Author: White Whale

I have gotten to where I can bring up and live with a primal fear that seems to date to my first year or two of life.  Moving through it, to the extent I can, creates within me momentary whiffs of peace.

For whatever reason, playing Assassin’s Creed seems to bring me relief, and it occurs to me at this moment, after playing for 2 hours or whatever, that it is really no different in principle than all the countless abstractions and imaginings I have been using my entire life to take the sting out of emotions I could not process, which threatened to overwhelm me at an existential level.

I ask myself: when I do my Life Review–which I believe we all go through when we die–what will be the status of time spent playing video games?  On the one hand, I suppose it is like playing dice games or any number of other outwardly useless diversions.  On another, it seems to me no different in kind than what I did in graduate school, reading erudite but largely useless texts on various religious traditions, and philosophical treatments of religion.  I just went through my bibliographies, which I have kept for some 20 years, and threw them away.  I looked at them, and smelled dirt–the sort in which no life grows.

If I play video games, some good things seem to happen.  Certainly, that is how it feels to me.

What happens, though, reading Jacques Lacan, or Karl Marx, or Jacques Derrida, or Michel Foucault?

I would argue, in large measure, that in dealing with virtually any thinker of the 19th or 20th century that college kids study, you are dealing with orcs and goblins, elves and dwarves.

What concrete good comes from reading these people?  In what way do people get practically smarter?  In what ways do they learn to live with happiness, sang froid, and tranquility?

My oldest has gotten the bug to read the classics. I bought her “A Farewell to Arms” as something extra whenever school work gets old.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, of course, as a parent I am glad to see she is not a flippant, frivolous kid like so many seem to be nowadays.  At the same time, I know Hemingway was a lifelong alcoholic who killed himself.  What did he REALLY have to teach us about living?

In my crankier moments I feel nothing useful has been written in a thousand years, but then I look to people like Martin Seligman, and Mihaly Czikszenmilhalyi, and Anton Chekov, whose short stories I adore.

And I have discovered it is actually FUN to listen to the plays of Shakespeare on CD while reading along.  Shakespeare was and remains useful.  His work can enrich a life.

So to end this minor rant, I am still an anti-intellectual intellectual who likes to call himself a thought worker.

How many leftists does it take to change a light bulb?

They can’t, but it’s the Republicans fault.

It occurs to me this morning that most of my fulminations against Leftism arise from the sense that I was not loved as a child.

This does not mean my analyses are wrong: on the contrary, I think my particular exposures to psychopathologies, in many forms, make me better able to spot them than most.

It simply means that I have not been free, and we are meant to be free.

Most important emotional truths are simple.

I had never heard this term until I was talking with someone who did Alcohol Rehab.  It’s a term people in the business use for people who have stopped drinking, but ONLY stopped drinking.  They are still an irritable mess.

And I had not realized either that drinking and drug abuse both facilitate delayed socialization.  One author I was reading said that many drunks are ten years or more behind people their same age in their ability to manage their own emotions, and accurately read those of others.  Drinking, of course, is often an alternative to socializing, and not an adjunct to.

I have not had a drink in three weeks.  I’ve been using a GNC ZMA supplement to sleep, along with 5-HTP, both of which I recommend.

And I am just letting things flow.  I am getting in touch with much of the inner nastiness in my family.  It is a really hard thing to do, to separate actual malice, from pretended helpfulness.  It is hard to understand how much anger and hate can lurk in smiling faces, and the habit of appearing nice.

We all of us are capable of nastiness.  There are no exceptions, and I think those who most think they are the exception are the ones most likely to latch onto some grand project to save humanity which will bring terror, death and pain in its wake, and which can on some level be predicted to do such.

The Christian and Islamic fondness for painting vivid pictures of Hell is a type of aggression in my view.  It is an attack they can launch on children that feeds their capacity and need for cruelty, while being rationalizable as “for their own good”.  I think it was Richard Dawkins who spoke of religion as a form of child abuse.  He is a clumsy thinker, and tends not just to conflate all theisms together, but all iterations of each, in one formless lump (practically; in his polemics, of course, he attempts to use the Bible against believers); but in this respect, I think child abuse is a correct term.

Me, I think I am beginning to connect with some energies that I should have connected to as a child.  They were withheld from me, denied me.

But I don’t quit.

I have been playing Assassin’s Creed IV, where I am both a pirate and an assassin.  Both nasty.  At one point, they even introduce the Crowleyan creed: Do what thou will.  Assassins are presented as champions of freedom, even if I spend all my time either blowing up ships, killing those defending it, and taking their stuff; or assassinating people for money and killing anyone who gets in my way.

Here is the point I wanted to make: it is strangely soothing, and seems to make me feel more calm, less angry, than I think I otherwise would.  Perhaps I am feeding the angry part of my gut.

But I think part of it is this: it is a self contained world, with rules, where you can gain a sense of absolute mastery.  No matter how many times you fail, you get to go again, and success is inevitable over some time horizon.  In this, of course, it is quite different from life.

Games are in some respects a retreat from life.  But they are also a microcosm where you can gain  or regain a sense of control that you have otherwise lost.  You have to be able to feel that emotion SOMEWHERE in order to carry it out into the world.

Now, at my age, I should of course have felt mastery many times.  In point of fact, I am very good at some things.  But in real life you can NEVER shrink things small enough to feel consistently in control–especially where people are concerned.  You can be skilled in dealing with people, and still misstep sometimes.

In a fantasy world, no harm is permanent, and growth is on-going.

For years I condemned violent video games.  For years I said they were awful and hurting people’s ability to socialize and empathize.  This may in fact be true for many people, particularly if they start playing hours daily at young ages.

But at my age, it is a welcome relief from the stresses of my day.  My children mock me, but then they mock me for lots of things.  I mock them.  We all love one another, so it’s all in fun.

I just thought I might put this out there.  I have not been posting because I am very much in some Primary Process–using that term loosely–work.

Few points:1

1) People like the Samuel L. Jackson character exist.  There are people who view humanity as a virus.  This is not an empirically valid argument: we are not killing off the Earth, nor is anything remotely like that foreseeable in the next hundred or more years, after which we will have made a collective decision one way or the other.  Global Warming is a farce.  It cannot and should not even be factored into the Gaia conjecture.

And I want to repeat, that this hatred must be seen as self hatred.  It represents the failure of intellectuals to deal with their own baser impulses, of aggression, greed, lust, sexual desire; as well as what I have termed Qualitative Repressions, which is their need for belonging, community, love, tenderness, and affection.

It is not different in principle, in my view, from the psychosocial roots of Fascism.  They want mass death.  They see the Earth as innocent and ALL of humanity as guilty, which is a long step past anything Hitler attempted.

2) Many people in positions of authority are complicit in these schemes of global conquest. It was interesting that they chose to more or less directly implicate Obama.

What a beautiful day, though, if instead of assassinating all the proles, as these elitists want, they themselves–ONLY the guilty–were put in their place instead.  Imagine the Earth the day after Eggsy’s triumph.  Most all the heads of State, gone.  Most all royalty, gone.  Most ueber-rich, gone.

The Democrats like to play the populist card, but you will not find anything in their playbook like William F. Buckley Jr’s claim that he would rather have the first 100 names in the Boston phone book running the country than the faculty of Harvard.  Democrats, CLEARLY, would want the eggheads (was Eggsy perhaps a play on this?).

3) Many of these people seem nice.  Sam Jackson (it’s my blog, and I’ve never understood the need for the middle initial) wore an OM necklace, and had pandas just like the World Wildlife Fund.  They seem nice because their ideology has enabled them to repress their inner feelings of rage and hatred, all while planning to vent them through proxies that enable them to sustain the lie.

4) The church scene was oddly gratifying.  It was, again, the zombie theme.  The all against all.  The primal rage and destructiveness that Political Correctness and the Cult of Nice have attempted to cull out of us, but which have simply submerged, to reappear in the vicarious enjoyment of scenes like that. It is the gut gone wild, the animal part of us, which having been without “food” for so long, no longer recognizes any boundaries.

5) The two balloons were testicles.

That’s all.  

My personal opinion is that being able to live in the moment–which of course is a very trendy spiritual goal, talked about among others by Eckhart Tolle and every Zen master who ever lived–is the PRODUCT of personal growth, not its means.

What is the effect of trauma?  Intrusions, as Judith Herman calls them.  Thoughts, feelings, avoidances that come and go, seemingly beyond our control.  And I think trauma–and the American habit of never sustaining focus on anything–are the two principle enemies of Present-Centeredness; and the former, at least, is in my view best not dealt with directly.

All wisdom must be assigned a time, place, and person.  What is splendid one moment for one person can be profoundly destructive for another person in the same moment.

In this respect, I will reiterate my personal fondness for Sufism–or, rather, to the body of practice and ideas which is most usefully aggregated under that term, to the extent such a thing is possible.

One saying that has stayed with me is that wisdom cannot be withheld from one ready for it, and cannot be given by anyone unready for it.  Every day you walk blindly by everything you could ever need to know about this universe.  So do I.  And we are both imbeciles.

I don’t think one person in a hundred EVER consciously chooses goodness or evil.  I think they do what they were programmed to do. If they were raised in happy families, then being nice is a simple thing.  Sharing happiness is a simple thing.  But it is not a choice, per se.

True engagement with life is a true engagement with morality, with struggling to do the right thing, after first struggling to determine what that thing IS, relatively speaking, which is to say what is mostly right.  It is a mission to see the world every day the way it is, and consciously be brave, consciously be caring, consciously cultivating the emotional and behavioral flexibility to react appropriately, no matter what comes down the pike.

And I think the people who do this best don’t know they are doing it.

I will grant that I like the Odd Thomas character.  I’ve read all but 1 of the books, less the latest.  It’s perhaps a bit simplistic, but I tend to like Dean Koontz’s moralizing.

That’s all on that for now.

