DIMITAR ANAKIEV'S „RUSTIC“ by JACK GALMITZ (from Roadrunner journal 12.2, 2012)

 

DIMITAR ANAKIEV'S „RUSTIC“ by JACK GALMITZ (from Roadrunner journal 12.2, 2012)

In 2008, the online journal Haiku Reality published an item that struck me as too important as to be forgotten or ignored: an essay entitled “Haiku and Capitalism” by Dimitar Anakiev, co-founder of the World Haiku Association, internationally renowned film-maker, poet, and erstwhile medical doctor. The essay (subsequently re-published in where the wind turns: The Red Moon Anthology 2009, Red Moon Press, 2009) was directed at what can only be called the new specter haunting Western Europe and the Anglo-American world: that is, the specter of global capitalism and its entrenchment into the deepest and most private spheres of existence (even in so seemingly innocuous a poetic form as haiku).

Dr. Anakiev expressed ambivalent feelings about this state of affairs since, by its nature, haiku was an art form that should of necessity fulfill the human need for inter-relationship with nature and not serve the domination of western materialism. Here is a portion of Dr. Anakiev’s essay:

“The “capitalistic haiku” has spread and taken root in its numerous mutations often expressing the spirit which has broken its vitality and uses it as a form without any ontological substance. Such, “capitalistic haiku” cannot be made by any further formal regulations into a “real” haiku, simply because it is not real, or is not real enough, and perhaps is even “unreal.” Having criticized the “naiveté” of the New Age rebellion against its own culture and having succeeded to adapt haiku from the subculture to the demands of the mainstream, we have to confront with the result and the result is the “capitalistic haiku.”

If we ask ourselves what the characteristics of the “capitalistic haiku” are, then we shall notice the maximal reduction of its human content, so that when reading poems of current “capitalistic haikuists” we cannot learn almost anything about their authors as human beings – the whole spectrum of human topics has disappeared and, in the “capitalistic haiku,” are dominated by dehumanized topics of nature. Thus, for them, nature is a mere object as if an aim in itself whereas man is most often present as an affirmative witness, and haiku is a record in “index afirmatorum.” The need to express something is not noticed; it is replaced by the need for recording. A deeper association is absent, that which is essential to haiku. I guess the so-called “ecological haiku” viewed in this way can be a subtype of the “capitalistic haiku” because a real, essential, connection with nature is replaced by critical conscience. It is doubtful whether “capitalistic haiku” can be considered to be poetry, and it is also doubtful whether it is haiku at all. If it is, it is of the most trivial sort.“

We recognize in this description the many haiku that are sketches from life (sashei), where a scene from nature, devoid of human presence, is given to evoke a mood, an emotion by the mere panoply of words on the page. Whether the haiku represents nature as adornment or wholly other, such haiku do sever human and nature as binary opposites.

Karsten Fischer, of Humboldt University, Berlin, in the essay “In the Beginning Was the Murder” (Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 6 no. 2, 2005) invokes Frankfurt School Philosopher Theodore Adorno to suggest that

“The domination of man’s natural environment made possible by controlling man’s inner nature leads to a limitation of the human horizon to self-preservation and power. In addition, the justifying idea of a divine commandment to subdue the earth and to have dominion over all creatures reduces the sensitivity of civilized humans for the conditions of their violent domination of nature organized in and by society. Finally, the internalized violent domination of nature also facilitates the use of force in social life. Adorno’s hypothesis with regard to a psychology of civilization means that man’s brute force against nature encourages him to use violence against other human beings as well.”

Of course, following the history of neo-Marxism (which did not separate man from nature, but rather saw nature as the inorganic body of man), we arrive at Jean Baudrillard’s hyper-reality, where all members of a society desire possession of the signs, the codes, of social hierarchy, so that there is no substance ontology any longer. The label, the name, the brand is all-important and this hunger so saturates the drives of the modern human psyche that human beings can no longer distinguish what is real from what is reified. The very fiber of the psyche is subjugated to appropriation of signs of belonging. As an example of this unconsciousness, the loss of a sense of belonging to nature, and the positioning of the modern “subject,” Dr. Anakiev’s poem that follows expresses it perfectly:

mall people!

do you know how soon

we will die?

