I can’t speak to other people’s experience, but it had a deep affective resonance with me.
In recent days, every night has brought new revelations, and every morning a coalescence–slow, but diligent; a learning, a stock taking, a measuring, and a movement of the marker, denoting progress.
Last night I first contacted the spirit of my shaking. It is bird like, flighty. Although I used to find it intimidating in itself, I see now that it is merely a bird leaving its branch when it detects a predator.
The predator is a baby doll. This doll has rules which must be followed, or else bad things happen. It cannot be satiated, only given away. As long as it is your burden, it is a constant burden. The feelings of this dream were the sort that sends literal chills up your spine, and makes you want to run in terror, but you can’t because you know it will pursue you. You must stay, captive, and pretend.
And I got to thinking about a frustrated baby. It is completely helpless. It is for all intents and purposes paralyzed in a way not that different than a toy baby. Neither can choose to go from here to there to get needs met.
And when it cries too long, or hurts too much the result is RAGE: insatiate, omnidirectional, absolutely primal.
And what does it crave, if not solace? Order. At least order. At least consistency. Small children love routines. They love knowing what is next. And they hate randomness, especially random and to them incomprehensible emotions.
How many of us have a baby within us that screamed itself to sleep more than once? The needs of this baby do not disappear, and what I think I saw is that they reappear in compulsive conformity. This is a root, perhaps THE root of Fascism. How often in history must small children have gone without, gone uncomforted?
And I was thinking too that modern thinkers want to find some sort of explanation for Fascism, while ignoring that violent imposition of conformity has been the rule for most human societies for most of human history. War has been the rule. Tribalism and taking other peoples stuff have been the rule. The only thing surprising about Communo-fascism is the extent of the intellectual subterfuge needed to enable minds trained in reason and concepts of universal human rights to tolerate them. Otherwise, they are merely new iterations of very old things.
And it occurred to me that science has often been the handmaiden of cultural atavism and tribalism. It is merely a tool for rationalizing. It allows people to appear to belong to this world, while dancing naked around fires in the wilderness.
And all this layered on a feeling I had the other day that each and every day is like a new jazz solo. It may sound much the same day to day, but it is never exactly the same, and our true mission in life is come up with new melodies, new harmonies, new rhythms.
Of course Hitler had to find jazz degenerate. It could not be heard by a trapped child who only wanted the same thing, day after day after day, and which was quite willing to commit psychological and even physical violence to whomever and whatever prevented this perfect repetition that was not there when it was most needed.
How to free yourself? See. Feel. Understand. When it feels the motion, it is already too late for everything built in the sand next to an ocean. The work is the work of the universe.