MAX ERNST

Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale

After writing my essay on "Confronting Doomsday," we visited the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL. Included inthe exhibits were art pieces by other leading surrealistic pioneers of the time, including this collage by Max Ernst This collage struck me viscerally! To me, in my gut, it felt like a representation of the end of the world: people fleeing in terror a chaotic and disordered landscape; one person unsuccessfully trying to push a panic button bigger than he was.

It is the perfect companion for my Doomsday  piece!

  After reading up on Max Ernst, I found out it's even more appropriate than I knew at the time. First of all, his whole perception of the world as a regularly ordered, sane place was shattered by being a combat veteran of World War I.

The excerpts that follow are from: https://monoskop.org/images/a/ab/Pritzker_Pamela_Ernst_1975.pdf

"Those four years of war for Ernst were as if he "died on the 1st of August 1914" and "re- suscitated on the 11th of November 1918 as ayoung man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of this time”.

Young, angry, outraged and full of enormous pent up energy from the War, Ernst became involved with the one group who could possibly present an outlet for these passions: Dada.

…

His collages force the exterior real world to confront the hidden reality of the unconscious. Theycreateamultiplicityof associations by giving form to the new reality of dreams and the unconscious as presented byFreud. Ernst has forced the viewer to expand beyond the rational and logical waking world into the world of fantasy, dreams and illusion. By rearranging traditional schemata, placing the familiar image into a new and strange context, he forces the observers to retune their old definition of visual reality and to reconcile the exterior and public world with the interior and private world of the unconscious. Ernst stated that the collage is "a meeting of two distant realities on a plane foreign to both." Thus, visually Ernst attempted to reconcile the two equal parts of our existence and turn them into a new and complete reality."

Confronting Doomsday

Max Ernst: "Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale" (1924)

While most of us watched transfixed when the Times Square Ball dropped as the clock struck midnight – like the misanthrope watching a  horror movie – I couldn’t take my eyes off another timepiece:

This clock, the Doomsday Clock, rather than heralding in the new year, represents how long humanity will survive as depicted by the 12 hours on a clock face. Midnight represents the end of civilization or the apocalypse.

For 2019, it is set at 11:58 pm, two  minutes from  midnight.”^⁠1 

 The Doomsday Clock, the brainchild of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, has been accepted as a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe since 1947.  Although The Clock evaluates all risks, including climate change, and emerging technologies, this year it is focused on nuclear dangers.

The Bulletin points out reckless language in the nuclear realm has heated up an already dangerous situation. It is clear we are on the cusp of a  new arms race, increasing  the likelihood of accidents and misperceptions, while, at the same time,  robbing resources from life-affirming objectives – like fixing our infrastructure, raising the minimum wage, and getting everyone health insurance.

The last time the clock was set this close to doomsday was in 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested their first thermonuclear weapons. I was 8-years-old, practicing duck-and-cover under my desk in Northwood Grammar School. A nuclear attack seems so imminent, I pleaded with my father to build us a bomb shelter.

Oh, how times have changed. 

Today, we appear unfazed by the threat of nuclear war, held in thrall as we are, by social media and shopping on Amazon. Worst of all, as opposed to when I was eight, now new existential dangers lurk.

The Atomic Bulletin warns us about one thing, evident to us all, that the world has entered a prolonged period of extreme instability: A situation where the caustic political environment, coupled with an acceleration of disinformation and cyber-warfare, puts civilization on an unsustainable path. 

And that’s not to mention climate change, that 800-pound gorilla just now slouching out of the shadows into plain view. Paul Krugman puts it this way:

“While it will take generations for the full consequences of climate change to play out, there will be many localized, temporary disasters along the way. Apocalypse will become the new normal” — like what is happening right now in Australia.^⁠2

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Somehow, I survived grammar school without getting ulcers and our world didn’t disappear in a mushroom cloud. I realize that things were simpler in the 1950s, but what happened then provides a blueprint for a way forward today.

 I don’t believe that it was just dumb luck that we avoided nuclear war back then: Rather it was because regular people got fed up and demanded change.

