LENNY BRUCE

LENNY BRUCE

The film Lenny (1974) was in my opinion one of Dustin Hoffman’s best performances. But more than the performance was Bruce’s brutal honesty about American attitudes about censorship. And, again in my view, he (Bruce) was not just ahead of his time, he touched a nerve that Americans still treat gingerly and with great hesitation.

Intolerance, bigotry, racism, and above all sexual obsession form the real foundation of this nation. You might say it’s the mossy underside of that foundation – the secular “thou shalt nots” underlying all the Constitutional “liberties” shining like white marble in the sunshine. Bruce addressed the former in its appropriate setting – cavernous nightclubs and bars below street level. How fitting.

In the 1974 film, Bruce, in what turns out to be a “contempt of court” ruling, pleas with the judge that “you need a deviate!” How true that was. A Judas Goat might be another term for it – without which the hard wall of censorship could not exist. You need a background of darkness against which to contrast a foreground of light. Knowing this, Bruce not very willingly volunteered himself.

The court of course saw the whole thing differently. It had no concept of, or time for, what he was saying. The ruling was as ruthlessly medieval as that of the Holy Inquisition – more like the 13^th century Cistercian abbot, Arnaud-Amalric, who in the Albigensian Crusade’s “killing for Christ,” ordered the execution of everyone in the Spanish village of Beziers. Reasoning that everyone (by association) was automatically evil, he questioned the need to then even ferret out the “still faithful.” After all, God would sort out the good from the bad for himself. “Kill them all,” he said. “God will recognize his own.”

Bruce’s whole thesis centered around the problem of systemic suppression. He said it was the suppression of the thought, the word, the idea, that gave them their power, ugliness, and viciousness. It’s what created and kept alive the porn industry, what made “deviates” deviate, and ironically (admitting) what kept his own career going.

The remarkable thing about this was the “underside” to what was being roundly ignored – the judge’s own mind. He knew this all too well, and Bruce knew that he knew. Bruce also knew that the judge had to respond to the collective attitudes around morality, social order and restraint. In other words, the judge had no choice but to see himself as a hero of moral virtue by equating goodness with the suppression of deeper truths. This had to be part of God’s will, fearing the collapse of everything otherwise – even if it meant the burning of witches and heretics.

Bruce was the first to yell out “nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger!!!” in his nightclub act – vis-a-vis a Black man – and then a White man. And then he waited. There was only silence in the room, a room designed for raucous laughter. The silence was audible, piercing, and stressful. Then Bruce shattered it by shouting every slur ever invented for every race and ethnicity – Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, and everyone in between. And he made his point. The “silence” was that very same “crack” our society has found itself stuck in for generations, even since the Civil Rights movement (long after Bruce’s death) – not knowing how to defuse a simple word. It’s our dilemma still today.

Being out on parole with a legal warning to “clean up his act,” Bruce then found himself in a comedy club the very next night, forced to confront the same moral dilemma. The room was lined with police officers watching, waiting, taking notes, wearing expressions of contempt and hatred. It came down to telling the truth – or – complying and hiding behind layers of hypocrisy which he not only hated but saw as an even worse moral offense.

So, Bruce does his usual act, about body parts and the sexual act, but replaces otherwise “offensive” terms with the infantal lallations “bla, bla, bla.” “Have you ever had your bla “bla-blad?” – and so on. It elicited tremendous laughter because of the absurdity placed on the entire situation. Not unlike the laughter we enjoy when seeing someone slip on a banana peel – “comedy from tragedy” at someone else’s expense – we were now laughing at ourselves at our own expense, and shaking our heads at our own tragic dilemma. By the end of the performance, Bruce announces, “this is the filthiest show I’ve ever done.” “Covering up” was worse than fucking in public.

Bruce was immediately arrested again. He fired his legal council because they insisted on a plea deal, thinking it was the best they could do. He wanted to represent himself but the court ruled that he find suitable council again before proceeding. He went home, did drugs, overdosed, and died. – Another crusader for human honesty who grappled with a profound intolerance for the truth. His agenda wasn’t to tear down and destroy what is good, but to elevate the good to a more enlightened place. Like Oscar Wilde who lived tragically a century “too early” in a time and place incapable of handling homosexuality, Bruce was scapegoated, condemned, and by the universal irony of transmutation – martyred.

Bruce was a flawed and imperfect martyr – as most are. We might say an “accidental martyr.” Most never consciously want to grapple with the forces against them but find themselves in a corner anyway and stuck with an inner passion. Something inside ignites and refuses to compromise what is “right.” There’s a fierce indignation that takes over the personality almost to the point of a split-personality. This, to me, is what defines integrity – “soundness, incorruptibility”; also dignity “a state of worthiness.”

Alas, such passion is something only some people are born with. It is rarely, if ever, learned. It’s an obsession fomenting from DNA to make things right again. And it has nothing to do with the fact that he may be a convict, pervert, slacker, ne’er-do-well, or a “bum” in other contexts. One has nothing to do with the other. It’s the same paradox we witness all the time with so-called “heroes” in our midst (military, spiritual, civic), who could very well be degenerates and deviates in private.

Bruce’s martyrdom is solidified because his film-bio is seen over and over today, and that’s because he’s still relevant today. We may have grown out of some of the stupidity our parents and grandparents defended, but the taboos symptomatic of control and intolerance are just as palpable today. We might say they’ve just shifted to another place, to another level in our collective consciousness. Racism and bigotry have not shifted, though sexual attitudes have shifted and have even evolved somewhat. But what remains is the fear of what would happen should the barriers of intolerance and hatred (towards anything) be removed. We simply must have something dark to push against lest the angels light all become “dark angels.”

In other words, if alive today Lenny would still be a “deviate.” His views still repel normative views enough that a comedian’s career based on those same issues would still be controversial. The late George Carlin was perhaps the last of this breed that hammered home the need to shake up our sensibilities around censorship, bigotry, intolerance, and cultural hypocrisy. This fact should alarm us all and show that indeed nothing really changes in a culture’s DNA. Donald Trump proves this point every single day.

They say the martyr is the “most lonely and isolated” human soul. But he also has great determination, passion, and stubbornness which keeps him close to many others like himself or those who embrace his views. There is also the debate on whether the martyr derives a certain pleasure or profit from his actions – not driven so much by some greater good but “over-developed self-esteem.” Then a third argument is whether he wishes to secure a place in “the beyond” for himself, hence not working as much for a cause as for himself. – Bruce was ostentatious, brash, and often arrogant – all the necessary traits of a stand-up comedian – but I personally think he fit none of these categories. He was, again, an “accidental” (even an unwilling) martyr. He derived no pleasure in getting arrested numerous times, he was a devout (Jewish) atheist, and he was, despite his many intimate contacts, marriage and family, probably the loneliest and most isolated individual of all.

Hence, the fourth debate: whether the martyr’s passion to change things is locked in his DNA, like a spark which is going to ignite regardless of what happens – or – if it is the knee-jerk reaction to a specific cultural conflict or political crisis. With Bruce it was the latter. He was admittedly DNA-predisposed to a life of high passion and political intrigue, but his politics only ignited when the law literally invaded his space and arrested him for “obscenity.” You might say it was the system that promoted Bruce to “monstrous or divine” martyrdom – depending on what side of the ideological divide you were on.

This was Bruce’s message, and indeed it martyred him: “You need a deviate!!” And his greater message was that needing him in that role was not just about a symbol in a sick society but a way for society to see itself in the mirror, to find a compass bearing out of its suffering. Again, like Wilde, he was too far ahead of his time.

