“Step back in order to leap further.”

–French proverb

Russell Brand Subscribe to my channel here: http://tinyurl.com/opragcg (make sure to hit the BELL icon to be notified of new videos!) Listen to my Under The Skin podcast here: http://luminary.link/russell Get my book “Recovery” here: https://amzn.to/2R7c810 Get my book “Mentors” here (and as an audiobook!): https://amzn.to/2t0Zu9U Instagram: http://instagram.com/russellbrand/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/rustyrockets Produced by Jenny May Finn (Instagram: @jennymayfinn)

Christopher Benfey

Many readers think of haiku, with its three short lines in a five-seven-five syllabic pattern, as a poetic form particularly well suited to evocations of nature and the open road. The prose-and-haiku travelogue of the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North comes to mind, or the Beat poet Gary Snyder’s “Hitch Haiku” (1967). A typical Snyder haiku yokes the unspooling highway to the surrounding natural world: “A truck went by / Three hours ago: / Smoke Creek desert.” And yet, some of the most moving haiku of the past century or so were written under conditions all too familiar to us at this present pandemic moment: illness, confinement, loneliness, and pervasive fear.

Bedridden in his Odéon apartment, Richard Wright—author of the 1940 novel Native Son and the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), his searing account of growing up in the Jim Crow South—spent the last year and a half of his life, before his death in 1960 at the age of fifty-two, writing haiku: “The sound of the rain / Blotted out now and then / By a sticky cough.” Wright had moved his family to France in 1946 to avoid the suffocating racism of the United States and the harassment of the FBI, which investigated his past ties to Communists, his advocacy of civil rights, and his criticism of imperialist American foreign policy during the cold war. “So far as the Americans are concerned,” he wrote, at the height of his haiku period, “I’m worse than a Communist, for my work falls like a shadow across their policy in Asia and Africa.”  

A South African friend had given Wright, who was suffering from a severe case of amoebic dysentery probably picked up in Ghana, a book of Japanese haiku in R.H. Blyth’s translation, little suspecting the torrent of poems that the gift would unleash. Julia Wright recalled how her father “would hang pages and pages of them up, as if to dry, on long metal rods strung across the narrow office area of his tiny sunless studio in Paris, like the abstract still-life photographs he used to compose and develop himself at the beginning of his Paris exile.” Wright feverishly wrote some 4,000 haiku, from which he selected 817 as worthy of publication. (Housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library, they remained unpublished until 1998.) Julia Wright chose one of the poems, a metaphorical self-portrait, as Wright’s epitaph: “Burning out its time, / And timing its own burning, / One lonely candle.”

Those sheets of haiku hanging in Wright’s studio recall the career of the Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), the greatest of all modern haiku masters, and a major influence on Wright. It was Shiki who, during the 1890s, revived haiku (a word he invented, to replace the older hokku) in response to the cultural pressures of Westernization. “When Shiki began his work,” Donald Keene notes in The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki (2013), “there was only a wandering interest in haiku and not one poet who is still remembered.” Shiki had studied English, admired Abraham Lincoln for his self-sacrifice to his principles, and loved to play baseball. But Shiki was also a passionate scholar and practitioner of traditional Japanese and Chinese poetic forms. He shrewdly countered Anglo-American modernism—with its emphasis on the spare, the fragmentary, and the suggestive (and, in Ezra Pound’s case a decade later, an Orientalist interest in Confucianism and the Chinese written character)—by promoting a Japanese alternative steeped in tradition but laced with contemporary experience. “As it spills over / In the autumn breeze, how red it looks— / My tooth powder!”

Like Wright, Shiki was bedridden when he wrote his best-known haiku, suffering for the last seven years of his life—he died in 1902 at the age of thirty-four—from excruciating tuberculosis of the spine. “Unable to sit or stand,” Keene notes, “he wrote his manuscripts on sheets of paper pinned above his bed.” Shiki took his pen name from the cuckoo, whose song is said to resemble the sound of someone coughing up blood. Many of his late poems invoke illness, like his so-called “farewell to the world,” a tradition among haiku poets: “The sponge gourd has flowered: / here lies a man dead, / suffocated by phlegm.” The poem invokes the loofah plant, grown for medicinal purposes; harvested before flowering, its juice was believed to thin mucus and ease coughing.

Shiki’s poetry also inspired Jack Kerouac, who began writing haiku around the same time that Wright did. “The greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes ‘The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.’ By Shiki,” says Japhy Ryder (modeled on Gary Snyder) in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (1958). “You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles.”

Both Wright and Kerouac were drawn to haiku as an art of improvisation. “How about making them up real fast as you go along, spontaneously?” Japhy Ryder suggests. While Wright’s haiku rarely invoke racial identity, and even when they do, only indirectly (“In the falling snow / A laughing boy holds out his palms / Until they are white.”), they engage African-American culture by evoking jazz: “From a tenement, / The blue jazz of a trumpet / Weaving autumn mists.” The way Wright played with the conventions of haiku—honoring the seventeen-syllable pattern and evoking its traditional seasonal themes while giving both a contemporary twist—can be likened to a jazz musician’s adapting a “standard” (a Broadway showtune, a spiritual, a classical melody) and finding fresh ways to give it new life, often with a dash of humor. “With a twitching nose / A dog reads a telegram / On a wet tree trunk.”

Wright’s haiku can also be thought of as a late contribution to Imagism. “No ideas but in things,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams, calling for a new kind of poetry that would banish Romantic self-involvement and Victorian verbosity. A pediatrician by profession, Williams explicitly linked his Imagist practice to the flu pandemic of 1918. In the first poem of his epochal Spring and All (1923), he wrote: “By the road to the contagious hospital / under the surge of the blue / mottled clouds driven from the / northeast—a cold wind.” It is as though the threat of contagion has sharpened the poet’s vision, italicized it, so to speak, with a steel-edged acuity resembling haiku.  