(this poem is not included in Rustic [Red Moon Press, 2010])

As Karsten Fischer noted (Ibid, supra):

The running wild of self-preservation as a regression of civilization into its former state and antithesis rather results from its ideological justification. This justification demonizes nature and therefore enables its unrestrained, exterminating domination. Adorno does not criticize the domination of nature as such but rather its boundlessness, which leads to its dialectical set-back. This set-back is a dialectical one because, according to Adorno, the absolute domination of nature provokes destructive socio-cultural phenomena, since the domination of fellow humans and the domination of nature are closely related through history in a disastrous way. They cannot be separated from each other.

Hence, we have Dr. Anakiev’s poem that stamps on our psyche the savagery that in dominating nature and man in the central act of civilization results in the savagery directed towards other human beings:

Neanderthal man

is bombing Afghanistan back

to the Stone Age

Here are Dr. Anakiev’s remarks on the poem:

“The idea for this poem came after the first massive bombings of Afghanistan in 2001. It was published on the Italian poetry site Casa de!a Poesia as a part of their “anti-war” poetic action. Apart from this poetic event it has less in common with any particular criticism than with speaking about the very nature of mankind: humanity is continually enacting a modern Stone Age, ! ! without any ability for moral progress.”

And democracy is no guarantee against the ferocity of man’s destruction of man. Just after the declaration of an independent Slovenian Republic in 1992, which was a parliamentary democracy, hundreds of thousands of people were “erased,” that is, denied identity, their own history, passports, civil rights, subject to defamation, inequity, and humiliation. Dr. Anakiev was at this time a practicing medical doctor until he was added to the list of the “erased.” Here, in the following poem, we have mention of Cerberus, the hell-hound of Hades, who keeps those who have passed through the River Styx (where memory is lost in the land of the dead), from passing into life again.

Ironically, Dr. Anakiev equates the pseudo-democracy of Sloveni with hell.

Cerberus at the door

of the Slovenian gulag

is a democrat

Again, the author offers these remarks regarding the poem:

This poem expresses a very interesting idea related to democracy: just as in the case of The Trail of Tears, the contemporary case of the Slovenian Erased people is the result of illegal action by a legal democratic government. The legal government is breaking its own law in the name of democracy.

In the following poem, written before the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia, which had previously been a multi-cultural society, we see the suspicion of man towards man (and in this poem Dr. Anakiev uses a kigo of winter to good affect):

The start of the war —

Through bare branches I spy on

my neighbors’ houses

Here is the author’s commentary:

“The last two lines of the poem were written in Tolmin, Slovenia, in the winter of 1990 just before the Yugoslav war started. I was aware of the nationalistic excitation of my neighbors, but not being an ethnic Slovenian it had not made an impression on me.”

To convey the unspeakable horror that resulted from the war in Yugoslavia, Dr. Anakiev transfers a human experience to nature, since the unspeakable is also the irrational. The short poem is based on Bashō’s famous poem

The summer grasses—

Of brave soldiers’ dreams

The aftermath.

(tr. Donald Keene)

Here is Dr. Anakiev’s version

Young grasses . . .

A mountain bleeds from a helmet

full of dreams

One is reminded of the difficulty inherent in writing poetry after the Holocaust. As Theodore Adorno said “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” For Adorno, no language, no poetry, could possibly begin to articulate the horror that had been unleashed upon the world. The inhumane cruelties of Auschwitz, Dachau, death marches, and crematoriums could never be contained in sonnet, villanelle, sprung rhythm, free verse. (Anaya M. Baker, cited in Poetry of the Holocaust: Writing A(er Auschwitz). Additionally, the poem also refers to the WWI battles of the Isonzo which were fought around the Tolmin area where Dimitar lived.

To think that the horrors of the Balkan wars were only in the past is to delude oneself. The Balkans, as Dr. Anakiev has pointed out, is primarily rural, and in these rural areas, the far-right still thrives. There exists a primitivism in the rural lands, based highly on traditions, and shared languages. The emphasis on tradition is aligned with anti-modernism. For the rustics, anti-intellectualism predominates, as reflection is seen as a form of emasculation. Disagreement is discouraged. There exists the fear of difference. Economic frustration proliferates. Xenophobia also predominates, as does envy of the wealthy.

These examples are but a few of what Umberto Eco outlined in his analysis of what he called Ur-Fascism (New York Review of Books, 1995).

