NP but Somehow Pynchonian to me. Dreams in the Third Reich.

[Mark Kohut]

There is an American woman asking Americans about their dreams since
2016. I'm sure it is findable if you are interested.

More than you might care to know, but not that embarrassing or revealing.
For more reasons than the uncertainty and bad shit of our polity and times,
I have been dreaming
of being lost and struggling, struggling to even move and then not being
able to get back.
 One Jungian dream, I say, about entering some kind
of transport machine that landed me in Canada,  where I went to college as
i've written, and I could not get back (but I kept trying to find the
transport station) .
As we know, many Americans went and stayed in Canada in the politically
turbulent sixties.

And lately, after a personally volatile day and a volatile newsday, I was
caught in the wilds of nature, with cliffs to slide down and trying to move
in mud--
this part surely comes from Margaret Atwood's *Surfacing*--and when I awoke
the Sinatra song from Joker, *That's Life*
were the first words in my mind.

Art isn't life unless you make it so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIiUqfxFttM





On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 8:27 PM Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Fascism's ongoing rise has certainly had an effect on my own dreams
> and nightmares, that's for sure.
>
> I find that my "dream self" is less certain of pretty much everyone he
> encounters in dreams, be they friend, family, or composite. I have
> more difficulty trusting these dream people, and they seem less
> capable of being reasoned with. I've had many dreams of people
> harboring hidden agendas and feeling more free to share their
> "politically incorrect" (i.e. fascist) opinions about, say, people of
> a different race, or people with a different set of political beliefs.
>
> I feel as though a big part of the New Fascist International(e)
> "project" has been the inoculation of the minds that they've targeted
> for takeover against facts, reason, truth, evidence, crushingly
> overwhelming expert consensus, etc, etc, etc... they just DO NOT CARE
> that they're wrong. It's an infantile regression, one that could only
> ever have happened in a society where the stakes have been made to
> seem not all that important (again, purely an illusion).
>
> I don't know. I'm rambling now. All this to say that, YES, the current
> crisis has personally affected me, right down to my dreams. Not really
> sure where I stand anymore.
>
> Cheers;
> Yer Old Pal Jerky
> (YOPJ)
>
> On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 6:31 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >
> >
> > "Yes, sort of GERMAN, these episodes here. Well, these days Slothrop is
> > even dreaming in the language. Folks have been teaching him dialects,
> > Plattdeutsch for the zone the British plan to occupy, Thuringian if the
> > Russians happen not to drive as far as Nordhausen, where the central
> > rocket works is located."
> >
> > Gravity's Rainbow, p. 240
> >
> > Inspired by Beradt's book, the historian Reinhart Koselleck had a
> > research program running on human experiences of time in times of terror
> > & the methodological consequences for history science. Koselleck wasn't
> > able to finish the overall project but there's an essay from the 1970s
> > where his basic considerations can be found:
> >
> > Reinhart Koselleck: Terror und Traum. Methodologische Anmerkungen zu
> > Zeiterfahrungen im Dritten Reich. Pp. 278-299 in R.K.: Vergangene
> > Zukunft. Zur Semantik historischer Zeiten. Frankfurt a.M. 1979: Suhrkamp.
> >
> > The essay collection - "Future's Past: On the Semantics of Historical
> > Time"  (NY 2004: Columbia University Press) - is available in English.
> > Here comes the pdf:
> >
> >
> https://www.academia.edu/33539151/Futures_Past_On_the_Semantics_of_Historical_Time_-_Reinhart_Koselleck_2014_1985_
> >
> > The essay "Terror and Dream. Methodological remarks on the experience of
> > Time during the Third Reich" can be found on pages 205-221.
> >
> > "Traumdarstellungen aus den Konzentrationslagern eröffnen uns einen
> > Bereich, wo der menschliche Verstand zu versagen scheint, wo seine
> > Sprache verstummt. Die konzentrationären Träume zeichnen sich durch
> > einen rapiden Verlust an Wirklichkeit aus, während Wachträume
> > proportional dazu zunehmen. Damit werden wir in einen Bereich gestoßen,
> > in dem offenbar die schriftsprachliche Quellenlage unzureichend wird, um
> > überhaupt begreifen zu lernen, was der Fall war. Wir werden auf die
> > Metaphorik der Träume verwiesen, um sehen zu lernen, was wirklich
> geschah."
> >
> > (pp. 288-289, here quoted after the fourth paperback edition from the
> > year 2000)
> >
> >
> > Am 08.11.19 um 08:06 schrieb Mark Kohut:
> > > https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1192490281687568384?s=20
> > > --
> > > Pynchon-L:https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> > > .
> > >
> >
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>