https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=raUh5LcTH1g
Hello everybody. So, I have to apologize first of all if some of these videos that I’ve been making, the recent ones have been very personal. I’m going through a lot of personal stuff. As some of you know, my family has been flooded. We’re still in kind of absolute chaos right now. As you can see, I’m still at my parents’ house. Luckily, I have wonderful parents. I’m still there. For a little while, we were able to rent a house for my family until everything gets set up. The government, as some of you, if some of you haven’t followed the story, there’s a dike that broke in my town and about 6,000 people were evacuated. 2,500 houses were flooded. And so, it’s absolute mayhem in the city. My street looks like a post-apocalyptic movie. And so, we were able to strip everything, remove everything from our basement. I lost all my books. We lost everything that was in the basement. And so, the government has said that they are going to rebuild the dike finally. And so, they hesitated for a while. They’re going to rebuild the dike, but the city told us to be very patient because they need to decide which areas of the city will now be considered, let’s say, floodable area or uninhabitable area. And so, they want us to wait before they rebuild because some people will be expropriated. So, we don’t know who that’s going to be. We’re far away from the water, but our house is one of the lowest on the streets. And so, we’re not sure whether or not we will be one of the people who will be expropriated anyways. So, that is the situation. We had amazing people help us. So many people have been helping us to clean up the house, my family, friends, even people who I never met. Someone, Mike, I forget his name, Mike McDonald came from Montreal. I never met him. He came by bus, and he came to help us, help our family. So, it’s been just, that has been amazing, just being surrounded by people who have helped us. A lot of people have also sent us money through PayPal. And several people have asked me to set up a GoFundMe campaign. So, I did that today. I will put the link in the description for those who like to give through GoFundMe and kind of see the amounts go up and get a sense of what kind of donations we’re getting. So, if you want to support us right now, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I have no idea. Everything is completely up in the air. I haven’t worked in several weeks. And so, I’m grateful for any help right now because I don’t know what’s going to happen. But still, next week, I’m still going to be in Seattle. I’m giving a talk there with Father Stephen Freeman and Daniel, I forget his last name. I’m sorry, Deacon Daniel. And so, I will be there. So, if you were planning to come to Seattle, don’t worry, that’s going to happen. I’m also going to be in Louisiana in a few weeks. That’s also not going to be canceled. And I’m also giving my carving workshop in the beginning of June. So, all of that is going to happen. So, if any of you have been wondering whether or not none of those will be canceled. So, all right. So, for the subject of this video, I decided I’m going to talk a little bit about what I would call the thrill of death. [“The Thrill of Death”] This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. [“The Thrill of Death”] And so, it’s based, obviously right now it’s based on my experience. It’s based on kind of looking inside and realizing some of the emotions that are going through me and some of the experiences that are happening related to a lot of the symbols that I’ve talked about in terms of exploring the symbolism of periphery and the symbolism of this crazy upside down chaotic world. And so, being kind of confronted with that directly, this flood, you know, talk about the flood and so being faced with the flood really brought about a lot of, obviously some despair, obviously some desolation, sadness, anguish, all that, of course. But I think the most surprising thing to me, which is why I want to talk about it, because it’s surprising, is this weird thrill that also comes in these moments. And it’s not the first time that I felt this. It’s also not the first time that my family and I have been in a situation which is similar to this one. Several years ago in 2004, I think it was, my wife and I were in Congo and we were visiting the east of Congo. We were visiting the Great Lakes area. We had been to Bujumbura and we were visiting, we were in Bukhavu, which is a city on the east, in the east of Congo. And while we were there, we were there for just one day coming back from, through Rwanda and Bujumbura coming back towards Congo, while we were in Bukhavu, there was a war that started. We were in a guest house and all of a sudden it started shooting. My wife, actually, I was insane because I was deathly ill. I don’t know what I’d eaten in Bujumbura. Obviously sometimes in Africa you eat stuff, and then you get food poisoning or you get a bug. And so I actually took a bus through Rwanda for, it was like an eight hour trip and I had horrible, it was horrible. Every time the bus would stop, I would run out into a field. Sorry for the disgusting details, guys. But I had, it was just horrible stomach stuff. So we get to Bukhavu and I’m dead. I’m lying in bed, I just want to die from my stomach issues and my wife says, I’m gonna go eat. And so I’m like, yeah, you go eat. I’m not eating anything. She goes out into Bukhavu to eat. All of a sudden I hear this ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta. And obviously having been in Congo already for a little while, I know right away what’s going on. But I’m