One can visibly see these complexes in the rustic population throughout the Balkans through the eyes of Dr. Anakiev.

In the Balkans

at the calling out of “rustic”

swastikas sprout

The author notes:

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was founded on the basis of fighting fascism during WW2. The democratic governments of national states in the Balkans were founded on the basis of a “goat’s milk” philosophy. Many collaborators of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini are politically rehabilitated only because they are “ours.”

Visibly impressed by this poem, Kuniharu Shimizu drew a haiga and Ban’ya Natsuishi translated the poem into Japanese:

And, as a marginal note, Ban’ya Natsuishi shares Dr. Anakiev’s distrust and anomie towards Western European and Anglo-American global domination. It is found in his poem:

Put a period deeply

into the desert

at the center of the New World

(Turquoise Milk: selected haiku of Ban’ya Natsuishi, Red Moon Press, 2012)

As can be expected, Dr. Anakiev, savors his praise for those who promote a cross-culturalism, a non-nationalistic approach to poetry/haiku. Being marginalized himself for so many years, Dr. Anakiev relishes freedom and the banishment of rules that are imbalanced, that favor one of the forms in a binary opposition to the detriment of the other. Here are a few of his glowing words for Richard Gilbert’s Poems of Consciousness ( Red Moon Press, 2008):

“Richard Gilbert's Poems of Consciousness represents the first voice in Anglo-American haiku criticism to bring to an international readership democracy instead of authority. This anti-dogmatic book tears down the prejudices which have been built up and culminated over decades of English-language haiku theory. In this work the genre is rescued from overly complex ideologies and ! ! refreshed by concepts inspired by simple and common poetic truths . . .”

“Let me also stress here: International haiku is not a name for a new concept in haiku but the result of democratic practice, which began its official life as a form of organization in the Tolmin Haiku Conference 2000, and has now found its theoretical footing in Gilbert’s work, and its real home in the democratic haiku practice of the Kumamoto poetic circle. It is my great hope that the democratic practice of International haiku will become more influential, at both the national and international level.” (Anakiev, “A Gift Of Freedom: Interpenetration in Haiku,” 2008).

It is in the field of cultural struggles (and this is related to cultivation, as in husbandry) that the future holds political possibilities of a renewed Balkans. As Dr. Anakiev wrote:

A big field of

cultural struggle: hens

are laying eggs again.

The author notes:

“Culture is the field of cultural struggle. Perhaps the only field still open for rebellion. Bertolt Brecht said: “A book is an ! ! armament, take it in your hands” and I think it still works.”

And, it must be borne in mind that in the cultural struggle, Dr. Anakiev never wields a sword, but always wields a pen/ pencil: He is the witness to the death and ongoing rebirth of the world:

The capital

of my heart: just one

sharpened pencil

He is fully aware that this carries a burden, because the author must put all else aside in focusing on the cultural struggle; he may sometimes have to depict cruelty, horrors, without intervening.

“The idea for the poem came as a result of becoming conscious of the cruelty of the poet’s job. To be a good writer or a good poet means making poetry and literature the most important thing in one’s life. No compromise, merciless. A gladiator’s job.”

Noting the war crimes committed by many involved in the breakdown of Yugoslavia, Dr. Anakiev gives us a sarcastic reminder of the pseudo-innocence of these war criminals.

With souls full of goat’s milk

rustic heroes

fill the jails

Recall that “rustics” has an encoded meaning and then consider the significance of “goat’s milk” as a cultural reference to the rustics’ sense of tribal identity. Our author comments on this poem:

“The Balkans is primarily rural. Even the people living in cities are the first urban generation.. many of today’s urban Balkans suffer a nostalgia for their villages, like a paradise they have left, goat’s milk is a metaphor for expressing rustic nostalgia, especially for Montenegrins but for others as well. One often hears the phrase “I miss the goat’s milk from my village.” Our statesmen fabricate a “Goats milk story,” and create a “Goat’s milk nationalism.” These people, even after completing their education, relate goat’s milk to the center of their world. Often they don’t understand problems of the modern world because they hate the modern world. One can imagine those accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia before the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal: “You bloody bastards, you never tasted goat’s milk from my village, you have no right to judge my war activities . . . ” Tasting the goat’s milk from a mountain village signifies an initiation into Holy Nationalism in the Balkans. You do not need to actually try the milk, it’s enough to say: “Yes, I know what you mean . . .” because the rustic Balkan soul suffers from not being understood in the centers of power. The “culture of goat’s milk” is dying in the prisons of The Hague.”

