think – then what’s the point of going on living, but he never said this to her.

His thinking was ambivalent, to put it mildly. He too was absolutely terrorized by the thought of death. He had these recurring dreams that he needed to use the toilet and everywhere he looked he was faced with toilets overflowing with shit. Every month or so, he would say to me, “To think, one moment you’re here and the next you’re not. I can’t get over it.” Yet he never could make the connection between his dream and his aunt’s neurosis.

Patrick and I had been friends for a long time and I had never known him to act like this. He was an accomplished poet but also a very good musician. When we were in our early twenties, we had been in a band together, The Young Artists. We took the name from James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Patrick had been born in Cork, Ireland and moved to the Woodlawn section of the north Bronx when he was eighteen, just out of high school. He was living with his aunt and uncle, who were our next door neighbors, and that’s how we met. He had an eye for one of my sisters, but that’s a story I’d rather not touch.

We were both big fans of Joyce and fancied ourselves young artists, wild bon vivants in the mold of J.P. Donleavy’s character in The Ginger Man, Sebastian Dangerfield. Donleavy had grown up a few blocks over in the neighborhood and we both loved his wild use of language and poetry. We also loved Guinness and the neighborhood pubs, all of them Irish, with rollicking music on the weekends and young women as crazy as we were.

Our buddy Diego Sandoval, who grew up in Mexico City and whose father, a psychiatrist, knew Fidel Castro, was a member of our group. Diego loved Nietzsche and his idea of the music of forgetting. He loved to free associate, so the three of us would often improvise songs in English and Spanish with a little Gaelic thrown in. It was very Joycean, so like Leopold Bloom, and we often weren’t sure what we were singing but there were times when some spot of magic seemed to touch us and everything made sense. What started as a farce ended as a feast.

Patrick says it’s all a farce now, a spectral theatrical show, just look at the news, it all repeats itself and people never seem to wise up. He thinks everyone is like his Aunt Winnie now, anxiously waiting for death and disaster to strike but denying their repressed anxiety as they participate in a blatant political masquerade led by the phoniest crew of political actors who are leading the world toward nuclear annihilation. Death of the soul at the very least.

I sure as hell agree with him.  As I have said before but which I think bears repeating, this waiting business is a deadly and widespread game.

I remember reading somewhere that some sullen sage once said that life is what we do while we wait for death. It’s not the kind of wise-guy wisdom I would try to refute, especially with today’s widespread public insouciance as our political charlatans make a mockery of the sacredness of life.

The writer William Saroyan once said that he could enjoy thinking that an exception to death would be made in his case. Now that he’s dead for more than half as long as he lived, his enjoyment can be considered short-lived. Kaput.

But wishful thinking aside, there’s no question but that Mr. Death knocks at everyone’s door sooner or later, better never than late, to coin a phrase in reverse and revert to wishful thinking. Nevertheless, it’s hard to deny the fact that he’s coming and everybody’s waiting for his knock.

Unless, that is, you are in league with those technologists out in Silicon Valley, such as Ray Kurzweil of Google, who think they are going to employ technology to knock death dead and live forever. But even Ray is waiting for what he calls the Singularity to kick in – the day when humans and computers tie the knot and the former get uploaded or downloaded into the latter, I forget which, and death disappears as humans live in the “cloud.” In the meantime, Ray swallows a few hundred pills a day to keep chugging along until he reaches the promised land.

These artificial intelligence (AI) folks in Silicon Valley and at the World Economic Forum, all besotted on their machine dreams, seem to feel they’re smarter than Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Shakespeare, and other idiots we used to think wise, but I think George Carlin meant to include the Artificial Intelligence crowd when he said:

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

Of course, rather than knock, Mr. Death just might blow the house down. Although it’s a little impersonal and there will be no introductions, a lot of people are waiting for that. Like the early Christians who were eagerly awaiting the imminent end of the world, most people today are unconsciously waiting for a nuclear holocaust – to be seen on the evening news, of course, or maybe announced by a tweet or an instant message as they scroll their little crystal rectangles to see what’s going down.

Everyone will, that’s what going down.

