Author: White Whale

I’m going to offer a general idea: support groups, in whatever size is allowed where you are, for people suffering from the fear and isolation which has been imposed on us, and demanded of us.

And ponder this: if you have a group of, say, 10 people, you are most likely breaking either the law or the stated guidelines not wearing a mask.

Ponder what a mask does; it makes you anonymous.  Several times now I’ve seen people I knew but didn’t recognize because they had masks on.  The masks may vary, and may be personalized, but the eradication of your face–to the point that this would actually be a good time to commit robberies–remains.

And ponder that if you wanted to end the meeting with a group hug, or series of individual hugs, or both, you would again be violating either the law or the published guidelines.

We have entered a time, in AMERICA, where you literally risk committing a crime having a group meeting with your faces uncovered, and ending it with handshakes or hugs.

There is a terrible symbolism to this whole thing that makes it feel intentional and conscious.

And I will add, as I think I have before, “social distancing” has to be viewed as an aggravation of, exponentially–since everyone was talking about exponents until they stopped because their predictions failed completely–of existing social isolation, which has been much written about, and which is a key feature in our “epidemics” of suicide and drug overdose, either one of which will kill in an average year will kill nearly as many people have died thus far from COVID.

And we still don’t have the numbers on overdoses and suicides.  

Something has changed.  I don’t if it changed in me, or the world, or both.

But my gut is telling me to stop fighting, stop arguing, stop trying to control the world. I’ve always been able to rationalize to myself that all my words might influence someone, who in turn influences someone else, etc.

But I need to stop.

Here is the thing: my ideal for a long time has been the warrior.  But if you think about it, part of the warriors job–a BIG part of their job–is to be afraid.  All the time.

Where else would a passion for discipline come from?  Where else a passion for preparedness?  You have to assume someone else out there is training as hard or harder than you.

There is, to be sure, something noble and admirable about facing death and difficulty willingly, in the service of a larger cause.

But I think, for me, right now, my job is to cull fear out of me completely.  All of it.

The true forces of reaction in this world are those which look back to the Pharaohs, which look back to kings and queens, which remember fondly the universal practice of slavery the world over.

The Soviet Union was a reactionary project.  It took the tyranny of the Tsars and at least doubled.  Lenin killed more political prisoners in a year than all the Tsars had in the previous several hundred, and by a good margin, if memory serves.  The Russians, and the Kazakhs, and the Georgians and the inhabitants of a dozen other nations were enslaved by an omnipotent tyrant who governed in the name of the religion of “history” and “science”.

The Nazis looked back mythically, certainly, but their racism was grounded firmly in a specific and then current iteration of biological science and eugenics specifically.

“Utopian” projects which do not elevate and honor the individual are innately retrogressive and reactionary.  The individual is the sole unit of meaning, of action, of thought and perception, and of progress.

All paths to a better future have to provide a template for all individuals to improve themselves morally and spiritually, as individuals.  Everything else is reaction.  Everything else is truly, to use the dismally overused term, right wing.

By that standard, I am far left, in my respect for the individual.

And the French Revolution, by this standard, was also dismally right wing.

I won’t stick with this essentially arbitrary resassignment, but thought I would offer it once as a thought exercise.

The key question is this; are we empowering self organizing systems, by empowering individual people and all the implicate and deep order they provide; or are we REMOVING information from the system by limiting decisions and power to a small handful of individuals who are morally and intellectually among the worst the human species has to offer?

I posted this on Facebook;

This is worth the read, I think, if you are unfamiliar with this particular type of Personality Disorder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…/Borderline_personality_disorder

Personally, I think most Trump Derangement Syndrome falls into this category, which is characterized by vastly too much emotion for a given topic, idealization and demonization, intellectual and emotional instability–usually unrecognized by the person displaying it–and a fear of abandonment which leads to excessive dependence on a political creed and propaganda, even to the point of self harm through stupid ideas. There is also a more or less complete loss of empathy, which is something I’ve seen twice in the last ten minutes.

I’m not a trained psychologist but this is my take. It makes sense.

What if viruses have a sort of hive mind, and simply “decide” somehow when to spread, and when to stop?  What if the Spanish flu was influenced in some karmic way by the Great War?