What we see in Dr. Anakiev’s pencil is radical in the world of haiku. Dr. Anakiev challenges readers/writers of the form to engage in politics (since they are, wittingly or no, already situated so). Politics in haiku has long remained something of a taboo, at least if it is too direct, which has virtually eliminated conscious politics from entering its content. However, even when poets are seemingly “apolitical,” writing is a social practice and hence a political process. To compose poems devoid of human nature is to void human nature; to present pictures of a “pristine” nature is to indulge in the delusion of a golden age (and remember America has a long history of being regarded, particularly by writers of the 19th Century, as the new Eden, freed from history).

Dr. Anakiev works in the tradition of the exponents of exposing the subterfuges of the hegemonic culture in his poetry. As Adrienne Rich wrote:

“Poetry is neither an end in itself, nor a means to some external end. It's a human activity enmeshed with human existence; as James Scully names it, a social practice. Written where, when, how, by, for and to whomever, poetry dwells in a web of other social practices historically weighted with enormous imbalances of social power. To say this is not—as these essays vividly demonstrate—to deny the necessity for poetry as an art whose tangible medium is language.

It's a commonplace to say that in a society fraught with official lying, hyperbolic urgings to consume, contrived obsolescence of words (along and the people who produce them) poets must "recover" or "subvert" or "re-invent" language. Poetic language may thus get implicitly defined as autonomous terrain apart from the ripped-off or colonized languages of daily life.

It's an even older commonplace to claim "the imagination" as a kind of sacred turf. The appeal to a free-floating imagination permeates discussions of poetry and is traced to many honored sources from Coleridge to André Breton to Wallace Stevens to Barbara Guest. It can assume a degraded public world to which is opposed the poet's art as an activity-in-itself, distinct from other kinds of activity, work, production, save perhaps as metaphor. (Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice).

It may be tempting to describe the poetry of Dr. Anakiev as polemical, but it would be more apropos to describe it as paralyzing, as psychologically distressing, as a way of finding catharsis by gracing memory with a voice. The air is frozen around the entryway to Dr. Anakiev’s psyche and only humanization can give it the warmth needed to dilute it.

“When we were soldiers . . .”

The refrain hangs in the frozen air

of my entryway

The refrain, the repetition, is something like the symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder; the song is the song of the stuck in a repeated, painful time, however convivial it is portrayed in the above poem. To enter the world of Dr. Anakiev is to pass through the entryway of war and its gory grotesqueries.

Even in his descriptions of commonplaces, there are signs of the unnatural, a way of emphasizing the omnipresence of whatever is vilest in the history of the Balkans. In winter, we expect that flies will be gone, but for Dr. Anakiev the dead keep returning, even out of season, even out of time sequence. Even dead flies have an ominous connotation to them in his world, as if they are signs that nothing has normalized in his world. Even on New Year’s Eve, the turning point in nature when evening and darkness begin to withdraw and cultures often celebrate the new strengthening of nature with fireworks and celebrations, Dr. Anakiev can only find more “gathering,” not as a social ceremony of joy, but as a gathering of mass graves, upturned dead flies (so like humans in their death postures).

New Year's Eve—

the window still gathers

dead flies

Dimitar says of this poem:

“In 1993 I left the army but my family and I were on different sides of the front. My wife and daughter were able to reach me traveling circuitously around Europe. We went to my father's mountain house on the Serbian-Bulgarian border to spend a few days together. The house had long been empty but the window sills were full of dead flies.”

In Rustic, history and domination and death reach back further in time than the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Dr. Anakiev retreats backward in time when Germany dominated the entire region of Eastern and Western Europe in the following poem:

Mitteleuropa:

in the grey cloud

a shadow of death

Dimitar says:

“The political concept of Mitteleuropa was offered by Slovenian separatists in late ‘80s and the beginning of the ‘90s as an alternative to the political concept of Yugoslavia. The poetry festival “Vilenica” was founded to promote ideas of Mitteleuropa in contrast to the “pro-Yugoslav” concept of the world famous Macedonian poetry festival “Struga”. One of the first laureates of the Valencia poetry festival was the Austria writer Peter Handke. He was asked in a press conference about Mitteleuropa, and he answered: “I have no idea about Mitteleuropa, for me Mitteleuropa is a place with a grey sky all the time . . .” I was traveling to Prague to receive the “Medal of Franz Kafka” and finding myself following grey clouds in the sky the whole time, I recaled the words of Peter Handke.

