Deep River Dispatch

Dreamscapes

I am redoing this room and moving everything elsewhere. The guitar has meaning as I bought it the day after an intense mortality dream. (Will not share for now.) Was walking through downtown Seattle in April of 1994. Spotted this guitar in a pawnshop window. Took me back to being 18, wandering the streets of Aberdeen.

There was a second hand store which was never, ever open. You could see still see all of the stuff inside. In the showcase front window, sat a Fender Shenandoah 12-string guitar. The beauty was untouched for years, faded from years of sunlight. Fast forward to my stroll, with the previous night's dream fresh in my mind, I looked at the moment as some kind of sign. I went inside the pawnshop and, after a few strums, walked out with the guitar.

That's a stencil of Chad Channing by Argentinian artist Cartoonneros.

Last night I dreamt I crossed the river to Astoria. I did not recognize anything, yet it was still an old place with historic buildings. I went to a cemetery which was packed with monuments. There were a lot of people milling about. In the crowd, a stranger approached to tell me that I had died. I took this news in stride and realized it is a good time and place to express my burial plans. I strolled through the grounds with the stranger, looking at plots and monument styles. I thought the headstones were garish. One was bright red with carved marble lipstick protruding from the top. Then a thought came into my mind, "How can I be dead if I'm walking around?"

The dream shifted and I was back on the farm, which also looked different from home; with some similarities. A friend from my late teenage years showed up on my tractor. This person is with the departed. I recognized my tractor too. I needed something, I can't recall what, and he took off on the tractor to get it. My little dog Pompey, who also died, was with him. They soon came back. At this point I was to the top of some stairs in a workshop. Pompey ran behind the tractor then gingerly bolted up the stairs and was happy to see me. I picked him up like I used to. I woke up missing Pompey.

Cancellation

Am currently readiing We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa Al-Gharbi. The scholar writes the following about cancel culture:

Consider the phenomenon colloquially referred to as "cancel culture."

Although most of René Girard’s (1923–2015) work was published before that specific term came into common parlance, drawing on his work, one could theorize "cancellation" as a secularized religious scapegoating ritual. When people are consumed by anger over a problem, but the real object of their anger is untouchable (or is, in fact, themselves), folks have long tried to collectively focus their rage on some other target instead—to purge, ostracize, or inflict immense suffering on someone who is not truly responsible for the problem that consumes us, but who comes to be representative of that problem in some way.

"It is easier than in the past to observe collective transferences upon a scapegoat because they are no longer sanctioned and concealed by religion," Girard argued, "and yet it is still difficult because the individuals addicted to them do everything they can to conceal their scapegoating from themselves, and as a general rule they succeed. Today, as in the past, to have a scapegoat is to believe one doesn't have any. The phenomenon in question doesn't usually lead any longer to acts of physical violence, but it does lead to a 'psychological' violence that is easy to camouflage. Those accused of participating in hostile transference never fail to protest their good faith, in all sincerity." (I see Satan Fall Like Lightning. 2001)

A recurrent example: some white woman has an unfortunate encounter with a nonwhite person, and part of the exchange is caught on video and disseminated online. People immediately and intensively research her, reach out to her employer to get her fired, and disseminate her contact information, her social media profiles, her physical address, and the identities of her family and friends online in order to subject her and her loved ones to harassment, ostracism, and humiliation. "Canceling" this woman, of course, will not do anything to end police brutality, mass incarceration, systemic racism, or ethnic strife. It's precisely because people feel helpless to solve those problems that they concentrate their ire so intensely on the woman in the video-laying upon her the sins of society and seeking to punish her for these social sins before expunging her from our presence. Although cancelers may feel impotent to eliminate racism, they recognize that they do have the capacity to destroy this person who has come to be emblematic of that ill. In seventeenth-century Salem, they burned witches. Today, we cancel Karens. In both cases, Girard would likely argue, the impulse is the same.

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