We have all experienced the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic has shortened our attention spans, drained our energy, and made us fearful of the future. For Richard Wright and Masaoka Shiki, lying on their sickroom beds, writing haiku was an art of short spurts of insight followed by exhaustion. “I believe his haiku were self-developed antidotes against illness,” Julia Wright wrote of her father, “and that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath.” On the morning before Shiki died, his sister held up a drawing board so that he could write his final poems. She said nothing as he paused after each line, choking on phlegm. When he had finished, according to Keene, “he let the brush drop, apparently exhausted by the effort.”

“Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue,” Wright wrote, in a lyrical passage from Black Boy. “And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings.” With Whitmanian expansiveness, he wrote of the “echoes of nostalgia I heard in the crying strings of wild geese winging south against a bleak, autumn sky.” In the tighter confines of Japanese haiku, and the isolation of his Paris apartment, Wright found a more surgical way to register how moments might speak with a cryptic tongue. “As day tumbles down, / The setting sun’s signature / Is written in red.”

June 25, 2020 (nybooks.com)

Husserl, Heidegger and our social nature

25th June 2020 (iai.tv)

Dermot Moran 

| Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Boston College. Formerly Professor of Philosophy (Metaphysics & Logic) at University College Dublin

Throughout the history of philosophy there has been a tension between the valuable introspection afforded by solitude and the intrinsic need to understand ourselves in relation to others. In the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger we find a vivid picture of man as a being meditatively alone but fundamentally social.

It is often thought that philosophers favor living alone, in isolation, devoting themselves to quiet contemplation. There is the standard image of the guru or sadhu living in a cave. And this really happens. A young British woman, Tenzin Palmo (formerly Diana Perry), converted to Buddhism in her teenage years, travelled to India to study at the age of 20, and then lived for some 12 years on her own in a tiny cave in the high Himalayas in Northern India. She lived alone in great hardship, but claimed she was never lonely – “not for one minute” (MacKenzie 1999, 87). Living alone in such isolation is an almost impossible ideal; and, indeed, she depended on others for regular deliveries of food and other necessities.

The Christian monastic system offers further examples of these extreme retreats. Skellig Michael rock off the West Coast of Ireland (made famous recently as a location in Star Wars: The Last Jedi) contains the stone huts of an early monastic settlement where monks lived in great deprivation and hardship in the eighth and ninth centuries CE, observing very strict, severe rules.

To philosophize is to be in dialogue with others, even if one is in search of oneself, as Socrates says.

The classical Greek philosophical tradition also has examples of such isolation. For example, Diogenes of Cinope, the Cynic (c.404-323 BC), lived rough, spurning all comforts, and sometimes sleeping in a large storage jar or urn (pithos). He left no writings but is commemorated in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers. He was critical of Plato and often disrupted his seminars.

In fact, however, the main Greek philosophical tradition was more urbane and cosmopolitan, centered around Athens. Socrates was a city dweller, frequenting the marketplace (agora), surely the busiest spot in Athens. Socrates wanted to live and discourse with others, but in order to learn about himself. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus are going for a walk outside of the walls of the city and Socrates says to Phaedrus: “I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country. Though I do indeed believe that you have found a spell with which to draw me out of the city into the country, like a hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is waved. For only hold up before me in like manner a book, and you may lead me all round Attica, and over the wide world” (Phaedrus 230d-e). Generally speaking Socrates, Plato and Aristotle emphasized that human beings were political animals; humans flourish in the polis, in the well-organized political community. To philosophize is to be in dialogue with others, even if one is in search of oneself, as Socrates says.

The twentieth-century hermeneutic philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), who loved to both walk and talk, frequently made the point that the idea of going for a solitary walk is very much a European Romantic idea from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It would have been almost inconceivable to those living in antiquity or in the Middle Ages to go for a solitary walk just to gain access to one’s thoughts, as Socrates’ remarks indicate.

To illustrate the Medieval and Renaissance disinterest in being alone with nature, it is interesting to consider that Petrarch (in his letter to Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro, translated in Cassirer 1948) recounts his climb of Mont Ventoux, in Southern France, accompanied by his brother, but, after appreciating the view of nature from the summit, he sits down to read St. Augustine’s Confessions and finds a passage where Augustine, in Confessions, Book Ten. Ch. 8 para. 15, says humans admire mountains, the seas and the stars – earthly things –  but don’t see the value of the vastly richer inner world of the mind. The climb to the summit, for Petrarch, is really a Christian Neoplatonic allegory for the ascent to the inner mind, away from the external sense.

Kate Williams, Simon Glendinning and Ed Stafford ask if we’re more alive when we’re alone.

The European Romantics (including Lord Byron and William Wordsworth) developed a new idea of being alone in nature communing with oneself as a way of becoming authentic. Retreating into rural isolation away from humanity becomes a trope that will continue into the twentieth century with the hippie and ‘back to nature’ movements of the sixties. One goes into isolation in order to be “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife” (Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Graveyard’, 1751). Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first to promote solitude as the natural state of human existence, in his unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rousseau 1782), composed shortly before his death in 1778, recording his thoughts as he did 10 walks around Paris. Similarly, Henry David Thoreau felt the need to shun society to live in his cabin for two years (1845-1847) in Walden, a day’s journey from Boston. He writes: “I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.” Thoreau, incidentally, quotes Thomas Gray’s elegy, “left the world to darkness and to me.” For Thoreau, and indeed, for all scholars, being alone is a necessary part of one’s vocation. Thoreau writes:

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. (Thoreau 2004, 135)

Following a similar desire for solitude away from bustling civilization, Martin Heidegger constructed his own hut on the slopes of the Black Forest hills in Todtnauberg, outside Freiburg. But, in this remote hut, he read Aristotle’s Metaphysics and the works of Wilhelm Dilthey (according to Hans-Georg Gadamer, who visited him there in 1923), and wrote his classic Being and Time (1927/1962). For the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, a key ‘existential’ characteristic of human existence (Dasein) is that human beings are also Being-with (Mitsein). The everyday, public, cultural world of oneself-among-others is a ‘primary phenomenon’, for Heidegger. Our individual lives are saturated with our connections with others, linked through shared social practices.