Mitteleuropa is also the German term equal to Central Europe. The word has political, geographic and cultural meaning. While it describes a geographical location, it also is the word denoting a political concept of a German-dominated and exploited Central European union that was put into motion during the First World War. The historian Jörg Brechtefeld describes 'Mitteleuropa' as the following:

“The term 'Mitteleuropa' never has been merely a geographical term; it is also a political one, much as Europe, East and West, are terms that political scientists employ as synonyms for political ideas or concepts. Traditionally, Mitteleuropa has been that part of Europa between East and West. As profane as this may sound, this is probably the most precise definition of Mitteleuropa available. ( J. Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German politics. 1848 to the present (London 1996).

The Mitteleuropa plan was to achieve an economic and cultural hegemony over Central Europe by the German Empire and subsequent economic & financial exploitation of this region combined with direct annexations, settlement of German colonists, expulsion of non-Germans from annexed areas, and eventual Germanization of puppet states created as a buffer between Germany and Russia.

Dr. Anakiev is so acutely aware of the violent history of his cultural heritage and region that even in “grey clouds” he can see the signs of impending death and destruction. History, as Marx said, repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. But, we find nothing farcical here.

Even where we expect signs of culture and the springs of life in the digging of a well and in reaching a drop of water (that everlasting symbol of life), the digging also unearths the stratum, the archeology of death and murder.

Drop of well water—

gravediggers dig up

my ancestral bone

Dr. Anakiev places this poem in the following context:

“Drop of well water represents ancestry. The village funeral of my father was at a mountain cemetery, without a priest, following an ancient ceremony led by the oldest villager. I have heard that this poem has something in common with the Celtic mythology.

(Dimitar, as an Erased, couldn't travel and had lost contact with his parents and couldn't attend his father's funeral).

A man, as Dr. Anakiev knows, has yearnings for belonging to nature, to his society, to his family, to his culture, language, to all the usually unspoken needs of fulfilled citizens. But for Dr. Anakiev all of this was denied. In the following poignant poem, we see this unsated appeal in the following one line verse:

from the balcony unreachable mountains

Anakiev brings up for the first time in this poem the period when the Republic of Slovenia, a democratic parliamentary state, “erased” members of its population. Here is the context provided by the poet:

“The balcony of my apartment in Tolmin was a symbol of my life for more than 10 years after I returned to independent Slovenia. To break with the Yugoslav policy of “brotherhood and unity,” and to foster enemies, the Slovenian government erased from the official records more than 25,000 people. All of the Erased, among them 6,000 children, instantly found themselves without any human rights: people of no-official-existence. Among them, me. Living without documents is not easy. Most of the time I spent on my balcony watching mountains.

Under the fallen sky

the freaks of chaos become

a hospitable sea

Here the unbearable is depicted as the impossible: a fallen sky. Naturally, the unnaturalness of this state of affairs is a “freak,” and “chaos,” the Greek word for lack of cosmos and order in the universe and society. Yet for some unknown reason, Dr. Anakiev compares this state of affairs to a “hospitable sea,” something welcome if inhuman.

Dr. Anakiev discusses this as a mythological poem, one which reaches back through the turbulent history of the Balkans to the time of Alexander the Great and up through and to the present modern wars. He reminds us that “the hospitable sea” was a Greek euphemism for the Black Sea.

As Kirsten Fischer noted in her essay mentioned above (“In the Beginning Was the Murder” [Ibid]):

Adorno’s view of the civilization process is not, like Freud’s, a tabooing of violence due to its first use against fellow man and following ritual enclosure. He rather suggests a removal of violence-taboos as the result of the use of violence against creatures. This violence became boundless by its ideological justification.

According to Adorno’s reconstruction of the history of philosophy as natural history, aggression against nature is inevitably an artificial result of civilization’s emergence from its origins. With this thesis Adorno refers to the psychic mechanism of projection discovered by Freud. In the course of the rationalization process aiming at the domination of nature, all uncivilized creatures are perceived as evil because of their incompatibility with sociocultural rationality . . .

