REFUGEES ! and / or PTSD # 2

Refugees or PTSD # 2

A few days ago I wrote about PTSD of FUCK me, FUCK YOU or any other four letters that can be so destructive and so misunderstood that, in the first and last instance, the amount of the damage can be devastating.

Yet, it is all to do with these inner wirings in our (mysterious brains and neurotransmitters ? Or….is it?)

But REFUGEES, well, that  is the ONE thing ( whether they are WAR refugees or refugees from their own making i.e. artists and so on), this is the number one article of my preoccupation and the subject which has shaped my life from day ZERO since this is in my DNA and from my early days at Amnesty International and so on…. Yes, “playing with peoples’ destinies” , “playing with peoples’ lives” is – to me – simply unfathomable.

Yes, simply unfathomable.

Well…. Of course ! Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis was a classic case of PTSD ! Actually, the “ENTIRE Kafka”  was one big lump of PTSD. And the same can be said of the best and the very best of all ART. From Goya to – say – Beckett, from Bosch to, say… Bacon and from Artaud to all of them: it’s all dark. Dark. It’s all dark. All dark. All Munch all dark all Duchamp, all laughing all dark.

So ! Why worry? Shouldn’t I be happy to be surrounded by such honorable demons?

In the case of art and so on….yes, sure. Not a problem. “How are you doing tonight, Mr. Maniac? Having your usual attack ?”

But when this illness takes over the minds of handlers and historical 20th century assassins such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Franco and hundreds of other delusional characters who will KILL in the name of a GOD or a prophet or some profit or some Assad, well, then there’s one only sentence left to say:

“You are on your back in the dark when a voice comes to you and says: You’re on your back in the dark and you are your only COMPANY”

(Samuel Beckett – paraphrasing Company)

Gerald Thomas

Feb 20, 2017

 

 

 

 

PTSD – eu sofro dessas letras. Voces sabem o que é isso? Sabem !

 

PTSD

Um dia, quem sabe, alguém poderá me explicar a cor do monstro que reside atrás daquela porta. “Mas qual monstro, Gerald ?” . Pois é. Nenhum.

Um dia, quem sabe, alguém haverá de me explicar porque eu tremo, choro, me encolho, desapareço por dias, invento desculpas, desmarco encontros importantes, crio dores que não existem, durmo demais, durmo de menos, como demais ou não consigo comer e torno a chorar convulsivamente por…. nada. Ou quando vejo uma cena que já me comoveu inúmeras vezes antes: Refugiados, desterrados, aqueles que sofrem numa guerra e nada tem a ver com ela.

Sim, a injustiça é FODA ! É uma cena comovente sempre. Não há mesmo como escapar. Mas por que ficar “preso nela e preso por ela?”. É aí que entra o tal do PTSD.

Ao ver uma cena assim – como de fato eu via em outros momentos da minha vida (nos anos em que trabalhei pra Amnesty International e o Russell Tribunal e a Liga dos Povos), eu ia pra ação: pegaria o telefone, telex, fax, o diabo a quatro e faria doações, telegramas, ou entraria online e…enfim…seria o ativista politico que já fui.

Hoje não.

Hoje eu simplesmente caio. Choro. Reclamo. Tenho piedade de mim mesmo. Que merda isso.

“Não se culpe, Gerald. Não é você. É o PTSD ou melhor, a síndrome do choque pós traumático. É o que me dizem. Ficou mais claro depois de 11 de setembro (que presenciei da minha janela, ao vivo, sem muitas cores, em Brooklyn, naquela horrível manhã).

É ! Desde aquele dia as coisas foram ficando piores e o medo… a insegurança… de perder tudo foi ficando mais forte.

Já não era muito bom. Cresci com meus pais dizendo “Rápido! Pegue tudo! Estamos de partida em 5 minutos”. Eu relato isso na minha autobiografia. Sempre achei que eu tinha nascido numa família de criminosos mas não. Eram refugiados de guerra. Ou melhor, sobreviventes do holocausto e…sofriam de PTSD e achavam, naturalmente, que regimes políticos depois da guerra, iriam voltar a persegui-los também.

“Rápido! Pegue tudo! Estamos de partida em 5 minutos”. Eu também sou assim. Guardo tudo em sacos plásticos até hoje. As coisas mais sem importância.

Fazem três dias que tento embarcar de volta pra casa em NY. Mas não consigo. Fico na cama, sem comida pois nem pro supermercado eu consigo ir. Tenho exatamente uma única fatia de pão (sem gluten, note-se) na geladeira, e um pacote de ravióli ainda pra ser usado. É pior que patético. Não faço barulho pra que os vizinhos (uns amores) não me ouçam pois tenho medo que batam na porta, oferecendo ajuda.

Não quero ser visto.

Quando me vi no programa “Roda Viva”, no ultimo 23 de Janeiro, desmoronei. Não me perguntem porque. Tudo mudou. Desmoronei. Não era eu ali falando, gesticulando. E o pior (ainda pior) é que esse é justamente um texto que escrevi em 2004 pra Marco Nanini chamado “Circo de Rins e Figados”. Agora, pareço estar vivendo dentro desse momento da peça.

