I Can’t See The Back of My Head

“The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
Zvi Rex

“Bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic purpose: to conceal
domination in production.”
Adorno and Horkheimer

“Mimetic desire does not always result in conflict, but it frequently does so for reasons that the tenth commandment makes evident. The object I desire in envious imitation of my neighbor is one he intends to keep for himself, to reserve for her own use; she will not let someone snatch it away without combat. My desire will be thwarted, but in place of accepting this and moving on toward another object, nine times out of ten my desire will resist this and become even more intense in imitating the desire of its model.”
Rene Girard

Antisemitism is becoming increasingly prevalent on the left in the U.S. And in the West, in general. The crimes of Israel are suddenly flaunted by Israel itself. Is that simply the result of Likud fanaticism and hubris? Perhaps, to some degree. I remember twenty years ago Israel controlled the narrative on antisemitism and on the nation of Israel itself. But the loss of control of that narrative strikes me as possibly intentional. Netanyahu is a ghoulish man to be sure, but he is cunning. Not smart, that’s propaganda. He’s not very smart at all. But he *is* cunning. And the increasingly open and arrogant manner of the violence directed at Palestinians cannot really be entirely an accident. For with this broadening of public awareness of Israeli settler violence has come broadening protests (BDS in particular, but not exclusively).

And with those protests has come a dramatic spike in Western antisemitism. They are inextricably linked, although that is not really the germane point. For one cannot finally separate this *return* of antisemitism from the ideological project of Western capitalism. And even that is not entirely correct; for this question of victim ideology, the inscription subconsciously of radical projection and scapegoating far exceeds the particulars of the relationship the advanced West has with Israel.

The proprietor imperial classes of Europe and North America impose mass violence against the *other*, the weakest nations of the world, because such violence is the cornerstone of their belief in supremacy and control. The secondary benefits of profit are not inconsequential, but they are not the driving force, finally.

“Imperialistic, crisis-torn capitalism swung over to an exacerbated nationalism of its own. One of its most malignant manifestations was the resort to anti-Semitism, a ready-made means for diverting the wrath of despairing and deluded people away from the real authors of their misery by making the Jews a scapegoat for the crimes of a decaying capitalism. This relapse into barbarism was consummated in Germany, the most highly developed capitalist country of Europe, through the frenzied chauvinism of the Nazis capped by Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews.”
George Novack

And allow me a quote here from Fred Goldstein…in an issue of Worker’s World last year:

“The imperialist rulers apply the same term to describe political acts that are diametrically opposite to one another. The term anti-Semitic is applied equally to, on the one hand, Greece’s pro-Nazi Golden Dawn, the undercover anti-Semites of the French National Front and Germany’s Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PAGIDA) and, on the other hand, to Hamas, Hezbollah and Muslim individuals or groups that attack Jews in Europe and the U.S.
These latter attacks by Muslims arise out of rage against the crimes of torture, bombing, drone attacks, occupation and terror campaigns like the 2014 Israeli 50-day war against Gaza, in which over 2,000 Palestinians were killed, the vast majority of them civilians, including women and children whose homes, schools, hospitals, water supply, etc., were ruthlessly destroyed.
Under such circumstances there may be many misguided but understandable acts of violence directed against Jews and other targets associated in the minds of the attackers with the suffering of their people. This association is deepened by the fact that Netanyahu and the Israeli regime repeatedly associate all Jews with Israel and Zionist ideology.”

Goldstein points out the obvious fact that antisemitism was a European practice and belief dating back to the 12th century. In England the arch fascist and Hitler admirer Oswald Mosely had the Royal Family attend his wedding, as did the future King Leopold of Belgium. The same toxic antisemitism permeated the French elite and state for centuries as well, culminating, perhaps, with Marshall Petain and the Vichy government during WW2.

“More recently, the Ukrainian right-wing, pro-U.S. puppet regime in Kiev was catapulted to power in a fascist-led coup by descendents of groups that collaborated with the Nazis in World War II and who still have allegiance to battalions that fought with Hitler.
These are the ruling-class forces that turned to fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s and used the Jewish people as scapegoats. The capitalists backed the fascists when they needed scapegoats to direct mass hostility toward the Jews because capitalism was crumbling during the Great Depression. At the same time, the fascists wiped out the trade unions and all forms of working-class organization.
To equate these reactionary forces and their monstrous persecution and crimes against the Jewish people and all humanity with the angry resistance and retaliation of the Muslim and other oppressed peoples who carry out anti-Jewish acts is to conceal the reality of ruling-class manipulation of ideology through the false application of terminology.
The acts of retaliation against Zionism for its genocidal policies or for the oppression of Muslims by French or U.S. imperialism are carried out by people who do not have F-16s, Apache helicopters, laser-guided bombs, Abrams tanks, drones, A-10 killer planes, Cruise missiles and all the modern armaments needed to defend against U.S., British, French and Israeli aggression.”
Fred Goldstein

