{"id":5650,"date":"2017-12-29T08:33:58","date_gmt":"2017-12-29T13:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/?page_id=5650"},"modified":"2017-12-31T14:35:07","modified_gmt":"2017-12-31T19:35:07","slug":"zeitgeist-weltgeist-poltergeist","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/archive\/glossen-43-2017-current-issue\/zeitgeist-weltgeist-poltergeist\/","title":{"rendered":"Zeitgeist, Weltgeist, Poltergeist"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Other Contemporary Realities <\/strong><\/p>\n

by Frederick A. Lubich, Interim Editor of\u00a0Glossen<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe order is rapidly fading
\nand the first one now will later be last\u201d
\nBob Dylan, \u201cThe Times They Are A-Changin\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cZeitgeist, Weltgeist, Poltergeist \u2026\u201d, that was the tentative title for Glossen<\/em> #43, as we concluded the year 2016 with Glossen<\/em> #42, which tried to capture the momentous political developments toward the end of that year under the headline \u201cMauerbau & Mauerschau: Cassandra Calls from Falling and Rising Walls\u201d. In that past issue, poets and academics, former dissidents and today\u2019s civil rights activists, as well as a rabbinical scholar reflected on the meaning of falling and rising walls from Berlin to Jerusalem and beyond, into the New World and its southern border under the imminent presidency of America\u2019s new leader.<\/p>\n

The authors of Glossen<\/em> #42 hailed from both sides of the Atlantic and some of their stargazing into the future from those towering walls \u2013 a practice also known as teichoscopy since the fall of ancient Troy \u2013 turned out to be quite an accurate prophecy. But before looking at those new horizons, the current issue of Glossen<\/em> looks back and recalls three of those who had lived through the hardships of history, as exemplified by the story of modern Germany.<\/p>\n

Reinhard Andress remembers the life and work of Egon Schwarz, one of the last prominent refugees of the Third Reich, well-known as one of the pre-eminent founding fathers of exile studies here in the United States. If the Holocaust of Nazi Germany was hell on earth, then the Stasi system of former East Germany was comparatively speaking a kind of communist purgatory. Axel Reitel and Utz Rachowski recall the trials and tribulations of the generation born after World War II, including their own incarceration as young men in the so-called \u201cWorkers\u2019 Paradise\u201d. Today, the \u201cGerman Democratic Republic\u201d, a political misnomer par excellence, can serve as a perfect example \u2013 avant la lettre<\/em> \u2013 for what has become known these days on this side of the Atlantic as \u201cfake news\u201d and \u201calternative facts\u201d.<\/p>\n

Looking back at the various writings on the wall in the past issue of Glossen<\/em>, some are worth mentioning for different reasons, as they not only confirm the expected but also adumbrate the unexpected. My own oracle \u00a0\u201cManhattan Menetekel: Access Hollywood-Babylon \u2013 From Age-Old Prophecies to Latter-Day Realities\u201d delineated the coming show-down between the \u201cLose Gun from Manhattan\u201d and the \u201cRocket Rattler from Pyongyang\u201d. It was a scenario even a blind man could have envisioned, since it was already written all over the wall towards the end of last year, in other words, the topic of countless newspapers and late night talk shows.<\/p>\n

The international sensation that both leaders would soon start trading barbs, slinging insults such as \u201cdotard\u201d and \u201clittle rocket man\u201d at each other, should not have been surprising at all. But that the impulsive American president would actually soon face-off with his equally unpredictable counterpart in North Korea in a visit close to the Demilitarized Zone, armed to the teeth with more insults and backed up by real military might, that rapid development toward nuclear confrontation with international consequences probably surprised even the most pessimistic doomsayers on both sides of the Atlantic. \u201cApocalypse Now\u201d? A final scenario ready to go as the world\u2019s ultimate Reality Show!<\/p>\n

Rabbi Panitz\u2019 crystal ball gazing in last year\u2019s Glossen<\/em> was called \u201cAnd in Her Heart, a Wall. A Jewish Lens on a Walled World\u201d and it turned out to be an even more astounding prophecy. \u201cNext Year Jerusalem\u201d, that millennia old prophecy of the Jewish people scattered all over the world, came true this year \u2013 spes contra spem<\/em> – \u00a0as the president of the United States has\u00a0 indeed recognized Jerusalem as the future capital of Israel. Last year, that writing on the wall was not foreseeable at all. Will that message bring a breakthrough on the road to peace in the Promised Land, the ancient Holy Land of all three monotheistic religions, or will it only lead to more terror, civil war, and ever more refugees?<\/p>\n

\u201cRefugees (2016)\u201d was the generic title of three paintings by Jeanne Finkelstein Goodman, which complemented last year\u2019s preface to Glossen<\/em>. The three paintings depict refugees in various configurations, commemorating their history and anticipating more of their misery, as the new administration of the United States was already announcing new rules and regulations, especially on immigration from the Middle East as well as nationwide deportations across the border in the South West. Finkelstein Goodman\u2019s paintings were also part of a juried exhibition called \u201cFacing Our Fear: Reflections on Our Time\u201d which opened on January 20, 2017 at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.<\/p>\n