so out of it, I’m just laying there for about two minutes, I’m just laying there and I’m listening to the shooting increase, increase, increase, and then finally dawns on me, okay, something’s going on. There’s shooting outside and my wife is not here. So I put on my clothes, I get dressed and I go out to the door. They don’t want to let me out of the compound but I’m like, I need to go see if I can find my wife. I think she’s right up the street. So I get out of the building, I run up the hill and there’s my wife coming to join me. And everybody’s kind of running around in the city and everybody’s, there’s a weird vibe going on. So we go back into the guest house and all of a sudden we become just locked in. And the shooting, the machine gun shooting turns into heavy machine guns, turns into shelling. After a while, the ground is shaking, the building is shaking and we’re stuck in this guest house. And we got stuck in the, we got stuck until the evening and then in the evening they were able to negotiate a ceasefire and I slept because I was so sick. I just slept all night. And the next morning, my wife got up and I was like, I need to sleep, I need to sleep and I just slept. Except for hours and the shooting started again. And for some reason I was just able, I just slept through the shooting and it was just shooting and shooting and shelling and I slept for a few hours in the shooting. It just reminded me of that scene of Christ in the boat, down in the bottom of the boat. Not that I’m like Christ but just the scene of Christ in the bottom of the boat as the storm is going on and he’s sleeping in the bottom of the boat or Jonah in the bottom of the boat sleeping amidst this total absolute chaos. And so I’m sleeping in the bottom, sleeping in my room and after a while it’s just too much. I get up and I get out and it was so surreal because the shooting was so intense, the sound was so intense but inside the compound was this beautiful garden. So I took a picture and in the picture it’s just this beautiful garden and you can’t hear the insanity that’s going on outside. So we get stuck in this place and we’re trying to be evacuated but they keep calling the UN to come get us but the UN says it’s too dangerous, they can’t come get us at all. So finally, because also the head of the UN was Swedish and we’re at the Swedish guest house so they had a personal connection with the head of the UN there. So finally they are able to convince the UN to come get us because the shooting has died down, they negotiated some kind of ceasefire so then I have to go, but it’s still shooting, I mean it’s still shooting pretty intensely. It’s just maybe not shelling, I don’t know why they decided that they could come but there was a shooter right on the top of the wall of the compound. We don’t know on which side the shooter was but I decided I’m gonna go back to the room, go outside into this outer compound and then walk through the garden and then go to our room which was kind of like a motel situation with the door on the outside to go into our room, get our stuff so that we could be evacuated. And so I get out of the room and then as I get out of the room it starts shooting and shooting and shooting and I’m going towards the room and there’s bullets whizzing through the trees above my head and I just remember that feeling and this is the feeling that I’m telling you about. I just remember this absolute thrill, like this rush, this rush of strange energy, this rush of, it’s hard to explain. I mean I think it’s not that hard to explain. A lot of people, that’s probably why a lot of people get into extreme sports and those types of situations where they put themselves really close to death and they can feel this rush. I’ve done some rafting and that kind of sports where you can feel a little bit of that. You know, you go on a roller coaster, that kind of stuff. But this experience was more existential because obviously my life was really in danger and also I don’t know, there was just a deeper sense of this coming into contact with death and this thrill of facing death. So anyway, so we get our stuff and it’s so strange because one of the things that I brought out that we bought in Burundi, it was this basket. If you watched my videos before, in the last few videos I made, I actually put this basket behind me on the shelf because it became one of my most, it’s one of my most precious objects just because of what it represents, that moment of facing death and then escaping with this basket from Africa. Anyways, so finally we’re in the guest house again and the UN says they’re gonna come get us but as they’re coming, the shooting intensifies again, once again, so when the UN arrives in front of the door, no one wants to leave except my wife and I because the car wasn’t bulletproof as well. So we just rush out the door, get into the car, and they go down the hill like swerving, they’re going down the street swerving to avoid bullets, stray bullets or whatever, I don’t even know, I guess they know what they’re doing. And we arrive at the UN compound and in the UN compound, the first thing we notice is that everybody is drunk. The workers, the people that are working there, all the expats that had been evacuated, everybody is drunk and it was so surreal because you leave this guest house, you come to the UN, you think you’re coming to a safe place but it was absolute mayhem, it was absolute chaos because all these refugees basically were piled into the UN compound. And so we didn’t know where to go, we slept in this massive room where there was hundreds of people, kind of slept under a table near the men’s bathroom and it was quite