Atlas Radio – alle uitgesproken teksten

In Atlas Radio laten Theo Eshetu en Keir Fraser dertien personen aan het woord. Hieronder de transcriptie. Alle fragmenten komen uit Youtube-filmpjes.
Dit radioprogramma heeft een link met het videokunstwerk Atlas Fragmented van de Brits-Ethiopische kunstenaar Theo Eshetu. Gemaakt voor de Documenta 2017. Dit werk duurt vijfendertig minuten.
In Atlas Radio worden de woorden gemixt met muziek, afkomstig uit allerlei genres en plekken op onze wereld. Klik hier voor vijfentwinig kort geciteerde Youtube-muziekfilmpjes

Door op een naam te klikken krijgt u toegang tot een pagina waarop meer informatie over die bewuste persoon wordt gegeven én verwezen wordt naar de bron waaruit het bewust citaat komt. Een Youtube-filmpje.

02:14-02:18 – Carl Gustav Jung
The whole personality of man is indescribable.

02:24-03:08 – Langston Hughes
I am your son, white man!
 
Georgia dusk
And the turpentine woods.
One of the pillars of the temple fell.
 
You are my son!
Like Hell!
 
The moon over the turpentine woods.
The Southern night
Full of stars,
Great big yellow stars.
 
What’s a body but a toy?
Juicy bodies
Of nigger wenches
Blue black
Against black fences.
O, you little bastard boy,
What’s a body but a toy? ()

I am your son, white man!
A little yellow
Bastard boy.

03:13-03:29 – Joseph Campbell
I tell you, mythology I think of as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry.
And to see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

03:43-04:11 – Homi K. Bhabha
For our  dream of difference and diversity is now turning into a kind of haunting kind of horror about the very feasibility of global politics.
With the increase in homeland security and international surveillance.
Doubts about the very ‘deterritorialized flows’ of global terror networks, that use the same technologies and information economies as financial networks.

04:12-04:36 – Homi K. Bhabha
What starts as the expression, () the passionate identification with a cultural territorial location and tradition, love of a country as attachment to our own field of action, is followed by a temporal anxiety, fueled by a sense of the loss of civilizational order and historic self.

04:55-5:44 – Toni Morrison
A lot of people say, “I didn’t ask to be born,” I think we did, and that’s why we’re here.
We are here, and we have to do something nurturing, that we respect, before we go.
We must.
It is more interesting, more complicated, more intellectually demanding and morally demanding to love somebody, to take care of somebody, to make one other person feel good.

06:20-06:57 – Bertrand Russell
Vraag: Why are you not a Christian?
Bertrand Russell: Because I see no evidence whatever for any of the Christian dogmas.
I’ve examined all the stock arguments in favour of the existence of God, and none of them seem to me to be logically valid.
()
Well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true.
That’s quite … at least, I rule it out as impossible.
Either the thing is true, or it isn’t.
If it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t.
And if you can’t find out whether it’s true, or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment.

07:22-09:49 – James Baldwin
What must be considered is a final act of the white Christian European industrial drama.
()
That war may yet spread to engulf the globe, and let’s speak plainly.
We know, everybody knows, no matter what the professions of my unhappy country may be, that we are not bombing people out of existence in the name of freedom.
If it were freedom we were concerned about, then long, long ago we would have done something about Johannesburg.
()
We are concerned with power, nothing more than that.
()
They talk about the colour problem, but the truth is that no white American is sure he’s white, and every American negro visibly is no longer in Africa and we know what happened and we know who had the whip; so it was not my grandmother who raped anybody.
()
And one has got to decide, I think, that  the actual and the moral basis on which the world we now know rests, are obsolete, must be changed, enterprises are obsolete they are wicked.
()
The civilization which is doing this, by doing this, dooms itself. It is not possible to agree with it. 
Nor is it possible to compromise with it.
Freedom is a much overused word and it may not be as real as slavery, which is a very concrete thing, but freedom is what one’s after. 
And as it cannot, I suppose, be given, then it obviously must be taken.

10:23-11:20 – Joseph Campbell
There are a number of services that myths serve.
The basic one is opening the world to the dimension of mystery. 
()
To realize the mystery that underlies all forms.
But then there comes the cosmological aspect of myths.
Seeing that mystery as manifest through all things.
So the universe becomes as it were a holy picture.
You are always addressed to the transcendent mystery through that.
But then there’s another function, and that’s the sociological one, of validating or maintaining a certain society. 
()
But then there is a fourth function and this is the one that I think today everyone must try to relate too.
That’s the pedagogical function; how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances?

11:46-12:23 – Angela Davis
Yeah, you see, that’s another thing.
When you talk about a revolution, most people think violence, without realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies in the principles and the goals that you’re striving for, not in the way you reach them.
On the other hand, because of the way this society is organized, because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions.
You have to expect things like that as reactions.
Yeah, you see, that’s another thing.
When you talk about a revolution, most people think violence, without realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies in the principles and the goals that you’re striving for, not in the way you reach them.
On the other hand, because of the way this society is organized, because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions. You have to expect things like that as reactions.

