Month: April 2010

Read through the lyrics to these two songs, then return to look at my analysis:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnnycash/aboynamedsue.html

http://www.rhapsody.com/everclear/rolling-stone-original/father-of-mine/lyrics.html

The two cases are roughly the same. In both you have young boys who grow up without a father, who have to struggle to survive, and who bear psychological scars.

In the first, you hear of a drifter who goes from town to town, often getting in fights, never settling down. He doesn’t whine about it, but clearly he is psychologically damaged.

In the second, you get the confession: “I will never be safe/ I will never be sane/ I will always be weird inside/ I will always be lame.”

Now, my own temperamental inclination, as should be obvious, is to side with Johnny Cash. Shit happens: deal with it. But as you ponder it, you realize he really isn’t dealing with it. He is running and hiding from his “shame”. He is acting out constantly in an aggressive way.

In our pre-Confessional culture–prior to our mass conversion to the idea that talking about psychological problems somehow helps us “process” them–people like Cash’s Sue were common. They were drunks, and losers. Some got religion, or found a good woman, and made their peace with their world; others never did. This world has always been filled with much suffering.

Freudianism, with the notion of the Unconcious, tells us that who we are now, is the product of who we were, then. The logic of this is that if we are suffering now, we should blame the past. Freud may today have no claims that pass even rudimentary scrutiny scientifically, but the basic notion of the retained experience, the permanent moulding of self at some time before our maturation, is everywhere.

Thus, when the claim is made “I will never be sane”, the singer is simultaneously attacking his father for his cruelty by claiming irreparable damage, and surrendering his creative capacity for regeneration and growth.

Now, the lyricist has obviously done something with his life–he is no doubt wealthy, as someone who created at least one major hit–and has commited himself to not doing the same thing to his kid. These are positive, and bely the fundamental helplessness he is invoking.

But he is still offering us an idea that is fundamentally pessimistic. Are we in fact pressed into molds at an early age, and forever after helpless in their face? Are the combinations of genetics and early experience fully and completely determinative of our future experience?

Johnny Cash’s Sue is insufficiently self reflective to make claims like that. He doesn’t think about it. And it does seem to me that as we evolve as sovereign individuals, we do so as whole qualitative Gestalts. Quite often, you can do things that are “impossible”, if you don’t know they are impossible. And it seems to me that someone who simply wants a better life will be more likely to get it than someone who has already determined in advance that the battle is already lost.

So, in the end, I have to come down somewhere in the middle. Clearly, whining is not generative. As a general rule, it makes you more depressed, and lessens your capacity for transcendance.

The optimal therapeutic approach would be one where you reject self pity, but also realize you have to process hurt. People are often blind and cruel, but that is for now simply the reality, and you can’t unwrite the past by accurately pointing to real wrongs done to you.

Our task in life is creation. This is what I believe, and any and all beliefs that subtract from your capacity for creation are for that reason to be avoided. Experience is primary. Explanation is secondary. This is the order. My operative optimism consists in the belief that if we truly understand how to live, everything can be clear and bright, pleasing and satisfying. We should never settle for anything that falls short of that.

It seems to me that art is the expression of the sacred myth. It is understandable that it became a cult in and of itself in the late 19th century among people who had otherwise rejected all faith and creed. The best art simultaneously ennobles us and binds us, one to another.

Regrettably, it also expresses who we are, and who we are becoming. On that score, modern art–as a rejection of form, meaning and beauty–represents the increasing formlessness and incoherence of our culture.

Yet, we remain a system in motion. We are still free. Our task, I think, is to evolve from the eternal verities which the ancients and medieval painters sought to convey, to a constant effort to reconcile stability with motion, through balance.

Thinking about art. I want it to be constructive without being didactic. The fractal pictures are a good example, showing beauty in disorder. Didacticism is a sort of linear, imposed order, that I oppose. The best art, it seems to me, induces in the viewer (listener) latent sympathies with what is good in life. It helps us find pleasure and companionship in difficulty, and helps us manage our tendencies to lapse into self pity, and move towards a creative, fulfilling engagement with life. I can’t say what exact forms this might take.

