Month: June 2011

In the Chicago Art Museum, I saw some Tibetan iconography where religious figures of some importance are making love, more or less obviously. Yab means “father”, and yum “mother”. In Hinduism generally, the male deities are normally paired with female deities [as an unrelated but interesting side note, Gods are normally also paired with their mounts: Kartikeya, the god of war, rides a peacock; and Ganesha, the elephant headed “remover of obstacles” rides a rat],but they are not always obviously locked in a coital position.

In the iconography of Siva, he is often worshipped as the lingam, which is plainly an erect phallus, and understood as such. It is paired with a Yoni, which is that empty space where the lingam goes. The lingam is often worshipped by pouring milk over it.

I would like to offer several thoughts on this. The one that appears to me most important at the moment is this insight I had the other day. There is a circularity to male-female relationships that occurs on a physical level, but which transcends that.

What a man gives a woman is hard and tangible. On a physical level, his member is hard, and he emits something physical, that can lead to new life. Generally, he will also provide physical security for the woman, and often a source of sustenance. On an emotional level, he is generally less susceptible to ups and downs, and thus acts as a steadying force. This is all clear enough.

What a woman gives a man, though, is intangible. She gives him space–literally in the case of her body–but figuratively in the sense of softening him up, helping him feel more, be more sensitive and kind. If you think of a hard substance diluted by air–say whipped cream, which is perhaps an infelicitous metaphor, but let’s go with it–it is less dense. Men benefit from women in ways which I think they often cannot see. I visualized the whole relationship like this:

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!

You can visualize a man and woman in coital position, and from the bottom flows something hard, that then circulates up the woman, and reenters the man as space. It is a process of contraction and expansion, continued endlessly.

As far as that goes, consider the conception of a child. Its source is a tiny egg, and a tablespoon or two of generative substance, of which only a single microscopic bit will make any difference. From that, though, grows a baby, within the woman.

In my own terms, I would call this the quantitative/qualitative distinction. Quantity exists in space; it has extent and duration; quality exists as the form of that space, and has neither extent nor duration. This is the old li and chi distinction I talked about many posts ago.

In our own day and time, this basic mechanism has eroded. What the socialists (who I use more or less interchangeably with “those who want to destroy all cultures”) want is the sexual masculinisation of women, and the pacification/feminization of men, which is to say the erosion of their protective instincts, as expressed in the principled defense of their homes and ways of living.

I was in a bar the other day, talking to a very attractive Canadian woman, and she said of some other group of Canadians that they “can suck my dick”. Now, I’ve never heard a woman day that before, for the obvious reason that that isn’t logistically possible (absent a strap-on, which may be what she had in mind; I will add that this is intended as an adult blog, dedicated to solving real problems facing real people; prudishness is not something I practice or believe in,and feel it is silly and counterproductive).

On a deeper level, though, the BJ has entered our culture as a primary sexual element, and not as an occasional treat for the man. Many men expect one on the second or third date. It has come to be a synonym, as with this woman, for domination.

This is a world purely characterized by physicality. I even once heard a man say that it really didn’t matter if it was a man or woman delivering it. There is no emotional connection at all. It is purely sensation, and as such utterly devoid of quality, and of the feminine.

It is the lingam without the yoni. It negates the “father” aspect entirely, since it is not procreative, and need not involve a woman at all.

More generally, even in “normal” sex, I feel that this return of space is absent in most relationships. Men look to “sex” early in life, and rarely are able to turn to love with the ease that would be the case if sex per se were not so prominant. I have long felt this preoccupation with “getting laid” was a curse. Yes, you can do it. You can find a willing woman. I did, and so do most young men. But you have left behind the possibility of LEARNING from it, of taking away from that woman what she actually has to give you besides her body. And for her part, as I have often said, she forgets who she was over time.

We need to return to the circle. It is the path of health and fulfillment. The way to do this is for men in particular–but to a lesser extent woman as well who have been masculinized in their sexual habits–to increase their capacity for feeling, and decrease their focus purely on the physical. As I have said a number of times, I feel Kum Nye is a good means for doing this. So is consciously valuing the women in your life, and realizing that they are giving to you even when you don’t consciously see it.

