Month: December 2015

I am slowly working my way through movies I probably should have seen years ago.  I’ve been focusing on Jim Jarmusch lately–A Night on Earth is my next–but needed a break.  I find his films take work.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps because he does not fill in any of the blank spaces, or offer obvious answers to the problems he does make obvious.

Couple notes.

1) there is an obvious, to me, comparison with 9/11.  Ponder, if you have not, how that date was obviously chosen for symbolic effect.  Can you think of any other combination of digits which would so conjure emergency and fear?  4/11?  3/3?

I am not entirely willing to say I feel sure 9/11 was perpetrated by high elements in our government, but it seems absolutely clear that the investigation was botched from the outset by the destruction of evidence, and that wrong and empirically indefensible conclusions were reached by an official body after what could and should have been a thorough, honest, and professional investigation.  These points are in my view beyond dispute.

Neither is it in dispute that the conspiracy extended at a minimum to pre-planted explosives/cutting charges in Tower 7, and almost certainly to all three towers.

2) The malefactors were shown to be hypocritical Christians.  Particularly in Britain this was then, and is even more so today, ridiculous.  It was an attempt to villify Bush, obviously, but as such constituted itself a propaganda.  Many Occupy Wall Street protesters seem to have failed to grasp that totalitarians use many rhetorics, but that the rhetoric of the Left has most often been used to build the social order that film portrayed.  Hitler and his National Socialists found their support among working class Germans, and it was not his universal healthcare, education and other State-funded perks that Leftists objected to, or to his de facto control of the German economy and habit of expropriating the private property of citizens deemed undesirable,  but rather his nationalism, and particularly his opposition to the Soviet state.

But Hitler was to Stalin roughly what Trotsky was: a disavowed brother.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  And self evidently, they were close brothers for a time.  They each viewed the other as seeing the world in the same way.  That was part of the reason Stalin found it so hard to believe Hitler has betrayed him, which caused his military enormous tactical and strategic difficulties in the early stage of the invasion.

3) And by what process of logic does a group which fears a totalitarian government want to abjure the right to gun ownership?  As the police commissioner said, in response to the question “what do you think will happen?”: “what usually happens when unarmed people face people with guns”. Those masses would have broken and fled in the first volley, had those soldiers fired.  The tactical situation would have been much different if there had been a gun under every cloak.

It is so hard not to see Leftists as unprincipled imbeciles who munch propaganda happily all their lives, that I have ceased making the effort.  Obviously.  They are stupid, do not understand history, do not think deeply, and live their lives in a muddle of sentiment, vacuous pipe dreams, and the very real if unconscious acceptance of despotic violence as a means to the end of their moral confusions, but not an end to human suffering.  They know utopias are not born at gunpoint, but being weak they have ceased to care.

4) And finally, V never would have gotten away with anything in the modern surveillance state. He walks out the door, and then disappears to the authorities.  How?  There would be cameras on every street corner, informers on every block.  There would be satellites and even drones watching every street, every alley.  If there were sewers they would be covered with cameras too.  Just put yourself in the seat of a competent authoritarian, particularly one facing one person.  How hard would it be to catch this guy when you can call curfew and detain anyone you want at any time?

I see this fallacy often.  I saw it in the last Hunger Games movie.  People seem to fail to grasp that cameras everywhere means an ubiquitous eye.  American movies are filled with miraculous escapes which are not recognized as such merely because they cut to the next scene. In the real world, the people with resources and planning and the upper hand pretty much always win.

I wonder sometimes if these are not mere plot devices, but an unconscious effort to avoid awareness of just how tight the noose has become.

My sense is that an acceptance of death itself is a prerequisite to the acceptance of the modern world. It is giving my some difficulty–this is indeed an audacious project, to remain consciously awake but cultivate inner calm–but I am making progress.  My world is an odd one, but the one I choose.

Read this .  It is really quite astonishing.

This problem is easily resolved: make student loan debt like any other form of debt, dischargable in Chapter 7, and reorganizable in Chapter 13.  This would force banks to make intelligent loans, and force universities to stop their fucking feeding frenzy and rationalize tuition costs within the constraints of the actual value of their product.  As things stand, market forces have been eliminated entirely.  There is nothing to hold any of these bastards accountable, on the university side or the banking side.  This applies even if it is “the government”–which is to say that monstrosity that takes taxes in from one group, and feeds them out to another, often borrowing from our grandchildren to do so–making the loans.

