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https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/27/patrick-lawrence-ellsberg-and-the-process-of-my-awakening/

Ellsberg and ‘The Process of My Awakening’

Of all the fine things written and said about Daniel Ellsberg since his death June 16, there is a thread running through them we ought not miss, a story Ellsberg himself told better than anyone else. It is a story from which we can all learn. As we consider this story, we can embrace Ellsberg as an exemplar as much as he was a courageous man of conscience. As he put it in an interview some years ago, “courage is contagious.” 

Ellsberg did not give the story I have in mind a name, a title, a headline, or any such designation, but he may as well have, and I take the liberty of drawing from his words to name it now, the process of Dan Ellsberg’s awakening. 

In 1970, a year and maybe less before Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, he traveled to Nevada City, California, a small burg 150 miles north of and inland from San Francisco, and knocked on the door of the house wherein dwelt Gary Snyder, one of the brightest lights among the Beat poets. We can confidently infer that Ellsberg had the still-secret Pentagon Papers in his car, as he wrote the following in “The First Two Times We Met,” an essay that appeared in a collective celebration of Snyder’s life and work called Dimensions of a Life (Sierra Club Books, 1991):

I didn’t show him any papers from the trunk, so as not to implicate him; but I hinted that he was implicated anyway, in the process of my awakening. I wanted to thank him.

Let us consider the scene. How far did Ellsberg drive that day to knock unannounced on a noted poet’s door simply to say thank you? Thank you for what? What had Snyder done, and when, that was worthy of such gratitude?

As Ellsberg told the story on various occasions, he had met Snyder in Kyoto in 1960—the first of the two times mentioned in his essay. Snyder was then halfway through a decade-long study of Zen Buddhism under the tutelage of Oda Sesso Roshi. Ellsberg was living in Tokyo at the time, developing policies concerning the use of nuclear weapons for the Office of Naval Research. As Ellsberg recounted the meeting, the two met by chance at a bar near Ryoanji, the Zen monastery famous for its garden. He had by then read of it in The Dharma Bums, the Kerouac novel, and, so inspired, had traveled to Kyoto more or less as a tourist.

Imagine reading Kerouac, training to a place he writes of, and there meeting one of the novelist’s close friends. In the accounts I have read, the Vietnam War was a major topic of conversation. Ellsberg was still a dedicated supporter; Snyder, who by this time had the sturdy composure of the monks under whom he studied, talked of it from the other side. They liked one another, a little improbably from our perspective. They had lunch together the next day, continuing the conversation begun the previous evening. 

A decade later Ellsberg identified the encounter with Snyder with his “awakening.” And so the defense technocrat drove a long way, we have to assume, to thank the poet. There is something in this to love. 

Nine years after the Kyoto meeting and a year before the Nevada City reunion—we are now in August 1969—Ellsberg attended a gathering sponsored by the War Resisters’ League. (The good old WRL.) This was at Haverford College. You have to figure Ellsberg was by this time at some stage in the process of his awakening: Why would he be there otherwise? Among the speakers that evening was an antiwar activist named Randy Kehler, who was then on his way to prison, without so much as a flinch, for turning in his draft card and refusing all cooperation with the Selective Service System. 

Parenthetically, Kehler had his life hanging on the line long after serving his prison term, which ran most of two years. After he long refused to pay taxes to protest the Pentagon’s budget, in 1989 the federal government seized the Kehlers’ house in Colrain, a small town in northern Massachusetts. It was Chris Appy, the UMass historian of the Vietnam War, who related this story to me many years after the fact.

That evening at Haverford had much to do with Ellsberg’s subsequent decision to copy the Pentagon Papers and, two years later, do with them what we all know he did. Ellsberg recounted his experience to Marlo Thomas many years later. “I left the auditorium and found a deserted men’s room,” he told the actress and sometime activist. “I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I’ve reacted to something like that.”

Let us ask at this point who was crying on the men’s room floor at Haverford, that we can understand the moment for what it was. Was it the eager Marine Ellsberg had been, the RAND war planner, the technocrat who toured the carnage in Vietnam, the Defense Department analyst? Or was it the person Ellsberg had just then become, mourning all that he had been and all that he had done until that moment—the Marine and the analyst having that very evening died?

Ellsberg’s account of that evening brings to mind Saul on his way to Damascus as related in Acts 9. There was a fall in each case and then an epiphany, a sudden conversion. Everything thereupon changed in each case. Saul became Paul, and, whatever you may think of him, St. Paul altered the course of Western civilization. Ellsberg, perfectly fair to say, spent the rest of his life attempting to do the same.

I go back now to something Ellsberg said in that brief essay he contributed to the book Gary Snyder’s friends put together to honor him. What most affected him when he first met the poet was what he intuited: He saw someone “who was in charge of his own life, a model of the way a life could be lived.” This comment is key, it seems to me. It explains why Ellsberg made the long drive to Nevada City a decade later. And it tells us what later happened to Ellsberg in the fullest sense. When we think of Ellsberg’s presence in the public sphere, we conclude that getting the Pentagon Papers published was the most important thing he ever did. But he could never have done that, we must not miss, if he had not first done something far larger: If he had not changed his life—the way he lived it and what he did with it. 

If he had not, in other words, completed the awakening, his chance encounter with a Beat poet did much to set in motion. This, “the process of my awakening,” is the very truest story Ellsberg has to tell us and the one from which we can learn the most.

As in St. Paul’s story, coming awake was the wellspring from which flowed everything Ellsberg did after, figuratively speaking, he fell from his horse on the road to his Damascus. It was his awakening—in essence to the difference between truths and lies—that enabled him to consider the prospect of life in prison with a remarkable aplomb, even equanimity. He knew, by the time he faced that prospect, that there was no turning back. You don’t get to go back to sleep once you come awake. Aeschylus famously put it this way:

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Ellsberg understood this, surely. He was well aware that to come awake means to suffer and of his own need to be pulled along by others as he made his way toward the state of wakefulness. From a 2006 interview:

I’d like peoples’ consciences to be rethought and reshaped as much as possible … Learning from people who have already had that conversion is very helpful. In my case it was crucial for me to meet people who were of that mind and who were going to prison rather than take part at all in what they saw as a wrongful war. … Courage is contagious, and coming into contact or exposing yourself to people who are taking those risks is very helpful as a first step toward doing it yourself.

“As a first step toward doing it yourself.”  Brilliant. It is what Ellsberg had most to offer us, what we can learn from him and put most directly to use in our own lives. Ellsberg’s story, the one he told in recounting the incidents noted here—Kyoto, Nevada City, Haverford—is in part one of surrender. He had to give up the eager Marine and the accomplished war planner. This meant giving up altogether a worldview. It left him weeping on a men’s room floor. 

But his story is also one of embrace, of transcendence, of self-mastery, of living “a life that could be lived.”   

Ellsberg’s first wakeful act was to rip the veil from the pointless savagery of our Vietnam adventure. Few of us will ever have occasion to do anything of remotely comparable magnitude. But each of us, providing we each summon the courage, can act as truly, as faithfully, as loyally to the human cause as Ellsberg did. No illusions here: Most of us prefer the irresponsibility of slumber. But for those who so choose, we can allow ourselves to awaken. We can accept the burdens knowledge always brings with it, just as Dan Ellsberg showed us in his own life.

Comments to article:

" This may be the most beautiful tribute to Mr. Ellsberg I have read. Epiphanies on the Damascus road of life are few and far between and those who experience them are belittled for the sake of Empire’s narrative.

I have been greatly influenced by a close friend of Gary Snyder–Wendell Berry. Zen and the Sermon on the Mount brought together in two minds open to the possibilities and absolute beauty of simplicity and peace. For the savagery of war, in all its exploitative forms, we as Americans need to sit on the bathroom floor and weep. Weep long and hard for so many years of blind complicity and/or our role as outright cheerleaders for the real American dream–might makes right.

Thank you to the poets and prophets of the world who may not change the world through directly their words, but may inspire the Ellsbergs of our world who can. "

" I am in complete agreement: for me as well, this is the most eloquent tribute to Ellsberg that I have read since his passing. I too didn’t know the two had met but having recently read Snyder’s brilliant The Practice of the. Wild and listened subsequently to some interviews with him from the 1970s where he lays bare the evil the US government was inflicting on the Vietnamese people, I’m not surprised he had such a profound influence on the young Ellsberg. Thank you so much Patrick Lawrence for writing this beautiful piece. "

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https://edwardcurtin.com/sea-monsters-threaten-the-world-with-their-tridents/

Sea Monsters Threaten the World With Their Tridents

Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what you have been thinking about for days.  I have just come up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of the house I grew up in because the basement light was on and the back cellar door had been opened by a mysterious man who stood outside.

I will spare you additional details or an interpretation, except to say that my daytime thoughts concerned the media spectacle surrounding the Titan submersible that imploded two miles down in the ocean’s cellar while trying to give its passengers a view of the wreck of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ship nicknamed “the Millionaire’s Special.”  The ship that no one could sink except an ice cube in the drink that swallowed it.

Cellar dreams are well-known as the place where we as individuals and societies can face the flickering shadows that we refuse to face in conscious life.  Carl Jung called it “the shadow.”  Such shadows, when unacknowledged and repressed, have a tendency to autonomously surface and erupt, not only leading to personal self-destruction but that of whole societies.  History is replete with examples.  My dream’s mysterious stranger had lit my way through some dark thoughts and opened the door to a possible escape.  He got me thinking about what all of us tend to want to deny or avoid because its implications are so monstrous.

