Author: White Whale

Home is a category of living.  It is a quality of being.  When you feel at home, you are relaxed and comfortable.  The opposite is feeling away from home, which is to say somewhere where you need to be alert and guarded, unless you are trusting enough to make the Earth your home.

I think people who grow up in violent homes lack what I tend to call, for want of a better term, a place-holder for “home”.  They never felt safe.  They never enjoyed a lasting peace.

Me, I’ve lived in the same place for quite some time, and have needed to do some painting and reorganizing, etc., to make it more into a home, into a place that is recognizably MINE.  Certainly, my decor is ideosyncratic and likely unique, but I have not gone all the way and made everything just so.  I am afraid to become attached to the place.  This is an irrational fear, since I cannot imagine a circumstance in which I would be FORCED to move again.

But it goes deeper: connecting to this place means connecting to the feeling of home, and home scares me.  My home was a place where I got hit, and my parents argued constantly.

So what I am feeling is that as I slowly become aware of all this, as I slowly build my emotional readiness to “nest”, this signified, intrinsically, healing.

John Wooden always said his games were won in practice.  He spent an enormous amount of time preparing them, such that everything was down to very small time intervals.  He would spend two hours planning a two hour practice.

I sometimes dream of being disciplined enough to plan my days like this.  Specifically, I have often thought that it would be enormously interesting and useful to allocate 20 minute blocks to various skill developments, and do so daily.  For example, 20 minutes juggling, 20 minutes studying Sanskrit, and 20 minutes listening to and reading along with Shakespeare’s plays.  That would be one block.

3 days a week you add a second block, say a 30 minute lecture on something, and 30 minutes memorizing as many songs as you can.

Sundays you spend 3 hours on something, like cooking a gourmet meal, while cultivating a capacity for recognizing fine wines or whiskeys.  And you smoke a cigar, and make notes on it, to develop your capacity for recognizing and describing fine smells.

Do this over years.  How interesting that would be.  And you could build to 5, 10, or 15 skills, cultivated slowly, gradually, and over long time intervals.

Love making: get the books, and build the skills.  Consciously experiment, take notes.  There is no reason a competent lover can’t give an average woman 2-3 orgasms every time he starts.  Most of us just don’t recognize how fantastically equipped women are for sexual pleasure.  We men are pikers in comparison.

Knowledge feeds curiosity.

Alternate rendering: Knowledge breeds curiosity.

I continue to find proclaiming my own words “bon mots” amusing.  As I tell my kids, even if I am laughing at my own jokes, at least someone is laughing.

I must, I can, I like, I love.

Doing something “voluntarily” that you are forced to do is no virtue.  If you don’t lie, cheat, and steal only because you fear being caught, you have not understood their value.  If you pray incessantly only because that is what you think you are expected to do–or if you want to be esteemed as pious without actually being pious–then that is no virtue.

The ultimate word is I Like. It lies beneath philosophy, and is twined about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says, in an instant, “I Like,” and does something else, and philosophy goes glimmering. It is I Like that makes the drunkard drink and the martyr wear a hair shirt; that makes one man a reveller and another man an anchorite; that makes one man pursue fame, another gold, another love, and another God. Philosophy is very often a man’s way of explaining his own I LIKE.

I will add to this a quote from Herman Melville that I am reciting (perhaps slightly wrong) from memory: “When I hear a man give himself out as a Philosopher, I conclude that–like the dyspeptic old man–he must have ‘broken his digestor.'”

Think about this: is not every failure of follow-through you have ever experienced not come as a conflict between “I Must”, and “I Like”? One part of you feels you ought to do one thing, but some other part of you tells the first part to go fuck itself, and following behavior, predictably, is erratic and incoherent.

My own task, then, logically, is reconciling my parts.  I am still working out how to do that, but am making, I do believe, some progress. 