For Heidegger, there is no isolated ego, human existence is a priori oriented to others.

In Being and Time, Heidegger discusses Mitsein (literally ‘being-with’, which, in normal German, simply means ‘togetherness’ or ‘companionship’). Heidegger gives the term the particular philosophical inflection: human existence is always already structurally related to others (even when one is alone and others are actually absent). For Heidegger, there is no isolated ego (“a bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally, nor is it ever given,” Heidegger 1962, 152), human existence is a priori oriented to others. As he puts it, ‘being-with’ (Mitsein) is co-original with ‘being-oneself’ or ‘being a self’ (Selbstsein). Mitsein is an existential constituent of being-in-the-world. One is never an isolated self. Being a self means being in a community. Even in solitude one hears the voice of the other, the absent friend, the dead mother, and so on. One visits oneself and others in memories of past times.

Human existence has the character of ‘being-with’ even if there are no others in one’s immediate vicinity. I walk by a field that shows itself as having been tilled by someone; the boat is owned by an acquaintance. Others are encountered in the ‘ready-to-hand’ world of equipment, e.g. a door handle is there ‘for everyone’. Humans are essentially other-oriented and communal, entangled in one another’s project and environments. The general other is encountered everywhere: Someone parked a car over there; they are digging up the street, that designer of that dress is very good: ‘the environing world [Umwelt] … is not only mine, but also that of others’ (History of the Concept of Time, p. 237; GA 20 326–27).

Other phenomenologists also emphasize human collectivity even in isolation. Max Scheler writes, in his classic Formalism in Ethics (1916/1973), that even Robinson Crusoe was never completely alone; he brought with him into solitude all the language, ideas, skills, clothing, of his seventeenth-century world. Scheler writes:

An imaginary Robinson Crusoe еndowed with cognitive-theoretica1 faculties would also со-ехрeriеnсе his being а member of а social unit in his experiencing the lack of fulfillment of acts of act-types constituting а person iп general. (Scheler 1973, 521)

In the Nature of Sympathy (1923/1954), Scheler clarifies further:

Robinson Crusoe would never think: ‘There is no community and I belong to none : I am alone in the world’. He would not only possess the notion and idea of community, but would also think: ‘I know that there is a community, and that I belong to one (or several such); but I am unacquainted with the individuals comprising them, and with the empirical groups of such individuals which constitute the community as it actually exists.’ (Scheler, 1954, 234)

Humans are intrinsically social even if there are no ‘others’ in my immediate community. Indeed, solitude can only ever be an artificial state. One needs extraordinary discipline – to maintain silence, to lose physical contact with other human beings. Indeed, unless it is explicitly chosen as a methodological way to gain access to oneself, solitary confinement is a punishment – a torture for human beings. Part of the key to coping with living in solitude is structured routine and tremendous mental discipline.

The meditating ‘I’ makes our everyday familiarity with ourselves unfamiliar to the point that I have to suspend all my knowledge of what an ego is. This is a supreme kind of solitude.

Edmund Husserl in fact thought that practicing his method of bracketing and suspension – the phenomenological epoché – was precisely a way to break with this being-with-others in the natural attitude. Husserl thought of the practice of philosophy as requiring a unique kind of philosophical solitude that breaks with the natural attitude. He writes in the Crisis of European Sciences (1936) about the very special status of the meditating ego operating under the epoché:

In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of humankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoché; and so has the privilege of I-the man among other men. The “I” that I attain in the epoché, which would be the same as the “ego” within a critical reinterpretation and correction of the Cartesian conception, is actually called “I” only by equivocation—though it is an essential equivocation since, when I name it in reflection, I can say nothing other than: it is I who practice the epoché, I who interrogate, as phenomenon, the world which is now valid for me according to its being and being-such, with all its human beings, of whom I am so fully conscious; it is I who stand above all natural existence that has meaning for me, who am the ego-pole of this transcendental life, in which, at first, the world has meaning for me purely as world … (Husserl 1970, 184)

The meditating ‘I’ makes our everyday familiarity with ourselves unfamiliar to the point that I have to suspend all my knowledge of what an ego is. This is a supreme kind of solitude, attainable only through special methodological reflection.

Our circumspective concern decides what is closest. One’s spectacles do not seem nearer to us than the computer screen.

Much more often, however, phenomenologists (including Max Scheler, Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Karl Löwith, among many others) ­ some stimulated by the writings of Karl Marx and Max Weber ­  turned their attention to the a priori structures of social existence and the constitution of the social world. For instance, Karl Löwith’s Habilitation thesis, written under Heidegger in 1928, was entitled Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen ([The Individual in the Role of Fellow Human Being], Löwith 1969). Similarly, the Austrian social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz (who had read Husserl independently) offered a detailed exposition of the world of everyday life in his Der sinnhaften Aufbau der sozialen Welt (1932; translated as The Phenomenology of the Social World, Schutz, 1967). Schutz distinguishes four dimensions of the life-world, namely: ‘the world of contemporaries’ (Mitwelt — Schutz’s own translation), and ‘the world of predecessors’ (Vorwelt), ‘the surrounding world’ (Umwelt), and ‘the world of our successors’ (Folgewelt). For Schutz, ‘die Mitwelt’, the ‘world of our contemporaries’, can be primarily impersonal and anonymous and Schutz distinguishes it from the world we have through ‘face to face encounters’. We belong with others, before we can separate ourselves as individuals.

