The only proper starting point of politics

Havel speaks of returning politics to its "only proper starting point...if all the old mistakes are to be avoided: individual people."  He contrasts this with the politics of ideology, where the needs of people are subordinated to ideas.  An easy contrast to draw in a communist state, but he goes on to say-


"In democratic societies, where the violence done to human beings is not so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution in politics has yet to happen, and some things will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is reflected in politics."]


The Power of the Powerless

Jung questions a childhood dream

"Who spoke to me then?  Who talked of problems far beyond my knowledge?  Who brought the Above and Below together, and laid the foundation for everything that was to fill the second half of my life with stormiest passion?  Who but that alien guest who came both from above and from below?"


Memories, Dreams, Reflections


I don't know how impressed I am with Jung's answer, but it is a profound question.

Baldwin on Acceptance and Integration

"Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration.  There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you.  The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them.  And I mean that very seriously.  You must accept them and accept them with love.  For these innocent people have no other hope.  They are, in effect, still trapped in a history they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it."

Black History

In an essay written about the time of my birth, Baldwin gives voice to what it was like to grow up and live as a black man in the society I was born into.  The essay takes the form of a letter written to his namesake, his then fifteen year old nephew.  Many still living today were marked by those conditions.  How many still live in remaining pockets of that despair?  How large are those pockets?  I have no way of knowing.

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"But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs.  I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it.  And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it."

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"...these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago.  (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No, this is not true!  How bitter you are!" -but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist.  I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was there.  Your countrymen were not there..."

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"This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.  Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country.  You were born where you were born and faced with the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.  The limits of your ambitions were, thus, expected to be set forever.  You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.  You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.  Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry.  I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and hear them saying, "You exaggerate."  The do not know Harlem and I do.  So do you."

Work and Fate

"But it was not really true that Okonkwo's palm-kernals had been cracked for him by a benevolent spirit.  He had cracked them himself.  Anyone who knew his grim struggle against poverty and misfortune could not say he had been lucky.  If ever a man deserved his success, that man was Okonkwo.  At an early age he had achieved fame as the greatest wrestler in all the land.  That was not luck.  At the most one could say that his chi or personal god was good.  But the Igbo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also.  Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed."

Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart

Chi here approximates the concept of "genius" in Roman thought and James Hillman's Daimon.

Anger and Fear

I was struck recently by how few black writers I have read.  I've set out to read three books to remedy the situation -Derek Walcott's Omeros from the Caribbean, Chinua Achebe's African Trilogy from Nigeria and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time from the United States.

"Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand.  His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children.  Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man.  but his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness."

Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart

Encouragement

"I recall the dream of a young woman who had tremendous difficulties relating to men.  In the dream, she came into a flower shop.  No one was there, and then she rang the bell.  A very mundane ordinary start, you see.  She waited a long time in the shop, and then the owner came down from above.  She was an unusual, super-human woman, because she did not walk down the steps, but floated down.  So she had a kind of angelic quality.  And so she appeared before this young woman and told her no less than the four possibilities of how woman could relate to man.  The dreamer knew it then, and woke up, and to her dismay, could not recall it.  She was just desperate that she had forgotten what this divine woman had told her.  It is as though the unconscious sometimes would tease us like this.  But I think it is not a tease.  With all her troubles and difficulties, she had to know that there is something like this….Sometimes young troubled people get hints, for the sake of enduring and surviving until they can know….They are not yet ready to experience it, but there is something….But we have to earn it.  It is not put into our laps."

"Insight can be lost again, and sometimes that has a very discouraging effect.  But it makes all the difference that one had it once.  Once, the sun did break through the clouds.  Even if it should rain afterwards for a long time, one knows there is a sun, and it can break through.  I think this is a consolation during periods when one is in a hole….But if one has never seen it, it is a totally different situation."

The archetypal significance of Gilgamesh

Rivkah Scharf Kluger

Self Reflection - Insight

Catching up on some older reading notes

“What is the faculty of insight?  It is to be able to question oneself, to reflect on oneself, and that is really the basis for the growth of consciousness.  Sometimes one sees people who are just not able to question themselves.  Everything is projected to the outside.  One can say it is a grace of God if we are able to question ourselves, to reflect upon ourselves.”

The archetypal significance of Gilgamesh

Rivkah Scharf Kluger