FRATERNITY

FRATERNITY

Once again, I read about another mass-slaughter of dolphins (including mothers and calves) somewhere in Denmark (1,428 killed in one day in the Faroe Islands), others “getting in the way” of massive tuna harvests. Animals with larger brains than ours (probably higher IQs), trusting, intelligent, inquisitive, teachers – betrayed, led into traps – and the island shoals turn blood-red. I can only hope (and predict) that in the spirit of Animal Farm they spread the news about human treachery and learn to give the “naked ape” a wider berth than ever before – as do wolves who have “watched and learned” over the centuries.

There’s another lesson to be taken from this as well: This time it involves humans-to-humans. It involves a kind of sensibility about our own kind, and forces at least some of us to imitate the wolves. It’s not just about rage at our own species’ behaviors but astonishment at how far we go to trick, deceive, and exploit. So deeply that we deceive even ourselves without knowing it. We say/believe/defend one thing while doing the opposite: “Joe Smith throws chair through window and smacks his wife because she said he was an angry man.”

It begins to tell me there’s a small but substantial “fraternity” of humans out there who are predisposed to a unique place in the scheme of things. The very thought of this, believe it or not, came to me while reading about an equally unique sociabilite in Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries (strange bedfellows, indeed). In the midst of rebellion and violence, a certain kind of people decided to gather and paint a different world around them – not evasive or avoidant, but intelligent, peaceful, artistic, understanding, embracing, and most of all “evolved.” And the fact that they remained a small minority only reflected the “medieval” violence around them.

Back then the initiative was to understand the world as it was while infusing new (potentially subversive) ideas into it – “the old ideal of worldly perfection with the new ideal of pure reason,” wrote author Benedetta Craveri. Both were “mutually reinforcing” and it created a “spectacular metamorphosis” – an identity crisis which always comes with infusions of new thought. Back then it was the collision of economic, social (and psychological) ideas with religious wars, commercial revolutions, and the scientific revolution. Today, it is a much subtler confluence of feelings, visceral connections, and sensibilities.

The “gathering” I’m talking about today is exquisitely fine-tuned to another vibration altogether. It knows the real character and nature of humans both en masse and as individuals. And it forms a deeper bond with dolphins and wolves than it does with its own species. To join this group requires more than just words, petitions, and protests – not nearly enough. It requires a basic (honest) understanding of who and what we are. It’s a sensibility and an instinct which words and actions simply do not touch – “which have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason,” said Sontag. One does not have to do or say anything. It is a knowing.

The difference between the dolphin and the human is that the former, with its IQ, hasn’t the capacity anymore to say one thing and do another. It is simply beyond any temptations to deceive and betray. And, astoundingly, they try to teach us this, to instruct us. The urge never even enters their inner processes. But what do we do to repay that integrity? We kill them. We over-harvest them for “whale meat.”

A normal harvest in the Faroe Islands is 250 white-sided dolphins per year. This year alone 1,428 were corralled by speed boats and jet skis onto a beach where they “gasped for air ” and waited for a slow death (because bad planning failed to produce enough “killers” to dispatch those numbers). Others were run over by motorboats and hacked by propellers. Afterwards a spokesman said there was “too much” meat that would have to be discarded. They killed too many. One conservationist later called it a “brutal and badly mishandled massacre.” It was the “largest single hunt in the Danish territory’s history,” said CNN.

The fraternity I’m talking about, by contrast, sees this kind of thing as a betrayal even more amongst humans than with animals. It betrays the notion of a presumed “higher” intelligence. “Darwin” is turned upside-down. As a consequence, it extricates and pledges itself to other species at such a depth that it identifies with them empathically. It “takes on” the suffering of the dolphins being “harvested” alive The very same psychic-neural connection goes out to whales, pigs, chickens, turkeys, cattle, horses, dogs, cats, and literally every living thing with “a face” condemned to exist alongside humans. It goes far beyond rage and moral contempt. It is a conscious decision to mentally remove ourselves, except where humans teach and instruct aesthetically and spiritually about our connection to animals. Here is where the fraternity finds itself and congregates.

In 18^th century France, salons met in private homes, churches, rented rooms, libraries, public parks, taverns, cafes, reading rooms, Masonic lodges, restaurants, and even in women’s boudoirs (for safety and privacy). Initially they had to choice, having to stave off all the violence and “testosterone” going on between men. Fortunately, and inevitably, the idea of male conquest and supremacy could no longer sustain itself. Killing got old and, slowly, some of the old patriarchs saw the futility in the rule of “might makes right.” They began learning from the salons (hosted by women), and by the 17^th century “success” was now being measured by “taste,” refinement, and higher standards of living – even as wars ensued.

In our case, there is no literal meeting place, except in the heart, mind, and spirit. One recognizes his own by a deep understanding of where he or she stands “inside.” It is a psychic predisposition. We are quite literally silent and invisible, unless/until it requires a political and moral response. Then we surface, acknowledge each other and the issue at hand. Afterwards, we slip away again and out of sight from the whole human tragedy, the slough of despond which is man’s violence to himself. We want nothing to do with the human theater (much like the wolves).

In another context this could simply be called “consciousness.” But the term has become so overused and worn out that it’s lost meaning (for me). Personally, I tire of using and hearing it. On the other hand, it is, we might say instead, where a meeting of minds conjoin, as in a confluence of knowing, or a sociabilite.

The salon culture was after something, and it captured it for awhile, even though the original spirit didn’t survive. It was a victim of its own irony: “Nothing brings on failure more than success.” In other words, it fell to a “human” paradox. At first it was natural, raw, and spontaneous. Then in time it became more fabricated and contrived by members trying to hold on to that spontaneity. But one can’t try to be spontaneous. After a century or so it became an imitation of itself, and self-consciousness led to self-censorship. Many could only speak freely behind closed doors.

This is what happens in the human theater. But it never happens in the animal kingdom. And again, the dolphins could never be duplicitous or deceptive. As for the “fraternity,” knowing (consciousness) isn’t something that can be twisted or perverted. It can’t be overused, contrived, imitated, censored, or taken away.

I’ll speak for myself here: I circumnavigate most of what I see and hear anymore, except when it comes to the animals. Then I get “mad” and vocal (or elated if it’s good news). But either way, the pain of it has taken its toll. It too frequently becomes too much to bear. So, again, I go underground. And it is there that I somehow sense a community wrapping itself around me. I don’t know who or where they are, because, again, we have no faces or personalities to exchange. It’s more a silent communion. The “salon” becomes a telepathic linking of arms. And the arms hold tightly to the animals. When the animals go down, we go down. When they survive and thrive, we thrive.

If you wish to see “us,” look into their eyes – from the dog to the cat, the mouse to the elephant, the pig to the whale, the hummingbird to the meerkat, the lion to the camel, the turtle to the salamander, the polar bear to the fox, the kangaroo to the moose, the coyote to the skunk, the squirrel to the condor – and everything in between. And at this time of year in particular, the “turkey”: fast-grown with antibiotics, kept as chicks in heated drawers, then for another 28 to 40 weeks given minimal daylight – 46 million slaughtered in 2021 (to commemorate an event that never happened as recorded). – Being vegetarian is something never discussed, because it doesn’t need to be. “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends,” said George Bernard Shaw.

It might be a stretch to say that this also has lots to do with my own decision for cremation when I go. But it isn’t a stretch at all. My body is “on loan” from the earth, and “it” plans to fertilize and nurture those living things my species ritually kills. That’s “the plan” – provided that humans don’t interfere with it, countermand my request, pump my body up with preservative and stuff it in a box by order of some fucking, fear-mongering, Bible-banging Christian who thinks he “knows better.” (Alas, it has happened). Hence the need to draw up a legal document (will) to protect myself from other humans. I am also donating everything I have to animal rescue groups (though, again, I’ve been warned that failing to “close out all accounts” before I die – hopefully I will still be of sound mind — banks will take everything, or what they can, leaving those rescue groups possibly nothing). Such is the treachery and greed of my species.