Made 1600 LPI on Lumosity.  Thought I’d brag.  I’m still only in the 97.9th percentile for my age, but I’m only a week or two into my new exercise program. I’ll make 99.  It’s the Problem Solving–basically, really fast math–that is my weak spot.

I am channeling my Inner Nerd.  I do that from time to time.

It is odd, come to think of it, that we live in a culture nearly entirely characterized by outer appearances.  The popular kids are the ones who dress correctly, say the correct things, and who are edgy in just the right ways.

Nearly our entire cultural landscape, though, is populated with ideas begun with nerds.  Our political life is dominated by ideas originating with intellectuals–or in defiance of them.  Our business lives are shaped by enterprises begun in many, many cases by inventors and nerds.  Only perhaps in entertainment does this change, and think about that: entertainment–frivolity, what you do when you are not being serious, not working.

And even there, consider, say, “Rebel without a Cause.”  The screenplay was based on a book written by Robert Lindner, and written by Irving Shulman, both of whom were likely nerds/introverts. Into this matrix stepped the ACtors.

It seems to me that the inner life is what creates meaning in the outer life, and denigrating those who largely live in their internal worlds is therefore a species of stupidity.  Of course, stupid is what stupid does.

You may never have thought of it this way, but nearly every word that leaves Obama’s mouth has roots in the life and intellectual work of some Dead White Nerd (as whispered in his ear by a very living Iranian-Chicagoan woman).

Here is how I think it works: you are attracted to what you are.

We are presented daily with a nearly infinite amount of possible complexity. We survive with heuristics and habits.  We form patterns out of the overwhelming chaos.  Some things stand out; some we ignore or don’t even consciously see.  These processes happen on a deep level.

How would you know if you passed up an opportunity your unconscious did not even allow you to consciously become aware of and evaluate in the daylight?

How would you know if some part of you gravitated to things which over time would prove destructive, if it felt “right” in some sense?

I do think this universe is interactive, but I don’t think it rewards positive thinking directly.  I don’t think there is a “law” which says that if we think constantly about what we want, it will be hand delivered to us in a gift wrapped box.

Neither do I embrace an idea of life as INHERENTLY one of struggle.

What I think happens is that small differences over time add up to large differences. People able to imagine themselves succeeding notice and exploit small opportunities as they present themselves, and over time this leads to much larger successes.

Me, I have to second guess my intuition, because half the time it leads me astray.  This is what I was taught.  This is what I have internalized.  This is why inner work is necessary for long term success.

Now, this by no means absolves me of responsibility.  No sane person should want to be absolved of response-ability, because that is a prima facie rejection of personal agency, and the possibility of GROWING beyond your–my–temporary constraints.

And there is, in my view, inherent benefit to figuring the system out, to learning to recognize negative patterns, and learning to diminish them.

And I would add that taking responsibility is not the same as beating yourself up.

I was watching a documentary/interview with Ingmar Bergman, where he was asked about his sundry and profound failures as a parent, if he felt guilt.  His reply was consonant with something I decided for myself.

He said something like: self abuse, self flagellation, is a form of vanity.  I cannot undo what I did wrong.  It was wrong.  I admit it.  And there is NOTHING I can do about it now.  I was an immature, self serving adolescent until some time in my fifties.  I can’t go back and become a good parent.  I cannot heal, now, the wounds I inflicted then.

I think there is wisdom in this.  Theatrical guilt is a form of display.  It is a distraction.  It is a way of avoiding learning the lessons that need learning, and getting on with a better way of living.  You cannot undo hurt.  All you can do is become a better, more giving person.

And I will add that I say this as someone with a reasonably clear conscience. My worst sins, by most standards, are pretty weak.  But the guilt I feel is comparing who I could have been, with who I was.

But the more I learn, the more I see that all of us are in large measure simple progressions on the path on which we began life.  What merit is there in focusing on failure, where we did less than our future selves now feel was possible?

We can only exist in the moment, and try to do better.  That is all we can do.

And I think many moral narratives are polluted by the absolutisms of most religions.  Certainly in my case, growing up with the threat of eternal damnation for moral failings of a scale I had and have no means to assess, I ingested a sense that all small failings were large failings.  There is little compassion possible in a world where the stakes are eternal and unavoidable.  It does not breed nuance.  It does not breed a spirit of exploration, of failing and getting back up.  What it breeds is conformity and fear.

These are the issues with which I wrestle daily, and I think that is the case of most who grew up like I did.

It is so easy, SO EASY, to choose an absolutism, to abandon curiosity, to abandon open hearted and open spirited exploration.

All Fascism and Communism are, are secular rearticulations of ancient solutions to the problems of confusion, belonging, fear of the unknown, and the omnipresence of the possibility of death.

And all Islamism is, is a revivification of old solutions in the face of modern terrors of inordinate complexity, death, and moral confusion.

We need new pathways.  We currently live in an ocean, and many drown.  Again, this is what I am working to create.  I have yet to create myself, though, and that is the logical first step.  Until you can trust your unconscious, you can never know when you are leading yourself or others astray.