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Love, Work, and Dissent in a Time of Hazmat Suits and Political Hypochondria
Recently, discourse, within the free-range pathogen zone of the U.S. political realm, has been infected and inflamed by the use of verbiage (applied both in the metaphoric and literal sense) related to disease and contagion by editorial scribes and political hacks. For example, we have been informed that Occupy D.C. sites were attacked and destroyed by police authorities for reasons related to public health and hygiene.
Authorities dressed in hazmat suits clear away tents and debris from Occupy D.C. protesters at McPherson Square. Cleanup crews uncovered dead rats and mice after removing wooden pallets that the protesters used for sleeping. (Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post)
These actions (part of a series of ongoing coordinated, anti-democratic measures) carried out on orders from the current governing class of the U.S. display the tendency of the hyper-authoritarian mindset to regard the inherent messiness of freedom--including those individuals who engage in acts of dissent in public space-- to pose a danger to civil order and the wellbeing of the general public on the level of that of bio-hazardous material.
(In a vain attempt to assuage his germophobic mania, J. Edgar Hoover had a throne-sized commode constructed for his exclusive use that included an appurtenance that allowed his feet to perch upon an elevated pedestal to prevent contact with the subversive-enabling floor of his bathroom where, presumably, seditious microorganism seethed and plotted his doom.)
Hoover's OCD pathology is axiomatic of the anti-freedom mania gripping the nation's capital where the concept of freedom has become so repellant to the ruling establishment that expressions thereof have been relegated to be almost exclusively expressed in cold marble statuary and soldier's tombstones. Not only is this approach fitting for late empire's cult of death, it is convenient for D.C.'s insular culture of prevaricators, for the dead don't protest; hagiographic monuments cannot mic-check liars.
Authoritarian personality types favor empty spectacle, such as sporting events and parades, over occupations and protest marches, because there is little danger of the primary taking on a life of its own, of evolving a consciousness beyond simply a provisional surrender to the intoxication evinced by an immersion in the mass. People are transformed by social movements, while they are benumbed by spectacle.
Calcified power structures detest the living architecture of social and political movements, wherein individuals, by engagement in the messiness of life, forge identities distinct from those favored by a self-serving elite who have rigged the dominant order to their benefit.
"When the individual feels, the community reels"-- Aldous Huxley
Mortified by this, authoritarian personality types are obsessed with the fantasy of scouring (a panopticon/predator drone mode of mind) life of all disorder. Not only making the trains run on time but demanding that the passengers on said trains psyches be cleansed of impure thoughts…sanitized for their protection, then covered in a sort of societal prophylactic plastic to safeguard the principles of societal propriety--in short, have the populace rendered Body Bag People.
Better this, they are convinced, than allow the person-to-person contagion of dissent to spread. Perhaps, this provides a clue as to why the enforcers of our fear-driven, ruthless authoritarian power elite go so far as to don Hazmat suits when attacking and dismantling Occupy sites.
As well as viewing dissenters as a dangerous contagion, the one percent, along with their operatives and enforcers, are convinced that we are just plain filth and are as dumb as dirt to boot…that we who revolt are ourselves, by nature, irredeemably revolting, or, as Mel Brooks, impersonating Louis XVI, in his movie, The History Of The World, Part One, sniffed, "[The peasants]-- they stink on ice."
The architects of neoliberal imperium have built gleaming towers and sterile high-rises into the pure, blue heavens to avoid our perceived reek. What they detest, in fact, is the musky redolence of humanity; although, they don't seem to be troubled by the stain of the blood of the innocent that is forever affixed to their names, for these are people who believe they can ascend to heaven by scaling the mountain of corpses that their imperial pursuits have created.
Yet, they claim we are unclean. Granted, the endeavors of liberty can get messy--but not so much as the orgies of blood wrought by the militarist agendas that maintain the privilege of the 1 percent. One would think they would have the presence of mind to clean up their own act before they go about lecturing us on the finer points of hygiene.
"Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity," wrote Vladimir Nabokov.
