Recent selections

“The external power that deprives man of the freedom to communicate his thoughts publically deprives him at the same time of his freedom to think.” (Immanuel Kant)

“You remind me of somebody who is looking out a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his feet.” (Wittenstein, to his sister) Louis A. Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion, Cornell, 1994, p. 13)

“For “in confessing,” as Cavell pointed out, “you do not explain or justify, but describe how it is with you.”” (Ibid., p. 14)

"In the novel In the Region of the Ice, a nun who teaches literature, Sister Irene, speaks of a brilliant, mad student. "'I'm very grateful to have him in class. It's just that ... he thinks ideas are real.' Sister Carlotta, who loved literature also, had been forced to teach grade-school arithmetic for the last four years. That might have been why she said, a little sharply, 'You don't think ideas are real?' Sister Irene acquiesced with a smile, but of course she did not think so: only reality is real."" (Carpenter, Oh What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me, p. 27)

“Today the Penghulus, the longhouse chiefs, have assembled in splendor. Tattooed & armed, in leopard jackets & feathered headdresses, they sit facing Temonggong Jugah, chief of chiefs, who paces back & forth in front of them, pointing at me, then sneering at them: "You with your tattooed fingers [for heads taken]: his hands are clean. You with your spears; he has come to collect them to show to children. You with your parangs [swords]: he is unarmed; he mocks you. Why? He reads. He has come so far in a day, you could not travel it in a lifetime. You will not disobey me: your children will come out of the fields and go to school."” (Carpenter, Oh What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me, p. 44)

“Religious. To love nature is to love nature’s God. The teacher’s manifest opportunity is to take advantage of the still voice in nature to reach the inner recesses of the child soul, to instill there a love for well-doing in looking after the happiness of God’s created things, thereby attaining the child’s happiness and for himself the crown of life. This makes for a religious country folk.” (The Rural Teacher and His Work, Harold Waldstein Foght, Specialist in Rural School Practice, United States Bureau of Education, Author of The American Rural School, Rural Denmark And its Schools, Etc., New York, Macmillan, 1917)

“Disputes and quarrels among spouses were virtually nonexistent, Le Jeune reported, since each sex carried out its own activities without "meddling" in those of the other. Le Jeune deplored the fact that the Montagnais "imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever. "” (Gowdy, John. Limited Wants, Unlimited Means. 1998: Covelo: Island Press, p. 145)

“The bulk of the population will divide increasingly into sinners, libertines, profligates, downright criminals, atheists, and cynics on the one hand, and into Stoics, saints, moral heroes, sublime altruists, intensely religious prophets, martyrs, ascetics, mystics, Gnostics, and the like on the other hand. Militant atheism will be countered by religiosity of the greatest intensity, and utter moral depravity by sublime moral heroism. Likewise, egotism will be counterbalances by altruism, anti-sociality by supreme sacrifice, militant materialism by fearless idealism. Skepticism will be met by questioning fanaticism; and criticism, by dogmatism. Opposite the materialistic and utilitarian City of Man will be built with City of God. Earthly utopians will contend with God’s Messiahs.

During the early stages of calamities, the movement of irreligiosity and moral cynicism will be dominant; but with the continuation of the crisis the movement toward religion and moral heroism will increasingly prevail, progressively curbing atheism and depravity. The struggle between these polarized movements will be multifarious, arduous and long, and sealed by the blood or martyrs, the inspiration of prophets, and the enthusiasm of apostles. These will be laying the cornerstone of the new system of values on which—in the post calamity period—a new creative culture and society can be built." (Sorokin, Pitirim A.. Man and Society in Calamity: The Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence Upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization and Cultural Life. 1942., p. 317)

“In East Greenland a child was given several names. Some of them were those of deceased persons, but many were words from objects drawn from the general vocabulary of the language: a lamp, perhaps, or a kind of rock. After a person died it was forbidden to mention even one of his names or else his soul would return to haunt the one who uttered it. This was no problem in the case of words that were names and nothing else, but it meant that names taken from objects could no longer be used to refer to those objects. New words had to be invented. When another child was born it might receive some of the tabooed names, which could then be spoken once again. But the corresponding objects kept the new appellations which has been assigned to them. By accumulation over the years, this custom led to changes in while sections of the East Greenlandic vocabulary.” (Burch, Ernest Jr. The Eskimos. 1988. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. , p.90)

“If there was a death along the way, the deceased would be left in the snow, or placed on a hastily erected scaffold. If someone fell ill or was injured, that person would have to be carried on the sled, hindering the party’s progress. If a pregnant woman felt birth pains coming on, a small parturition hut would be built for her, and she would be placed in it, along with a small supply of food. If there was a good camping place nearby, the res of the party would halt there. Otherwise, they would continue on until they found one. The mother would bring her baby into the world alone—as she would have done anyway in accordance with local custom—and catch up with the rest of the party later, on foot, carrying the newborn infant inside her parka.” (Ibid., p. 76)

“Young women were expected to smile pleasantly, talk quietly, and generally maintain an unobtrusive presence in the community, whereas old ladies could laugh and talk and tease and joke and pour forth a torrent of abuse or commentary and time they pleased.” (Ibid., p.110)

“But songs of one kind or another were everywhere. When Rasmussen asked an Alaskan Eskimo how many songs he had composed, he replied, ‘I merely know that I have many, and that everything in me is song. I sing as I draw breath.’” (R16, p. 111)

"There were four men who went hunting together. Three of them were brothers, while the forth one had taken their sister as wife. They went out to the floe-edge. Suddenly the ice broke away, and carried them out of sight of land. After some time the floe of ice became smaller and smaller. Then the oldest brother, who was a great shaman, summoned his guardian spirit, a large bear, and told him of their plight. Then the ice flow began to tip up, and when it became quite steep, the oldest brother slid off into the sea. When he came up again, he was transformed into a polar bear. The other brothers followed his example, and when they came up were also transformed into bears. Then they swam to the shore. The olders brother told the other men that if they should see any seals, they must not kill them, else they would not regain their human shape. The brother-in-law could not resist the temptation of killing a seal when he saw it, and he devoured it. When they reached the land the oldest brother transformed himself into a gull, and flew to a place where the people were cutting up a whale. He had some of the meat, and took some back to his brothers. Then the brothers resumed human shape, but the brother-in-law had to remain a bear" (Ibid, p.?)