Which brings up another question: Is anyone who brings up a new unorthodox idea necessarily always “ahead of his time?” Is the newness, the novelty, of an idea the litmus test of unacceptability? Is it the crossing of grains, the challenging of ideas, which automatically places him in a future context because he challenges “the present?” The definition of creativity is “bringing something new into being.” To be creative is to be ahead of what is no longer “creative.” (The same paradox applies to liberalism: to achieve acceptance means it’s no longer liberal). Without creativity there simply is no forward movement. The world stops spinning and everything dies.

As an aside to this, what conservatives constantly grapple with is that every new idea that comes along, which they finally accept, is initially a “liberal” one. They whine and scream and condemn it for as long as they can, like lost children afraid of the dark – until one day it’s “okay.” Then they turn around, take credit for it, and whine, scream, and condemn all over again over the next “liberal” idea happening along. It’s like trying to coax a child out of a closet fearing the sunlight.

Bruce was just one of those doorstops that kept a door slightly ajar, a door that those inside wanted to constantly slam shut and keep locked. And he suffered for it – as doorstops do.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

TRAILS

TRAILS

Last weekend I watched Into the Wild, a 2007 film about the real-life story of Christopher McCandless. In 1990 he graduated with honors from Emory University, then left home (an affluent family riddled with dysfunction), burnt his credit cards, money, and all his identification documents, donated his savings to Oxfam, and “disappeared.”

This was a journey about self-discovery and transformation. He “bums” around the western United States, his final goal being to reach Alaska. His new name is “Alexander Supertramp.” He meets the inevitable dangers associated with “the road” but also incredible people. He hires onto odd jobs and undertakes adventures which are either illegal or just dangerous and “crazy.” He finally “hitches” his way to Alaska in 1992 and finds an old abandoned bus in the wilderness which he makes into a makeshift home. He manages to live off the land until one day he eats berries which he discovers (too late) are lethally toxic.

McCandless knows he’s dying (at 24). He crawls into a sleeping bag and awaits his fate. He writes a farewell message to the world. Two weeks later a couple moose hunters find his body. Later that year his sister carries his ashes home in her backpack. – The movie is based on his journal meticulously kept throughout his travels.

To me, what makes this film so popular (and an Oscar winner) is that it speaks to the McCandless in all of us. It speaks to that part which sees the hypocrisy in everything and wants to simply scream at the lives we lead. We not only identify/relate, we see ourselves “leaving” it all at least in our fantasies. And, if necessary, dying in a place where humans cannot find us – whatever it takes to find ourselves spiritually.

But then I remind myself that every person’s journey is different and unique. We don’t literally need to do exactly what McCandless did to reach the same state of “no mind” – “creative insanity” if you insist. We have our own trails and landmarks to follow. To follow someone else’s is just as saccharin and toxic as listening to the commandments of organized religion. It really just comes down to whether we have the courage McCandless had in following what I’ve heard native peoples simply call “the path of a true human being.”

Everyone sees his own terrain differently, its hills, valleys, and horizons. And it summons us to take a good long look at the imagination – what it is – because spiritual geography is a product of the imagination. It’s the psychic geology of pressure and time which forms it. It is real and solid, not just “imagined” in that dismissive context. It is also the stuff which shapes the optics of ordinary perception, the lens we see through every day. It opens and closes doors which summons the famous William Blake line: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

Geography implies terra incognita, which tells us that we’re all searching for something lost. It’s hidden in the “wilds” of the imagination, the thickets and forests of the unconscious. Some of those treasures have been buried since before birth, others sublimated and forgotten for any number of reasons – the usual ones being shame, guilt, pressure, fear, and denial. Whatever the reason, we each set out to explore the (ultima) thule which conceals it. We need it back. We become the mythic hero setting out on his odyssey to recover the golden ball, the Excalibur, and the Holy Grail.

The topography is rugged. It has to be, because each rock, cavern, path, and forest is a deity, and we are tasked with questioning what gods have come to dwell among us. Some are jealous, others are not. Some are humble, receptive, and open; others throw threats and warnings at us (commandments). Some give us signs posts and beacons; others discourage us from looking further and more deeply.

It seems that those regions usually labeled “forbidden” expose themselves by the very geologic stresses placed around them. The old saying: “If you want something done, just make it taboo.” It’s obvious that what our culture does not want us to be is “alive,” because it’s the very thing we seek most – the one drive which sent McCandless “into the wild” and nothing else. In order to breathe again he had to escape the plastic bag placed over his head every day of his life.

Who does not relate to this??!! I suppose the difference comes down to which terrene gods we choose to follow and the trails they make for us.

Each trail is virgin, and in that sense I think we’re searching for a time when we were all alive, for a regeneration of spirit. It’s as instinctual as breathing air. Where we’re coming from is a place of spiritual (imaginative) paralysis which programs us to stubbornly resist regeneration for fear of “more loss.” And it succeeds. The tiger always returns to its cage. But McCandless wants to talk to the bears and reindeer, the coyote and the sun and the moon. Mind you, there’s nothing romantic about this. All romance is gone. Most of the time it is more disturbing than enlightening (even terrifying). Yet it still summons him – and us. It drags us over the fields of alienation and isolation, and of our learning which has taught us the mechanics of everything but the nature of nothing.

Just look at American literature as the perfect analogy to this. In the 19^th century people like Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson and Thoreau took us back to nature. What followed were Freud, Nietzsche, Rand, behavioral psychology, the Berlin Circle of logical positivists, nihilists, clerics, and others who basically picked that journey apart, analyzed it to death, stuffed it into formaldehyde, and killed the imagination. – We are the product of that, the progeny of the progeny of the progeny now so torn from nature that we mistakenly use artifice and mirrors to “mimic” our way back to it. McCandless knew better. The human tragedy has deepened.

And yet through all this “art” has always reminded us of who we are. We use words like “symmetry” and “balance” without knowing what they really mean or how to really access them. This is why art often repeats itself, becomes repetitive even through new genres and mediums. Newer ways of pleasing the eye and ear are just old ways of getting us to “listen” again, to seek real symmetry. Space to the imagination is not four-corned and three- (or four-)dimensional. It is poly-dimensional, ephemeral, amorphous, and instructs us to think spherically. The oldest cave symbols – the circle and cross – invoke not so much an ancient (linear) past anymore but signs of our deepest natures “here & now.” This is the trail we seek.

The same is true for language. Buckminster Fuller not only said that everything is “angle and incidence,” he also said “I seem to be a verb.” The verb “to draw” is the same for “to write,” and the pictographs on the rocks of the Upper Paleolithic entertain nothing about a subject-object relationship. “Being and having” are one-and-the-same thing.

In the (linear) end, it forces me to agree with author Guy Davenport. First, “Man, it would seem does not evolve; he accumulates.” We like to think we’re further along from stone knives and bearskins just because we’ve reached the moon. But our savagery has kept pace with knowledge and has arguably outpaced spiritual growth. Second, art has not evolved either, because it hasn’t needed to. “[Art] has always been itself, and modern artists have notoriously learned more from the archaic ….” Thirdly, “history is not linear; it is the rings of growth in a tree….” And fourthly, “We are searching for man in his past and finding him not brutal and inarticulate but a creature of accomplished sensitivity and order, sane and perhaps more alive than we…. The real meaning, it seems to me… is not what we have grown from as men living together, but what we have lost.”

Melville said that the whaling ship was his Harvard and Yale. “Intelligence” is a cosmic ocean. And what we really seek is a kind of total disillusionment instead of clarity (i.e. death). Because “clarity” too often demands caution and limitation without our knowing. It demands a “lens” of understanding. We actually yearn to feel primordial mud between our toes; we want to experience an inexplicable cosmic trust. But in order to reach it each lens must close down and/or reflect the same degree of light as every other lens.

The arts will take care of themselves, but we will not – because we are not. Life needs to imitate art once again — but not just imitate it. Life should be about erasing the divide between I and Thou.