The general consensus seems to be it will solve all problems, which is a brilliant insight in a Humpty Dumpty sort of brillig way in a looking-glass/ technological world where our most amazing technology is the nuclear bomb, rather recently joined in conjugal bliss with the computer that will save us from death.

In any case, what’s there to do? Keep waiting, that’s all, seems to be the popular approach. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think people were looking forward to meeting Mr. Death. For why else are they waiting without raising their voices in protest against U.S. nuclear first strike policy and the trillion-dollar modernization of American nuclear weapons announced by Barack Obama and continued under Donald Trump and Joseph Biden.  Why do they wait in silent fear and trembling as the United States military and CIA maraud across the planet killing and maiming to profit their capitalistic masters?  How can they possibly in good conscience wait while the Israelis with full American support try to obliterate all Palestinians in their ongoing genocidal bloodbath?

That’s the big picture, so to speak, the big waiting game. Waiting in the smaller sense can also kill you, or keep you going (but don’t ask where), depending on your point of view. There are endless variations to this waiting game with the smaller joined to the larger in a powerful synergy that freezes people in their tracks.

This sense of waiting for something terrible to happen permeates the air these days. The media and government pump out incendiary reports in an endless stream of things to fear in an effort to immobilize the population. Neurotic fears have long been known to be most effective tools of social control. When these can be manufactured in great and continuous numbers, they have a cumulative effect of creating growing social anxiety, which is the case today. It is no accident that the dramatic increase in drug usage to quell anxiety, nervous stress, and depression has occurred concurrently with the mainstream media’s propagandistic outpouring of fear-mongering and the drug industries relentless advertising campaigns for their psychotropic fixes.

The news is constantly suggesting that some “apocalyptic” event is just around the corner.

Like: there will be strong thunderstorms at 4:30 PM, or at least a 58.5% chance, so wear your helmet and take shelter.

Like: a woman in South Dakota ate a cherry that had a double pit that caused her to almost choke to death, so be very careful eating cherries; “almost” might be “really” in your case.

Like: the sun is very hot this year, so never step outside unless you are sprayed with chemical sunscreen from head to toe.

Like: there is a bug or bird or some critter that has recently been detected that is carrying a disease so deadly that if it flies by you within 11 ½ inches you will die a slow tortuous death in four days, five at the most.

Like: space aliens are coming for you if the Russians don’t get you first.

All kinds of neurotic fears are endlessly broadcast to keep folks on their anxiety-ridden toes while the real dangers go unmentioned and bubble under the surface. This is the corporate media’s job, of course, one they have perfected.

Wherever you go in the United States, you can see on people’s faces the strain of waiting for some absurd fear to become a reality, while things they should be fearing are repressed.  You can almost feel them holding their breaths in nervous anticipation. It keeps people occupied as they await every presidential election that is “the most important one in your lifetime.”

Yet no one laughs.

The recently deceased wonderful essayist Lewis Lapham said it eloquently in an issue of Lapham’s Quarterly:

In my capacity as human being, I’ve met with most if not all of the descriptives handed down from antiquity, but in my profession as journalist, I’ve encountered primarily the distinctions between what Sigmund Freud in 1917 defines as real fear and neurotic fear, the former a rational and comprehensible response to the perception of clear and present danger, the latter ‘free-floating,’ anxious expectation attachable to any something or nothing that catches the eye or the ear, floats the shadow on a wall or a wind in the trees. Real fear invites action, the decision to flee or fight dependent upon ‘our feeling of power over the outer world’; expectant fear induces states of paralysis, interprets every coincidence as evil omen, prophesizes the most terrible of possibilities, ascribes ‘a dreadful meaning to all uncertainty.’

Ironically, it was Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, the great red, white, and blue American propagandist, who took his uncle’s insights and used them in the service of corporate and government control. By inducing irrational fears of a foreign enemy – i.e. the Soviet Union in the 1950s – as he urged President Eisenhower, you could distract people from the real threat, which was their own government and the CIA with whom Bernays worked overthrowing the democratically elected president of Guatemala, among other evil projects.

Fake fears large and small could paralyze the average person and create loyalty to the state and capitalism. They would wait for their protectors to tell them what to do. The present Russia bashing and fear-mongering as well as Israeli propaganda is straight from Bernays’ play book.