The Romantic Age poet, John Keats, believed earthly existence--life as lived in the muck, mire, and uncertainty of mortal circumstance--to be what he termed, "a vale of soul-making", wherein an individual is challenged to descend from life-devoid towers of habitual action and insular thought into the eros and accountability of the human condition, and, in so doing, one descends into one's humanity. By commitment to this process, the poet averred, one is provided with a means to transmute grandiosity and a sense of entitlement (defining traits of the 1 percent) into a sense of appreciation of being in the presence of life’s grandeur.
Thus, one is advised to: show your face to the world…Yet the corporate state demands an individual become a job résumé on two legs, as opposed to the sustained act of revealing one's innate self by means of a chosen vocation. Moreover, the hierarchy of vampires who lord over the present economic system demand the 99 percent surrender their very life force to sustain the disastrously narrowed, self-serving agendas that ensure the privileged status of the economic and political elite.
In so doing, they reduce work to empty servitude, as opposed to allowing one to make a contribution to the interwoven fabric of life as a whole by the everyday sublime of one's individual art and labor. What these corporate state undead demand is an abomination. Conversely, one's work is an act of providing and receiving common communion, an activity of both solemn reverie and joyous reverence…a process that originates in and is borne by love--but is not bestowed with soulful agency by the small bribes and unspoken coercions imposed by the operatives of the neoliberal state.
One does not have to be a monk, artist, poet, mystic or musician to approach their vocation with élan and ebullience; yet one should grant oneself the right to surrender to ardor while engaging in work. To derive meaning and resonance from life demands artful labor--the awful daring of choosing to give oneself over to responsibility, thus allowing one to occupy one's occupation, heart and soul.
The act of working is a journey (not the prison sentence demanded by the 1 percent); one cannot predict where the journey will lead or how one will be transformed along the way. Antithetically, the corporate state, by means overt and covert, demands an unjust portion of one's fate.
Therefore, to some, dissent becomes imperative.
Yet love and work (the act of political protest falls into both of these categories) places one in a struggle with oneself, as well as with the powers that be. Oh, what vehement angels and dogma-besotted demons are unloosed by the process, and, often, it is difficult to discern the difference. Apropos, the latest leftist tempest as to whether the Black Block delivers belligerent balm or inflicts carcinogenic rancor to the OWS movement.
"Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once, beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything is in its deepest being is something that needs our love."--Rainer Maria Rilke
Still, many seem at a loss to understand why some are driven to struggle for a more just world, even though, time and time again, their ardor will be met by seemingly implacable, ruthless resistance…that one’s heart will be repeatedly broken.
One might as well ask, why one's heart yearns to move towards beauty?
We are compelled to move towards beauty and justice for the same reason a sunflower follows the course of the sun across the sky…opening, wheeling across the eternal moment, ripening and casting seeds of futurity beneath the heavens.
At our best, we are graced by the type of moments, engaged in craft and suspended in beauty, that an earthworm knows as earth passes through its body, as its body, in turn, passes through the body of the earth…Now, that is perfection achieved through labor; beauty incarnate; a living line of verse.
And that is what one experiences when one's character is aligned with one's destiny--when one has gained the wherewithal to insist on one's portion of fate.
This is essential: One diminishes oneself and the world when one chooses to ignore one’s heart’s calling to passionate engagement, for the fate of an individual is determined by the collective fate of humankind.
May we all be so graced as to be granted an earthworm's portion of fate.
There are, of course, obstacles (because no story worth telling unfolds without antagonists and obstructions). Thus, at present, in an era in which one's humanity is deemed only worth its value by the amount in dollars that one generates for the one percent, as, all the while, one's sense of self is continually inundated and buffeted by the come-ons and emotional coercions of the commercial hologram--one holds unto the debris of one's essential nature, as one is pulled along by powerful currents of a cultural death-drive.
In this age of economic imprisonment and exponentially increasing environmental devastation (e.g., How can one adapt to the social and political climes of a culture that is dangerously altering the climate itself, yet denies it?)--what verities should one hold to?
Perhaps, we might grow so desperate that we open ourselves to the spirit of the following quote--an eminently more resonate sentiment than that expressed by garden variety Valentine’s Day cards:
"The spirit of justice is nothing other than the supreme and perfect flower of the madness of love." --Simone Weil
Now we have something to work with: spirits, madness and love.
