Thoughts on "The Atomic Cafe," Atom Bomb Dreams, and the Urgency of Uniting Communities

So last night I watched the documentary, "The Atomic Café." For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a loose documentary, a compilation of footage from American atom bomb propaganda, set to period songs of the time like “Atomic Cocktail.” The film has this upbeat, end of the war, jubilant swing juxtaposed beside the gross devastations leveled on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Watching this film really got me thinking about collective trauma. The duck and cover scenarios of happy families having happy picnics suddenly overcast by the rapid fire of air raid sirens, where families then wrapped themselves in picnic blankets seeking safety from nuclear war by huddling against the ground, appears so naïve, funny, dangerously cute, and obviously manipulative to our now media savvy eyes. It made me think more deeply about how we hold trauma as individuals but also how we hold trauma collectively as a culture. It seems here that I may be touching on the realms of transpersonal psychology, which focuses in part on the individual experience within the holistic realm of spiritual experience. ...But then what of the whole communal (community) experience, how does that fit within the realm of the spiritual?... In my life, I have worked very consciously to process through trauma that I experienced as a child, but now I’m starting to ask myself what’s the collective trauma of the culture in which I live? It is possible to not only heal myself but also heal the heart of collective culture into which I’ve been born?

I started thinking again last night about this man who I met once at Red Emma’s, an anarchist bookstore, coffee shop in Baltimore that serves as a salon to the community. If you want to go somewhere and dialogue with an absolute stranger about “What is truth?” or “What is power?” then you go to Red Emma’s. This man who I spoke with, Tim, was middle-aged but he possessed the energy of youth, characterized by those who like to dialogue with youth. Tim was telling me how he has had these reoccurring atom bomb dreams. Dreams he’s had throughout his life since childhood. This has stayed with me, this idea- the atom bomb dream. Now, I want to find Tim again and possibly interview him. What is the character of these dreams? Who else has these dreams? What are they symbolic of? The annihilation of humanity for sure, but it is also the annihilation of self. This often-American fixation with violence to the point of cultural suicide is characteristic of our times.

In undergrad, I took an apocalyptic literature course called End of the World, and whether we were reading Samuel Becket’s “Endgame,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” or Haruki Murakami’s “Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,” I started to see in this literature that these writers were not actually writing about the end of the world but instead the end of the self. A year or so later I started studying Buddhism and began to see an overlap here. Buddhism also addresses the end of the self, except apocalypse could then be replaced with enlightenment. There’s a seed of something here; something I need to further explore…

The atom bomb may be to this date, the absolute violent eruption, restructuring of time, restructuring of ourselves in relationship to time. Nuclear war threatens the annihilation of our world until we’re able to not just intellectually engage with quantum physics but until we are able to understand this through our heart, our direct senses, our souls. Jane English actually writes about this in her collections of writings and photos called “Fingers Pointing at the Moon.” Daniel also discusses restructurings of time and the concept of "time-freedom" when discussing the philosopher Jean Gebser in "The Return of Quetzalcoatl."

Right now, I’m wondering how I can engage with all these ideas as a creative project and also direct engagement with my community. I’ve been brainstorming a lot, and I’ve begun to contact people, sending out roots in multiple directions. This thought is actually one beside many. I may begin working on possible interviews and research for a long atom bomb dream poem. But I’ve also been thinking a lot on the fracturing apart of spiritual and political communities. It seems that the more thought and energy that I give to Evolver, the more I find myself in the urgency of needing to unite my own spiritual and political belief systems. I look out to my community in Baltimore and find these communities at polar ends of each other. Night and day and seemingly never between shall meet. But isn’t the work that one does on his or her yoga mat or cushion, the same work that is done at a protest? I know a lot of people would disagree with me, but I think that this is the same work. I’ve seen evidence of it at Naropa. I believe that spiritual practice combined with political action is key. Inward peace and outward action find natural harmony and sense of agency in each other. To care politically because you care spiritually and to care spiritually because you care politically are positive feedback cycles for change. So I’m working on putting together a panel discussion on this topic. I wrote one really politically active friend who has yet to return my mail. But another friend paid me a surprise visit today while I was working on this post, and she’s totally game for a panel discussion.

Anyway these are thoughts in progress, my mind in movement. Please let me know if you have some ideas for how to accomplish these different projects or thoughts to add or share on this process. Thank you.

Peace-
Robin