Month: June 2011

If I’ve used that tagline before, then the “really real” core of Keynes. . .

is Signal Distortion. If prices act as a signalling system, and if a system of prices forms an Extended Order which efficiently orders the production, delivery and consumption of wanted goods, then anything which deranges prices deranges the system. The signalling system doesn’t operate properly.

I would use the analogy of my own understanding of cancer: if parts of the economy are made external to the larger free flow of goods as facilitated by the price system, then not just those parts, but the economy as a whole becomes deranged. Massive government spending is a sort of cancer which wears a hole in a weblike fabric.

As an example I have used, much IMF and World Bank aid has been spent on things like dams in third world countries, that did not have remotely enough money or industrial capacity to warrant those investments. The money comes in, gets spent on construction–which employs for some years local people–then the money is gone.

What has happened in the meantime is that the wages paid those workers deranged all the other local wages. Supply and demand, free market forces were not at work. This hurts EVERYONE outside the system, which is to say all private small businesses in that market area. Further, it only helps non-independent entities–which in general is to say government elites–and damages all private enterprise that could be viable independently and sustainably. This is a disaster for any economy. It does HARM, on balance. And this is more or less what FDR did with the New Deal, which beyond question extended rather than shortened the Great Depression.

Keynes knew this. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing.

It is baffling to me to behold people actually arguing, in this day and age, that Keynesian ideas COULD benefit anyone, much less that they do.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: semi-autonomous entities along Keynesian lines. During the time they did their damage, they wee “Government Sponsored Entities” (if memory serves), but they did not have to report to anyone. Moreover, they were largely unregulated. The result? Complete price deviancy and malignancy. Homes were allowed to inflate at far greater rates than free markets would have allowed, prices were deranged, and the fix–which we are still in–can only consist in reattaching the housing sector to the larger economy as a whole, absent–let me coin a phrase: “Price Derangement Entities”, or PDE’s.

As I think about it, such entities could be counted on to roll around as virtual wrecking balls, leaving economic damage wherever they go. This would apply EVEN IF they were not trying to do that, and even if they were not fundamentally socialists of the Keynesian stripe. This would include any agency associated with the misnamed War on Poverty, and quite obviously the entirety of the so-called Stimulus. TARP would apply.

Keynes was unquesionable a first-order economic genius, and as such an idiot savant. He was as stupid in the moral arena as he was brilliant in the realm of economic subversion.

The last century has been filled with much stupidity and much evil. I of course can’t say if it’s too late to turn it back, but perseverance and not giving a shit if you succeed or fail because there is no fucking way you are quitting is a fundamental part of Goodness, as I have defined it. So the possibility of success is entirely irrelevant.

Go to it, and do or die.

It occurred to me today that Keynes latter career can be summarized as creating a body of thought that, when implemented, would in Hayek’s terms Act For prosperity, but in reality Act To poverty and increased governmental control. You create a plausible pretext, all while knowing that to the extent people followed your ideas, they would get the opposite.

He further immunized his system from criticism by making it tautological: if you spend money to boost the economy and the economy improves, then it was your doing. If you spend money and it fails, then you didn’t spend enough. Add to this the fundamental insight that politicians never balance budgets, and you have debt accumulating day-in, day-out for decades.

This is the result that has in fact been achieved. He also has in place his “semi-autonomous bodies”, like Fannie Mae, the IMF, the World Bank, and of course the Federal Reserve. To this I would add semi-autonomous AGENCIES, like the FDA, the EPA, the Dept. of Homeland Security, etc. Practically, many of these agencies can escape the scrutiny of Congress. They enable Obama to execute policies by fiat, rather than by legislation.

The aim was for wealth to be less important, as Keynes himself said, and his hope–pathetic and ungrounded as it may have been–that people without money would find better sources of meaning that he achieved in his own life.

