Moderates United

I went to an outstanding concert tonight, and it occurred to me to posit the following logical chain: if music is an important part of life, and if life is worth living well, then good music is necessarily an important part of life.

One of the most basic foundational flaws of Islam that I can point to is its hostility to song and dance in any form.  Singing, playing music, and dancing are all activities which soothe us, which calm us, which tame the wild beasts within us.  They make society possible.  They facilitate the laughter and shared happiness which are the essence of communion, genuine goodwill, and the capacity for love.

Now, practically of course, many Muslims break this code.  They sing, they dance, they celebrate.  But the zealots hate all of that.  Their creed is one of meanness, cruelty, rigidity, death, and darkness.  There is nothing good they will bring to Europe.

Making everyone mean is of course good for the religious business, if the goal is expansion and control through agents of violence, but it is not good for peace or human well being, and certainly not for thriving.

I would add that shame is a basic tool which, when installed at a young age, makes social control much easier.  You inculcate through it both submissiveness, and fear of being different.

It is for this very purpose that shame is being so carefully cultivated in our own youth, in the form of the Original Sin of being born white or male or unapologetically heterosexual.  The indoctrinators want their propaganda targets to feel deep shame at their very existence.  And kids are so fucking desperate and stupid that they BUY this bullshit.  Amazing.

Principle: politics can never be a means to community, merely an expression of it.

Politics comes from Polis, and the underlying Greek idea is that no true community could be larger than could hear a loud voice yelling from a 2nd or 3rd story rooftop.  They are small by design.

And America is by design intended to consist in many, many Polises (Poli?  Polei?  I don’t do Greek), many small communities.  This is the whole point of the Electoral College, whose SUCCESS we saw in the election of Trump.

We see fear of Trump ending any number of Federal programs.  If I might again paraphrase Bastiat, simply because someone objects to one person doing something, having control over something, does not mean they object to it being done.  To object to bad policing is not to object to policing.  To object to bad policy is not to say there should not be policy.

And to object to the Federal Government doing something does not mean that it should not be done.  We can and should point to long term failures in educational achievement and view the Federal role in it as either irrelevant or pernicious.  We can and should point to the fact that the arts have been completely politicized, to the point that conservative tax-payers are in many cases being forced to subsidize–in the NEA, in “The People’s Radio”–media that are overtly propagandistic.

But that is not to object to art.  Art, and environmental policy, and education, and food for the elderly and everything else can be funded by the States, if they choose.  It can be funded by cities and counties.

This is the thing: caring should be local and responsive to specific problems which individuals can see in the places they live.  It should not be monolithic, one-size-fits-all, and originating for most of the country in a far distant place, filled with career bureaucrats who get fat paychecks and retirement bonuses, and who are nearly impossible to fire, EVEN WHEN THEY FAIL MISERABLY.

The EPA has more or less said to Trump “we don’t work for you”.  Fine.  What they do can be outsourced to the States.  Where there is a stream or river or lake or land area that crosses State borders, the two States can negotiate.  The EPA has clearly been abused for partisan political purposes.  That sort of abuse should not be possible in a politically well organized nation, which is what our Constitution created.

Culturally, both the right and the left want their politics to represent some ideal of community.  But caring is not enacted by bureaucrats disconnected from the lives they have so much control over.  And we cannot go back to the past.  What I might call the log of the past is falling, never to rise again in the same way.

We need new ideas, new seeds, new visions.  This is what I continue to attempt to provide, and I do not think I am speaking out of turn in saying I have enjoyed some success in at least the articulating, even if I am a nearly complete failure, thus far, in the implementing.

I’m trying to avoid politics, but would like to ask a question: why the fuck does James Comey still have his job? He refused to prosecute Hillary despite a superabundance of evidence even in the public record, and is now apparently concerned that WikiLeaks someone triangulated with Trump and the Russians to deny a dishonest tired and evil hag access to the Presiddncy.

Comey is corrupt. Period. And we don’t need s politicized hack running an agency with the power of the FBI.

Are not all Federal employees at-will? If not, can we not make them that way?

As I suppose was inevitable, I am going to indulge myself and offer a few comments on this movie, which I first watched last night.

Ultimately, it is about redemption and survival, which are both highly positive themes.  I liked the ending.