 

Within Human Matrices, There Are Beautiful Cracks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb-U1aXoCuQ

Breakroom chat

Moraline:

What’s interesting is how the early catholic church embraced the pagan gods and rituals. The saints replaced the pagan gods, the virgin, the festivals of easter and christmas, all grafted upon older pagan rituals. Even the churches were constructed upon pagan holy sites. This leads me to believe in a strange continuity of the gods. Even the great santuario de las lajas in southern colombia, its massive bridge built across the gorge upon which the virgin was sighted, i believe was probably a holy site before the spanish arrived. No doubt buga was always holy too. Call the spiritual power of these places whatever you want. 

But men have blemished the gods. Luther was the start of the great blemishing in the west. The rejection of trabsubstantiation was the rejection of god on earth. The protestants sent the gods away. No wonder it was protestants who made up 99% of scientists. 

Maximin:

Our gods are here, below. They are with us in the

Bureau, in the kitchen, in the shops, in the rest rooms. The

gods have become like us, ergo we have become like gods.

And we shall come to you, my unknown readers on another

planet, we shall come to you to make your life as

godlike, as rational, and as correct as our own ...” (Zamiatin, We)

I really can't say what it is. I know nearly nothing about gods or the history of Christianity. I had always hoped that I myself was a god, which would explain why I have never been able to fit in Western society. Yet then again Tim Feriss is a god. If you pay him a few hundred dollars a month, he will send you a package of what he is buying these days, really cool things that will make you happy for a few days. Western gods have very short shelf lives. The gods of Moraline are eternal--a great blender, or an eternal cupcake or steak. I am reaching for metaphors. A man from Northbrook, Illinois must search for consumer metaphors. That is all I was put on earth to do. Every boy's dream in Northbrook was to have his own infomerical. My parents would be beyond themselves with joy if I were Tim Feriss, because Tim Feriss is a god. He mails gods to other men who pay him. The selling of Church indulgences, that sort of thing. Tim Feriss maintains his sanity and sells indulgences, is a god and sells smaller gods with curt shelf lives. This happiness is godly, although these gods, these consumer products, are fragile, and soon die.  There are no standardized tests to make certain of godhood so man will always be uncertain of gods and godhood. I also remember the last farmland in Northbrook. It later was paved. McMansions were built upon the farmland to make the farmland holy. Each home is a god. Inside there are gods who live in groups and they are called families. The family itself is not worshipped but there are strange fetish cults. Families report to larger gods. But even farmland isn't godly. If anyone had even read the first few chapters of moraline free a kid from Northbrook would realize how fucked he really is--his childhood feeling of nature and spirituality was a pathetic plot of land not even farmed, one fucking horse, some old rusting farm equipment, a few old 'farm houses' that backed to the land that, if you even read the fist chapter of Moraline free, it’s clearly the cemetery of a murdered tribe. Try sleeping at night now. A litte kid from northbrook would have to dig very deep in the field to find the gods. It would be shocking for him to find corpses.

You are more like Fritz in this respect--he knew Christianity inside out. My family didn't even have a chance to reject the gods--they weren't aware of them. I only knew one kid in high school, Manos, a Greek, who ever mentioned gods and I almost thought he was joking. My parents also never took seriously what they called 'religion.' My mother was a catholic and she only described Catholicism as a strange system from which she escaped. Perhaps this is where I get my concept of matrix and the constant feeling of escape. The catholics think many things as dirty but I always thought catholics were dirty and protestants clean.  My father was very deft, raised in a time of great expectations for high modernism. The gods had been swiftly defeated all over the world and a huge vacuum needed to be filled by law, finance, real estate--it was a very gratifying and exciting time for the empire. I greatly enjoy terms such as 'liberty' and 'freedom' as I tackle ancient hunter-gatherers. I am confident these libertarian concepts would be deeply relevant to the Eskimo, more relevant than even excel.  I also am ignorant about Greek gods, although from time to time I read a description of Greek Gods or read Roman mention of the dead gods.  As a product of high modernist upper middle class law and finance, I find all the mention of the gods very curious. Given my upbringing I should, if I were a correct product of my specific matrix, seek to illegalize or otherwise discourage the gods you speak of. That I do not partly explains my bad conscience while in the west. Lawyers, accountants, and men of high finance and legal systems believe that their systems are the holy or the magic--power, it is to them. I am working on a retracement of this power. Yet in the mean time I feel powerless in a matrix I have rejected and powerless among gods who do not love me. Yet today was R's birthday and I bought her a baby tiger stuffed animal and flowers.

Moraline:

I was raised with my parents during their cult period where demons and witches and warlocks ravaged green bay wi and lansing, mi. I was told of a neighborhood witch who could levitate small objects such as pencils. I saw other witches myself and was visited at various moments by spirits. Halloween was a devils day and i was not allowed to celebrate it. My mother told me of the cat sacrifices done but the witches of green bay as tribute to satan. There were plans to procure a baby for an ultimate halloween sacrifice. This was my childhood and early youth. I stopped seeing the spirits when i came to northbrook, il and my mother stopped mentioning them. 