If, as I have posited, the principle task of meaning formation (one of four tasks which “culture” performs, and by far the most important one) is contextualizing and reducing psychological pain–as exemplified chiefly by resentment and self pity–then any social order which does not accept the necessity of pain in life, has in fact rejected any and all possible cultural forms. It has castrated itself, and will in short order be taken over by another culture which actually provides solutions to that problem.

I have in mind at the moment Sweden, and stories like this. Even from a strictly materialistic standpoint, girls and boys are put together differntly. Their hormonal landscapes are different. Their bodies are different. Their brains are different.

From what moral principle does the need for reducing and eventually eradicating all cultural markers arise? From where, specifically, are these children to get the raw building blocks of “identity”, and how exactly are small children to decide who they “want to be”? The logical end of giving this freedom would be to stop nurturing and guiding them altogether, and let them stew in silence for ten years, and see what happens. Self evidently, that would be child abuse. As I see it, though, even this abdication of direction amounts to child abuse.

Presumably, of coruse, there will be tacit and unconscious reinforcement for boys to act like girls, and vice versa. The question is: will this make them happier in life? Will this teach them to face the challenges of life–such that remain in a cradle to grave welfare state–with dignity, poise, and perseverance?

I doubt it. All of the Scandinavian countries are committing slow cultural suicide, by reproducing at half the rate needed to maintain their populations. This is happening at the same time as massive increases in birth rates among Muslim immigrants. Unless something changes, Mark Steyn is right is assuming that all the cultures which allows this to happen will be submerged eventually in Sharia.

To my mind, this is an abdication of responsibility on the part of the Swedes and others. They want to live in this make-believe, fairy-tale world, where everyone is always nice, and hard men and hard women are never needed; where suffering is always accidental, and sybaritic pleasures the norm.

That is not the world we live in. We may be able to build it someday, but only by marginalizing and converting or destroying all the anti-liberal elements in it.

As I say from time to time, I definitely repeat themes, but what I intend are what amount to sketches, in which I try to flesh out ideas in new ways, and thereby find new pathways to new places. The treatment of women in our culture is a principle consideration of mine, and I am exploring that theme here in slightly new ways.

It seems to me that women retain and transmit 2/3rds of most cultures, if not more. Men may do most of the talking and most of the walking, but they feel keenly the women around them.

Women feel more deeply and more often than most men, in my view. They are more sensitive socially. They reach, in my view, states of connectedness and spirituality more readily than men. They enter into mythic worlds, in my view, more easily than men. I will grant to the reductionists one item on this: their brains are physically wired differently, such that they can use their entire brains with greater facililty. There are more connections between the hemispheres, and their hormonal cycles necessitate learning to manage and recognize mood changes. Emotional circulation is more or less necessitated by their biological reality, when that is much less the case with men.

Maternalistic cultures tend to lose in competitions with paternalistic cultures. Sensitivity will lose out to naked and structured aggression every time. Lao Tzu counseled “understanding the masculine but keeping to the feminine”. According to the legend, he said this on the way to an unknown fate out in the mists beyond the boundaries of the kingdom he was leaving for good.

As a sort of romantic ideal (and I use the word romantic in all sorts of senses; in this case what I intend is an outcome that would be emotionally fulfulling, in the sense that most of us are happy when the good guys win), I would like to see the triumph of Liberalism in the sense of much greater cultural diversity, and I cannot see how it can be retained psychosocially unless we empower women to BE women. Unless we respect them for what they can do BETTER than men, rather than demand of them that they BE men culturally, and only differ in their capacity for the physical reproduction of the species.

What do I mean by this? As it seems to me, women by far have the best aptitude for emotional and sexual satisfaction, IF, and ONLY IF, they are given the affection and safety they need to truly open up emotionally and spiritually. This, in turn, can only happen in a relationship in which sex is one of the factors, but not the primary one. This, in turn, leads to the creation of women who dominate their worlds qualitatively, who raise good kids, and empower their men to be men; and who in turn preserve our culture, as transmitted and influenced disproportionately by those women.