I will submit as well, as a public minded citizen who detests most banks and our banking system in general, for reasons I have articulated at great length, that you can pay off student loans with other loans which CAN be discharged in bankruptcy.  If you are willing to sacrifice a house, you can use a second or third mortgage.  You can use credit cards and lines of credit.

This is a poor solution, and yet, remarkably, still better than a Terminator-like debt that follows you to the very edge of the grave.  Ethically, you can assume not one of the entities making these loans wants you anywhere but on your knees.

An actually Liberal Democrat Party would recognize this.  But of course the Democrats have become an elitist anti-Populist Party which actually serves the interests only of a power hungry elite who are quite willing to use any rhetoric, to pander to anyone who will listen, in the full confidence that no one will ever hold them accountable for servicing the constituencies–blacks, the poor and working classes, the cause of peace–which they claim to value.

How else to explain their enthusiasm for importing millions of competitors for scarce jobs, which can only make them harder to find for native-born Americans, and make them pay less?

How else to explain the wars Obama and Hillary have started, which have only damaged our national security?

I have realized that if life is to be an adventure, I need to have freedom of movement, and one of the things judgement–particularly combined with Emerson’s foolish consistencies–does, is create no go zones.

Who will I need to be tomorrow?  I have no fucking clue.  My line is not straight in any visible sense.  It is always the next step, but how can I know where that will be?

Trying too hard to be smart will always make you stupid.  I see it every goddamned day.  I have learned, more or less, though, to keep my mouth shut.

There is possibility in silence.  When you are speaking, you are telling the world who you cannot be.  Why?

I am currently playing Fallout 3.  It is set in a post-Apocalyptic Washington D.C./northern Virginia, with many of the ruins, I suspect, modeled with occasional fidelity on actually existing places they mapped out and included, like Arlington National Cemetery.

As an unknown intellectual–I will use that word here–I see no limits on where I can go.  I have no reputation at all, which is a clear blessing.

And I am finding that video games calm me.  It is a way of practicing persistence, and experiencing success in a very tightly controlled environment.  Some situations I have to go through 20-30-50 times to master, since I am not a quick learner.  I tend to want to do frontal assaults, and they usually fail.  I don’t use my brain, and this game requires the use of intelligence.

It is a way of harnessing aggressive and destructive energies in a controlled environment.  On the one hand we read that first person shooters are very similar to the way that the Army trains people to kill, which it has gotten very good at. David Grossman has written about this quite a bit.  I don’t doubt this.  All tools have their place, and this sort of “tool” is available to everyone at all times, and some people are made sick by this one, particularly those who use immersion in a fake world as real world acculturation.

At the same time, it is connecting me, personally, with energies that were already there.  Combined with a meditative practice it constitutes a sort of Tantric immersion in death.  I see the effects in my dreams, and I watch them, and learn from them.  On balance, I have learned needed lessons.  In my own case, it is making me more compassionate.

Traumatized individuals, particularly, have some part of themselves that is trapped in a subversive sweat, a sense of helplessness, within which is enfolded both life and expressive rage.  You cannot get the one without the other.

I am a very different sort of person.  I am unique in my experience.  I have not knowingly met anyone like me, although I look like a redneck construction worker, and have often been mistaken as such.  If I am invisible, then others like me must be too.

Be that as it may, my experience may differ from most.  But I suspect that the sheer volume of the video game business–about $100 billion or so–speaks to a variety of cultural needs that games meet.

Could we perhaps posit that anything anyone can get addicted to meets on some level, and in an appropriate proportion, an actual need?  Do not most people need at times a River Lethe, sex, work, risk, an immersive experience?

One of the deepest spiritual insights you can get to is that we are all born with an instinct to kill.  Our alimentary tract has equipped itself through evolutionary adaptation with a perceptual and locomotive apparatus that meets its imperative for survival.

On a “spiritual path” we are not supposed to speak of this.  We are supposed to cultivate compassion, and wisdom and grace; humility, kindness, self abnegation and service.

But as I grow I realize I need to know and befriend the part of me that sometimes wants to stick a knife in someone’s throat.  We all have it.  Let me repeat: we all have it.