And I don’t think Chiron is gay.  This was not a movie about gayness.  It was a movie about the importance of positive and nurturing physical contact combined with trust.  Trust is everything, especially for people who have found the world hostile and dark.

And I really like that aspect of it: that there was no preaching, merely telling, merely relating.  There was no politics there, even if it is safe to assume Hollywood read the politics into it.

It is perhaps both poignant and appropriate that there should have been such a fuck-up at the Oscars.  Barry Jenkins never thought he could get there in the first place.  He got there only as a result of an extended act of faith, courage, and putting one foot in front of the other and hoping for the best.

And he gets there, and wins, and gets his thunder stolen. But he still won.  Whatever the shit was that happened on the way, and when he got there, he still found redemption and acceptance of his vision in the end.

We all get hit.  Many of us get kicked on the ground.  But there is no use dwelling on all that.  There is still much goodness, much love, and much reason for hope in this world.  Perhaps it comes in small doses at irregular intervals, but this is still God speaking in this stony world.

Because they will hurt you in the future, by changing, by becoming ill, by dying.

In the past, the belief in heaven helped most Americans deal with this grief of anticipation, because whoever they lost, they would see again.  But more and more Americans–and the world generally–are indoctrinated in the creed of Materialism, or what I read is now more often called Physicalism.

To love deeply is to be hurt deeply, so why not make your relationships more superficial, and your lasting attachments to abstractions who will never leave you?

I look at our kids today, and at my own childhood not so very long ago, and I think many American kids bear subtle scars of having been loved a bit, but not enough.  Their parents were distracted by work, by media.  Quite possibly their mother worked full time and they were raised by care-givers who were not family and not able to care quite enough in the first two years.  Quite likely their parents divorced when they were young, each seeking some new adventure, or at least escape from an inability to mature into a healthy giving and receiving relationship.

I was struck many years ago by how much more mature kids in Europe seemed to be than American kids of the same age.  Partly it is the real demands placed on them by the school systems over there.  Partly it is the continuity of culture and expectation which is communicated person to person, parent and grandparent to child, and not socialization through television.

We did not used to be overgrown children.  Americans were as mature and able at the same ages as Europeans.  But the 1960’s happened, and somewhere in there the ideal of becoming an adult underwent a crisis and psychosis, and permanently weakened.

And the core of maturation is individuation, and the core of that is the development of a felt sense of personal agency, that your world is in important respects within your control, that your behavior dictates your future, that you have a say, and that even if dreams take time to manifest, that persistence prevails most of the time.

None of those core personality beliefs and attributes can manifest in conditions of continual protection from psychological randomness and difficulty.  Life inherently becomes something beyond control, something dark and dangerous, something fearful, and life in a cage–to be called a “sanctuary”–something to be treasured.

I do not feel today as I felt yesterday.  But I needed to let that energy out. I am tempted to stipulate as a general principle that if something is falling, let it fall.  Then allow something new and more robust to be planted and to grow where it stood.  No use protecting dead wood.  This is not how life–which is inherently wild when lived honestly and freely–works.

This is what I am feeling at the moment.  This is the core of evil.  I want to watch the Earth destroyed, and everyone killed and dead, including me.  Paint it Black, with only slightly more energy and honesty.

Why do I write so much?  Why did I write all those essays on Goodness Movement?  Why have I spent so much time in political and philosophical debate?

Because I was fighting, through proxy, demons within myself.  Anyone who is driven is driven by something, and a better word might be chased by something.

Love is gradual. Love is patient and takes the long view.  Love embraces and expands and it is flexible and adaptable.  It is attraction, not compulsion, not obsession.

Hate may manifest using the word love or the word goodness. It may project words like justice and peace, but it does not come from those places, and it does not really know them.

I myself was laid on a sacrificial altar and every effort made to destroy me emotionally by my family.  I had no shelter but abstraction and dissociation.  No one intervened to save me.  Even now, they refuse to recognize what they tried to do, and I am left with that memory.

When a knife enters you, it leaves a gap.  Your memory retains that gap, and fashions it into an identical weapon, to be directed against the world in some way.  Now, this energy can and often is introjected to create a second wound, through patterns of self destruction and self harm, but it cannot easily be dissipated except through knowing and a slow process of acceptance and integration.

I do not want to be smart.  I want to be wise.  And this process is non-linear.

