SHOCK

I’ve been here before. I know this interruption to the morning routine, this onslaught of news and information blaring from the television and radio like jagged spears. I’ve heard the siren song rushing across town. I’ve choked on smoke and ash, tasted the detritus of aftermath. The crushing pain and loss of innocence under a burning blue sky.

On a grey day in Paris, years later, a red sea of fury is released. An amalgam of red and grey and black flames. Violence and chaos being the last refuge of a tired mind. 

Murder, confusion, protest. Tout est pardonné.  

One who knows his devil knows his God

Do they? Do we? Je suis confused.

I’ve had a few heated conversations with close friends since the attacks in Paris on Charlie Hebdo. We are all pained for the senseless loss. We feel untethered. But deeper into the conversation, differences emerge. Freedom, it turns out, is an incendiary concept. I’m not confused about what feels right in the nettle of my bones and I express it in company. Over dinner, at coffee, in the street.. everybody is expressing their expectations and boundaries of freedom. I feel as though I’m wrestling no grey matter about liberty and freedom of expression. But I must be, on some abstract level. The only way to set our eyes apart from propaganda, blasphemy, or provocative editorial is to possess enough education to know the difference between dogma and intellectual resistance. Those who wish to be offended, will take offense. Then they will take prisoners and the spiral begins.

Of course this is the crux of the problem. Education. From Malala to the sickening school massacre in Pakistan a few months ago, the brutal hunting of the human mind is en jeu (in play). Keep it wrapped in its niqab so it can’t breathe and won’t expand.

Quelle tristesse.

If we allow the separation of words and images from the delicate matter of religion (capital R) where does it end? The offices of the equally delicate Pornography trade? I don’t agree with the content of explicit pornography but the models and photographers, editors and writers must be free to exercise their right to work. If that work promotes carnal gymnastics, frankly in an unappealing way, if that’s what moves them out of bed every morning, than I must say they are free to get dirty. I don’t buy pornography or subscribe to it. But if I ever change my mind I will exercise my right without shame.

 

OFF LIMITS

After Religion and Pornography, then what? Shall we move up or down the matrix? High brow or Low brow?

Let’s see.. Politicians. Critical messages, held up on placards during street protests and demonstrations, aimed at rustling those in power.. should the hands holding those signs be cut off? We remember the Stasi, the Politbureau, the Taliban, the Sharhia enforcers. We know why Wei Wei left Communist China. And what he fights for every day to communicate his art.

Lest we forget Art. The writer Ayn Rand, herself in protest, exulted the iconoclast in Howard Roark. She drew a character impervious to societal pressure, one whom would not bend to conformity or expectation. And surtout pas moral law. In his design of “offensive” architecture, departing from the comfort zone of its day and time, lies the mustard seed of truth. Don’t violate my right to create. My mind doesn’t harm; bullets, knives, and bombs do.

 

 

 

 

DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

I had a bad dream last summer that continues to haunt me. I dreamt that when I arrived back in Paris, after the summer in New York, ISIS fighters were camping out on every street corner of Paris, flying their black ominous flags, wrapped in their menacing masks and Kalashnikovs. The face was always absent. Women’s faces too. Take everything away. Except fear and menace. Darth Vader. This is our idea of evil. How can we create dialog with this “enemy”? We must but we are lost today in our paranoia, misunderstanding, anger, and fear. Of course this plays right into their hands and achieves their ultimate goal. Some of them. Them. Who are they? I don’t know this enemy I am supposed to fear and cower to.

The collision course is set. And it’s heartbreaking for world harmony and those whose hearts hunger for peace. Say nothing of the future for our children. All children suffering and/or prospering everywhere on the planet.. is this the dark future they face?

I say No. I protest. J’accuse… Darkness, you are on trial.

I am human with faults and struggles just like you. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know my God as well as I should but I keep trying. I keep asking questions. I keep going deeper into my heart. This is what forms our time on earth I believe. Once we arrive at a place where we have all the answers, the bullets start flying to defend those positions… and they land in the heads of aging humorists and cartoonists, and in the bodies of the young.

 

LOVE IS THE SUBSTANCE FROM WHICH ALL IS CREATED

I’m sticking with this fortune on my tea bag this morning. While being offended at something I read in the paper.

It’s that simple.