disgusting, the smell, obviously there was hundreds of people so the smell started to increase. So anyways, it was quite crazy. If you guys are interested in seeing a little bit of that, it turns out that while we were there in this compound with in Congo, there was also a famous punk band that were there and I saw them from far away but I didn’t know who they were because I was growing up by then, didn’t know about these things, punk band. It’s a punk band called Sum 41 and they made a video about it, it’s called Rock in Congo. So if you want to check that out, you can actually see, it’s very strange to watch, like you can watch our experience during that time. You can see the compound, you can see all these people, all this chaos and anyways, so, and then after that, in the next few weeks after that time, we finally were evacuated and we were brought outside of the city into another city and it was very interesting because we were just sitting there, we’d left this war zone and within a few hours, now we were in this calm hotel and everything was calm but both my wife and I could still hear massive shooting, we could still hear shooting and war trumpets and all this stuff but there was nothing, there was no sound, I mean, it was just traumatism I guess but we could hear it as if it was there, quite surreal experience. And then in the next few weeks after that, a lot of the expats left Congo but our organization, we were working for Mennonite Central Committee, they tend to evacuate people really at the last moment, like they don’t evacuate, just evacuate and so we ended up going back to Kinshasa where we were living but we stayed in Kinshasa as it devolved into riots and we got stuck in our house for a week with all these riots going around our house, it was quite intense because we lived in local neighborhoods, we didn’t live in like white enclave, we lived in local Congolese neighborhoods and at some point, this crowd came to our door and they said they were coming because they heard that there were white people in this compound, it’s so funny because this crowd came to the door angry because they blamed the UN for the war and they blamed the international community for the war and so they were just angry, so they came to the door and they’re like, we hear there’s white people here and our neighbors who were amazing, it was so funny because our neighbors said, no, no, no, they’re Canadian and that was enough to dispel the crowd of angry people and so they dispelled this crowd and then finally, we were pretty safe in our house, people came to visit us and brought us food and stuff, so we stayed there for about a week and then we were, as soon as things died down, we got into our pickup truck and just like bolted to a compound, an American compound that we knew of but all the Americans had pretty much gone so we were kind of alone in this compound. It was just a very intense time, several times in that, in those very few weeks, I came like right face to face with the possibility of dying. After that, I was also, once I was arrested by the police because there were no expats left and so we became suspicious to the police, I was arrested and I was, like a car came right up against my pickup truck and like forced me to move off the road, these guys got into the back and someone got into the, a policeman got into the front and then he started, he started saying that I’m a spy, you know, and all this and then he, and I just thought he wanted my money, which ended up being the case. And so he said, I need to search your bag, so it’s okay, fine, you wanna search my bag, that’s fine, but I always kept my money in a Ziploc bag, so I pulled the Ziploc bag out and I said, this is my money, I’m gonna put my money in my pocket and if you wanna search my bag, you can search my bag. So I pulled the bag, put it in my pocket, the policeman searches the bag, but obviously he didn’t want, he didn’t want to search my bag, he wanted my money, so he says, I need to count the money, I need to count how much money you have, and I was like, I’m not giving you my money, it’s not happening, I’ll also, obviously now, by now also I was just sick and tired of this, like I didn’t care anymore and so he said, I need to search you, I need to count your money and I said no, so then he actually, I can’t believe I did this, actually it’s quite surreal, it really shows you this kind of thrill, this kind of weird thrill, this kind of weird rush when you come face to face with death that can happen, the policeman goes to put his hand in my pocket to take the money out and I like, I slap his hand away and I’m like, no, you’re not gonna get my money, I said, if you want, you can go to my office, which was down the street, we can go inside, we can go there and then we can talk, but here I’m not doing anything, so the policeman takes his gun out and I just start laughing, I mean, by now you guys, if you know me, you’ve seen that I always laugh in the most inappropriate moments and so I just start laughing at the police officer and I’m like, are you gonna shoot me? You gonna shoot me here, like right here downtown, in the middle of town, you’re just gonna shoot me because you want my money and I’m like, you’re not getting anything from me and I just, anyways, like I said, rush, this weird rush of energy that you get, so I’m like, you’re not getting anything and so finally the policeman backs down and then, it’s weird, he becomes like a, he turned into like this weird, like a weird beggar and he started to say, yeah, but you know, you know, we made all this effort, you should at least give us money for cokes or for beers or something and I was like, you’re