I should also mention it was through prayer that i was even born alive at all due to my mothers sickness in pregnancy. My feet were also very pigeontoed and this was corrected through the administration of holy water. 

Maximin:

You arrived in the center of godlessness incarnate when you arrived in Northbrook. If you study the history of the Northshore of Chicago--I haven't--you will learn of the settling along this Northshore of the super-rich industrialists in Glencoe, Winnetka, Kennilworth, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff. Northbrook was built after these lakefront settlements in the late 50s and early 60s as a chance for a farm town to play catch up in just few years from developers (I speak of the real suburb, not the old village in the center). It was an old farmtown and Mr. Landweir who you certainly didn't know was involved in the transformation from Shermerville to Northbrook. It would attract the insecure and confused to become secure and productive members of society--my parents, your parents. I wonder how many ran from witches in Wisconsin. Your mother didn't see any witches in Northbrook. I find this impossible because you must recall "Nursey," the old lady who lived in one of the turn-of-the-century homes. She died when I was 8 and they found rooms completely filled with junk. It was once a beautiful house because I saw the restoration after they took away her body and things and sold the house to a rich couple. My parents never understood why anyone would restore an old house. My mother hated old homes and she loved her suburban home in Northbrook and loved carpet. There was a small bubonic rat which lived in this carpet infested house and it bit children on the face.  When I was a child I saw, huge, rambling abandoned mansions in Lake Bluff. I would throw rocks at the abandoned greenhouse of the Armor mansion because my father bought a 'lot' out there. It was totally undeveloped save these abandoned mansions and my father would go there to be alone and think about why he had entered into law and accounting. He was happy in that forest. However, past age 11, something either happened to he or I and there has been a strange mutual suspicion. However, I believe he was at once like us, I am certain. You must remember that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father; never forget this.

Moraline: 

But i have much more sympathy for the WE guy than orwell or rand paul or the libertarians or any of the western complainers. In the ussr you had difficulty leaving. Any man with a us passport can go to a lot of good places. Why stick around and whine? Answer: because whining is their hobby. Because they have no skills to live in freedom. Its all silly to demand freedom from a state. The presence of any state is an infringement on freedom. The choices are simple: gain the skills to live freely within the cracks of that state system (as in scotts mountain people of asia) OR leave for some other place. But to have no skills to live otherwise, no courage to leave, and to complain that the state is acting too much like a state is ridiculous. 

Only a russian of that time could write such a book. Orwell had not experienced enough or in depth, none of the great russian suffering. For this reason orwell is read today. Its imaginative and specilative. WE is probably straight history.

Maximin:

The purpose of philosophy is as an escape route, to fortify his mind to retrace and deconstruct lies and allow him to find his way back. You mention courage--I have just finished writing a piece that speaks on that--courage is more rare than diamonds, it leads man back to the hunt. If philosophy is not used as anything other than an escape route, it grows cancerous. But so goes matrices:

“The sins the angel promised to punish were, most particularly, the crushing exactions of grain and labor by the nobility, the tithes of the high clergy, and the failure of avaricious, licentious, and vain elites to observe God’s commands.” (Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance)

It is. And like your writing of Patagonia, there is something different about it, striking. So striking no one knows what to do. Men are shocked to encounter bravery. Bravery and courage are rare things and highly valued and remembered. But why is this? Why is bravery and courage so precious? It shows man a path and brings him back to his original freedom. What no one realized about Patagonia is that no matter how much mystery anyone tries to remove beforehand, man loses himself there. It is a force of mountainous and enormous wonder. This is the god experience.

There is another experience in western matrices but it is a very negative electrical energy, akin to standing near an electric power station transformer. Far, far too much surplus, as you say. Surplus is the orginary concept of when and how things got off kilter (or just perhaps slightly different, and then off kilter). I say slightly different because surplus as surplus (I prefer the beautiful Latin, surplus qua surplus, and in fact contemplate writing in Latin but am concerned of limited audience) did exist temporarily even in hunter gatherer tribes--or at least from my limited anecdotal knowledge from what I read in Brody and Carpenter. Canetti describes the force of how surplus seems to be shipped in high pressure pipes--the onerous pressure of the financial systems. He describes how men of great wealth have the overwhelming force and burden of the lives this money represents. You then have a very strange counter-product--money guys talking just about the money, totally detached from the lives. It's as if people have forgotten the human factor. Isn't it strange that in a totally mechanized product, it is as if a computer is almost the producer of the product? As if the human buys from computer? At that point the money represents a computer's labor. This is where it gets very strange and man becomes one with computer, perhaps a convergence to computer--I'm not certain yet but I believe Zamiatin was getting at this.

I also wonder if Argentina (maybe parts of Chile) were as close as a man could get to hunter-gatherer society. I am aware of the enormous surplus of the sheep. I am aware of the huge estancias and some of the outright horrid oppression of the workers in Rio Gallegos in the 20s. Yet clearly some of these estancias were far less surplus driven. And then this incredible phenomenon of the failed state--the estancia at which I stayed was huge but there was an enormous feeling of freedom there, meaning, not the taint of high-modernism, or traces of it so small that compared to western matrices it is barely detectable.

A smaller estancia may have fluctuations in sheep or other food supplies that could bring it close to hunter-gatherer balances. The difference would be that the hunter-gatherer seemed to roam to other areas to cycle hunting areas. This may well be the modern man's sense of freedom--following the natural contours of the earth in his pursuit of something to eat--a perfect correlation. It is basically man as animal or what man now calls animal. Perhaps then in that context man never thought of himself as special. Later on there would be other cultures that would be far bolder, perhaps driven by their building surpluses--bold enough to say they were god's chosen people, or codifying the names and stories of the gods and mixing it with institutionalized slavery and servitude such as with Egypt and Greece et al..