Cremation and “natural burial” are the only ways to get back to nature, to the earth, and finally to the animals again – which no hermetically-sealed “box” will ever stop in any case. In the Darwinian sense, I can only hope that I go one way or the other – up or down – to leave the human tragedy where “intelligence” is “wedged between the angels and the beasts.” The dolphins left that contradiction long ago.

“Dust to dust” is the only literal place that we call a gathering of souls. And even that is contingent and temporary, as dust blows away in an instant. We ride on a different current, a different vibration, in a different dimension. It’s what you might call truly swimming with the dolphins.

© 2021 Richard Hiatt

LOSS

LOSS

The poet says that when we lose family, it’s time to go out and find family. The “borders of our lives” (courtesy of Simon & Garfunkel) are lines that keep intersecting and rearranging. Soon they’re like tessellated mosaics, or imbricated fish scales, showing no beginning or end. The Biblical fish is the vesica piscea – concaved lines intersecting – the human family linking arms.

When it rains, it can rain very hard. And for some “cosmic” reason I seem to be engulfed right now in the theme of loss – literal, emotional, symbolic. People are dying, others are moving through membranes onto horizons that require letting go of old baggage: “Come as you are, no backpacks allowed.” There’s the sense of aging stripping off the layers of youth day-to-day. Then there’s “time” gnawing away at old memories.

Watery bubbles collide and meld into larger bubbles. At that instant we are no longer who we were. And yet we are, but much more. Everything conflates, reconfigures and rearranges. Room is made for parts we didn’t know existed. We say hello to newly invented selves like multiple personalities meeting for the first time. Or like the twelve signs of the zodiac converging at the middle of a cosmic wheel. The waters are turbulent and deadly but won’t be denied. It’s a one-way street. We’re all doomed to grow.

Maybe the Age of the fish (Pisces, water) as it bleeds into Aquarius has something to say about it. I’m not an astrologer, but maybe “the old” isn’t exactly leaving with a whimper. The transition into the New Age is about 150 years (so I’ve read, though some say it to be only 50 years and that the actual Age “officially” began November, 11, 2011). In either case, I can see the old not giving up its dominion with any grace – walls of water smashing against torrents of air. Air rises, water sinks. One has its murky depths, but air has its dark clouds. Between them they meet up with fire and earth, and the alchemist forges his golden diadem.

I’m out of my depth there, but I know the usefulness of symbols and metaphor systems. The empirical mind dismisses them until science begins to see “intelligences” it never knew existed, that cannot be measured or even sensed. And one of those intellegences is all about the conflation of life experiences into larger universes which are then subsumed into even larger ones. And all we have are symbols and mystical metaphor systems.

The point is made. The stages of life are processions into phases of letting go, holding on, and letting go again. And as I see friends die or move away, then new ones appearing I can feel mechanisms in my mind releasing their grip (and fear) and just letting them happen. What choice do I have? Elizabeth Kubler-Ross surfaces more times than we think, at the smallest and seemingly most trivial moments. Every day I’m in two (sometimes three) of Kubler-Ross’s “phases” of loss. It’s never one at the time and never in the neatly defined chronological order in which they’re taught.

I hate to trivialize what most think of as deeply significant, but looking back at whole lifetimes, human struggles, achievements and losses, it all fades into dust. And one conquest becomes no more significant or trivial than the next. It’s all just time & space on a “spec of dust at galaxy’s edge.” I think of my parents and grandparents, and all they wanted to be remembered for, as survivors, workers, public servants – to be hallowed on their headstones. Meanwhile, the stones and the words on them are cracking and falling into the winds of time, and dust. Eventually the last people to have remembered them will be gone.

There’s a statute of limitations on “importance.” There’s even one on cruel humor. Someone said that “humor is the combination of tragedy and time.” Given enough time, we can joke about the worst tragedies in history, and they’re often the best jokes. “Did you enjoy the theater tonight, Mrs. Lincoln?” wasn’t funny a century ago. Things are sacred or sacrilege, until they’re not. Then they bulldoze the cemetery for a parking lot.

Does all this mean that (as nature abhors vacuums) loss fill up with gains not yet understood? Gains that even Kubler-Ross will tell us aren’t fully grasped until the stage of “acceptance?” This is what I try (faintheartedly at first) to envision when I hear about someone’s death. Something, somehow, is telling me that the void left in his wake awaits something that “he” wants me to discover and embrace. It reminds me of the Native American logic shared in Dances With Wolves: Costner’s character is approached by Wind in His Hair who says to him that Stands With a Fist’s (deceased) husband left her “because he saw you coming.” It presents a whole new logic behind the cycle of life and death. It suggests processes going on that we don’t understand. Like bubbles connecting and intersecting, there are continuums linked arm-to-arm beyond the world of space & time. And “this is” (we are) just one link in that river of cause & effect.

Small links in small chains form larger links in larger chains, ad infinitum. And yet it does not portend a cosmic “direction” as we are so eager to translate it. The universe doesn’t move in a straight line, but spherically (tossing free will, determinism, and even cause & effect up for grabs). There’s direction and no direction. And the only language we can use to describe it (symbols, metaphors) become foolish logic (oxymora).

It’s the language of “insane” people, and the veil between genius and madness is thin. The only real difference is that the genius holds on to his “faculties” long enough to translate what he knows down into the “lower IQs.” He makes himself understood. The madman does not, or cannot. But many times they see the same things. – One get an award, the other gets a Thorazine drip.

And so, tomorrow I will get up, do the usual perfunctory chores, hope for some things, and fear others. A normal day. But it will be slightly different than today. I am beginning to see patterns of continuity, just slightly. The biggest challenges are the biggest losses, so big that they promise confusion and disillusionment. But the cycle of loss always finds the end of Kubler-Ross’s famous model.

I know that it’s something that can’t be rushed. Everything is fleeting, yet nothing changes. Nature has its own time-table as we move along in that huge continuum. But at least I can be “conscious.” I can turn awareness (Latin geware: “to sense danger” – to “be wary of, “to beware”) into scire cum (“to know with”). There’s an enormous difference between the two (apples to oranges). Animals are aware; humans (some anyway) are conscious.

All of the above hopefully to hone my ability to handle the loss of myself. If I am fated to witness my own vital signs fading away, I can only hope that I’ll whisper, “you’re leaving because something else is arriving.” I am now “this.” Or, I am “no longer.” Or, I am “g-d.” Or, just “OM.” Or, “______!”

© 2021 Richard Hiatt

A PORNOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

A PORNOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

Freud sure has taken lots of shit over the past century, no doubt about it. And he was wrong about several core issues regarding human behavior. I’m not a Freudian, but I defend him for two reasons: first, we all too quickly jump into the murky waters of “presentism” (judging someone/something by virtue of what we know today, not by what they didn’t know long ago). Keep in mind that Freud took enormous risks just mentioning the word “sex” in public, risking reputation and career. The second reason is because, like it or not, Freud is still very much with us today (as Jung would even concur).

Everything at one level or another is rooted in the sexual urge. We are sexual creatures. We attract and repel like magnets according to the pheromones we transmit. There’s no avoiding or denying it. Cars, jobs, salaries, houses, sports, entertainment, art, music, motorcycles, deodorant, fashion – everything is bought and sold for the sexual power it contains. We use things to get other things. And we might ask: “what is the ultimate thing we want?” Is it not something (sometimes) unfulfilled from childhood that we set out to finally resolve in adulthood? I’ve even heard enlightenment described as a “cosmic orgasm.” Is not the “primal breast,” “Mother Earth,” and the “spiritual womb” something to which we return (or yearn to)?

Tragically, it also reduces Mary Magdalene to that one-dimensional archetype – procreation. In Biblical lore her only “other” mask is that of Mary the prostitute. In the whole Jesus Mystery she simply breeds, then disappears – then shows up in the end to mourn. The real Grail myth is buried, along with the “Quaternity” (versus the “Trinity”). That fourth dimension is “the feminine” which is empowered and celebrated fully (via many faces) in pagan cultures (e.g., Lakshmi, Saraswati, Durga, Kali, and Paravati in Hinduism, Tara in Buddhism who is seen as “twenty-one” goddesses). These are all facets of Mary – buried and forgotten.