In this sense I think we all seek death (Thanatos). It’s the only trail leading to metamorphosis. Freud called the death-wish the “great unknown” which is also the “aim of all life.” It’s the instinct to return to the earliest state where everything began. It’s the unconscious wish to rid ourselves of anything (or anyone) “who has offended or injured us.” In one sense it’s going backwards in order to go forward. But in another sense everything is always going forward. One cannot touch the same ground twice.

It’s the old saying about what the caterpillar says to the butterfly: “You’ll never catch me up in one of those things.” We find ourselves saying it over and over while simultaneously inching our way to the precipice. The butterfly says nothing back, and neither did Christopher McCandless. He simply left. I think we all simply want to leave.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

THE HUMAN LENS

THE HUMAN LENS

My favorite thinkers all seem to share a common notion: that is isn’t what one thinks but how he thinks that really matters. What is thought is of course important, but in the final analysis what seems to need more attention is the kind of mental hard-wiring that brings a person to certain conclusions (and premises) in the first place. To truly understand someone, hence to at least try to improve the human condition, requires knowing the lens he sees through and why.

Since my own lens predisposes me to leftist thinking, I’m then naturally drawn to the theater of “intellection” which oozes from the political and religious right. It mystifies me. Call it a convex lens looking at a concave lens. I have no doubt that I, and those like me, leave the same impression on them. But the difference is a dramatic and significant one.

The metaphor of a convex versus a concave lens works here. One brings objects closer and easier to read; the other rejects them and makes them very small. The first immerses. The second claims to enjoy wider paradigmatic views, but it really means not seeing anything at all, a turning off of apertures and f-stops, closing shutters, and resting in dark complacency. It’s therefore easy to see how difficult it is for one lens to understand the other. But let’s try anyway.

In going further inside the other’s nature real paradigms appear anyway, including the parallax view of rejection and ignorance. Seeing “up close” also allows one to enter a foreign encampment with an olive branch, an open mind, with an interest to learn the language and customs. This, even if in return all he gets are volleys of invective and efforts to poison the well.

The rationales designed to defend religion, a moral commonwealth, war and peace, have always intrigued me, and more often than not baffled me as well. At day’s end I’m struck most of all with the impression of a subspecies which, more than anything else, is scared to death of its own shadow. That said, I confess to being a card-carrying defender of just “one” conservative cause of my own. It involves language. Call me an anachronism, but a cold shutter shoots up my spine when I hear the English language stomped on and shredded mercilessly today.

Even those “allegedly” educated in the arts of semantic/syntactical use (journalists, editors, writers, reporters) can’t seem to speak, let alone write legibly, anymore. In 1941 the vocabulary of a high school graduate was 10,000 words. Today it’s 5000 words. It’s normal today for people to communicate with short Dick & Jane sentences. Backing into a sentence with a participial phrase has been abandoned because it too quickly loses one’s concentration. They’ve also lost the devices of irony. And when I hear a “professional” TV anchorperson saying words like “affirmance,” “plentious,” “annoyment,” and “indulgment” I want to scream. (Already my word processor is lighting up with sirens and red flags, wondering what the hell I’m typing). “And these people are getting paid, enjoying lucrative careers, becoming local and national celebs, and getting book deals.” It’s the mantra I mumble to myself almost nightly now.

Okay, yes, call me a curmudgeonly, grumpy old pedant who may not have received the rigid linguistic training others have, but who nonetheless supports those lingering crusades trying to save the English language. As Orwell said as early as 1946 in Politics and the English Language, “Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse…. [T]he slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts….” “The mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose.”

Enough about language. The how of cognition, it seems to me, must have a starting point. To prefer viewing things from afar, to thus isolate one’s galaxy from all others, must be a defense mechanism marinated in fear. Alien visitors and their ideas to the “concaved” mind must mean only danger and destruction. Speaking with them is only allowed under the close inspection of scrupulous surveillance and full military readiness. Donald Trump may be recklessly shaking hands with Russians and Koreans, but think not that the Pentagon doesn’t have its finger on its DEFCON buttons. A “visitor” is already presumed guilty before being declared innocent and harmless. One wrong move violates the strictest protocols of diplomacy – everyone (on our side of the table) walks away.

Fear comes from training and early trauma. All beings come into this world like tabula rasas (or voluntary palimpsests), unbiased and totally trusting of everything. They have no reason not to be. They are inquisitive and trusting. The first living thing they see, feel, and touch become their parents. What happens after that determines their orientation to everything. It becomes a primal lens through which everything is seen. And it’s unbreakable. It metastasizes and molds the psyche. It becomes the psyche. There is no moral judgment to be meted out here because it’s never the infant’s fault. It has no choice about where it is. But the parents are another matter. Psychic predispositions are multi-generational and passed down, like batons and old cars.

Martyrdom not only gets passed down, it becomes an institution unto itself, draped in time-honored pride. Taking one “on the cheek,” living in perpetual self-denial, volunteering for careers of ritual sacrifice, is all about one strongly entrenched early predisposition. First, the world is “out there” and separate. It is also unknown, and unknowns cannot be trusted. And that implies elements equipped with their own agendas which are not controlled – and everything must be controlled. What isn’t controlled must be relegated to “faith” by religion. We are quite literally “in this alone,” fighting to defend what’s worth defending, floating in a cosmic ocean with only stick and stones and a jealous god (as navigator) telling us not to put other gods before Him – hence His admission that He knows He’s not the only god hoisting maritime flags (and petards).

This is another way of saying “trust” comes prepackaged – anointed by an auto-da-fe of meticulous examination. Having passed the exam, conservatives then congratulate themselves on being objective and open-minded. This is quite stunning since ordinary citizens themselves are also “unknowns” to the extent that they “think.” Everyone has the potential of entertaining alien concepts and beliefs. Hence, they also need to be contained, subdued, exploited, converted (and/or killed) before the same is done unto them. It’s the Golden Rule.

The tragic side to all this is that it metastasizes in the culture’s DNA. And the great debate remains weather early childhood trauma shifts to “unconscious” messaging through time – even without trauma. I don’t believe that it actually changes human DNA; but it does become an unconscious defense mechanism, a knee-jerk reaction. This is the negative side. A positive incentive (in their minds) is that it serves self-advancement. The rationale is that mistrust and fear are good things. They facilitate acquisition and power in a Darwinist world. It’s all about “rugged individualism” and survivalism.

The living exemplar of this now occupies the White House. And those surrounding the king/mob boss are a brand of conservatives who I simply call corporate whores. A label which does not discriminate genders, but which identifies those who have sold their souls long ago for self-gain. These are political-corporate opportunists who will say and do anything for money and acquisition. And it would not be exaggerating to say that it could be Hitler or Stalin themselves in the Oval Office – it wouldn’t matter. As long as they were promised promotions and wealth, they would gladly step forward and do the emperor’s bidding with warm accolades and praise. These are Quislings and the worst cowards imaginable.

The king can “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue,” molest women, promote racism, hatred, and zenophobia, lie daily and compulsively, and commit treason with foreign nations, and it simply doesn’t matter. These people think only of their bank accounts, real estate, and retirement- and to hell with everyone/everything else, including the planet.

The metaphor of being absent a “soul” might also say lots about how these people think. Admittedly, the soul is an abstract concept, immeasurable and transparent to use as a tool for understanding the mind. But would it be too indulgent to say there is a parallel between a lens of thinking and something absent in the human psyche? There’s a conspicuous void where something should exist. A soul carves a lens in its own manner and holds it at its own angle, an angle which approaches, embraces, and trusts. Without one the lens drifts rather randomly along and attaches itself to needs which tend to isolate and alienate. It is quite alone and fear becomes its modus operandi. The lens defocuses, discriminates and rejects. When the space is “filled” it tends to connect and relate to others. The mirror sees itself in its own reflection. – Whatever one wishes to call the soul, it is conspicuously either there or not there.