Today’s faux or branded left in the West — led by the open bigotry and xenophobia of Slavoj Zizek — is ideologically collaborating with the Imperialist West. And with, I suspect, Israel. For Israel, however intentional or not has been their loss of narrative and control of propaganda, is really the beneficiary of this new antisemitism of the western fake left.

But this leads me to several other issues having to do with narrative and scapegoating. And with the psychic containment of Capitalism. And this touches on what Rene Girard described; the mechanisms of desire and dissatisfaction.

“The American Dream is incompatible with the reality that only a few prosper.
The question arises as to how people ‘prevent their self-image being mired
in self-disgust and degradation at their lack of success’. Individualism is
impossible to sustain in a market society because there are more losers than
winners. Now and then the anxiety and rage expressed by the losers bubbles
over to threaten the hegemony of the state. This is usually displaced by
canny politicians onto individuals and groups, such as immigrants, who
are blamed for collective problems. Such instrumental scapegoating is more
strategic than the primitive scapegoating described by Girard, being useful
to the political elite to deflect attention from genuine causes of insecurity
to unite civic society by invoking a common threat.”
John Desmond

So, there is an obvious structural aspect connected with finding scapegoats to blame for one’s own failures, and on a societal level this scapegoating is coerced and directed, or managed. But there is another aspect here that I have encountered recently which is the desire for a remembered pleasure of hatred. I find white men, mostly young, who self identify as left or anti capitalist, are acutely driven to revisit their enjoyment of hating. Israel becomes convenient because of their very visible and extreme crimes and hence, these young western white men can’t wait to *Jew hate*. It mirrors the red neck southerner’s enjoyment of hating blacks or other minorities.

“A particularly interesting aspect of this research on a psychoanalytic
perspective is the ‘chameleon’ effect, or mimetic tendency for humans
to unconsciously imitate the behaviour of models. Researchers studied
whether the chameleon effect can be extended to the automatic activation of
social stereotypes. { }. Chameleon effects are also found in relation
to brands. For example, a person primed with an Apple logo unconsciously
becomes an ‘Apple’ person, behaving consistently in line with the meanings
attached to the brand and being more creative than a person primed with
a different logo.”
John Desmond

Mimetic reactions are taking on qualities of restriction and angst. The extent of marketing has resulted in at least two generations, now, who can’t activate their mimetic response, or rather, it simply doesn’t activate. I have had students look at me with utter bewilderment when I speak of the mimetic response in humans.

It is worth going back a moment to Freud at this point. For Freud, sexuality had aims, or goals. And goal orientation has infiltrated every psychic layer of the Western mind. Progress and expansion and protestantism (Well, Christianity). And this aim directed obsessiveness is coupled to the instrumentalized and (per Marcuse) one dimensional man the result seems to be a kind of over fixated psyche but one with deeply crippling neuroses. The racism of today’s educated classes, often liberal and sometimes anti capitalist, and usually environmentally conscious, is also regressively fixated and narcissistic. And coinciding with these fixations is the residue of a trend that began with Western colonial exploration. Eugenics has had a far greater impact on the psyche of the Western individual than is normally thought, I believe. Getting rid of the infirm and the abnormal or inferior is coupled to a bourgeois notion of sexual health (normalcy?) and to this increased sense of *working* on your self emotionally (and by extension economically). This bourgeois notion of health included a long term vision of improving the stock — sort of animal husbandry for the affluent professional class.

The post modern/advanced capitalist object of desire is the self, firstly. And shaping this self, managing the brand, and decorating it are all intertwined with other goals and the associated (real or not) pleasure of all expansion (Manifest Destiny and economic growth, colonization and eventually space travel). This ego ideal has, in the West, trended on several parallel paths. One is the self mastery of slim and fit, which is also overlapping with the eugenics idea. And also on sheer power, physical violence — body builders and action figures and super heroes. And then there is this need for an appearance of uselessness. The ruling class tend toward self display of lack of utility. The underclass favor the violent body of power, which is of course also the body of the warrior slave, a fantasy that permeates the male ruling class as well. Game of Thrones and the unsullied comes to mind, an amalgam of several factors (the problem, though, in that narrative is that the supposedly invincible eunuch batallion has been rather stunningly underachieving, but I digress…) that draw from these various notions of hedonistic rejection and elitism itself as an fictive object of desire. The desire for asceticism is acute in the West, and is almost an entirely separate topic worthy of several volumes, but suffice to say it is a kind of Orientalism and kitsch spirituality.