Is it any wonder that Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot was such a popular play in the 1950s? Godot never came then and he’s not coming now, but waiting is still the name of the game. The character Vladimir sums up the waiting game:

Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?

It is not just waiting that recurs to me as Patrick undertakes his novel act on the slippery sands of Rockaway.  The autumnal season and especially this weekend of ghosts, the dead, and masks has me thinking once again of my own experience with acting, so I will repeat myself as in a second coming, in the hope of a visionary breakthrough, chimerical as it may be.

Having grown up as the only brother among seven sisters, I was always my parents’ favorite son. With such dumb luck, I never felt the need to be someone I wasn’t and so accepted my favored fate. But from an early age I learned from my sisters what it meant to “put on your face.” Like most girls in a cosmetic culture, they would stand or sit in front of a mirror dutifully applying lipstick, cover-up, and mascara (Italian, maschera, mask) in preparation for their entrances onto the social stage where they would face so many other faces facing and eyeing them. Mirrors meeting mirrors, the looking-glass selves. It seemed to the boy that it was an exhausting act.

At the time, I had only a dim awareness of the depth of people’s playacting, although I don’t think there was much playful joy in it.

I’ve been fascinated by masks, liars, and the role of acting on the social stage ever since I was three years-old and was posed before a large mirror for a professional photographer. Look in the mirror, son. Look at yourself looking at yourself. Pose for us. The photographer’s cigarette providing the smoke.

When Patrick and I met, we realized we had a common interest in the performative nature of social life and so we fashioned our songs and performances around this theme. Diego added great spontaneity. We believed we could use words in a poetical way to reach people below their everyday consciousness.

Patrick has lost his faith in words and thinks a stunt like burying himself in sand up to his neck, like Nag and Nell in Becket’s Endgame, both contained up to their necks in ash cans, might reach people.  I don’t.  Becket had an actual stage and mesmerizing words to match.  Even then, it took years for audiences to appreciate the play’s brilliance. They at first thought he was too depressing and now probably have no idea who he is.

Today is Halloween and Patrick therefore thinks his act might resonate with the day. I told him that I think the only thing he will accomplish is to suggest to people to put their heads deeper into the sand.

As Halloween and the coming weekend transpires, enchantment only increases. I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask. Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too meaning mask, ghost, or evil spirit. The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days, like the wind blowing the dry leaves everywhere.

While etymology might seem arcane, I rather think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Shakespeare was right, of course, “all the world’s a stage,” though it’s debatable whether we are “merely” players. It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.

But who are we behind the masks? Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth holes (the per-sona, Latin, to sound through).

Halloween. The children play at scaring and being scared. Death walks among them and they scream with glee. The play is on. The grim reaper walks up and down the street. Treats greet them. The costumes are ingenious; the masks, wild. The parents stand behind, watching, smiling. It’s all great fun, the candy sweet. So what’s the trick? When does the performance end?

As Halloween ends, the saints come marching in followed by the souls. All Saints. All Souls. The Days of the Dead. Spirits. Ghosts walk the streets. Dead leaves fall. The dead are everywhere, swirling through the air, drifting. We are surrounded by them. We are them. Until.

Until when? Perhaps not until we see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us.

Lying is the leading cause of living death in the United States, and the pharmaceutical companies have no prescription for this one. Not yet, anyway, as far as I care to know.

By the time you read this, Patrick’s performance will be over. I hope he planned to do it at high tide. Otherwise, Patrick’s endgame will be Patrick’s end.

Then I too will be at a loss for words.

Edward Curtinis an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.

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Ron Marr
Ron Marr
Nov 4, 2024 3:02 PM

Keep it simple…My mentor always stressed to leave yourself alone.Plato’s cave still dances all around the illusion of life and many still believe it is who they are and write about it. In my experience, all technology is the Reptilian surveillance of their human food farm. They are weak and fear your awaking to their deceitful game of virtual reality. Shut down their technology, be confident in our relationship in spirit. For together we form the human spirit the most powerful force on Earth. We must make the illusion of life in matter our own. A place where we can look ourselves in the eye and celebrate the only proof of our existence. Do not fall into their trap of violence, hatred, Fear, war and money. Without our participation THEY cannot exist. Consciousness is our ONLY salvation. YOU ARE THE POWER!

