I understand evil. I understand sin. They float among us, and for many of us, they seem obvious and easy.
God, help me save myself from that easy one step down, and perhaps help me save one other person.
God, let my my present self serve as a bad example to my future self, and an object of compassion and forgiveness.
But we are in the river, are we not? We are all drifting to the sea. There is no entering, because we are in the flow. It is an abstraction to pretend otherwise, and an abstraction is an effort to leave life.
If I might be only vaguely recondite, given past posts, it is disappointing to me that no one really grasps this large cave I have discovered. I watch what from my side look like beams of light disappear in the distance.
Still, I am an odd soul. It is hard to compare me to anyone, certainly anyone most of the people I know might know. I don’t know anyone like me, and I don’t reveal everything to anyone.
I will figure this out, though. Today I was thinking perhaps I don’t need to be here at all, and I infected myself with the disease of life to see if I could solve it. I think I can. I don’t need much more time, either.
This is perhaps all ludicrous, for a man writing to an unknown and perhaps nonexistent audience. These are, regardless, the contents of my mind. I deal equally well, for the most part, with silence, praise, and condemnation. I do my thing. Join me if you can and feel inclined. There will be water, the unknown, darkness, and possibly some illumination which makes no sense until it does.
And it won’t be what you were
Looking for.
Not at all.
But you will know it
As an old, old friend.
There is warmth.
Even here, even now.
Now, I don’t think this is an omen of anything in my immediate future. I think it was my unconscious releasing something from my distant past, when I was driven out of my mind by fear and a sense of being unwanted. I died, in life. This happens to many.
But my body continues to function, and I am left wondering now what, if I am to “live”, I am supposed to do. What is a worthy life? What is the most any God could ask of us? What is the most we can and should ask of ourselves? Of each other?
I will likely answer this many times in many ways in coming years, but this morning the phrase that comes to mind is Grace and Gratitude.
If dissociation is death, then life is association, connection. The essence of grace, it seems to me, is appropriateness. It is physical balance. It is a judgement which acts harmoniously with any circumstances or people which present themselves. It is a ready and flexible connection with mutable circumstances such that one always blends well, interacts in a way which increases the whole, which brings pleasure and satisfaction.
Gratitude is an attitude of open welcoming, of being open to experience, and glad of it. It is taking pleasure in the sun on your face, or the feeling of rain. It is feeling the walls around you and the roof when it is cold outside. It is placing a value on your friends, and feeling joy in their company. It is welcoming the work in your life.
My personal defaults are relative rigidity and irritability. I am describing ideals. When you see them–and I will be looking too–figure out how to emulate them.
I am tempted to say this world is frightening and confusing, but this is not true, is it, for those who find it fascinating, beautiful and engaging?
Grace and gratitude are keys which will unlock a new world within this one. I feel this.
Think about the BPD kids in Portland and elsewhere: is each and every one a massive parenting failure? Do not some come from relatively well to do homes, with parents who did their level best to love and care for them? Yes, this seems likely.
What else is involved? I would hazard a guess that, if we suppose that BPD is basically two year old behavior in a biological adult–who of course would get overwhelmed by everything when operating with the emotional command and control apparatus of an infant who needs a parent–then perhaps one of the key losses in the culture war as it now stands is a clear pathway to adulthood.
Some combination of media addiction, superficial parenting, and the fact that our society never demands that people individuate and separate from the parental matrix (I would suggest that this word is multifaceted, in that in such a world nothing is truly real, since an immature person cannot see but through the eyes of others, making the whole world a mass illusion; I would further suggest, as I have in the past, that socialism for such people is simply a pathway to being a child, with a directly involved parent, their whole lives), causes perennial childishness.
Antifa, from all rational perspectives, is little more than play acting and public tantrums. If it is true that white conservatives are the real danger, it can only be because as a group we have individuated, and are capable of effective purposive behavior at the individual level. We are also a much greater risk for running our own companies, raising successful well adjusted families, going to church to find a higher purpose, and to be capable of giving back to our communities in meaningful and useful ways.
And even where it is not presenting itself in the street in pointless charades, dissociation is everywhere. Life is supposed to feel meaningful. It is not supposed to feel like you are in perennial war you cannot escape, which is how it feels I think for many if not most Americans. The Rat Race is a war, and you cannot feel your natural, relaxed best at wartime.
So this sense of disconnection, this abstraction (which I recall Jacques Barzun among others mentioning as a defining attribute of what he called our declining, or at least decadent, civilization) is everywhere. It makes all lives beset by it less rich, life less fun. We should sing more, dance more, relax more. But we don’t. A quasi-military mindset underlies everything.
I will make several comments.
First, pretending our border doesn’t matter is effectively equal to saying that our nation, and our political culture, do not matter. This itself is tantamount to saying that WE don’t matter. If you let people walk all over you, you are obviously dealing with serious shame and self loathing. Allowing in tens of millions of people who just want to sponge off of us is a way of committing national suicide. This is what the Europeans are doing. They don’t seemingly care to live any more, not as nations, not as cultures, not as inheritors of a history worth a shit. And most of their leaders are not sufficiently optimistic about the future that they have had children. Macron and Merkel and May: all childless. As the song goes, “only stupid people are breeding”. The rest of them think they know better.