For Heidegger, in Being and Time, we can be with ourselves in the community in different ways, that he named ‘authentic’ (eigentlich) and ‘inauthentic’ (uneigentlich). In the public domain (die Öffentlichkeit, ‘publicity’, or ‘public sphere’, Heidegger 1962, 165) we are aware of others in all kinds of ways, some closer and some more distant. But there is an implicit leveling down, averaging out, and distantiation (Entfernung) involved in this ‘publicness’ (e.g. seats on planes are designed to accommodate average size humans). This social world of others is often anonymously given and is experienced in terms of ‘the one’ or ‘they-self’ (Heidegger’s das Man). In this experience, I am less myself as I am just ‘anyone’, part of the anonymous, collective ‘they’ (as in ‘I hear they are going to ban smoking in private cars’). Further, das Man is, for Heidegger, a modality of Mitsein, it is a way of being myself among others. We all belong to the same shared world that occupies us and engages our solicitude. Heidegger correctly points out that purely personal authentic ‘owned’ acts are what they are precisely against a background of anonymous acts where one does what one (‘the one’, ‘anyone’, das Man) does along with others.

Isolation is a discipline that has to be learned. It has its place, but its place is within the larger environment of the ‘world-with-others’. This is surely the lesson of phenomenology.

Meditation on human solitude and co-existence with others leads a consideration of the peculiar nature of ‘nearness’ (Nähe) and ‘distance’ (Distanz) with respect to others. These concepts are being profoundly altered in our modern technological worlds. Heidegger and others (e.g. Marshall McLuhan) point out how technology (roads, railways, ships, planes, radio) in one sense brings things nearer. We indeed live in a “global village” (McLuhan 1962). Heidegger makes the point that just because human existence is ‘in’ the world, that does not mean it has a neutral way of occupying space and time. Things are experienced as near or distant. The voice on the radio is in the room with us but it could be reporting on a disaster thousands of miles away. The far is brought near, in one sense, but it is not necessarily closer. Indeed, for Heidegger, it is the essence of human existence to overcome or domesticate the distant in that way (Heidegger, 1962,139). Heidegger emphasizes, as we now know from the new media, this kind of ‘nearness’ (Nähe) or ‘proximity’ brings with it a peculiar kind of distance. Our Facebook ‘friends’ are not necessarily real friends. For Heidegger, the radio has brought us closer but perhaps also emphasized gaps between us. Heidegger in Being and Time discusses this characteristic of both making-near and distancing (Entfernung) as something most complex – relating to the temporality and spatiality of Dasein. Human beings both distantiate (‘make strange’) and domesticate: “In Dasein there is an essential tendency towards closeness” (Heidegger, 1962, 140). Our circumspective concern decides what is closest. One’s spectacles do not seem nearer to us than the computer screen.

In the current pandemic, everyone has suffered social restrictions and ‘social distancing’. Philosophers had in the past perhaps too readily assumed that normal everyday life was rather boring and not morally significant, but now we see everyday life harbors and nourishes the most important values we have – values of comradeship, family, social participation, and so on. We long for a time when we can meet face-to-face, when we can embrace each other. We long to see our children playing together in the playground. Our future response must be to protect our everyday human environment, our capacity to bodily interact with each other, and to be able to feel each other’s emotional responses directly and not just mediated through technology. Arising from this crisis, I think there will be renewed interest in the philosophy of embodiment, empathy, intersubjectivity and the life-world, all themes of the phenomenological and existential movements. Isolation is a discipline that has to be learned. It has its place, but its place is within the larger environment of the ‘world-with-others’. This is surely the lesson of phenomenology.

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References

Cassirer, Ernst et al. Ed. 1948. Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press.

Diogenes Laertius. 1965/1966. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. 2 Vols. Trans. R. D. Hicks. London/Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann Ltd./Harvard University Press, 1965-66.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. [1927]. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row.

Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy. [1936]. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Löwith, Karl. 1969. Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen. [1928]. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Mackenzie, Vicki. 1999. Cave in the Snow, a Western Woman’s Quest for Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1782. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. London: Penguin Books, 1979.

Scheler, Max, 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. [1916]. Trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Scheler, Max, 1954. The Nature of Sympathy. [1923]. Trans. Peter Heath, Hamden. London: Routledge & Kegan Press.

Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Thoreau, Henry David. 2004. Walden, 150^th Anniversary Edition. With an Introduction by John Updike. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dermot Moran
25th June 2020

London Real June 23, 2020

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The symbol of a bluebird as the harbinger of happiness is found in many cultures and may date back thousands of years.Mountain bluebird (Sialia currucoides) from North America

Origins of the bluebird as a symbol of happiness

Chinese mythology

One of the oldest examples of a blue bird in myth (found on oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty, 1766-1122 BC) is from pre-modern China, where a blue or green bird (qingniao) was the messenger bird of Xi Wangmu (the ‘Queen Mother of the West’), who began life as a fearsome goddess and immortal. By the Tang dynasty (618-906 AD), she had evolved into a Daoist fairy queen and the protector/patron of “singing girls, dead women, novices, nuns, adepts and priestesses…women [who] stood outside the roles prescribed for women in the traditional Chinese family”.^[1] Depictions of Xi Wangmu often include a bird—the birds in the earliest depictions are difficult to identify, and by the Tang dynasty, most of the birds appear in a circle, often with three legs, as a symbol of the sun.^[2] (See also: Three-legged crow)

Native American folklore

Among some Native Americans, the bluebird has mythological or literary significance.

According to the Cochiti tribe, the firstborn son of Sun was named Bluebird. In the tale “The Sun’s Children”, from Tales of the Cochiti Indians (1932) by Ruth Benedict, the male child of the sun is named Bluebird (Culutiwa).

The Navajo identify the mountain bluebird as a spirit in animal form, associated with the rising sun. The “Bluebird Song” is sung to remind tribe members to wake at dawn and rise to greet the sun:

Bluebird said to me,
“Get up, my grandchild.
It is dawn,” it said to me.

The “Bluebird Song” is still performed in social settings, including the nine-day Ye’iibicheii winter Nightway ceremony, where it is the final song, performed just before sunrise of the ceremony’s last day.