I feel, too, that most women do not want to be dominated (clearly, some categorilly do, as do some fewer number of men), but do want to be led in matters pertaining to the real world. They want men who are stable, reliable, mostly sensitive, and who know who they are and what they want. This is the field within which the optimal blossoming happens.

One needs to look, therefore, with great consternation to the widespread eradication of the notion of the woman as feminine. What was bought in the sexual revolution was greater social acceptance of women detaching themselves emotionally from their need to nurture, and instead pursuing pleasure as its own end, regardless of the emotional cost. Such women need never get married or have kids. They can pursue men solely based upon pleasure considerations, and not with regard to their characters, or with an aim to develop a deep and trusting relationship. They can abandon all pretense of pursuing love, in other words, and settle instead for physical relationships that are not qualitatively better than really good masturbation. I have seen women post on-line that they preferred dancing to sex. It’s easy enough to see why that would be the case.

And our culture is increasingly filled with anger at women. The black culture is particularly guilty of this. I have personally heard ten year old black kids refer to ten year old black girls as “hoes”. You could google almost any random hip-hop song and find aggressive and sexually brutal lyrics when it comes to women. They seem to view women as objects.

Most of them, statistically speaking, grow up in single parent homes, in which the father plays little to no role. This means they have to get all of their emotional nourishment from their mother, who was often emotionally underdeveloped when she had them. They have both an exaggerated need for her, and likely an underlying anger for putting them into that situation. Psychosocially, this leads to chronic and generally oppressive denigration of the feminine.

But this phenomenon is not confined there. I went to see the “X-Men: First Class” movie, and saw a number of somewhat disturbing scenes I wanted to point out as supportive of misogyny. First, the CIA agent has to pretend to be stripper/prostitute. One could say, I suppose, that our culture is becoming “stripperized”, in that normal housewives are taking stripping classes; it is a common way for college girls to earn tuition money; and it is talked about in the mainstream media all the time. When I was growing up, such clubs were for dirty old men. Tattoo parlors were for bikers, sailors, truckers, and convicts. Much has changed.

Then you get the image of a girl kissing a man while he is taking her blood, which Eric Lenscher says is “kinky”. Pain for the woman and pleasure for the man. One could almost, I suppose, see an echo of the vampirism that surrounds our kids nowadays. If you have kids or an interest, go check out the “teen fiction” section of your local bookstore. All the books whose colors are mostly red and black deal with images of what I would argue symbolize morally and emotionally defective human beings, projected onto fictional creatures like vampires or werewolves.

And Havoc does target practice with the forms of women. That is what he is destroying. They could have used bales of hay or anything else. They used female mannikins.

Emma Frost is tied up and briefly strangled, an image which follows shortly on that of her copulating with the Russian General. This is S & M.

Finally, we have the image of the sex-worker turning to hate and murder. One wonders if those balls she shoots out do not symbolize the internalization of the rage she felt performing oral sex, that is then thrown back out into the world as explosions.

All of these themes happen mythically, or if you prefer unconsciously, or semi-consciously. But they feed into the understandings of both men and women of what our proper relationship should be.

Actually, I will add that Charles Xavier had an absent mother. I wonder if the sensation of that is not increasingly common even among those who grow up in two parent homes, whose mothers are unfeminine and unnurturing.

I would think that is a common experience of children of single parent homes, whose mothers work a lot of hours, are tired when they are home, and all too many of whom are not up to the task of feeding their little ones emotionally.

Now, sexual relations are complicated. In what I believe is the world’s oldest extant epic, Gilgamesh, the hero starts the poem out by in effect making a habit of raping the wives of all the men in the kingdom. If memory serves, he was always the first one to have sex with a woman when she got married. He was big and strong, so no one could stop him. How they end this is the subject of the poem.

I know so many women–an amazing number of women–who seem to be somewhat masochistic. I hear stories, and wonder why they react the way they do. Women, in general, really do seem to want to be led/mildly dominated–even though of course they complain about it–and they will put up with a lot of crap from men to protect fundamentally unhealthy relationships. They talk endlessly about problems they never fix. It is relatively easy to conclude from this that they don’t mind the basic situation, provided they can talk about it enough.