So often growth is conceived as a falling away of undesired traits.  You lose anger, and you lose greed, and you lose self absorption.  This is a simple idea, one which does not require conquering the fear of what lies within us, our primal demons, our ancient decay, the atavistic desire for rapine we share with animals.

In recent days I have been meeting these parts.  They are terrifying.  Anyone who really knows, who really sees, who really contacts on an emotional level what they are actually capable of, must feel shock, and other emotions I don’t quite have words for. I do not want to shoehorn them into inadequate words.  Terror and horror, though, certainly belong in this mix.

Ponder the quasi-death cult which is the obsession with relics, with the bones of supposed holy men.

Ponder Saint Simeon the Elder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Stylites

There are several interesting points here.  One, that he chose to leave the world, where he lived in the constant presence, according the iconography, of temptation, which he resisted through what would amount to physical torture if it were inflicted on someone unwilling.

What is this temptation?  His own anger and violence, which he merely avoided and did not process through his asceticism.  Sex–primal, animal passion–is merely a gateway drug to everything else.  A good solution allows one to live happily in the company of others, in peace, in communion and community, as we were meant to do.

Second, the fight over his “relics”, which are the pieces of his skeleton.  The Christians, certainly, but I believe also some Buddhists and some Muslims of some sects, revered a thumb of a saint, or a knuckle; a knee, or perhaps even a skull.  God lived in these.  God blessed the believers through these bones, or so it was believed.

We all know death waits for us.  It cannot be avoided, even if its fact can be pressed out of polite conversation, its existence made something which happens somewhere else until you reach an age where everyone you know is dying.  In our world, that is 60 years or more of avoiding most death. Pestilence and war are strangers to most of us.

But I think acceptance of death is tied to the acceptance of our own culpability in the violence of every era.  When I say culpability I do not think most of us are directly, physically guilty.  What I mean is that some part of us relates to the desires enacted by some for death, torture, and glorifying both.  None of us are innocent.  And none of us are truly absolved by the “blood of the lamb”, or by submission to the Koran or Torah.  Or by sacrifice, of animals, people, or our own comfort.

Walking through the valley of death is a necessary rite of passage for us all.  We need fear our evil, our own capacity for destruction, but only until we know them, and walk with them too, until they make themselves known and accessible.

I am getting to these places in recent days, and it is freeing me from bonds I did not know tied me down, prisons whose walls I could not see.

We all see the sky as the limit, but in truth we live in an infinite universe.  We need the sky as a limit, and use it as such.

Who would you be, if you were a ball of light, without arms, without legs, without an up and down?

It’s a reasonably well guarded fact–one at least that I only recently became aware of, despite what I think is a well earned self image of being reasonably knowledgeable–that only about 1 in 20 AA members achieves long term sobriety. Most no doubt achieve short bouts of being clean, likely often with the assistance of court orders and looming financial disasters, but not long term.

This means that the job of addiction counselor is likely one filled, also, with tales of chronic failure.

I was thinking about it today, and I think if I were doing that job the first thing I would do would be counter-intuitive: I would ask them to take their time and provide as comprehensive an inventory as possible of what that substance gives them.  I would ask them to write poems of praise, provide music that supports them in that habit, and really inhabit consciously what is in that world.

This is what addicts are really up against.  They understand conceptually that, logically, their poison will shorten their life, damage relationships, etc.  They have been through the list of negatives that naive people think should be enough to get them to quit.  These lists, from the perspective of non-addicts, should be enough to make ANYONE quit.

But they have never been addicted in the first place.  What drives addiction is a deep-seated emotional lack, and no one who has not experienced it can really understand it.

In own case, alcohol has helped protect my self from very vicious assaults from a deep place within my being.  But I got to that place, and my perception of need to drink has plummeted as a consequence.

I had many good times drinking.  I really like alcohol.  I think I always will.

But I am looking at the inventory of the needed things it did for me, and that list has been shortened near to zero.  Right now, it is a cure for boredom, insomnia, and confusion (read procrastination) , all of which I have strategies for dealing with.  It is not a solution for a deep wound.  It is not a solution for a failed sense of self.  It is not a balm for fear.  I no longer need shelter from the wind.  At one time, and recently, I did.  Absolutely.  I do not regret my drinking one bit.  

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out.  

