After the fifth instalment of selected quotes from Benjamin’s book, I had planned to comment on Brendan Simms’ biography about Hitler. That way, I would be interspersing a post about the four words—which includes stopping abusing children—with another post about the fourteen words.
But since I am also a victim of abusive parents and a psychiatrist my mother hired to finish destroying me, reading Consumption makes me dwell on my past, especially since these days I have been suffering from what I wrote on the first day of the month in “Selfish heirs.” In many ways, my past was as handicapping as Benjamin’s. For example, it is unclear what will become of me when I run out of money from the sale of my parents’ house, divided among six heirs.
On the one hand, it is true that someone like “Bran the Broken”, whom (in my appropriation, not in the novel) his beloved father threw off the tower and who, with his broken spine, can no longer lead a normal life, can see his biographical past and even History from a paranormal perspective that normies, who lack that retrocognitive gift, can’t.
But on the other hand, material needs remain imperative. Even in the HBO adaptation of Martin’s novels—directed by a couple of Jews who in many ways betray the author—it can be seen that Bran enters the mind of his pet wolf to have the illusion of eating when, in reality, he is not feeding himself. These astral journeys can be harmful in that, in real life, Bran must feed himself, as his travelling companion Jojen warns him. The novel is even more sinister than the HBO series because it seems to suggest that, already in the cave and learning the magic of the three-eyed raven, Jojen allowed himself to be sacrificed so that Bran could eat a paste that was made from his body thanks to the culinary arts of the children of the forest…
I can say something similar about my countless journeys into inner space. Like Van Gogh and the painters of his time, I have sacrificed the most basic aspects of physical survival in pursuit of enlightenment about what happened in my early life. The difference, of course, is that in the real world there are no children of the forest to help me, even with their black magic. I have survived to the age at which Cézanne died, but it is unclear how I will survive when I reach my seventies. It really sucks that, if my literary work has any value (I am referring to the trilogy), I have to die to be recognised. And that’s if you’re lucky! (the work of Aristarchus of Samos, for example, was lost forever when the Christians destroyed the Library of Alexandria).
I will end this post with an image of the very copy that I used to look at with my parents when I was a child, around five or six years old: a book that inspired me greatly to understand the great painters. I am referring to an image of the first painter reviewed in the book, Cézanne: