I’m reading Erich Fromm’s Psychoanalysis and Religion along side Galeano’s Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone and Wilhelm Reich’s The Sexual Revolution. In it, he quotes from his book Man for Himself. The quote, which I’ve copied below, speaks to the human struggle for understanding and meaning - a condition which revolutionaries should take to heart in constructing our narratives of society, program of solutions, and visions of the future.

Here is Fromm:

“Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the “harmony” which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yes chained to the home he shares with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accident place and time, he is forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limitations of his existence. He visualizes his own end: death. Never is he free from the dichotomy of his existence: he cannot rid himself of his mind, even if he should want to; he cannot rid himself of his body as long as he is alive - and his body makes him want to be alive.

“Reason, man’s blessing, is also his curse; it forces him to cope everlastingly with the task of solving an insoluble dichotomy. Human existence is different in this respect from that of all other organisms; it is in a state of constant and unavoidable disequilibrium. Man’s life cannot “be lived” by repeating the pattern of his species; he must live. Man is the only animal that can be bored, that can be discontented, that can feel evicted from paradise. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape. He cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature; he must proceed to develop his reason until he becomes the master of nature, and of himself.

“The emergence of reason has created a dichotomy within man which forces him to strive everylastingly for new solutions. The dynamism of his history is intrinsic to the existence of reason which causes him to develop and, through it, to create a world of his own in which he can feel at home with himself and his fellow men. Every stage he reaches leaves him discontented and perplexed, and this very perplexity urges him to new toward new solutions. There is no innate “drive for progress” in man; it is the contradiction of his experience that makes him proceed on the way he set out. Having lost paradise, the unity with nature, he has become the eternal wanderer (Odysseus, Oedipus, Abraham, Faust); he is impelled to go forward and with everlasting effort to make the unknown known by filling in with answers the blank spaces of his knowledge. He must give account to himself of himself, and of the meaning of his existence. He is driven to overcome this inner split, tormented by a craving for “absoluteness”, for another kind of harmony which can lift the curse by which he was separated from nature, from his fellow men, and from himself.”

I’m thankful to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, not only for his tremendous leadership in leading his country and the world in new wave of egalitarian revolution, but in particular for introducing me - and millions of other people around the world, to the great poet, Eduardo Galeano. I’m amazed daily by the re-realization about the degree to which my formalized schooling has thus far been wholly inadequate. Of course I shouldn’t find it surprizing, understanding the real role of formal schooling, but it continually does. I was with my friend John on a rainy day in the East Village. We were visiting several bookstores in New York’s East Village. I picked up a bunch of used books - books by Herbert Marcuse, Freud, and Erich Fromm. We spent a while in St. Mark’s Books, where I noticed Galeano’s new book: Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. I opened the book, not knowing what to find, and I was immediately taken in. Under the dust jacket, the gorgeous red hardcover book is 400 pages long, and contains around 500-700 vignettes - short scenes which convey powerful lessons - each between half a page and a page in length. The stories draw from history, mythology, legend, religion, spiritual stories, parables, fairy tales, and social movements, each turning classic stories on their heads in imaginative ways to leave debunk the authoritarian myths we’re told about history and society. As my words are far too weak to do Eduardo Galeano’s poetry justice, here are two of his stories:

—
How Could We?
by Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, pp. 4

To be mouth or mouthful, hunter or hunted. That was the question.
We deserved scorn, or at most pity. In the hostile wilderness no one respected us, no one feared us. We were the most vulnerable beasts in the animal kingdom, terrified of night and the jungle, useless as youngsters, not much better as adults, without claws or fangs or nimble feet or keen sense of smell.
Our early history is lost in mist. It seems all we ever did was break rocks and beat each other with clubs.
But one might well ask: Weren’t we able to survive, when survival was all but impossible, because we learned to share our food and band together for defense? Would today’s me-first, do-your-own-thing civilization have lasted more than a moment?

—
Guernica
by Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, pp. 293

Paris, spring of 1937: Pablo Picasso wakes up and reads.
He reads the newspaper while having breakfast in his studio.
His coffee grows cold in the cup.
German planes have razed the city of Guernica. For three hours the Nazi air force chased and machine-gunned people fleeing the burning city.
General Franco insists that Guernica has been set aflame by Asturian dynamiters and Basque pyromachiacs from the ranks of the Communists.
Two years later in Madrid, Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German forces in Spain, sits beside Franco at the victory parade: killing Spaniards was Hitler’s rehearsal for his impending world war.
Many years later in New York, Colin Powell makes a speech at the United Nations to announce the imminent annihilation of Iraq.
While he speaks, the back of the room is hidden from view, Guernica is hidden from view. The reproduction of Picasso’s painting, which hangs there, is concealed behind an enormous blue cloth.
UN officials decided it was not the most appropriate backdrop for the proclaimation of a new round of butchery.

—
I’ll certainly be picking up more of Galeano’s books soon. I’m thinking about getting Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent next.