It’s the difference between a thirty-second flash of you running towards an inescapable cliff, fanged carrots in hot pursuit, and a three-hour drama in Panavision and Technicolor where you can smell the smells, taste the tastes, feel the fear and longing, not as something you know is only dream state reality but something altogether different because you’re actually there. And you can’t wake up because you don’t know you’re sleeping.
There’s no way to explain why because it starts well into the first act, but we’re being deported again. Then again, the whole point is there is no valid explanation. It’s something that’s happening, and the only reason it is allowed to go on is that all participants are caught up in the absence of critical thought caused by inevitable History grinding along its tracks.
The Swiss authorities stand by and watch, as they are prone to in these circumstances. Everyone just stands by and watches. Even M seems to accept the fact with a total lack of surprise or sadness. Once we are again separated from the masses, set aside from normality because of what we are, non-Jews lose their capacity for empathy because we no longer are part of their group. For the same reason we don’t really feel the suffering of cows off to the slaughterhouse.
The general setting is quite obviously inflected by my recently reading the Pianist, everything is washed out greys and olive greens, a sort of November rendering of mid-countryside landscape.
We are being deported, but have been invited to come to the station of our own free will and I am therefore in the process of trying, in a fifteen-minute time span, to set my affairs in order before going away. When you have so little time to reason twenty-six years of life, your priorities surface rapidly, even if they are only dream priorities.
So I make sure to send the members of my rock group a sealed envelope containing the address of the group’s website and the login and password information, as well as the same information for my personal site, containing most of what I consider to be my “important” writing. Then I send various other letters and set aside the papers containing my poems etc…
As I said, dreams have a tendency of randomizing your priorities. Although I get in touch with my father and brother, my mother is left out of the picture completely and I don’t worry about her until I’m on the train, realizing I don’t know where she is or what has become of her. My feeling is that this apparent lack of love or gratitude on my part is only caused by the absence of conflict in my relationship to my mother, whereas the tension between my brother, my father and myself is a constant cause of worry.
So I’m at the station, which actually bears closer resemblance to an airport. The pervasive feeling is that we are to be carried away as were the humans in the “How to serve man” episode of the Twilight Zone.
The only indicator of a dream state reality here is the flexibility of time, not only the fluctuation of duration, but also of continuity.
I’ve gotten on the train and started my long voyage to nowhere, but now I’m back in the station and have time for this question: is it better to go along, hoping I will be part of the small percentile that will survive, as my grandparents did the first Holocaust? Or should I join the “underground” (my Cineculture provides the certainty that there is necessarily an “underground”), risk fighting my way out, risk certain death. It is more a moral question. Should I go along and hope for the best or do I have an obligation to contest and fight, though facing a swifter more immediate death?
The dream then dissolves into random pornography and I wake up bathed in sweat.
What troubles me is the sense of impending doom, that it is really going to happen.
What troubles me is that the United States are acting like a Nazi Germany of the 21st century.
The current American government does not want to expand America’s Lebensraum, it wants to ensure uniform thought, which is a lot scarier.
