Month: January 2018

I think I am done being mean on the internet.  I was trading insults with some left-winger, as I used to do for hours daily, and I started coughing uncontrollably.  I’d been smoking a pipe, and eating some food that sometimes causes congestion, but I think it had psychological roots.  Something was telling me to stop.

I’ve been clearing some space on the counter, and looked up pour-over coffee, since I’d like to get rid of my coffee pot, and there they had a number of articles on dealing with your kids leaving.  Somebody had quoted that very sad Beatles song.  You know the one.  I have two kids in college, and it makes me sad.  Everything great about having little kids is gone.  My job, now, is to wait and listen.  To wait for them, if they need me, and to listen, if they need to talk.  My job is to be there in an emergency, or where needed.  But no more.

I do think it is a feature of our age that many parents have a very hard time letting go, perhaps more than in ages past, although I have no way of knowing.  Life is just so lonely for so many people.  Couples who have been focused on parenting for a couple decades find themselves alone together.  The reason I got divorced–and now you really know I’m changing, since I am allowing shades of genuine autobiography–was I could see that day coming, 10-15-20 years in the future, and I did not want that pain and terror.  I made the right decision.  It has been a hard, hard fucking time being me for some time, but slowly I am fighting my way out of the spider webs (another fantastic Lord of the Rings metaphor), and that would not have been possible without exorbitant amounts of alone time and down time.

And I thought: I’m not getting any younger.  I’m already trying to decide how to get old.  I think I have a good  plan, which I am in the process of executing–details if and when I feel like it, but don’t hold your breath–but my God we all get old, get sick, and die.  All of us.  Trump voters.  Trump haters.  Non-voters.  Pot heads, heathens, evangelicals, dog lovers, dog haters, ice fisherman, and deer hunters.

I can stand being mean to other people as long as I can stand being mean to myself, as long as I can be cold to myself, as long as I am willing to make myself stand outside, too.

But I seem to be softening.  There is a melting going on.  There might even be a word for looking at other people as not so different from me, for looking at them with understanding, and with a smile in my heart.

Has anyone said this yet?  Have I?  I can’t remember.  If not, let me be the first.

Edit: this post is meandering.  I know it.  I am not going to fix it.  But I think it hits some good points.

I was watching Martha Graham’s “The Life of a Dancer” last night, and thought I detected a bit of pretentiousness.  I thought well, if anybody deserves it, it was her.

But I think the more useless society deems an activity, the more intensely the practitioner must value it.  Art becomes intensely important, in part, because it is not immediately practical, because it does not fit the American propagandas of efficiency and productiveness.  Of what USE is a bunch of people hopping around in tights, not infrequently coming close to being copulatory?

In my own case, I looked at it, and decided they could teach me something about sex, done properly.  We don’t do “it” right much any more, or so it seems to me.  Pornography makes it all about the oohing and aaahing, and the varied positions, and the duration, and the climaxes, of course.  There is a large in-between zone, that used to be seen by most.  She has one dance about flirtation.  I liked it.  Making sex somewhat Verboten, means you dance around it, figuratively and literally.  There are many small pleasures, short of orgasm, and a large number of which are in some respects BETTER than an orgasm.  Life on a pleasant day, with a theme of, but not reality of, sex.  You can imagine that, can’t you?  What could be is so often much more fun than what is.  The pleasure is often in the chasing, and not the apprehending (Tom Waits line).

But then I got to thinking further, and thought about this whole anti-bourgeois thing, which grew to permeate Western culture, including American culture, some time between 1850 and 1950, with the 1960’s just being the Pop version of it, the version for kids, the version with toys and games and amusements of all sorts.

What do you get, taking a counter-cultural stance?  Being an “Artiste”?  It seems to me there are two elements to this, and two ways of going about it.  The first is to truly enjoy being who you are, to take genuine pleasure in life, to simply not care what people think because you have developed your own way.  I don’t think very many people can do this, but don’t doubt that some do.