Most O’odham lore associated with the “bluebird” likely refers not to the bluebirds (Sialia) but to the blue grosbeak.^[3]

European folklore

In Russian fairy tales, the blue bird is a symbol of hope. More recently, Anton Denikin has characterized the Ice March of the defeated Volunteer Army in the Russian Civil War as follows:

We went from the dark night and spiritual slavery to unknown wandering – in search of the bluebird.^[4]

In L’Oiseau Bleu (“The Blue Bird“) a popular tale included by Madame d’Aulnoy (1650–1705) in her collection Tales of the Fairies, King Charming is transformed into a blue bird, who aids his lover, the princess Fiordelisa, in her trials.

Most to the point, a “blue bird of happiness” features in ancient Lorraine folklore. In 1886 Catulle Mendès published Les oiseaux bleus (“the blue birds”), a story bundle inspired by these traditional tales. In 1892 Marcel Schwob, at the time secretary to Mendès, published the collection Le roi au masque d’or, which included the story “Le pays bleu”, dedicated to his friend Oscar Wilde. ^[5] Maurice Maeterlinck had entered Mendès literary circle as well and in 1908 he published a symbolist stage play named The Blue Bird inspired by the same material. Two children, Tyltyl and Mytyl, are sent out by the fairy Bérylune (Jessie Ralph) to search for the Bluebird of Happiness. Returning home empty-handed, the children see that the bird has been in a cage in their house all along and create great happiness for another by giving their pet bird to the sick neighbor child. Translated into English by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, it played on Broadway from 1910. In the programme for the (revival of the) play at London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1912, the programme explained: “The Blue Bird, inhabitant of the pays bleu, the fabulous blue country of our dreams, is an ancient symbol in the folk-lore of Lorraine, and stands for happiness.”^[6] The play was quickly adapted into a children’s novel, an opera, and at least seven films between 1910 and 2002.

See the German equivalent blaue Blume (blue flower).

Popular use of the idiom

The immense popularity of Maeterlinck’s play probably originated the idiom in English. In 1934, this was strengthened by the popular American song “Bluebird of Happiness“. Written by Sandor Harmati and Edward Heyman, it was recorded several times by American tenor Jan Peerce, for RCA Victor and also by Art Mooney and His Orchestra.

The bluebird is featured in the song “Be Like The Bluebird” in the popular musical Anything Goes.

The lyrics “Somewhere, over the rainbow, bluebirds fly” in Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg‘s 1938 song for the movie The Wizard of Oz is a likely allusion to the idiom as well.

Shirley Temple starred in the American fantasy The Blue Bird (1940 film).

In 1942, the popular song “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover” used them, despite an absence of real blue birds on those cliffs, among other imagery to lift spirits.

The Academy Award-winning song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from Walt Disney’s 1946 live-action and animated film Song of the South, makes reference to “Mr. Bluebird on my shoulder” as a symbol of good cheer.

In the 1946 Japanese film No Regrets for Our Youth, directed by Akira Kurosawa, when Yukie and Noge reunite in Tokyo during the war, Yukie laments that she is not happy with her career and wants to do something truly meaningful in the struggle for freedom. Noge responds, “Who finds work like that even once in their lives? It’s like finding The Blue Bird of Happiness.”

The bluebird is mentioned at the end of the 1968 Beatles film Yellow Submarine, when the leader of the Blue Meanies claims that his “cousin is the bluebird of happiness”. Beatles Paul McCartney wrote a song about them for his band Wings’ 1973 album Band on the Run, “Bluebird“.

The Allman Brothers Band‘s 1972 song “Blue Sky” has the lyric “Don’t fly, mister blue bird, I’m just walking down the road”.

A scene in the 1977 Disney film The Rescuers uses the bluebird as a symbol of “faith … you see from afar.”

In the 1985 film Sesame Street Presents: Follow that Bird, the Sleaze Brothers kidnap Big Bird and press him into service in their fun fair, where he is painted blue and billed as the Blue Bird of Happiness. In a play on the word “blue,” Big Bird sings the mournful song “I’m So Blue.”

The lyrics of the They Might Be Giants 1989 song “Birdhouse in Your Soul” by John Linnell includes the phrase “blue bird of friendliness.”

The 2001 film K-PAX, directed by Iain Softley, written by Charles Leavitt and based on the book of the same name by Gene Brewer, contains a scene in which the lead character Prot (played by Kevin Spacey), claiming to be a visitor from outer space. He ends up in a psychiatric ward where he ‘prescribes’ a fellow patient with the task of finding a ‘Bluebird Of Happiness’. In a later scene, the fellow patient excitedly yells out that he finally found the Bluebird, resulting in pandemonium amongst patients spanning several floors of the institution.

The bluebird is also mentioned in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya episode “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Part III” in 2006.

Musician Neil Young has a song “Beautiful Bluebird” about a lost love on his 2007 album Chrome Dreams II.

“Blue Bird” is a song by Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions from their 2009 album Through the Devil Softly.

The character Luna from the 2012 video game and visual novel Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward wears a necklace with a caged bluebird, and the story is discussed in one ending.

The titular bluebird of the song “Birds”, from the 2013 album Government Plates by the experimental hip hop group Death Grips, is thought to be referencing Charles Bukowski‘s poem “Bluebird”, wherein the bluebird represents the vulnerability that Bukowski felt as a result of child abuse from his father.^[7]

The bluebird is also mentioned by David Bowie in the song “Lazarus” from his 2016 album Blackstar.

In the 2018 video game Red Dead Redemption 2, during the scene where John Marston builds the ranch at Beecher’s Hope, a bluebird is seen perched next to the gang while they are hammering and nailing the wood.