My past indicates I will be fine, but right now I am dealing with some extraordinarily destructive and nasty energies, that I have, seemingly, kept at bay until it was time to deal with them.  That time is now.  I have long practice facing things which I cannot face.

Wish me well.  I feel I may be human soon, and have learned important things in this excruciating experience.

Buddhists do not renounce all attachment.  For a very long time, they attach themselves to the Tripittika, the Triple Basket: the Buddha, the Sangha and the Dharma.

In theory, even this attachment does not endure forever, but as a practical matter, for most Buddhists it does.

Psychologically, there is no way to say to people “you can have this, trust this, place all your faith and trust in this, and then kill it.”

Oh, life.

Perhaps you can say the first part, and then add: and when it changes color, and becomes smaller and less attractive, and when your inner world becomes filled with light and love, then you can leave it behind, as a vehicle which served its purpose carrying you across the water.

What interests me here is not the proposition that everything and everyone you love can be taken–this is obvious–but the idea that some things cannot be taken; or at least, that the taking involves a different level of misfortune.

We have all read the stories of people being captured and sent to concentration camps where they “have” flea infested clothes, tattoos, endless workpaindeath, and nothing else but their memories, and perhaps their hopes.

More sinister to me are the efforts to take from people not just their possessions, but their memories and beliefs.  This level of evil is unique to Communism.  Not even the Mongols would have contemplated that level of cruelty.  They simply enjoyed killing and taking.

So in this world, not only can your things be taken, but your very sense of self, too.  One can only imagine what brain-washing tools have been developed by psychopaths working on their own account for “the future of mankind”, and in reality in service of primitive wounds they have no hope of healing or even remembering.

I was contemplating the other day that the lowest levels of evil require justification and dogma.  A psychopathic killer is an animal in a man’s–more rarely, a woman’s–body, but there remains a connection between the frontal cortex and what we might term “the predator’s brain” in their viscera.  The frontal cortex negotiates pretending to be a socially connected human, and the viscera express to that person feelings of completion and the cessation of tension and anxiety.  Serial killers go through a cycle, one in which their acute sense of emotional disconnection is temporarily suspended when they commit an act of cruelty which is not evolutionarily disconnected, in my view, from a wild cat playing with its prey, then killing it.  Since this is always a temporary solution, they tend to repeat their acts, and, importantly, keep mementos.  This is a nearly universal trait among those who have been caught.

But to the point there is a connection between what is felt and what is thought.  They know what relieves the tension.  They have moments where they feel, relatively, good.  There is a connection between the social brain and viscera, where feelings and thoughts flow back and forth.

This is not true for ideologues.  I feel the conscious connection between the social brain and the viscera is severed, in a permanent act of dissociation expressed through abstraction, and invariably in the service of an ideal which uses words which are socially acceptable, such as justice, progress, and peace.

What this means is that ideologues are disconnected, consciously, from their hatred, their anger, their violence, their venom; ultimately, given the words they always choose to use, from their hypocrisy and soul-level dishonesty.

No wild beast commits mass murder for no reason.  We can watch a cat play with a mouse, but one mouse is sufficient for most cats for a while.  Then they lose interest.

I am losing my way here.  I am tempted to delete all this, but it feels important to me emotionally at the moment.  I am not completely sure why.  I am trying to reach the abstraction needed for mass slaughter.

Nationalism is in some respects tribalism.  But tribalism represents concrete connections with actual people with whom you share an historical and cultural and social connection.

What do we call the tribalism of the abstract?  How do we understand their crimes?  I can’t go farther down this path at the moment.

As I have shared several times, I identify (like many men) with the Wolverine character.  In my own case, perhaps among a smaller group, I identify with the recurrence of severe pain which does not kill him, from which he recovers.  But he feels the pangs of conscience.  He feels the pains of physical wounds.  He feels the pain of absence and loss, and his torture is surviving everything which kills everyone he makes the mistake of loving.  Small wonder a lifetime of continual disappointment makes him so hard, even if he can never bring himself fully to stop caring.

For me, this movie was somewhat redemptive.  As stark as the loss at the end was, it brought me emotional comfort, which puzzled me.

My children grew up watching the X-men movies with me.  This was a part of their childhood, and my parenthood.  A long story line has come, seemingly, to an end.  And my children, for their part, have grown.