Mastery runs through these models of self, as does suppression of appetite. And this is linked to the Puritan legacy in the U.S. The relationship of an increasingly pornographic culture with ideals of mastery and self control and even sexual abstinence is highly complex (Mormon Utah for example is the state with the highest consumption of internet porn). But cutting across all these branches of self image and ego ideal is a profound narcissism. And the narcissist of 2016 is one who is desiring the idealized self through screen image. And this is not just selfies, which is obvious and not so important a symptom, but more the idea of time and maturation and control. I love who I imagine myself to be, or who I imagine I was –or will be. But this dynamic with the optical enchantment of self is also deeply mediated and ambivalent. Self love is wanting to fuck the image of myself on the screen. And here there are curious echoes of necrophilia and infantilism. Peter Pan syndrome stuff. An image of who I *was* becomes partly an erasing of historical time and of history itself. The reproducing of images of ourselves, compulsively, is an attempt to go back in time. To reproduce the previous image of the self, the younger self. But that desire to go back masks the desire to eventually return to infancy and then uterine existence and then non birth. The sense of constant compulsive image reproduction feels more and more as if it has a direct relationship to Death.

If one were to follow Lacan here, the *real* is that realm in which the infant blissfully exists, floats, prior to falling into language and rules and containment. For the infant at this stage has no experience of spatial ends… of containment. But the helpless human infant is vulnerable, pre-mature, and somewhere in that malleable cranium resides the sense of not being ready. The child has none of the motor skills of other primates when born. The helplessness either is or isn’t experienced — for Lacan the realm of the *real* seems to indicate there is no experience of spatial borders. At that point when the infant senses the Mother’s absence, that marks the birth of anxiety. The mirror phase, without getting into that here, suggests the misrecognition the infant makes regards itself. But it IS the image *over there* that constitutes the self for the child. So, narcissism then may very well be formulated, structurally, by image repetitions and modifications. However one tracks this stuff, the point in this context is that the Western psyche is sedimented with various registers of anxiety. The anxious, or about-to-be- real anxious, and the alienated other.

“…it is through mimesis, (identification with the mirror
image) that one gains a sense of unity, self-containment and mastery over
the body. If that was all that there was to it, humanity would be condemned
to dwell forever entombed in the hell of mirrors. However, the identification
with an Other in the mirror opens out the possibility for symbolic thought.”
John Desmond

It is curious in a way that so much resistance is put up to the importance of art and culture, even crappy art, in its role of shaping our consciousness. Or reflecting it and modifying it. Desmond’s comment above about a hell of mirrors has the ring of correctness about it. For even after symbolic thought opens for the infant, the residue of mirrors, their fractured infinite quality — infinite regress, lingers. Welles’ Lady From Shanghai, of course, the famous funhouse mirror sequence at the end of the film comes to mind. That may well be the most copied sequence of celluloid in the history of movies. In fact, it is compulsively copied. Every year at least one film or TV show directly copies that scene. Usually more. Such scenes echo something outside our understanding. We are back in the *real* again, in one way. The mirror though slips out of our hands. Our fingers cannot hold it. And we fall into symbolic conceptual thought. And sublimation. The point here is that the scapegoat mechanism arrives in the human at a very early stage and it does this because the psyche is born ill equipped to process social interaction and to navigate the material empirical world. And so it misidentifies and reaches for what she or he thinks is itself. (As Lacan said, except we never see the back of our head). The rise of that scapegoat mechanism occurs at the dawn of antiquity. It exists in the Old Testament. And today, the left and the environmental left, veer from one scapegoat to another. The myth of overpopulation for example.