Hit the art museums in Milwaukee and Chicago over two days. The way I do art museums, any museum, is I look at everything. I am tired when I am done. I am definitely arted out. It was useful though.

I had many thoughts, but will only share one tonight, as I am tired. Walking through the South Asian section of the Chicago museum, it hit me that “Art is that which organizes culture”. It does not create it, per se, but it organizes it.

Medieval churches were artworks, as they organized culture. City planning, on this rendering, becomes a type of art, since it organizes culture.

I once dreamed of living in Tibet in an endless winter. We had a shrine (my wife and I) where we had to go down a very narrow, chimney like tunnel, then crawl through a very narrow tunnel, at which point the room appeared, underground, that was spacious. You had to have that sense of contraction to fully appreciate the release. It was dark, too, now that I remember, and only slowly lit by those already there, and of course filled with iconographic images. First time, the tunnel filled you with fear, but the whole gestalt worked at cultivating a state of mind, which is to say a state of culture. It was an artwork.

Speaking and writing, on this rendering, are also acts of art. They organize how we think about ourselves, who we are, what we believe together, and what we want to do and why.

I will offer this as an open question: what has been the organizational effect of most modern art, say since the Cubists?

What is goodness? As I have argued, it is a contextualized tendency, in which you pursue your own happiness and that of others with equal vigor.

The problem in modern philosophy is that Plato said it was, in effect, a thing, more real than real. It emitted a shadow, but we could not see it directly.

Plato may have been right, but he was impractical. Practically, it doesn’t matter if Goodness “exists” or not. We have decisions to make. Do we make them more intelligently, or less? Do we take the fact of our existence and make the best of it, or do we decide to give up and take “angst” as somehow emblematic of something other than being fucked up in the head, normally as a result of ingesting stupid ideas emitted by evil, confused people?

I have defined Goodness as a “volitional character disposition in which you are capable of living happily on your own, and in which you take pleasure from the happiness of others.”

This has endless possible contexual implementations, doesn’t it? Imagine, as an example, being a German soldier drafted against your will, and assigned to an SS unit running a death camp. You feel genuine sympathy for the people being murdered, but if you show it, you risk murder yourself, and you know that your wife and children will need you there after the war. What do you do? Do you perform some foolishly romantic but pointless act, like releasing a roomful of prisoners, who enjoy freedom for about 1 minute, prior to getting gunned down in a courtyard somewhere? What can you do?

Surrepetitiously, can you not look some of them in the eye, letting them know you see them as human beings? When you deal with their bodies, can you not do so with some measure of respect? Can you not, above all, remember who you are, and not surrender to the horror, not accept it as acceptable? Can you not then go home and live life with increased energy, love your wife and family with greater gratitude, and pray for those who were killed?

What is the proper level for the ocean? As I understand the matter, it has been some 40′ higher than it is at present in the remote past, and some similar number lower in ice ages, when all the water is sucked up into vast ice flows. Which was the exact correct level?

As far as that goes, is the ocean level? To get something level, you have to freeze it, don’t you? And then it isn’t level: it just isn’t moving. Wave bob up, and they bob down.

Goodness is like this. It is always trying to do good where you can, when you can. Sometimes, the water is frozen, and there is little you can do. You soldier on. Sometimes, there is a lot you can do: but still you float like a small boat on the waves, going up and down, moving in and out, doing what you can.

A formulation I like is that all moral decisions should be local, imperfect, and necessary. Goodness is the same, but I would say it is local, imperfect, and organic. It is based on a connection with your circumstances, and with the people in those circumstances, that is non-compulsive, and sincere. It is relaxed, but not apathetic, and capable of great diligence.

As it must be practiced to succeed, Leftism uses a combination of deception, character assassination, and fear-mongering to implement its goals. As an example, the Great Depression was clearly lengthened by people more concerned–in their own words at the time–with “reform” than with recovery. Social Security had nothing to do with recovery. Neither did their fascist price controls, granting the right to labor to form legally protected, monopolistic labor cartels, or the decision to legalize labor violence. All of these things helped a few people, and hurt far more. But they were implemented because people were scared, and FDR said they would help. When people are panicked, they are susceptible to stupid ideas.