But in some ways his pain was my pain.  I have long felt myself a “warrior”, which for my own purposes I would define as “someone who keeps fighting when he can’t go on and does so for a very long time.”

I felt some peace last night, as I realized that it need not remain my self appointed task to try and solve the problems of the world.  There is a difference between someone who fights, and someone who provides an alternative to fighting.

This world is broken.  None of us have the power to heal it fully.  Certainly, I don’t.

Douglas McArthur, among others, reminded us that “old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

What does this mean?  When someone has given their all and then some, when they have consecrated their souls to battle, to the taking of lives, and enduring watching the lives of their own kind, their friends, their own spiritual flesh and blood, being taken in turn, there is an energy in the air created, a torment, a turmoil, a restlessness and recklessness which continues long after their bodies are dust.  They are memorable, and remain felt for a long time.

But I feel my path is to provide an alternative to war.  And for those who have known war, a path out of it.  Soldiers bring war home.  They may not show it, but it is there.  Once it is in the blood, nothing else feels right, for most.  They may fear and loathe it, as McArthur did.  But they cannot get it out of them.  It is a tinge, a coloring, an odor that remains.

I have never been in an actual battle, but within my heart I have endured countless hours of desperation, of reckless, seemingly impossible courage.  I am alive because of these battles, which I think would have claimed many in suicide or a suitable equivalent.

But I felt, last night, for the first time, the possibility of peace.  It goes not through arguing, not through that disputatiousness I use to protect myself from unmanageable emotions, but by letting it all go.

I feel that the inner cutting which attends deep perception is painful to me.  I am unwilling to renounce it fully, but I am willing to admit my clumsiness, my lack of skill, my painful stupidity, and with it, an alternative.

That alternative is silence, and the allowing of healing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bfA3fhsSnk

Much of this blog, perhaps, is me working it all out in my own way.  That whole album is excellent.

I am dealing with evil right now. Peter Levine says healing involves contacting our inner goodness, and I believe this, but in my own experience the path through it is an awareness of human evil, and specifically an awareness of its presence in our own hearts, all of us.  I watch it simmering up in me.  It is no longer hidden. I am becoming one, not two.

There is no easy way to be fully human, but that is what my aim in life is.

The following is written under the influence of fatigue.  It is meandering and, perhaps, in some places falls short of the lucidity which is my usual goal.  Nonetheless, here you go:

One of the hardest tasks of human life is to see people as they actually are.  To do this, you need to be emotionally engaged, but neither repulsed nor attracted.  You yourself need to be free from neediness, and free of those hidden triggers which create unnecessary and foreign (to the interaction, as they exist in a timeless space of their own) reactions.

Virtually everyone you meet, every single day, you either want something from, fear in some way, or react to in ways which are related to things and events of long ago.  They are never just there.  They are there, and YOU are there, and your illusions and feelings are there.  It’s a complex mix.

Growth, for me, seems to consisting in the realization that every negative emotional pattern I have is BEST seen as originating, now, in me.  When I sabotage myself, of course I can trace it back to someone outside of me.  But they are not there, now, are they?  That happened oh so long ago.

But surely, it is easy to think, I would not hurt myself.  That must be a relic.

No: that, too is you.  Part of you is an asshole.  And if you are an asshole to yourself, you are to other people too.  You have just learned to hide it from them and from you.  Nobody sees it, but your asshole self.  You have to get on speaking terms with your asshole self.

And don’t think you can tell it what to do.  It will get in your face and say I SAVED YOUR LIFE YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER.  And it has a point.  It did.

I think–and this is where I am at at the moment–you need to give it an alternative, by both staying emotionally present and doing the sorts of things which work towards success in various forms.  You have to give it reason to trust in a stable adult form of agency which does what it does, but better, with less stress internally, and which pisses fewer people off externally.  You need to give it a reason to stop telling you what to do by giving it an HONEST–and spotting bullshit is an essential part of this part–alternative.

It would be impossible to describe some of the feelings which are coming up in me as I thaw, feelings which evoke times when I was much younger, feelings which I had forgotten were possible.
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Last night in some dreams I won’t recount, I realized that my conscious awareness, on an emotional level, was just flat gone for many years of my life.  I was hypnotized.  I was there.  It was my body.  I walked on the street, and drove my car, and met the expectations laid on me, mostly, but I wasn’t there.  It was an automaton.