I am thinking of organisms like termites, whose ability to coordinate their activities we don’t really understand.  Specifically, I’m thinking of Rupert Sheldrakes idea of “morphic resonance”.

As I’ve been noting everywhere, the flu ends about now every year.  It runs all winter, then stops.  Good ideas exist as to why, like increased Vitamin D levels and overall health improvements in those who are getting sunlight and fresh air.  Sun also seems to act as a disinfectant, and coughs and sneezes, empirically, simply don’t travel as far on warm and moist air.

But there could be more.  I feel like there is.  It is only a feeling.

Everything is interconnected, according to modern physics, or at least most interpretations of it.  This is something worth remembering, particularly for those who want to speak of “science” as if science were something other than the total output of everyone using a particular method of inquiry, or as if experts did not disagree on everything under the sun, continually and often angrily.

I really think Catcher in the Rye is about sexual abuse.  Throughout the book, Holden is either trying to protect women, or he is treating them with contempt. He literally has a whore in his room and finds he has no desire to have sex with her. A teenage boy.

The guy in the bar he met, where he was talking about how “flitty” the place was, felt ambiguously gay to me, and Holden finds himself talking in crude ways about sex with him.

And there is the “20 times” comment.

The whole thing felt very autobiographical, with the most important elements more or less hidden in open view.

Here is Salinger on it:  “My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book … [I]t was a great relief telling people about it.”

Note, that the “relief” came many years after the fact.

I will note also, simply because it was interesting, that Salinger was with an infantry unit in WW2, where he saw action, possibly, on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.  He got PTSD and was hospitalized for it for a few weeks.  They called it “Combat Stress Reaction” back then.

But of course you don’t really get over true PTSD, although I think the community support for ex-soldiers was much better back then, not least because so many went.

But that the guy was, to use the term used then, “neurotic”, seems obvious.  And unwanted premature sexual experience seems like the obvious candidate for cause.  That book was in some senses a “cri de coeur” for someone to hear him, but I doubt anyone really did.

The maladjustment, alienation, confusion: THAT they got.  But that respected and well known men were doing awful things at times to boys: not so much.

It’s like with Freud.  Freud GOT what the women were telling him.  He simply convinced himself to lie about it.  He made a career and became famous for his lies.

And in that context, through that prism, one can easily see how Caulfield would view everyone reflexively as phony, find himself unable to trust anyone but his sister, and be so charged with nervous energy that he couldn’t function.

This book, in important ways, is really a tragedy.  It is about a boy destroyed by a system which lied about it.

I don’t see how Holden will ever have a truly healthy relationship with a woman.  As apparently others have commented, it would not have been surprising if he wound up a homosexual.  It would not surprise me, as a reader, if he was headed towards becoming a pedophile himself.

As far as Mr. Antolini (I think it is): I could spin that both ways.  He was drunk and feeling affection for Holden like a son.  I could see it that way.  He could also have been drunk and having fantasies about Holden.  I could also see it that way.  Either way, it was utterly and completely inappropriate, and Holden’s confusion understandable.

It seems obvious something in that neighborhood must have happened to Salinger himself.  And as he got older, he famously retired from the world, much like his deaf mute gas station attendant.

Some things are just too much to bear.

This triggered a few things for me.  I was not molested, but I was–as I think most boys are–subjected to queer and inappropriate energies on a number of occasions.

I’m sure this whole thing will continue to unfold in me in interesting and I hope useful ways.

I just finished reading “The Catcher in the Rye”.  I had a specific personal reason for reading it I won’t get into.

First off, I can relate to this kid.  He’s a dick, but only because he is absolutely fucking miserable.

Here is the thing: he doesn’t feel loved, other than by his little sister.  And he apparently loved his brother who died.  His father and mother live in distant worlds, and it seems likely his mother was not an attentive mother and that his bonding is ambivalent or avoidant.

Here is the solution: love.  Kids like that need to feel loved, valued and understood.

But standard therapy does not have that as a goal, does it?  It’s rejected in principle and at the ethical level, as inappropriate to a therapist/patient relationship.  So both are reduced, in the end, to dancing around the real issue, aren’t they? 

And the patient learns all these stories about “why” they are the way they are, which are really untrue.  They just need to feel loved. They don’t need to undo something that happened 25 years ago.

