FUKUSHIMA – A Protest Monologue

[David Sparenberg]

There is a scene in Bram Stoker’s Dracula which is, for me, the most frightening. It is not a depiction of the vampire’s infernal, blood lusting eyes, of the vampire’s gore dripping fangs and death mask fixation, or even of the vampire vertically scaling the wind tortured, towering walls of Castle Dracula in guise of a biomorphic demon, at once inhuman and reptilian. The situation of ultimate, paralytic terror is one in which the nosferato, the unnatural fiend, enters a room silently through a window as an invisible evil. Here the malignancy is sensed but not seen—a presence determined on inflicting cruel, infectious death, while lacking a containable shape and definition. Rather, the destroyer, a some-thing un-think like, is ambient—omnipotent as omnipresent—whose victim’s next heartbeat, next movement, next breath, could be the last.

Imagine: invisible evil, ultimate terror. Evil that can take hold of life and end life but cannot be faced off against, cannot even be looked upon! How, after all, does one defend oneself from a formless perversion which will, by the law of what it is, do to death any and all living forms with which it has contact? An invisible evil, let us say, like carcinogens in a chronically polluted atmosphere, invisibly ablaze with toxic particles that penetrate body, bones, organs, blood, energy. An invisible evil like an unanticipated release of Sarin gas, which would, in sufficient quantity, turn a sprawling urban center into a petrified necropolis. An invisible evil like the phantom, signature killer escaped twenty-five years past from Chernobyl. Or such an evil that comes, breathlessly, into the presence of the living without the warning of being seen, like the radiation currently spilling out from the explosive nuclear reactors of Fukushima Daiichi, along the sea, near tsunami ravaged Sendai, in the north of Japan.

An invisible evil…. An ultimate terror….

Of course the vampire is a cult archetype in American pop culture, even as Godzilla; a radiation mutated and paranoid projection of the reptile mind, frightened and fascinated by its mirror reflection; is a culture icon in modern Nippon. But these surreal fictions, exchanged across the ocean, serve mostly to numb us before the dread of today’s reality.

I first read Bram Stoker’s Dracula when a teenager and the scene referred to disturbed me enough to have never been lost from memory. The lurking, unspeakable horror of an invisible evil encapsulates every conceivable human fear of identity-dissolution; the threat of being reduced to nothing by malignant nothingness—when what stalks is unseen, is “unseeable,” and could be anywhere, everywhere

When seventeen, I wrote a somewhat lengthy, political poem and within months of my eighteenth birthday the poem was published in the premiere issue of a small literary magazine out of Silver Spring, Maryland; mere miles from the epicenter of American war making policy. It was my first publication and the poem was a protest, commemorating the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

But here it is now, mid March, 2011, and with the rest of the human world I awaken daily to the latest descent into nightmare scenario of the threefold crisis, tragedy and darkening catastrophe of quake, tsunami and impending nuclear meltdown, wrapping a vice of death around 21st century Japan. After years of experience facing and addressing recurring themes, my present words are also words of protest. Here however there is no poetry, only the voice of one more objection. Protest coupled with the somber, sobering yet disquieting reflections of existence forever exposed to the deep psyche trauma and worldwide terrorism of invisible evil, of an ambient assault on life by an overmastering, formless, faceless onslaught of unnatural death. Within such a condition, what passes for normal is far removed from what “on earth” is sane.

Calamitously, even “green” loses it depth—for the Orphic Voice along with prayer, is stricken, suffocated—in a world where dreams are curdled into nightmare and reality is petrified beneath a shrouding ubiquity of fear.

Invisible evil…. Ultimate terror….

Poetry is not a practical mode of address. It has be do with the feeling-sense of experience and things, with compression into artistry, that is to say, intensity as an aesthetic, with passion, with recognizing and remembering connections, and with perceptions of the soul. It has to do with acts of beauty expressed through word-pictures and linguistic rhythms, with compassionate affirmations and, whenever required, with compassionate denouncement. All of this is contributory to the adequacy and well being of the human condition, and all of this is needed.