“After the World War I the new discipline of demography arose in the USA,strongly influenced by eugenics, framing the overpopulation issue as essentiallya question of womens fertility; it related the apparent diversity in fertility ratesacross societies and social groups to class as well as intelligence and other per-sonal characteristics.
These narratives were still present three decades later with the establishment of The Population Council in 1952 by John D Rockefeller III, as a result of concerns about growing populations in developing countries and their impact upon wealthier societies with lower fertility rates. With the consolidation of development discourse after World War II thequestion of overpopulation took on newfound importance. { } This preoccupation increased such that during the late 1950s, for the first time, overpopulation came to be understood as an imminent threat.”
Rob Fletcher

The Malthusian model fits into the Capitalist unconscious seamlessly and eugenics of course was a scientific mythology that valorized the white European as somehow god-like, while the beastial colonized savages will only develop, if ever, with a kind but firm hand from the master.

“…the term population evokes images of an explosion, mainly of uneducated Third World people, in countries that cannot repay their debts. Population evokes anger at irresponsible procreation, insufficient funding for birth control programmes, and against the Catholic Church for opposing contraception and abortion.”
B. Duden (The Development Dictionary)

So here is the contemporary white Capitalist bourgeois, educated, professional (or student or resentful unemployed professional) who self identifies as left and anti-Capitalist, though often only to a point (and this brings to mind those leftist journals who demand payment to be read because, as businesses they tell you, they cannot survive without subscription money). The contradictions are acute here, and yet this is the new antisemite, too. Anti-semite, white supremacist, and sometimes environmentalist. The rational instrumental calculus of the new xenophobic of the West is one that sees only certain problems fitting their image of their ideal self. Attacking Israel is fine because it offers an excuse to attack all Jews for not condemning Israel itself. Circular logic you ask? Uh. Yeah. Much like the reactionary Republicans (and Martin Amis and the late Chris Hitchens, et all) asking why Muslims don’t speak up more about fundamentalist Islam. In both cases, from right and left, the Capitalist unconscious seeks out, like hellfire missiles, the appropriate scapegoating target. This is the logic of FOX News.

This demand for accepting blame (whether it is racialist or something else) is often concealed by what Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2003) called the *tolerant middle*. This is a subject position that voices a bland plea for balance, reasonableness, and tolerance, and yet such pleas disguise a demand for the status quo. All extreme opinions or emotions are accused of being unreasonable and somehow harmful. The need for this tolerance in this case masks intolerance to the extent that the hierarchies and values of the tolerant middle are those of the dominant class. In the liberal and left today, in the West, there is almost a secondary subject formation that is closely related except that is expanded to labels that accept a certain kind of activist critique. The activist middle. And environmentalists often harbor this subject position, a kind of self image based on highly instrumental thinking and a deep belief in the authority of science. Now, I mention this because this secondary version of the *tolerant middle* is closely related to the new antisemites who present themselves as concerned about Israeli violence yet harbor a deeper need to scapegoat. The reality of colonial history (including Zionism) is deflected and this new voice of tolerance enters the discourse to allocate blame in appropriate percentages. The system recedes ever further in the rear view mirror. There is, then, something in the 21st century Western liberal and leftist (the new faux left I should say) that compulsively demands *others* atone for the sins they see around them. Violence, inequality, environmental degradation — it is all a search for the perfect scapegoat. And this scapegoat, to be the appropriate one must be containable conceptually. This is the cunning of Capitalism. A system of domination and coercion that operates according to a rationale of containment, in fact, produces subject positions that can criticize everything except their own experience of containment.

It strikes me that there has been a loss of true melancholia today. One cannot experience rejection — the loss of something by any means except death — if one has nothing that one desires to master or control. By which I mean when the subject position wants to see in others all the qualities, both good and bad, that normally (sic) one would see in oneself, the idea of rejection recedes in that same rear view mirror. Sadness itself is pathologized now. Grief is acceptable, and there is even a pretty flourishing grief industry, but melancholia is either reduced to a variety of depression, and medicated, or it simply is projected out as part of this scapegoating mechanism. The Israeli question again is relevant, for there is an approved sadness and concern for the victims of settler state violence (Palestinians) but that becomes the alibi to demand atonement by SOMEONE ELSE. All those Jews not in Israel must speak up. It is utterly irrelevant that many in fact do. For this is the presumed guilt one sees in the exact same way in the new Islamophobia.

Presumed guilt is now projected onto the legal systems as part of the victim’s right movement. No justice without guilt. The boundaries of this guilt apportioning become ever blurrier. Now, to return to Girard a moment; the formulation of coveting that which belongs to my neighbor seems to be shifting. The desire for your neighbor to lose what he has, rather than getting it yourself. This also allow for this false concern. It is not quite that simple, of course, for the desire for your neighbor to lose must be repressed.