It does seems to me our culture in some ways is getting meaner, at least in terms of the media presented to us, which is presumably indicative of larger fluctuations in taste. Part of this is directed at women.

Sartre had some sort of idea where he set up the relation between the sexes as fundamentally antagonistic. Clearly, this is the case sometimes. At the same time, there are cycles back and forth–even and perhaps particularly in healthy relationships-where power swings back and forth, love swings back and forth, attention swings back and forth, vulnerability swings back and forth. A healthy relationship is alive and evolving. At a minimum it is a reality that is fulfilling for both parties most days, in most ways.

This requires, though, respect for and appreciation of the feminine.

As I feel it worth pointing out from time to time, I use Liberalism in its historical form, of desiring as much liberty for people as is possible. Liberty, liberal, and, in my view, the word for life are all related. Self evidently, what goes by that name currently is anything but liberating. Those under the thrall of this doctrine believe in using the regulatory power of the government to engineer society, which necessarily results in unwarranted restrictions in economic and political liberty.

Anyway, that was just a clarification.

The point I wanted to make is that liberty can in some respects be treated as a commodity. Specifically, one can posit that the demand for liberty goes up as cultural diversity increases. Many of the little wars around the world amount to one group of people wanting to live their own way, who have taken up arms to free themselves from some other group.

The more liberty you want, the higher the price (the higher the demand, the more costly the supply). If you are content to let others make most of your decisions, then you don’t have to work much. If you want you and your community to make most fundamental decisions, then you have to get it done.

The cost of absolute liberty is death, since if you want the freedom to kill others, you shall be killed yourself. Note, too, that this death can be moral–I have often spoken of hard-core leftists as “moral suicides”–in that moral death some people pay for the “liberty” of being enslaved. This is a psychological malady of the sort Rousseau talked about. It is the outcome of being so ungenerative as to be unable to form a coherent code for governing oneself, and therefore seeking release from freedom.

The cost of to liberty of order within a political system rises with the immorality of the people, and falls with their capacity to rationally govern themselves.

Liberalism, then, is a political implementation of basic economics as applied to the mass forces which govern behavior. As I have often said, the operative metaphors are Smith’s Invisible Hand, and Hayek’s Extended Order.

The essence of Liberalism is breaking things down to localized orders to the extent practical. Some look back romantically on the countless diverse Medieval towns–around the world–which has so many local customs, festivals, ways of dressing, etc. I want a return to this much more interesting way of living, consisting in genuine diversity.

As a general rule, you can look up the antonym of any word a leftist uses, and from that discern their true intent. George Soros wants a closed society. Those who agitate for diversity want absolute cultural conformity, and hide this by pretending that race and sexual “Identity” alone constitutes culture. In reality, the most important cultural differences historically have always been religious. They want to end religion. They want to end moral distinctions of all sorts, more generally, in favor of political correctness, which is in fact nothing more or less than the demand for conformity to doctrines originating with elites.

They want to clone ideas, and propagate them flawlessly, eventually across the entire planet. This is anti-Liberal, anti-humanistic, and by my definition anti-moral, since as I have argued proper moral decisions are always LOCAL, imperfect, and necessary.

The basics of economics are well understood, and well articulated by people like Thomas Sowell, in his “Basic Economics”.

The crux of my own contribution is to point out that the demand for money is fixed. There is never any intrinsic value in money, qua money. Yes, gold can be converted to fine jewelry, but it is not then acting as money.

Mutability in supply is, then, necessarily a corruption of the generalized wealth building that would otherwise happen in conditions of free markets.

Given a fixed supply of money, the purchasing power per unit of labor would logically rise. This follows as an element of common sense from the obvious fact that productivity has been surging vastly faster than population for the last centuray and more, yet what you can buy–although it has increased vastly in quality–is really not that much more. What has in fact increased VASTLY is our collective debt. This is the fault in the US, primarily, of the Federal Reserve, and in the developing world that of the World Bank and IMF.