The mind is in general the least interesting part of the self.  You might say “but oh the life of the mind is fascinating”.  Really?  Where does “fascination” happen?  Are naked women not also fascinating if you are a heterosexual man?  The “life of the mind” leads somewhere, and that somewhere is unquestionably interesting, but it is not in the mind.  As I have said repeatedly, the mind is a tool, and when used as a source of aesthetic pleasure it tends to be abused.  It is separated from the need for usefulness, which is its main value. Pleasure can and should be pursued elsewhere.  Where, elsewhere, is a proper task for thinking.  The enjoyment of elsewhere, is not.

I just did a forward bend for 21 minutes.  I have just discovered that very long stretches lead interesting places.  If you bring a quality of patient attention, of the sort used in Kum Nye, then a great deal of movement and motion happen in that 21 minutes.  Now, I move around.  I rock gently at the limit of my range of motion, as I read is useful.  I sit up and focus on my upper back.  I alternately push one leg then the other out a couple inches.

But I have found areas of tightness will over time release information. This is fascinating.  My next experiment is going to focus on my very tight hip flexors for an hour.  I am going to alternate myofascial release with stretching.  I’ll post results.  I suspect it will tell me something, something non-verbal, which means I can’t write about it, but something useful.

It seems to me that the cultural consequences of Leftist ideology are vastly more pernicious than most of us perceive.

I was thinking about babies 200 years ago.  Who calmed them?  We assume the mother, but in most homes was there not also an aunt or two or three, and a grandmother, whose energy was in most cases likely much more serene and patient than that of the young mother?

The cultural model in most of the world is not to create remote places to cast our unwanted old and abandon them to the care of the State, much as Rousseau envisioned for unwanted children (of which he personally fathered a couple).

No, the old live with the young and help out. They cook, and care for the home.  They exist in that cultural space and impart what they know of life, which I am hopefully not being too romantic in thinking once consisted in something more than how to invest in stocks and tips for playing golf.

Does it not seem that in casting off our old, we cast off both our past, and our connection to the future?  Can we not learn to live for more than the weekend, the sportsing and beer, the Cosmos and girl chat?

Here is what I wonder: does some of this hypersensitivity among the young come from the fact that their mothers went back to work a month or two after having them, and were never fully emotionally present to them because they worked all day and were tired?  Their care-givers varied at the daycare, and the grandmothers were in other States.

We are supposed to exist as productive economic atoms, able to move and merge with other atoms at will.  But we are born to live in webs: of connection, of  meaning, of history.

It is just one of the ironies, the intellectual hypocrisies, of Socialism that it presents itself as a giving, loving, compassionate creed, but that in actual fact it separates people from one another, from their past, from their people and creeds.

Yes, we can say tribalism leads to violence.  But Liberalism was intended to solve that problem.  And it still can, if we return to a genuinely Liberal ethos, as opposed to the overt Fascism which has overtaken our universities, and largely our news media, and political order.

Edit: You know, a big part of what enables nursing homes and full time skilled nursing, is economic progress.  Wealth.  People buy enormous homes and make no place for mom and dad.  And part of this is mutually desired.  What I am not noting is how much tension, how many fights, how much unwished unpleasantness must have attended, and must still attend, the care of the elderly.

What I had in mind was Social Security and Medicare, which pay for State run homes, but the progress (and regress) made possible by free markets and property rights (what is mistakenly called “Capitalism”, which was Marx’s term for a system he critiqued in so doing) is a big part of it too.

It seems to me you have to first become fully conscious of who you are in order to begin to choose a path of growth.  Until you know yourself, that is your primary work

If you equate your mind with your self, it is easy to believe that it is easy to change.

But you are a pattern of energy flow, some of which is overtly emotional, some of which is something else which needs its own name.  I will call it “that”, as that is the least reductive.

People, and the world, are vastly more complex and interesting than is assumed by those who are compelled to conquer both.  You can get outer silence, clearly, and external order through violence, and call it peace.

But true calm and peace flow outward from the inside.  Nothing in the outer world can equal the peace and joy of what lies within all of us.

If you think about it, no matter where you go, or what you do, you will always be the center of your own life, even if that life is focused on others.  You are the middle.  Everything you will ever know and see and experience and learn and enjoy and fear will come to you here, where you are.  There is nowhere else, for you.

So often we seek something out there.  If it is to exist for us, it can never be anywhere but here, and now.  If it was, and is not now, then it is not.  If it is there, it is not here.

Perhaps this is gibberish.  Perhaps not.