The paradox of this freedom is it really cannot happen now with the world's current population. It almost certainly cannot exist given the current state of man. The nature of the hunter gather 'society' (societies did not exist pre-surplus) kept populations in check as there was only a finite amount of animals and plants the earth can produce in any one region. Man's body was one with everything--physically as he made his way through the land (he did not 'conquer' anything, which is a very, very arrogant and emblematic way of looking at getting up a mountain or getting across a plain, etc.).

But the paradox gets even more perplexing. On the one hand you have Zamiatin who specifically calls out this thing with the Gods. This is why I bang my fist on the table because you guys would be shutting down ale houses (I say ale house in the context of protected social spaces in which subordinate classes could express their hidden transcripts, not dens of vice in which inebriation or licentiousness are the main focus) night after night in discussion. You cannot fault me also for using terms such as "hidden transcripts" or "subordinate classes" as they are from Scott and you are the one who told me to read Scott. It is permissible to use academic language so long as it is used for good and not evil.

Zamiatin claims that the world population will shrink considerably but be highly regulated like a computer, and the remaining people will be a fraction of the world's population but live like a computer (maybe people actually go away and only computer is left--the ultimate convergence) somehow serving a computer, but I need to get through the book.

What is very strange about this proposal is that it would mimic in an evil way what would have to happen for man to return to freedom--a huge reduction in the population. If men lived again, all of them, as hunter-gatheres, there would have to be enough space for each man (or each band) to roam and hunt and gather freely.

Surplus paradoxically leads to "more" yet then drastically leads to a lot less as it all falls apart. In man's attempt to be god or make freedom, he fails. God for man is the authentic feel of his planet each day as he moves about the earth following its contours and being affected by it in pursuit of food. Man wanders, not aimlessly as Western man would say, but that free spontaneous wander mimics the free spontaneous wander of the animals. Nothing in the world is like the grid of a suburb--clearly not even stock market or commodity prices. Which is the mental sickness of geometry, for example--whose fucking sick visions are those? Certainly not mine, and what megalomaniac arrogance for anyone to imply that geometry is a very good example of truth, e.g. a priori truth. Plato tried to say that such forms were windows into some god-like forces but they would have no relevance whatsoever to hunter-gatherer man.

Based on the nature of human matrices--how they grow, control, and dominate men, how they expand populations, harvest energy, and continue to grow-- the growth represents sickness--it is a mimicking of wandering that has been lost, of lost wandering and lost freedom. As you had written early, the hunt was the greatest thing for man (although balanced by the joy and return to woman and family), or so essentially a part of him and a part of his happiness that once he has lost it he will always try to find something to take its place. Yet matrices do two things: they hold men back socially (really the most important point in describing a matrix), and dominate land physically, significantly lessening his chances of ever getting away.

There is the tragic prospect that the reason that this is so suddenly and rapidly clear (as it was so suddenly and rapidly for Zamiatin) is that matrices are forcing man's hand by the dooming vision which means servitude for all, total loss of freedom without any respite, a world in which only autistics are happy with their green trains or images thereof.

Jesus, though, the million dollar question was what the hell got this surplus shit going? If this question can be answered, can man be saved? Or is the idea of saving man always going to involve some high modernist scheme that makes things worse, further entangling man in some idiotic scheme? At least your solution of the hunter-gatherer isn't some idiotic high modernist scheme.

Perhaps this is also the origin of evil. Perhaps this is the original sin. But the original sin was not Cain killing Abel. It seems original sin is deception. Ah, I see it now, the Garden of Eden. This Side of Eden, Hugh Brody. Was it woman that started the matrix? Jesus, is that a possibility?

That then begs the question--if deception is the original sin (coercion of other men, one could say, not unlike law, not unlike all systems of domination), it could be argued that all this got bad for man with the first matrix. Abundance was always around. There always was surplus. Indeed there is nothing more today than there was a million years ago. Hence it isn't surplus qua surplus as the evil force which has changed man. Man chose to abuse the world. But the question is why. The question is whether surplus is a symptom or a cause. If it is true the earth has always been there for man, why did he suddenly strike at earth? Why did man strike at earth? Or why did man strike at man? Was it cowardice? Did men no longer have the courage to fight and slay one another? It has to be asked why man didn't hunt other men but hunted other 'animals.' Yet nearly no animals hunt each other--lions don't hunt lions. No animals do this (fish, perhaps?) So for man to hunt man represents sickness. Taking away a man's freedom (taking away his roaming, his hunt) is equivalent to killing a man. A matrix is by definition then a system of killing other men. The whole enterprise is built on the enslavement of other men--the killing of man's liberty or freedom, which began with preventing other men to hunt and roam through coercion.

I had a sketch of an idea that showed the balance of how a guy could make things useful for his hunt--carry enough food and water for example to get across a plain to get at more animals. Maybe he creates a wineskin or some sack for berries or dried meat. But just enough to get him to the next hunt. What if something bad happened though--although it seems unpopular or offensive to speak of anything bad in Eden. The man breaks his leg and suddenly has to survive in a cave to get through a winter, for example. He is alone and maybe no one will help him. No longer is his life of the wander and the hunt. Now it is to stay in the cave, limp around for berries or small animals, and try to make it. Maybe such a man survives and suddenly a whole different kind of man is born--the planner, the saver. He has to lure women to him to live with him in his cave (I am reaching here) and convince the woman that his stationary life is preferable. Perhaps he encounters other men. Who knows what happens when other men approach him, if they are friendly or not. I do not know what contexts men fought and killed one another (always?).

