[Sundaycommunity] The solar eclipse essay: Night for Day or Day for Night in the Heart of Darkness

Sun Apr 7 17:04:08 PDT 2024

Thank you Art, like Dwyer we need this sober reminder of just how close we
are to possible annihilation. The Doomsday clock is now 90 seconds from
midnight, a terrifying prospect. Fr. Dan Berrigan to paraphrase said and
this is supposed to be the behaviour of sane leaders.

Greg

On Sun, Apr 7, 2024 at 7:15 PM Dwyer Sullivan via Sundaycommunity <
sundaycommunity at lists.integralshift.ca> wrote:

> Thank you Art for reminding us of somed darkness that not everyone wants
> to see. Peace, Dwyer
>
> On Sun, Apr 7, 2024 at 12:40 PM Arthur Blomme via Sundaycommunity <
> sundaycommunity at lists.integralshift.ca> wrote:
>
>> *I believe that this is an excellent essay by Edward Curtin  to read into
>> these times of war on the occasion of the upcoming solar eclipse.*
>>
>>
>> *Art *
>> Night for Day or Day for Night in the Heart of Darkness
>> It is strange how today people revel in the darkness even while fearing
>> it.  Sunsets are far more popular than sunrises, even while death is the
>> great bogeyman and birth deserves cigars and champagne. Crowds regularly
>> gather in the evenings, trying to freeze time, even as they celebrate the
>> death of another day.  This is a twisted relationship we have; to day and
>> night, life and death, darkness and light
>>
>> We are such strange and paradoxical creatures.
>>
>> And now the upcoming plunge into night for day with the solar eclipse is
>> the next great big thing to see.
>>
>> A plunge into the heart of darkness that is pertinent to the dark heart
>> of U.S. foreign policy with its ruthless power, craven terror, and pride in
>> killing.
>>
>> It is uncanny how the darkness of social life today is reflected in the
>> promotion of a natural event as if it were a must-see film that has just
>> won the Academy Award.
>>
>> As Joseph Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness: “Like a running blaze on a
>> plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”
>>
>> And we will die in a flicker if the dark-hearted leaders of this country
>> continue to push against Russia in Ukraine for the nuclear war that they
>> previewed in 1945 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It is understandable why in
>> retrospect the great Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s first report
>> from Hiroshima was so widely censored and why he was for many years
>> portrayed as a communist dupe, even as twenty years later his honest
>> reports from Vietnam were so important for those interested in the truth
>> that the mainstream media blacked them out.  The exposure of America’s
>> ongoing war crimes was for decades blamed on communist influence, just as
>> today it is blamed on Russian propaganda.
>>
>> But now it’s time for a flick to give us crocodile tears from the father
>> of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, with that must-see Academy Award
>> winning film, Oppenheimer.
>>
>> A biopic of one man with all his complicated and twisted personality and
>> scientific brilliance is a far cry from Wilfred Burchett’s article, The
>> Atomic Plague: “I write this as a warning to the world.”  But then the
>> Academy Awards’ ongoing support for Ukraine in its U.S. proxy war against
>> Russia – a war rooted in the 2014 U.S. engineered coup and NATO’s
>> encircling of Russia – is just the opposite: a provocation that makes
>> nuclear war much more likely.  It’s a sick celebrity game.
>>
>> The creation of the atomic bomb and its use on the Japanese was demonic –
>> pure evil.  Robert Oppenheimer was not a tragic figure as portrayed in the
>> New York times article titled: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy
>> of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
>>
>> As I wrote in “Trinity’s Shadow,” he was “complicated, yes; but he was
>> essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic
>> project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the
>> Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to
>> restrain itself in the future.”
>>
>> Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical
>> and big tech industries, or the CIA, to regulate themselves.  Anyone who
>> would give the name “Trinity” to the site where the first bomb was exploded
>> had a twisted mind.
>>
>> Oppenheimer, which *excludes *scenes from the devastation in Hiroshima
>> and Nagasaki but includes one wherein scientists rapturously celebrate with
>> flag waving the exploding of the bomb over Hiroshima, recently opened in
>> Japan.
>>
>> The New York Times published a piece about the opening that contains
>> various Japanese reactions, including one from Yujin Yaguchi, a professor
>> at the University of Tokyo, that accurately raises a fundamental issue: the
>> film “celebrates a group of white male scientists who really enjoyed their
>> privilege and their love of political power.
>>
>> We should focus more on why such a rather one-sided story of white men
>> continues to attract such attention and adulation in the U.S. and what it
>> says about the current politics and the larger politics of memory in the
>> U.S (and elsewhere).”
>>
>> Exactly. The issue is political, not aesthetic.  Why it is good to see
>> some flickering images and not others? Why is night for day and the
>> blocking out of the sun by an eclipse so good but the reminder that we are
>> on the edge of a nuclear eclipse because of the policies of our
>> dark-hearted leaders is not?
>>
>> *We live in very dark times.* There is no need to watch the sun being
>> extinguished and day turn to night in the heart of an immense darkness.
>> Kurtz’s dying words as recalled by Marlowe at the end of The Heart of
>> Darkness – ‘The horror! The horror!’ are not words we want to utter as we
>> realize we too have gone mad in our souls because we looked the wrong way
>> as the nukes were in their flight.
>>
>> *Chase the light!  *
>> As Oliver Stone writes in his memoir, “One of the first basic lessons in
>> filming is chasing the light. Without it, you have nothing. . . .”
>> *It’s true in life as well. We live in the flicker.*
>>
>> So if we are to celebrate the dawn of a new day on earth, paradoxical and
>> contradictory as it might sound, we do need to look into the darkness – the
>> heart of the darkest and demonic crimes committed by our heartless leaders
>> – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the genocide in Gaza, the escalating and
>> expanding war in the Middle East, and the U.S proxy war against Russia in
>> Ukraine, to name a few.
>>
>> And if the contemplation of the eclipse of the sun disturbs you enough to
>> impel you to do so, a quick peek won’t hurt.
>>
>> *Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in
>> Western Massachusetts. **He is a Research Associate of the Centre for
>> Research on Globalization (CRG)*
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>>
>
> --
> Act Justly, Love Tenderly, Walk Humbly With Your God
>     - Micah 6:8
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