“We congratulate ourselves on having within us a desire that “will last forever,” as Baudelaire put it (“l’expansion des choses infinies”), but we do not see what this “forever” conceals: the idolization of the neighbor. This idolatry is necessarily associated with the idolization of ourselves. The more desperately we seek to worship ourselves and to be good “individualists,” the more compelled we are to worship our rivals in a cult that turns to hatred.”
Rene Girard

I suspect the digitally shaped unconscious of Capitalism today is one in which the production of the good individual is mediated with the ambivalence of the neighbor’s losing the desired possession. Collectively the bourgeois West today is constantly self congratulating. Hollywood is a factory of self congratulation. And yet, that self congratulation takes, increasingly — because of this streak of environmental narcissism — a kind of false modesty and humility. And that false modesty is the reincarnation of the suppression of appetite. Loss is good, if its not actually our own loss. Loss is the reduced environmental footprint. This is the accelerating cottage industry of green guilt. Environmental responsibility becomes part of a character production where less and small is transferred to the person; the subject starts to fade and dissolve into an environmentally responsible phantom. The constant celebrity diets and health advice is part of an economy of resentment. It is also paternalism, and that is also, or has some linkage I think, with the residual white supremacist values of eugenics. The ruling class ideal, expressed in corporate media, is passionless even tempered and physically fit. The aerobicized overlords, mildly autistic and superficially tolerant.

“Vengeance succeeds in spanning generations and encompassing the world. It transcends time and space. One should not be surprised that in the ancient world vengeance was taken to be sacred.”
Rene Girard

The Girardian insight is really the same one Norman O. Brown saw, that the mimetic eventually forecloses time — the infinite regression, the always repetitive return of temporary cancellation. The rear view mirror. It is only in the rear view mirror that we can see the back of our misrecognized head. We were not ready to be born. And our missing appointment (per Lacan) is tied to that sense of missing qualities of ourself — the pre-conceptual anxiety of Maternal absence, or father, or Other…this is felt, and that is an experience we recognize as much like that dim fleeting sense of not-being-ready. And so we try to return. To go back. Homesickness. And these are the themes that permeate cultures, all culture, but in wildly differing ways. Vedic time is not Christian time. Buddhist time, or Mayan. But time is in all formations save Christian, a formula that goes backward (circular or not) as easily as it moves forward. If time returns then we have eliminated the burden of goals and results. And without goals, desire is reshaped. Pop sci-fi seems of late to produce an armada of time travel narratives. Never has that theme been so popular. And I suspect, as in the case of Zombies, that the idea of getting to do it all again is very comforting. Zombie apocalypse is now entered the vernacular. But buried in that comfort and dream of reconstruction, is unease, too. Vengence transcends time and space.

“I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking
for oneself for the evidence of
what is said…”
Charles Olson ( Maximus Poems, #23)

Olson travelled to the Yucatan in early 1951. The year I was born. Olson was probably a less great classroom teacher, and administrator. But as a guide, a seer of sorts, in search for revelation, he was the best. His search for Melville remains the quintessential writing on America’s greatest author, and probably greatest artist, period.

“…it’s grass that is the big enemy of maize, the only real
one, for they burn off the bush, before they plant.
But grass keeps coming in. And in the old days, they
were able to stand it off – for as long as seven years
(the maximum life of a milpa) – by weeding out the
grass by hand. But then came the machete. And with
it, the victory of grass in two years. For ever since
that iron, the natives cut the grass, and thus, without
having thought about it, spread the weed-seed, so that
the whole milpa is choked, quickly choked, and gone,
forever, for use for, maize (grass is so tough it doesn’t
even let bush or forest grow again!)…{ } the Maya were far too intelligent a race to exhaust
their soil, not to speak, as you are right to
question, of his observation, that they were a highly
spiritual race and such races always regard their soil as sacred.”
Charles Olson (Mayan Letters)

Soil and vengeance. Eternity in the West is always imagined as a forward gaze. For the Mayan, for the Vedic peoples, for a dozen others, this was not true. Is not true. What does Olson and Campeche and Mayan glyphs have to do with antisemitism? I think probably everything. Imagine the Yucatan in 1951. No high rise tourist hotels. Imagine Laguna Beach, California in 1951, where my parents conceived me, and again, no congestion, no overbuilt hills and expensive blighting condos along the shore. The West has deteriorated aesthetically, destroyed the landscape and intensified class punishments. Mike Davis wrote about the great fires of 2003 in Southern California, and Laguna Beach was hit particularly hard.