The obsession with the alleged marvels of technology together with naming them after ancient Greek and Roman gods are fixations of elite technologues who have lost what Spengler called “living inner religiousness” but wish to show they know the classical names even though they miss the meaning of these myths.  Such myths tell the stories of things that never happened but always are.  Appropriating the ancient names without irony – such as naming a boat Titanic or a submersible Titan – unveils the hubristic ignorance of people who have never descended to the underworld to learn its lessons.  Relinquishing  their sense of god-like power doesn’t occur to them, nor does the shadow side of their Faustian dreams.

They will never name some machine Nemesis, for that would expose the fact that they have exceeded the eternal limits with their maniacal technological extremism, and, to paraphrase Camus, dark Furies will swoop down to destroy them.

Nietzsche termed the result nihilism.  Once people have killed God, machines are a handy replacement in societies that worship the illusion of technique and are scared to death of death and the machines that they invented to administer it.

The latter is not a matter fit to print since it must remain in the dark basement of the public’s consciousness.  If it were publicized, the game of nihilistic death-dealing would be exposed.  Because power, money, and technology are the ruling deities today, the mass media revolve around publicizing their marvels in spectacular fashion, and when “accidents” occur, they never point out the myth of the machines, or what Lewis Mumford called “The Pentagon of Power.”  Tragedies occur, they tell us, but they are minor by-products of the marvels of technology.

But if these media would take us down to see the truth beneath the oceans’ surfaces, we would see not false monsters such as the Titanic or Moby Dick or cartoon fictions such as Disney’s Monstro the whale, but the handiwork of thousands of mad Captain Ahabs who have attached the technologues “greatest” invention – nuclear weapons – to nuclear-powered ballistic submarines.

Trident submarines. First strike submarines, such as the USS Ohio.

These Trident subs live and breathe in the cellars of our minds where few dare descend.  They are controlled by jackals in Washington and the Pentagon with polished faces in well-appointed offices with coffee machines and tasty snacks.  Madmen.  They hum through the deep waters ready to strike and destroy the world.  Few hear them, almost none see them, most prefer not to know of them.

But wait, what’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening: the Titan and the Titanic, wealthy voyeurs intent on getting a glance into the sepulchre of those long dead, while six hundred or so desperate migrants drown in the Mediterranean sea from which the ancient gods were born.  These are the priorities of a society that worships the wealthy; a society of the spectacle that entertains and distracts while the end of the world cruises below consciousness.

The United States alone has fourteen such submarines armed with Trident missiles constantly prowling the ocean depths, while the British have four.  Named for the three-pronged weapon of the Greek and Roman sea gods, Poseidon and Neptune respectively, these submarine-launched ballistic missiles, manufactured by Lockheed Martin (“We deliver innovative solutions to the world’s toughest challenges”), can destroy the world in a flash. Destroy it many times over. A final solution.

While the United States has abrogated all treaties that offered some protection from their use and has declared their right of first use, it has consistently pushed toward a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China.  Today – 2023 June – we stand on the precipice of nuclear annihilation as never before.

A single Trident submarine has 20 Trident missiles, each carrying 12 independently targeted warheads for a total of 240 warheads, with each warhead approximately 40 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb.  Fourteen submarines times 240 equals 3,360 nuclear warheads times 40 equals 134,400 Hiroshimas.  Such are the lessons of mathematics in absurd times.

James W. Douglass, the author of the renown JFK and the Unspeakable and a longtime activist against the Tridents at Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action outside the Bangor Submarine Base in Washington state, put it this way in 2015 when asked about Robert Aldridge, the heroic Lockheed Trident missile designer who resigned his position in an act of conscience and became an inspirational force for the campaign against the Tridents and nuclear weapons:

Question: “What did the Nuremberg attorneys say about war crimes that had such a deep impact on Robert Aldridge?”

Douglass: “They said that first-strike weapons and weapons that directly target a civilian population were war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg principles. Those Nuremberg principles, which are the foundations of international law, are violated by both by electronic warfare – which is why we poured blood on the files for electronic warfare [at the base] – and also by the Trident missile system, which is what Robert Aldridge was building.”

Robert Aldridge saw his shadow side.  He went to the cellar of his darkest dreams. He refused to turn away.  He became an inspiration for James and Shelley Douglass and so many others.  He was a man in and of the system, who saw the truth of his complicity in radical evil and underwent a metanoia.  It is possible.

If those missiles are ever launched from the monsters that carry them through the hidden recesses of the world’s oceans, there will never be another Nuremberg Trial to judge the guilty, for the innocent and the guilty will all be dead.

We will have failed to shed light on our darkest shadows....

....We turn away at our peril.