Citadels of
Paranoia; Panoramas of Despair: An Occupation of
Phantoms
By Phil
Rockstroh
October 11,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The bad news is, we have been deluged with bad,
even mortifying, news, and for such an extended
period of time, the mind reels in bafflement as the
spirit sinks. Despair seems an apt response to
events one cannot reconcile, of circumstances of
which one cannot gain perspective nor control.
“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy
are the ones that we carry around in public in order
to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that
are treated superficially and foolishly, they just
withdraw and after a short interval break out again
all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are
life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life
that we can die of.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt
from Letters to a Young Poet
Depression can be a compensatory response to the
inherently manic nature of capitalist dominance of
every aspect of life in late modernity. The
affliction knocks you on your ass and keeps you
there until the psyche can find a better means of
using the agency of libido, which, under the extant
corporate/consumer/surveillance state panopticon has
been usurped. Under the system’s economic despotism
and attendant anomie and alienation, one’s longings,
more often than not, do not lead to the connecting
eros of a life-enhancing vocation or deepening
interpersonal encounters but only as a vehicle that
hijacks one’s life into the service of a
soul-crushing system, wholly designed to exploit
every moment of this fleeting life for the benefit
of an overclass of parasites, a klavern of vampires
and ghouls.
Depression is the soul’s way of saying, to
paraphrase the Vietnam era antiwar chant, "Hell no,
I won't go.”
Alienation is an apt response to negotiating a
soulless landscape. Where is the eros in Big Box/stripmall
encounters? The ad hoc architecture of the consumer
culture, which manages to be both utilitarian and
garish, renders the heart dry as dust and grinds the
mind to spittle. The psyche is in constant communion
with its outer surroundings. Thus, what comes to
pass if what is extant is a nadascape of vapid
commercialisation, designed to deliver the shallow
sensations concomitant to consumerism but lacking a
connecting eros to both numinous inner realities and
binding human encounters? A mortification occurs.
Some individuals are driven to lash out in anger,
even in acts of mass murder. The rage remains
inchoate thus is displayed In acts of road rage…in
nebulous hatred of outsiders and minorities and the
foreign other.
The propagandists of empire are privy to the fact.
Hence, so many are convinced, so easily, that North
Korea and Iran are threat to the homeland; that
Russiagate is a thing; that the US military and the
nation’s so-called intelligence agencies are a force
for good and act as agents of protection against a
hostile world.
But with some, their soul isn’t buying it.
Depression pulls one deep into oneself; therefore,
manic compensation and displacement is not possible.
They have opted out of the collective madness.
Depression’s descent into the self becomes the
option to surface level tropes of distraction.
Compulsions fall away like Autumn leaves, the sap of
life is seemingly frozen, the winds of the world
howl through barren branches of one’s inner
wilderness — to wit, an accurate apprehension of the
sound of propaganda and its affront to mind and
soul.
Yet: All too many cannot envisage the veritable
dangers of our age: ecocide and their threatened
extinction of the human species; blanched coral
reefs, scoured of life; dying oceans, gagging in
plastic particulates; the sky burning, the ashes of
charred forests stippling the wind.
Shooting sprees. As American as convenience store
hotdogs, mass incarceration and drone murder.
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Las Vegas,
the crass and sterile US landscape on stilts and
steroids, retails in empty sensation. Dominion of
night where coruscating lights have scoured away the
stars. Perpetual, meretricious come-ons. City of
towering, shlock temples wherein what the US holds
sacred is worshipped: legal larceny, the deification
of empty sensation, and the transubstantiation of
everything it touches, flesh and material, into
fodder for exploitation. Kitsch über Alles. A 24/7
neon pentecost of mammon.
A wilderness of the collective mind howling with
hungry ghosts. Vengeful spirits…inundate the air of
the US cult of death. The imprecatory prayers of
millions of slaughtered Indians ride the western
winds and are funnelled into the void of vapidity
that is Las Vegas.
A man, eaten hollow by alienation, his soul rancid
with displaced rage, stands on a hotel balcony. The
heft of his firearm is the only thing that feels
tangible in his hollowness and amid the weightless
sheen of the architecture of the city below.
The life of an Iraqi, Libyan, Yemenian, Syrian,
Palestinian et. al. translates into nothing in the
US American system of value. “The only thing those
people understand is brutality. When we rain down
death….that is the fate they demand.”
The shooter’s mind roils. He acts as he has been
condition to act. Now, he has achieved the power and
control he has been denied. He is a military empire
of one. His birthright as a US American has been
fulfilled. God bless the USA.
After mass shootings in the US, the sale of firearms
rises. The phenomenon is very much like the reaction
of alcoholics whose solution to the stress-inducing
trouble, pain, and chaos that their addiction
inflicts upon their lives is to attempt to remedy
the situation by careening into another drinking
binge. US Americans are attracted to guns in the
same manner drunks are in love with their chosen
killer.
They are seeking sanctuary from fear. All too many
view the world as a hostile place, and the remedy,
US culture has instructed them, is to dispatch the
threat by means of violence. These tormented souls
believe they will be provided safety on a
weapons-bristling citadel built on a mountain of
corpses. (Floridians had to be advised that it would
be a less than propitious act to fire weaponry into
the fury of Hurricane Irma.)
Thus discussions of “gun control” will only
exacerbate more fear, will cause gun sales to rise,
and will increase the body count. The great unspoken
is: US Americans fear the wrong things. The culture
roils in a miasma of confused apprehensions and
displaced responses. The threat US Americans are
attempting to ward off is comprised by an occupation
of ghosts, the ghost of history that stalks the
precincts of their own minds.
If the habit of communal engagement is forsaken the
heart atrophies from a lack of practice. The
presence of others, even the panoply of life itself,
is misapprehended as menacing…Others are perceived
as malevolent, inhuman – as phantoms, devoid of
face, heart, and blood.
Empathy is cultivated through participation
mystique. Denied of the experience, the heart is at
risk of being rendered a cold citadel of angst and
paranoia. Without empathy’s agency, passion cannot
be transmuted into compassion. Sans the sublimation
of the heart’s hearth, psychical fires threaten to
become a raging wildfire of collective madness:
“Putin’s neo-Cossack hacker squads have invaded my
hard drive; Iran craves nukes; North Korea is a
coiled, nuclear viper of seething crazy. Or the
madness is made manifest as shooting sprees whereby
the mass murderer attempts to cut down with barrages
of semiautomatic weapon fire internal phantoms that
torment him from within .” – Paranoid thoughts such
as those can be read as, a confused soul’s dark
fantasies of release from ego-ossified bondage
although by means of the agency of death.
Moreover, I have noticed that often the true state
of mind crouched beneath paranoia is envy.
Envy…unconsciously evinced as, others are taking up
your space in the world and are plotting to maintain
the arrangement by your undoing.
There is a solution: Go take a survey of the world
beyond your self-circumscribed range and Insist on
your portion of life -- your portion of fate.
Yes, of course all too many situations in this life
are rigged e.g., the capitalist state.
But life itself is too vast, too intricate to be
fully controlled; the world is too big to rig.
First release yourself from the stultifying
confinement attendant to self-inflicted bondage.
Then proceed into the midst of life and show your
face to the world.
Storms will pass, the landscape glistens with
renewing rain…
Set barriers and barricades aflame…their flames
caress the future.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and
philosopher bard living, now, in Munich, Germany. He
may be contacted:
philrockstroh.scribe@gmail.com And at
FaceBook:
http://www.facebook.com/phil.rockstroh
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