Regarding a “conscience,” one can have a conscience while managing to keep it as selective and narrow as possible. For example, he can constantly invoke the names of his children, father and grandmother, in some desperate plea of emotion to prove that, indeed, he is “a human being.” He can recount all kinds of self-sacrifice. But anyone who knows him knows that it ends there. With just money and power in mind, of course he includes his own family. What isn’t said is that ex-spouses, adopted children, cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles in nursing homes are commonly “optional.” (I have in mind Trump’s “other” son, rarely seen, almost muted and invisible – Barron Trump). The mind is indeed the master of deception.

But what staggers my mind most of all, seeing what I see, knowing what I know about the human lens, is knowing that the concaved one is so relentlessly prevalent, despite everything. Not just prevalent but impervious and tenacious. It never changes or diminishes in numbers or magnitude. We like to think that we’ve evolved culturally with regard to racism, intolerance, insensitivity to the environment, etc., in the last 243 years, since the start of the American experiment. But in fact, as I see it, this ignorance has simply gone underground through time, awaiting its opportunities to surface again and take possession of everything. Left and Right, conservative and liberal, simply cycle around.

We act stunned whenever this happens, and we all recite the old mantra “I can’t believe this is still happening today.” But really?? It’s really not hard to believe if we decide to face that our most primitive and selfish instincts never really die. They’re just glossed over and pushed underground (into the unconscious). Every day we fear that maybe some of it will surface subliminally or erupt massively. We use the intellect to convince ourselves that it’s simply not there anymore, that we’ve killed our savage instincts, our selfishness and greed. But every watchtower, every guard at the gate, falls asleep eventually, and the worst of us oozes out on to the political stage. Then the worst human beings imaginable get elected (or installed).

Emile Zola is one of countless examples which proves this point. We might say he happened to live at that moment in the great cycle when it paused at the same point where it is today. He could just as well be living today, saying exactly what he said in 1898, and it would be just as relevant. He witnessed the same opposing lenses at work. The Dreyfus case was looming, and he decided to write an open letter – J’accuse – to the newspaper addressing the French president. The government’s concave forces were at work showing the worst side of anti-Semitism, unlawfully jailing Alfred Dreyfus for crimes he didn’t commit. Zola protested and found himself accused of libel. He was forced to flee to England or face prison. J’accuse has since become a generic expression of outrage against powerful and corrupt forces everywhere.

Zola was a freethinker and something else which wasn’t even a word until the Dreyfus case – an “intellectual” – a term initially used pejoratively by “the concaved,” meaning “misfit,” “malcontent,” “disloyal, and “unsound.” The term still suffers epithets from the contemptuous and unhinged who hate thinkers. It still invokes tinges of embarrassment.

Having survived all the slurs and epithets, Zola was then tasked not just to free Dreyfus but to hold the case up as a mirror for the public to witness its own hypocrisy. It was a moral indictment essentially against the Three Estates: clergy, nobility, and “the people,” all three who kept fetishizing France as a pillar of truth and justice.

He even targeted young students from the Latin Quarter who were actually indoctrinated enough to openly condemn the Dreyfusards and defend anti-Semitic views: “This idiotic poison has really already overthrown their intellects and corrupted their souls.” He targeted the “third estate” for rationalizing that Dreyfus’s guilt was essential for national safety: “[N]o one dares say what he thinks for fear of being denounced as a traitor and bribe-taker.” He targeted the military: “Examine your conscience. Was it in truth your Army which you wished to defend when none were attacking it?” And finally the Church: “[Y]ou return to that past of intolerance and theocracy against which the greatest of your children fought.”

This was fierce indignation. Though Zola defended Dreyfus, his writing was conspicuously ahistorical. He dissociated himself from an eminently political affair at a particular time and place and addressed France with a particular set of “eternal” principles. He spoke of justice and revolution as a freethinker and an intellectual, and addressed the future of Paris. He legitimized “the intellectual” as well – someone who never claimed to know any more than anyone else about anything but simply saw things differently – again, it wasn’t about what they thought but how they thought.

For all this Zola faced his own trial and was exiled to England for eight months, only to return when a new trial was announced. Dreyfus was offered a plea-bargain which he reluctantly accepted. In 1899 an amnesty bill was passed indemnifying everyone in the case, on both sides, and in 1906 Dreyfuss was fully exonerated, finally, by the French Supreme Court.

The Dreyfus case and Zola’s fight for “intellectuals” and freethinkers are still going on – in my view. The oblique but intensely burning heat magnified between two different lenses is seemingly eternal. The Church still grapples with its guilt over the Jews; young people are as confused as ever over the political “truth”; the military still grapples with (racial and sexual) discrimination; and the government continues rounding up minorities for deportation or detention camps. Nothing’s changed.

The late Christopher Hitchens made an astute observation when speaking about “miscarriages” of justice: “the framing of the innocent axiomatically involves the exculpation of the guilty. This is abortion, not miscarriage.” – Just another way of showing how one lens attempts to burn out the other in an eternal struggle to win all the light.

Lastly, Hitchens, a devout atheist, addressed in his own terms what could almost be construed as “the soul” – his acknowledgment of an intangible: “There is good reason to think that such reactions arise from something innate rather than something inculcated….” As for a lenses correctly angled, “we can be certain that they will continue to occur, and will not depend for their occurrence upon the transmission of good examples or morality tales….” As for how to think and see the world, “It is something you are, and not something you do.”

My apologies to the late Mr. Hitchens. He steadfastly rejected any credence given to “the supernatural.” But does the soul necessarily belong just to the supernatural? Is something intangible, just because it can’t be measured in Euclidian terms, always an inheritance of the mystical and religious? I think we’re beginning to understand not just the meaning “spiritual atheism” but “secular religion” – the convergence of lenses burning each other up. It’s more than just the marriage of science and religion, it’s the reconfiguration of both to where one lens is concaved on one side and convexed on the other.

The next evolutionary “hiccup” might just be the reality created when one such lens faces another. What kind of light will that create? Euclid’s own First Common Notion said that “things that are equal to the same things are equal to each other.” This was “self-evident.” Two lenses facing off back-to-front, front-to-back. Where will we be in that mirrored moment? It might just lend new meaning to being “blinded by the light.”

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

LOVE’S DARK SIDE

LOVE’S DARK SIDE

Sometimes it’s not what’s said but how it’s said and when that grabs your attention. And while perusing an article on Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie Marsh, I read the hero asking, “What use was war without also love?” Pressing issues of pointlessness and futility a critic responds,” this must count as one of the most affirmative … sentences ever set down.”

But I read this, perhaps, differently. The criminal commits an act of violence, the ballplayer competes to win, the minister pontificates and scolds, the attorney/politician defends malfeasance, lovers fight, and nations go to war. On the other side of the ledger – lovers make love, people give to charity, couples hold hands, and love songs dominate C&W radio. – What do these two sides have in common? And what do they need most of all in order to simply exist?

These are dark twins which meet in the darkest hour of the night to reaffirm themselves. They embrace, laugh together about triumphs and failures, and devise new techniques on how to fool the human mind the next time the crusades of “love & hate” go hunting. It’s an alliance we seldom if ever want to associate. We want to see love as pure and virtuous without subversive ties to some ne’er-do-well cousin. We want it surrounded with trumpet-blowing cherubs, angelic clouds, and hearts. We want it to be the penultimate awakening to the eternal heavens where nothing but restful bliss awaits us. It is, so they say, what life is supposed to be all about and what we all strive for in the very end.

And yet, on its day off, or even worse in between encore performances, love sits in its basement dressing room smoking a cigarette with his sibling from birth. We speak of three different branches of love to help justify its rather “multiple personalitied” behavior: first, eros (raw animal sex); amour (courtly love); and agape (unconditional-Christly love). We place the onus on ourselves to figure out how love can be so angelic and pure and so artfully cunning at the same time. “Well,” we say, “there’s love, and then there’s real love!” We defend its “alters” (dissociative sides) in hopes of saving it from humiliating ruin. We enable it and rescue it.