As should be obvious as well, this corruption is necessarily in the favor of some, at the expense of others; and, to the point here, to the benefit of a few, at the expense of most of us.

Monetarists like Milton Friedman looked at what happened, and thought about how to improve it. They saw monetary contraction causing recessions, and concluded therefrom that a modest amount of inflation, by extension, was the corrective. Friedman’s arguments in favor of capitalism and free markets were sound, but in my view he missed this very fundamental point, for the simple reason that he was an economic historian. This perhaps made him a realist, but in my view there is also a moral principle involved here, that we still have kings and economically non-productive avenues to vast accumulations of wealth.

This is unfair. It is literally and with no exaggeration theft, and on a scale beyond even my own comprehension.

The economic system I am talking about (here, if you have not see it) has never happened anywhere, since the beginning of recorded history, to the extent of my knowledge.

Neither have nuclear bombs. It is time we begin in earnest the new thinking that needed to attend our new capabilities that Einstein talked about.

The demonic are among us, and collectively probably do have the ability to crash the global economy. Their numbers are not great: merely their money and following power are.

Our task is to reach those capable of moral judgement and encourage them to change their mind–and I have in mind here those who think they are “improving” the world by eliminating political liberty; and to fight like hell those who are psychopaths. Where George Soros lies on that continuum is unclear, but that he has in mind the enslavement of the many for the benefit of the few is clear enough.

Most Communists take as their task the REPLACEMENT of a Capitalist elite with an elite of their choosing. The fundamental power relationship, however, devolves from one of what can amount to de facto slavery–although in historical reality it has always been liberting–to one of actual and overt slavery of the worst sort. No slave plantation in the American South ever erected psychological torture camps to “free” the souls of their charges.

I will add that they have always lived among us. Globally, genuine Goodness is probably increasing rapidly, with the “outbreaks” of peace we see. I doubt that fewer wars have been fought around the world ever, in human history.

There is certainly room for cautious hope, but only if people keep waking up to the danger they are in, and the fundamentally corrupt nature of our current system.

I first watched this many years ago when the kids were little, thought then, and think now, that it is an excellent metaphor for things an observant person will notice every day all around them.

Please note in advance that it is, in fact, a silly song, but one with a larger point than the one made in the video.

I will add for those with young ones that I was a big fan of Veggie Tales. I would watch them to this day if my kids still enjoyed them. They are genuinely funny, at last as I recall them.

The Yodelling Veterinarian of the Alps.

Please do not ask me for a consistent tone. I can’t do it. Why be flat when you can roll?

The essence of community organizing is convincing people that you know better than they do, and that they should follow you. Since you need a “them” to fight a war, it normally consists in extorting money from people who have it, but doing it in such a way that no one involved in the process learns anything about business, how to create jobs, how to run a business, or has any creative economic ideas.

In spite of what are no doubt some temporary victories, then, the net effect is community impoverishment. If Van Jones had gotten his “green jobs in the ghettoes” program going, it would have been dead in ten years, at considerable expense not just to the taxpayers, but to the economies unfortunate enough to have allowed actually viable business enterprises to atrophy due to competition happening outside the free market.

The reality is you can’t extort money from intelligent people–and by definition those who own businesses know how to run them, or they would go out of business anyway–forever. If you are doing it in the form of coerced unionism, you will steadily lose jobs over decades, as has happened in the Northeast, with Detroit being particularly hard hit. What happens is that the business owners know that to stay competitive, they have to cut costs. If Unionism makes that impossible, then they avoid the unions by going somewhere beyond their reach. Had activists in Seattle not been so greedy, they would have a lot of jobs that instead went to South Carolina.

Given their choice, most people are intelligent enough to realize that a job with lower wages is better than unemployment, since even the most generous unemployment packages run out eventually, and are always combined with a loss of self esteem and typically depression and anti-social behavior. Not working too long is psychologically damaging.