My true self sees fucking everything.  I feel textures in the air.  I get whiffs of people’s personal stories.  As I have said before, I think at some point I will be able to read spirits–minds alone are boring.  It is astonishingly interesting.  I am fascinated by everything.

I play this game wherever I go, which Doris Lessing called “What do you see”.  I’ll sit in restaurants and wonder why an access hatch is where it is, or what work had to be done and patched there, or wonder why they only applied one coat of paint, or wonder where they got all the lamps, etc.  I see as much as I can, and am constantly trying to figure out the back story.  It’s an interesting hobby, and an antidote to staring at my phone.  Almost every room of almost every building has interesting questions.

Then of course you have the people.

When my kids were younger I took them to Pizza Hut one time.  There was a man sleeping in his car in the spot next to where we parked.  When we got done, he was gone.  I spent the next thirty minutes making up stories of what happened to him, from Big Foot to flying saucers, to ex-wives, to the FBI, etc. It was great fun.

I am getting off an a tangent, as I do, but I continue to believe that the spirits of curiosity and imagination are emotionally and culturally more important in many ways than logical and scientific rigor.  I would not want one without the other, but I feel we have strayed much too far from playfulness and completely open minded inquiry, in far too many fields.

The POINT I wanted to make, was that as I grow I realize that feelings, and the people who feel feelings, are stranded.  They have threads.  Take the feeling of happiness.  Is it never tinged with sadness?  Jealousy?  Fear?  Sadness?  Is sadness never secretly tinged with gladness?  Is loneliness never tempered with a sense of relief from people?

And the people who hurt us, to return to my initial point, finally, are never FULLY bad.  This holds even if they were and are bad most of the time.

Do you think Hitler–or his moral equal Fidel Castro–never inhaled the smell of blossoms on the air on a beautiful spring day, and took a stroll in a garden somewhere filled with colorful flowers, and perhaps laughing and ideologically acceptable children, and forgot for a time their self appointed missions to save somebody from something?  Do you think they never forgot even for a moment their manifest destiny to save the world?

Of course they did. Hitler smiled sometimes.  Castro was content sometimes.

And even people who torment us have moments where they are human, where they relax, even if only for a moment, perhaps at the end of an acceptably arduous day, or in a moment of forgetfulness of the misery they are bound to protect within themselves, who forget the monsters destiny has made it necessary for them to act the role of.

People are stranded.  They have moods. They have modes.  They have, even within viciousness, the capacity for reason and mercy.  They are small threads, too small.  That is why they are unseen.  That is why they still become monsters.

But true cruelty requires belief. It requires in the case of the ideologue the belief that morality is found in violence and pain in the service of some abstract cause embodied in concrete people.

In the case of the sadists, who derive short term satisfaction and release from their emotional confinement in the exercise of cruelty, the belief that this price–that of deepening the fear and social disconnection which has pervaded their lives–is worth this short pleasure and release.

No doubt sadists flock together.  But they are all alone, no?

My point is that even these people have moments of humanity, hard though they may be to see.

I listened to “In Cold Blood”, and both killers–even though they giggled for hours after the killings–had moments of moral lucidity.  Perry propped the father and brother up on mattresses, for comfort, even though he also slit the fathers throat and they blew his head off.

We are stranded.  We are all partly human, if not acted on by ideology.  Only ideology can make people fully evil.

And I have never considered throwing the Marquis de Sade an ounce of sympathy, but perhaps I will here.  Even he, the patron saint of cruelty, and in my view the patron saint of the political Left, found an ideology which preached cruelty to be unacceptable and horrible.  He loved cruelty, but he never sought to justify it.  And perhaps some remaining human part of him could see that the love of violence in the pursuit of factitious virtue was even worse than anything he had imagined.

I am, in my own way, preparing the ground in my own life for what I may or may not term forgiveness.  What I intend, specifically, is an attempt to see my parents as they ARE and WERE.  Such seeing sees good and bad, stupidity and virtue.  It sees textures, with no names, and no place holders for value, which are interesting, and worth exploring for their intrinsic interest and merit.

Nobody IS.  We are all many things.  We are all many people.  We are all many moods, many thoughts, many actions.

And for a full circle: seeing this accurately is fucking hard.  Really, really, really fucking hard.