A Narrative: "Dreaming Aloud"

1

He was a Nazi, serenely vile, inviting us to kill him, not caring whether we did so or not. "Which of you will pull the trigger?" he inquired. "It is a great honor, even in dreams, to kill one as consummately cruel as me. It is an open-and-shut case. The question here is not whether I should be shot, but which of you two will do it."

The two of us were me and my girl friend, both members of an underground easily conjured, or continued, after watching a movie together earlier that evening about the Nazi occupation of Poland. The film was Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be Or Not To Be," about a Jewish Warsaw theater troupe that must pretend to be S.S. officers and later a Nazi entourage with the crowning presence, a la Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," of Hitler in it.

"Well," the Nazi said, "which one of you is to pull the trigger. This is taking forever and dreams like this aren't supposed to last longer than a few moments."

2

He was as Nazi as they come, as exact a stereotype as my subconscious could construct, and deserving of death. "It isn't often you get the chance to be the instrument of your own deliverance," he said, tied to a chair which he could position to face either of us. "All one of you has to do is pull the trigger."

3

He was a Nazi, "Eichmann-grade" as a friend used to say whenever we talked about latter-day embodiments of evil such as Pol Pot and Augusto Pinochet. He knew he was on loan to my dream as some lifelike verisimilitude of villainy. "Men wish to kill me as often as they wish to sleep with Helen of Troy," he said with pitying pride. "Personally, I would prefer a night with Cleopatra, but then I know what it is to kill as fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. Date rape of a goddess is a pleasure I have not known and, if one of you fulfills this dream, shall never know."

4

He was a Nazi, worth killing just to keep his hands off Marilyn Monroe or any other archetype of universally agreed upon beauty.

I wanted my girlfriend who held him at gunpoint and who had lost her father in WWII to do the honors. Vengeance was rightfully hers, especially since she didn't believe in God, and so was not usurping a divine right. But I knew it was for her to decide.

She handed me the gun. "Here, Shylock," she said, "You've got 6 million reasons. I've only got one."

5

He was a Nazi, strangely venerable in his commitment to evil, exquisitely comfortable in his willingness to represent glint-free darkness. He asked us for a cigarette. Mo pulled a pack of Merit's from a yellow faux-leather handbag. She proffered one to him. "As you can see," the Nazi said, "my hands are tied. Can you do me the favor of placing it between my lips and lighting it?'

She did as she was told.

6

He was a Nazi, both rigorous and relaxed at his occupation. He inhaled deeply and let out a filigree of smoke that would have impressed anyone who saw it. "I suppose you think I am dreading the moment of my execution," he said. "Or maybe you think I shall have the reward of making one of you become like me. Neither is true because neither would change the fact that I have done everything in my life that I set out to do. There is no unfinished business. None whatsoever."

7

He was a Nazi, as practiced and proficient in embodying evil as time and circumstance would allow. "Did you hate each Jew you killed?" I asked him, wanting to scratch my suddenly itching nose with the nozzle of the gun.

"David," he said, "I am no white dog German shepherd trained to kill on sight. If anything, I am a dog catcher, sending unwanted strays to the pound. I pride myself on the distinct lack of pleasure or reward I take from my job. It is a duty. I am not stupid enough to suppose we could not, by some caprice of karma, trade places. That is what I hate and love most about this job: the sheer interchangeability of victim and victimizer. This time I get the luck of the draw. Why be boastful about one winning hand?"

8

He was a Nazi, and he was annoyed with his dualistic world where all flesh could not be his own. "If it is any consolation," he told me, "you can flip a coin to see which one of you will kill me. Heads it's you, David; tails it's your girlfriend."

"I have a name," Mo interjected.

"In circumstances such as this," he reminded, "everyone is an alias for the dreamer, even me."

"I no longer fear that I harbor your depths or its needs," I said.

"Then why am I here?" he asked. "So you can kill the part of you I symbolize."

"Bullshit," my girlfriend hissed, grabbing the gun from my hand. "You are here to be forgiven."

"But I don't wish to be forgiven," the Nazi said, his face enwreathed in cigarette smoke.

"What do your wishes have to do with this?"

9

He was a Nazi, a fact which no longer seemed to bother me or interest him. "Shoot at his feet, shoot the heels off his boots," my girlfriend ordered. "The God I don't believe in and the God you do both need to have fun."

"Give me back the gun, Mo," I commanded. She did as I requested. "Your time is up," I told the Nazi, loosening the ropes so they fell to the floor.

I took aim, slowly pressed the trigger, and asked, as I prepared to fire, "Care to dance, mien commandant?"

--David Federman, Ardmore, July 17, 2010

A Manifestness: "Say Something"

SAY SOMETHING: A Manifestness

1

"Say something," Eve requested.

I love you, came to mind. So Adam said that.