Martillo
Martillo
Nov 4, 2024 12:12 PM

“The sun shone having no alternative on the nothing new” and wallow we shall in the one liners from writer funeral directors and lovingly dwell on the nothingness, the apparent futility of being, dare I say the Sartrean gangrenous odour in a brutalized world run by psychopaths (who else would want to?) but the joy is all around and meaning can be invented if not found. The only thing sadder and more unbearable than a manic depressive is a contented nihilist. Bad as it all might be but it is what it is until all of us can come up with something better. Even then there will still not be good without evil, light without darkness and life without death even for the ruling cryogenic mutant electro reptilian filth and their refrigerated demon “souls”.
Enjoy the horror show, it’s all we got.

Lay Down Burden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMvg_y_ap90&ab_channel=KirkWheeler

Brian Steere
Brian Steere
Nov 4, 2024 10:50 AM

The breakdown of Communication persists a split mind driven to seek within futility of self-contradictory premises.
Beware the compulsive fascination of the mind in horror – & an addictive alignment with the ‘dynamic’ of conflict that seeks solution in the only place it cant be found (or allowed in).
Freedom to invest in an imagine of self-reinforcing conflict knows not freedom to release it.

ACIM UrText Chapter 15 – The Purpose of Time

The Uses of Time
T 15 B 1. The ego IS an ally of time, but NOT a friend. For it is as mistrustful of death as it is of life, and what it wants for you, IT cannot tolerate. The ego wants YOU dead, but NOT itself. The outcome of its strange religion MUST therefore be the conviction that it can pursue you BEYOND the grave. And out of its unwillingness for you to find peace, even in the death it wants for you, it offers you immortality in hell. It speaks to you of Heaven, but assures you that Heaven is not for you. How can the guilty hope for Heaven?

T 15 B 2. The belief in hell is inescapable to those who identify with the ego. Their nightmares and their fears are all associated with it.
The ego teaches that hell is IN THE FUTURE, for this is what ALL its teaching is directed to. HELL IS ITS GOAL. For, al‐ though the ego aims at death and dissolution as an end, IT does not believe it. The goal of death, which it craves for you, leaves IT unsatisfied. No‐one who follows the ego’s teaching is without the FEAR of death. If death were thought of merely as an end of pain, would it be FEARED?

T 15 B 3. We have seen this strange paradox in the ego’s thought‐ system before, but never so clearly as here. For the ego must SEEM to KEEP FEAR FROM YOU, to keep your allegiance. Yet it must ENGENDER fear, in order to maintain ITSELF. Again, the ego tries, and all too frequently succeeds, in doing both, but using dissociation for holding its contradictory aims together, so that they SEEM to be reconciled. The ego teaches thus: Death is the end, as far as hope of Heaven goes. But, because you and ITSELF cannot be separated, and because it cannot conceive of its OWN death, it will pursue you still, BECAUSE YOUR GUILT IS ETERNAL.

T 15 B 4. Such is the ego’s version of immortality. And it is THIS the ego’s version of time supports. The ego teaches that Heaven is here and now, because the FUTURE is hell. Even when it attacks so sav‐ agely that it tries to take the life of someone who hears it temporarily as the ONLY voice, it speaks of hell even to him. For it tells him hell is HERE, and bids him leap from hell into oblivion. The only time the ego allows anyone to look upon, with some amount of equanimity is the PAST. And even then, its only value is that it is no more.

T 15 B 5. How bleak and despairing is the ego’s use of time! And how TERRIFYING! For underneath its fanatical insistence that the past and future be the same, is hidden a far more insidious threat to peace. The ego does not advertise its final threat, for it would have its worshippers still believe that IT can offer the ESCAPE from it. But the belief in guilt MUST lead to the BELIEF IN HELL, and ALWAYS DOES. The only way in which the ego allows the fear of hell to be experienced is to BRING HELL HERE, but ALWAYS as a foretaste of the future. For no‐one who considers himself as DESERVING hell, can believe that punishment will end in peace.