Nature must contrast sharply with civilization and is perceived as evil as such; it must be exterminated to preserve civilization, and soon the self-preservation running wild has its dialectic set-back. Initially self-preservation by the domination of nature was ! ! an anthropological development which was both necessary and positive. Adorno agrees with Nietzsche’s reminder to be grateful for the end of “continual fear of wild animals, of barbarians, of gods and of our own dreams” made possible by the ! ! rationalization process. The running wild of self-preservation as a regression of civilization into its former state and antithesis rather results from its ideological justification. This justification demonizes nature and therefore enables its unrestrained, exterminating domination. Adorno does not criticize the domination of nature as such but rather its boundlessness, which leads to its dialectical set-back. This set-back is a dialectical one because, according to Adorno, the absolute domination of nature provokes destructive socio-cultural phenomena, since the domination of fellow humans and the domination of nature are closely related through history in a disastrous way. They cannot be separated from each other.

We can easily see this unrestrained reflex striving for survival and indifference to the slaughter of creatures in one of Dr. Anakiev’s most well-known haiku:

Spring evening.

The wheel of a troop carrier

crushes a lizard.

Animal Day—

lop-ears of a rabbit

full of jumping light

The author has this to say about “Animal Day”:

“There is no “Animal Day,” but I invented this holiday for our pet rabbit living in his prison on our inner balcony.”

One cannot help but see the irony and ambivalence in this poem and commentary. While an animal ordinarily slaughtered and eaten is kept by the poet as a pet, he is caged, and this is equated to keeping him in a “prison.”

And, we can see how “alien” people are easily dominated by the hegemonic culture because of the association of them with nature and with pre-cultural existents: Dr. Anakiev gives us this poem, one that relates to the United States of America:

A tomahawk made

to forget its native tongue

keeps the democracy

One does well here to recall Dr. Bruno Bettleheim’s The Informed Heart (1960), where Dr. Bettleheim records his experiences as an inmate of a concentration camp during WWII and how he discovered that by maintaining his humane emotions as well as intellectual distinctions, he as well as those inmates who shared these values remained alive and morally intact, whereas those who strove to struggle to survive at any cost either died or lost what was most essential to their humanity: the human heart.

Bettelheim’s view was that the individual’s inner control of hostility was the key to interethnic harmony, while projecting hostility onto other social groups created the prejudicial attitude upon which the concentration camps were formed. After all the suffering Dr. Anakiev underwent in the Republic of Slovenia, from being a practicing medical doctor to suddenly become one of the “erased,” I asked him how he bore it. He informed me that it was part of his maturation as a person and, indirectly, it forced him to learn a new language, that of film, and to become a successful and internationally known documentary and artistic director. It also formed his character to such an extent that he has spent the years of his life since the wars in Yugoslavia writing haiku, forming haiku societies, documenting the lives and history of the various people who comprise the population of the Balkans. Some of his films are available online (all you need do is search under Anakiev films); some are with English subtitles and some are not. He has a unique way of juxtaposing and overlapping different historical periods, with old engravings, poems overlaying them, and always the faces and voices of people. People stand out in his works, poetic and filmic. This is his heritage and his inheritance, what he will leave to the world. The people in the films are not actors, but ordinary people, sometimes the very last living member of a long line of family genealogy.

In his poems, as is readily evident, there is a strong voice, a strong human presence, a man who takes a stand without following the “rules” and “taboos” laid down by Anglo-American and Western European haiku poets. If you recall his essay (“Haiku and Capitalism”), you will agree that there is a “capitalist haiku,” one which in a sense dehumanizes mankind by removing him/her completely from the tabloid of words. These poems are not neutral, not innocuous, for they implicitly project a view of the insignificance of humanity.

I will close with words from Bruno Bettelheim, if only because Dr. Bettelheim went through as horrific and catastrophic an experience as did Dr. Anakiev.

Dr. Bettelheim (The Informed Heart) wrote in the preface:

“With so much at hand that generations have striven for, how bewildering that the meaning of life should evade us. Freedoms we have, broader than ever before. But more than ever before most of us yearn for a self-realization that eludes us, while we abide restless in the midst of plenty. As we achieve freedom, we are frightened by social forces that seem to suffocate us, and that seem to move in on us from all parts of an ever contracting world.”