The second is to consider yourself ABOVE the plebians, because of your superior artistry, because of your rejection of their antiquated and dull values, because of your radical politics, your vision for a radically different future, your refusal to be practical or ask realistic and obvious questions.

I was this person for a minute, so perhaps I am projecting, but I don’t think so.  I grew out of that phase, because Truth has always been important to me, not in a theoretical way, but in the way which allows me to predict the outcome of things, of ideas, of people, of my own way.  I have not always been a conservative, but became one quickly once I started reading history and economics.  I chose not to pursue an academic career because I got tired of smelling like books.  That is not quite the full story, but it’s actually pretty close.

Pretentiousness would have been nearly my only solace, reading recondite subjects, writing papers none but a handful of fellow professionals would read, which would have been irrelevant to the world at large entirely.  Put another way, I nearly put myself in a cave, where I could convince myself my isolation was my superiority.  Perhaps I still do that somewhat, but I am much more open than I was.

But the point I wanted to make is what becomes of those who choose this path in life, the anti-bourgeois path, the path away from money, from success as Americans understand it.  What becomes of the Greek scholar, or the only-somewhat published author, or the artist who is reduced to touring art fairs around the country, who once wanted to change the world? What becomes of the committed radical, who decided when they were 25 they were going to change the world, and who somehow reach 55 without really having done anything other than shout, yell, hand out fliers, work phone banks, read radical books, cover their car with bumper stickers, and attend Bernie Sanders rallies?

There is a solipsism in all this, there is a wandering without finding, there is a narcissism, and there is a moral pretentiousness bordering on the comical.

You know these people.  You have met them.  What do they have, if they give up their idealism?  What do they have, if they admit they were wrong?  They have nothing.  The hippies, who have spent their lives proud of their “victory” in getting America to retreat from Vietnam, and longing for some comparable struggle, one that would make them feel that good, make them feel that relevant, reach old age, and what is there left but anger?  What is there left of that energy that made them feel unstoppable, that made them feel they burned with righteous fire, if they admit, now, that it was all a bad farce?  That they knew nothing then, and know less now?

There is a Jacques Ellul quote I am going to indulge myself in writing out, again.  I wrote it some time ago, but that may have been five or more years ago.  I will submit that Viewpoint One is the necessity of reassuring themselves–old, middle aged, and newly radicalized–that they are right, that their cause is right, that their commitments are right.

Viewpoint Two, which is complementary–my intent here is not to oppose them, but to note there are multiple accurate perspectives, which is true of all things–is the impossibility of returning home, of going back where they once were, to who they once were.

But propaganda can also destroy the group, break it up–for example by stimulating contradictions between feelings of justice and of loyalty, by destroying confidence in the accustomed sources of information, by modifying standards of judgement, by exaggerating each crisis and conflict, or by setting groups against each other.

Moreover it is possible to provide successive stages for the individual.  While he is still a solid member of a group, propaganda can introduce a factor of ambiguity, of doubt, of suspicion.  But the individual finds it very difficult to remain long in such a situation.  Ambiguity is painful to him, and he seeks to escape it.  But he cannot escape it by returning to his previous certainties and total blind allegiance to his former group.  This is impossible because the doubt introduced can no longer be assuaged while the individual remains in the original context of values and truths.  It is then, by going over to the enemy group, by compliance with what provoked the ambiguity, that man escapes ambiguity.  He then will enter into an absolute allegiance to the truth of the enemy group.  His compliance will be all the more radical, his fusion with it all the more irrational, because it is a flight from yesterdays truth and because it will have to protect him against any return to, memory of, or nostalgia for the former allegiance.  There is no greater enemy of Christianity or Communism than he who was once an absolute believer. (page 190, Propagandas)

Likewise with someone REJECTING the American Dream.  Trump, in important respects, represents everything the hippies thought they were saying NO to when they dropped out and turned on.  He is an unabashed patriot, a successful businessman, someone who makes no apologies for who he is, who is loyal without being weird about it, and honest without being compulsive.