But look again. Which of these three Faces of Eve do we actually see sitting and sharing space with its twin? And which twin by the way (it too has a multiple personality)? – It’s a Manichean universe, whether that fits with our absolutist notions of heaven and hell, or not. There’s no getting around it, unless of course we give up our dualistic notions of ourselves, our own multiple sides which, ironically, we celebrate. And by the way, we do not follow these rules as if they were axiomatic. They follow us, our own multiple sides, just as religion does. We make the rules.

The problem with love is the same problem that resides with evil. There are gradations and shades. Hence the very thin red line between both. Eventually the “gray” between both begin to intersect and overlap. This is why I believe we obsess so about evil characters and ask “how could he do what he did?” This has plagued nervous theologians since the beginning of the Common Era. Where do people who commit horrible acts come from who have the ability to love and have loved others? Where do the Uni-Bombers, Sons of Sam, and Jeffrey Dahmers come from?

Hitler is the most obvious and contemporary spokesman for them all. We can’t even speak of him without reducing him to a caricature, a dull, cruel, insipid man with no personality. To not do so, and worse yet to say anything “respectful” about him, almost anoints them with power all over again. This is the power he still wields today. Is it verboten to admit that his early art work wasn’t all that bad, as landscapes go; that I might have even purchased one of his paintings in the 1920s had I been there? Does that say something about me? Did I cross a line somewhere?

Seventy years later and he’s still in our thoughts, like it was just yesterday. Why? If he was so wrong about everything, why can’t we just “finally” dismiss him just as we have with every other evil dictator in history? Hitler is much more to us than we dare to allow in conversation. The issue speaks to processes working in ways which clash with our notions of good and evil, love and hate.

It’s about how goodness-love has the capacity to become its twin so swiftly. Here was a decorated young corporal, fiercely loyal to the fatherland, coming from a meager and distraught family, and who claimed to defend reason and justice. His prejudices were minor rants to those who heard them. “I argued til finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force.” He advocated for “nation and decency.” His understanding of love actually required exclusion and banishment. Amidst certain “dark” elements, love was impossible.

Hitler was also not just a hypochondriac who hated “germs,” he was also a vegetarian, hated smoking and excessive drinking, hated lewd barroom jokes, shied away from sex, and was health-oriented. His favorite American actress (allegedly) was Shirley Temple, and his favorite American film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He also loved John Ford westerns (white man always defeats heathen savage). – It would seem that such a figure would be easy to reduce to an common philistine. But it wasn’t – and still isn’t. All attempts fail. He comes back to us, reminds us that the most impressive demonstrations of goodness and purity mean nothing. If our understanding of evil were accurate (that he simply “lied”), this man would simply drift out our consciousness. But we keep retrieving him, over and over. He continues to speak to us; hence, his posthumous power.

We seem obsessed by the association of love with “order” – even more so the “restoration” of love as it allegedly was, as it should be. Thus, we keep Hitler warm. We incubate him and resurrect him to reconcile our own obsessions of psychological order. But then he betrays this. He’s the only voice speaking honestly about the fraudulence around agape. That is, love without its twin. He’s Jiminy Crickett (another cocaine-induced Disney dream) sitting on our shoulders whispering the truth of who and what we are. We are all capable of “that,” and love will not always stop it. Love also stabs us in the back. It requires deluded fantasies sometimes for its own promotion, all the while promising purity and virtue.

Indeed, we use Hitler to ferret out evil so we can ferret out love. We want to keep them separate. But he was/is unbearably “human,” telling us that such a disjunction is impossible. Whenever we try to understand Hitler we seem to go into a fog about ourselves; when we understand ourselves we go into a fog about Hitler. This is why.

Sometimes in the name of love we appeal to the lowest common denominator. Most Germans, including German officers, actually hated Hitler. But it didn’t matter. They needed an insurance policy against Communism and a puppet-leader to effectively jump-start an economy in ruins. His military and business supporters didn’t give a damn about the Jews or his personal views on Marx. They were opportunists and capitalists and knew they had hired a marionette to do their bidding. Their mistake was, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, they “nationalized … the lowest common denominator.”

To reach their goals, his political operative Franz von Papen said “We’ve hired him,” and Erich Ludendorff said “You have delivered up our holy German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.”

And speaking of enablers, Churchill, Chamberlain, and FDR all had more laudatory things to say about Hitler in the beginning than they ever did about each other. Chamberlain “appeased” Hitler to the very end, and his fellow secretaries even refused to meet with German officers imploring their help to overthrow their resident madman. – The fact was, Hitler “spoke” to them in subliminal ways which have rarely been, if ever, analyzed enough. He was everyone’s obsession, and he knew it. And by knowing this he he was also in a hurry about it, afraid he wouldn’t make it to the end. He was afraid he would be “found out,” afraid that we’d learn about the playing out of light and dark on the world stage – that the brighter the light, the darker its shadow.

Apropos of light and dark, it’s ironic that we can switch so easily to another subject where the same dynamics are in play. War and peace (for me) instantly congers the horrible ambivalence most feel around holy wedlock? We commonly agree that real love is about accepting all the flaws and weaknesses in a person. Okay, fine. But a person’s “other side” is not the same as love’s “other side.” These are two different animals. Loving someone for his flaws is one thing, but “living love” as a many-faced phenomenon is another.

For years I was cynical over the very legitimacy of marriage as an institution (still averaging a 65% divorce rate). I was always baffled at the ritual taking place at the altar which seemed to explain the failure rate very well. On average, while our three players (bride, groom, cleric) were all speaking “the word of love,” each had her/his own understanding of what that meant – assuming the other two shared and same understanding, hence the issue never coming up – until it was too late. Recall our three sides of love above mentioned: generally speaking, the man thought eros, the woman amour, and the cleric agape – and (65% of the time) the cleaved never met.

At last, we must consider that love actually has a sinister side (as oxymoronic as it sounds) which trumps even eros, amour, and agape. Clerics aren’t even aware of it but seriously should be. There’s no such thing as “purity” or “virtue” per se, not inside a Gnostic-Manichean universe. There are not only eternal oppositions but many shades of each intimately connected. As one shifts in meaning, so does the other simultaneously. One “listens” to the other without pause and responds to every subtlety negotiated between “lover and loved.” – I think this is something we all sense intuitively and unconsciously – and “the deal” (conspiracy) is to keep it unconscious. Hence, we go into marriage “accepting the other unconditionally,” but not really. Not the part we don’t even accept, or understand, about ourselves.

This whole discussion glissades into other seemingly unrelated areas as well, for which there is no space here. For example, Nietzsche’s “master-slave” relationships not only between people but nations (of which Churchill, Chamberlain, and FDR were players), the temptations of servility to a greater power, and so forth. This too must pay its debt to our confusion over good and evil, love and hate.

Is all this just another way of saying everything is negotiable? Everything has its price? When we say love is a “death and rebirth,” are we going even deeper than we thought when “in love?” Are we grappling with that Iranian-Persian, Mani himself? – Gibran’s famous line: “Love is sufficient unto love… Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.” Be always aware, and wary, of Cupid’s arrow “said to be a child, because in choice he is so oft beguiled.”

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

THE NEED TO BELONG

THE NEED TO BELONG

The calm before another “patriotic” storm. Another parade, another litany of speeches about national greatness, more reminders of being “chosen” as God’s favorite people, more doctored war films and documentaries, more redacted (foreign & domestic) news, and more surveillance than ever before on citizens themselves, guilty until proven innocent, prone to claiming too many rights and learning too much about their own government.

