(266) **. ***

Unconscious man: it is the case that man is asleep—I provide two examples. I do not love my neighbour—my neighbour is an asshole. His wife bought a cat and he didn’t like it—so he bought an Alsatian and the Alsatian chased the cat out, I watched them stare at each other through the glass doors at the front of the house. Eventually, the cat died. It was a young cat—it was suicide, really. It had been driven out into the street. The anger didn’t stop there. The other day, I came home with my dog, a spaniel, and the Alsatian had been left in the middle of the street unattended—so it barrelled towards my dog and started a fight. Eventually, my neighbour’s daughter and her boyfriend pulled the dog off. When will man learn not use animals as a surrogate for his unexpressed aggression?

We are asleep. Another example, the left-wing journalist Patrick Cockburn (“Co-burn”, not “Cock-burn”) has a son who is schizophrenic. In a book about it, he noted that there was “no family history of madness” but then said that his very storied relatives (socialist from the elite, is Cockburn) were “often eccentric”—which means, in understated British English, “often totally nuts”. We are asleep.

Cockburn’s son, like many schizophrenics, has religious preoccupations—he saw a vision of the Golden Buddha on Brighton beach, and then swam between two distant points along the Sussex coast (almost drowned). He adored Juan-Carlos, a journalist his father knew who always went by the initials “JC”. When he died, Cockburn reported his son felt “personally responsible” for the man’s death (he had no part in it)—Cockburn reported this with bemused confusion. We are asleep: his son felt personally responsible for the death of JC—Jesus Christ. His son had seen and known Christ—felt that he put him on the cross himself. When will we awake? I don’t know, but it is always dangerous to wake a sleeping giant.