The point is that perhaps the scheming to survive in contrast to the spontaneous joy of the wander and hunt is what led to man's first attack on earth. Something went wrong with the hunt. Man lost his ability to hunt due to a natural accident. If he then survived and had a son or daughter, he would have to teach his children the only way he could teach them--for as a cripple he could not teach his son how to hunt. The original sin may well have been an original perversion--not some insanity of a man driven organically but due to a bad fall and a leg break. Man was hurt but never got better. He passed on his hurt or sick spirit. This then led to a degenerate attack on earth--a loss of faith in the hunt. Degeneracy bread degeneracy, until man was so unfit all he knew--his only and entire way--was an attack on the earth. He perfected and strengthened his perversion into what is now called *science* and his system to protect his perversion was called *government*. Remember when you told the man in the bar that you come from a culture of science and government? Western man is a man wandering in sickness--the blue pill men tell themselves each day they are well to continue on. The red pill men realize their sickness but some can never quite conduct the pathology.

I do not here see why it would be necessary to blame woman for the original sin. It makes no sense to pin it on her, especially if it can be demonstrated that man can fuck himself alone and on the hunt. Loss of freedom can be man's own doing--but the evil, if you want to call it that, or the original sin, is when man spreads his misfortune. Can he spread his misfortune to other healthy, hunting men, or must it be from father to son?

Man, alone with his broken leg in the cave--one hopes that he summons the great force of the gods, that he is always happy, that, as you say, he is never alone. Did the bad gods gang up on man and drive the lone injured man crazy in his cave? Why weren't the helping gods helping him? Maybe a man would have just come to rest in the cave and died in peace. He was always at peace. Perhaps this theory of the sick man was never even possible in a world of helping gods and man was always at peace and there was no torment, anxiety, or suffering.

"While traveling with Ohnainewk, I remarked, as best I could in Eskimo, "The wind is cold." He laughed. "How," he asked, "can the wind be cold? You're cold; you're unhappy. But the wind isn't cold or unhappy."" (Carpenter, Oh What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me)

Nietzsche's Daybreak

These two aphorisms were written in 1881. Reading them today I looked over my shoulder--had someone played a joke on me? I post here two aphorisms from this work. Take, for example, this passage from aphorism 206:

"In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: 'better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!' This would be the right attitude of mind: the workers of Europe ought henceforth to declare themselves as a class a human impossibility and not, as usually happens, only a somewhat harsh and inappropriate social arrangement; they ought to inaugurate within the European beehive an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before, and through this act of free emigration in the grand manner to protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice now threatening them of being compelled to become either the slave of the state or the slave of a party of disruption."

On aphorism 205--indeed, some cultures no doubt benefit from high modernism. Whether this culture in particular is very good at adapting, or is in fact is the driving force behind the high modernism, I do not know.


205. Of the people of Israel.  Among the spectacles to which the coming century invites us is the decision as to the destiny of the Jews of Europe. That their die is cast, that they have crossed their Rubicon, is now palpably obvious: all that is left for them is either to become the masters of Europe or to lose Europe as they once a long time ago lost Egypt, where they had placed themselves before a similar either-or. In Europe, however, they have gone through an eighteen-century schooling such as no other nation of this continent can boast of  and what they have experienced in this terrible time of schooling has benefited the individual to a greater degree than it has the community as a whole. As a consequence of this, the psychological and spiritual resources of the Jews today are extraordinary; of all those who live in Europe they are least liable to resort to drink or suicide in order to escape from some profound dilemma  something the less gifted are often apt to do. Every Jew possesses in the history of his fathers and grandfathers a great fund of examples of the coldest self-possession and endurance in fearful situations, of the subtlest outwitting and exploitation of chance and misfortune; their courage beneath the cloak of miserable submission, their heroism in spernere se sperni, surpasses the virtues of all the saints. For two millennia an attempt was made to render them contemptible by treating them with contempt, and by barring to them the way to all honours and all that was honourable, and in exchange thrusting them all the deeper into the dirtier trades  and it is true that they did not grow cleaner in the process. But contemptible? They themselves have never ceased to believe themselves called to the highest things, and the virtues which pertain to all who suffer have likewise never ceased to adorn them. The way in which they honour their fathers and their children, the rationality of their marriages and marriage customs, distinguish them among all Europeans. In addition to all this, they have known how to create for themselves a feeling of power and of eternal revenge out of the very occupations left to them (or to which they were left); one has to say in extenuation even of their usury that without this occasional pleasant and useful torturing of those who despised them it would have been difficult for them to have preserved their own self-respect for so long. For our respect for ourselves is tied to our being able to practise requital, in good things and bad. At the same time, however, their revenge does not easily go too far: for they all possess the liberality, including liberality of soul, to which frequent changes of residence, of climate, of the customs of one's neighbours and oppressors educates men; they possess by far the greatest experience of human society, and even in their passions they practise the caution taught by this experience. They are so sure in their intellectual suppleness and shrewdness that they never, even in the worst straits, need to earn their bread by physical labour, as common workmen, porters, agricultural slaves. Their demeanour still reveals that their souls have never known chivalrous noble sentiments nor their bodies handsome armour: a certain importunity mingles with an often charming but almost always painful submissiveness. But now, since they are unavoidably going to ally themselves with the best aristocracy of Europe more and more with every year that passes, they will soon have created for themselves a goodly inheritance of spiritual and bodily demeanour: so that a century hence they will appear sufficiently noble not to make those they dominate ashamed to have them as masters. And that is what matters! That is why it is still too soon for a settlement of their affairs! They themselves know best that a conquest of Europe, or any kind of act of violence, on their part is not to be thought of: but they also know that at some future time Europe may fall into their hands like a ripe fruit if they would only just extend them. To bring that about they need, in the meantime, to distinguish themselves in every domain of European distinction and to stand everywhere in the first rank: until they have reached the point at which they themselves determine what is distinguishing. Then they will be called the inventors and signposts of the nations of Europe and no longer offend their sensibilities. And whither shall this assembled abundance of grand impressions which for every Jewish family constitutes Jewish history, this abundance of passions, virtues, decisions, renunciations, struggles, victories of every kind  whither shall it stream out if not at last into great men and great works! Then, when the Jews can exhibit as their work such jewels and golden vessels as the European nations of a briefer and less profound experience could not and cannot produce, when Israel will have transformed its eternal vengeance into an eternal blessing for Europe: then there will again arrive that seventh day on which the ancient Jewish God may rejoice in himself, his creation and his chosen people  and let us all, all of us, rejoice with him!


