MEDITAÇÃO DE SEXTA: «Vai, vai, vai, disse a ave...»
«(...) Não estamos preparados. Talvez nunca estejamos preparados. E logo agora quando o mundo arde.
Tão rendidos que estávamos à empatia – quase sempre traduzida em sentimentalismo, e do mais barato –, tão evoluídos que já a disforia de género passara de perturbação a opção democrática acessível a crianças desde a mais tenra idade, tão civilizacionalmente adiantados que a linguagem estava quase, quase a tornar-se neutra e inclusiva, tão respeitosos que não havia passado pelo qual não pedíssemos perdão, e logo nos caem em cima não uma, mas duas guerras, fora as restantes, daquelas à antiga, com bombas, mortes e desespero. Para mais, apesar de relativamente distantes, com todas as características incendiárias que qualquer boa guerra necessita para ser levada a sério.
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The Screamers
Arthur Koestler
Adapted from Arthur Koestler, “The nightmare that is a reality”, New York Times (January 9, 1944), pp 5, 30.
Published in The Analog Sea Review nr 4
There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me: the crowd walks past laughing and chatting.
I know that a great many people share, with individual variations, the same type of dream. I have quarreled about it with analysts and I believe it to be an archetype in the Jungian sense; an expression of the individual’s ultimate loneliness when faced with death and cosmic violence, and his inability to communicate the unique horror of his experience. I further believe that it is the root of the ineffectiveness of our atrocity propaganda.
For, after all, you are the crowd who walk past laughing on the road; and there are a few of us, escaped victims of eye-witnesses of the things which happen in the thicket and who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming on the wireless, yelling at you at newspapers and in public meetings, theaters and cinemas. Now and then we succeed in reaching your ear for a minute. I know it each time this happens by a certain dumb wonder on your faces, a faint glassy stare entering your eye; and I tell myself: now you have got them, now hold them, hold them, so that they will remain awake; but it only lasts a minute. You shake yourself like puppies who have got their fur wet; then the transparent screen descends again and you walk on, protected be the dream-barrier which stifles all sound.
We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic Van der Lubbe put fire to the German Parliament; we said, if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass electrocution, and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch.
I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worthwhile. The facts have been published in pamphlets, white books, newspapers, magazines, and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here**. He told me that, in the course of some recent public-opinion survey, nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it!
** Born in Budapest, Arthur Koestler moved to Britain in 1940
As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka, or Belzec. You can convince them for an hour than they shake themselves, their mental self-defense begins to work, and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.
Clearly all this becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they loose contact with reality and live in a fantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who tottered about in a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within site of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive.
I said “perhaps”, because obviously the above can only be half the truth. There have been screamers at all times – prophets, preachers, teachers and cranks – cursing the obtuseness of their contemporaries, and the situation pattern remind very much the same. There are always the screamers screaming from the thickets and the people who pass by on the road. They have ears but hear not, they have eyes but see not. So the roots of this must lie deeper than mere obtuseness.
It is perhaps the fault of the screamers? Sometimes, no doubt, but I do not believe this to be the core of the matter. Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah were pretty good propagandists and yet they failed to shake their people and to warn them. Cassandra’s voice was said to have pierced walls, and yet the Trojan war took place.
We say “I believe this” or “I don’t believe that”, “I know it” or “I don’t know it”, and regard these as black and white alternatives. In reality, both “knowing” and “believing” have varying degrees of intensity. I know that there was a man called Spartacus who led the Roman slaves into revolt; but my belief in this one time existence is much paler than that of, say, Lenin. I believe in spiral nebulae, can see them in a telescope, and express their distance in figures; but they have a lower degree of reality for me than the inkpot on my table.
Distance in space and time degrades intensity of awareness. So does magnitude. Seventeen is a figure which I know intimately like a friend; fifty billion is just a sound. A dog run over by a car upset our emotional balance and digestion; a million jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness. Statistics don’t bleed; it is the detail which counts. We are unable to embrace the total process with our awareness; we can only focus on little lumps of reality.
So far all this is a matter of degrees, of gradation in the intensity of knowing and believing. But when we pass the realm of the finite and are faced with words like eternity in time, infinity of space; that is, when we approach the sphere of the Absolute, our reaction ceases to be a matter of degrees becomes different in quality. Faced with the Absolute, understanding breaks down, and our “knowing” and “believing” is lip-service. Death, for instance, belongs to the category of the Absolute and our belief in it is merely a lip-service belief.
These limitations of awareness account for the limitations of enlightenment by propaganda. People go to cinemas, they see films of Nazi tortures, of mass shootings, of underground conspiracy and self-sacrifice. They sigh, they shake their heads, some have a good cry. But they do not connect it with the realities of their normal plane of existence. It is romance, it is art, it is Those Higher Things, it is church Latin. It does not click with reality. We live in a society of the Jekyll and Hyde pattern, magnified into gigantic proportions.
This was, however, not always the case to the same extent. There have been periods and movements in history – in Athens, in the early Renaissance, during the first years of the Russian Revolution – when at least certain representative layers of society had attained a relatively high level of mental integration; times when people seemed to rub their eyes and come awake, when their cosmic awareness seemed to expand, when they were “contemporaries” in a much broader and fuller sense; when the trivial and the cosmic planes seemed on the point of fusing.
And there have been periods of disintegration and dissociation. But never before, not even during the spectacular decay of Rome and Byzantium, was split thinking so palpably evident, such a uniform mass-disease; never did human psychology reach such a height of phoneyness. Our awareness seems to shrink in direct ratio as communication expand; the world is open to us as never before, and we walk about as prisioners, each in his private, portable cage. Meanwhile the watch goes on ticking. What can the screamers do but go on screaming, until they get blue in the face?
I know one who used to tour this country addressing meetings – an average of ten a week. He is a well-known London publisher. Before each meeting he used to lock himself up in a room, to close his eyes, and to imagine in detail, for twenty minutes, that he was one of the people in Poland who were killed. One day he tried to feel what was like to be suffocated by chloride gas in a death-train; another day he had to dig his grave with two hundred others and then face a machine gun, which of course is rather unprecise and capricious in its aiming. Then he walked out on the platform and talked. He kept for a full year before he collapsed with a nervous breakdown. He had a great command of his audiences and perhaps he has done some good; perhaps he brought the two planes, divided by miles of distance, an inch closer to each other.
I think one should imitate this example. Two minutes of this kind of exercise per day, with closed eyes, after reading the morning paper, are at present more necessary to us then physical jerks and breathing the yogi way. It might even be a substitute for going to church. For as long as there are people on the road and victims in the thicket, divided by dream barriers, this will remain a phoney civilization.
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