And I would like to point out that our leftist political culture is telling us that if we have ANY positive feelings about our nation, its history, or our particular ethnic group (if it is white, because God knows all white people are the same, with the same history, with the Irish exactly equal to the Germans), then we should feel shame. We should also feel shame if we don’t like our history. In fact, the only people who don’t need to feel shame are those who spend all their time telling OTHER people to feel shame. It’s a fucked up situation, embraced only by fucked up people.
And if you are minority, you are helpless. You are told to feel proud for being a victim, but victimhood and pride are not natural companions, to put it mildly. And there is no pathway to earned self respect. Everything is given. You are what you are. All black are equal. All Latinos are equal. All women are equal. The only way to climb it to intersectionalize yourself, and that still does nothing to actually empower you in your daily life. You just get better seating at the political luncheons.
So shame here, shame there, shame everywhere. Nothing to hold on to. And Trump of course is going to destroy the world. Fucking Trump, fucking fucking fucking Trump. If only we had elected Hillary: rainbows across the sky as far as you can see, sugar plum fairies, and pots of gold.
Pure childishness, in other words. And if I might frame it this way, someone with Borderline Personality Disorder more or less functions with a two year olds emotionality, in an adult body. It is wildly inappropriate. It is exhausting. This is why BPD suffer from depression and suicidality.
And if I might generalize, in the lead ups to both the Bolshevik Revolution and Nazism, there was mass nihilism, mass blackness, mass anomie and angst. In both of those cases, I think that large scale events created pervasive attachment failures, which created kids who were naturally supportive of any political regime which involved mass conformity, strong emotion, and violence.
I’ve commented that Nazism, psychologically, can easily be seen as rooted in the attachment failures of parents who had children during and after World War 1. In Russia, you had both the war in 1905, the first World War, and you had people who were more or less proud to call themselves Nihilists (it is a Russian term, or originated there, and was applied to people who looked and acted like hippies) infecting everyone with atheism and pessimism.
The psychological stage is set for fascism in this country. It is arising among children whose parents didn’t love them effectively for whatever reason, and who suffer mental illness, and a hunger that goes down to the seat of their souls to be members of a mindlessly conformist group authorized to commit acts of violence against innocents. They need a channel for their rage, and an antidote to their alienation. And they need a sufficiently good moral background that their innate self loathing can be held in check long enough to satisfy their blood lust.
As I continue to say, it’s hard to be optimistic. But my work continues. It is possible to be happy in a fallen, depraved world. It is possible to float atop the muck, as in the much used Lotus flower metaphor. And sooner or later a bullet or the Grim Reaper in some other form will find me, and I too will see what is next.
Until then, I will do my best to speak the truth, to embody truth, and to do my best to guide others to it.
You sabotage yourself, you create problems for yourself, you distract yourself continually and call it ADHD (or at least the people in the seats in the offices do, but most people seem to me to be happy to “have” something like that), all in order to avoid seeing the Sun of the Primary Wound, the thing that you cannot see, cannot unsee, and cannot live with. Many of us–I won’t presume say say most of us, although that is likely true in some places, for example inner city ghettos–have a primary developmental failure. We have a scar from before we could speak. A terror, left over from a world when we could not walk, could not talk, could not reason, but were quite equal to the tasks of mistrust and fear.
My family mythology claims that I turned myself over at a week. This is not supposed to be possible. I believe it happened. I was trying to get the fuck out of there. I failed, obviously. Babies fail. That is what they do.
My work continues. I will call it here Ocean work. It is the work of the white whale. It is diving deep, deeper, and staying there, for a long time, and looking around in the darkness, and trying to bring light.
In my own particular case, I think I have reached the bottom, cognitively. I am still trying to process it emotionally, but I have a pathway. The way is difficult, but relatively open. I walk a stone path, but a path nonetheless, now. A direction is a true mercy. We all need it. We all seek it. Far too many of us fail.
Imagine a baby, a newborn baby, whose mother, the very first moment she lays eyes on him, feels disgust and repulsion. Imagine this baby is highly sensitive, natively intelligent. Oh: consequences.
For me, it is important to always be swimming whatever direction the world is not swimming. I have long watched lemmings will themselves to fall off emotional and intellectual cliffs.
This is not self pity, and it is obviously not a call for attention or the pity of others. It is an extremely interesting story, one I have been desperately looking for all my life. And there it is. There it is. It’s ugly. And it is fantastically beautiful.
I am alive, amazingly. I am alive, against all odds. I am alive, to write these words. I am alive, to speak new words, and to walk over that next hill. I am alive, when I was cut immediately after my first breath. I am alive, in a world of pain, to say and feel there is something else.
It is a miracle. It is marvelous.
This is an arrival. This is a celebration.
However, given that the British used those sources and methods to help our own intelligence people more or less plant false evidence to get Mueller appointed, we should not worry about what they think. Those people are not Trump’s friends, and he owes them nothing.
In my view, Trump needs to tell Mueller to put his cards on the table, and do it now, or he will again order that everything be declassified. It has been two years. Mueller needs to stop this shit show. Whatever integrity he may once have, whoever he may once have been, he is no more. He has become a Javert obsessed with Trump, and willing to break any vow, any code, and any law to do it.
And Javert, in the end, did the right thing. There is no sign that spirit has any residence any more in this craven and awful man.
I am absolutely, categorically willing to give my life for this. That, I think and feel, is the only way.
Wish me luck. Not in death, to be clear, but in new life.
Nobel Laureate who is old school enough to still remember the basic math and critical thinking skills he learned in grade school.