206
The impossible class.  Poor, happy and independent!  these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave!  these things can also go together  and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition  I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations  the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived  until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans¹⁰⁶ dawns in all its glory?  In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: 'better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!' This would be the right attitude of mind: the workers of Europe ought henceforth to declare themselves as a class a human impossibility and not, as usually happens, only a somewhat harsh and inappropriate social arrangement; they ought to inaugurate within the European beehive an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before, and through this act of free emigration in the grand manner to protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice now threatening them of being compelled to become either the slave of the state or the slave of a party of disruption. Let Europe be relieved of a fourth part of its inhabitants! They and it will be all the better for it! Only in distant lands and in the undertakings of swarming trains of colonists will it really become clear how much reason and fairness, how much healthy mistrust, mother Europe has embodied in her sons  sons who could no longer endure it with the dull old woman and were in danger of becoming as querulous, irritable and pleasure-seeking as she herself was. Outside of Europe the virtues of Europe will go on their wanderings with these workers; and that which was at home beginning to degenerate into dangerous ill humour and inclination for crime will, once abroad, acquire a wild beautiful naturalness and be called heroism.  Thus a cleaner air would at last waft over old, over-populated and self-absorbed Europe! No matter if its 'workforce' should be a little depleted! Perhaps it may then be recalled that we grew accustomed to needing many things only when these needs became so easy to satisfy  we shall again relinquish some of them! Perhaps we shall also bring in numerous Chinese: and they will bring with them the modes of life and thought suitable to industrious ants. Indeed, they might as a whole contribute to the blood of restless and fretful Europe something of Asiatic calm and contemplativeness and  what is probably needed most  Asiatic perseverance.

A reaction to Moraline's A Hunter Learns to Scavenge

“What is good is always present in our souls, and the soul is good; what is evil has been forced into it from outside.” –Tolstoy

Make the hunt go away as if it never existed:

Tweedledum said to Alice, "You know very well you're not real."

"I am real!" said Alice, and began to cry.

"You won't make yourself a bit realer by crying," Tweedledee remarked.

"There's nothing to cry about."

As I read aphorism 55, I knew I was seeing something that I had not seen before. To scavenge from dumpsters, to eat what was left from other men: I remembered my days hunting in the bars. I thought of the foxes begging from cars in Patagonia. Had it been a bear I would not have been alarmed. The great eagle in the dumpster. Had the eagle lost his pride? His soul or spirit?

The high modernists dream of a blank slate—they dream of perfect fields, manicured and irrigated. They dream of perfect cities—Brasilia. Indeed these schemes seem sinister—yet Scott accounts for the misery yet reminds that these projects were all set off to improve the condition of mankind, this social engineering. Yet perhaps they never aimed to improve anything—perhaps there was a hatred of something in the human spirit, and the goal of these projects was to kill the heart, soul, spirit of men and women. So many are miserable, beat down—the energy, the freedom that allows for great beauty in the human species, that great, beautiful spontaneity that allowed so many races to spread about the earth, each with their languages and their ways of living—it is being dominated, consumed, by a cancer. Perhaps this force initially spread with good intentions, perhaps not. Perhaps it was an accident, all of it, unintentional.

Yet to truly create this blank slate for these high modernist schema to succeed, we must unify the hardware—the human body—and unify the software—language, thoughts, feelings, emotions. Or create hardware that will fit this new unified software. Destroy hunting. Destroy pride. Destroy love. Destroy family. Make man sick with food and change his hormones. Make man the blank slate a matrix needs for the final solution (for details on the final solution, see the end). Overwhelm his senses with high definition television, mindless programs, sports. Give women their social media for spying, gossip, mind control, and their new devices to schedule sex time. Destroy womanhood and motherhood. Obfuscate, frustrate and confuse with doublespeak, doublespeak, doublethink. Destroy privacy, occupy the attention of a man through the manic paranoia of social media. Menace, harass, control.

But the great loss of power was when man no longer hunted. Man is only happy when he roams. From staying in place comes sickness and depression, illness. In the west the philosophers call themselves anarchists and they seek freedom, but they do not know where to find it or what it is, but it is their only hope. They are told their work is menacing and poisonous—but in the end they know they are fighting for something, they simply do not know what it is. They know it is there, they know it is truth. In Europe the Frenchman spoke of authenticity, but he could not quite grasp it although he knew it was there. The hunt has ended and with it has ended what western man calls freedom, the thing for which he longs. He longs for it as women once longed for children. Nothing will take its place. The difference between Proennake and McCandless was thatProennake spent far more of his days a truly happy and free man. Yet McCandless, despite his clumsiness, despite his upper-middle class cluelessness, despite the bus in which he sheltered, had found freedom, or at least glimpses of it, and that he died, or how he died, meant nothing. He was making his way out at any cost, a rejection of all the wealth and power and control and science and certainty his matrix could offer him—as best as he could, given he was a man running from the bad conscience implanted into him by his matrix. Proennake walked calmly from his matrix to freedom. McCandless tripped and fell but I do not criticize the man.