T 15 B 6. The Holy Spirit teaches thus: There IS no hell. Hell is only what the ego has made OF THE PRESENT. The BELIEF in hell is what PREVENTS you from UNDERSTANDING the present, because YOU ARE AFRAID OF IT. The Holy Spirit leads as steadily to Heaven, as the ego drives to hell. For the Holy Spirit, Who knows ONLY the present, uses it to UNDO the fear by which the ego would make the present useless. There is NO ESCAPE from fear, in the ego’s use of time. For time, according to its teaching, is nothing but a teaching device for COMPOUNDING guilt, until it becomes all‐encompassing, and demands vengeance forever.
(my bold 😉

T 15 B 7. The Holy Spirit would undo ALL of this NOW. Fear is NOT of the present, but ONLY of the past and future, which do not exist. There is no fear in the present, when each instant stands clear and separated from the past, without its shadow reaching out into the future. Each instant is a clean, untarnished birth, in which the Son of God emerges FROM the past, into the present. And the present EXTENDS FOREVER. It is so beautiful and so clean and free of guilt, that nothing but happiness is there. No darkness is remembered, and his immortality and joy are NOW.

T 15 B 8. This lesson takes NO time. For what IS time, WITHOUT a past and future? It HAS taken time to misguide you so completely, but it takes no time at all to BE what you ARE. Begin to practice the Holy Spirit’s USE of time, as a teaching aid to happiness and peace. Take this very instant, NOW, and think of it as ALL THERE IS of time. Nothing can reach you here, out of the past, and it is here that you are COMPLETELY absolved, COMPLETELY free, and WHOLLY without condemnation. From this holy instant, wherein holiness is born, you will go forth in time without fear, and with no sense of change WITH time.

antonym
antonym
Nov 4, 2024 5:49 AM

Two different solutions for feeling powerless and depressed:

Recently average Chinese under the CCP losing money and faith resort to tang ping, “lying flat”, so do nothing.

Average Muslim Arabs with Palestinian status play the eternal victim card since 1950, which gives a lot of UNWRA (US$ 1.17 billion in 2022) income plus extra donations from gullible guilt-ridden non Muslims plus tax free Zakat from fellow Muslims, so each kid extra more means more $$$$.

Normal, non privileged refugees flee and get new nationalities, + ~ zero donations / UN money

Martillo
Martillo
Nov 4, 2024 12:19 PM
Reply to  antonym

Wait until the Khazar ZionaZi$ have to flee Semitic Palestine and head back to a ghetto near you and let’s see how they continue to “play the eternal victim card since 1950”, not to mention their beloved Hollowco$t card when their genocide no longer brings home the bacon to occupied Palestine…so to speak.

tonyopmoc
tonyopmoc
Nov 4, 2024 1:20 AM

I could be wrong, but I think World War 3 has been cancelled for tonight..something about floods and storms in Cyprus, wind in the wrong direction – the radiation from the nukes, will get blown back…The big landing base in Guam – Maldives has been given by the UK Government back to the Maldivians, and various peoples and tribes – like Mauritians – who have lived by the Indian Ocean for many thousands of years

In my experience, obviously it depends on local earthquakes and nukes and stuff

The Red Sea is nearly as Good as The Indian Ocean

Dunno about the Aussies Pacific – its a long way to fly

But it was nice to go to Cuba with my wife and kids…mainly because there were hardly any Americans there…

I do remember some coral – it wasn’t all white…But coral grows back – other wise we wouldn’t have such beautiful white sandy beaches in the world

If they let off all their bombs, almost all of us will be dead, and any survivors will be sitting on the kind of sands you get in the Med, after the latest volcano has gone off….and the lava has trickled down and solidified on the beach

So don’t do that even if you are a religious maniac, and you think our lovely earth is dying

Planet Earth just can’t stand you Malthusian lunatics in control.

Why do you want to kill us all?

FOAD Bye

Erik Nielsen.
Erik Nielsen.
Nov 3, 2024 11:06 PM

This will wake both you and Patrick up from your depressions: https://youtu.be/n2PN6-U4U14?t=3488 . Life is that easy man.

les online
les online
Nov 3, 2024 10:27 PM

Neurotic Anxiety rules the hoomin world: Security is the only conversation
in town. Everything, especially every genocide and destruction, is
rationalised as making a people secure…
Enough Security – there can never be enough security…
A world of competing struggles for Security…
One people’s Security can require another people’s annihilation…

And a touching story about a squirrel:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/squirrel

‘We have put Safety First, and if safety come first, it necessarily follows that
everything else comes after safety. There is no price too high for Safety, and
so we pay everything for it.’