Bluebirds in nature

Three species of blue-headed North American thrushes (Turdidae) occupy the genus Sialia. The most widespread and best-known is the eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis), breeding from Canada’s prairie provinces to Texas and from the Maritimes to Florida; discrete populations of this species are also found from southeastern Arizona through west Mexico into Guatemala and Nicaragua. The mountain bluebird (S. currucoides) breeds on high-elevation plains from central Alaska to Arizona and New Mexico, and the western bluebird (S. mexicana) inhabits dry coniferous forests from extreme southwestern Canada to Baja California and from the Great Basin south into west Mexico. Other all-blue birds in North and Central America are the blue mockingbird, blue bunting, indigo bunting, blue grosbeak and a number of jays, including the blue jay.

Europe has only a few birds with conspicuous blue in the plumage, including the great tit (Parus major), the various blue tits of the genus (Cyanistes) and the common kingfisher. The adult male of the blue rock-thrush is the only European passerine with all-blue plumage; this species is best known from its literary treatment by Giacomo Leopardi, whose poem Il passero solitario makes of the rock-thrush a figure of the poet’s isolation.^[8]

In South and Southeast Asia, the fairy-bluebirds, blue whistling thrush and verditer flycatcher are strikingly blue.

Poems mentioning bluebirds

The world rolls round,—mistrust it not,—
Befalls again what once befell;
All things return, both sphere and mote,
And I shall hear my bluebird’s note,
And dream the dream of Auburn dell.— Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-Day, 1867

And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens how joyous we
shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be
found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper
of wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world
will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise
Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped
galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when
books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander
about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of
fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see
the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the
Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float
the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of
things that are lovely and that never happened, of things that are
not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must
cultivate the lost art of Lying.— Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1891

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebird_of_happiness

JUNE 25, 2020 (counterpunch.org)

by BEHROOZ GHAMARI TABRIZI

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Black Lives Matter (BLM) has raised mass consciousness against the institution of police violence and the brutality it inflicts on Black communities around the country. The movement has placed the question of police brutality at the top of the political and juridical reform agenda. The naked display of the oppressive state apparatus has now forced everyone, from the fascist residents of the White House to the liberal democrats of the House, politicians speak of the need to reform policing–more training, more screening, more record-keepings, judicial vigilance, and other haphazard sutures for the centuries old wounds. Many observers have pointed out the depth of this chronic pain and different ways it might be remedied.

Here I would like to propose that this acutely American dilemma needs to be viewed and explicated in close relation to U.S colonialism and imperialism. Race relations in the U.S. and the violence with which the country operates has always been accompanied by the civilizing logic of colonial expansion and imperialist wars that the United States has raged around the world. The two heads of the hydra of imperialism and racism stem from the same body of the political order that defined this imperialized nation from its inception. So long as the American war machine runs on high gear, leaving destruction, devastation, and death around the world, here at home, Black Americans will not be treated as equal citizens. Drone attacks overseas are inherently linked to the murderous impulse of the police against Black Americans.

The concomitant rise of liberal political philosophy and modern colonialism is an established historical fact. One might still question whether colonialism and the atrocities through which it expanded ought to be regarded as an aberration in liberal thought or as an inherent feature of its worldview. But one thing is clear, the British and American founding fathers of liberalism did not understand democracy and colonialism in mutually exclusive terms, both were understood to be different elements of the same civilizing project. Far from contradicting liberal tenets, writes Uday Mehta, imperialism in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Evoking the same sentiment, more than a century ago, Jamal al-Afghani (1838-1897), the anti-colonial Muslim transnationalist, ridiculed the seemingly incongruous attitude of British colonialists in India: “They drew their swords to cut the throats of the Muslims, while weeping for them and crying: ‘We kill you only out of compassion and pity for you, and seeking to improve you and make your life comfortable.’”

No other liberal philosopher has articulated and justified this contradiction better that J. S. Mill. His philosophy made clear the entanglement of liberal political thought with colonial expansion. John Stuart, like his father James, Mill was an employee of the British East India Company. But economic interest alone cannot explain his ideological commitment to the idea of progress and the higher civilization that the British afforded the backward Indians. He believed that the transmission of civilization to colonized subject could only materialize through a benevolent despotism. “England,” J. S. Mill believed, “had a right to rule despotically because it brought the benefits of higher civilization.” In a chilling assertion in his Principles of Political Economy, he declared that “the question of government intervention in the work of Colonization involves the future and permanent interests of civilization itself.”

There is no doubt that the plunder of human and natural resources of the colonies shaped imperial expansions. But the reality that the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, Oceana, and South America were all subjected to these atrocities has roots in a racialized worldview that gave legitimacy to Europeans to situate themselves on top of the racial hierarchy as the torch bearers of reason and progress. Th light of the world was the Europeans’ gift to all nations to overcome their superstitions, ignorance, tyranny, and backwardness. The light was lit by prey and pray, by plunder and proselytizing, by power and pauperization, and by pots and pans.

Despite her own prejudicial views on race, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt highlights that it was European imperialists who initially reordered “mankind into master and slave races, into higher and lower breeds, into colored peoples and white men” during their conquest and exploitation of much of Asia, Africa and America. That is how the ruling classes “imperialized the nation,” by expanding and acquiring new territories abroad and by solidifying and policing racial hierarchies at home. Expressed in no ambiguous terms by Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. president during the Great War, the goal was clear, “to keep the white race strong” and to preserve “white civilization and its domination of the planet.”

The eugenicist structure of the white supremacy that motivated great European and American ruling classes operated with great consistency within and outside national boundaries. The same generals who led the American conquest of the Philippines in 1898-1902 fought the wars of annihilations against American Indians at home. One of them, Brigadier General Jacob H Smith, explicitly stated in his order to the troops that “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn the better it will please me.” More than 200,000 civilians were massacred during the war. During a Senate hearing on the atrocities in the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas) referred to the “magnificent Aryan peoples” he belonged to and the “unity of the race” he felt compelled to uphold.