I’m not ready to flesh this idea out yet: just a phrase.  But I think there’s a lot of possible value here.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/david-horowitz-the-lefts-destruction-of-inner-city-communities/

Our problem as both a nation and a world, is that nice people lack the bullshit detectors they need to realize that the people calling for justice and peace and prosperity in nearly all cases either intend the opposite consciously; or worse yet, achieve the opposites without naming them or claiming them, and continue to do so year after year, decade after decade.

The people who call bullshit on all the nicey, nicey stuff aren’t popular.  Many people want the world to be all sunshine and rainbows, but it just fucking isn’t.  Not yet.  And it will never be until the overwhelming bulk of people have the emotional courage to see what is plainly in front of them and call it by name.

I reposted one of my pieces today and noticed that I referred to the fact that John Keynes married a Russian women.  Someone else recently commented on my grammar as well, so I thought I might say something.

Here is the thing: nearly every piece on Goodness Movement was written in one or two sittings.  Those sittings in some cases were 12-15 hour days, but they were of a piece.  My psychology being what it is–somewhat fucked up, but with I think significantly above average reality testing, which is a documented positive of depression–I can’t mull these things over, and do them gradually.  I have to get them out all at once, or they don’t come out.  And one outcome of this is poor editing.

I am trying to fix this.  I am trying to implement gradualism in my life, peaceful progress.  But it has not happened yet.

I should add, I think, that sometimes I actually don’t care what proper grammar is.  I have a style I have evolved that I like.  I think anyone who thinks grammar is of intrinsic importance should read Shakespeare and tell me how his prose would be improved with a good editor (because, you know, people reading me immediately think of Billy Boy).

While I’m at it, here is the Keynes piece again: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/keynes.pdf

I am going to try again to stop reacting emotionally to stupidity (as I see it) masquerading as knowledge, and grotesque narcissism disguised as philanthropy; at least, I am going to try and stop reacting UNPRODUCTIVELY.  That is to say, I am going to try and write one place, and not another; to one audience–me for now–and not the world at large.

We’ll see how it goes.

You know, I am on Facebook too much.  It is like I am looking for something, but never find it.  It is fear, of course, that keeps me from setting sail, finally, but I am for the time being indulging myself.

And even though I am censored on most left-wing websites–I can’t post on Salon, Media Matters, HuffPo, Daily Cause, and probably some others I’ve forgotten–I still see links from time to time to leftwing propaganda, where for instance they are still trotting out the tired theme that conservatives are all racist.

And I sometimes call them on it.  Some part of me prefers fighting to living.  And I look at them, and wonder how there could be ANY connection between the education I received–which valued reason, and perspective taking, and self restraint, and respectful dialogue and above all an effort at UNDERSTANDING other people and their ideas–and what is on display daily.  The hate.  The unreflective, reflexive hate.

There is no difference, in my view, between people who hate one group they don’t understand, and other people who hate some other group they don’t understand.  It is still hate if KKK members hate blacks they don’t know, don’t talk to, don’t interact with, and know nothing about; and it is still hate if left wingers hate Republicans for their alleged racism–which has no signs, which is not present in any recognizable form–and who hate passionately, and with ZERO desire to understand, to interact with, to learn about people who think differently than them.

As I have said often, there seems to be some part of our organism which craves aggression and violence, and the subterfuge of the Left is perhaps the worst because it claims not to be subterfuge at all.  Still, it is not different in principle than Christians who kill in the name of Jesus.  They may be doing the right thing, but they can’t do it in the name of Jesus.

Hate is hate.  This is a simple enough concept.  If you are hating, then you are playing the same role as the people you condemn for hate.  If you are a Leftist, you are simply too disconnected with your feelings, too self righteous, too self absorbed, to fully grasp what you are doing; and of course a full and effective propaganda apparatus has been developed around you to protect you from self awareness, until such time as hate and conformity become the only things remaining of value to you.  The transition from Sybaritic Leftist to Cultural Sadeist is not all that hard.  Resentment is easily fed in a world where you have been taught life is supposed to be easy.

