The Last Return 16

[Above a shot of the traditional half-timber houses in the small town of Fritzlar, near the city of Kassel in northern Hesse].

Friday May 10th (continued)

I have been invited to present my ‘Waking to One World – The Nightmare, the Dream’ PowerPoint slide-show in Kassel in northern Hesse at a small gathering of the Future Now Network Foundation. I travel up by ICE, smooth, pleasurable, efficient as always. The Hessian landscape travelling northwards seems pleasantly less over-developed than north Franconia and south Hesse, more woodland-and-fields. I read the Kosmoprolet magazine I picked up in the Karl Marx bookshop in Frankfurt. It seems to be the usual mix of insightful libertarian-Marxist analysis and a certain tone of slightly arrogant absolute certainty about how everything is to be understood and where everything is heading. I can see my own unwelcome tendencies there.

I am met at the station in Kassel by M., an old friend from Munich and Frankfurt university days and who now runs the Future Now Network Foundation, a small organisation attempting to combine both inner-spiritual and outer-organisational work as we, hopefully, transition to a more sustainable, equitable, democratic planetary civilization, to One World. We first met as young university students in Munich fifty years ago and have not seen each other for 43 years.

We repair to a café and talk for about three hours, talking through and quickly resolving any old or lingering personal issues. My meditative awareness of, and stepping back from, my own habitual responses flickers on and off as usual; our basic ‘personality’ patterns, similar in some ways, seem much the same as they have always been, no ‘ageing’ there. M. suggests I check out Terry Patten’s ‘A New Republic of the Heart – An Ethos for Revolutionaries’, as it also combines inner and outer transition work like the FNNF.

Our meeting venue is about a ten-minute-walk from the station, and in a broad, beautifully tree-lined avenue on the way there, M. shows me some of the rows of upright basalt stones and now-mature trees that the artist Joseph Beuys, moving away from his notorious and influential ‘esoteric’ avant-garde performances, had had planted throughout the city as his environmentalist contribution to the famous Kassel Documenta in 1982: ‘7000 Eichen’ (7000 Oaks). The last tree was planted in 1987, just after his death.

The meeting is in a beautiful late-nineteenth-century villa belonging to a wealthy FNNF member. After the initial introductory small-talk conversations I escape out into the garden and enjoy some quiet time with a huge old plane tree with a plastic collar around its trunk. (I’m later told that this collar is to protect trees from pest feral racoons introduced by US soldiers and kept as pets). The event is billed as the FNNF’s first ‘salon’, and perhaps it does remind a little of the Parisian liberal aristocrats’ salons of the French Enlightenment, with all the upper- and middle-class ambiguities thereof.

My PowerPoint presentation consists of images and texts which I mostly translate where necessary. I’ve chosen powerful music to underlay the whole thing: Bach cello music and trance music ‘El Hadra’. As the images succeed each other I feel myself getting more centered and into a certain calm meditative rhythm. Most of it is probably ‘preaching to the saved’, as usual, although I do stress the usually ignored ‘utopian’ aspect of the need both for grassroots, participatory democracy and a general feminization of politics in our transition to One World and de-growth. I also use Blake, Whitman and Rumi as poetic voices of the necessary spiritual dimension to all this.

The presentation seems to go down well with the eighteen people present. Afterwards the usual discussions about ‘what to do’, changing our personal consumption, the promise of the new student climate strike movement Fridays for a Future etc. Again a little weary of our habitual patterns of response, I try and stay out of most of that. Anything I’ve got to say, I’ve already tried to say with my selection of texts and images. For what it’s worth, my little sermon is over.

I spend the night at M. and his partner G’s place near the town of Fritzlar in a small uninspiring village, at least in the drizzly cold, called Ungedank. The name is strange, literally meaning ‘Un-Thanked’ or else ‘Un-Thought’. The latter possibility sets me off joking about the possibility of creating a No-Thought Zen Theme Park here: Zen fun for all the family, with No-Mind slides and jumping castle and a 19-hole mini-golf course (koan: ‘Find that Empty Hole!’).

~ by Peter Lach-Newinsky on August 12, 2021.