As I said at the time, his election was a bookend, in important respects, to the hippie era, to the era of anti-American Americanism.  His election puts the lie to everything they believed, everything they fought for.  In the end, they believed nothing, fought for nothing.  That is a tough pill–a Red Pill, to use a modern analogy–to swallow.  Hence the irrational hatred.

I need to do useful things today, so that will have to suffice, but there is much to ponder here, I think.

You know, if we look at the American nation as a whole, and American workers as a whole, people who come over here and work for sub-market wages illegally, or who drive wages down across an industry because they are so poor they will work for peanuts, are effectively scabs.  They are strike breakers.  They are an impediment to wage negotiations.

It is true that most Americans will not landscape for $9/hour.  But the wage used to be $15/hour or more.  There are places in Texas where you can hire an electrician for $11/hour.  Most people born here won’t work for that.  But the wage used to be $15-$18/hour or more.

Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of economics–supply and demand is usually taught on the first day in most Economics classes–cannot fail to grasp that large numbers of people willing to work for low wages hurt the people who would otherwise be doing that work, and HELP the people hiring them.  Large corporations LOVE cheap labor. 

Who do YOU think is running the propaganda in favor of pretending we don’t have border laws and that all the people coming here pushing down wages have no effect at all?  It’s sure as fuck not the unions.  Any and all of them, if they take the time to smoke one cigarette and put two and two together, should abandon this current crop of Democrats en masse, as they largely did in 2016.

The cards are on the table.  To pretend otherwise is undignified and stupid.

I was walking in the park just the other day (that might make a good lyric someday), and saw this frumpy old woman, with matted gray hair, in an old hippy kind of way, walking along frowning at the world.

Some people, you just look at them, you don’t really need to ask their politics.  Older woman, seemingly chronically angry, no felt need to conform to female stereotypes, such as by combing her hair once in a while, or caring about her clothes, and I got the feeling if I wanted to argue with her, all I needed to do is say something nice about Trump.

Then it hit me that so many of these women, particularly, resemble Dana Carvey’s church lady.  They are humorless.  They are relentless.  They have stupid pseudohumor, but they really don’t mean it.  They judge everyone they meet according to a very strict standard, but feel no need to match the standards of others, such as by making congruent their Christianity and the call of that religion to love all.

Likewise, Nancy Pelosi is humorless.  She judges everyone she meets.  This is how it feels to me.

And I really think Chuck Schumer thinks of himself as a modern day Martin Luther King, Jr. even though MLK himself would have been horrified at his politics, since black people stand to be hurt the worst if he pushes through his insidious legislation.  Schumer thinks of himself as a moral genius, a leader of the greatest virtue.

Now, I am thinking out loud, and I don’t spend a lot of time watching these people on TV.   Perhaps I am being a bit tone deaf.  Perhaps I am projecting my assumptions on them.  These are real possibilities.  But I thought I would post this anyway.  The main point I wanted to make was the humorlessness, and emotional disconnectedness from the currents of what could be a shared cultural life.  They are out there somewhere.  They are not here.  They are not us, where most ordinary Americans are concerned.

I will never forget that Pelosi, self styled champion of the downtrodden, spent a night, perhaps a few nights, in a $10,000/night hotel.

Edit: I do actually feel some sympathy for this woman I saw in the park, or in any event, the mental image I formed of her, and all the assumptions I then made about her.  The “angry woman” usually has a reason for being such.  The ones I feel no sympathy for are the ones who use this anger to gain power.  I feel no sympathy for Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer is a Grade A asshole.  He doesn’t give a flying fuck about anybody but himself, his grandstanding and pious rhetoric notwithstanding.  These people can go to hell for all I’m concerned, and frankly it is within my own personal belief that that is where they are headed.

Jesus himself did not judge the sinners.  He judged those who caused others to sin, and who benefited from their sin. 

I am reading “Kindly Bent to Ease us”, which is Buddhist text from around 1300, and the chapter I am currently reading is detailing all the hells which people can wind up in, and how long they stay there.  There is a lot of calculation, like 10,000 times a million years, and of course they get into some very large numbers.