Should it surprise anyone that I’m writing this on July 3^rd – pick a year, it doesn’t matter. But the whereabouts does matter. Some cities are more “patriotic” than others, at least in their rigidity and ostentation about it. And this year’s dispatch comes from one of the worst with its military machismo, Republican politics, and Christian hubris.

It’s not the parade and militancy per se that’s so bothersome but what both combined inevitably brew in a cauldron of unexamined excess. It’s the kind of excess sought and captured by ambitious demagogues and dictators who study the psychology of “herding.” The herding instinct is the power to gather many otherwise diverse feelings, opinions, ambitions, and philosophies and, by channeling them into one cause, party or leadership, convince their holders that either a) the primary needs of each will be met, or b) another separate cause is even better than their own.

In either case what happens here is a lopsided quid pro quo. That is, two things happen: First, one surrenders his individuality for “the cause” (principle, goal, philosophy); and second, by so doing fuels another collective “intelligence” or “consciousness” which takes on a life of its own. But this intelligence is always lower than his own. Here the process gets predictably dangerous. And it’s why in the end one is usually baffled (embarrassed and ashamed) that he witnessed himself doing and saying things he never would have said and done alone or outside “the group.”

The group has the power to actually stifle one’s conscience and replace it with a sense of mission that disregards real conscience altogether. Or, if it preserves any conscience, it is militated beyond one’s own sense of reason. Either way, the group totally dominates the person in this manner, almost hypnotically. Then, when outside the group and alone, he’s required to ignore/deny/suppress what thoughts and reflections that stir in his mind critical of his experience. It’s called indoctrination.

The reason for the instinct to herd is “to belong.” It’s natural for us to feel wanted by others, to feel important, and to have a sense of purpose. “Belonging needs” is a phase of early childhood development, the absence which grows into severe mental-emotional issues later in life. We are fundamentally “social” animals, and we derive meaning and purpose from (in contrast to) others around us. This is what James Hillman meant when saying, “to say psychological is to say psycho-social.” Unconsciously we bounce ourselves off others every day to reaffirm what/who we are “not” and to rally who we are.

This is why being stranded alone on a desert island for a long period is a virtual death sentence to one’s sanity. With no one around we lose our bearings of who we are. We end up talking to the trees, animals, and rocks, but to no avail in the end. We need our own species around us.

This is “the hook” demagogues, politicians, and salesmen use to gather people in. “Come, join the spiritual family and be one of us.” “Be a proud American, join the Marines.” “Here at XYZ we’re family. When you’re here, you’re part of the family.” “Bronco fans are part of our team.” “At our school we have pride in who we are,” etc.

Another side to belonging needs is the instinct to survive. When threatened, animals of a kind will bond instinctively knowing that there is strength in numbers. This is another hook used by leaders – the promise of protection. On the other hand, it’s something we do anyway when threatened. It’s the one behavioral trait which always instills a sense of renewed hope in the human race after all the horrible things humans do to each other (groups against groups). They come together to challenge other groups.

The irony here about groups is that they only seem to really join up when things go very badly. Short of that, we still defer to our own complacency and self-absorption. The other tragedy is that coming together is strikingly short-lived and fleeting. This is why appeals continue to go out after a tragedy lest people quickly forget their group needs. If a group stays united even without tragedy around (for its “positive” messaging, as many religious groups reason), I submit that it’s still really out of the fear of tragedy.

Military parades and commemorations are all about herding in the name of national security; that is, the fear of (take your pick) – invasions, enslavement, dictatorships, too much democracy, social pressures all kinds – all variations of death to whatever they need to defend. All the while never disclosing the fact that, in order to prevent coercion, invasion, and death, the system itself imposes its own coercions-invasions-deaths onto its own citizens. It’s the most clever (subliminal) indoctrination process ever devised in the guise of floats, bunting, uniforms, and parade queens.

National holidays and parades are simply one aspect of propaganda. And propaganda itself has an intriguing history – especially impromptu military parades concocted by corrupt and small-minded presidents concerned only with their self-image and private parading of lies.

The term first appears, not surprisingly, in Catholic literature in 1622. Pope Gregory XV is afraid of Protestantism spreading, so he instructs the curia to enact the Congregatio de propaganda fide, instructing missionary efforts to work harder with their conversions. At this time in history it isn’t a plan to lie, deliver half-truths, or spread a selective history – these policies are already firmly entrenched. It’s simply concerned about “sheep now wretchedly straying” needing to be “placed in the pasture of the true faith.”

The term retains its strongly Catholic coinage until the 19^th century when it’s suddenly used politically and for deceptive purposes. But still, even while attempting to create sinister impressions, it still doesn’t mean “overt” subversive falsehoods. Historically, politics had always made a distinction between these two intentions, ever since the Greeks (nothing new); but now there is an official term for it. In fact, the spread of deception is deemed necessary, even patriotic, for national pride, in the name of national enlightenment, even for the spreading a “arts and liberty,” (Emerson). The Oxford Dictionary even treats it benignly as simply “any association, scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice.”

Then comes World War I. Until 1911 the term is still almost irrelevant and rarely even known. The Encyclopedia Britannica spins a short history on the word “propagate,” but this is all we hear of it. By 1915 the Allies decide to impress certain thoughts (of virtue) on themselves while casting Germany under a lens of evil. By now governments are intent on using their media to rouse enthusiasm for a war effort which the masses would otherwise be mystified about and may not support.

After the war a new market takes hold, called “public opinion.” From this comes a new industry called “public relations.” In learning how the power of propaganda during the war has convinced citizens of ideas that are pure fabrication, it isn’t difficult to see market capitalism retaining it for its own purposes. The best propagandists find themselves going to work for companies like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, General Electric, and John D. Rockefeller. A new generation of admen and publicists are employed full-time to do advertising for big business.

Curiously, some of the best propagandists hail from, of all things the ministry, or are relatives of the clergy. These are the individuals who seem to know how to bend the truth better than anyone. Although those on “the inside” all know what’s going on, the process is officially about “exalting the nation and advancing the civilizing process” – teaching the ignorant and lowly-educated about “smart consumption.” In other words, how to be a “good American.”

By the mid-1920s opinions about propaganda begin to shift because different nations (and companies) are all using it, each claiming to be “the best” while their competitors are “the worst.” Following the war Americans are also realizing that not all Germans are evil, that “the Hun” is not a monster, especially with German immigrants having arrived (still arriving) at Ellis Island. Citizens everywhere begin catching on to a greater truth, that there are “two sides” to every lofty claim and promise. They begin backing away and examining the forest instead of individual trees; they’re learning to be critical of what they’re told by government and big business interests. They’re learning about the depths of deception and lying on a grand scale. Propaganda now takes on its evil stamp.

Ergo, propaganda’s principle leaders – Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud), Walter Lippmann, Ivy Lee, and others – set out to clear its name again. Lippmann convinces industrialists, educators, and the business community that most Americans are basically stupid and illiterate, incapable of lucid thought, driven by “herd instincts” and prejudice – hence needing guidance.

This idea is not new: Our very Founders invented the Senate and the Electoral College for this very reason — so “educated men” could make the important decisions on behalf of a largely illiterate and incapable electorate. “Democracy” required a supra-governmental body of “professionals,” led by “the responsible administrator,” the “invisible governor,” to run the show and make all the important decisions.

John Dewey (psychologist, educational “reformer”) goes so far as to ensure that a deep divide survives forever in America’s education system, between leaders and workers. He actually advocates for (and receives) two systems of education – one for the elite and “well-born,” another for the factory worker and manual laborer. One will inherit an ivy league education and his seat in government; the other will “work for a living” – go to war and pay the nation’s bills. Another unspoken fringe benefit: one will work for money his entire life; the other will let money work for him.

