My last dream of the night, the early morning actually, is usually quite intense and often memorable. So it was recently.
In my dream I found myself in a semi-industrial space chatting with two friendly fellows. I was drawn to their animated and boisterous energy despite their appearance; both were copiously covered in spattered blood. As the conversation progressed, I learned that they were the proud operators of a torture center.
Their business, they explained, consisted of clients who volunteered to be tortured, and they handed me a sign-up form in case I was interested, which I was not. But the form was very attractively designed, and a lively discussion turned to their creative use of fonts. They turned to enter an elevator, and we said goodbye, at which point I woke up.
Dreams are very personal, of course, and each of us may choose to interpret what they mean. I feel dreams are my psyche’s way of bringing things to my conscious attention, and this dream arrived on the heels of the recent inauguration of Trump’s presidency, itself a combination of conviviality and mayhem. Attendees at inauguration parties seemed positively delirious with joy. Trump himself seemed actually friendly and happy as he signed one-hundred executive orders before reporters, yet many of the orders will wreak havoc and mayhem in people’s lives.
Convivial mayhem; through dream, my psyche is telling me of the human condition. This is a very long story of ours, the conflation of the suffering of others with pleasure. The Ancient bouts of public torture in the Coliseum are dubbed Roman Holidays, a theatre of blood and circus. In his masterwork “The Dawn of Everything” author David Graeber recounts how the women of the Huron tribe in Canada would spend days slowly and meticulously torturing captives. At the same time, men in the tribe like the elder Kondiaronk had sophisticated and well developed views of what creates a good democratic society and held forth about them to the French colonialists. Later incorporated into a best-selling 17th century book, Kondiaronk’s ideas, Graeber explains, influenced enlightenment thought in Europe.
Lest you think I am completely biased, the Biden administration displayed plenty of convivial mayhem as well. Its support for the destruction of Gaza by Israel, although accompanied by handwringing and efforts at a cease-fire, nonetheless was nothing short of bloody mayhem. America is, after all, the world’s leading arms supplier. And so, in one armed conflict after another, innocent lives have been turned upside down and destroyed in the name of this or that while at the same time friendly smiles and good cheer are displayed to the press at state dinners or convivial chats before a burning fireplace in the White House.
The death wish, Freud believed, is real and significant, and plays a leading role in human behavior. I find it hard to disagree. Our storied abilities of reason are employed to justify our cruelty, and only the death wish can explain our ongoing fetish with war and murder. Projected upon others, the death wish satisfies some primal, animal drive that becomes sublimated into acceptable cultural forms. Thus it is that our popular entertainment includes a flood of convivial mayhem: dashing killers like James Bond, rogue cops like Dirty Harry, and a flood of sociopathic anti-heroes like Rambo and Dexter.
And in my dream, I too was swept up in conviviality despite the blood. And then I woke up.
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