What follows below are only a few portraits from Zamiatin—already millions were dying from the collectivization plans that began fiercely after the 'revolution.' According to Scott, Lenin won by luck and chance and had no idea there was going to be a revolution so soon. Lenin capitalized on this 'chaos'--and laid down his fantasy. The newly free serfs would face a hell far greater than the royal family. Peasants revolted and refused to again be serfs. Russia starved--it was just beginning, but 20 million would starve in Russia due to a preference for order and control rather than a loss of control to peasants who would, if given their free ability to do so, feed themselves and others.

Western nihilist is so easy now that we have taken away hunting and hidden the remnants of its remaining spirit—there is nothing to fight for once the hunt has been taken away. Indeed no one knew—and yet this Moraline fellow with his eagles casually mentions what may well be a missing link, stated so simply, but matched with a photograph that only the supremely autistic cannot help but stop and realize something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Zarathusra had eagles as his friends but they did not eat hot pockets. In its place you have Baudrillard.

The great hope is that there is still energy, symptoms of great freedom, this energy that remains from the day of the hunt. It is perhaps not as wild and pure as it once was. Can it return? What must a Western man sacrifice for its return? 

But the wild horses in Argentina and how they run in the pampas. Even the men who have their sheep herds in the Patagonia of Chile. There is that hope. And then there is the end of man:

Passages from Yevgeny Zamiatin’s We, 1924:

“I cannot imagine a city which is not surrounded by a Green Wall; I cannot imagine a life which is not surrounded by the figures of our Tables.” [Note: In 1924 Zamiatin predicted the color green would control and mesmerize men.]

“I shall be quite frank: even we have not attained the absolute, exact solution of the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from sixteen to seventeen o'clock and from twenty-one to twenty-two, our powerful united organism dissolves into separate cells; these are the personal hours designated by the Tables. During these hours you would see the curtains discreetly drawn in the rooms of some; others march slowly over the pavement of the main avenue or sit at their desks as I sit now. But I firmly believe, let them call me an idealist and a dreamer, I believe that sooner or later we shall somehow find a place in the general formula even for these hours. Somehow, all of the 86,400 seconds will be incorporated in the Tables of Hours.”

“I suddenly perceived all the music, all the beauty, of this colossal, this mechanical ballet, illumined by light blue rays of sunshine. Then the thought came: why beautiful? Why is the dance beautiful? Answer: because it is an unfree movement. Because the deep meaning of the dance is contained in its absolute, ecstatic submission, in the ideal non-freedom. If it is true that our ancestors would abandon themselves in dancing at the

most inspired moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), then it means only one thing: the instinct of non-freedom has been characteristic of human nature from ancient times, and we in our life of today, we are only consciously-”

“It is clear that the history of mankind, as far as our knowledge goes, is a history of the transition from nomadic forms to more sedentary ones. Does it not follow that the

most sedentary form of life (ours) is at the same time the most perfect one? There was a time when people rushed from one end of the earth to another, but this was the

prehistoric time when such things as nations, wars, commerce, different discoveries of different Americas still existed. Who has need of these things now?”

 

How the Inuit Harvest their Spirit Crops for Surplus and Dread

 “The agriculturalist feels alone. Either he is without land and surplus and feels an outcast from life's feast, or he amasses so much surplus as to insulate his lonliness. Before farming men were without themselves, identity was unknown. The inuit took the atiq or spirit of the dead ancestor into them along with his name. How could anyone ever be alone. Even the hunter who starves where the animals do not appear, he dies alongside spirits that give him comfort and knows his atiq will be reborn in a new form. Solitude is perhaps an ignorance. An ignorance of divinity. Man cannot claim himself, not in the presence of a god.” (J. Myner, last known spoken words in English)

"An experience in which one feels, though one cannot intellectually know it, the slipping away of all-that-is into the Nothingness in which it is suspended…” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness)

 “Estimates of the death toll alone, as a result of the

"dekulakization" and collectivization campaigns and the ensuing famine,

range from a "modest" 3 or 4 million to, as some current Soviet figures

indicate, more than 20 million. The higher estimates have, if anything,

gained more credibility as new archival material has become

available.” (Scott, Seeing Like a State)

“They created, in place of what they had inherited,

a new landscape of large, hierarchical, state-managed farms whose

cropping patterns and procurement quotas were centrally mandated

and whose population was, by law, immobile. The system thus devised

served for nearly sixty years as a mechanism for procurement and control

at a massive cost in stagnation, waste, demoralization, and ecological

failure." (Scott, ibid.)

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” (American Declaration of Independence)

"A developed country is one that allows all its citizens to enjoy a free and healthy life in a safe environment." (Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations)

“…All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”  (American Declaration of Independence)

 

“In an arrangement later copied in the "strategic hamlets" in Vietnam, the reluctant residents were lodged in identical, numbered houses arrayed in straight lines.

The population's movement in and out was strictly monitored. They

were one short step away from the concentration camps built in wartime

to create and maintain a legible, bounded, concentrated state

space and seal it off as completely as possible from the outside. Here,

direct control and discipline are more important than appropriation.” (Scott, ibid.)

