Author: White Whale

Just watched this movie. I stopped it for a minute, since virtually all of Kaufman’s “comedy” (not his word for what he did) seemingly consisted in making the audience uncomfortable.  Then I thought, I am trying to become spiritual, and nothing is beyond that.  “Spirituality” itself is often a facade, with its own conventions, its way of holding your body, smiling beautifically, affecting serenity, of speaking.  Genuine spirituality engages with the world on its own terms, with people as they are.  It misses nothing.  It avoids nothing.  It encompasses everything, at least in principle.  Few can do it, and certainly not me.

What struck me immediately was how socially disconnected he was.  He did not know what was funny.  He broke social conventions because he simply did not recognize them by feeling them.  So of course I speculated he had Asberger’s.   And looking this up, it is quite astonishing how many famous people are claimed by some to have been somewhere on the autism spectrum: https://awetismhalloffame.wordpress.com/tag/andy-kaufman/

Bill Gates.  Albert Einstein.  Bela Bartok. Arthur Conan Doyle.  Tim Burton.  Samuel Becket.  Look at it.  It is quite an interesting list.

And I wondered about the value of his performance art.  His fights with Jerry Lawler.  His continual hoaxes, to the point where it was impossible to say for certain he even died, even though his death certificate was issued.  The logic of his friends in stating publicly he DID fake his death, fed by the continued appearances of Tony Clifton.

And then I got to thinking about the nature of creativity. Life itself is confusing.  We are born, we know we are going to die, and we don’t know a whole lot more than that, or at least most of us.  Human kind builds behavioral patterns which promote peace, which minimize our existential anxiety, and get most of us from one side of life to the other.

All acts of genuine newness are inherently potentially unbalancing.  Their effects are hard to predict, and for this reason much of human history has consisted in punishing innovation.  Our modern world has evolved from the idea that creativity is an inherent and beneficial need for human beings, that in some respect the “quest for the self” is part of our nature, and that social institutions needed to evolve to meet this need. 

But I think many of us, now, are confused and perplexed by the very speed with which creativity is happening all around us, all the time.  Nothing seems to be given any more.  We are even now trying to grapple with the long term social effects of smart phones.  I have been wondering recently what will happen as Virtual Reality continues to distance our awareness from the given universe.  It allows us to create universes to our liking.  Is this good?  As with most things, the answer is likely that the effects are mixed.  Some good things become possible, but many bad things do too.

The Hindus and others believe that the universe as we perceive it is a giant illusion, and that recognizing this, progressively, is the path to Enlightenment, and lasting joy and innate fulfillment.

So I suppose it was logical for Kaufman, as a dedicated member of the TM movement, to CREATE illusions, to show people that much of what we take to be true isn’t.

And I think of Michaelangelo, dissecting dead bodies, in an act that would have seen him hung in public had he been caught, doing so to perfect his art, to create something better than what had hitherto been created, and in any event, something different, something unique, something uniquely his.

What I feel is that there is a pendulum, or a balance is a better metaphor, in which we are born to create, but within bounds.  We need a relatively stable platform within which to evolve, but that if we do so too quickly, we lose all connection with our sense of self, and this is a terrible loss, which is spiritually detrimental. Every day becomes an act of recreation, and this is not a good use of time, I don’t  think.

This, I feel, is the root attraction to “socialism”: it promises an end to relentless change. I can feel this mythic attraction, one seen in, among other films, Dr. Strange.  Dormamu is, on my reading, a symbol for stasis, and Socialism its political expression.  This is perhaps the Yin to the Yang of highly creative people.  It is why so many creative sorts have always been drawn to Communism and the many words used as synonyms.

And I feel, too, the wisdom, of a sort, of the medieval Church burning heretics.  They may have been personally sympathetic in some ways to what these people had to say, but felt that the society as a whole was at risk.