This level of propaganda remains the status quo throughout World War II. Citizens are convinced that “smart consumption” of products and the decisions they make are actually their own ideas, that no one is convincing them to do anything without their consent. At the same time, as Hitler, Goebbels, Mussolini, and much later Joe McCarthy are quick to discover, there is a very real “mental borderland, where one can never clearly see conviction as distinct from calculation,” said Mark Crispin Miller. This is the “basis of the mass manipulator’s enigmatic power.”

Goebbels says, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth,” and “Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.” Stalin says, “Everybody has the right to be stupid.” Hitler says, “If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things,” and “By the careful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.”

By 1946 magazines and journals are rethinking the virtues of propaganda, and many “liberal” essays and exposes are examining its internal workings for the first time. Propaganda never recovers from such scrutiny. The public knows that for every claim there is a counter-claim. Everything is relative to an opposing view, and consumers are more wary than ever – though they keep buying products. Companies are forced to be more accountable in their advertising.

Public knowledge especially about “war” takes a sour turn (this will happen again with Vietnam). In 1945 GIs are returning from campaigns that aren’t anything remotely like how they were described before going there. Even John Wayne is called a draft-dodger and a liar for spreading lies about what war was like. He is “booed” when visiting a veterans hospital in Hawaii – a memory he will never forget.

But another problem surfaces as well with companies and government: “How does a costly truth get out to the world as truth?” When is an idea no longer a crackpot theory, a paranoid delusion of the left or right, but something that must be, and finally is, accepted?” (Miller). – Examples: cigarette smoking, nuclear waste, cell phones and cancer, fluoride toxicity, pollution, and now global warming. It’s a dilemma that stays with us today. Everything can be (almost is) politicized now. Add to this the “insanity” factor: the most reasonable ideas are doubted and scorned, while the most outrageous superstitions and fantasies are seriously entertained and legitimized.

Today, propaganda is commonly condemned in the press, while the corporate media employ its own tactics and “selective” information on what to report. Noam Chomsky said that in the first half of the 20^th century propaganda was defined by what the government told its people. By the 2^nd half of the century propaganda was defined by what citizens “were not told” – what was deliberately, consciously, and systematically left out of the national conversation. This has proven even more effective than what they were told, and it takes on an extra sinister quality. It also exonerates the guilty of false truths since they it was “never said” – just implied or “voluntarily deduced” by the public.

Which brings us back to the military parade. Remember what it’s about and what it attempts to convey as “the truth.” Remember who it is sponsoring it and paying for it. Remember whose brainchild it was in the first place and who he/she/they expect to attend and support it. Observe the signs, leaflets, and chants both in the parade and in the crowds. And remember that line between “conviction and calculation.”

This is what I think about every time there’s a national celebration or religious holiday. I’m not quite sure what to believe, but I’m damn sure about what not to believe absolutely. And the more it presses on the unknowing attendee, on his/her mental processes via subliminal messaging or direct messaging, the more one should back away and go home.

For the record, there are some parades and celebrations that actually convey no political or religious message at all. I will allow that. But for the life of me, I don’t know where they exist or why. Let’s just allow that some people “like to party” down Main Street and leave it at that.

Remember that when a parade, especially on July 4^th, intends to cheer on and celebrate the “idea” of freedom — to think for oneself and the First Amendment – think about its real cause and its effect. In 1912 Eugene Debs told his socialist voters that he would never lead them into any kind of Promised Land, even if he could. Because if they were trusting enough to be led in, they’d be trusting enough to be led out again. He urged them to not be led anywhere but to think for themselves instead.

Having said all this, by normal standards I might qualify as an official “dissident” I suppose. I don’t blindly conform to the mass-thoughtlessness or to the reduced intelligence of crowds because I feel no need to belong to one. I do know however that, though the term would do me honor, it’s something that must be earned rather than simply claimed. As Christopher Hitchens said, “it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.” I have never really risked enough to truly consecrate the term, as others have. I don’t even attend parades or protests, though I donate, sign petitions, and write letters when I feel it might do some good.

Chalk it up to age I’m afraid, but also to knowing what I already know and not desiring to repeat old mistakes from my youth. My current “dissidence” hails from an easy chair in front of a computer. From there I listen to Marx’s favorite Socratic maxim: de omnibus dubitandum – “doubt everything.” After that, the Roman maxim: “Do justice, and let the skies fall.” Que sera, sera.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

CHRYSANTHEMUMS

CHRYSANTHEMUMS

Cecelia Watson has a new book out, entitled Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. She says “The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated.” She chronicles a long list of writers and critics who were both great fans and detractors of the semicolon. For every fancier there was (and is) a critic.

The visual smallness of this sign, this hieroglyph now writ[ten] large, reminded me how self-conscious writing has become in an extremely self-conscious age. Psychology, technology, and mass-media has seen to this. Something else has finally reached a point of equal interest as well – the metaphor – a communication tool not used any more today than in neolithic times. It has not just literary ramifications but psychological ones as well. It’s the older sibling to the simile: the latter only compares us to things; the former actually turns us into something else.

When you think of it, is anything not a metaphor – a representation/symbol/ sign signifying something else? Perhaps this is jumping the gun. Maybe we need to ease into this more gently.

I just wrote an article on the nature of “the lie” – it’s virtues when understood, it’s devastating impact when misunderstood and misapplied. This I suppose could be considered a continuation of that discussion, only taken to another depth. Let’s look at the cleverness of the metaphor and what it does to our thinking and to reality itself. It might just help us understand how using the very tools of “endarkenment” to find enlightenment never works.

Since everything is essentially something else, what does that do with our sense of understanding things, and more importantly our sense of purpose? Does our “selective” understanding depend on a “displaced” reality? I think so. To have one is to need the other. To lose the one is to lose the other. And therefore, what does it say to the validity of anything? It reminds me of the great paradox spelled out in Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. Consider: a) Life is dukkha (suffering), b) the cause of suffering is desire, c) put an end to desire, hence, put an end to life itself as we know it. And to achieve that, d) live the doctrine and walk the eightfold path. Plato’s Cave of shadows and illusions is the West’s response to this, but Plato never went so far as to advocate giving up desire – just to know the truth.

Appearances? Shadows? So fleeting and subtle are they that they come down to another Buddhist (post-structuralist) principle: “what is the proof behind your proof, the premise behind your premise?” Who is it that’s asking the question? – Suffice it to say, this is territory, again, which Western philosophy and religion dare not enter. If they did the very institutions and pillars of Western civilization would suffer “self-consciousness.” What would we do without our “absolutes” which are our foundations of meaning – God, I and Thou, empirical-sensory evidence, etc, – the absence of which would send us hurdling into the worst death of all – nothingness. Without purpose, ambition, and desire, the Western mind sees only darkness.

Hence the black veils which place a frightening pall over funerals and death in general. In place of specificity and concrete knowledge (shared in the East), the West offers only “faith” in the hereafter. Which isn’t really faith at all, but belief (lief, meaning “to hope for”). We hope to be rescued and saved. The blackness Christianity paints over death isn’t exactly the best indicator of trust in (or knowledge of) the subject. It’s all about mourning and fear and very little in the way of celebration. Something else seemingly ignored is that “the dead” don’t care anyway – only the living. Funerals are for the living, who privately repeat the mantra “there but for the grace of God go I.” The best the living can do is Pascal’s Wager.

“In the beginning was the word” – the Logos. And what is the word but a sound. And what is a sound? Suddenly a circular relationship begins between the sound and the object. There is no subject-object (awareness of the other) independent of language. Hence, the appearance of “signs” comprised of the sound (signifier) and what it indicates (signified). From this, language begins. But it doesn’t end there. Sounds only point to other sounds (“no word is free” said Lacan) and a metaphor is just one signifier in place of another in communication. One word/sound is only identifiable in terms of another. And from here advanced languages flourish – called “metaphoricity.” Just open the dictionary and what you see are words defining other words. So where does it end, or begin? Is there any solid foundation to fall back on anywhere? No.