 At the height of the ‘Cold War,’ about 50,000 women brought together by “Women Strike for Peace,” marched in 60 cities to demonstrate against nuclear weapons. A robust movement to save the environment arose, spurred by Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, These causes merged with burgeoning, feminist, civil rights, and anti-war  movements to form the 1960s counterculture.  

I believe that when we were young, our Sixties generation, standing up together for a cause bigger than ourselves –or our pocketbooks – changed history, at least for a while, striking a blow for peaceful co-existence, universal human rights, and protecting our precious little, spaceship  Earth.

It is time to do it again. 

And, once again, it will be the young who will inspire us and lead the way. Young people, like 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, speaking truth to power at the 2018 Climate Action Summit:

“People are suffering. People ae dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”^⁠3

Go, girl, go!

xxx

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¹ https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

² https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/opinion/climate-change-australia.htmlalgo=&fellback=false&imp_id=466133981&imp_id=337733934&action=click&module=trending&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer

³ https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit

Happy New Year to All

taken from our deck this morning

Brilliant and Bright

the rising sun

on January 1:

A hopeful sign

for 2020

Wedded to the Land on the Solstice

Published in the Concord Monitor 12/19/19

This gnarled apple tree still stands in what remains 
of the orchard once owned by my grandparents

Wedded to the Land on the Solstice

My father purchased 21 acres across from our home when I was about five. Before the neighbor sold it, she clear-cut the land to maximize her profit. The logger, as was the custom in those times, set up a portable sawmill and reduced the mature pine forest to rough-cut boards, which were then neatly stacked next to the road.

The forest was gone. I built forts out of the stickings^⁠1 and slabs that were left.

 My mother and I would walk diagonally across the road and through an opening in the stonewall to pick blueberries, which spouted around the stumps of what had been majestic trees. 

Once we saw a bear.

When I was little, I loved being outside, chopping down dead trees with my hatchet and building dams on the little seasonal brook beside our house. 

I could never shake that formative experience of living an outside life, working with my hands. It haunted me wherever I went.

 When I was attending St Paul’s advanced summer sessions, I envied the groundkeepers outside the window trimming the hedges; when I was heading off to start college at Columbia, I envied the fishermen unloading their catch outside Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant where we had stopped for lunch.

Perhaps it was inevitable I would return to the land: that I would drop out of Columbia and volunteer for Vietnam and, afterward, reject graduate school twice; and gravitate home, in the aftermath of the tumultuous 60s, to build stonewalls for a living and erect a house on that very land my parents had purchased when I was five.

I built my driveway for my new house up through that opening in the stonewall my mother and I had entered to pick berries. With a $14,000 construction loan, and a lot of sweat equity, we moved into that house, but it was only half-done.  

At our housewarming party, Bud Carpenter, local horseshoer, welded brackets and cut a stovepipe hole in a 20 ft steel culvert which we erected for the chimney, like soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima.

 Raising the culvert to get heat was a top priority because it was Winter Solstice time – and freezing! 

 The denuded land my father bought, the blueberry patch we picked berries in, is now a registered Tree Farm, a respectable forest of pine and oak. I still cut my own firewood and burn it, but the smoke now flows through a stone chimney.

Vietnam turned me off to the frenetic hustle and bustle of the holidays. That feeling intensified after becoming a stonemason with its demands of physical exertion and distant jobs. 

When the work stopped after the frost set in and the land went to sleep, all I wanted to do was hibernate like a bear. 