"I love you," the man obeyed.

"No," the woman quickly qualified, "say something I don't know."

2

"Every river comes from some place not itself," he said, hesitating just slightly before adding, "not itself."

"Does that place have a name?" she asked.

'God', he thought. So he said that.

"That place is called 'God'," he submitted.

"Is that its place name on a map?" she asked.

"The cartographers use names of 'Eternity' and 'Heaven'," he said, as if remembering facts that had served as correct answers on a TV quiz show.'

3

"So even if there is not a God by name," she reasoned, "there are places named after him. God is the mouth of the river."

He propped himself on his elbow, looking down at her with tender admiration.

"So to speak, yes, God is the mouth of a river," he suggested. "

"Is the world a proof of God? Is it that tautological?" she persisted.

"Proofs are for people out of practice at what they once excelled," he qualified. "A piano player sits down to prove he could once play."

"The history of God is never kind to the world," she added. "No history of God has ever left the world as good a reason for itself as it seemed on that first storied shiny Sunday after a week of inarticulate molten Mondays."

"If we ever have kids, I will show them this meadow as proof the world was God's best idea," he promised, squeezing his hand.

"If they have to take someone else's word for it, if the world is already bereft of self-evidence, God will become the property of religion," she warned. "We will be priests not parents and they will hate us for telling them we know more than they do."

"Yes, Eve, it will seem a punishment to swear to something no longer apparent to them," he prophesied. "Prayer will cease to be praise of the obvious. But not to preach faith as full mindfulness of the world will be even worse. Words must never fall from our lips like cups from a hand."

"What do you think we should do to prevent that fall?" Eve asked.

"Bathe them in the river of song. Drown them in the flow before we teach them to drink from it," Adam outlined. "Then we must hope they come back of their own accord as adults for a second swim."

4

"Say anything," she pleaded after long silence.

Fuck you, he thought instantly with unexpectedly gratuitous malice from a place inside he never knew existed. Until then. I'm having a lapse, he thought. They will be tempted to remember this moment forever.

"Do I have to say the first thing that comes to mind?" he stalled, thunderstruck by the thought he needed time. He had never before had such a thought or a need.

"You don't think I already know the rumors that you're the son of Lucifer?" she said her features wrinkling with deadpan scorn.

He laughed. "What if it was worse than that?" he qualified.

"As long as we imagine a God who could get it wrong before He got it right there must be Satanic Verses," she explained. "Fortunately, they, too, are inspired by him. This God contains multitudes."

5

"Say something worth saying," she amended a moment later. "Say anything that would make 'speech after long silence' worthwhile."

"'In the beginning was the word,'" he quoted an ancient silence-breaker. "In the beginning was something to get the conversation going."

"So on the eight day, at the start of the second cycle of days, the world became a story worth telling," she calibrated.

"Yes," he agreed, "on the eighth day God joined his vocabulary. God became a name for the world."

6

"Which of the names he spoke was distinctly his?" she asked. "G-O-D?"

"To take such a name proves there was a devil not that there was a deity," he argued. "Once God agrees to be a name among the many, he can be offered a throne to further set himself apart. Does he need to signify ownership? Does he need a distance greater than that between any two words that can be spoken? Does he need to make a sound greater than the silence the river's roar makes louder?"

"Doesn't every painter like to sign his painting?" she tried to justify.

"Some use an icon instead," he reminded.

"Give me an icon for God," she challenged.

"A red wheelbarrow," he suggested.

"'A red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens','' she quoted with rapturous rapidity from scripture.

"Now we're on the same page," he assured her delightedly.

7

"If the world as a Creation story begins with a red wheelbarrow, how does it end?" he asked as if posing a philosophical problem.

"Like this," she said, pausing for a long time, then repeating, "Like this . . . ."

8

"So there is no ending we can speak of," he said after a long while.

"'The birds do not disappear. The birds are still in flight'," she again quoted from scripture.

"Is there a beginning?" Adam asked Eve.

"There is no beginning other than resumption of the story," she answered. "A rider and a horse by the river. The horse drinks directly from the flow. The rider scoops from it with a 10-gallon hat. Both drink. Both are quenched."

9

They listened to the birds in the meadow as if their shrill sheet of song were an authorized substitute for river flow.

"Listen, darling," she invited, "the birds are making a meadow the way the river makes a shore."

"Do you think they see us standing here like horses drinking their fill?"

"That's as good a reason for a river as any ever given," she calibrated.

His face darkened. "But what if August drains the river bone-dry?" he asked. "What if there are only diamond-shining, diamond-sharp sands that cut like scalpels and make men think the river wants to thirst them?"

"Are you reading from the Satanic Verses again?"

10

"What if the red wheel barrow becomes an empty bird feeder of no use to the birds or their song?" he panicked.