I do like the idea of layered pictures, with very rich information in them, more than we can process. Currently, I think much art ALSO has more information than we can process, but what is being signalled on the channels which elude our conscious awareness is gloom, pessimism, and latent sympathy for evil. Is the proverbial blank canvas not a rejection of all values, and of creative engagement, regardless of what excuse may be offered for it? Is it not a rejection of society, and effort?

I have thought often about architecture. Broad stroke, I think it would be useful to have interactive homes, which react to changing conditions. We tend to stagnate, and moving homes would work to counteract that. That is the implicit myth in the Harry Potter novels, at Hogwarts. The stairs move, and the pictures are alive. In their world, nothing remains static, and life is never understood as being even potentially without risk. We need that, and Rowlings very insightful use of these principles–which she may or may not have even expressed consciously to herself–is why so many people have taken such pleasure in her creation. Actually, she offers a good example of the sort of art I like.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to develop homes that react to the weather. You could, for example, have very complex glass pathways in a wall that carried water when it was raining. You could invent patterns; you could add flywheels; you could make the tubes move as the volume of water changes.

In the ceiling you could have an area filled with smoke that moved with the wind, or flywheels inside that turned the speed of the wind. The smoke could change color as the temperature changed.

You could have rotating homes, or homes that tilted a bit this way and that.

You could put in optical pathways for the sun, so that you could direct light wherever you wanted, or run it through filters that changed depending on the time of day. You could pipe in moonlight, and have a moving mirror that followed it all night long.

A paint could be developed that changed color regularly. You could have roofs that altered their shape.

All of these, of course, would be expensive, and many would recoil in horror at movement in the one place they can rest. Yet, can any of us REALLY rest, finally, on this Earth? Is the task not much more to be up and exploring every day, and would it really be so traumatic to have a dwelling that supported our efforts not to get stuck somewhere?

The best meal I ever had was at the Oak Room, in Louisville. At the end of a fine dinner, they brought us out 6 fine chocolates, each one not only delicious, but prepared as a unique work of art. All of them were visually appealing, in different ways.

I have dreamed of a world where we all live in little houses, in the middle of large expanses of grass and trees. What matters most about the houses is not their size, but their quality, how interesting and innovate they are.

If we are to contain our relentless thirst for more, more, more, the way to do it is in Quality. We must remember beauty, and in my view copying the ordered chaos of nature is the best way to do it.

The Taoist speak of the Uncarved Block. As I understand the issue, what this term in Chinese actually means is an uncut forest. If you look at a forest, it is not ordered, but it is harmonious. That is the metaphor I like.

Socialism is lines of trees in neat rows, labeled and confined. That, of course, I don’t like. A blank canvas serves this cause well, since it agitates for individual creative nullity, and passive submersion in a vast heap of undifferentiated things, to be moved and ordered like so much clay, by those who control us.

It would be interesting to compare and contrast the arguments the Fascists used against Democracy with those used by Communists, and compare both with the arguments being advanced today by the environmentalists. I think what one would find, laying one piece of rhetoric next to another, is that the claim is being made “we–or I–know better. Since the people are stupid, their sovereignty over their own lives should be sacrificed and ceded to their betters, against their will, if necessary, since they don’t understand their own interest.”

Ultimately, you have only two directions: voluntary compliance with laws you believe in, and forced compliance with laws you oppose. In the first case, very little government is needed. In the second, a great deal of government. In Cuba, for example, as many as one in three people may be informers. No one really knows. That’s the point.

And historically, what the Communists have really done is return us to Monarchy, Feudalism, and Mercantilism (whose core doctrine is that one man’s gain is necessarily another man’s loss), with none of the tempering virtues of those doctrines, such as noblesse oblige, faith in an eternal future in a better land, and honor.