Síndrome do Choque Pós Traumático (imagino eu) ainda deve ser algo pouco estudado. Confesso que ainda não coloquei no Google, mas já vi muita coisa na TV a respeito pois vivo nos USA e aqui é lugar de veterano de Guerra do Vietãm, da Coreia, Afganistão, enfim…das Guerras Mundiais. Aqui as pessoas trazem memórias horrendas que….deixa. Era a minha neura que precisava de explicação pois eu não estive em guerra alguma senão a GUERRA CONTRA as GUERRAS.

Será que a minha PTSD é a síndrome da covardia? Ou da abstinência?

Tenho medo das respostas que virão. Assim como tenho medo das 2 milhões de respostas que vem quando coloco “benefícios dos antioxidantes” “os perigos ou benefícios do Omega 3, 6 e 9” ou algo assim.

Esse artigo (obviamente) é um work in progress.

O problema agora é conseguir abrir a porta. Tomar um Rivotril, abrir a porta e esboçar um sorriso. Esse é o dia 4. Nenhum sucesso ainda.

Gerald Thomas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I SCREAM BECAUSE I CAN (or because I MUST). We are being fooled again !

We Are Being Fooled Again

When Abbey Hoffman was struck by Pete Townsend’s guitar at Woodstock in 1969 and the refrain “meet the new boss, same as the old boss, we won’t be fooled again” was sung by a chorus of half a million. Who on earth would’ve believed that – after two Obama administrations and so many liberties (I mean, so much freedom….), we would witness the ultimate “collapse” of everything?

By “everything” I mean EVERYTHING ! I mean all the values that entail  everything that made us triumph in our pride. Pride? Yes, the pride in what we consider MODERN. Modern pride.

YES I’M SHOUTING ! NO, I’M SCREAMING.

It’s called the scream of despair. “Les Pair”.

I used to be an iconoclast. Yes, a proud post modernist. I used to use this brand like a hippie used to (fuck)….never mind. I am a hippie today so….where’s the confusion?

Iconoclasts lied. We lied deliberately. Iconoclasts destroyed. Iconoclasts destroyed deliberately. I was one. So, where’s the confusion. FUCK !

But we did it in the name of ART and we did it in the name of “CONTROLLED DEMOLITION”.

Well, all that changed on the 11^th of September of 2001 when the World Trade Center fell. Years before that, French juggler and iconoclast, Philippe Petit “walked” across the two towers of the WTC on a tightrope. He was successful at it. But that was ART.

That walk, in a way, was a response to Pete Townsend.

Petit and Hoffman were friends. I’ll try to explain later. It’s a complicated analogy which includes Jerry Rubin, the Yuppie, the networker – the first “internetter” – decades before the existence of the internet – as was Petit, the tightrope walker, without a net.

Without a net.

We lied. We, the proud iconoclasts, lied.

Trump lies. All the president’s men lie. They all do. Always have. Nothing new there. But this is different.

But this is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT !!!!

But we demolished the sacred cows of art such as Shakespeare or….(you name it)…. Rembrandt. We deliberately broke into millions of pieces – pieces of masterpieces and reveled in the double edged saw of a jigsaw, puzzling it all while the Duchamps, the Rauschenbergs, the John Cages, the Buñuels and the Schönbergs of the world could only envy us because they hadn’t achieved what, say, the “Heiner Müller” generation had achieved. Now, how the hell does one explain a Heiner Müller generation to one who hasn’t lived it?

One doesn’t. One wants to forget it. I do.

Now the world is being fooled (again) as a whole because it is the ULTRA RIGHT politicians who have adopted what used to be a gimmick of ours and…Well, this rhetoric is now the new boss! “Meet the new boss”

NOT THE SAME AS THE OLD BOSS.

Not the same as anything.

Trump chooses to lie left right and center and says whatever he wants. By doing so, he is actually demolishing the LITTLE BIT OF HUMANITY that we had left. Yes, we did. We did it in the name of art. And in the name of hoping to reconstruct (something)….

LE PEN in France is doing the same

That idiot in the UK, has managed already something similar with his BREXIT strategy. It’s all isola. Isolationist. It’s all a new form of imprisonment and ignorance.

What seems to be even more interesting is the “alternative fact”. WE used to be the alternative generation, i.e. alternative foods, medicines and so on. We used to be the resistance. Now, the FAKE NEWS seem to emerge from all the wrong corners and these names?

Hoffman derives from Hope-Man (German Hoffnung) The Abbey of Hope.

Farage? Seems French, no?

Le (The) Pen (as in Pencil ..) seems English, no?

May ? As in Maybe? Might ? Not the month but….

Boris seems like a Russian name and

Donald DRUMPF , well and rise and HEIL !!!!

It’s all part of a George Duhuit puzzle made to dizzy us up.

As in the two state solution. For the world, it used to be a thing between Israel and the Palestinians. For Trump, a Two State Solution, is a world split between the USA and the former USSR, intent in DROWNING (Street) Europe, suffocating NATO and any alliance which isn’t him and Putin, holding bareback hands.

When Abbey Hoffman was struck by Pete Townsend’s guitar at Woodstock in 1969 and the refrain “meet the new boss, same as the old boss, we won’t be fooled again” was sung by a chorus of half a million, he was followed by the news of a certain silence. His brain went dead.

And the rest is History.

History has a terrible ring to those who, like myself, know great parts of it (and have lived through it).

Gerald Thomas

February 9, 2017.

PS: on a reasonable note: Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, privately expressed dismay on Wednesday over Mr. Trump’s increasingly aggressive attacks on the judiciary, calling the president’s criticism of independent judges “demoralizing” and “disheartening.”