Each year, as the darkness deepens and the cold strengthens, I found myself entering a primal cave beyond words, a sacred space Gunilla Norris has been able to poetically illustrate:

Our souls can dive into the biting cold, into darkness,  into bare being. The unknown is there… Winter is a womb in which we grow.⁠2

Due to occupational infirmities, as I approached the age of 50, I went back to school to learn an inside profession, dealing with the trauma we inflict on each other and the world.  Since then, my solstice reveries have been increasingly buffeted by sadness and grief at the state of our world, steeped in suffering, injustice, and climate crisis – caused not by some alien devil but our own selfish and small-minded actions. My feelings resonate with those of the Episcopal Priest, Tish Harrison Warren: looking honestly at the darkness connects us to an “almost cosmic ache: our deep, wordless desire for things to be made right and the incompleteness we find in the meantime.”⁠3 As I sit musing by my woodstove this solstice, I have no magic wand to awaken the world – and each one of us – to a higher standard of ethics, justice, and good behavior. I am left with only what I’ve always had: my sense of place and the changing of the seasons. xxx

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¹ Stacked green lumber must be separated by narrow strips of wood called “stickings” for ventilation to allow proper drying of the wood.

² Gunilla Norris A Mystic Garden:  Working with Soil, Attending to Soul

3 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/christmas-season-advent-celebration.html++

In celebration of essays, local control, and the Concord Monitor

This essay published in the Concord Monitor 11/17/19

The old Monitor Building when they were situated downtown

Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite writers, happens to be the editor of The Best Essays of 2019. I’m guessing this book won’t become a bible for Trump supporters, mainly because of one essay.

Solnit included, We are the Resistance by Michelle Alexander, because it demonstrates the author’s ability to think outside the box by disputing the conventional belief that those who oppose Trump are “the resistance.” 

On the contrary, she says, “Viewed from the broad sweep of history, Donald Trump is the resistance. We are not.” She equates those of us who believe in diversity and universal human rights to a river, “sometimes powerful, tumultuous, and roiling with life; at other times meandering and turgid” but always moving.

The river is a perfect metaphor for our plight: Rather than viewing ourselves negatively as a dam holding something back, we empower ourselves by identifying with the river, a powerhouse of nature whose forward movement is inevitable.

Solnit asserts that essays like this are powerful currents propelling the river forward, churning out ever more inclusive perspectives on race, gender, climate, and social justice.

She says, “we live in an essayistic age,” where some of the key transformations in our country have been the result of arguments advanced in essays, not individual ones, generally “but flocks of essays that fill the sky like birds.”

I agree with Solnit and believe, on the local level, the new format of the Concord Monitor is doing the same by providing a roosting place for flocks of local writers, from a variety of backgrounds, to enrich us in “The Forum” section of the paper.

These local scribes, on a consistent basis, challenge us to broaden our horizons by embracing diversity, social justice, and equality for us all, while bringing it all home by celebrating our unique sense of place, including specific ideas on how to make our local communities thrive. 

I can say, without doubt, that I’ve enjoyed and profited more from these local folks, than the old, big-time national columnists. However, looking ahead, I worry about the future of the Monitor.

One-fifth of all newspapers have gone out of business in the last 14 years, and more are closing all the time. One can’t help noticing that the Monitor is getting slimmer all the time.

Losing the Monitor would be like losing an old friend, unfortunately, not an uncommon occurrence when you are 74. Already this year, my other local paper, the Suncook Sun, succumbed without warning, erasing access to my most local news happenings.

How do we cope with this accelerating loss of access to what’s happening around us? What happens to our democracy if all our news comes from corporate giants and Russian bots on Facebook.

Everyone across the political spectrum has an answer. Folks on both the extreme left and right say we need a revolution. In an old essay in The Nation back in 2009, my mentor Rebecca Solnit claims the revolution is already happening.

In fact, she points out “we have thousands of them, being carried out quite spectacularly over the past few decades, community gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers’ markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better.”

The revolution is already happening in bits and pieces all over the place – but not much has been done to connect the dots. And that’s why we need the Concord Monitor!

The underlying vision is “neither state socialist or corporate capitalist” but something we in New England are intimately familiar with: direct democracy, as in town meetings and local control.

That’s my vision: Connecting the dots by each of us buying local, keeping profits in the community, enabling we, the people, to prosper, rather than corporate titans in NYC or Silicon Valley. 

The more we buy local, the more new, local businesses, farms, and community spaces will emerge. At each turn of the wheel,  more profit will stay in the local community.