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Look at use of word Reform. One could compare Healthcare Reform with Land Reform as used by the Soviet and Chinese Communists, which meant ceding all private land to that State, resulting in mass famine in both cases. Likewise, with so-called healthcare reform, we can expect the virtual famines of rationing down the road.

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The professor who taught the Teaching Company course on Chinese history really did a poor job of the Communist period. One particular theme I found very revealing.

Bit of background: like Lenin, Mao promised all the peasants “Land reform”. What they understood by this is that the land of the large land owners would be taken from them, and dispersed to them, the less well-off farmers. Where they had say 2 acres, they would now have 10 acres, and all they had to do was support Mao. Being short-sighted, they did.

In the short term, this is what happened. The land was taken from the “bourgeoisie”, and a great many of them were murdered after staged “trials”, where the “people” were expected to show no mercy, and express loud indignation at the supposed crimes of the rich for being rich.

Mao, though, was a liar, of course. All Communists are liars. They want absolute tyranny, and no matter what they say, they never stop until they get it. In this case, 10-15 years or so down the road, they took the land from the peasants, and placed it under the control of the State, which took everything they grew, then gave some of it back to them. Understandably, many of them were very upset. In the Soviet Union, many refused to grow food, and in retaliation Stalin condemned millions to starvation, by taking everything they did grow, and prohibiting all importation of food.

In the Chinese case, simple incompetence caused a similar result, with tens of millions dying of preventable hunger, after being “saved” by Communism. It is somewhat complex, so I won’t get into the details here.

(It is my sincere hope I can at some point induce in a previously commited Communist nausea at the extent of the horror they have sponsored).

In any event, relative moderate (read: incomplete psychopath) Deng Xiopeng forced Mao out as head of the Party (the ruling aristocracy), and implemented liberalization. One of the features of this was limited de facto land ownership.

On this point, our illustrious professor comments that whereas they had previously had to give up all of their food, now they had to surrender a certain amount, but were able to keep anything the raised over that amount. He viewed this as an improvement.

What is noteworthy about this, is that THIS IS FEUDALISM. You have the peasant and the Lord of the area. The peasant pays his taxes to the Lord, and keeps what is left. Tens of millions died to return to a system which was worse than what they had before the revolution.

It’s interesting that as a professional he couldn’t make that connection. All that has happened, when Communists take over, is you have deducted ideas of virtue and honor from what is otherwise a medieval system. Communists eradicated the “mandate of heaven”, which had been a key feature of Chinese political theory for nearly 3 millenia. That doctrine stated, in effect, the same thing our Declaration of Independence did, that when governments become abusive, the people have the right to overthrow them.

The Chinese Communists–like all Communists–have kept what was bad, and implemented it in such a way that all moral critiques have been disabled.

I have decided to call myself a conservative Liberal. Little c, big L. By this I mean I think the basic approach of the 18th century–of our Constitution, of Adam Smith–was correct, that of dispersing government as widely as possible, with a constant eye to balance. If you spread it too much, you get anarchy; and if you concentrate it too much you get tyranny. This is the doctrine of Liberalism. Little c because I use the older version of the term, and reject root and branch the newer ideas tied to that word, as Illiberal.

Because they favor less, not more freedom, all modern users of the word liberal are liars.

A word might be in order on what these musings are. What I like to do is the thought equivalent of experimental sketches. I like to build small parts of large ideas, and see how they fit, and what happens when I move them. As in drawing, sometimes if you move something just a little, one way or the other, the whole form changes.

And as in drawing, I am creating forms–rather, symbolic representations of what I believe to be external realities–which in general I try to formulate in such a way that predictions are possible. This roughly, if not exactly, hews to the scientific method, but as applied to the qualitative dimension of human experience (often, depending on the topic; sometimes things ARE directly measurable).

I do sketch after sketch after sketch, and periodically I “paint” something, which is a distilled argument on some topic or other which aims at both concision and thoroughness, which are two traits that are hard to combine.