“It would be, Wilson wrote to a friend, the largest mechanized wheat farm in the world. They planned the entire farm layout, labor force, machinery needs, crop rotations, and lockstep work schedule in a Chicago hotel room in two weeks in December 1928.31T he fact that they imagined that such a farm could be planned in a Chicago hotel room underlines their presumption that the key issues were abstract, technical interrelationships that were context-free. As Fitzgerald perceptively explains: "Even in the U.S., those plans would have been optimistic, actually, because they were based on an unrealistic idealization of nature and human behavior. And insofar as the plans represented what the Americans would do if they had millions of acres of flat land, lots of laborers, and a government commitment to spare no expense in meeting production goals, the plans were designed for an abstract, theoretical kind of place. This agricultural place, which did not correspond to America, Russia, or any other actual location, obeyed the laws of physics and chemistry, recognized no political or ideological stance." (Scott, Ibid.)

“The concept of state spaces, suitably modified for the context of a market economy, can also help us to resolve an apparent paradox in colonial agrarian policy in Southeast Asia. How do we explain the decided colonial preference for plantation agriculture over smallholder production? The grounds for the choice can certainly not have been efficiency. For almost any crop one can name, with the possible exception of sugarcane, 17 smallholders have been able historically to out-compete larger units of production. Time and time again, the colonial states found, small producers, owing to their low fixed costs and flexible use of family labor, could consistently undersell state-managed or private-sector plantations. The paradox is largely resolved, I believe, if we consider the "efficiencies" of the plantation as a unit of taxation (both taxes on profits and various export levies), of labor discipline and surveillance, and of political control.” (Scott, Ibid.)

 

“They were described by their would-be civilizers as "not yet arranged" or "not yet ordered" (belum di-ator), as "not yet brought to religion" (belum berugamd), and their cultivation practices were described as "disorderly agriculture" (pertanian yang tidak teratur).” (Scott, ibid.)

 

“After seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in

moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and

schoolbooks as quickly as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience.” (Scott, ibid.)

“I believe we ought not to speak of the weaknesses of very great men.”
(Lafcadio Hearn)

"He would go to libraries and read books. Feel something literary, he thought. He would read books from the shelves. He would sit on comfortable chairs. When he needed water, there was a drinking fountain. From the windows he could see the rain. The sky rained and it fell to the green grass and fed the thick green moss on the headstones. Sometimes when he went to the library he was inspired. Other times he fell asleep. He felt sad about the man who was born on the Greek isle. According to the book, he was born to a Greek mother of noble lineage and his father a soldier. Her brothers didn't like his father, and one night they attacked him with knives and left him for dead. She found him and hid him in a barn. She nursed him back to health. They eloped and were married. The marriage was consummated. Two boys were born. He moved her from the isle to England, and she lamented of the rain and the strange language and her isolation. Her cousin came for her and she left the two boys and the soldier. She married her cousin and and returned to the isle. His father remarried but gave him to a relative. He would never see again his brother, his father, or his mother.

It affected the way he lived, this past of his. He would see each new person in his life as a god, like his mother, a Greek goddess. His love knew no boundaries. But no one he met possessed such a capacity to love, no one on earth could see gods in each man and woman. And so he would feel betrayed, incredulous and bludgeoned that those in his life could not feel as he did. And so he would disappear from their lives, never to be seen again.

Toward the end of his life he had a Japanese wife and lived in Japan. It struck me as odd that he chose a Japanese woman because his first love was a Norwegian. Love was different then, or at least for him. It was a 4 day train ride to Ohio from the East coast and he had already gone 38 hours without food, just breathing the smoke from the 3rd class car full of immigrants. She sat across from him, 18, blonde hair wrapped in a blue bonnet. How could such an angel be put in such a cattle car? It wasn't out of his timidity but out of his shame and hunger that he did not speak to her. The Jewish man sitting to his right saw into him. "You like her, no, don't you?" He was enraged the man could be so forward in speaking to him about such a personal matter; doubly enraged that the man found him so obvious."You should say something to her," he said. 
 
The train moved on and his hunger resonated in his mind. He saw her coming towards him in a blur. She handed him a large piece of brown bread with a slice of yellow cheese. He devoured the bread and cheese and then realized he had not thanked her. Can food be more important than a Norwegian angel? In haste he thanked her, but she spoke nearly no English. Her face became crimson and washed with rage. He said something terrible and now they were at war. The Jewish man intervened with his slight command of Norwegian yet she was not open to negotiation. She turned her back on him and he never spoke to her again.
 
In his last days his health was very poor, afflicted with a cough and the failing eyesight of his only eye. "Maybe she knew I only had one eye," he thought. He never stopped thinking of the Norwegian girl, even in Japan, she appeared everywhere. To think now she is old, tending to her grandchildren, it didn't matter where he was. It could have been back on the Greek isle. She was the only woman who had a light brighter than his mother. In all places he was without her, her face, her blue bonnet. What had he said to her? Why did she turn away and suddenly hate him? He still loved her because he knew she could love him even more than he could love her.

He was nearly blind and without energy. He would sleep after his fits of coughing and when he would wake there was little he could see--to work, to type his remaining lectures he had to assume his hands could write as they had always. He had resigned his post in Japan but his offer to lecture in America had been reneged due to a typhus outbreak. He abandoned the last of his friends, this time not due to their incapacity to love but rather due to self-preservation. He had no energy, no feeling left, save the last few sparks which were devoted to his final book.

The book was finished. If he could not lecture in the United States, he could publish the lectures in a book. He held his book. She appeared with her golden hair wrapped in her blue bonnet and her blue eyes that saw his hunger. "I love you," she said.""
--Saint Maximin, his best recollection from The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Elizabeth Wetmore, Houghton, Mifflin, 1906.   

(Maximin noted the text had never been checked out since its publication 108 years ago. The library was closed due to Spring Break and Maximin, in a hurried state to share the Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, wrote down what he could, as best he could remember, indulging at times in important detail neglected by Elizabeth Wetmore Houghton, a known author.)

The people's blindness

"Those who have put out
the people's eyes
reproach them
of their blindness."
John Milton, 1642