There’s no doubt that a very good way to describe our culture today is as “pornographic.” Think about it. What are the telltale signs of the pornographic mind anyway? That it has but one purpose (like Mary)– to arouse, to comfort. Pornography (in literature) also has no beginning or end, no plot, no narrative. It doesn’t care about discretion, taste, proportion, or perspective. Lastly, it resists treating people as real human beings. It respects no boundaries. It prefers instead to reduce, exploit, and throw away — like Kleenex. It depersonalizes. – This is our world, one we create, feed, and move around in everyday.

There’s nothing wrong with “sex” per se. In fact prior to the shame we placed on it (which then made it into an obsession, which then gave it tremendous power), it was as natural as nudity itself. In that sense I distinguish “erotica” from porn. In the former case, nothing/no one is exploited or forced, no one is hurt, and what goes on between two people (or more) is done voluntarily and by consent among adults. In this completely innocent sense, sex can even be an art form. Done with taste and a creative imagination, literature and art are elevated to something that inspires, educates, and arouses (aesthetically and sexually). Even Eros carries a lyre and embodies sexual power like an artist. – But again, porn has no time for patience, taste, discretion, rights, needs, or feelings. It simply “uses.” Doesn’t this sound like a first rule in that manifesto known as market capitalism?

It’s the very height of hypocrisy as well. One part of us claims to subscribe to the old moral guidebooks of medieval Europe, even those of the Pentecostal churches of the Allegheny Mountains. The words didn’t match the deeds then, and they don’t now. If anything, they subscribe to the rules of the old red-light districts of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York (where the only “discretion” was enforced under penalty of death).

One of the blinders that makes us like “deer in headlights” is the system itself – again, market capitalism. Sex is actually defined by the covenants of mammon, as a consumer product, a commodity. It is packaged, perfumed, and kept pliant for every department store window and supermarket shelf. It enhances every consumer need. It then defines “who we are” through the purchase. It even measures our self-esteem and sense of belonging – from the “confident woman” to “missile envy.” – Pardon me, but sex IS EVERYWHERE (thank you, Dr. Freud).

The hypocrisy begins to really stink when we deny it. An example witnessed everyday: Young female media professionals hired for “t & a,” dressed up “for ratings,” anchors/reporters talking about sexy subjects and products, avoiding embarrassing Freudian slips, while denying anything too obviously prurient. They tease it for all they can, as far as they can. As long as it’s on TV and radio, it somehow makes it okay. It’s magically sanitized, “mother-approved,” “government inspected,” passing the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

The media claim special exemption in this way, pretending to be “above board” and “tasteful,” while obsessing about sex, (nudity, fucking) at every opportunity. Particularly for the Christian right, FOX, CNN, and the Hallmark Channel are like latex condoms. They make it “safe.”

This is how our best and brightest leaders win elections and celebrity status. They compete in a market of old-time puritanism, appearing to fill in cracks of moral uncertainty but never cementing any unified understanding of anything (especially sex). This is the first rule of porn. If we really understood it, the markets of seduction and double entendre (involving cars, deodorant, fashion) would crash into nothing.

Sex permeates politics (above all, politics!). We elect either sexy celebs who know nothing about politics – or – “unsexy” people who can market sex well. They reflect our own moral confusion and dysfunction (“he’s just like us!”). Freudian symbols abound which appeals to the “manly” voter (bigger is always better). Indeed, the connection between slick rhetoric, the confident smile, and lying “by omission” (in committee meetings, press conferences) is the same predatory legerdemain whispered in executive hot tubs, backyard soirees, limousines, and late-night dinners. Our leaders are as morally lost and confused as voters are.

In a Freudian sense this is why we vote for them. We (and they) are searching for something we know nothing about. Terms like “shock and awe,” “penetration,” and “complete dominance” don’t discriminate between war, football, or the bedroom.

Consider American history, just briefly: Washington had his neighbor’s wife; Jefferson had Betsy Walker, Maria Cosway and Sally Hemings; Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child; Harding had two mistresses and his own bootlegger and sired an illegitimate child and paid people to keep quiet; FDR had a lengthy affair; Eisenhower had an affair with his British escort; and JFK reinvented “executive privilege.” Talk about blurring lines between sex and political conquest?! “Finesse” is a term useful in many contexts.

“Confusion” is, believe it or not, sexy all by itself. Our heroes and anti-heroes are perpetually lost in a state of moral weightlessness. And it’s the loss of identity that actually “sells.” It’s good for business, because it creates a demand for ballast – more of everything (cars, gadgets, salaries, styles, cologne, deodorant) – also better deals and options. Sex is woven into the psycho-social fabric like clay worked into whatever shape that finds a market. Seduction is the first selling point.

This is why virtually nothing stirs our interest until we talk about “money” or “sex” – which are the same thing (status, power, dominion, escapism). There’s the price tag and the “bottom line.” Hanging below the hemline of every product is the price of admission, atonement, and final bliss. Just pay the doorkeeper on your way out! Finding that “perfect” apartment or “perfect” car is almost the “perfect” orgasm. Enjoy it while you can, before the rush fades and the price goes up.

For the record, it wasn’t Adam Smith but the many Wall Streeters who came after him who made sure money was the only vocabulary with which to engage the most morally abstruse questions, like sex. With the help of Christians (who made it “dirty” and “shameful”), they succeeded in spades. Wall Street said “If you want to sell it, make it taboo.” And the Christians obliged. – It was Calvin (and later the American Puritans) who equated economic success with “divine election.”

Indeed, it is sexy not to face our moral contradictions, as long as we manage to stay ahead of them — to breathe, consume, and just barely survive day-to-day. This is the ballast. It’s like the “functional alcoholic” making it through each day, always “on the edge” of crashing & burning, but always barely making it to work the next day. What could be sexier than that, as long as we get away with it? It’s temptingly Faustian.

Fixing it would ruin everything. God forbid!! As a favorite writer once said, “it would depress sales and sour the feasts of consumption.” After all, if I knew who I was, why would I buy that deodorant or the new car? Indeed, I might even “wax existential” and question the prevailing wisdom of everything. That would never do.

Money and markets make sure that everything moves exponentially fast, so we never completely grasp what’s going on. Without the blinding speed of money we’d actually have time to “think” – which would promote patience, which would promote objectivity and insight, which would promote moral responsibility. These are the biggest taboos in a culture of instant gratification..

This is our “existential” dilemma. We look for ways to fill up the cracks, only to make more cracks. How do we differentiate fact from fiction, right from wrong, when we all live by one (bottom/prurient/primal) economic denominator? Why should we be shocked if an 18-year-old excuses herself from high school graduation, goes into the bathroom, delivers a baby, puts it in the trash, and returns to graduate (which actually happened, by the way)? It’s all the same anyway. One is simply a piece of merchandise, a user/product of consumption, temporary and disposable – like hand-wipes. Young people are just matching the words with the deeds.

Pornography, to me, is sex which is coerced, violent, predatory, and age-inappropriate. It isn’t really even about sex. It’s about domination, exploitation, and control (a cousin to rape). It’s the very opposite of “erotica.” Given all the above, ours is a pornographic world. And we will never recover from it as long as it “sells.” That means everything influenced by the sexual drive (which is almost everything) will be legitimized by a standard of duplicity, treachery, white lies, half-truths, and the cleverest lies “by omission” – euphemistically called “good business,” “rugged individualism,” “entrepreneurialism,” “hard knocks, and “growing up.” Nothing escapes it. Everything has a price, just like a red-light district.

© 2021 Richard Hiatt

SOLITUDE

SOLITUDE

I’ve been reading about solitude lately, a subject which seems familiar to many this time of year. Some may experience it more as isolation, but it comes down to how one approaches it. It seems to go hand-in-hand with a question of (un-)fulfillment (solitude’s dark cousin).

It’s not just an issue of solitude but a growing sense of that “dark cousin” that festers in all seasons. As for my own sense of it, it’s like being wrapped in a kind of cocoon, a vortex of heat that insulates me from the cold. It’s like a warm coat that repels the unfamiliar and unfriendly. I can reach through it but never see it. Some people refer to solitude sarcastically as a “bubble” (“he lives in his own bubble”). Well, I suppose it can be that. It is kind of an aura, or force field. The ancient Chinese used to call it one’s wa, as in one’s “personal space” – simple enough. But for me solitude goes deeper than that. While personal space is spherically wrapped around us, solitude is also an inner feeling that permeates everything outer.