The exhibition was quickly organized to coincide with the day of inauguration of the new president of the United States. It featured the work of roughly twenty poets, scholars, and artists from the artistic and academic community in and around the university who wanted to express their fears and anxieties about imminent policies and rapidly changing realities. In hindsight, some of the visions of these artists turned out to be most revealing and three of them are therefore also represented in chapter IV of this issue and shall be briefly introduced here.<\/p>\n

Fred Freeman\u2019s sculpture of a mournful Mother Earth with the subtitle \u201cWorld Weary of Being Wary\u201d is a foreboding prefiguration of the new environmental policies of the current government that has been in denial of global climate change from day one with worldwide consequences after its withdrawal from the international Paris Agreement. The president\u2019s ecological va banque <\/em>strategy, heading towards a potential \u201cScorched Earth\u201d reality down the road, certainly goes hand in hand with his hazard game of nuclear warfare, which he shares with his counterpart in North Korea.<\/p>\n

Clearly, Mother Earth, whom the ancients had venerated as the Goddess Demeter, is not only world weary and potentially in more and more trouble, but she is also figuratively speaking increasingly angry and furious. There is no doubt that this fall the wrath of the Goddess was written all across the American continent, as some of its worst hurricanes and firestorms in recorded history have been ravaging it from shore to shining shore. Make America Great Again?<\/p>\n

Jenny Windsor\u2019s painting \u201cPersephone\u201d adds to this environmental perspective an important additional gender narrative. Not only is Persephone the daughter of Demeter, she has also been according to myth Hades\u2019 object of perennial wantonness. Since time immemorial he has been abducting her every fall into the underworld, from where she was not allowed to return until the following spring.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, it was not until the end of this year that this ancient rite of fall, this perennial robbing of Persephone by the Lord of the Underworld, in other words, patriarchy\u2019s subculture of rape, was systematically challenged, when Persephone\u2019s modern daughters began to expose in rapidly growing numbers the timeless horrors of Hades and its latter-day perpetrators. And as we ring out the old year 2017, the media is calling it more and more and most appropriately \u201cThe Year of the Reckoning\u201d.<\/p>\n

Manuela Mour\u00e3o\u2019s creative installation with the title \u201cTo Grab and to Hold\u201d might have appeared at the beginning of this year to some visitors as nothing more than a somewhat enigmatic assemblage. However, in hindsight it turned out to be the conceptual culmination point of this exhibition and its Demeter-Persephone trajectory. In other words, it reflects and represents arguably – as will hopefully become transparent in its accompanying commentary – the zeitgeist of the year 2017 as a virtual Gesamtkunstwerk. <\/em><\/p>\n

Or to put Richard Wagner\u2019s late-romantic concept of a total work of art into a more timeless vernacular, one could argue that the three above mentioned pieces of art are all part of worldwide Cassandra calls that evoke that looming \u201cDies Irae\u201d, that ominous \u201cDay of Wrath\u201d, just as the eponymous poem from the time of the Middle Ages used to evoke the Old Testament and above all its much touted \u201cLast Judgement\u201d. And by the same token, one could make the case that the \u201cDay of Reckoning\u201d not only alludes to Saint John\u2019s \u201cSecret Revelations\u201d but also vice versa to all the dirty secrets of man\u2019s sexual abominations which his descendants have been trying to hide throughout history. Or, to update their chronology a bit: From Exit Hollywood to Exit Washington, D.C. \u2026 some of them still might have a blast \u2026 but remember our latter-day prophet laureate \u2026 \u201cthe first one now will later be last\u201d!<\/p>\n

Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeculum in favilla<\/em>! That day of wrath, that dreadful day, shall heaven and earth in ashes lay. That is how one of the translators of this final farewell to our world put it. Heaven forbid such awful destruction, such awesome reckoning! But what about all those high and mighty who thought they could abuse their power for their own personal pleasure, trying to grab and hold on forever? Lo and behold, day by day more and more of them are coming down in shame and disgrace. For them, life on earth will never be the same again. Or to put it differently, from the silver screens of modern Hollywood to the walls and towers of mythic Babylon \u2026 mutatis mutandis \u2026 sic transit gloria mund<\/em>i.<\/p>\n

Summa summarum<\/em>: For more on those recollections and latter-day reckonings, see the pertinent commentaries and subsequent chapters in this current edition of Gloss<\/em>en #43. They are all further explorations and investigations of the spirit of our time, the world spirit in all its dialectical contradictions, including some of its past and dark realities as well as some of its future and much brighter opportunities.<\/p>\n

Zeitgeist, Weltgeist, Poltergeist: After all its spirited manifestations, its patriarchal and matriarchal realizations, after all the continuing breaking of silence and the increasingly outspoken protestations, \u00a0if we keep looking for the good in our world, if we keep searching for the best of all worlds, in short, if we listen to the better angels in all of us, those fallen angels who still can rise and soar, those legendary angels of our history \u2026, in other words, if we keep following Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cKnocking on Heaven\u2019s Door\u201d, then hell will have no chance and Hades will be no more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Other Contemporary Realities by Frederick A. Lubich, Interim Editor of\u00a0Glossen \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe order is rapidly fading and the first one now will later be last\u201d Bob Dylan, \u201cThe Times They Are A-Changin\u2019\u201d \u201cZeitgeist, Weltgeist, Poltergeist \u2026\u201d, that was the tentative title for Glossen #43, as we concluded the year 2016 with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":282,"featured_media":0,"parent":5496,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5650","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/282"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5650\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}