Abyss & Shield

Winter, 1972, two days and nights in the New York subway, traveling on an empty shield. Deciding: love it or leave it. The American War in Vietnam. But the real decision is not personal but political, and philosophical: What a decision is and what making a decision means.

Meta-memoir, an abyss, a cat chasing her tail: the (somewhat imaginary) history of psychiatry, from ancient Greece through Freud to present-day Venice. A perfect storm of dreams! Love them or leave them!

https://www.amazon.com/Empty-Shield-Giacomo-Donis/dp/1912477920/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1V1L076S3NBMC&keywords=giacomo+donis,+empty+shield&qid=1676757330&sprefix=giacomo+donis,+empty+shield,aps,242&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Abyss-Dreams-Giacomo-Donis/dp/1848618468/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1676757370&sr=8-1

MICHAEL MOORCOCK
New Statesman Books of the Year 2022

‘The Empty Shield,' a rave by Bill Ayers, author of 'Fugitive Days':

Whew! My shield is empty, my sword sheathed. What a book! What a dazzling experience! Discovery and surprise on every page!

But this is not a book one reads; rather, it’s an encounter one yields to, an experience one accommodates. Right here, right now, just this.

Take this book firmly in both hands and fly upward, kissing the clouds and winking at the kites and condors and whooper swans flashing by. Or dive deep, and slide past the luminous sea creatures sparkling in the yawning darkness all round. Skate across the book, or perform wheelies and magic tricks with it. But do not—under any circumstances—attempt to torture a confession out of it, insisting that it tell you what it means. It means everything, and it means nothing at all.

Or do what I did: Stuff it into your back-pack with your other survival supplies—water, Vaseline, Vitamin C—add whoever you like for ballast (I took George Orwell, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis—Giacomo had Melville, Conrad, the Greeks and the Zen masters as his traveling companions). Best read on a circular subway, the alphabet soup of D, F, B, A offering incalculable choices and unbound opportunities for getting lost and being found. The hours of folly are measured by the clock, says Blake, but of wisdom no clock can measure.

and here's a review by his brother Rick:

https://medium.com/curious/slouching-toward-bethlehem-acc7e371ca8c

author's presentation of
'The Empty Shield' (Eyewear/Black Spring, 2020)
'An Abyss of Dreams' (Shearsman, November 2022)

The Empty Shield takes place over some 40 hours in the New York subway in late-winter 1972. The student-narrator, after winning his war for a 4-F deferment, now has to decide what to do for the rest of his life, since the big decision has already been made for him — namely, the decision of his country to go to war against Vietnam, 'in the defense of tyranny' as he puts it. But he is also doing something more radical: he is trying to figure out 'what a decision is and what making a decision means.' In the subway he studies Captain Vere's decisions in Billy Budd and Eteocles' decision in Seven Against Thebes, and is confronted with a 'chain' of seven Vietnam war veterans carrying placards, like the shields at the Gates of Thebes. This 'chain' of images is the heart of the book.

Published two years ago, Empty Shield has now become unexpectedly topical. Eteocles 'bad decision' at the 7th Gate of Thebes. Putin's 'bad decision' at the Great Gate of NATO. I do not stop at the surface of facts, as [practically] all political writing does, however intelligent and articulate. The 'Ukraine facts' are getting quite tired out — I mean, people are getting tired of facts. But Shield is radical, and radical is important, and much needed, and badly missing, if not missed, because no one goes there: What a political decision is and means in and for itself. The whole book works on the relation between freedom and necessity in making a political decision. Hegel's Logic applied to practice. And the Zen relation/no-relation between mind and no-mind. Philosopher and Samurai. The freedom and the necessity in Putin's decision to invade, and, possibly, his future decision — nuclear weapons. It is true that Putin was tremendously 'decided for' (the key word on the Shield) by NATO's decision to expand right up to his gates. But his decision was also 'free'. Shield shows that this 'deciding' is much more complicated, and can be analyzed and discussed.

The tone is lighter and brighter in my new book, An Abyss of Dreams. So much goes on that it is hard to sum up, I took a shot at it in my blurb. The backbone of the book is an 'imaginary realism' socio-political philosophical history of psychiatry, from Ancient Greece through Freud to present-day Venice. But watch out for Hegel's Anthropology! His 'night of the world,' his writings on the soul, and on madness. Then there are my many big questions, such as Why Dream? and the biggest of all, What is Consciousness? — I actually have something highly original to say about this. Plus, my poems, Antonin Artaud who wanted to slit his psychiatrist's throat, and my first and second cat. The book is dedicated to my friend and psychiatrist in Venice, Gianfranco, with his battle in the Public Health Service for more intensive talking therapy and fewer psychiatric drugs. I dream his alter ego, Eudemus, a real, if extremely obscure historical character, Aristotle's classmate at Plato's Academy, famous for his real — not dreamed — dream. Here he is dreamed as the first psyche iatros in history, 'soul doctor,' with his invention of 'abyss therapy.' This is the therapy I dream for the 4th century BC and the 21st AD and all the centuries in between, the Eudemusian Age — Kill Kill Kill, War War War, Eat dead, burnt bodies! The 'cradle of democracy' Athenian invasion of Sicily, Welcome to Vietnam! (I give Athens hell in this book.) Eudemus sees it for himself, in the writing on the grimy walls of Pherae, Tyranny capital of Greece. The Eudemusian Age of permanent pre- and post-traumatic stress has extreme need of his 'abyss therapy.' After all, as Thomas Bernard put it (my epigraph), 'it's the abyss that keeps us all alive, only the abyss.'


Let me conclude by saying that An Abyss of Dreams is, fundamentally, a book about madness. Indeed, precisely about 'social madness' — the social, not the clinical, dimension of madness. It may be true that the term 'madness' turns on a basic grasp of reality: mad actions go against reality. Well, Eudemus poses the radical questions What is a fact? and What is reality? It is not certain. It may actually be difficult to go against reality if we don't really know what reality, as such, is. By this, of course I don't mean Republican demagoguery (we have power, we invent reality), no, I refer to Hegel's Logic. Even if Hegel says that reality is reason, he, we, know also about the political world. Also about the world of the physicist. The real subject of my book is uncertainty, an uncertain reality, that's why I call it an abyss of dreams.

Born in the United States in 1950, Giacomo Donis has lived in Venice, Italy, since 1972. 'Love it or leave it.' He made and sold thousands of beautiful inexpensive earrings for ten years to survive and then prosper, before forging ahead into the slave's life — thirty years translating art critics, philosophers, and marxists, from Achille Bonito Oliva to Jacques Derrida to Amadeo Bordiga, founder of the Italian Communist Party. An Abyss of Dreams is the companion volume of his 'political autobiography' The Empty Shield (2020).