We all know the wa sensation. Proof is when someone is standing inside “your space” without your permission. (S)He’s too close, and you feel you’re being physically violated. You step back and request that he/she step back as well. I sometimes wonder (and worry) about those who violate it on a regular basis. Do they have no sense of their own space, are they desperately needy in some way; or are they just fucking obnoxious, obsessed, and twisted? The young, immature, and mentally challenged step into our spaces all the time. But the old expression, “know what flavor gum he’s chewing” is a good indicator of wa intrusion. We’re talking about an instinctive emotional geography. We all have our “bubbles.”

There’s voluntary solitude and forced solitude. And I often wonder how much the latter (presumably meant to discipline or punish) actually works on those comfortable with the former. We are by nature social creatures. We define ourselves (and meaning) by how (and how frequently) we interact with others. But, introverted as I am, I catch myself getting caught in the crossfire between coercion and need – between feeling “complete-whole” just as I am – versus – not. The whole need to interact is programmed into us in such way that, without it, many panic. We constantly compare ourselves to what others do, and without thinking, measure our self-worth according to how successful we are at fitting in. And it’s so easy to become depressed when we fail.

“Failure” is a (social) value judgment. It’s relative. Yes, we are social creatures. But say that to those who have made peace with solitude, especially those few who are “enlightened” and prefer being alone. Even when socializing, they are very much in their own “bubbles.” And yet they also seem fulfilled when completely alone. Being alone is therefore subject to interpretation. I now understand what the Buddhas and Saints mean by working to “fail in the world.” Because the path to enlightenment (God, whatever) requires going against being “in the world.” One blends in, or leaves, but listens to his own drum. He may return, but his presence is uniquely different.

Alas, I fear that, for the masses, solitude is a devastating (discouraged) experience. The worst cases are those I’ve known who have said they could “never” be in a room alone, or sleep alone at night. The fear of abandonment is that severe. Most people aren’t that bad off, but a “phobia” is what becomes their winter coat (using the previous metaphor). Instead of insulation, it is a magnetic field that locks them is a state of despair. They constantly need to draw people in to warm them up. The funny thing is, they feel sorry for those like myself and consider us imbalanced. Needing others persistently is “normal.” – Have I just stumbled upon the defining difference between introversion and extroversion? Introverts find that crowds deplete their “batteries”; extroverts use crowds to “charge” them up.

When you examine the kinds of “forced” solitude imposed on people in prisons, as a form of punishment, it becomes a litmus test for describing society-at-large. In this way prisons are a mirror reflection of the “free” world surrounding it, just magnified ten-fold. There are the oppressors/punishers/victomizers/sadists, and the oppressed and victimized. There are the haters and the hated. They exist on “both” sides of the bars. After awhile they begin seeing themselves in the eyes of the other. They’re just wearing different uniforms. Both are “in prison.” Which then just ignites even more mutual hatred and resentment.

Solitude becomes a studied science in that environment – down to the simplest and most elemental privileges and needs. Hearing silence, music, feeling “safe” for just a second, or just sitting alone with one’s feelings (un-intruded upon), become weapons of sadistic manipulation. Sensory deprivation is designed to intentionally drive a prisoner insane. Prisons, far from ever rehabilitating (from the Latin habilis: “to restore with dignity”) keep every minute of an inmate’s day and night calculated and measured in terms of how far he can be taken to the edge of insanity. The prison guard sees himself in the prisoner, resents it, then becomes even more vindictive in turning solitude into pure isolation.

And this is the question: Is life on the outside just prison disguised as “freedom?” Is society normally in a state of coerced isolation? As I therapist I once had to counsel a “court-ordered” prison-guard for domestic violence. Under ordinary circumstances, and if you didn’t know him in any other context, you’d find him gentle, personable, very normal and pleasant. His problem was that the prison system gave him an ultimatum: either take your hatred out on the prisoners directly – or -be “professional” and repress it until you leave. Then, “you’re on your own.” All it took was his wife or child to say the wrong thing at the wrong moment (innocent, disproportionate to the response) and he would become the prisoner he left back at work; that is, “trapped.” – Psychotherapy required not just behavior modification but an “understanding” of a systemic dilemma which surrounds all of us.

I could not help but wonder what home-life was like for this man (and his family). Not just living with others, but going to the store, driving in traffic, watching ballgames with friends, drinking beer with “the guys,” etc. Even the experience of going to church and grappling with concepts like “forgiveness” and “inner peace.” I could only imagine a world of tremendous confusion and conflict. This man goes home, hits his wife, and he faces criminal charges. And yet his best friend next door engages in road-rage, another drinks himself “numb,” another “kills” things (hunting, playing football, abusing his dog), and still another screams violent obscenities at the man refereeing a little league game. Is one form of violence and hatred any different than another? Isn’t it all just a matter of degree, frequency, and bad timing?

Another small fact to ponder: The prison system as we know it is actually an American invention. Yes, there have always been prisons elsewhere, but how it was turned into a “penitential” system (for penance) was concocted by the early Quakers in 1829. Philadelphia (the Walnut Street Prison) became home to the first “modern” prison system emphasizing “solitary confinement” as a way to give inmates time to reflect on their misdeeds, then emerge reformed. Interestingly, the idea was to give every inmate time alone. This was more or less the standard in treatment up until the post-World War II years. Even as recently as 1955 the “Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners” (adopted by the United Nations Congress) stated that “each prisoner shall occupy by night a cell or room by himself, except in conditions of temporary overcrowding” (my italics).

Today, solitary confinement means being locked in a cell alone 23 out of every 24 hours on a permanent basis, except to shower. He’s give one hour outside (alone) to exercise. It is clearly set up to torture, punish, and encourage insanity. The whole idea of “restoring a man’s dignity” (habilis) was abandoned long ago. Then we wonder why recidivism in America is over 65 percent. If the released prisoner doesn’t return to prison, society wants him returned ASAP. Because he is quite literally a maladjusted “time bomb” waiting to go off. Cops know this, judges know this. It’s almost as if recidivism is just another way of treating the prisoner with sadistic vengeance. Things are designed in such as way that he will never get “out” of the system.

Getting out of prison is prison – with different rules. He goes from impossible rules he understands to impossible rules he doesn’t understand. Even if he does understand them, he’s so emotionally/mentally wrecked that the “bull in a china shop” is a fitting metaphor. Another is a “square peg in a round hole” during those brief periods in between acting out. He actually seeks the safe sanctuary of the prison bloc again (the tiger running back into its cage).

All in all, the history of solitude in our culture is so dysfunctional that we “want it and don’t want it” at the same time. We need others around us, but then fear the violence that stirs because of close proximity to others. The only difference is that some of us “get charged” by that odd mixture, while others are repelled by it. Society forces us together because it’s the “normal/healthy” thing to commune. Then it becomes Russian Roulette as to what happens from there. We long to be alone again, at least for awhile, until the guilt of “isolation” forces us to mix again.

Most people would probably say this is a gross exaggeration of reality. But is it, really? I see stress and anxiety on both sides. The almost perfect example is the man who goes to the ballgame to “relax” and “have a good time” – only to end up wanting to kill a player, a referee, or the poor slob sitting next to him. Once upon a time it was just good clean fun. Now it’s unbridled violence.

Another interesting (recent) phenomenon: Men particularly have found “man caves.” They “hide out” there. They do it alone or with a few others known and trusted. But the trend is more and more in the direction of extrication from “out there” – a kind of safe solitude. They typically argue that it’s just about simple convenience and comfort. But it’s much more than that (as I see it). Especially when alcohol is in the mix. Man caves are symbols. They’re private places where its resident can “be himself.” And what does that mean? Therein lies an interesting case-study on human dysfunction. Not on the surface of course, but what lies underneath.