NixonScraypes
NixonScraypes
Nov 3, 2024 9:01 PM

It’s better than burying yourself in sh!! you know what. And blatantly changing the subject, I repeat something I heard today: There was a protest in London about sewage in the rivers and the two causes blamed were: 1- climate change and 2 – greedy capitalists. One reason which was studiously ignored was the fact that the population of London has increased by about 3 million in the past 40 odd years. The reason it was ignored is that it is due to insane levels of mass over-immigration. We all know that pointing this out would be labelled “racist” which is why nobody dared mention it. If that isn’t suicidal insanity beyond the absurd, what is?

odi
odi
Nov 3, 2024 10:25 PM
Reply to  NixonScraypes

The suppose shit in the river or sea also works as a deterrent to keep people away from the energy of that nature.



Vagabard
Vagabard
Nov 3, 2024 7:52 PM

Better to wait for God than for Godot. The cuckoo cannot always shut out the clock’s chimes:

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” (John Donne)

judith
judith
Nov 4, 2024 12:35 PM
Reply to  Vagabard

I don’t rememer reading that entire quote. Thank you.

sandy
sandy
Nov 3, 2024 6:36 PM

The real paralysis is the result of universal peer pressure of like induced-fearing people attacking anyone not adhering to the bucket of FAKE fear disinformation they keep commoners saturated in. When liberals misread Trump’s (I am no fan) logical condemnation of an elite warmonger not facing bullets on THEIR battlefield and sending instead commoners to fight their wars, liberal peers in discussion with me were confused and puffed up. For the first time having to read for themselves what he actually said.

Trust of elite statements is collapsing. Seeing the truth of what is actually happening has become imminent. After trust is lost, self-reliance and reflection on what kind of SYSTEM we desire to live in, possibly something like described in the book Ecotopia, is the logical next step. Once we have an intent toward that possible Ecotopia, we can abandon the elite’s dystopia and pursue, in earnest, that better world with a livable future. That’s my Hopium and I’m sticking to it!

Jos
Jos
Nov 3, 2024 5:56 PM

In the UK, burying yourself in sand at high tide would be impossible on most of our beaches as the sand’s covered over. Low tide would give you enough hours of safety but it’s never a good idea or a good look. On another note, Becket’s play to me epitomised the drudgery and endless repetition of our ‘meaningless’ lives but, even though I could get that as a teenager when I first read it, I now think our lives are not meaningless and that repetition and routine are our attempts to create order and sanctuary from chaos. Endgame was depressing because it was inhuman and anti-life like a lot of the satanic death-culture we are told is worthy of our attention. Humanity needs more positive messages in these bleak days.

Howard
Howard
Nov 3, 2024 4:37 PM

All through the millennia prophets have insisted the world will end – yet it continued. Therefore it follows that all such prophecies are flawed and that the world (i.e., the “world” created by humans) will continue forever. Except for one tiny nano-factlet:

Humans at long long last have at their disposal the actual means of ending their world (as well as half the real world with it). Every species has its very own trajectory: a beginning, a middle and an end. So too does the human species. Humans being the self-styled Crown of Creation can only reach their end by their own agency. And that’s precisely how the human species will end: by its own doing.

And you know that time is nigh when there’s nowhere to go – when everything is in place to effect an endgame but no one dares take the first step back from the abyss lest someone else take their place on the edge. “This is mine!” is man’s death knell. And he has been shouting it louder and louder since he began.

Vagabard
Vagabard
Nov 3, 2024 8:10 PM
Reply to  Howard

Which is why anyone close to their own personal death should be kept well away from the ‘red button’

Erik Nielsen.
Erik Nielsen.
Nov 4, 2024 10:12 PM
Reply to  Vagabard

If I am going to die the rest is f.cking going with me, and I am not going to leave a dollar for your glasses of champaign behind me! (Voltaire).

p.s.
p.s.
Nov 3, 2024 3:56 PM

What are these ridiculous “building sketches” suppo-
sed to “prove”? Nothing at all! Not one ass hair wide!