Completing the circle, all these local businesses and farms, acting locally, will advertise in the Concord Monitor, making it once again – along with the local community – vibrant and prosperous.

And here’s the final piece of my vision: Harkening back to its roots, and in celebration of community, the Monitor returns to its brick and mortar home in downtown Concord.

xxx

The props of my youth are collapsing

Jean Stimmell CC, photograph taken 11/15/19

Sometimes I feel like an entry in the 2 volume, psychology tome, “Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience.”

I don’t usually feel that way, even after 1-1/2 years in the brown water navy in Vietnam, 9 years counseling veterans with PTSD in the VA and now an additional 20 years in private practice with a heavy share of trauma patients dealing with life-defying experiences.

But I felt that way yesterday, attending a free lunch celebrating Veterans Day at a banquet hall in a nearby city. The veterans, a smattering from each of our generous smorgasbord of recent wars, were humble and grateful, breaking bread together, enjoying this brief reunion of brotherhood and sisterhood.

However, at least to me, the scene was more than just sitting around the fire singing Kumbaya: I was racked  by the dissonance between enjoying the understated, modesty of my fellow veterans who knew war, while, at the same time, being assaulted by ultra-patriotic music, playing so loud conversation was difficult: songs so adoring and one-sided, as to border on being jingoistic.

These lyrics pulled me back in time, twisting my soul, making me feel ill. I grew up revering John Wayne and this type of – how can I nicely say it – patriotic excess. 

But those fantasies of the USA, who never did anything wrong, were trampled, after marching off to war in Vietnam to kill innocent third-world peasants, whose leader, Ho Chi Minh, declared his independence by reciting America’a 1776 Declaration of Independence.

How could I feel proud of my country for attacking Iraq because it allegedly had weapons of mass destruction, a propaganda ploy to sanction the attack that killed 100,000’s and upset the balance in the middle east? 

How could be proud of our country today for supporting Saudi Arabia’s massacre of Yemini citizens and the dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi, our Washington Post columnist?

If that wasn’t enough, the next day, I happened across an article in the NYT magazine written by an American soldier who was a medic in Afghanistan. He tells a story of survival guilt; a familiar one I have heard from 100s of patients over the years.

What was new – and viscerally unsettling – was that he struck a nerve in me, exposing feelings I am usually in deep denial about: 

"You feel the guilt but it doesn’t feel outsize; it doesn’t seem misplaced and unjustified. Your own innocence is precisely the thing you can’t see or feel." ^[1]

Though it’s not that simple: in truth, my guilt extends far beyond war: I feel the same way about a lot of things, recovering, as I am, from being a white, middle-class, American, man.  

It isn’t easy, it’s a heavy burden to carry, trying to ferret out and purge my 74-year old history as a man, steeped in patriarchy, classism, and the blinders of institutional racism. 

Don’t get me started on what we’ve done to blacks and Native Americans, or my own sad history of patriarchy.

I’m trying…I’m learning…I’m changing with the help of courageous mentors. However, there’s one thing I am proud of: 

I am still proud to be an American, just one who, having taking off his rose-colored glasses, no longer grants her blind obedience, parroting that everything she does is right and virtuous.

Consequently, while I love her just as much, it’s more in the manner of a parent loving his delinquent teenager. Because I love her, it is my duty to work to change her objectionable behavior – and right now, there’s a lot to change!

xxx

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^[1] guilt.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/magazine/survivor-guilt-veteran.html

Golden Mirrors to the Soul

Florida Flamingo   Jean Stimmell©2019

Palomino Pony   Jean Stimmell©2019

"I have long been fascinated by the use of “oracles” in shaping human thought — including such devices as augury (in ancient Rome), the I Ching (in China), the Tarot (in Europe), and Rorschach tests (in western psychology). It is my understanding that such practices basically function as mirrors — by confusing the rational mind, they unlock the user’s subconscious, allowing insights to arise from within."

quote by JonathanHarris from “A silent Place."

http://number27.org/asilentplace