12:35-13:29 – Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell: My friend, Heinrich Zimmer, of years ago, used to say, “The best things can’t be told,” because they transcend thought.
“The second best are misunderstood,” because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can’t be thought about, you know, and one gets stuck with the thoughts.
“The third best are what we talk about, you see.
“And myth is that feel of reference, metaphors referring to what is absolutely transcendent.
Bill Moyers: What can’t be known
Joseph Campbell: What can’t be known!
()
It’s the edge.
The interface between what can be known and what isn’t.
Never to be discovered, because it’s a mystery, transcended of all human research.
The source of life!
What is it?
No one knows!

13:49-14:49 – Homi K. Bhabha
When cultural critics argue with increased regularity that postmodernism is the logic of global capital or that the world market establishes a real politics of difference – heart and negri –  they seem to turn the world into a metaphor of Mondizilation, in which the persistence of national or international governance is wrongly seen as the remnant of an archaic activistic force.
Such arguments work through analogy by equating the conceptual language of cultural globalization with select aspects of the political economy, commodification, financial flows, capital transfers, outsourcing, flexible accumulation.
These economic and financial processes seem to resonate with the semiotic vocabularies of cultural studies.

16:00-16:55 – James Baldwin
Now, according to me, and what I hope for in the future, the flesh is all you have.If you want to fight back, there’s no hope for you.
Everything you find out, you find out through your senses.
Everything that happens to you in this frame, this tenement, this mortal envelope.
Which should be a beating of chains and hammering nails through it and hang it on crosses.
They should be, these celebrations, your life, your body and that concept comes back into the world.It will come back only through the black people have been submerged so long and that will change, not only the black personality, but that  will change the world.

18:18-18:37 – Andy Warhol
Edward Lucie Smith: Do you believe in feelings and emotions?
Andy Warhol: Well no, I don’t, but I have them. I wish I didn’t.
Edward Lucie Smith: Why? Do you think you’d be happier?
Andy warhol: Eh, no, just the feeling, you know, just getting by.

19:15-19:31 – Carl Gustav Jung
So you see, it is demonstrated to us, in our days what the power to psyche is of man.
How important it is to know something about it.
But we know nothing about it.

19:47-20:00 – Joseph Campbell
People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life.
I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking.
I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.

20:00-20:24 – Maya Angelou
Say nice sister, you know what’s right.
Just do right.
You don’t really have to ask anybody, the truth is right may not be expedient, it may not be profitable, but it will satisfy your soul.

20:24-20:57 – Maya Angelou
If one percent of our world was complaint free.
Would we care more about the children and realize that every child is our child.
The black one and the white one, the pretty one and the plain one, the Asian and the Muslim, the Japanese and the Jewish.
Everyone is our child.
If we were just one percent free of complaint.

21:36-21:43 – Chris Hedges
Brace yourself. The American empire is over and the descent is going to be horrifying.

23:35-24:08  – James Baldwin
The second proposition is what I really want to get at tonight, and it sounds mystical, I think, in a country like ours and in a time like this.
When something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets and – when it’s even more crucial – when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report, that only poets can make.

26:45-27:20 – James Baldwin
But you, in this context, you the white liberal – in this context – suffer from your colour. 
Exactly size of my colour, in another, a more brutal context
We gotta face that. 
If one can face it one can deal with it and then it doesn’t matter, but I don’t think it serves any purpose to get anyone’s feelings hurt. 
‘Cause it’s not a matter of my liberation, for example, it’s also a matter of yours. 
If you’re working, if we are working together it’s not because we are gonna do something for the black people, we are doing something for each other. 
To save this really rather frightening world.

27:42-28:29 – James Baldwin
And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what is important.
Everybody’s hurt.
What is important, what bullwhips you, what corrals you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive.
This is all you have to do it with.
You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can be released from it and then hopefully it works the other way around too.Insofar as I can tell you what it is like to suffer.
Perhaps I can help you to suffer less.

32:17-33:35 – Chris Hedges
Civilizations rise, decay, and die.
Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states, is cyclical.
As societies become more complex, they become inevitably more precarious.
They become increasingly vulnerable, burdened by vast bureaucracies, an increasingly rapacious and disconnected elite, and a blind loyalty to ideological systems and ideas that no longer correspond to reality.
And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat, by a frightened and confused population, from reality.
An inability to confront the fragility and impending collapse.
The elites who speak in phrases and jargon – that do not correspond to the real – retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court of Versailles, the Forbidden City, or our own enclaves of wealth and privilege.

34:09-35:44 – Maya Angelou
Human family
I note the obvious differences
in the human family.
Some of us are serious,
some thrive on comedy.
 