One's spirit (which includes the spirit of conviction, labor, and dissent) goes into the world with the ardor of a lover--and becomes enmeshed in its madness. How could it not? Spirit in itself is by definition as impersonal as nature: to be possessed of spirit is to be suffused with the inhuman fury of nature itself…of spiraling galaxies and spindling earthworms; spirit is borne of a womb of thunder and the autochthonic urgency of daemonic (i.e., instinctual) drives, and, like the act of surrendering to romantic love or to an immersion of the self within a mob, while in its grip, one is apt to be spirited away.
Conversely, to be devoid of spirit, one becomes cipher; one lacks vitality; life is a prison yard shuffle, in which the condemned serves a life sentence for the crime of not choosing life itself…the crime of refusing to commit Eros' error.
Yet upon committing the crime of passionate engagement, one places oneself in an asylum for the hopelessly insane i.e., a life lived in this human realm.
What to do? Proceed to the ward of the madhouse of yourself where the powers in charge have placed in lockdown the most hopeless cases…and love the inmates within.
Give voice to the suffering lunatic whose mouth is frozen in terror. In our age, it should not evoke bafflement as to why he has been struck paralyzed by fear. It is quite possible, he cannot drive the knowledge from his mind that our species, by means of manic consumption, is destroying our planet--our only home and collective body--yet the allegedly sane go along as if nothing of the sort looms. Given the state of the situation, it might be proof of one's sanity to be driven a bit mad with grief.
Weep into the darkness with the inmates. Rage at invisible demons in the air, until they make themselves visible to you; a strategy by which one can keep a close watch on them, because it is from one's inner demons'--those shunned and shunted aside, lost, troubled spirits--from their tormented minds, from their fear-palsied hands, out of their gibbering tongues, from their raw, raging energies bloom "the spirit [of justice, of meaningful labor, of protest] of the supreme and perfect flower of the madness of love."
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Show All==“Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” ==
1984, George Orwell, pg. 112.
Trylon
Bravo Phil - Bravo !!
Mike
======
Thank you.
Poignant and pertinent. I salute your exquisite call to love.
Every fall I gather large amounts of leaves (while most people are trying to be rid of them) to feed the soil and the worms and every spring I am sincerely grieved when I find that I have, even though I try to be more careful each year, harmed any worms in my soil preparations.
At the same time, the "Robins" are often nearby and clearly know that I am in league with them also.
Then there is the suffusing odor of the fecundity.
People I know think that I am anti-social.
No you're just a "gardener".
They love for us all to gather at political rallies and media events. They revel in the thousands that at times convene together. How is it disease is not a factor then? It appears to only be a problem when the 1% haven't organized the communion.
"Before I knowed it, I was sayin' out loud, 'The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing.'... I says, 'What's this call, this sperit?' An' I says, 'It's love. I love people so much I'm fit to bust, sometimes.'... I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it."
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 4
I just wonder why the 1% feel they are not part of the "whole shebang".
When the divisive practices of human society separated from natural dynamics, deemed sacred in their normative nature, result in the veil of claiming that resulting madness, I find myself standing firm in resisting that society's convention of condemnation of 'aberration': madness.
Those who actively resist do not indulge in the shattering being perpetrated. There is no instance of that war making peace, unity, health and life. Instead, it is coherence that that transcends threat. It is coherence in recognizing that sanity/madness dichotomy is a false construct. What is broken on the material plane, the intermediary psychological plane and the ultimate normative plane of which all of us are composed, are in in constant balancing within and .among us
There is no lie that moves through awareness without a portion of truth that is known before words, in the exquisite manifestation of these multiple planes in the creatural existence of the human portion of life that claims destiny rather than succumbing to 'fate'. Can it be said that it is in being unaware of normative unity that destiny crumbles into fate?
As long as the abusive forces use the pointing finger of control with condemnation of 'madness' at whim, I resist the imposition of that projection of abusive causality - a blaming of the victim; in negation - a usurpation and vandalism of only portions of individual elegance in sacred unity of process.
Is it in choosing an aggressive force of negation that the impotent wielders of extreme power, by virtue of their own mediocrity of shattered entity, demand demonization according to the dualisms of 'enlightenment discourse'?