At the end of both world wars, sustaining the purity of whiteness and racial boundaries became increasingly challenging. The world wars shook the old structure of colonialism to its core. But that did nothing to change the colonial powers’ perception of racial superiority. Learning from the experiences of the two wars, the emerging superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, entered a “Cold War” that meant that superpowers ought not to fight their wars in the European theater. Cold War was a misnomer. Proxy wars raged around the world and claimed more than 20 Million lives from 1946 to 1989. The old colonial structures had collapsed, but the propagated racialized ideology that peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin and Central America were incapable of exercising the right of self-determination persisted.

As the atrocities of American superpower proliferated around the world, Black Americans struggled for recognition of political rights and social justice at home. Despite legal gains, the ideology that incentivized the U.S. to commit mass murder around the globe, disincentivized it to put in place meaningful structural changes that would recognize racial hierarchies that informed the existing political order. The growing black population in Europe, Afro-Caribbean, North African, and South Asians among others, forced European states to face the consequences of their colonial past on the streets of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. What the authors of The Empire Strikes Back wrote almost forty years ago about the United Kingdom eerily resonates today with Trump’s America that “the construction of an authoritarian state in Britain is fundamentally intertwined with the elaboration of popular racism.” The kind of racism that has historically been exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoization, militarized border controls and mass incarceration.

Racism was and is not about an attitude. Rather, it is the problem of a political order that sustains and perpetuate that attitude through a complex system of legal and economic institutions at home and around the world. Black Lives Matter protests has now razed or forced the local and federal agencies to remove monuments that celebrated the legacies of slavery, lynching, and segregation. Corporate America now “recognizes” the pandemic of racism. Nike employees were offered a paid holiday on Juneteenth. The same goes for workers at Twitter, Target, General Motors, the National Football League and a variety of other businesses. JPMorgan, Chase, Capital One and other banks will close branches early. All those institutions that maintain and perpetuate the dominance of racism and imperialism are at work hard to coopt the movement. Centuries of racism in the Untied States will not wane by bringing down statues or tearing down monuments, despite their significant symbolic values, or having a half-day off at JPMorgan. The entire American political order, economic organization, and social hierarchies are informed by the question of race and a commitment to white supremacy. The veneer of great American ideology of meritocracy and opportunity is crumbling. America needs that ideology, the “American dream,” a myth that turned the land of slavery and indigenous annihilation into the land of milk and honey. “This mythology is not benign, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explores, “it serves as the United States’ self-declared invitation to intervene militarily and economically around the globe.” The United States needs to conceal its racial injustices at home in order to advance and legitimize its imperialist ambitions around the globe.

Police brutality is inextricably linked to the military industrial complex. This link is not only through the sales of surplus hardware, uniforms, and other equipment. Yes, the military leadership stood firm against Trump’s recent transgressions and reminded him that the military cannot get involved in suppressing the right of protest for American citizens. But since its inception, the same military has operated as the instrument of imperialist projects that carried out mass murders and subjugated people of color around the world. In his recent book, Jakarta Method: Washington’s anti-Communist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World, Vincent Bivens shows how the U.S. masterminded the project of annihilation of communists and members of labor unions in Indonesia during the 1965 coup against the nationalist leader Sukarno. Although all the documents about the CIA involvement in the coup that brought the tyrannical regime of Suharto to power are not yet released, those declassified documents show how the CIA operatives provided the names of the unionists and members of the Indonesian Communist Party to death squads for extermination. According to more conservative estimates between 500,000 to one million people were massacred during the coup. More than one million were sent to concentrations camps many of whom vanished. Later it became evident, as Bivens discloses, that it wasn’t only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.

What Bivens uncovers is that the extermination project in Indonesia, became a model for the U.S. covert operations in Latin and Central America. “Jakarta,” the capital of Indonesia, in this new sinister vocabulary of political oppression became the code word for massacre of civilians. In Brazil, Operação Jacarta became the modus operandi of the military junta. In 1971, in eastern parts of Santiago, up in the hills where many supporters of President Allende lived, a short message was plastered on the walls. “Jakarta se acerca” (“Jakarta is Coming”)! Or sometimes, simply, “Jakarta.”

I do not intend to provide an exhaustive list of atrocities committed by the United State around the world in the name of democracy, in defense of freedom. I bring this up to insist that Black American will not be recognized as equal citizens so long as people of color around the world remain subjected to the brutality of imperialized nations such as the United States of America. The drones that kill the Iraqi, Yemeni, Pakistani, Somali civilians, the bombs, the fighter jets, the missiles and guns that are sold to the tyrants, they are all parts of the same system of oppression that brutalizes Black Americans. The Palestinians know the meaning of ghettoization in American cities. The immigrants who are dehumanized by ICE understand the depth of police brutality and the meaning of murder with impunity. These voices need to hear one another. Black America has given voice to a global movement.

Opinion

Conversations on the platform stretch our understanding of the politics of the possible.

By Charlie Warzel

Mr. Warzel is an Opinion writer at large.

• June 10, 2020 (NYTimes.com)

In February, I declared, somewhat winkingly, that Twitter is real life. My argument was not that what happens on that social media website is broadly representative of popular opinion but that what happens on Twitter is a good barometer of enthusiasm around movement-building and fandoms. And that elites tend to undervalue or dismiss what happens on the platform, suggesting that those loud voices making them uncomfortable aren’t accurate indicators of lived experiences.

Since, I’ve received a steady stream of gloating emails about how wrong I was. After all, I cited Senator Bernie Sanders’s online movement for the Democratic presidential nomination, powered in large part by Twitter, as a primary example of this insurgent force and referred to the candidate as “arguably now the Democratic front-runner.” Not two weeks later, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Joe Biden, effectively cementing him as the Democratic Party’s nominee. If Twitter was actually real life, surely it would be Mr. Sanders doing virtual town halls from his basement campaign headquarters, not Mr. Biden.

The power of online movements has been at the front of my mind the past two weeks as Americans have gathered by the tens of thousands to protest police and state violence against black people. Millions, too, have followed along on their screens, amplifying protest messages, sharing donation links and expressing solidarity. Online platforms, especially Twitter, “have become like security camera grids, each with images of a dystopia,” my Times colleague Jenna Wortham wrote last week of the images of police violence against peaceful protesters.