Apropos of this, it is also very unfortunate when the phone rings or someone knocks on the door at the “wrong time.” The “cave” is violated and great frustration ensues. The primal self must be muted. The “persona” is dragged out and donned like a mask. The edge between how he feels and how he’s forced to behave is sharp and irritating. The contrast (though sometimes humorous in appearance) exposes the huge space that separates who we are and who we want others to think we are.

We’re all digging our man-caves today, deeper and deeper (women too). And when we leave them, we take amulets with us (unconsciously) to ground us – a baseball cap, a memory, a scent, a list of reminders, a photo. In this manner we never leave the cave. It then becomes a test on how powerful the amulet is in warding off “the world” – the heat of traffic, work, people we don’t like, rude customers, political reality, chores we hate, parenting our kids, etc. We close our eyes and transmigrate back to the cave. – When I was a 60s hippie, it was about getting “back to the garden.” Now its more primeval than even a garden, and far less peaceful. It’s now about safe sanctuary and “time-outs.”

In 1958 a prominent psychoanalyst said that “more has been written on the fear of being alone or the wish to be alone than on the ability to be alone.” Without all the stressers facing us today, we would probably be able to handle solitude naturally – like the child who learns to handle longer periods of “aloneness” without anxiety. When his parents leave, he still feels nurtured and whole. But today the experience of being left alone is like abandonment. As with our own parents, we end up resenting them for being there and resenting them for not being there. Then we resent ourselves for being resentful. And then we try and compensate for it all by reaching for extreme isolation and/or extreme socialization – losing all sense of moderation and perspective. We get one person who’s afraid of sleeping alone at night, another who is withdrawn, reclusive, and paranoid. And the question becomes: What exactly do we want? What will make us secure?

The verdict is out, and will be for a long time. Meanwhile, we have only ourselves to prevail upon for answers. At the day’s end, we are inextricably, ineluctable, mercilessly alone. It’s also how we’ll end up in the end. We are born alone, and we die alone (regardless of what religion says). – Seems to me that this is the one singular issue facing us more than anything, perhaps, at this so-called “eleventh hour.” If it requires a man-cave, an amulet, a cabin in the woods, “time outs,” or meditation, so be it. It doesn’t matter. We simply need to learn how to be alone, whether we’re by ourselves or in the company of others.

© 2021 Richard Hiatt

A GOOD AMERICAN?

A GOOD AMERICAN?

Just recently an insurance agent called me about Medicare. I’m 72, and I needed to know about the new “C plan,” as opposed to the “A” and the “B” plans. After about 15 minutes of comparing this with that company and alternatives to customizing a “package” fitted to my personal needs, I stopped him cold. I said, “thank you for reminding me of what I should have done 20 years ago, and greatly regret not doing.”

I laid it out plainly for him. I asked, “How can you sit there and shovel out shit like this?” Somewhere in his prepared script he mentioned the evil “socialism,” to which I quickly riposted “Hey, I am a socialist,” which drew a moment of silence – the “pregnant pause” as theater-goers know it. I didn’t mean to throw him a curve ball, but did mean to warn him not try and pull wool over my eyes with tricks and half-truths.

I volleyed two facts back at him: first, that I hail from a long line of doctors and nurses, grew up in a hospital environment, hearing all the truths and lies told behind closed doors. Secondly, that the US is the only industrialized nation left in the world still holding out for “for profit” healthcare. And the only reason is because of corporate lobbyists bribing Congressmen everyday to betray their constituents – with shit like Medicare (the best we can do, folks) and which we’re forced to pay for.

I told him that our hospitals are run like hotels. They’re businesses. First rule is to keep all the beds filled. Therein lies the profit-motive, and doctors are paid to do just that. It is an “illness” system here, and when all the beds are filled the insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, and doctors all make out like bandits. The only poor schmuck who doesn’t is the one for whom the whole business is supposed to serve in the first place – the patient. He’s sick, vulnerable, and there’s nowhere he can go. And they know it.

I reminded him that in “socialized” England, it’s a “wellness” system. By that I mean that doctors are actually paid to keep hospitals “empty.” They actually still make house-calls (remember house-calls?) to make sure patients stay well enough to avoid hospitals. And when successful the government rewards them with bonus payments. Variations of this are found in France, Germany, Holland, Norway, Canada, and even Cuba. – Yes, even “Cuba” has a better healthcare system.

My friend then let loose with the old, cliched arguments used by the corporate defenders about “waiting lines.” The cherry-picked anecdotes of the “rejected and regretful” who scurried back to the good ‘ol USA for “quality care.” A few of which may have been true, but mostly exaggerated or flat-out fabricated. I told him we could sit here all day tossing stories back & forth like tennis balls, but that we both knew the truth. The facts “are in” – everywhere.

I reminded him that “waiting” is a two-way street, and it’s not a clear “black & white” scenario. For every story of someone waiting “weeks” in Canada, there’s the same patient waiting even longer in the US for a different ailment. Women, for instance, wait longer in the US for mammograms and pap-smears than they do in Canada. And rest assured, if you find yourself with a broken lag somewhere, Canadians are not going to say “take a number.” They’re going to pick you up, take you to a hospital, and fix your leg – free.

It simply amazes me how Americans are still actually left with the images of socialism (and communism) that they had in the 1950s – black & white footage of bread lines, impoverished and starving people freezing in the Soviet winters. This is the bullshit Uncle Sam still delves out – no differently than the old propagandist crap about communism depicted by its favorite octopus (the cartoonish, tentacled monster engulfing the entire world) popular during the Vietnam War. In World War II it wore a swastika cap. Now it was the hammer & sickle.

I told him that I see the American healthcare system like a vulture (silent cousin to the bald eagle). It soars high above, biding its time, has all the patience (and patients) it needs, knowing sooner or later everyone will end up sick – some worse than others – and we’re all going to need doctors – unless we’re lucky enough to die elsewhere and suddenly. At that moment it’s going to swoop down and pick our bones dry. If we are fated to die at that moment, or soon afterwards, it’s only response will be: “If you’re going to die, pay your bill first.” – I ended my little lecture with a simple truth: American healthcare is corrupt, criminal and immoral. Alas, I think it fell on deaf ears accustomed to hearing the virtues of “rugged individualism,” “entrepreneurialsim,” “free enterprise,” and “the American Way.”

The only citizens who disagree, with the exception of mostly blue-collar Republicans, are the “rich & shameless.” Like Rush Limbaugh who visited a hospital in Hawaii once for an ailment. Standing outside the facility afterwards, he gloated that “America has the best healthcare in the world” (this, from the guy who believed, along with Reagan, that if you couldn’t afford it, you were lazy and just didn’t want to work). As he was lighting his cigar and grinning from ear-to-ear, the reality was he could have purchased the entire hospital sitting behind him, if he wanted to. Others in his income bracket just happen to include the CEOs of Big Pharma (the most profitable industry in the US, next to America’s war merchants). ¹

As my friend continued shoveling out options and plans, it reached such a crescendo, so absurdly/comically complicated, impossible to understand, that I started to laugh hysterically. Somewhere midstream he stopped and there was just silence again. As soon as I could compose myself, I told him that, if we were in any of the countries (above mentioned), all I would have to do is present the equivalent of a Social Security card (proving citizenship) and a hospital would let me in free. No questions asked, no paperwork, no boilerplate/red tape — no vulture riding the thermals above. End of story. I could not help but think that, by now, my friend must have felt like a snake oil salesman selling elixirs of laudanum from the back of his car.

After ending our chat and hanging up it all just reminded me of yet another dismal fact – one which has been incubating inside me for 20 years (since the “Bush, Jr.” years). It made me question my very status as a “good” American. By that, I mean my patriotism, my trust in “the system” which defends its institutions unwaveringly and unconditionally. The fact is, there are too many “wrongs” to count.

Just a brief list of what I mean: We’ve already covered healthcare (which includes the insurance industry and drug companies). To this I would add the two-party (bicameral) system of government which is supposed to be self-correcting, but which is one “corporate” party split in two halves. Then there’s market capitalism itself which is also supposed to “self-correct” but instead only monopolizes power and wealth. Then the military industrial complex which commands the lion’s share of the national budget and operates military bases in over 180 countries (as the world’s policeman) – commanding a bigger budget than the next eight largest militaries in the world combined, keeping us in a wartime economy. General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, and DRS Defense Solutions haul in billions. A “fraction” of that budget could pay for infrastructure, schools, jobs – and healthcare.