But that wasn’t the point of this post. The point was that the essence of leftist political strategy has come to be dominated by the Alinskyan tactic of personalizing and defaming. You can attack figures like Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush without too much trouble. It is much harder to personalize and attack a broad-based movement based upon principles and a rational understanding of the facts of the issues at hand. You can demonize people for wanting to take dog food away from starving old blind ladies living in cans, but you can’t demonize them for pointing out that if you spend more than you have on a long term basis, you have nothing. There will be NO money for the little old ladies in the shoes.

This is obvious to many people, and these people are now politically active. They are not just voting, but they are educating themselves, taking to the streets, and organizing.

If you demonize a large-scale, heterogeneous movement with no clear leaders–we have de facto spokespeople, but not leaders–you necessarily demonize the individuals within that movement. And to the extent that you are telling patent lies about those people–the most obvious example being that racism somehow underlies a desire to avoid financial Armageddon–you permanently alienate them.

It is one thing to tell lies about Ronald Reagan. Most people never met him, and had no prospect of ever meeting him. He was an abstraction, outside of his public speeches, which of course the media covered selectively to control the narrative.

But when you start attacking normal Americans, that is an entirely different animal. To be effective, propaganda has to keep people within its informational space. Good propagandists understand they have to back down at times–they have to control the boil–so that when they need the outrage, and when they need to tell the large lies, they have an open conduit. Often, this will mean telling the actual truth 95% of the time.

Calling normal Americans racists who are not even remotely racist violates this principle. It is bad propaganda, but the Left really has no choice. This really is a broad-based, grassroots movement that has set as its task the destruction of all the destructions the Left had planned for America, many of which are already in place, such as broad-based control of our retirement system in the form of Social Security.

So what to do? Attack people who will in that very process wake up decisively and permanently; or let the movement grow, foster actual debate, and pursue ends which are inimical to the tyranny that is the end goal of all radicals on the Left?

This is an interesting year, and this will be an interesting election. Bachman can be demonized, as of course have been Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Horowitz and others. But you can’t attack the people whose support you need. All you can do is protect your base, which in my view is at best a third of the electorate.

Been logging some miles. Was in a very well done, very thorough art museum today, and walking out I was thinking about modernity. You know, the Renaissance preoccupation with antiquity was already a sort of identity crisis. Look at our Capital: Greek and Roman ideas.

It seems to me that the orienting idea that has led to the eruption of economic wealth and accompanying political liberty in the modern era is the notion of progress. People have always made things. The Industrial Revolution did not change this. What changed was the idea that the process itself of making things could be improved. Pari pasu with this came–predictably–the notion of applying that same engineering mindset to SOCIAL progress.

When I look at modern art, the dominant emotion is confusion. What are they trying to do? Why? They don’t know either. They are searching furiously for the Big Idea. Normally they settle for the banality of cultural erosion and resulting compulsory moral and economic egalitarianism. This is a stupid idea, but they can’t do better.

My own Big Idea is that there is no need for a Big Idea. Humanity has survived to this point with many different Big Ideas, and can continue to do so if only those without ideas do not insist on imposing their nihilism on the rest of us, to our detriment, and to their only short term benefit.

I want to be clear: Evil works, over short periods of time. You eradicate anxiety, anger, sadness, and all the other emotions that seem to plague the very wealthy and the overly educated (not infrequently the same people) through cruelty. It is my considered opinion that places like that pictured in Hostel actually exist. I have more than once wondered if the hundreds of murders that plagued Juarez were not in fact arranged by, shall we say, evil “cultural entrepreneurs”.

But this effect fades, the pain becomes all the more the farther down this road people go. No amount of cocaine, booze, money, women/men, possessions, or anything else can ease this. Only choosing to do the right thing, locally, imperfectly, can do that.

Few thoughts. Back to my Old Fashioned.

The essence of the American ideal is not the idea that we have always been perfect, but that our system is perfectable. If you look at, say, Medieval Europe, what you had was a static system, that mapped the social order onto the order of the universe, as something given, unchanging, and unchangeable. Obviously, this was wrong, but social reform is not something anyone could initiate without a severe risk of premature death or imprisonment.