And the therapists get to keep their own emotional content at arms length.  Here is another thing: many therapists are themselves “catchers in the rye”.  They deal with their own insufferable emotions by acting like they are saving others.  The whole analogy is a good one for the emotional basis of virtue signalling and what I recently saw called moral narcissism.  The things they do for “good” are really stage acting intended to convince themselves and ideally others that they are the sorts of people they really aren’t.

I think Holden is obsessed with phonies because he is clever enough to have seen how often people play act their own lives, but he is not able to create something of his own.  He’s lost, utterly and completely.  And I think he became famous because he was an early form of a type which later became very common, the dropout. In his own way, it would not be overstating the case, probably, to see him as a proto-hippy.

I’ve pondered this whole thing.  This book created quite a stir in 1952.  It was not long before the time of the Beatniks (as Herb Cain eventually termed them).  “On the Road” came out in 1957.  Howl was first howled in 1955.  But already in 1952 Ginsberg, Kerouc, and Burroughs knew each other, and were preparing the foundations.

I’m not the historian I would like to be, but I’m not ignorant.  Here are a few elements I will introduce as potentially relevant.

Firstly, the success of “capitalism” created degrees of freedom, education, and opportunity which were really quite new to middle class Americans.  Freedom can bring with it both fear and hope.

Fear, if you do not love yourself, and are filled with self loathing, as Holden plainly is.  He is afraid of the future. 

And I wonder to what extent various attempted molestations affected him.  He said it must have happened to him 20 times.  Scared kids lacking in confidence are the standard targets of these horrific and emotionally abusive men.

Secondly, anyone who was 40 in 1952–a good guess as to the age of his father in the novel–would have been 30 in 1942.  They would have lived through both the Great Depression and the Second World War.  There is a good chance they would have served.

What hard living, hard experience, difficult, traumatic experience does, is it makes you emotionally unavailable.  You are not as kind as you otherwise might have been, at least most people.  You become hard.

Holden is obviously very sensitive, and he must have picked up on all this.

Oh, I’ll leave all this there.  I’ve had a long day.  No doubt a lot of ink has been spilled on all this.  I’ll need to read some tomorrow or the next day.

True wealth is always an emotional state.  So is poverty.

Bill Gates is a very poor man.

And I would comment that money doesn’t make people bad, but that bad people are often driven in the direction of wealth.

I say bad: really, the world is simply filled with people unable to process traumas that they often can’t remember.  And the worst trauma is not being loved.  If you are never loved, then you don’t miss it.  But you can’t be a complete human being without love.

Based on his behavior, I doubt very much that Bill Gates has ever felt loved, and I don’t think he knows it, not on a deep level.

I think one of the most generous things you can do is be openly and authentically happy.  I think this is close to the essence of genuine spirituality, because you can’t be happy if you are not living a good and honest life.

I think there is, or may evolve into, a market for old fashioned books, and an old fashioned card catalogue.  Nothing you do on the internet is private.  You can’t look up the capital of Moldova without it being recorded and logged.  Algorithms track your very thought process, I suspect, if anyone has an interest in you.  I assume I am tracked, to some extent, although I would assume it is automated (I was talking with an NSA contractor once, and he told me if you are a “person of interest” they assign someone to “watch” you 24/7; I will add this blog is banned from Facebook, for unspecified “policy violations”.  I can’t link it.)

What if you could go somewhere, like a library, but not a library, and pull out an old World Book encyclopedia and look up the capital of Moldova?  Then spend an hour just browsing through the thing, like I did often when I was  a kid?  $10/month, new books added weekly.

You could read books there.  There could be a magazine section, like there used to be.

It sounds retro, and it is, but who would have thought records would make a comeback?  I think in the right market, with the right marketing, this would work, and perhaps work really well.  You could ask everyone to check their phones at the door.  I think even the kids are starting to understand their addiction is unhealthy. 

Free coffee–how about an espresso machine people could operate themselves, with training?–meeting areas for people to hang out and talk.  Bean bag chairs.  Place to do old school homework, with unconnected computers running word processing software.  Maybe even old software, barely better than the Atari games which might also be present.  Maybe even a typewriter or two.

A working pay phone.  Etc.