Monkey Biz
Monkey Biz
Nov 3, 2024 3:21 PM

blatant political masquerade led by the phoniest crew of political actors who are leading the world toward nuclear annihilation

The masquerade is complete with empty threats and phoney world-ending powers. If those psychos really had those doomsday nukes they would have used them again already (!) so wise up. Nuclear fission cannot be weaponised (and it looks like there is not that much money in it either despite it being the obvious solution to “civilisation”‘s insatiable energy needs)… Of course the science behind “nukes” is classified so nobody can disprove it – oh, they are so clever, their mums must be so proud of them boys!

Hornbach
Hornbach
Nov 3, 2024 12:39 PM

Thank you for the essay, Mr.Curtin !
I always have thought of Death as a Mrs. but here we are, Mr.Death sounds more credible now, not sure why. Joyce is one of my favourites, each time different in a subtle way.
One of the commenters mentioned a book and it’s strange that I thought (while reading the article) how interesting would be to have these ideas collected in a structured book (SMP as taught at the AMDG schools).

wkr
wkr
Nov 3, 2024 11:53 AM

“There are limits to artistic freedom, but they are broad. Art, including political art, must not violate human dignity. It should be clever and clear in its message. It should also be good, but even that is a matter of taste with modern art. Within these broad limits, art, like satire, can do anything.”

I agree. The crucial question is rather “How much cock is needed?” Does the sculpture of a naked Kai Diekmann with a meter-long penis have to hang on the wall? Start the day’s work under two bulging testicles.comment image

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friede_sei_mit_Dir

In my opinion, the penis on the wall is a gross understatement, because Mr. Diekmann consists entirely of penis from head to toe; one could also say that this pathetic creature is clearly a dickhead, and even that is a gross understatement.https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/06/benjamin-netanyahu-given-auschwitz-blueprints-to-smuggle-out-of/

When Schröder grabs Merkel’s pussy, and she in turn grabs Stoiber’s willy, then one of the most complicated political connections can clearly be made out here. It is a subconscious drive, the Jewish “sexologist” Freud already had this deep realization before all Western culture.comment image

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwigs_Erbe

So here we are faced with a tricky constellation that raises the question of who in this Jewish-infiltrated and deformed society is still entitled to own a dick or a pussy or even to reach for them? And who is the rightful owner of a genital, if not the Jewish doctor, who performed a highly necessary sex change already on Goy children?

Erik Nielsen.
Erik Nielsen.
Nov 4, 2024 10:19 PM
Reply to  wkr

Who permitted this provocative “artist” pervert to destabilise Germany like that in public?
Seems someone wants Germany to be angry again.

underground poet
underground poet
Nov 3, 2024 11:49 AM

The chap should have just got his self a pet ostrich.

suzaloop
suzaloop
Nov 3, 2024 11:37 AM

There is me on this Sunday all excited within the opening quote being Samual Becket!

I thought it was Quantum Leap being discussed.

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Nov 3, 2024 10:28 AM

Good Evening Ed. This is an unusual essay and there is much of looking through a glass darkly (glass is made from sand). The metaphor of sand is useful as it has many applications. The game of politics these days has us all buried in sand up to our necks, powerless to do anything to change the course of events. Unwilling to play their game, we can be but spectators of a play more absurd than anything Beckett could have written.
I have the impression that the (CIA) script plans for uproar and riots whichever candidate claims to have won. Agents provocateur will already be in place, locked and loaded. The predictable atrocities and mayhem will then have Joe Public pleading for the military junta to take command. That is the script, but sometimes, the plot cannot react quickly enough to reality (whatever that may be) and the script quickly moves from drama to farce e.g. a Monty Python UFO as ‘deus ex machina” rescues Trump?
Clutching at straws perhaps, but I was heartened to note the bold attacks on CIA and FBI by both RFK Jr. and Tucker Carlson at the Trump rally in Arizona. Such honesty may be morsels of truth in a sea of lies, but I savoured them nonetheless. But were their scripts written by Mossad as more distraction and razzle-dazzle ’em?
I suspect we are at a low water mark which is never a good time to be buried up to the neck in sand. Time and tide waits for no man…

judith
judith
Nov 3, 2024 12:24 PM
Reply to  Hugh O'Neill

RFK Jr makes bold attacks against the CIA but no attacka against the US Military in Israel and in every other country that we disrupt and demolish.