I have read the word used in the Bible for the duration of hell is in fact a finite but large number.  Hell is not, even on the Biblical rendering, forever but a very, very long time.

Be all this as it may, I don’t think the fear of Hell motivates bad people very much to change their ways, and where people who might be good are concerned, I  think it creates a terror that leads to a permanent limitation in their capacity to see, and the capacity to see is, alone, the sole reliable path into higher spiritual realms.  The idea of hell stunts most people, and I think a focus on it makes them mean.

The path forward is through reasonable enjoyment.  Through learning to appreciate life’s beauty, the companionship of others, music, song, dance, through creation.  You need the smallest amount of anxiety to start things, but once you are on the river, growth will happen if you pursue “autotelic” experience, which challenges you but does not scare you too much.

All this, though, within a framework like Buddhist, or even Spiritualism, which posits spiritual growth as a possibility, and places this life in a larger context.

Oh, I was bound to use that as a title at some point, wasn’t I? 

Here it is: you can’t capture anything.  Whatever has been, was, and remains only in your memory.  Whatever will be, isn’t yet. The expectation of an experience is not the experience, and removes all possibility of something genuinely new.

For me, I feel things freeing up, but last night in my dreams I felt some part of me trying to hold on, to get stuck in a middle I knew, rather than an ending I have never experienced.  And every moment is an ending, is it not?  There it was, now it isn’t.  You will never get that back.

They say “capture the moment”, but what I feel lasts is the process by which you surf the moment.  Surfing, as I know I have said, is an excellent metaphor.  You are responsible for your balance, for being out on the ocean, for setting a rough line one way or the other, but much of what happens is in the ocean, is beyond your direct control.  Even the best surfers don’t have great runs every time, and they can’t move at all without waves.

Feeling is the energy of the waves.  It is what makes interesting things possible.  It is why you have to free feeling, but it is the unpleasant fact for many of us that we spent many years learning how to lock feelings away, so we could wander around with our fake smiles, lies we tell ourselves, and to operate in our mechanical, inhuman, inhumane world, without singing and dancing that we share easily or often.  Most Americans need to be drunk to do either.

Life, in some respects, is an endless succession of rooms.  Ponder the early Buddhists, or the Hindu Sanyassin, moving around, homeless, carrying their homes in their hearts and sacred texts.  You can’t live in one room forever.  Me, I counted once the number of places I have lived at least 3 months, and it is something like 25.

But feeling stays.  There  is a way of being with yourself that is comforting, loving, calming, enlightening.  You can start a slow, small, steady process of learning to live, and learning to love life, and with it everyone else.  You don’t start with loving others.  That is impossible.  It is, for most people, a lie, and quite often one which conceals a fundamental manipulativeness.  You have to love life first.  You have to love yourself first.  Only then can you be trusted.

I need people so much I sometimes have to avoid them.  It is a sad fact that sometimes the loneliest among us are destined to remain lonely, because your very need makes you toxic.  I want to figuratively eat people, to consume them, to get their love and feeling and understanding, because I am emotionally starving.   This makes me dangerous.

So I walk a lonely road.  It is slowly getting better, though. I have had the courage to see in the darkness, to speak the truth to myself, to see who and how I am.  I do not feel there is ANYTHING left hiding.  It is not all healed and dealt with, but who I am is on the table in full.  This means I can see it when unhealthy processes start.  They can’t hide from me.

And for most people, capturing, consuming a time, and staying there, really means to find a way to live in one room, while keeping everything bad you don’t want to see locked in a closet.  You can’t move out of that room while all that stuff is in there, but at the same time, you don’t have to go through the pain of seeing it either.

Most people get stuck somewhere.  They get stuck in habits which are good enough, emotional attitudes that are good enough, and they slowly age without seeing or learning very much, until there is a shock.  I am sympathetic to this.  I understand it.  It is simply the case for me that my stuff would not fit in a closet, and kept spilling out continually.  Dealing with it was unavoidable.  Had I not, I would likely be dead now, and am lucky even so that I have survived all these years.