Look at the civil rights movement. Who led it? Americans. Who opposed it? Also Americans. Who wanted us in Vietnam? Americans. Who opposed our involvement there? Americans.

The use of excessive abstraction when it comes to complex social and personality systems often leads to perceptual errors. Academics call this “essentializing”, as in “the essence of the American project is racist imperialism”, or “the essence of the American project is enlightened political and social liberalism.” Pointing out the contingency and potential fallibility of the “big story” was the reason I coined the perhaps infelicitous term “tubaforms”. You know, you need tubas in a marching band, but most people don’t find them beautiful.

The point to be made here, though, is that the question should never be who we “are”, but who we WANT to be, and how we plan to get there. Progress depends on a plan, and plans that will actually work in complex social systems have to be based on principles that people actually hold.

What I term Regressivism does not work because it does not have actual principles. They are quite often like the retarded mechanics in “Brazil”, the movie, who take a working system and completely destroy it, even after being told it was in perfect working order, since “things don’t just fix themselves.”

Here is the final scene of the plumbers, who present a nice metaphor for a system which is broken, but which cannot be fixed (normally: Gilliam allows us a nice fantasy here).

There was no person outside the central power authority in the Soviet Union who could fundamentally change anything. There is no one in China outside the few hundred men who rule it who can fundamentally change anything. The system was immune to reform, since it was presumed to be perfect, in exactly the same way that medieval Europe was presumed to be perfect; and it was held in check by the same combination of indoctrination and overt use of terror (torture) and power as that of the Catholic Church.

Cultures are always organized locally. They always consist in people doing things in ways that make sense to them. The people of northern England behave just a bit differently than those in the South, and this is the way it should be.

Culture, too, is internal. It is what you actually believe. It cannot be mandated, although those interested in mind control have no doubt spent much effort trying to make that happen. Behavior is external. Behavior, in large measure, CAN be compelled through the use of power.

Morality is culture. Legality is power.

No system can self organize in a condition of excessive legalism.

This–and the last couple posts–have been a bit meandering, but are hopefully helpful to someone.

Hell, since I’m already doing figure eights: I’ve always wanted to be an artist, but seem to lack talent in artsy things. I recently realized, though, that THIS–what I do here and on my other site–meets the goal I had set, which was the creation of new objects that were an expression not just of me, but which were connected in an interesting way with reality.

It is like I’ve created a download that adapts itself to the personality and tendencies of the person downloading it. “Culture”, per se, does not exist. It is a reification of the discernable patterns of masses of people in motion, which vary constantly, but in largely predictable ways. I like to think of myself as injecting little tumblers, or “chakras”–little spots of compressed, complex light–into this system, such that they expand and alter the proverbial flow of water and air.

This is what I enjoy doing, and I’m vain enough to think I’m good at it.

Core questions I always ask myself is: what are you trying to accomplish, and how will you know when you are there? As I have said often, there are four principle cultural tasks: the creation and distribution of meaning, truth, power, and wealth. Art, it seems to me, ought properly to be pursuing the first two tasks. It should inspire people, and teach them deep truths about life and humanity.

In the last century, under the thrall of complete failure in meaning formation, “truths” have been distributed which are anything but. We are told the permanent point of human existence is economic and political equality. Nothing more. This has led to the subordinatin of art to, what? Supporting change in the political and economic spheres.

The essence of the Fabian idea is slow internal subversion, not just by suggesting new ideas–I will note that Socialists do not HAVE any new cultural ideas, being in a formal sense nihilists–but much more by undermining old ideas, by attacking notions of God, and Goodness, and common sense morality; by undermining notions of beauty and transcendance, and by denigrating traditional ideas of social roles and responsibilities, as seen outside the direct control of an ubiquitous State.

This has not happened yet in Muslim (whose radicalism is both a reaction to and internalization of the Fabian project of moral subversion: reaction to, in that they hew to their traditions; internalization of in that they reject in their methods their own actual traditions, and adopt instead the amoral, unprincipled terroristic methods of Leftists) and other nations, to the extent they would like, but it is their goal to eradicate all difference whatever, the world over. We are to be interchangeable cogs, managed by ruthless lunatics.

I use the Franklin-Covey planner pages. Every day has a new quote. The quote for today is from Sidney Webb: “The inevitability of gradualness cannot fail to be appreciated”.