All this for Rosebud.

Here is my actual point.  I had to get that rant out first, for my own emotional cleansing.

I get angry.  I want to punish people.  But what I see is that when I form that connection with others, I have stopped looking up.  I have taken my eyes off the highest aims open to me.  I enter into a fight of some sort with someone who I will beat, or who will beat me, or who I will wound and/or will wound me and we move on.  We make each others lives less pleasant, then go on to the next one.

This cycle never ends, as long as I am looking across at those opposing me, placing myself at their level.

Yes, the bastards cause no end of damage.  Yes, they need to be opposed.  But practically how often am I effective?  Would time spent being angry on the internet not be better spent at dealing with these issues properly once and for all in a book format I can then provide to people to accept or reject as they choose?

And I think more generally about punishment.  Socially, you need deterrents, which is what the threat of punishment provides.  But I don’t think it is EVER useful to judge people, to see yourself as better, to see them as DESERVING their punishment.

Let us say some psychopath kills someone you love.  This would be an unmitigated horror.  You would want to see them dead, preferably painfully, if you are typical.

But even if they are caught, even if they are put to death, rage is still an unpleasant companion.  So too is hate.  And bitterness.

Every so often I get these flickers of light, I get small instantaneous glimpses of a world where I pursue light every day, where I pursue qualitative joy, regardless of the darkness around me.  I get glimpses of constantly and consistently being my own best friend, constantly and consistently seeking in a balanced and daily way personal growth, felicity, fun, happiness, creative engagement, and ignoring all the wrong people in the world, ignoring all the countless opportunities for conflict, for punishing those who I feel deserve it precisely to the extent I have abandoned my own best prospects, my own best self.

Now, I want to be clear that I am not advocating simple minded anything.  I get angry too at people who say you have to be nice all the time, or compassionate all the time.  I think most of the time these people are compulsive, and preachy.  They want you to look up to them, and don’t want you to know how many fucked up things are floating around in their heads.  Yes, I am a bit of a cynic, but I have come by it honestly.  I have trusted many people who have failed me.  I tend to distrust anyone who is not an honest sinner.  If I can’t see where your self interest is being met, then I assume you have hidden it from yourself, and that wherever it comes out, it will likely be unconscious and destructive.

So kids, this post is all about being a fucking ray of sunshine.  I think that was the point I wanted to make.  I feel better now.

Like most people educated in my approximate fashion, I have read “The Myth of Sisyphus”. I was actually quite enamored of Albert Camus in high school, and once spent a summer doing a close reading of, and completely misunderstanding, because I was stupider, his book “The Rebel”.

He argues that all psychologically normal people have thought about killing themselves.  So he heard a shrink say somewhere.  And today I was reading someone’s account of an acute depression, where he thought about ending it all.

And I wondered again, what I wondered then, why this has never occurred to me.  I have never thought seriously about killing myself, ever.  I have had moments where I would have taken heroin,if I had it.  I have had moments where I understood clearly why people cut themselves to feel pain.

But I have never felt a need to end it all, even before I acquired the belief that suicide solves nothing, that it actually prolongs and amplifies suffering.

And I look at this, and it seems to me that I have been more or less clinically depressed since I was a small child.  Apparently even when I was 4 or 5 I didn’t like playing with other kids.  So I am told.  I would go sit off in a corner and do something by myself.

But I’m used to it. I often feel as if I am moving in a very low gear, but I also feel as if I can tow the weight of the world behind me. I have the strength.

And I think this is the reason: I have no contrast.  People who want to kill themselves know what it is like to be happy and care-free, at least relatively.  They have a better before.  I don’t.  This is the air I have always breathed, and I think it has made me strong.  The thought of walking into pain does not phase me.  Many mornings I wake up feeling that I am being lacerated with a sharp knife.  Then I go on.

When I get through this–and I will–I will be quite an interesting and capable fellow.