In the name of “national security” they absolutely must build state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jets yearly at $89 million apiece, and helicopters ($21 to $95 million apiece). Last years models simply won’t do – not for “our sons and daughters, men and women, who sacrifice for our freedom every day!!!!” – the biggest goddamn guilt-trip laid upon taxpayers since “original sin.” It reminds me of the TV ad for baby food, saying (subliminally) that “if you don’t buy this product, you’re a bad parent”). If you don’t wave the flag, “you’re not a real American!” ² – Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin builds one hundred-fifty six F-35’s per year, and a spokesman recently said that this is the plan “for the foreseeable future.” – After all, policing the world is an expensive burden.

Then there’s the federal income tax (which is a “voluntary tax” by the way – what we’re not supposed to know). And with that, the Federal Reserve (which is as “federal” as Federal Express) and is not just one bank. It’s a cartel of twelve industrial banks run by CEOS whose in cognitios have been kept secret since 1913. – In 1913, three of the richest men in America (J.P Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Paul Warburg) got together and tried to use the 16^th Amendment to enact a federal income tax law. After failing twice, the third effort convinced Congress to allow them to control the monetary system, lend money to smaller banks (with interest), and write the tax laws that protected wealthy investment bankers. This became the Central Bank. In 2015 alone it earned a net income of $100.2 billion.

This has an interesting history (worth knowing). They did it without a Constitutional amendment (required by law), and the bill was introduced at the worst time for Congressional review – on Christmas break when Senators were home with their families. No one had time to read it. But the bill passed and the bankers won.

The 16^th Amendment says, “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes.” But it does not define what “income” means, and citizens were led to believe that there was now a tax on their own “labor and wages.” This was not true. It refers only to (corporate) “profits and gains.” It also stipulates no new powers of taxation beyond that. On January 25^th, 1916, The New York Times reported, “the court holds that the 16^th Amendment did not empower the Federal Government to levy a new tax.” – But the Fed survived anyway, and we all now pay a federal income tax, which, again, is at best “voluntary.” There is no law in writing saying it’s mandatory.

Moving right along: Then there’s law enforcement which has taken on the mantle of paramilitary (black shirt) SWAT teams with “unmarked” credentials (abandoning “Posse Comitatus”). Over 2.1 million people are in “for profit” prisons (more than any other country in the world). Not to mention invasive surveillance systems on innocent citizens, on private records, cameras everywhere, home invasions without search warrants, and on and on.

And lets not forget the “national religion” which still insists that the US is a “Christian” nation founded on “Christian” values. Oh really?! Tell that to the Native Americans, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists.

Then there’s the oil & gas industry which speaks for itself. Not much needs to be said here. It actually “writes” our environmental laws, poisons the air, water, and ecosystems, leaves a devastating carbon footprint, then lies about it with “nature” shows on PBS (sponsored by Exxon-Mobil and British Petroleum), elaborate PR schemes, and a team of lobbyists for every Congressman. Enough said (and never enough said).

Last but not least, our very own “propaganda industry” which IS the corporate media itself, sponsored by huge companies with huge investments in how the nation’s politics operate. The cardinal rule (in media and Washington) is “preserving the status quo” and keep citizens sufficiently “ignorant.” It’s not about what we’re told as much as what we’re not told (lying by omission).

Then there’s the food industry, putting “profit over people” like everything else. This one is “closer to home” for obvious reasons. The dilemma can be summed up in “apples.” In the last 40 years the apple has lost 80% of its vitamin C content (and “ditto” for all produce). We now need “five apples” a day to keep a doctor away (all the better for doctors, drug companies, and hospitals!!) Mass production and “cosmetics” (color and uniform appearance) are more important than nutrition. And we can thank agribusiness for that. We can also thank companies like Monsanto (the company trying to kill off organic foods, the company that also brought us “agent orange” in Vietnam).

We can also thank Tyson Foods which has the most horribly inhumane record for animal abuse imaginable, yet it supplies virtually the entire fast-food industry. We can thank animal “farms” which are really factories for the horrific torture and fast slaughter of pigs, turkeys, chickens, and pigs. All so Joe-SixPack can have his bacon in the morning.

We can also thank lawyers going back to the Bush Jr. administration who tried (with minor success) to redefine “organic” (as opposed to “all natural”), so companies could take short cuts and save money. If you think you can’t tell the difference anymore between organic and commercial produce, it’s because you can’t. We simply don’t know where our food is grown, how, or by whom. Most of our commercial produce is grown out-of-sight in South America where companies like Monsanto spray crops with horrible pesticides (like RoundUp) for fast growth and quick shipment to markets (like pigs and chickens). It all about deadlines, budgets, and money – the food itself is last priority. By the way, RoundUp is responsible for killing off our honey bee and butterfly populations (bees pollinate 70% of all our plant-based foods). Without them, no food.

All in all, the question then looms large: “What do I believe in about the US, as a citizen? What keeps me here?” And I have to respond, honestly “very little” – and nothing voluntary. I’m here because a) I’m too old for nations (like Canada) to be interested in my expatriation (over 2 million fled to Canada in the last 20 years, flooding their healthcare system), and b) a simple lack of money needed to make an even bigger leap to Europ). I’m here quite literally in a more or less marooned and exiled state, you might say. That’s how it feels. There is very little at all I can honestly say which I approve of (morally, ethically) about the US of A.

In all honesty, it wasn’t always this way. When I was growing up the rich paid a 93% income tax, cameras, drones, and computer surveillance didn’t exist, an average blue-collar worker could afford his own home, got “quality” health insurance, and actually lived a piece of that thing called the “American Dream.” Racism existed, and the term “rights” hadn’t yet entered the nation’s vocabulary, but at least there was fairness and commonsense in the area of citizenship. We had also just finished a “just” war with Hitler. All wars thereafter have lost more and more of their legitimacy.

What pains me very much is thinking about all those who sacrificed so much in World War II (the “greatest generation”) AND those sacrificing today (but for agendas of which they remain unaware), for a nation which has abandoned so much of its moral currency. The young recruits today just don’t know.

There’s one more thing I need to get off my chest. Yes, there’s no doubting that in some countries (even those with better healthcare), “civil rights” and “democracy” are marginal at best. I have two responses: First, they are often no less “marginal” here in the US. Second, at least most of those nations say it “up front.” They say “This is the way it is, if you don’t like it, don’t come here!!” They make no bones about what it is you’re walking into. Though I may not like their politics, I respect the honesty of corruption over and above lies about justice. Hypocrisy is the worst of all things.

Oh, and one last point: Uncle Sam knows Americans discover places that are better than the US all the time — higher standards of living, better healthcare, long lifespans, very little crime,³ etc. This is not the best place to live on earth. The government is threatened that they won’t return (very much like white children abducted by Indian tribes in the 19^th century, not wanting to return to their white culture). And its response is that of an immature, compulsively controlling despot. In other words, an ultimatum. Should we desire citizenship elsewhere, we lose it here. It punishes for daring to move out – as in, “don’t think of coming back!” The US is the only industrialized nation that does not grant duel-citizenship. How’s that for trusting in your own system of government?

For the sake of being thorough, the question needs asking: Okay, so what do I consider to be a “good” American? For myself, a good American subscribes to a definition of democracy seldom acknowledged here. Democracy at its core is not a place, a piece of paper, a code of laws, an ignorant mob, or about voting in a system that’s clearly broken. It is an understanding, an awareness, a state of mind (something uncomfortably “abstract” for the many who hate abstractions). It is a temperament which is always skeptical and contentious, an attitude, a consciousness that transcends political, ideological, and religious lines.

What that means is that even foreigners (from whom we all come) are Americans. Even non-Americans are Americans in this sense. The doors to the nation are perpetually open, free to all who live by a certain “spirit of mind,” a standard of justice, transparency, truth, and tolerance. – In this framework alone, I am a good American. Ironically and tragically, it also makes me a bad American.