We all know about the CIA. They likely have a hand in alll of our military operations, but to focus on the CIA right now is smoke and mirrors.

Kennedy and Trump still do not address Israel/Palestine or AIPAC.

GR-Watch
GR-Watch
Nov 3, 2024 2:02 PM
Reply to  judith

“Kennedy and Trump still do not address Israel/Palestine or AIPAC”

1) they declared their UNCONDITIONAL LOVE to israel
2) they adhere to ‘israel first’ policy
3) trump said the israelis should finish Gaza ‘quickly!’

doesn’t all this grovelling count as addressing the palestine/israel issue?

Erik Nielsen.
Erik Nielsen.
Nov 4, 2024 1:11 AM
Reply to  GR-Watch

If we know Israel is US biggest and cheapest Air-Carrier base in ME, it is easy to see why US love Israel and the Congress has standing ovations for Israel.
.
If we know the brutality of US ref 9/11, Iraq, Libya, m.m., it is easy to see who behind the curtain erase Gaza from the surface of their property.

judith
judith
Nov 4, 2024 12:41 PM
Reply to  GR-Watch

Granted. Yes.

What I meant, of course, is that they do not address putting a stop to AIPAC, a lobbying group for a foreign country controlling our Congress, putting a stop to funds to Israel or any other country, putting a stop to it all.

I can dream, can’t I?

Brian
Brian
Nov 3, 2024 2:37 PM
Reply to  judith

RFK isn’t perfect so I reject anything he says, even though he’s one of the only prominent people in American politics to say anything bad about the CIA much less even mention them.

odi
odi
Nov 3, 2024 10:29 PM
Reply to  Brian

Tulsi Gabbard did and she was an intelligence officer that appeared everywhere and was supposedly different and now shilling on fox news.

RFK is the same grift to lead the lost astray into believing you can vote your way out of tyranny.

judith
judith
Nov 4, 2024 12:46 PM
Reply to  Brian

At this point I believe he is allowed to say what he wants about CIA.

He is not allowed to say what he wants about Israel and Palestine.

I think the puppetmasters control the leash. You can say what you like about this, this and this, but we’ll reign you in when you go over the line.

He does not speak about the CIA’s role in the war in Palestine. He speaks of the CIA’s role in the assassinations of his Dad and his Uncle. Fair enough.

But we all know about that CIA connection. We don’t need Bobby to tell us. And if those JFK records are ever exposed we will likely find out that, yup, the CIA had a hand in it.

They have a hand in a lot of things. But I do not think the CIA calls the shots. They just make it happen.

underground poet
underground poet
Nov 3, 2024 5:05 PM
Reply to  judith

Yet if you like your smoke and mirrors, you can keep your smoke and mirrors, right?

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Nov 3, 2024 6:25 PM
Reply to  judith

Hi Judith. I am extremely disappointed and bewildered at RFK Jr.s complicity n the Palestinian genocide (hence my reference to a script written by Mossad). In reviewing IOsraeli policy in the Middle East, both Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Yeats’ “Second Coming” spring to mind.

ariel
ariel
Nov 3, 2024 1:00 PM
Reply to  Hugh O'Neill

Not to mention ‘concrete.’

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Nov 3, 2024 6:26 PM
Reply to  ariel

Indeed. This material is usually reserved for footwear.

Sue
Sue
Nov 3, 2024 10:23 AM

Mesmerising.
Patrick burying himself in the sand up to his neck is receiving abundant earthing/healing energy. Just ask the native Americans!
I must use that term crystal rectangle with folk…says a lot.
Now I’m intrigued to read Ed Curtin’s new book!

underground poet
underground poet
Nov 3, 2024 11:54 AM
Reply to  Sue

Those americans who could not be civilized and were not even clever enough to take advantage of the wheel, you want to ask them what?

Johnny
Johnny
Nov 3, 2024 8:57 AM

I can think of a few Suiturds that should be buried up to their ANKLES in sand.

Head first.