Nostalgic overture

The genocide being perpetrated in Gaza is grabbing the attention of the alternative media, including the racial right. We should welcome this Israeli blunder insofar as, thanks to it, the tribe will lose its aura of victimhood and become a victimiser at least for a section of the Western population. But this spotlight could be misleading when it comes to the most important news of the moment. I am referring to the recent long-range strike missiles launched on Russian territory whose button was probably pressed by NATO itself. As Colonel Douglas Macgregor has just said, the war has entered a new phase: a very dangerous phase that could escalate into a direct US confrontation with Russia, since NATO is, after all, the military arm of the US on European soil.

Changing the subject, there is something I would like to add to my Friday article, ‘The Narrow Door’. Precisely because (except in my case) there are no people who have written this new kind of autobiography, not only is there no psychological healing for those who were mentally wounded as minors, but the mind of the surviving mutant isn’t understood.

For example, yesterday I read the phrase ‘Christianity is essentially a spent force’ in an article in The Unz Review which suddenly made me feel a passing nostalgia for my years when Christianity was still at its prime, to the extent that I listened to the overture of the 1959 film Ben-Hur and even the opening scenes. Since I come from a family of musicians I feel that music perfectly portrays how many Westerners still felt about Christianity decades ago: when that religion was still in good shape. I saw the film as a child and teenager several times over the years on the big screen, while in the country where I live, it used to be re-released from time to time.

But how did I engender that nostalgia yesterday with the first half hour of Ben-Hur if I am anti-Christian, my readers may ask? Precisely because I fulfil the Delphic mandate I can make contact with the César I once was: someone like Bran the Broken touching a Weirwood root in the cave of his mentor to find some solace in a nostalgic memory of the old self he once had.

Retrieving all those selves of the past makes one better equipped to understand a present-day Christian who, unlike me, hasn’t apostatised from the religion of our parents. These are very healthy mental exercises because, if we imagine them in Venn diagrams, my present mind ‘encompasses’ the mind of the former César, although the mind of the lad of that time cannot encompass the mind of the present adult: it wasn’t so expanded. In other words, I can empathise with a Christian just by an exercise like the one I did yesterday with the majestic overture to that film, but a Christian cannot return the favour as he hasn’t expanded his mind to the degree of an insightful apostasy. To use a metaphor I’ve used for years in my soliloquies, I can see them but they can’t see me.

Incidentally, at the end of ‘The Narrow Door’ I said that those young people who would like to contribute their work to reprint our books of the featured post could write to me, and I added that they could contact me via the ‘Donate and/or contact’ entry, which until yesterday posted my Tutanota email. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to access my Tutanota account for a few days now, so I’ve just changed my email address to a Gmail account.