Moderates United

I’m watching “Birth of a Nation”–which I understand was used for propaganda purposes in the resurrection of the KKK, and in a telling piece of symbolism, was the first film shown in the White House, to the patent racist Woodrow Wilson–and have reached the scene of a Ball, in the (at that point relatively) antebellum South.

I think we should bring back the institution of the Ball, where people dress to the nines, act genteelly, and dance all together in dances all know.  The Ball, of course, was an aristocratic institution, something denied the plebians.

But if America is anything, if the project we started means anything, it is about the generalization of all the things that make life congenial and pleasant.  To my mind, the American project remains among the most bold, most audacious, most GOOD, ever attempted in human history.  Our principles are sound, even if like all peoples at the time, our early history was contracted by bias and ignorance.

We destroyed the Indians.  We enslaved the blacks, at least across half our domain.  These are historical facts that cannot be undone.

But history as a whole is FULL of such atrocities.  It more or less CONSISTS in the repetitious fall of one nation and the rise of another equally bad, but more congenial for those who suffered under the previous one.

Only here, only in this nation, only under this Constitution has a serious effort been made to end “history” by making freedom general.

There is great beauty in what has been attempted, great courage, great vision.  It is therefore only with sadness, as I have said many times, that one looks upon all the efforts to recontract us, to make us dumber, less principled, to return power to an elite that looks upon the masses with contempt, as do Socialists, and all the others who use their rhetoric for their own ends.

The laws of the Roman Public Thing, the Res Publica, were written in stone.  It mattered not, when the caliber of humans running the enterprise decayed beyond redemption.

The only faith we can have is in the pursuit of Goodness, which can be conceived many ways, when conceived in sincerity and good faith.  We can reconcile the many ways, in peace, and public piety, when we remember who we are, remember the brazenness of this enterprise, and remember the sorrow of history.

I will submit that the Ball is one way to do this, one way to remember.  We have reached a point of prosperity where such things can come into being again.

I know, of course, that I am in many ways a fool, preaching to the wind.

Still, one must have dreams.  I am an archetypal, ueber-Pisces, quite content to be skewered by contradictions I embrace.  The waters rise and fall: this is an eternal reality.

I think what I like most about this day is the silence.  There are few cars on the road, few people out and about.

It makes me think of how things must be and have been in predominantly Jewish communities on the Sabbath.  It is hard to rest when everyone else is out and about and doing, but when the community, everyone, is silent, resting, peaceful, it is much easier to unwind: nowhere to go, nothing to do.

Family: it works better in such conditions.  We all need a rest from the ache of work, of worry.  I can’t be the first to say this, but the Sabbath may well have been the key to the survival of Judaism, which antedates almost all world religions, and has the dubious distinction of having been cast out of its homeland more than once, and in the last case for several thousand years.

One sees the men clad in black walking to the Synagogue, and knows they have a candle lit at home.  This is culture.  Plainly, it works.

Resolved: that in a plural society diversity includes moral diversity, and that moral diversity in principle includes diversity on all topics, including that of sexuality.

Corollary: any society which does not tolerate diversity on any topic of consequence is by that fact alone no longer pluralistic, and if this lack of diversity is enacted by violence–whether directly physical, or by eliminating the ability of dissenters to express their views–that society is tyrannical and inherently, definitionally anti-Liberal.

With regard to the Phil Robertson case, what is at issue is neither whether or not homosexuality is moral, nor whether it is moral to believe it is immoral.  What is at issue is whether we remain a pluralistic society capable of resolving or at least reconciling our difference through open dialogue, or whether we are becoming mon-archic–an order based on One, on one vision, one view, one way of behaving. 

As a practical matter, we have in this country competing societies, competing social orders.  One remains pluralistic, and the other is patently Fascist in habit and expression.

Fools rush in where the wise fear to tread; sometimes the wise are cowards, so this makes fools at times invaluable.

I am well aware that I repeat myself–that some themes recur.  I would submit, though, that even though words and themes may repeat, FOR ME their meaning evolves, or at least I hope it does.

One could in principle utter the same phrase a thousand times–say, God is Love, or Good is love–and mean one thousand different things.  Such is the nature of language. 

To use an analogy from a previous post, can the word “cloud” ever mean the same thing twice?  Have you ever seen two identical clouds, even though when we use the word we all know approximately what we mean?

There is a continuum between an infinitely sharp blade and an all-encompassing fog–hell, let’s make it an INVISIBLE fog, even space itself–which we all need to traverse regularly.

Bit meandering, but I stand by my meanders.

Perhaps rather than speaking of reason, and unreason, we might more usefully speak of effective and ineffective reason, and logical reasoning and emotional reasoning.

When a human organism is in balance, it is possible to calmly think things through, and to readily change one’s mind when new data appears, or circumstances change.

When one is out of balance, however, as in conditions of living under tyranny, and being compelled to commit it, then logic is not logic at all.

A common example of insanity–the sort of insanity that could have been used to justify, say, Neil Cassady in his Dionysian revels–was the nuclear arms race.  Through the 1950’s and 1960’s, Americans took seriously the Communist intent to take over the world, and took seriously the fact that both sides had atomic weapons.

Hopefully, it will never become clear what the effect of a nuclear war would be, but many not unreasonably supposed it would mean the end of our civilization, and thus even the thought of engaging in one was insane.

It would have been insane, but the point missed by many is that Communism is an insane doctrine, and so too are all the “lite” versions of it, the essential element in which is the rejection of individual moral agency.

When you are dealing with fundamentally irrational and violent people, violence has to be on the table as an option.  This is, to my mind, a rational position.  You are good, they are bad: this can happen, and relatively speaking has happened many times in history.

In actual historical fact, our nuclear arms buildup, at least to this point, WAS rational.  It worked.  We are neither Red nor Dead.

When people say, though: “who knows what is good and what is bad” this is a rejection of the possibility of coherent moral action, and thus Communism lite.

If I ask you “is the sky blue or grey”, do you not need to look out the window?  Some days it is all blue, some all gray, many a mixture.  Some days it is mostly blue, some mostly grey, but it is moving, it is changing.  This does not mean we cannot make general statements about it.

All of us understand common sense morality: don’t do things to others you would not want done to you.  Don’t lie, in general; don’t cheat, in general; empathize, offer kindness.  Should you always offer kindness?  of course not.  Be nice all the time is a recipe for failure.  It is the creed of the morally vacuous.  So, too, is the demand for relentless and unreflective compassion.  Should you feel compassion for those who want to hurt you?  If you do, if you fail to take effective action to prevent or counter their violence, they will not just hurt you, but all the other people around you.  Do they not deserve compassion as well?  Do not the innocent deserve more compassion and mercy and regard than those whose lack of emotional wellness and development drives them into enacting violence in the outer world they cannot avoid in their inner world?

Everything begins with balance, but balance, in turn, sometimes cannot be brought about except by losing it, for some period of time.

This is obvious in Holotropic Breathwork, but even in my Kum Nye practice I have no way of predicting what will come up.

Charles Bukowski’s grave stone reads “Don’t Try”.  This is apparently what he meant.  Let it come.  If you force it you kill it.  And if you kill it, you have lost access to effective reason, of both the logical and the emotional varieties.

Sanity and insanity ought to cycle, should they not?

Few drinks, long week, lots of emotional processing, strange places.

So, watched a Thomas Merton biography.  Decided he was murdered in Thailand by Communists.  His last public statement before being found dead alone of an odd, freak, electrical accident in his locked room was along the lines of “Communism only works in monasteries.  But you can question me.  Questions are tonight.  For now, I’ll disappear and you can go have a Coke or something.”

Got to thinking about other thinkers of the 1960’s who died in freak accidents, and came across Albert Camus fairly quickly.  Here is an article alleging he was killed by the KGB: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/07/albert-camus-killed-by-kgb

Ferlinghetti was in the Merton piece, so I looked him up, then Charles Bukowski (real name: Heinrich Karl Buko(v)ski: he was born in Germany, and had an accent as a child for many years).  Bukowski was beaten with a leather strap by his father multiple times a week from an early age, perhaps 5 or so.

So: entropy: leather straps, failure, despair, creative response, alcoholism, p[oetry], sex, words, words, awful delightful words.

Sean Penn was apparently a Bukowski fan.  They went to the track together.  Penn seems big on symbolism, and relative photo ops.

So I got to thinking.  This is the point of this post, which I am allowing to be meandering.

Bukowski in some respects represents the 1960’s.  Many of the figures of the 60’s, like Ferlinghetti and Merton, were really from earlier generations.  And so was Bukowski, born if memory serves in 1925. Hippies, proper hippies, were born in the late forties, and early 1950’s.

Dionysian: this is the word.  Out of whack, countercultural, non-clicking, forgettable, outside, out there, stranger, death to normal: these are words for Bukowski, and they make a lot of people of a certain disposition like him.

Me, too.

But what I want to say, before I walk my dogs to avoid the smell of urine, is that this feeling of wanting to stand outside the normal social realm is in my view quite ordinary, quite normal. It is our culture (and you are me, no doubt: can’t I assume this?) which makes it abnormal.

Do we not need to integrate the unintegrated?  Do we not need to make ordinary Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness?

I looked, in my overly simplistic way, the Enlightenment, Rationalism.  And I saw a reaction to myth, a reaction to the religious abuse of power, a clinging to science in some form, and form in all events, to order, to reason, to the adequate at the expense of the insufficient.

Then I looked at Romanticism, and saw a reaction to reactionlessness, to unreason masquerading as order, which led to an insistence on myth.

Plato said moral values exist, roughly.  Others say they do not “exist”, certainly.  Ontology is greeted with deconstruction.  The quest for values is countered with the claim that they do not “exist” outside the verbal realm and should thus be–argue the children–cast aside.  Cue the assassination.

For me, I want to say that reason and unreason must coexist.  One day one, one day the other.  Like the alternating consuls, the alternating kings, of the Roman Republic, we must not ask questions like: Is Reason Paramount:?  Is Passion Paramount?

Do we suffer from such questions?   Of course: we suffer from all bad questions.  No, I have not stopped beating my wife yet: have you stopped your abuse of truth?

Yup: It’s time to Walk the Dogs.  I don’t like the smell of urine. [they really do pee on my rug: how truly do symbol and reality procreate?]

It seems likely I will change the terminology of the fore-going, but I am working a 9 day week, and don’t have time at the moment for more exploration.

A distinction I want to make though, is between awareness and personality.  Awareness is best thought of as expanding and contracting, more or less like a sphere around a person.  Here, I might at some point speak of an Inner Expander, and Inner Contracter.

Personality is built and destroyed, much like a building.  It has analogues in the brain, and is characterized nearly entirely by habits of mind, body and emotion.  Here, it is a question of building and destroying, constructing, and deconstructing.

It is perhaps–I am tempted to say likely–for this reason Buddha spoke of “no Self”.  The role of personality, per se, is simultaneously to stabilize experience and to LIMIT it.

Now, thoughts are machines, and all analogies used here–in this world, in this life–lose, we must assume, their validity in other qualitative realms; but since we are here, we have ample cause to take them seriously, when advanced by serious, accomplished teachers.

I’ve always had very lucid dreams, both in terms of actual lucid dreams–which feel very literally like out of body experiences–and much more commonly the ability to directly affect dream content. It’s sort of like a movie, where I can dictate to some extent what happens, but in which most of the time it is more interesting to just see what happens, and more or less knowing while it is happening that it is a part of me.  Put another way, it is a sort of moving, real time psychoanalysis.

Last night, just as the engineer was going to show me the keys to the building–the controls–the orcs and Giants broke through the gates, and surrounded me.  They were going to kill me, but I surrendered.  I normally fight them and win, but this time that seemed inappropriate for some reason.  Then I awoke elsewhere (in the dream), free again, but they were still loose.

As I contemplate this, it seems to me that the evil forces represent limitations, parts of ourselves which perform the function of limiting us, keeping us within bounds.  Particularly in traumatic situations, it is best not to feel too much.  It is best to limit spontaneity, best to control thinking and emoting, to allow some things and actively discourage or even squelch others.

But this is a very unsuitable situation in conditions of freedom.  What was a protective angel because a jealous captor.  Life evolves.

We use the word “healing” for going beyond the boundaries dictated by survival in a bad situation, but this is really not the best term.  What I think we fail to realize is that we were bound BEFORE.  When we shrink in response to survival necessity, that becomes our new reality.  This is the reality of having endured trauma.

Growing beyond this, experientially, in terms of how it actually feels, feels like crossing new ground.  We can gradually grow to remember old feelings that were discarded out of necessity, but we now know about this process of growth, and that necessarily brings into question the old boundaries too.  You are shrunk, but then come to realize you can expand past where you were.  This is how trauma, pain, difficulty, can be liberating.  It brings out the awareness of possibilities you had never had cause to suspect.

Experientially, this feels to me like creation.  So, until I change my mind and come up with something better, I propose we call this Psychogenetic Expansion.  “Healing” lacks all ambition.

The smaller the self, the larger the vision.