We stopped burning heretics some time ago, although the process is still continual, seen metaphorically.  The need for social stability, the need to be able to predict, looking to the people on your left and to your right, what they believe, and how they will behave.  Only in conditions of relative stability can people truly relax, and relate authentically.

Or is this true?  Does INstability breed truer sentiments?  These are deep, highly abstract questions, likely left for concrete contexts and times.

What I feel, though, that we need now is a reliable context for human connection.  We have lost this ability, in far too many cases.  Traditionalists retain the benefits of their particular delusions, but the avante garde among us are not better for having substituted new delusions. 

Happiness is rooted in misery.Misery lurks beneath happiness.Who knows what the future holds?There is no honesty.Honesty becomes dishonest.Goodness becomes witchcraft.Man’s bewitchment lasts for a long time (Tao Te Ching, 58)

What I feel is that all too often, we seek to control the world, to order it, but this ordering is always a lie of sorts.  Kaufman screamed “The world is not real”, but of course dedicated himself to a very long term and very diligent spiritual practice.

What I feel is that when we stop imposing order on the world, stop building sheltering caves in the vast darkness we see, then and only then does the true order of the universe reveal itself.  This is the essence, as I understand it, of the Buddhist teaching of the unconditioned nature of reality.

I have been trying to anchor myself and my own work–which I cannot honestly say yet that I have even begun–in some sort of context.  It is a huge advantage, in seeking to see formlessness, to have a form of sorts to come back to, until you have learned to live there, learned to breathe that air.  Emotionally, I need some sort of context, some sort of tradition. 

I am not a born Buddhist.  I am not a Tibetan.  I am an American, who was raised watching Gilligan’s Island, eating Hamburger Helper, spending my time talking with friends about new movies, new music (new to me or us, since many like to go back now), and feeling a relative stranger to everyone I meet.  What binds us?  I am not the first to ask this.  We have no religion.  And we are Godless, if we reference God as a metaphor for what binds us.  This is the root reason for the obsessiveness of the Left in the world today: there is nothing else.  How else to explain all the Question Authority hippies now DEMANDING an omnipotent government, which we already KNOW is abusing its unfathomable powers, and which we KNOW is quite capable of an eternal dictatorship. 

Perhaps they would even want the world run by Artificial Intelligence, by a God of our own making, which cannot know more than what we tell it, which is simply an infinite Games Master, which perfects all the moves on a board it cannot expand, since it is lacking spirit.  Which condenses the universe as it IS, to what can be portrayed and represented symbolically.  Which casts a net over life on this Earth, because we have demanded to be confined as a form of protection from all that we cannot know.

Where I am feeling presently some kinship is the mid-century artists who tried, and failed, to build something new.  When I look back, in my rudimentary and very, very incomplete understanding, I feel that the Beats, and people like John Cage and Martha Graham, were the last generation that were still culturally American.  They were looking everywhere else, but they still had their feet planted in a culture they were wanting to change from within, which reacted when they protested, because it still believed something.  There were still rules they were self consciously breaking.  Now, there are no rules, none that are sacred in any meaningful sense.

Here is a comment by John Cage that struck me:

 In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”.

Another:

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound […] I don’t need sound to talk to me.

It does seem obvious to me that there is a homology here–and indeed with his infamous 4’33”–and Kaufman’s work. 

Within all this is a sense many of us have that the world is being slowly built in the image of a machine. Design is the essence of the machine.  It is what we make it.  It is likely accurate to say that Cage saw music, itself, as a sort of machine from which he wanted to escape, though randomness– which is to say, the universe as it is, and not as we make it.  His was in some respects an act of humility, even if seen socially it was audacious.  So many of us, I suspect, resented that reminder, both of where we come from, and where we seem to be going.

There are, I think, some interesting musings here.  My brain is tired, though.  I need to shower and go for a walk.

When you read Buddhist texts, they talk about how the universe is filled with souls with nowhere to land, and what a miracle it is to be born with a human body, to live on this planet.