Consciousness (and conscience) are dangerous (subversive) things here. It’s the combat soldier trained not to think, just carry out orders, but who sees moral atrocities before him. It’s the oil executive who sees entire ecosystems desecrated and tribal cultures poisoned, and decides to speak out. It’s the researcher who discovers that the latest Big Pharma drug is addictive and deadly. And it’s the citizen “calling out” his country for the truth.

I have this one insurance agent to thank for all this – for crystallizing the facts in my mind and what I need to do, even if my efforts are futile. I am always trying to link up with expats in Canada. One day, maybe, I may just find a way there. Meanwhile, don’t ever try to sing the praises of “America, land of the free.” Unless you want a fight on your hands. I’m one who does not stand for the national anthem. I won’t be doing that for a long time.

© 2021 Richard Hiatt

1America’s biggest ,most lucrative import of all is military weaponry. We sell to anyone (friend, foe, freedom fighter or criminal drug-lord/fascist mass-murderer) who pays the most. It’s how we keep the world at war.

2Our veterans are so “special” while serving. But then the vet clinics close down (no funding) and the veterans of previous wars end up homeless, without benefits, living outside Catholic Services and thrift stores.

3In the same year that the US reported over 11,2000 gun-related crimes, the whole of Canada reported a grand total of 35.

THE SURREAL EXPERIENCE

THE SURREAL IMAGINATION

There’s an issue I keep returning to in these entries for the obvious reason that it never feels like I’ve touched the root of it. It has to do, again, with life as a disposable product, temporary, and replaceable. We’re so alienated from nature (and ourselves) that we measure progress by our ability “to have” and/or to “own it.” And “to have” requires that it be made as solid (concrete, tangible) as possible. We then collect it and even throw it away. We “create” but turn our creations into “products” in order to “handle” them. – The world has become is a collection of artifacts.

We spend time with the spiritual and psychological imponderables, but we too quickly put both aside so we can get down to “brass tacks” – get things “squared away” and “straightened out.” The nebulous, cryptic, amorphous, abstract, and nonspecific give way to Euclid and Archimedes. Hence, the world is interminably solid and sharp-edged.

But the fact is, we find ourselves stuck between being and having, in a flotation that can only be described as surreal. Surreality is in fact now the norm. It seems each moment becomes an “event” unto itself, where we ask, “Am I here? Is this what I am? Am I the one doing this? Is this real?” It’s a constant war between consciousness and egoism, of subjective bewilderment and objective analysis. We step in and out of a door that turns into a kind membrane or portal. Here we are one minute; now we’re not.

Is what I see just a series of mental fabrications? Is Wittgenstein and Heisenberg correct about all things being dependent on my experiencing them? Or is it “real” irrespective of my being here (the tree in the forest)? And if so, how does that change free will? How does that change my notions of God, or no God – since I’m the creator?

It’s the old “bla, bla, bla” heavy stuff again. But it all channels back to a surrealist irony we all face today en masse. I think it contributes to a collective depression, anger, and impatience, not to mention drug dependency. We are, as we like to say, the “worst versions of ourselves” because of it. The science & art of “escaping” is riding an unprecedented crest in the scheme of things. But there is no escaping. I see people everywhere today, faces turned inward, lost in existential tensions and stressers. In a way, strangely enough, it’s bringing us together. In another way it’s ripping us apart.

I can offer an example: Anyone who has ever meditated has used the “single-point” object to hone his meditative skills – a candle flame, a dot on the wall, and mandala’s center. When we focus, everything drops away and there is only the “still-point” which empties the mind. As the world moves faster and faster, and life becomes more blurred, I see people momentarily, subconsciously honing in on things/moments/sounds/events and trying to hold on to them like a life-preserver. It’s like a subconscious effort to make everything go away so as to create a moment of silence, an inner sanctum. The mechanic handles a carburetor, a cook handles a carrot, a teacher writes a word on the chalkboard. Time stops, and there is only the “still-point” of what is in front of them. It is a kind of “alpha-wave” hypnosis.

At that moment a number of things happen. Among those being a kind of “Proustian pause” – intense remembering, or as the poet said, “You realize that you don’t belong anywhere. You begin to move to the edge of the world.” You find yourself at “the center of the fringes.” Some people also find themselves desperately alone, and as Andre Gide said, it’s the fear of that which stops everyone from finding themselves at all.

It’s like a ward full of mental patients on a new experimental drug. Some are responding well, others are banging their heads on walls and tearing up the furniture. While the majority sit quietly, albeit restively, nervously, watching both. – Where to fit in? Where am I? – And what is this new drug/tonic being dispensed? It’s the world as we now know it. Is Nurse Ratchet my friend or my enemy (asked Ken Kesey)?

The world is a montage. And all montages are abbreviations. And abbreviations turn everything into labels and asterisks. Everything is accelerated and glossed over. We can’t drive fast enough. Everything from food to buildings is “instant and temporary.” Which means that what goes into them must also have a “shelf-life” lacking any quality or substance. This now includes “us” as well.

Is this why we ignore history and fail to learn from it ? Because it’s just a long list of statistics, data, and “stuff,” now treated as disposable and irrelevant? Is this what the pioneer of photography, Fox Talbot, meant when he said that the camera recorded the “injuries of time?” Even when things aren’t disposed of, even when we consider them invaluable, we seem to toss them away. We reduce them to abbreviated “things” in that greater montage. Things then line up according to their importance, and life thus becomes “prioritized” according to those rules. The camera becomes a movie projector freeze-framing moments chronologically, like vignettes and snippets. We only catch glimpses of each frame because we’re moving too fast. We’re only honed in to the blur of time on a white screen.

The result: We’re on on edge because we’re all on the edge. That middle (surreal) ground is a collision between the “mystics and mechanists,” between hope and despair, optimism and cynicism, new age cures and chaos. And at that intersection it’s not a matter of what we think but what we don’t think. In the intervals between thoughts/feelings and reactions, inhales and exhales, being and having, we recall what we already know – and it obliterates what we thought we knew. We are the creators and the destroyers. It shakes us into a process of (Proustian) recollection (or re-collecting ourselves, our “souls”).

But it isn’t about literal destruction. It’s about reorientation and adjustment. It’s about “becoming” that relationship between the two worlds, between the infinity of consciousness and the ground of physical existence. William Irwin Thompson said, “Edges are important because they define a limitation in order to deliver us from it.” It takes us to a “frontier” of letting us “become more than we have been before.”

Earlier on I alluded to myth descending into folklore, and folklore descending into fairy tale. But even the fair tale, said Thompson, does not have to have a beginning and end. “The nursery rhyme is a memory of the soul” if we allow it. It is then elevated back to its proper “mythic” provenance. The surreal experience then begins to make perfect sense. “Intelligence” even takes on new meaning. Someone once said that “the higher intelligence goes, the lower the survival rate. The insects are just fine. We are not.” But now it hinges on what we mean by “survival.” What exactly needs to survive?

Anything surreal can never actually be touched. It’s never tangible or concrete or in a fixed state. And this is the conundrum of postmodernity today. It’s the two sides of our nature, to observe and to know – versus – to be. Surreality is that world in between. Mystics sometimes refer to it as the ethereal realm caught between the earthly and causal realms.

Closer to home, it was Rod Serling who referred to it as the middle ground “between light and shadow, between science and superstition.” On one level it escapes “what man has deeded to himself”; on another level, its escapes nothing. Instead, it confronts and resolves. The most abstract art does not escape reality; it confronts it head-on. So did The Twilight Zone.

Serling also presciently used the metaphor of fermentation. Things need to “age well,” like wine. Unfortunately, we stew in a vat of unripened grapes, prematurely fermented, while simultaneously trying to make vintage wine. We’re living in fermentation going backwards. We regress in every effort to evolve. One step forward, two steps back. – The metaphor was just fun.