Some declare their lives are lived
as true profundity,
and others claim they really live
the real reality.
 
The variety of our skin tones
can confuse, bemuse, delight,
brown and pink and beige and purple,
tan and blue and white.

I’ve sailed upon the seven seas
and stopped in every land,
I’ve seen the wonders of the world
not yet one common man.
()
and lovers think quite different thoughts
while lying side by side.
 
We love and lose in China,
we weep on England’s moors,
and laugh and moan in Guinea,
and thrive on Spanish shores.
 
We seek success in Finland,
are born and die in Maine.
In minor ways we differ,
in major we’re the same.
 
I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type,
but we are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
 
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
 
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.

37:29-40:50 – Charlie Chaplin
I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an Emperor, that’s not my business.
I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone.
I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white.
We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.
We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.
We don’t want to hate and despise one another.
In this world there is room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in machinery that gives abundance, has left us in want.
Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind.
We think too much and feel too little: more than machinery we need humanity;
More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.
Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together.
The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all.
Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me I say “Do not despair”.
The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress
The hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as men die liberty will never perish . . .

Soldiers: don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think or what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder.
Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts.
You are not machines.
You are not cattle.
You are men.
You have the love of humanity in your hearts.
You don’t hate, only the unloved hate.
The unloved and the unnatural.
Soldiers: don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty.

In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written:- “The kingdom of God is within man”
Not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men; in you.
You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness.
You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then in the name of democracy let us use that power.
Let us all unite!
Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth the future and old age a security.
By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie.
They do not fulfill that promise, they never will.
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people.
Now let us fight to fulfill that promise.
Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.
Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Soldiers! In the name of democracy: Let us all unite!

42:23-42:57 – James Baldwin
The first thing an artist finds out is, when he is very, very young.
As it occurs at that point, in this hypothetical artists life is a kind of silence for reasons he cannot explain to himself or to others . 
He’s up along anywhere

45;25-46:02 – Chris Hedges
The liberal class (and much of the left) has busied itself with a toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance — a word Martin Luther King never used.
()
“If we extend unlimited tolerance, even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” (Hij citeert Karl Popper)

46:04-46:53 – Chris Hedges
The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for expressing anger at injustice.
The elites and their apologists call for calm and patience.
They use the hypocritical language of tolerance, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to work and accept the systems of power, that long ago abandoned these virtues.
()
That, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

49:24-50:55 – Carl Gustav Jung
But when you observe the world, you see people, you see houses, you see the sky, you see tangible objects.
But when you observe yourself within, you see moving images – a world of images, generally known as fantasies.
Yet these fantasies are facts.
You see, it is a fact that a man has such a fantasy and it is such a tangible fact – for instance – that when a man has a certain fantasy, another man may lose his life.
()
If somebody has been clever enough to see what’ there’s going on in people’s mind, in the unconscious mind, would be able to predict it.
For instance I’ve predicted the nazi rising in Germany through the observation of my German patients.
They had dreams in which the whole thing was anticipated .
()
And the whole world is in fire and flames.
It is nowadays, we are not threatened by elementary catastrophes.
There is no such thing as an H-bomb.
That is all mind’s doing.
We are the great danger.
The psyche is the great danger.
What if something goes wrong with the psyche?

51:45-52:40 – James Baldwin
The fact that all safety is an illusion.Is in this sense that all the artists are divorced from, and even opposed to necessarily any system whatever.
()
You can only take if you are prepared to give, and giving is not an investment, it is not a day at the bargain counter.It is a total risk of everything, of you.
Of who you think you are.
Who you think you like to be.
Where you think you’d like to go.
Everything

57:35-59:59 – Michel Foucault
Je me suis demandé si finalement nous ne nous faisions  pas nos autres occidentaux de bien grande illusions sur nous mêmes. 
Nous nous imaginons volontiers que nous sommes une civilisation très tolérante, que nous avons accueillé toutes les formes du passé, toutes les autres formes culturelles, étrangères à nous, que nous accueillons aussi toutes les déviations qui sont de l’ordre du comportement du langage de la sexualité etc.

Moi je me demande si ça c’est pas une Illusion. Comment on dit?

Tout pouvoir connaître la folie, il a fallu exclure. 
Peut-être pourrait-on dire aussi que pour connaître les autres cultures non-occidentales, les cultures des primitives, ou les cultures américaines, africaines, chinoises et cetera. 
Pour connaître ces cultures il a sans doute fallu non seulement les exclure,non seulement les mépriser, mais les exploiter, les conquérir. 
Et en quelque sorte par la violence les faire taire. 
On a fait taire la folie et on l’a connu et on a fait taire les cultures étrangères et on a connues et peut-être égalementpourrait on dire qu’il a fallu attendre le grand puritanisme du dix-neuvième siècle. 
Pour faire taire les excluvités et la connaître enfin dans la psycho-analyse, dans la psychologie dans la psycho-pathologie.

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(woensdag 13 september 2017)