I really felt this the other night, on a chilly night, with a light drizzle.  I felt Earth as a giant waystation in the dark, a beacon of light, a hub of hope, of a hustle and bustle unknown on the vast, lonely trails countless souls are traversing across this universe.

There is infinite life we can’t see, infinite awareness we can’t see.  And no matter how miserable a life might be on this planet, it is still better than what is out there.  I feel there are heavens and hells.  There is no being eager to punish or reward us.  There are simply consequences, rules.

And this is a subtle point.  Christians posit a loving God who looks after us.  But Christians are not spared random tragedies, although I’m sure it is true their belief makes it easier for them to deal with them, if it is authentic belief.

What if there is a life beyond, which simply operates according to laws like those of physics?  True Buddhists to not worship the Buddha–although of course He is one of the Three Jewels–but to the extent they worship anything, it is the PATH, the rules, the game plan, the most effective course of action, which he shared, which in the spiritual life is roughly equal to the rules of physics in planning the behavior of matter.  It tells you what to do in order to get where you want to go, or would want to go, if you knew more.

On one level, it is very lonely looking at an infinite universe without some force playing the role of parent, and feeling how we all exist in space, even on Earth, even when sitting at a computer keyboard typing.  I feel this.  But I also feel what a fascinating and interesting game it all is, what miracles lurk underneath the most mundane scenes and experiences.

Life will not come to you.  You must go to it.  And in making that effort, it will meet you in the middle.

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds deep!!!! (I’m laughing at myself.  I sometimes describe myself as an Alpha Nerd).

Have a pleasant day!!! 

My oldest will periodically contact me asking for help phrasing something.  One thing I am always quick and consistent in pointing out is that fuzzy language is always the inevitable result of fuzzy thinking.  If you want to speak clearly, you have to think clearly, completely, and honestly.  You can have good ideas expressed poorly, but no matter how well you express bad ideas–think Keynes, who I am quite content to grant had a much higher IQ than I do–they will remain fuzzy, if you actually take the time to think them through.  They cannot but do otherwise. 

Here is what was really going on with that post.  I know I shouldn’t care, that my passions, from most perspectives, are silly, but that whole thing felt woolly to me. 

It does feel to me like the world is changing, that some astrological alignment, some configuration of energies, something in the air and water, is changing for the better.  That was the feeling I had.  There is literally zero rational content to it.  Then I thought that maybe I was just looking at the world differently.  How can I know if the world is changing when I am changing too?  When you change how you view the world, the world “changes” without changing at all.

Then of course I went to Galadriel.  As a spiritual being, it would be unreasonable to say she was unchanging, but at the same time, she was very stable, she was coming to her intuitions from a stable place.

Now, all this may make no more sense to anyone, but I feel better. 

I might have mentioned a variation on an old saw that I read a few months somewhere, about a Yiddish saying that “if you should be someone else, then who will be you?”

I yam what I yam.  A big, bookish, emotionally timid/damaged, sometimes insightful, curious, and hopeful human being.

Yeah, so are they speaking to me, when UC-Berkeley and the University of Chicago–my two schools–come out with a study showing written words, which I love deeply, do very little compared to speaking out loud?

I don’t expect anything to come of this, but if I can get 5 comments asking me to do videos, I will.  Being me, they would have to start from first principles, and evolve from there, but it might be fun.  I might do it anyway.  I’m not quite ready to put my ugly mug in front of a camera, but I might get there eventually.  I see so much stupidity, and failure to think things through. I see Ph.D’s in Economics seemingly unfamiliar with what is taught the first week. I see Ph.D’s in Philosophy who could not tell you why it is wrong to molest kids.

Or is it me?  If you have two things evolving independently, how do you measure change?  Unless I am constant, how can I feel what changes out there?  Until you are quiet, you can see nothing.  The world is you, and you are the world.  There is a fusion which makes everyone stupid, while the “world” watches in bemused disbelief.

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.