Surrealism is about a synthesis between the workings of the unconscious and waking consciousness. It’s an excursion into a-logic (or non-logic) as opposed to the illogical – having nothing to do with logic. Such are the rules set by the unconscious. The first manifesto of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s was to liberate the mind from logic and reason, to concentrate on a different “threshold.” It anticipated a kind of limbo in the “gulfs of the mind.” The second manifesto encouraged a “vertiginous descent” in search of a certain terrain where all that was contradictory is made plain. Therein awaited a new knowledge.

My own view is that our culture has stumbled into this without even knowing it. It forced itself in by its own hand as a result of our pushing it away. We’ve been so compulsively controlling that it has spurned what Alan Watts playfully called the “law of reversed effort.” The unconscious delivers what we need, not what we want.

The unconscious is very much like a parent to a child. It creates us. We do not create it (and the same goes for the archetypes). This is where Freud did not go far enough, but Jung did. The parent gives the child some leeway, but not much. And when it goes astray, it steps in and reigns it back in. This, said the surrealists, is why dreams are such an invaluable teacher and guide. It’s the parent speaking down to the child.

Hence the only remedy to our existential dilemma: to allow it in, embrace it, and let our dreams instruct us. With one caveat: Dreams are tricky – like a powerful drug. To resist them, fear them, deny them, is to invite a “very bad trip” — nightmares, ghosts, devils, and all the rest. Reversely, letting go and inviting them in is to surrender and trust that you will come out the other side “intact” and in a better (more informed) place than when you went in.

Which necessitates another caveat: Don’t let anyone dictate what your dreams mean to you. Designing people (religionists, politicians) have their own agendas for you. And this is what has caused all the mental illness in the first place.

As a postscript, it’s interestingly that our civilization is embracing/studying/learning from the unconscious anyway – through science. Science is probing into the unconscious more deeply than ever, while not trying to control anything. It’s about learning how it does what it does. It’s not trying to “harness” but trying to elevate the human mind to new horizons of consciousness. The only obstacles in that effort are, again, the politicians and religionists with their fatuous warnings and “thou shalt nots” – the voices of fear, superstition, hyperbole, and envy. – The unconscious works in mysterious ways. The parent will not be denied.

© 2021 Richard Hiatt

JEW and GENTILE

JEW AND GENTILE

If I were to narrow down any one thing which has seduced me a very long time, it’s about being a Gentile orbiting a (faute de mieux) “Jewish” sensibility. It has nothing to do with religion, history, or cultural belonging. It’s a kind of inscrutable space that just hangs “out there,” right in front of me – just beyond reach – more than a feeling and less than an idea. It’s an overture into a unique consciousness.

Religion and cultural/ethnic studies have always been an enormous turn-off. Nothing bores me more. So let me get that off my chest. I’m an atheist/apostate, leftist, socialist, and skeptic of all persuasions claiming special status, knowledge, entitlement or divine right. Any such claims thereof are tossed into a trash heap marked “wasted time, wasted flesh.” These are afflictions that have plagued every religion, every culture, every race and ethnicity I’ve ever encountered. This is not that.

My literary heroes/heroines, by accident mostly Jewish, collectively open a portal into another kind of universe. The fact is, no one else succeeds at this with such predictability. It’s an accidental fraternity cemented together by the human imagination, one fitted to a subjunctive mind-frame – a world of “what ifs,” and “if onlys.” It lives entirely in the abstract and on the edges of a frontier (I must say) secured by “extra” neurons. It follows me as I follow it, like a shadow. To look at art or read a poem or an essay hastens a kind of (thanatological) self-sacrifice: I lose myself to find myself.

And then there’s the most obviously “impossible” dilemma: A cocktail of envy and admiration fills me. I want to be part of that fraternity. But I can’t. It is (I must say, in my own case) a neuron-deficiency. It is way out of my league. I’m not smart enough, not talented enough, not creative enough – simply not “enough,” period. Adding to the frustration even more are many of the women of that assemblage, too many attractive in all the right ways.

The seduction is fatal and final. I enter the room wearing the worst possible credentials: no PhD, no MD, unauthored, no status (unaccomplished), and nakedly “non-Jewish” (albeit circumcised!). As for romancing its women, I don’t relish recounting how many times I’ve been rejected for those very reasons. Yet, I keep returning, like a fool, to the executioner’s knife. She cuts deep and with gusto. — The old “black widow” analogy applies: she kills after mating – sometimes before.

It was one Susan Sontag who, in her famous Notes On Camp, described what could only be a “sensibility.” In a stroke fortuitous (serendipitous) luck, I just happened to find it in one of those black moments while thirsting for something, anything, that might inspire me and push me towards a tiny “aha” revelation or two. And there it was, reprinted from its 1964 debut. She captured its essence, and validated this feeling, of what stood just out of reach for so many years.

A sensibility: “unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication … is one of the hardest things to talk about.” Using “Camp” as her analogy, it is “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration…. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it…. I I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it…. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”

Someone once said (a friend of hers in fact) said that Sontag herself was the “embodiment” of Camp. “Her seriousness was posed, mannered, and stylized.” I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I understand the sensibility she stirred. I would use her own words to describe her: “unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication.” But she was also an observer, an analyst, more than just an exemplar. She could step away from it, even when she found herself enmeshed in it. As she herself said, Camp is like “taste” – it spreads itself out “unevenly.” – When I think of Camp, I think of jam – messy, lumpy, sticky, unevenly spread, but “all natural.”

Certain sensibilities underlie certain kinds of taste which foster an aestheticism, beauty, and art. They require a very “tentative and nimble” state of mind. Reversely, “any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, of handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.”

Hence, the energy that floats in front of me. It feels like a space I might have perhaps once known, but somehow, for some reason, I abandoned. Or, maybe one I’m freshly on the precipice of knowing for the first time, as an initiate. Either way, I’m still embarrassingly unworthy. I haven’t what it takes to generate the kind of weightless, sublime, ethereal “variant of sophistication” that generates a constant state of wonder. I can only relate. Mine is to be a “contact high” only. I can barely touch it.

A “contact high” will have to do. It’s the same sensibility that still draws me to the college campus, and has for years. Not needing to know what’s being taught in “philosophy 101” or “physics 102,” it’s more about what envelops the classroom and lecture hall, what preserves free thought in a kind of sanctum. It as the sense(-ability)of learning, openness, tolerance, and inquiry that generate better IQs, better angels, and higher intelligence. It is my first and last safe refuge away from a cold, brutally illiterate, and violent world. Old brownstone buildings, ivied walls, and the aroma of pipe tobacco also (I might add) bring back the flavor of “home.” But now I wax nostalgic.

Finally, the space before me is a combination of other things too: solid while translucent, a “style” which engenders understanding and wisdom, “animated” (even theatrical) for being on the margins, cutting edge, radical, subversive, elusive, and persistent. – From these words it almost feels like a black hole with a gravitational pull so strong that there’s no circumventing it. Nothing can pull me away. It’s an energy of extreme dispassion and a “black widow” temperament. It devours. But what one finds on the other side is atonement.

It is also “out of time.” There is no past or future, no parameters to frame it or measure it. A black hole is bottomless. Once you’re in it, you no longer are who you once were. Nothing is recognizable because you now see through different (brighter, sharper) lenses and filters. The world becomes magically clear and unclear at the same time. There’s the old pushed up against the new and unexplained. Two-dimensions (the planar world) is now three and four-dimensional. You fall in and die.

This can be seen as a affliction/curse; or as an overture to an opportunity – for an atheist/apostate/Gentile (like myself). Imagine the uneasy juxtapositions this introduces. To navigate through the day’s most oppressively perfunctory bullshit means that I can never summon this space soon enough. The two universes are in constant misalignment and magnetically repellent. It’s like treading water all day long and then finding the shoals of dry land to rest and explore. Such is the karma of the day-to-day life of this one Gentile man. – Alas, it also does wear on me, on my body and soul. After so many years, it has begun to unravel me. It tugs at my sinews like someone pulling apart warm bread. What’s left each and every morning these days is anyone’s guess.

I think this why so many “older” people are content to sit more and simply contemplate. They see something out in front of them. It’s different for everyone, but they want to reach out and touch it. I can truly relate. It’s a fraternity of its own kind, sitting peacefully and sharing a secret.

© 2021 Richard Hiatt