Those images appear, at last, to be having a sweeping effect on our public consciousness of racial inequality and injustice, especially in regard to police violence. “The most urgent filmmaking anybody’s doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones,” Wesley Morris, a Times critic at large, wrote last week.

For black activists and their allies, the only thing new about this experience is its widespread public recognition. This movement’s rallying cry — Black Lives Matter — was coined as a hashtag in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of Trayvon Martin’s murder, and scholars have been studying the internet’s central role in amplifying protest movements and racial inequality since before that.

“Social media participation becomes a key site from which to contest mainstream media silences and the long history of state-sanctioned violence against racialized populations,” Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa wrote in 2015 in a hashtag ethnography of the Ferguson protests.

They cite early hashtag movements like #HandsUpDontShoot and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown as “entry points into larger and more complex worlds” that helped illustrate that “‘#Ferguson is everywhere’ — not only in the sense of a broad public sphere but also in the sense of the underlying social and political relationships that haunt the nation as a whole.”

But as the activism dominated social media, it did not necessarily have large-scale public support. A 2017 Harvard-Harris poll suggested 57 percent of registered voters had an unfavorable view of the Black Lives Matter movement. And yet, these conversations didn’t disappear off the internet when they left front pages. They were there all along, in plain view for those who sought them out. They continued, despite portrayals to discredit the movement as a violent fringe and specious claims that “systemic racism is a myth” perpetuated by the media and so-called social justice warriors.

But what begins online and is castigated as an unrepresentative view gradually builds consensus, in this case, tracking to our current moment. When, at last, it reaches critical mass it is treated as conventional wisdom by those who once dismissed it. According to a new Times analysis, “in the last two weeks, American voters’ support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased almost as much as it had in the preceding two years.” As my Opinion colleague Aisha Harris wrote on Tuesday, “all of a sudden, everybody seems to care about black lives.”

The undergirding movement and struggle has been there the whole time. It was an articulation of a better future, even when it fell on unlistening ears. It was real life.

There’s a similar argument to be made for the insurgent-left politics of Bernie Sanders and his supporters. Throughout the primaries, centrist Democrats argued that the senator’s ideas were overindexed on places like Twitter but considered on the fringe and unpalatable to most Americans. But since Senator Sanders dropped out of the race in April, his policies have resonated beyond his base. Now staring down a pandemic, mass unemployment and a potential depression, centrists have mused publicly about a health care system like Medicare for All that doesn’t tie insurance to employers.

Similarly, the Sanders campaign’s racial justice reforms and intersectional economic programs now appear more acceptable to a political establishment that dismissed the proposals as unrealistic and radical. Twitter’s left-leaning politics weren’t (slightly) ahead of the times — they were merely disregarded as implausible or not representative. Or as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at The New Yorker declared just before he left the race, “Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders.”

This cycle is beginning to play out again during the George Floyd protests, where protesters have adopted a new rallying cry: Defund the Police. The demand has been met with scorn by the president and conservatives, and anxiety by centrist and establishment Democrats. The Biden campaign has rejected it as a bridge too far. Journalists and news outlets have qualified it — suggesting it’s merely an aggressive statement of support for reprioritizing police funding.

Of course, for tens of thousands marching in the streets waving #DefundThePolice signs, the phrase is not a dog whistle; it’s a bullhorn. It is, like Medicare for All, a call for a complete reimagining of what they see as a corrupt, broken system. The argument is, quite literally, to defund the police and build a healthier public safety system from scratch while investing that money in other adjacent community-support resources.

The slogan — just like Black Lives Matter — is blunt. Its intentions are clear: Imagine a world without the police state. But do a Twitter search for the words “defund the police Twitter real life” and you’ll see the dismissal in real time, suggesting that an overhaul of militarized policing is a fantasy held by a small number of extremely online leftists.

An argument about Twitter — or any part of the internet — as “real life” is frequently an argument about what voices “matter” in our national conversation. Not just which arguments are in the bounds of acceptable public discourse, but also which ideas are considered as legitimate for mass adoption. It is a conversation about the politics of the possible. That conversation has many gatekeepers — politicians, the press, institutions of all kinds. And frequently they lack creativity.

“Many times our politics and our political imagination is limited by our politicians. … I think people who could do more to try to imagine a different political world often times are obsessed with the filibuster,” the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates said last week on a podcast about reimagining the police state. “I’m not saying the filibuster isn’t important. … But I’m saying that there’s one group of people who have to be concerned about that but there’s another group of people who also should think long term. What do we want? What are the guiding lights?”

Right now, in the midst of a series of cascading, intersecting crises (racial and economic inequality, climate change, mass unemployment, a pandemic), what’s possible feels like more of an open question than in recent memory. But that possibility, while life-affirming for many, is deeply threatening to some: the rich, and the white and powerful, to name a few. And those who feel threatened will try to demean the ideas. They’ll be met with eye rolls as the out-of-step activism of the hyperpolitical Twitter fringes or the ramblings of the woke, coddled campus kids. Implicit here is that Twitter and the campus are siloed spaces away from reality.

Which is what makes the events of the past two weeks of mass protests so powerful. The marching in the streets, the waving of signs and defiant chanting as well as the choking tear gas and the grotesque shows of police force — they are positively, indisputably, physically real. And it is further proof that the online spaces that helped to galvanize these movements have always been rooted in reality. It’s just one that many refused to open their eyes to.

Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) is an Opinion writer at large.

(Submitted by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

“Practical experience and accurate observation show that one cannot influence one’s own dreams. There are people, it is true, who assert that they can influence them. But if you look into their dream material, you find that they do only what I do with my disobedient dog: I order him to do those things I notice he wants to do anyhow, so that I can preserve my illusion of authority.”

― Carl Jung