“Oct. 26 and Nov. 7, firestorms fanned by Santa Anas destroyed more than a thousand homes in Pasadena, Malibu, and Laguna Beach. In the last century, nearly half the great Southern California fires have occurred in October. This time climate, ecology, and stupid urbanization have conspired to create the ingredients for one of the most perfect firestorms in history. Experts have seen it coming for months. First of all, there is an extraordinary supply of perfectly cured, tinder-dry fuel. The weather year, 2001-02, was the driest in the history of Southern California. Here in San Diego we had only 3 inches of rain. (The average is about 11 inches). Then last winter it rained just hard enough to sprout dense thickets of new underbrush (a.k.a. fire starter), all of which have now been desiccated for months. Meanwhile in the local mountains, an epic drought, which may be an expression of global warming, opened the way to a bark beetle infestation which has already killed or is killing 90% of Southern California’s pine forests. Last month, scientists grimly told members of Congress at a special hearing at Lake Arrowhead that “it is too late to save the San Bernardino National Forest.” Arrowhead and other famous mountain resorts, they predicted, would soon “look like any treeless suburb of Los Angeles.”

When Olson dug into the dirt of the Yucatan hills, my parents had moved to Laguna Beach. My mother worked at Woolworths as a counter girl. My father acted in the community theatre there. It was a sleepy beautiful barely touched village, really. It lay off the old Highway — the old PCH. In those years nobody thought about the destruction of entire pine forest in the San Bernadino mountains. Olson didn’t dream of tourist high rises, resorts for white people, all across the Yucatan peninsula.

I was in Marrakesh for ten days last month. First time I had visited in twenty two years. One used to be able to see the Medina from the french colonial new city, Gueliz. Now it is solid housing, new housing, suburban. I asked locals who lived in these houses. They shrugged. Mostly nobody. Retired wealthy French in some. Most are empty. A few already in disrepair.

A half century has been spent in the West destroying things, and destroying people, and destroying beauty. A post apocalyptic treeless suburb, that is the inner circle of hell. Having to live next to affluent white men who bitch about Jews, and then look to play a round of golf at one of the thousands of courses in drought ravaged California. While in far off corners of the globe U.S. made bombs explode and kill and maim. These same guys, over drinks, might discuss topics like ‘reverse racism’. Fifty solid years of this.

Lacan wrote..
“The drive that circles round the excavated centre of being, is pulled outwards towards the objects that promise gratification, but inwards too towards the completest form of
a loss that it already knows.”

John Desmond wrote of Lacan’s gloss on Freud and the fort/da game played by the boy….

“By means of his use of language, the boy has managed the passage from
the bliss of union with his mother into another place entirely. This is the
realm of culture, where one is assigned a role, where one can never be everything
or the sole object of desire for another. It is the movement from
Imaginary union with the mother to the Symbolic that thus injects the child
with a sense of death.”

Desmond’s book is excellent, but especially so when he writes of Lacan and the late Freud. For he links many things I have tried to link up, sensed WERE linked. Burroughs surfaces here, as he should, because he knew Mexico and the Yucatan. He knew addiction, and opiates, and revelation. The search for revelation. Most of my life has been shaped by opoids. I am still not sure anyone writes of addiction well. It is so distant from language and speech.

“Pika Don. Pika Don is a word that has been integrated into the Japanese vocabulary as a result of the atomic bombs. Translated, PIKA means the flash (brilliant light) and DON means the explosion, representing what was seen and heard when the bombs were detonated.”
David Favrod

Once when Genet was asked about his support of the Palestinians and what he would do if they got their own state. He said he would move on. Once you are a state, he said, ‘I cannot actively participate'(I paraphrase). I understand this. Maybe all addicts understand something about refusing to answer ‘the man’. That hole in our subjectivity that comes with the fall into conceptual life is never filled. And sometimes it seems the planet is an after affect of the endless reaching for relief from the pain.

Olson was an early experimenter with LSD. When I was in high school, most of my friends and myself took LSD. A lot of LSD. Once, I sat in Venice, California, with a friend, both of us had taken acid. Across the street a lumber yard burst into flames. It was two in the morning. Did that really happen? I am pretty sure it did. But we left.

We see our reflected image, in a mirror, or glass, or simply the face of the Mother. In the eyes of the caregiver. We misrecognize. It must be ME. What else is there but me? And it is me, only its just a reflection. Later, the search for words, the search for the *other* who I thought was me, the search for relief all come together. I only see myself in the rear view mirror. But it may not really be me.