Likewise, you can extort “blood money” from governments, but eventually the people paying that money rebel, and either change the government, or move out of the jurisdiction involved; again, as happened in Detroit.

One would think that the organizers would realize the damage they are causing at some point. One would think that common sense at some point would cause them to question whether or not their hard work to create a legally sanctioned labor monopoly–which denies individual workers the right to self determination, and by extension the use of their own judgement, rather than that of the community organizer–was a good idea.

Here is the reality: Marxists like Trumpka and Van Jones think of people as consisting in generic types. How you classify them depends on the particular radicalization you are working on–inner city blacks require a different set of lies than suburban unionists–but fundamentally you assume they are stupid, homogeneous, and without the capacity for self determination without the “enlightened” intervension of their future dictators.

The rhetoric of class warfare does not admit of personal consciousness. It never considers that the “rich” might in fact be providing some needed service, like jobs; and that the poor might be poor because they are unintelligent and unmotivated, and just fine with their station in life. Most of Appallachia is like that. They just want to be left alone.

As I think about it, once you think of people as generic, where does the qualitative outlier come from, that enables their organization? Is it not the “leader”, and have we not directly derived the “Fuehrerprinzip”? Hitler’s entire argument rested on the idea that the German people were generically perfect, but rudderless without him. The Jews were generically wicked, and could thus be judged, condemend and slaughtered en masse. There was no room for qualitative variation.

The Soviets, and Chinese, and Vietnamese did the same thing. They decided that having a certain amount of wealth, in and of itself, and without regard to the sources or uses made of that wealth, constituted a capital crime. Of course, there was always the enticement of legalized theft, rape, torture and murder, for people of a psychopathically sadistic mindset. Imagine what Ted Bundy could have made of the opportunities granted the Cheka, and NKVD. They never took human beings into those dungeons: their class membership told them all they needed to know.

Yet all developed societies reject the notion of collective guilt. Most white southerners–something like 95%–were not slave owners. Many were uncomfortable with slavery. They fought for their homes, under invasion–Unconstitutionally–from the North.

Presumably in our day and time, not all Arabs are comfortable with the idea of slavery either, even thought it is explicitly authorized in the Koran, including the taking of sex slaves (and in unlimited quantities; only wives were limited to four).

In our own day and time, manifestly (Allan West and Herman Cain being two examples) not all black Americans are happy about the implicit paternalism and smug arrogance with which leftists assume that they can arrogate to themselves the right to speak for people they don’t understand. Is Van Jones “one of the people”? He went to Yale Law School. I don’t know where he gets his suits, but it probably isn’t JC Penny, where I have always bought mine.

Obama went to a prep school where he smoked pot, drank, and snorted cocaine “when he could get it”. This was the sort of place where Biff and Buffy go, and where tennis and golf are the big sports. He followed this with trips to very expensive Ivy League schools, where the power elite and political radicals congregate. He is no more ghetto than I am, and likely less, since I have spent a lot of time working alongside normal people who will wear a hard hat the rest of their lives. I’m not anti-union: I’m against using the power of law to prevent people from making their own decision as to whether or not to join.

Obama’s only apparent talent is convincing people who should know better than he knows what is best for them. The implicit message of “hope and change” was “you don’t need the details, because I am all that and a bag of chips: trust me”. Newsflash: not only does he not have the faintest clue how to help people in actuality, he is leading them to hell in a handbasket. Moreover, he will never personally have to face ANY of the consequences of his actions. The Party members never do. They just blame bourgeois traitors and foreign influences for failures occasioned by stupidity, and the predictable results that follow it.

Two characteristics of cults is they have leaders, and they demand perfect conformity to the dictates of those leaders.

What is interesting is that the Anthrogenic Global Warming crowd keep making dire predictions–the world is COMING TO AN END. We have to end freedom. Liberal democracy is the tool of the rich elites (who of course will just build mansions on the moon when the planet melts) and needs to be ended.

Do you remember Al Gore, when he was Vice President (We Americans sure know how to pick ’em, don’t we?), telling us in 1998 how many awful things were going to happen within ten years if we didn’t act then? James Hanson was doing the same dog and pony show a decade before that.

