Author: White Whale

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.

I read in passing about this large family that two parents kept locked away in some suburb in California.  Some were chained to their beds, and all were apparently chronically hungry.  The mother, when the deputies arrived, was unable to understand what the problem was.  The rescue was made after a 17 year old escaped and called police.

There are a number of pictures of them in public, one I believe from a trip to Disneyland.  There were, I believe, 13 of them, and not all were chained to their beds.  Most of them could have escaped at any time.  The oldest was 29.

What is interesting to me is that this was not a physical confinement, but a mental one.  This girl who escaped and alerted authorities may well have been told not to go by her siblings.  Perhaps she escaped after they were asleep.

Martin Seligman, in experiments that will never be repeated in this country, locked dogs into metal cages with electrified metal plates for the floor.  He shocked them until they gave up.  Then he put them in a cage with no door, or opened the cage door where they were.  Once they gave up, they would endure the shock indefinitely, even when freedom was five feet away.

This is of course called Learned Helplessness, and it is a very common concomitant of traumatic abuse committed by parents in the quest to make their children manageable.  What it feels like to me is that some part of me is ALWAYS working.  Most people work for a while, get tired, then rest.  A traumatized person can never rest.  Even when you are sitting in a chair, staring at the wall, you are working.  And what I think this means, to put it in dog terms, is that the very IDEA of escape becomes exhausting.  You go there, and there is a massive flash, a massive terror, and you either abandon the thought, or endure the unendurable again.

All these children were caged in their minds.  I get this.  I see this.  I feel kinship with them.  In my own family, we developed this elaborate pretending, this elaborate charade playing, so that we all seemed happy and normal.  But I was fully expected to surrender my sense of self, any personal ambition I may have had that led away from my parents, and the right to speak any unwanted truths.

I am slowly escaping my cage, but it is astonishing to contemplate how old I am, how long ago all this happened, and how it still haunts me.

And if you look at the parents, they, too, are caged.  The impulse to cage others springs from the experience of living in one yourself.  It can be rationalized in an infinite number of ways, although I think religion is likely the most common.

And this is why the word love feels so tainted to me.  It was, after a time, used at least by my mother.  But she has no idea what the outside world even feels like.  And she doesn’t know that she doesn’t know.

But I do think getting beyond the need to cage–which is to say to control–others is an important mile-marker for all people seeking emotional growth. And ponder all our politicians, our business leaders who want political control: all of them live, in some part of themselves, at the same level as these parents.  They are horrible, execrable.  But they exist on a continuum with all who seek to deny the liberty, the joy, the exultations of others. 

Whether one believes in demons or not, I think that it can be said with certainty that their principle manifestation, their principle practical effect, is fear. Even if they are artifacts of unconscious processes, unprocessed contents of our deep past and hidden wisdom, what “they” do is create fear.

And it seems to me that a great many of us deal all our lives with a sort of blackmail in the dark, in which the “agent” of some hidden suffering meets with the “agent” of our agentive consciousness in a back alley somewhere, and makes a deal where, if you–the decision making mind–engage in these self defeating behaviors, it–that part which knows what is hidden–will keep all these secrets from emerging.

And thus fear, and more importantly fear of fear, pushes us around forever.  It is only when you are willing to go deep inside and confront these things directly that you can begin to be free, which is to say, free to make decisions which are not conditioned by fear, and which are truly congruent with what is healthiest and best for you.

I visited Helen Keller’s childhood home in Tuscumbia, Alabama the week before last. I need to rewatch the Miracle Worker, but it was pretty amazing seeing the actual setting for so many famous scenes.  The Water Pump is, of course, a focal point.

The tour guide was telling us her IQ was tested at 160, and that she learned Braille in something like 4 or 5 other languages.

She was also a socialist, and here is the point I wanted to make.  Can anyone say that, as a blind and deaf person, she saw less of, or heard less from, American workers than the average socialist, than Karl Marx, than a typical academic?  As someone who was likely always willing to “listen”, she perhaps was more in touch than most of them.  In her era, socialism had still not failed decisively, so it was still possible then for intelligent, decent human beings to believe in it.  That obviously is not the case any more.

It is an astonishing fact that most of the Democrats who arrogate to themselves the right to speak for “the workers”, or for that matter “the blacks”, or “the Hispanics” or others–politicians who use identity politics in their daily schtick–don’t live in their neighborhoods.  They don’t have the rank and file over for dinner.  Their kids don’t go to their schools.  They don’t even visit, other than for occasional campaign stops, their neighborhoods.  They know virtually nothing about their lives, what they need, other than that if they say certain words, promise certain things, that they can usually get their votes.

And in power, they ignore them.  All Communist regimes have shit on the actual workers, outside of a core party cadre they needed to maintain power and discipline.  All the rhetoric–all the alleged REASON for their political activities in the first place–is not based, in nearly all cases, on actual people, but on abstractions which they use for their own benefit, and which never reference living, breathing, hurting dying working human beings.

So my last dream before I got up this morning, some Republican leader, at a bipartisan meeting of some sort, sparked up a “J”–a Mary J. Juana cigarette–and passed it to me.  Dan Quayle was sitting there, looking on in horror.  In my dream I was thinking of him as a Mormon, although on waking I don’t seem to recall he was.  I asked him if he had ever indulged, and he shook his head vigorously, and said no.  I said, “well, it’s probably better for your health, but it’s fun sometimes.”

In the dream, it was a political act, a calculated political act, and an intelligent one.  Wasn’t my idea, but I participated.

Here is the thing: I am hard pressed to say what Jeff Sessions has done right.  He refused to stop Mueller, he hasn’t fired Rod Rosenstein, he took over a year to launch an investigation into Crooked Hillary (if indeed it has been done now), he cost us a Senate seat, and now he has the colossal stupidity to launch a war not on marijuana, but on State’s Rights, which Republicans have been slowly making an issue of their own.  State’s rights is a return to honest Constitutionalism, which should be an issue that conservatives own.

I personally would like to see Mitch McConnell, on a visit to Washington or Colorado or California, spark up a big blunt.  It would get us the kind of publicity that wins elections.  Or so my unconscious seems to believe.

As far as myself, I have one bad habit already.  No need to replace it with what would likely, yes, be a slightly better one, but one that is still unhealthy.  I do think–and have said for a long time–that we should legalize EVERYTHING, allow States to determine what they are going to allow, and spend, like Portugal, all the money currently going to the DEA–which we disband–on treatment. I think neurofeedback would be great, as would job training programs, and anything that rebuilds something like a sense of belonging, of community.  Much useful research could be done, and much of it would apply to the larger “culture”–such that it is, which is our problem–as a whole.

I do, while on the topic, continue to be visited by what I will call demons. I was thinking last night that some people must have a lot of pleasant dreams, but I am not one of them.  There are variations, but usually I am sleeping in my own bed, or something like it, in a strange home, and something I can’t see which is close to the spirit of fear appears immediately above me in what feels very, very real.  It always feels like waking life, and being visited by an aggressive ghost.  Perhaps this is a distant memory of something that really happened.  I do think my mother screamed at me as a baby when I would cry in my crib.

But all of this gives me practice facing up to mainlined fear.  This is a difficult job, getting rid of the capacity for fear, from a place of having so much of it, but I am slowly doing it.  And this is a path–a long path, granted, but a path–to a much deeper peace than most people will ever have any chance of reaching.  My sleep is slowly improving.  My only sleep aids last night were Tart Cherry Juice and Black Walnuts, and overall it wasn’t bad.