"Our psalm will always promise seed," she assured him, "in accordance with the deep, deepest need out of which the Father creates. Anything less than deep need is not worth his while or our wiles. Just one drop of rain will suffice to make the seed explode into life. Just one drop of moisture from your mouth will remind them that the essence is song mingled with existence."

"Huh?" he asked, "I don't catch your drift.

"The human part of the story begins with need--deep, sacred need that coheres all things by decreeing them. The birds are summoned. And Adam tells them, 'So much depends . . .'"

"On what?" Adam asks Eve.

"Silly boy," she kids him, jostling his hair, "why, on a red wheel barrow, of course."

11

"To the birds, a red wheelbarrow is an empty bird feeder unless it becomes of use to them," she repeated, as if hinting at something he should do.

"Do you want me to fill it with seed so they can feed?" he paraphrased.

"That isn't necessary," she said. "Some things are better sung than said. Let them hear about the famous red wheel barrow of song and story. Let those who sing the sun up into the sky know that everything seen is lit from within. Words bring light from a matching fund of sacredness."

12

"Say something," she whispers, sensing she has been here before.

"'The river comes from some place other than itself' is a false proposition about God," he says with certainty, also sensing he has been here before.

"'No river wants to thirst men," she descants, "even if dry from drought or choked at its mouth by men who seek to prove water's scarcity."

"The river flows forever, always keeping the promise of an ocean," he ratifies.

"Even in times of famine," Eve says to her husband, "the river gives itself as eternal word and keeps its word by being so."

--David Federman, Ardmore, July 10-12, 2010

A Fifth for the 4th

I love a good fable. This is a good fable about the BP oil spill.sent by Anne Hochberg.

Like it or not, we are being politicized by events. On this 4th of July, I propose the following global definition of patriotism: Defense of earth. This is no longer an abstract moral imperative but a social necessity on which a future worth living for and in depends.

Tomorrow, consult your Communist Manifestos and read the prognosis for capitalism published the same year and place as the "Origin of the Species," in London 1849, then wonder why both books are well on their way to becoming banned reading in the U.S. of A. Marx rang as loud a death knell for Capitalism as Darwin did for its cultural proxy, organized Christianity. The crucified that has died because of, not for, our sins is Planet earth itself. There is no resurrrection in sight--hence belief in a distant realm called heaven where we remain beyond the reach of noose or cross. Salvation has, I have glimpsed, as much to do with embodiment (em-bodhi-ment) as transcendence. To save the soul is to save our common Self and sole being: Mother Earth. That's what Merlin thinks this transfigured day, mumbling within the tree where he is imprisoned. Even when he bangs on the Grail Cup locked in there with him to serve as drinking glass and midnight denture holder, few hear and no one comes near. Would you, if the voice you heard kept quoting Jack Spicer, "Nothing deserves to live"? Could the magi be having a bad day? Pray without ceasing he, and we, change our tune--soon.


Stories Change The World
BP or Not BP?
Posted: 01 Jul 2010 08:26 AM PDT

New Zealand farm

This is a wonderful, well-written blog post by my business collaborator Ian Waddelow. Ian is a European consultant who works with successful businesses around the world. He is a white knight crusading for a better world.

There are four types of people in the world:

Landowners: who control the world’s assets

Farmers: who are appointed by landowners to tend and maximize their assets
Sheepdogs: the trusted and loyal adjutant of farmers that tear around with tireless energy snapping at the sheep, keeping them under control and bending them to the will of the farmer.

Sheep: who bleat a lot but usually end up following the crowd and doing as they are told.

You can see this play out perfectly in the recent BP oil spill off the coast of America.

The Landowners – for BP: the shareholders -
for USA Inc: voters who own assets affected by spill -
for GB PLC: the voters with assets tied to BP (pension funds etc.)

According to Christopher Helman, a Houston-based editor with Forbes, the Gulf Oil Spill will cost BP more than $60 billion: $20 billion into the BP Trust Fund (recently set up after a lot of arm twisting from the Obama administration) $22bn in clean-up costs (two years at $30.6 million a day) and $20bn in penalties (and lawsuits)

It is clear to any financial analyst that such numbers seriously call into question BP’s ability to remain solvent. Were the company to liquidate, the shareholder – our landowners – would stand to lose $236bn in assets.

Naturally, they will fight to stop this from happening. US asset owners don’t want this to happen either unless it gives them the best chance of the biggest payout in restitution. GB PLC cannot afford for this revenue stream to disappear as it receive $5.6bn a year from BP in income tax, national insurance contributions, fuel duty and VAT.

To see BP go under has long-term far reaching consequences for all the landowners.