Five years or so ago, we were told with absolute confidence that global warming was going to cause a bunch of really bad hurricances, and weren’t we going to feel sorry we didn’t listen to our mental superiors. We are at a 40 year low.

So what do they do when they are wrong? What do all Millenarians do when they pick a date for the end of the world and it doesn’t happen? They find some slight miscalculation in their basically correct forecast, and pick a new date.

Alternatively, they tell us they are absolutely right, but they can’t say when our doom and destruction will come, but we sure better listen to them now, and repent for our freedom and impoverty. Sell your house: the world is on fire. We can’t say when, but when those giant mosquitoes come for you, you’re going to wish you hadn’t mowed your lawn, eaten beef (cow farts), and driven to work each day.

This is what those capable of irony call farce. “Unscientific” would do as well.

Listen to this song, and feel it. Somewhere down the crazy river.

Here are the lyrics:

Yeah, I can see it now
The distant red neon shivered in the heat
I was feeling like a stranger in a strange land
You know where people play games with the night
God, it was too hot to sleep
I followed the sound of a jukebox coming from up the levee
All of a sudden I could hear somebody whistling
Fromright behind me
I turned around and she said
“Why do you always end up down at Nick’s Cafe?”
I said “I don’t know, the wind just kind of pushed me this way.”
She said “Hang the rich.”

Catch the blue train
To places never been before
Look for me
Somewhere down the crazy river
Somewhere down the crazy river
Catch the blue train
All the way to Kokomo
You can find me
Somewhere down the crazy river
Somewhere down the crazy river

Take a picture of this
The fields are empty, abandoned ’59 Chevy
Laying in the back seat listening to Little Willie John
Yea, that’s when time stood still
You know, I think I’m gonna go down to Madam X
And let her read my mind
She said “That Voodoo stuff don’t do nothing for me.”

I’m a man with a clear destination
I’m a man with a broad imagination
You fog the mind, you stir the soul
I can’t find, … no control

Catch the blue train
To places never been before
Look for me
Somewhere down the crazy river
Somewhere down the crazy river
Catch the blue train
All the way to Kokomo
You can find me
Somewhere down the crazy river
Somewhere down the crazy river

Wait, did you hear that
Oh this is sure stirring up some ghosts for me
She said “There’s one thing you’ve got to learn
Is not to be afraid of it.”
I said “No, I like it, I like it, it’s good.”
She said “You like it now
But you’ll learn to love it later.”

I been spellbound – falling in trances
I been spellbound – falling in trances
You give me shivers – chills and fever
I been spellbound – somewhere down the crazy river

This is a very sensuous song. It evokes that period in the morning when it is warm, and possibility is in the air, you are alert and waiting, but you don’t know for what.

Add to this her admonition, apparently emotionally congruent with the moment of “Hang the rich”. When I realized that was what he said, this song changed for me.

There is an element to Leftism of what the Germans call “Sehnsucht”, and the Portuguese “saudade”. Looking it up, I see I am not the first to make this connection. That piece is actually worth the read.

For my own purposes, the analogy I use–which admittedly is a strange one–is getting poison oak. I had a summer job in college hiking through the woods, and even though I took care to protect myself, invariably both of my forearms would get completely covered in an itchy rash, that drove me nuts. Running hot water over it both made it worse, and created a sensation of pain, pleasure and release. I have never felt anything like it.

But I feel this longing is always a gap. Now, gaps can be useful: they create space into which you can move, but it is important where that gap is, or alternatively in what direction you choose to move.

Mystical literature is full of “saudade” for God. You see poets like Hafez and Rumi, Kabir, Mirabai, St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and many others describing meetings that are all too short, connections of bliss felt and then withdrawn. I have felt brief flashes myself, of a connection in which the entire universe is experienced as a sea of rich and infinite joy.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I am going to stop because thinking about this makes me sad. I hit it again after a while in a new way.