Given the Mormonism of the owners of that company–as least Stephen Covey–it is highly ironic that they would include a quote from a man who very much wished to see the Soviet model duplicated around the world, and who dedicated his life to spreading the lies necessary to make that idea palatable to silly people.

The essence of their project is aggregating power. I see historical ignorants act from time to time as if there were any fundamental difference between Nazism and Bolshevism. Was there a complete abrogation of legal rights? Yes, in both cases. Mass terror? Yes in both cases. Mass murder? Yes in both cases. Did Webb approve of both systems? Of course.

One gets the sense reading about Webb, his wife, and his pal George Bernard Shaw, that in their ideal society a person could be sent to the gas chambers for failing to provide stimulating dinner conversation, or for wearing an unsuitable tie. They would of course laugh it off over tea the next day, and plan their next murder, all in very cultivated accents.

This facade of civility is what we see to this very day in large sections of our creative communities (note: business requires a lot of creativity, so I am here referring only to those who have arrogated to themselves the right to speak about general cultural issues in academic and creative works of art of all sorts), in which the most horrific crimes–real crimes, involving real people having the bones in their bodies broken, being raped, being burnt alive, being buried alive–are glossed over, in favor of focus on the minute and accidental crimes of the civilized West.

I drove by a “Starving Artists” cafe the other day, or something like that. I got to thinking: why does the stereotypical starving artist starve? Why not get a real job? What is the point?

As I see it, there are a few answers. One is vanity. These people want to be recognized as the geniuses they believe themselves to be. This is common enough the world over in all trades. Their need to feel important trumps their need to secure a secure living. Most people who major in English feel superior to those who major in business, in my observation. But they aren’t.

Changing the world for the better. This happens seldom enough in art, but it does happen.

A genuine belief that the talent will eventually pay. This is the mindset of the entrepreneur.

Pleasure. It seems to me that this is perhaps the best answer: you simply enjoy doing what you do so much that you prefer poverty to abandoning it.

Edit: two more I might add would a be an inability to be happy NOT doing art, which is probably a subcategory of pleasure; and an inability to do normal work due to mental defects, which seems to have been the case for many better known artists in the modern era.

It seems to me that a well constructed–which is to say accurate and complete–perception has an esthetic element to it. There is a dynamic to problem solving that in my view is fully comparable to that of perspective, and light and shadow in painting; to the careful choice of felicitous words in poetry and prose; to harmonies and melodies in music.

I had a vision the other day of using a “painting” approch to debate the other day. One person writes out their argument on a given topic on a sheet of paper mounted to the wall. Someone who disagrees with them does the same. Wherever the “opponent” wishes, the other person must expand or contract their perception. They must abstract complex prose, or defend on the level of detail apparently unanchored premises.

Difference can be bridged, if approached in this way. Most bad thinking is the result of mistaking abstractions for facts: a good example is “the rich become rich at the expense of the poor”. This CAN be true. It HAS been true in some times and places, but not over time within a free market economy in which legal rights are defended consistently and honestly.

As an example of this method, I would demand of someone making this statement that they define “free market”, and show to what extent our markets are actually free. Housing is not free. Banking is not free. We do not even control our money supply, even though all aspects of our economic well being depend on monetary policy. Construction is not free. Many manufacturers are forced to deal with labor cartels protected by the force of law.

Worth pondering.

Lamestream media, leftwing media, whatever: the reality is they are COMPLICIT in a lie, actually a series of lies. They work to further agendas with no actual moral content but habits of conformity.

One prime example is the legacy of the history of the war in Vietnam. How many people know that the North Vietnamese Communists routinely used children for suicide terrorism? Or that they routinely slaughtered entire villages, and engaged in very wide-spread campaigns of assassination and torture, only rarely of actual combatants, and usually merely as a means of compelling submission to lunacy?

Here is a listing of some of the atrocities. They go back to the 1930’s, long before Ho Chi Minh conquered North Vietnam for Communism. This listing only dates to the late 60’s, and is very partial. I will note that Diem’s brother was murdered by Communists by being buried alive.

I also wrote out a good speech from “The Green Berets.” Think, ponder.

Link is here.