14-05-2013, 10:29 AM
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Charles Drago Wrote:Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Quote:"It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
This is wisdom, timeless and inescapable.
It is.
But indulge me, Pynchon's prose is resonant, and a longer excerpt sprinkles some subtly different magick dust.
The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.
Mass death.
Grieving parents.
Griefstricken friends.
Mass death. Bloody slaughter.
Trauma used to switch the points.... to send the train hurtling along the chosen tracks...
The cold, calculated use of genocide simply as a means of deflection. It's chilling. No, it's worse.
To carry out such a thing you have to be devoid of a heart, free of thoughts of right or wrong. Pathological. Malevolent. What used to be called evil.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Carl Jung - Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14