It would be an interesting experiment to compare people with objective traumatic residue, as measured in EEG’s, with “normal” people when it comes to measurements of willpower.  I read Roy Baumeister’s book, but have forgotten much of it.  I do assume, though, that something approximating a test of willpower exists.

My prediction is that those with traumatic residue will perform much worse.  Trauma takes up much of your attentional capacity.  It takes a great deal of energy to keep it at bay, and to stay on a straight line.  Using a computer metaphor, it takes up much of your RAM, which makes it harder not just to parcel out willpower on useful tasks, but also to form the habits which would reduce the need for willpower.  Everything is in a state of constant collapse, and has to be rebuilt continually.  Doing nothing can be exhausting, and doing something likewise.

It is easy enough to see how, from this baseline, that depression, anger, and anxiety would flow like water downhill.  Depression is being tired of fighting all the time.  Anger is being unable to suppress impulses that most people would keep down, combined with an underlying state of existing hyperarousal.  Anxiety, of course, is simply being aware of what you are feeling.

And of course these can flow many directions, into eating disorders, gender dysphoric disorders, addictions of all sorts, what gets called ADHD, criminality: the list is about that of every human problem, other than true organic abnormalities.

I would like to see this research done, though, if it hasn’t been done.  The controls would seem reasonably easy to set up, and the overall protocol both useful and relatively easy to engineer.

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/parents-accused-holding-13-children-captive-appear-court-171008421–abc-news-topstories.html

I look in the eyes of the parents, and they were fully convinced they were doing right by their children.  The phrase God’s Work will likely show up at some point.

What is interesting about life is that True Believers–who can be sadists at heart, and often, perhaps even usually are–speak the same words as everyone else.  They do the same things.  Only open eyes can tell you the difference.

I will comment, too, that Tarkovsky has a character like this in his Nostalghia, a man who confined his wife and children for years, because he was afraid of the world.

I am listening to “The Agony and the Ecstasy” by Irving Stone, and really enjoying it.  You have to love Lorenzo d’Medici, his Platonists, Bertoldo.  I’m sure I will have more to say.  Unless I don’t, in which case I won’t.

But I wanted to comment on Savonarola.  I’m pretty sure he gets burned at the stake, but I don’t want to look it up.  I am presently at the point where Lorenzo and Bertoldo are both dead, and Michaelangelo has just started on Hercules. 

Be that as it may, listening to his fire and brimstone sermon, his “you are all sinners, and the end of the world is coming” it occurred to me that the moral sentiment is not all that different from modern socialists.  On both accounts–Savonarola’s and, say, Bernie Sanders–the world is a dark place filled with corrupt people, and that only the light made possible by following a carefully orchestrated program to be implemented by the only sane, moral people left–Savonarola himself, of course, and Bernie himself, of course–will allow the survival of everything everyone holds dear. 

I’m sure I’ve commented on the religious nature of socialist enthusiasms, but I don’t recall feeling it so clearly, feeling so clearly the kinship of “voluptuary ascetics” in the realm of actual religion, and the same spirits in the political realm.  They feel a joy in denial, a joy in telling the world no to everything.  Yes, Bernie promised free everything.  Savonarola promised moral cleansing and universal redemption.  But free stuff, in our fallen society, is more or less the same as redemption, and there can be no doubt that the flip side of Bernie’s program was sticking pointed sticks up the asses of all business people who did not toe his line immediately and completely.  I get that metaphor, by the way, from a picture from my Black Book of Communism, where Communist enthusiasts did precisely that to someone who did not agree enough, fast enough.  Then they strung his naked body up.

I am being a bit fuzzy here in my thinking and following language.  I will need to ponder all this a bit more.  But I will wonder aloud if there is an instinctual religious impulse–one likely connected to the tribalizing impulse–which is served and expressed by political enthusiasm understood in a religious sense.