Yet the practical mind, wanting to learn how to dance out of danger, even when distressed, disorientated and uncertain, seeks practical instruction in the confidence of dance steps. Then what are we to do in an authentic and heroic confrontation with invisible evil?

Paracelsus, the alchemist-physician whose medieval explorations provided initiating insights for the development of Jung’s depth psychology, put it forward that within a disease are clues to the disease’s cure. And Bob Dylan in one of his early but most illustrious songs wrote, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind/ the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

With our feet set in these two positions, let us begin a practical, perhaps transformative, dance lesson. First, we must set both feeling-thought and public speech free from all propaganda serving the limited interests of governments and corporate profiteers. Next, we must empower our collective need for dialogue and change with the “truth-force” Gandhi summoned forth to counter the marginalization of people through machinations and manipulations of deception, violence and betrayal. Finally, these same basic steps, brought dynamically into play with the mojo of courage and humility, must become integral to a deep perspective commitment to invisible evil being rendered visible and not left hidden from public discourse until after our next “world accident” occurs. Importantly, the instinct of life, our genetic coding, what has been called “the genetic imperative,” needs once again to be felt, heard and heeded in decision making processes. This means, in an ongoing way, that we, as planetary citizens, no longer leave a human future or the fate of the Earth to be decided solely by the delusions of denatured and self-referential, modern reason.

On the morning radio, today, March 16, 2011, a leading researcher from an NGO identified as the Chernobyl Project is heard saying: “Well, wild life will eventually return to the area. At first only insects and small rodents. But that is agricultural land and we may not want to feed our children anything grown there for maybe a hundred or even three hundred years.”

Only the researcher is not talking about Chernobyl, in the former Ukrainian Soviet Union, but about the farm lands around Sendai, northeast Japan, where, at this hour and for time to come, the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant continues to spew radioactive fallout. Marauding gamma rays: poisoning sky, descending like microscopic death’s angels, onto soil and into waters, spreading disease, deformity and premature death.

Invisible evil…. Ultimate terror…. The present—a world time of suffering challenges, a species time of painful choices…. And while we have, over generational eons, turned out poorly in the timing of the human drama, now is a time to come together and do what is right for life and not again do only what we are told.

Our shaman enlightened human-animal ancestry, back to the Paleolithic if not before, apprehended in the earth-body the relationship between sacrifice and blessing, the dynamic between giving and receiving, and the trust in prayer out of vulnerability, rather than reliance on assumptions of control, inflated and elevated into ruinous imbalance by arrogance.

Fukushima is another crossroads in human history. It is yet to be seen if Fukushima will be a turning point.

David Sparenberg
16-17 March 2011

[David Sparenberg]

Well Serene, to you and anyone else, here is my response: In order to be alive in the realities of the Earth and living with truth-force, a person must be open to the dark and threatening as well as the light and transporting, and niether afraid or deluded before either. Real--sustainable--changes only happen wihin the fullest dynamics of reality. That is why compassion, which is so important, is of two interdependent kinds--compassionate denouncement, as protest, and compassionate affirmation, as embrace.

[Serene]

There is so much Light to embrace. Open yourself up.

[Béatrice LATEUR LACROIX]

http://lejour-et-lanuit.over-blog.com/article-ceremonie-de-l-eau-le-31-3-11-masaru-emoto-70543984.html

In French and English.

If you want to.

Love and Peace for Japanies and all Beings

[Irit Hakim-Keller]

Thank you, David for your interesting post. 

It is really a horrendous time in Japan, It is unimaginable, the scene on TV look like a  horror- movie, not real at all...

 

 I am posting here a link to a short video of drummers, all women, who would like to play for the people of  Fukushima,when they are ready.....a kind of memorial concert. to give courage and energy to the people event. They had played in the area previously...the town they played in is now completely gone. :-(

 

Taiko concert tour becomes rescue effort
http://www.theworld.org/2011/03/taiko-drummers-fukushima/

[Béatrice LATEUR LACROIX]

Prayers for Humanity.
Love and Peace for all Beings

[Eva Libre]

Today it is officially announced that in Europe radioactivity has been measured in the air !