The Farmers – for BP: Chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg and CEO, Tony Hayward
for USA Inc: President Barak Obama

for GB PLC: Prime Minister David Cameron

Whenever there is trouble on the farm, the farmer has to take the flak and all four are under immense pressure from their lords and masters it makes sense to come up with a deal between them.

The additional problem for Obama and Cameron is they are the appointed farmer for many landowners, some with conflicting requirements. Both heads of state are starting to realize they cannot please all their masters all the time. For Obama, he has the local population hit by the disaster desperate for restitution and punishment.

They want to see the company brought to its knees and yet 40% of BP shareholders are members of USA Inc. Pensions, investment funds, and personal savings would all be dramatically hit. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil would love to get their hands on those $236bn in BP assets for a knockdown price.

Cameron, meanwhile, was on the campaign trail when the disaster struck and has to get up to speed quickly and defend his revenue stream and one of the few remaining UK global corporations.

The Sheepdogs – The PR men

This is trial by media and so any good farmer will have some loyal and efficient sheepdogs rounding up the press and controlling public opinion. Obama’s team were the first to coral them, demanding summits and capturing the green moral high ground.

They positioned BP as ‘the evil baddy’ in the story, negligent and uncaring and put a white Stetson firmly onto Obama’s head.

Cameron was yet to walk through the door of Number 10 so could do little without a clear mandate to act.

Unfortunately, Tony Hayward’s sheepdogs watched the sheep wander all over the place and in irritation started snapping at the heels of the flock leaders. Despite spending $50m on PR, his team made a series of gaffes, including:

initially saying the impact would be ‘very modest’(enraging Gulf coast landowners and US politicians).

going sailing while the disaster was at its height

pledging on a nationally broadcast TV advertisement that “We will make this right.”

posting a public apology for the oil spill on the BP website and promising to clean up every drop of oil and “restore the shoreline to its original state”.

telling the people in Louisiana, where oil had begun to reach parts of the state’s south-eastern marshes,. “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.” The statement was particularly criticized given that eleven people died in the drilling platform explosion that caused the spill.
stating in an interview with Sky News that he was not overly concerned by the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest.”

insisting to a Guardian reporter that the leaked oil and the dispersant being released into the sea should be put in context: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

telling NBC that BP was not at fault for the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon or the subsequent oil spill. “The drilling rig was a Transocean drilling rig. It was their rig and their equipment that failed, run by their people and their processes

advertising on the web for any ideas on how to stop the oil leak

spending the $50m on these statements – allowing Obama to cry “What I don’t wanna hear is when they’re spending that kind of money on their shareholders and spending that kind of money on TV advertising that they’re nickel and diming fishermen.” It also allowed Obama’s chief of White House staff and loyal right-hand sheep dog to chime in and say Mr. Hayward “wouldn’t be working for me after any of those statements”.

A sheepdog that doesn’t round up sheep is not a sheepdog.

The Sheep – all the stakeholders living on the farm

Life as a sheep is ultimately one of powerless frustration. Their world is filled with death, suffering and devastation but what to do? The sheep have every right to be incredulous. They are suffering but they are also just playing the game.

The solution is also not simple. You try just tightening a nut with a robot, with no purchase, 1,500 metres below the surface of the ocean. While the sheep make suggestions to stop the leak (ranging from ice plugs to nuclear weapons) they are powerless to act.

The sad thing in all of this is that had BP cut the riser during the first week and installed a second blowout preventer, a massively heavy stack the size of a five story building, then we may have been applauding Hayward for averting an horrific natural disaster.

What pains the sheep the most is it is their lives that are ruined and can do little to avert the problem. Big problems are generated by big entities and in many cases these corporate entities are bigger and more powerful than governments.

They, therefore, are the only ones capable of solving the problems that they make.

The suspicion is that the BP landowners and farmers are in a collusion of greed. They ignored the signs that their golden goose was sick and, instead of paying for a vet, decided to simply shoved their arm inside the bird to pull out whatever gold they could lay their hands on.

Modern day landowners are short term. They want their jam and bread today. They are not interested in handing over the assets to future generations but surely global companies are one day going to realize – no globe, no company.

It is time for shareholders to think bigger and longer and appoint farmers who think the same rather than maximizing their exit after three years of starving the golden goose.

So if you are a landowner or farmer, be wary for being too judgmental of Mr. Hayward. Everyone from railway companies to airlines, from pharmaceutical companies to utilities are cutting corners and the farmers that are appointed are the ones who turn a blind eye.

If you are a head of state like GB Inc you will see that selling off all your land leaves you at their beck and call. You will never be more than their hired hand.

As for the rest of us, the sheep, what to do? We appoint farmers who have sold all our assets to wealthy corporate landowners and plunged us deep into debt. Shall we just bleat?.

Are we just going meekly like lambs to the slaughter or is it time to ensure that the meek truly inherit the earth and build some new assets for us all?