Of course, western religion begins with the Logos. This is its chosen “rock” which cannot be deconstructed. It’s disallowed – incontestable, self-evident, unerring, axiomatic, infallible, and absolute – because God said so. He created the Word so that man could talk to Him. There’s no discussion about (as the little boy innocently asks) “but who created God?” There’s no serious looking at the construct of “I & Thou” which assumes the unqualified existence of the “self” (self-consciousness) which purposefully “decenters consciousness.” Decentering creates need. Power is now given away to the object, and God is now made in man’s image – also censored.

At this juncture, the Manichean universe opens up – dualism, yin & yang. And human evolution is henceforth given the conundrums of balance and constant disharmony (decenteredness). In the East it’s about the Fourth Noble Truth (mindfulness) which addresses duality. In the West it’s cogito, ergo sum and an omnipotent deity reigning over everything. – He is perfect and all-knowing, we are not.

So, we’ve at least touched on the roots of metaphorical thinking and the subtle but palpable (and absolutely crucial) utility of “sounds to sounds.” Today we take it all for granted, and the realization that all experience and understanding happens only in terms of signs relating to other signs means very little to anyone. On the contrary, meaning and truth must also always be “objective truth,” even if objective meaning has no meaning. It has meaning only if that meaning is independent of (outside) the human mind. In other words, it must be “disembodied” – independent of the words themselves.

With this as our premise, we seek “higher meaning” everyday, using the very tools which keep us from it. Paraphrasing Einstein, we can’t solve problems using the same thinking which creates them. Hence it becoming a matter of “undoing” our learning. Again, “who is it asking the question? Who do you think you are?

The pure and “absolute” unknowability of ourselves puts me in with a small fraternity of others obsessed with this. Though I could never be in their league intellectually, two individuals come to my rescue – heroes both.

First, I think I know where Hermann Hesse was going with his “glass bead game.” Even today most of his readers are virtually stumped by the meaning behind his Nobel-Prize winning book. For that very reason, I wish I could hitch a ride on an old tanker to Castalia.

“How far back the historian wishes to place the origins and antecedents of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately a matter of choice. For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least the idea of it…. There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles…. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture…. This same eternal idea… has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of universitas litterarum, every Platonic academy, every league of the intellectual elite, every rapproachement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward the reconciliation between science and art or science and religion.”

Aside from the truly gifted are other seekers who also migrate to Castalia: “[T]his elect circle of candidates for the higher reaches of the hierarchy of the Glass Bead Game seem odious and debased, a clique of haughty idlers … who lacked all feeling for life and reality, an arrogant and fundamentally parasitic company of dandies and climbers who had made a silly game, a sterile self-indulgence of the mind, their vocation and the content of their life.” – Insofar as society sees those individuals engaging in frivolous abstractions and “sterile self-indulgences of the mind,” I must include myself.

But what is “the game?” Not a utopia, and yet a reality which has actually existed. It is a mental synthesis through which the spiritual values of all ages are simultaneously present and alive, a “synthesis of human learning” requiring years of hard study in music, mathematics (sacred geometry), art, cultural history, psychology and religion. Hesse’s school is led by Josephus III, a Magister Ludi (Master of Play) who guides students through thematic mazes “to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal.” The teacher uses analytical psychology (the tools of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition) to best facilitate this.

This has remained incredibly cryptic and illusive ever since 1943 when the book was published (originally in German, entitled Magister Ludi). No one has ever figured out a definitive meaning to this mental-spiritual labyrinth. And yet I think I know where he was going: to a place beyond dualities and divisions, where one flips into seeing things coalesce from incomplete pieces into the inexplicable and unfathomable. Everything from science to music and art are mere metaphors of metaphors, words and signs of words and signs – as if individual instruments in a large cosmic orchestra.

And then there is my second hero – psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. At fifteen he wallpapered his room with pages from Spinoza’s Ethics, and decided to specialize in psychology. What fascinated me most about him was his observation of how we all (as young children) look into the mirror for the first time. Prior to this pivotal moment we experience ourselves as an almost infinite universe of feelings, thoughts, sensations and intuitions (borrowing again from the “four psychic functions” in analytical psychology). We are quite literally not beings but eternal becomings.

And then, one day, we look in the mirror. And we ask ourselves, “Is that me?” Of course it isn’t, and all of us (without exception) announce “that’s not me!!” Instead, we know ourselves to be is formless inside, a stream of consciousness made up of thoughts, images, memories, and fantasies. We are “polysexual,” ever-changing, chaotic, and ambivalent. – But now, we’re told that the image is us, a stable, three-dimensional entity” with symmetrical features. This Lacan simply called the “mirror phase.”

The outside world tells us we must not only conform to the image but the image itself must conform to its expectations. Suddenly and forever, our true inner universes are virtually shut down. From then on we’re measured by our physical dimensions and attributes – voices, hair, eyes, weight, height – and what clothes we wear.

This is why Lacan said that we are eternally “alone,” frustrated, and unhappy. Each one of us is a vast universe which actually intersects everyone else’s universe, but we aren’t allowed to say or share that.

We use words to try and bridge the distances now separating us, but they always fail us. We can never say what we feel. And Lacan says this is not a personal failing on our part but simply an “existential truth.”

We all long for others to understand us, but we’re all resolutely stuck on the “outside” of ourselves – alone and lonely. The outer world insists that if we just “look” and “act” a certain way, we’ll all be properly understood and accepted. But we know better.

Hence Lacan’s pessimism regarding romantic love too – doomed from the get-go.”There is no such thing …. Man knows nothing of woman, and woman knows nothing of man.” We never truly comprehend our partners and spouses. All we have are outer projections, physical forms, and fantasies drawn from the outside. Hence Lacan’s understanding of true love: “an awareness of our fundamentally illusory nature.” Eventually all else falls away, and must. If we’re still standing (and together) – that’s love.

With Lacan’s help, we can hold on to who we really are, within and relationally. At the same time we are always more or less “alone.” But just knowing this becomes a window on how we can begin building realistic and sustaining relationships.

In the 1960s Lacan saw young people protesting and forming new identities at many levels. But underneath what he saw was a vast movement in search of a new kind of leadership; not a religious or political guru in the generic sense, but what might be the equivalent to a Castalian Magister. He said the hallmark of a truly effective leader wasn’t his/her ability to just stir up crowds, but who “dared to be an adult.” In other words, who taught the disappointing (but potentially redeeming) nature of reality. We are all immature and lonely creatures, and we’re more miserable than we need to be. Hence, our endless search for “something” more than we admit to ourselves.

Lacan mixed intellectual truth with politics believing that it all blended together – again, parallels to the “glass bead game.” He was an atheist, and believed that psychoanalysis could eventually enlighten our greatest institutions like the Church and governments. He hoped it would liberate them from their errors. Instead superstition and fear have taken over since he died.

These are two of my personal heroes – reaching for (and finding) the transcendent. The former carving out an actual place (Castalia), not very different from my own “Underground Cafe.” The second finding it in deeply “alone” intellectual spaces.

All these themes eventually come together. I can truly understand Cecelia Watson’s great interest in the semicolon. And why not? The smallest and most trivial-sounding subject becomes a microcosmic “game” within an entire universe of its own. It is no more or less important (wisdom-filled, instructive) than anything else. It becomes a study, an institution, unto itself.

Like the Chinese in martial arts who say, “pick one thing and study it your entire life,” any one subject contains all the answers to the universal questions. And of course, there are no answers, just riddles and cryptic allusions – corridors and alleyways leading to yet more clues. Eventually we give up, find a cafe, and sit down for a drink with a stranger who specializes in chrysanthemums.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt