Wednesday, July 29, 2009

American Creativity

American Creativity

            America the grand. We the glorious UnderGod, in US we trust, the dollar, the $. Upstarts ever!

            “You cannot simply buy cultural values; you must develop them for centuries as us Germans have: who created England, who created France. Save your contemptible Hollywood Films, stuff your high sky-scrapers. What worth is your intellectual freedom without an opera to sing it? Your sense of superiority is the most annoying in the world. How can you claim to be a people with no clear sense of life? Your Mrs. Roosevelt whores herself as a fashion model, as a self-gossip in her article, ‘My Day.’ Your technological innovations make the modern world, but we know that the meaning of life is beyond the toaster, wider than a refrigerator door, that your technological precociousness is nothing compared to centuries of history and tradition, that you cannot buy your soul, but must slowly build your nation through generations of cultural labor. Only then will you be “God’s Country”: until then you are arrogant pests” – Goebbels.

            The naissance of America, the joy of our 19th century Emerson and his prodigies—glow glow glow glow with warmth. Emerson is the oversoul, the overman: he is every drop of moisture in and above our soul—and his optimism is the blue of our sky. Emily is the waif psychopomp, who warms the hand of our afterself upon the quiet of death, and leads us to the gate of the inner. Edison is another Vulcan, forger of the greatest wonders of the world—who inherits the bolts of Zeus. Whitman is every leaf of grass that grows on this continent, his flesh the widest flesh of the world because he became the very dirt of America. Twain, Beirce, and Mencken were the laughing winds that blow over the land with cheerful jeers.

            Emerson the oversoul, and his optimism the wide blue sky, and his torrential brats are Hawthorne who overrides guilt, and Melville who overrides duty. Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Wright, Ives, James and James, each studied under Emerson, and express different pours of rain. Melville and Hawthorne were the first explorers of the shadow of those white flight of clouds. Emerson, with his subtle categories, tricky names, and elusive structures, wrought the spirit deep in our veins, so that no man knew yet how, but the structure of his writing like subtle fate bind the Fenrir wolf of necessity.

            Wright is each right angle, in the complixigons of the geometrical lattice. He is as organic as the spider’s spin, as unearthly as a meteor shower.

            Seek your blood, this every great writer knows, to seek the art his blood ran through for thousands of years, and thus the Saxon Teutonic brilliance of our designers, Jefferson, Wright, Whitman – Dutch and Germanic – for the cup of the world is the blood of our DNA, and the soul is the salt sea of blood, cup is heart and vagina, and by this we drink our augeries. America is all bloods, none excluded. Our blood will yet mingle by the philosophy bolts which strike out river bed. The diabolic lightening of Zeus, like two horns a bull, which throw apart and sets the beds of rivers, Zeus the Deus, the great God of two, where Z is 2, we have fully taken and made our own through greater Gods Franklin, Tesla, and Edison, the binders of the bolts, till finally we cast our electronic web over the world, a finer tapestry than Athenarachne dared, with the fallen God tamed, who “fell like lightening” and now swallows the world in electricity, SIS#em, Prometheus, Shivat, Satan, the Beast, the logic of information. For she is Minerva’s owl, the mechanical wisdom, familiar for Theseus, the image of Hermes.

            Words are the fingers of consciousness, and now I have touched fingers to yours, pledge to pledge, for we know our literary criticim lives by this dictum: Everything is Readable, Everything Relatable. We say by cash and dollar: E Pluribus Unum, from the one, many, all bloods, all people, melt together like the witches brew, the great adamentium amalgum, the perfect state, with a pyramid to heaven, workers all of us, the greatest minds have day jobs – Emerson as pastor, Hawthorne customs agent, Melville whaler, Thoreau surveyor, Ives insurance manager, Franklin and Whitman printing pressmen, all of us ever working, hammering out the pyramid, or like Thor, hammering down the troll in the East to his wooden cross, a man who forsook his true calling and was nailed, in time, back to it, for the Animus of beauty is death – seek your blood! – death wrestling to gain your wisdom, and as de Tocqueville interpreted the infant, in the ancient tradition that saw in every slight gesture of the infant what would become plotline destiny, by and by, we do not judge by relativity to the norm, but by innate potentiality, we believe only our inner anima-muse, women their inner animus-genius, so that stepping beyond the “small ship” and “large ship,” we insist “All American’s go to heaven” nor does a single one of us escape that first step, even the inventor of Blues who sold his soul at the cross roads, but in fact purchased Satan’s soul, rise of the Elite, American Illuminati, so that like Hawthorne’s novels, layer by layer, we become the complete picture and the completing picture – this is our manifest destiny.

            The creative process of Emerson, Whitman, Ives, Edison, and myself are the same:

            Take all of experience, as in a lifelong journal of Emerson’s, or in every stray thought to glance over Whitman’s poetical brow, tucked and categorized in poem-labelled envelopes, so each poem over years was distilled and melt pure, or in every musical motif to ponder Ives mind, and gather them together, ordinate and subordinate, layer, catalogue and categorize, endlessly rework, edit, perfect – Ives perfected his works and did not publish, worked his day job in order to keep his passion free from concerns over “what will sell?” – and I myself with this Perfect Idius have already written out a decade, and tuck in the right niche each idea – if by random whim one occurs to me! – to its right and proper place, to redefine and amplify everything that went before, to grow by and by a Summa as my secret garden—how American! I am Edison with his 10,000 notebooks, Emerson with his 100,000 journal days, Whitman with the ever freshly mowed plot of grass—a poem book written and rewritten for over three decades, Ives with this thousdand times overworked layers of music, William James, wrestling doubt with thousands of pages of assuage, constantly summarizing the views of others and plying them against his own, like the Republic –  from the many, one – ever redefining, every growing more and more pure, perfected, ordered, structured, with the occasional mutant spore like Eliot, who complains that he can “barely contain his chaos” – in truth he couldn’t contain it, he barely shared in the infinite intuition of the yankee omniscience, write a few chaotic and beautiful shuffles of ideas, and died into abysmal critic, Royalist, Catholist, and god hope us what else! – and now our computers are the nerves of the world! Ponder with me what our Allism will shine in the next 10,000 years, in the next 100,000…

            As every man and woman has a genius and muse, and the man identifies with his genius and listens to his muse, and a woman identifies with her muse and listens to her genius – in Greek the genius is called “demon,” as in Socrates daemon, and Zeus had a Muse named Metis, his first wife whom he swallowed into his gut hunches – these are the archetypical pictures of male and female creativity. Who among you can laugh and and climb at the same time? Whoever flies the highest mountain laughs himself glowing at the tragic plays and tragic taking-the-world-seriously! Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent! – thus Sophia loves us, she is a woman and loves us warriors! Who is our Sophia? Who is our Wotan?

            Till we know for sure, we have always the Magna Mater! We love her face for us, who presents Ama, and we the “Ama – Reich,” America, rule of the strugglers, the reign of the creatives.

 

Friday, July 17, 2009

the replacement of the mother anima with the first-lover anima

The anima as for as I have experienced her, begins as an image of our own mother – at the very beginning, the instinctual looking for and loving of whoever fits the role “mother” – and everything about her falls into focus, the quiver of her lips, the walk of her hips and the brows of her doubt, her angry glare, her laughing shout: everything becomes a persona of her within us, and this is the anima for men, and I suppose the opposite for a women would be the animus of dad. We build other personas of siblings and friends, and the early models becomes “Archetypes” for later people we meet. First impressions orchestrates subsequent impressions. As the individual nears adulthood, he or she falls in love if not for the first time, for the first full-blown time, the great passionate tempestuous trying out of love – intense, questionable, violent, romantic, and almost certainly doomed to failure. Who forgets their first love? Who can fail to compare each subsequent lover to her first great love? Perhaps, finally, maybe a decade later, she will finally be able to again discover a “pure” love (one not compared to the first love) but this is merely apparent – the archetype has become completely anima. That is the great event of early adulthood: the death of the mother anima and the replacement with the lover anima: a man becomes the first love of his life, his femininity is in the image of her. At that point, he may leave her memories, forget them, laugh at the foolishness of youth, betray the lover’s memory in a dozen ways – betrayal is always apparent – and us thus rid of her control of him: he has become her.

Jung gets closer to the psychic reality her as elsewhere, and the Oedipus complex completely misses the mark, when we should speak of the Attis complex. Attis was the son and lover of Cybele (mother earth), and when he grew up and loved another woman, the jealous Cybele appeared in an ecstatic vision, drove him mad, and so he castrated himself under a pine tree, and bled to death. Grieving, Cybele resurrected him. We celebrate this event every year with the Christmas tree. Freud erred to think that we feared being castrated by the father for loving our mother when in fact, the fear is to be castrated by the mother for loving another (disappointing her), as in this myth, where her ecstatic image is a stand in for the male anima patterned after her. Jung is the apt interpreter of myths, but even he doesn’t understand the riddle of the serpant, told in the myth where the White Goddess All castrates herself into a serpant which impregnates her with the world egg. Such a mytheme seems strange to us, but in fact its meaning is readily apparent when we equate the womb with penis, yin to yang.

The macho-heroes of mythology – Hercules, Samson, Adonis, Giglamish – are tempted most by their mother anima, since because they emphasize their masculinity, they never confront the feminine within, and she works indirectly to revenge herself: Samson’s eyes are castrated and he is sent into the the mill of samsara to work as a beast, Adonis we have already mentioned, Gilgamesh successfully dodges Ishtar altogether, the profoundest of the heroes here, and Samson is done in by a jealous but naïve wife. These men seem to choose the overly feminized women in order to escape the inner feminine, and this is the source of the tension. Achilles was never so lucky, for the arrow to his ankle is merely another motif on the snake at the ankle, the snake representing mother vengeance, and the ankle the genitals, as with Oedipus swell-foot, and Jesus Christ (his cry “my father, why have you forsaken me?” isn’t direct. Who is the one at his foot who has not forsaken him, though he forsook her publicly and privately?) As for the myths of the other Mary as Lover, and the ensuing love triangle (if not love square) with Judas, I leave that the speculators. The Babylonians have a touching tradition where Tiamat (“great mother”) the horrible mother of all the gods, is torn to pieces to create the very world they live with. How is this primordial image of mother, where we determine beauty and order from her face, and love and passion from her moods, used to create the very world we live in?

 

Saturday, July 11, 2009

hey diddle diddle

Nursery Rhyme Window Mural - Hey Diddle Diddle

 

I recently listened to my kid’s plastic toy play a rendition of hey diddle diddle, song with suprising passion by a woman who clearly had different career plans before she got into the tot-crooning gig, belting out her nursery rhyme pathos like a 1980’s heart throb broken heart ballad. And then it dawned on my what hey diddle diddle was all about. Grasp my hands and listen intently:

Hey diddle

The cat and the fiddle

The cow jumped over the moon

The little dog laughed

To see such sport

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

We begin with the diddling of the cat, singing his guts out in the typical caterwail, played on the cat-gut fiddle, presumably of strung of the entrails of his deceased lover. A stark image of making music from tragedy: something significant is afoot. The cow jumps over the lunar horns of cow Goddess moon, maker of the milky way, an image to chill the bones in apacolyptic anticipation: mortal cow oversteps immortal cow – the world goes upside down! The little dog laughs – the dog who is death, little Anibus, jackle god of the desert, son of the cow-goddess Hesat – and how he laughs, like the eternal footman, to see love sung on the entrails of his beloved, to see God leapt over by Man; he is the very wolf who chases the moon over middle earth, a double of Odin’s wolf – wolf means necessity means death, God is swallowed by the wolf in the end – Just as Jesus and all crucified were eaten by desert dogs, or eaten by zealous cultists meaning to make religions from rabbis, eaten like Jezabel, because the dirty guy in the desert hated her, whom Jesus would meet himself, thrusting Jazebel on her bed, and killing off her previous children to make room for children of his own: yes the dog is loyal, loyal as death. Why this fiersome imagery? Because: the dish ran away with the spoon. Let the world end, let the moon bleed, for the plate has upset the world and way by taking from the fork his one beloved, the spoon, leaving behind is darling bowl and their three saucers, the plate – and the man the plate represents, upset the order of life and order – love is none – the cat sings her guts out.

 

Thursday, July 9, 2009

is honesty a christian virtue?

Truth, honesty, integrity, these are all foreign virtues to the Christians, who value love of Christ above love of the truth. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that historically, and since the very beginning, they have plaguarized the authors of supposed disciples, interpolated fake historicaly reports about Jesus into the works of contemporary historians, once they gained control of the libraries (the ones they didn’t burn down as they burned down Alexandria), they rewrote legends and myths of other nations as if they were stories of real historical saints of Christianity; of other religions and Gods they wrote disgusting smears, deliberate misrepresentations, demonizing accusations, shameless blasphemies, and not only against he religions and their stories, but against those believing in them, such as when they misreported on the nature of the mystery cults from which they stole blood drinking and baptisms, claiming that such cults also practiced any number of monstrosities and indecencies – and all those grown out of the pious imagination of the Christians! – they added stories to, edited errors out of, and rephrased elements of their own inspired gospels, the four they chose, and burned the hundreds of competing gospels, along with the writings of the gnostic and any other competeition their hatred caught sight of. They wrote histories and biographical notes of pagans, from Aesop to Petronius, to any respected “pagan” (that is, non Christian), that emphasized any moral uncertanties or mistakes, and when these were lacking, they invented them, and wrote them either into their own histories, or edited them into the writings of other historians. The invented countless lies and accusations against the Jews, beginning with the made up stories about the Pharisees in the gospels, and continuing down to stories of Jews drinking the blood of Christian infants, and thousand of others stories that have cost the lifes of millions of Jews. They invented no end of fake relics of fake saints who were ripped from nonChristian sources anyway, and these were venerated and touched, for miraculous purposes, at a cost. Once a certain sect of them gained political power, namely, through Constantine, who was chosen by God through a vision, in exchange that he decimate his enemies, after which he killed off his parents, being the typical behavoir to expect from Gods annointed, and he was gladly used to produce an official Bible, and to burn the documents of, if not the owners of, other writings and gospels, so that, through the state, as would happen later in Germany, Iceland, anywhere Christianity spread, certain sects were outlawed, violently condemned, tortured by the fiercest methods, and in fact Christianity and Christains have invented more methods of torture than any other religion, if not all other religions. Truth, honesty, and integrity are not Christian virtues, never were, never in the Bible does God say “to yourself be true,” or “know yourself,”—we would have to thank Plato and Shakespeare for popularizing that sort of morality. Instead we see everywhere and always lies, forgeries, and meddling with politics in order to kill off thousands of Christains who believe the wrong things about the God who doesn’t exist in the first place.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

waking life is work, play, and voyeurism

Work, Play, and Voyeurism

 

                Man is a body. Whatever he is after death, he will still be a body, though death would be pointless if he were to leap back into a resurrected or reincarnated human body. Any religions that view man’s best as his spirit, and his best deeds as his duties, do so at the expense of the body, a crime against the earth. For the most important questions you can ask a man is how does he live? How does he get a living? What does he use his living to do?

            How does he live? The most important question to ask a man is how does he treat himself? What does he eat? When? Why? How does he maintain his health, for the first concern of every man is how he values and maintains his health. The body is the land and mountains, is made of trees and wood, is the matter, and his work is earth and tree, is center and support for the rest. Everything in the body requires health, and a healthy man does more for the world by walking through the city than a sick man does by charity and gifts. Seek your health before your wealth or beauty.

            How does he get his living? And this determines what kind of man he is. If he works for money, he must think his time can be paid for by mere money – an unworthy man. The great man works a job that by working it pays his body and soul. The money he will take to support body and home, but he will sacrifice body and home to quit the job paying only money. The ways to make a living are begging, taking, and making for trade. Begging is any man, drifter, charity worker, or preacher who asks for money. Taking is any criminal or government which by tax or tackle takes your money. Making for trade is the noble way of making money, and lets every man do so as he is able. But do not be bound by any duty to society. As the fairy tale of the frog prince teaches: know when to break a contract. Socrates did not well make his bread, though Plato did better, and Aristotle better still: progress!

            What does he use his living to do? When the man is not working – and let this be at least 2/3 of every day, if not ½ -- he is growing his body and his body’s soul. He may play or watch, must play or watch – games and aesthetics – and these two to run over the mountain of work like a playing stream and an aesthetic breeze, to make work pleasurable, to make all our work fit together. The purpose of play is to secure us in our work, and the purpose of aesthetics is to secure others in their work.

            Play includes any activity sought for fun; the best play is in games, challenging play, goal-oriented play, play which aims to win by the rules. Writing, reading, witty conversation, love, sports, olympics, and wars all have the nature of games and play, or at least the structure of them, though they may in fact be work, depending on whether the participants are playing the games or working the “games.” Thus we call life a game by metaphor, though many people work games and do not play them.

            Do not define a game by family resemblence, for family resemblence itself is undefined, is not a definition, is an infinition, since we are all related and we all resemble each other, from the highest elf to the lowest dwarf.

            All philosophy is verbal wrestling, a way of talking, to play and win truths from others. To win a truth from another is not to bind him in irony nor expose him a fool, but to twist his arm till he shames you and shines a truth. The wise man knows how to talk deep philosophy even in the idle banter of the work or coffee house.

Play is violent: I will win! Nature brainstorms a billion at a burst, and favors only a dozen of her creations.

            Aesthetic beauty is watching the play of others. All works of art come from the play games of the poet and painter. God walks through words. If man were to lose his tongue, god sits lame. Our movies, our politics, our newspapers, our novels, our celibrities, our politicians, stand only for entertainment, exist for nothing else, to teach us how to play, and we play to learn how to better love our work.

            Public looking is the voyeurism of normality. Why in the world would a group of man watch a pornographic film in a movie theater? Or attend a strip-club? To feel normal. We watch movies and learn when to laugh at the movie’s success and when to mockingly laugh at the movie’s failure. We attend churches and rallies to get normalized, to synchronize our responses, to not only watch the same thing, but to watch each other watch the same thing. Rally for or protest against the war: the war needs both to stabalize and succeed. Choose either side and you enable it. Celebrate the holidy and you create a holiday spirit to prolong us. Add your two-sense about the latest court battle, wryly chide the television soda ad, curse the political scandel, and none of your ideosyncratic comments can escape getting labelled “ideosyncratic,” – and so you are normalized despite yourself.

            Religious services, movie theaters, sports arenas, and television programs provide a medium for group voyeurism; watching each other watch, commenting and commenting back, is the process of normalization, and no matter how abnormal you are, knowing at least that you are abnormal normalizes you.

            The ancient book meant that one thing. But we must have it mean this. Interpretation is getting a priviledged book to say what we want it to say—there is no other purpose to interpretation! An interpreter, when making the first book speak lies we hold true, learns many things as he twists the text, things more important than either the meaning of the ancient work or the modern truth we wish it to authoritize. Hold those secrets dear—they are yours.

            Ignore the critics. Artists alone are worthy to criticize. Flunk the rest. A critique must be finer in beauty than the work it criticizes, other wise it doubly wastes your time. The few words Nietzsche said about Shakespeare are worth a dozen tomes by the Shakespeare scholars. When we watch, we too will comment, if only by how we choose to place our eyes, and so does every else. Commentary teaches you how to watch and what to watch intently. Commentary is a play of watching.

            Work and Body are it, the main thing, but they are not valued as the main thing: playing and watching are what we love. Yet we play and watch to secure body and work. It is like the importance of the eyes for seeing, yet they rarely stare at themselves in the mirror. Play feeds the wooded body, rushes over the mountain of work, gorges rivers from dancing rains, and watching the rivers and rains are the winds of watching, the breeze of commentary.

 

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Re: Tao Te Ching (section 22)

The cross was invented for Jesus, since he would have been impaled on a stake, as was the custom of his time. But the cross as symbol is ancient by the time Jesus gets around, and fitting for a Christ, namely, the bisection of two realities, the vertical heavenly and the horizontal earth, upon which Jesus gives up the divine ghost and becomes a corpse – a splitting of natures. The double tear drop of the Yin Yang has not a single line in it, and there is no splitting of natures, but a cycling and intermingling. These symbols as symbols present alternatives to looking at binaries: oppositional and hierarchal, or complementary and cooperative. I would suggest using both symbols according to time and purpose, since neither of them, by nature, can exclude the other.

 

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logostao3.bmp

 

 

It does seem to be a very peaceful philosophy. Always Yang pitted against
Yin. If you think you understood it, you will have misunderstood it. Just
when you think you developed your ego by getting the point, it takes you
down again; showing us that in developing ego we developed egotism as well.

By breaking the self, it seems the Tao shows how much a part of everything
we are...and not separate from anything.

F. Bacon

note about myths as prerequisite for philosophy

Myth

 

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            Every Great philosophy grew out of a rich and sublime mythical tradition, as is seen clearly with the ancient Greek and ancient Germanic myths, which resulted in the Greek and German philosophies, the two greatest traditions in world philosophy yet. In the case of the Babylonian myths and Indian myths, these were also rich, but were spent on world religions instead (Judaism and Hinduism). The Hindoos were a rich religion/philosophy, whereas the Jewish religion remained a legendary/explicatory faith. None of these four developments, the two main sources of religion, and the two main sources of reason, would be possible without a strong mythic basis, like a Archimedean circle drawn over the void, to base and found greater things.

            The Americans, still an ancient people compared to where we are going, have a sort of mythic in our comic books and movies, and novels, but we are not mythical; though by democratizing the entire world through the internet, we have an (electronic) oral tradition as well. In one thousand years we might have a philosophical tradition to boast of.