Edward Curtin
Often you wake up from a dream to recognize it is informing you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, particularly when it is linked to what you have been considering for days. I have just shown up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of your house I grew up in because the basement light was on and the back cellar door had been opened by a mysterious guy who stood outdoors.
I will spare you additional information or an analysis, other than to state that my daytime ideas worried the media spectacle surrounding the Titan submersible that imploded 2 miles down in the ocean’s cellar while attempting to give its guests a view of the wreck of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ship nicknamed “the Millionaire’s Special.” The ship that no one might sink except an ice cube in the beverage that swallowed it.
Cellar dreams are widely known as the location where we as people and societies can face the flickering shadows that we decline to face in conscious life.
Carl Jung called it “the shadow.”
Such shadows, when unacknowledged and repressed, have a tendency to autonomously appear and appear, not only leading to individual self-destruction but that of entire societies. History is replete with examples. My dream’s mystical stranger had lit my method through some dark ideas and unlocked to a possible escape. He got me thinking about what everybody tend to wish to reject or avoid because its implications are so monstrous.
The fixation with the supposed marvels of innovation together with calling them after ancient Greek and Roman gods are fixations of elite technologues who have lost what Spengler called “living inner religiousness” but wish to show they understand the classical names despite the fact that they miss the significance of these misconceptions.
Such myths inform the stories of things that never happened but always are. Appropriating the ancient names without irony– such as calling a boat Titanic or a submersible Titan– unveils the hubristic lack of knowledge of individuals who have never ever descended to the underworld to discover its lessons. Relinquishing their sense of god-like power does not occur to them, nor does the shadow side of their Faustian dreams.
They will never ever call some machine Nemesis, for that would expose the reality that they have actually exceeded the eternal limits with their maniacal technological extremism, and, to paraphrase Camus, dark Furies will swoop to destroy them.
Nietzsche termed the outcome nihilism. Once people have eliminated God, devices are a helpful replacement in societies that praise the illusion of technique and are terrified to death of death and the machines that they invented to administer it.
The latter is not a matter fit to print since it should stay in the dark basement of the public’s consciousness. If it were publicized, the game of nihilistic death-dealing would be exposed. Due to the fact that power, cash, and technology are the ruling deities today, the mass media revolve around advertising their marvels in incredible fashion, and when “accidents” happen, they never ever mention the misconception of the devices, or what Lewis Mumford called “The Pentagon of Power.”
Disasters occur, they tell us, but they are minor by-products of the marvels of innovation.
But if these media would take us to see the reality beneath the oceans’ surface areas, we would see not incorrect beasts such as the Titanic or Moby Penis or animation fictions such as Disney’s Monstro the whale, but the workmanship of countless mad Captain Ahabs who have actually attached the technologues “greatest” invention– nuclear weapons– to nuclear-powered ballistic submarines.
Spear submarines. Descent on submarines, such as the USS Ohio.
These Spear subs live and take in the cellars of our minds where few attempt descend. They are managed by jackals in Washington and the Pentagon with refined faces in well-equipped offices with coffee machines and yummy snacks. Madmen. They hum through the deep waters all set to strike and ruin the world. Few hear them, practically none see them, a lot of choose not to understand of them.
But wait, what’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening: the Titan and the Titanic, rich voyeurs intent on getting a glimpse into the sepulchre of those long dead, while 6 hundred approximately desperate migrants drown in the Mediterranean sea from which the ancient gods were born. These are the top priorities of a society that worships the wealthy; a society of the spectacle that amuses and sidetracks while the end of the world cruises below consciousness.
The United States alone has fourteen such submarines equipped with Spear missiles continuously prowling the ocean depths, while the British have 4. Called for the three-pronged weapon of the Greek and Roman sea gods, Poseidon and Neptune respectively, these submarine-launched ballistic missiles, manufactured by Lockheed Martin (“We provide innovative options to the world’s toughest difficulties”), can damage the world in a flash. Ruin it many times over. A final option.
While the United States has abrogated all treaties that offered some defense from their use and has stated their right of very first usage, it has consistently pushed towards a nuclear conflict with Russia and China. Today– 2023 June– we stand on the precipice of nuclear annihilation as never in the past.
A single Spear submarine has 20 Spear rockets, each bring 12 separately targeted warheads for a total of 240 warheads, with each warhead approximately 40 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb. Fourteen submarines times 240 equates to 3,360 nuclear warheads times 40 equals 134,400 Hiroshimas. Such are the lessons of mathematics in absurd times.
James W. Douglass, the author of the distinguished JFK and the Offensiveand a long time activist against the Tridents at Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action outside the Bangor Submarine Base in Washington state, put it in this manner in 2015 when asked about Robert Aldridge, the heroic Lockheed Trident rocket designer who resigned his position in an act of conscience and became an inspiring force for the campaign versus the Tridents and nuclear weapons:
Concern: “What did the Nuremberg attorneys say about war criminal activities that had such a deep influence on Robert Aldridge?”
Douglass: “They said that first-strike weapons and weapons that directly target a civilian population were war crimes in offense of the Nuremberg concepts. Those Nuremberg principles, which are the structures of global law, are breached by both by electronic warfare– which is why we poured blood on the apply for electronic warfare [at the base]– and also by the Spear rocket system, which is what Robert Aldridge was constructing.”
Robert Aldridgesaw his shadow side. He went to the cellar of his darkest dreams. He declined to turn away. He became a motivation for James and Shelley Douglass and so many others. He was a man in and of the system, who saw the fact of his complicity in radical evil and underwent a metanoia. It is possible.
If those rockets are ever launched from the beasts that carry them through the surprise recesses of the world’s oceans, there will never ever be another Nuremberg Trial to evaluate the guilty, for the innocent and the guilty will all be dead.
We will have failed to clarify our darkest shadows.
Writing in another context that refers to today’s high-flying nuclear madmen whose mythic Greek forbear Icarus would not listen, the poet W. H. Auden put it by doing this in “Musée des Beaux Arts”:
About suffering they were never incorrect,
The Old Masters: how well they comprehended
Its human position; how it occurs
While someone else is eating or opening a window or simply walking dully alongHow, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the amazing birth, there constantly need to be
Kids who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They always remembered
That even the terrible martyrdom must run its course
Anyways in a corner, some messy area
Where the canines go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how whatever turns away
Quite leisurely from the catastrophe; the ploughman may
Have actually heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it needed to on the white legs vanishing into the green
Water; and the costly delicate ship that needs to have seen
Something incredible, a young boy falling out of the sky
Had someplace to get to and cruised calmly on.
We turn away at our peril.