not getting anything from me, like, you just get out of my car, so finally, anyways, the policeman got out of my car and that happened several times in those few weeks, I also got taken into by police with a guest that we had and I had to negotiate his release and all this happened in the span of about, I would say, about two weeks, all of that and I remember the, I remember what I’m telling you guys, I remember this rush, this like rush of, this thrill of being face to face with danger, being face to face with death, being face to face with losing everything because it’s almost as if it, it’s almost as if it feels like it could be a liberation, like it could be this weird liberation to kind of go off the edge and I’m telling you this, I don’t, I have to admit, like I’m telling you, I’m telling you guys this and even the symbolism, I don’t totally understand it, I think I grasp it somewhat, I don’t totally understand it but I felt the same now, felt the same during the time of the flood when we were, things happened very fast, the police came and told us we have to leave now and the water was coming and so we had to like get in the car and leave as the water was rising up in our house and then we came back to our house, you know, in a lake, basically our house is flooded and everything is floating in the basement and we don’t know where we’re gonna go, we don’t know what we’re gonna do and everything is uncertain and it’s the same thing. As we’re stripping the basement and I’m like throwing my books out the window and I’m taking all my, you know, our kids’ drawings and taking them out the window and all our homeschool and all my kids, my son’s room and everything and just through the despair, I mean there’s despair and obviously that, everybody knows that there’s despair but there’s this strange, this strange rush, this strange, this strange energy which comes and I don’t, the intuition that I have, okay this is the intuition that I have, is I think that obviously this is not at the same level but I think there’s something about Christianity in that, there’s something that can be flipped in that and I say that, I’m being very careful when I say that because obviously I don’t know but when you read the testimonies of the martyrs, it seems like there’s something in there where they ride that, they ride that experience in a holy manner, let’s say like for me, it’s not, there’s nothing holy about that experience that I had, there’s nothing holy about those feelings, it’s basically just the passions, it’s a form of passion really but this idea that you could ride that rush or that thrill, you could ride it in a manner which would flip it and make it into a kind of glorification and it feels when you read some of the stories of the martyrs of how they face death and the death becomes almost a kind of ecstasy, I’m wondering about that, I’m wondering if maybe that has something to do with this experience of coming face to face with death, coming face to face with the edge and so anyways, that’s a little meditation that’s a little meditation I’m offering for you guys, another thing I wanted to talk about before, I don’t wanna make this video too long but another thing I wanted to talk about was one of the things I noticed in my town as these heaps, these piles were coming up is people started to put these weird mascots in front of their heaps of rubbish, there were few houses where it almost became like apotropaic imagery, apotropaic imagery is the idea of putting monsters on the edge, like putting gargoyles on the edge of churches or putting fearful creatures on the outside and one house had this pile of rubbish and right in front of the house, they had put up this little stand and on the stand they had a mask of an evil clown, like a kind of Halloween mask of an evil clown and I was like, oh my goodness, this is so strangely appropriate, especially with all the hunk, hunk, clown world stuff that has been going on so here’s this clown, deadly clown mascot, protecting or manifesting this heap of rubbish and chaos, there was also someone nearby who had put up this like weird doll, like this kind of monstrous doll that was up on the top of a water here that had been taken out of the house and so it’s very fascinating to see that in this chaos, you think about the people who took their trash out and obviously there’s all this stuff that everybody’s throwing all this stuff away and so why did they choose, it’s not conscious, right, they didn’t do it consciously but for sure there was something happening, something about that mask that just made sense for them to put there in front of their pile, in front of their heap and I think that this is sometimes how symbolism happens, like in all the possibilities, the one that you end up choosing is the one which is closest to reality, which is closest to what is happening, what is manifested and so it almost has a ritual shape despite the fact that this is a common experience, this is not a thought out ritual or a thought out thing and so I thought those are some of the strange experiences that I’ve been having that have been extremely interesting. So anyways, so I’m gonna end this video now guys, sorry that these videos are becoming very personal but just remembering all these events in my life as my own life is still in kind of in shambles right now so hopefully soon I’ll come back to the normal videos and I’ll be able to talk about symbolic things that aren’t so close to me. So, all right guys, so thanks for your attention, thanks again for everybody that has been supporting us through prayer, through great messages of encouragement and financially as well and I will see you soon.