Oh Philip Rockstroh, another whirlwind of tornadic sweep from the terrain whispering wasteland, again alights feet on the ground facing sunrise.
Poetry from a poet. Great article. Just one thing: Not a fan of J. Hoover, nor am I privy to his habits in the bathroom; however, a stool elevating the knees does lead to a more pulsatious evacuation.
Thanks, Phil Rockstoh, for your gloriously dark and beautiful 'un-Valentine'.
You had me at your reference to the noble earthworm. As any compassionate gardener will tell you, there really is no way to "Do no harm." Life is beautiful in it's complexity!
This was inspirational. Thanks, Phil.
I often wondered how some could write so beautifully and are able to put into words concepts that can swirl about in ones head so well.
It takes a special talent.
I am prone to reading several books at one time. I can read one on hard science and another on history, one of fiction and one on philosophy all at the same time and all turned over and marked to different pages. In any case i was reading a work that spoke to the Pineal Gland and the latest science around it.
This gland sits in the middle of the brain directly behind the middle of ones forehead. It was thought it served no real purpose until recent scientific studies showed it regulated melatonin and serotonin. It was with great interest I read that it also had the same structural makeup of the retina and had the ability to detect photons of light , very much like an eye.
It also has inside of it thousands of small micro-crystals and any that knows their science knows crystals can detect and receive energy waves and that crystals can emit their own light when broken down. There also suggestions by some scientists that it the source of DMT that is found in our bodies. DMT is a drug very much like LSD. It is a psychedelic.
The gland has the shape of a pinecone which was very much how the Ancients who spoke of the "Third Eye" and spoke of seeing higher truths with the third eye described it.
So I am fascinated by this all and set the book aside to reflect on this gland that can see light in the middle of our brains . I then decide to read some of "The Celtic Twilight" by William Butler Yeats and almost the very first chapter I read is called "The Visionary" where Yeats a friend who claimed to have "visions" and spoke once of a woman of light standing in the doorway peering inside, one that Yeats himself could not see.
This person, according to Yeats would write poems and words of great beauty that came to him and would pass them on and Yeats commented how some of the passages seemed like someone trying to put thoughts and ideas to paper that words could not properly describe.
Was it mere coincidence I picked this one passage up after that other book?
From "The Celtic Twilight"
>>The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions. Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them to their own minds. I told him I would write an article upon him and it, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention his name, for he wished to be
Always 'unknown, obscure, impersonal.' Next day a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words: 'Here are copies of verses you said you liked. I do not think I could ever write or paint any more. I prepare myself for a cycle of other activities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches. It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers.'
>>The poems were all endeavours to capture some high, impalpable mood in a net of obscure images. There were fine passages in all, but these were often embedded in thoughts which have evidently a special value to his mind, but are to other men the counters of an unknown coinage. To them they seem merely so much brass or copper or tarnished silver at the best. At other times the beauty of the thought was obscured by careless writing as though he had suddenly doubted if writing was not a foolish labour. He had frequently illustrated his verses with drawings,
We need our poets more then we need our Science. They see what we can not and put it into words for us.
GW: It's sychronicity, a principle I believe acts to shape events which naturally come into accord. Have you ever heard the expression, "Serendipity favors the prepared mind"? Because you retain a very open mind, mystics would say your guides are able to show you things that others would be resistant to learning or even noticing.
On my last trip to California about a year ago, I was reading a thick copy of seer Mary Summer Rain's, "Daybreak." I've been reviewing all the previously published data on earth changes as prophesied by a number of visionaries. In any case, Ms. Rain kept referring to her previous book, "Phoenix Rising." I had a strong feeling that if I could locate a large used bookstore in San Luis Obispo, that I'd find that book there. Not only did I locate the bookstore, its name is Phoenix, and yes that book was waiting there for me.
There's another used bookstore in a little town called Micanopy that's 11 miles south of Gainesville. I can't tell you how often I'd head there and find the EXACT book I was looking for.
There IS a divinity that shapes our ends... as Shakespeare noted. And while, as Martin Luther King attested, our Univers arcs towards justice, it also seems quite amenable with the goal of education. Every creature is designed to interact with and learn from its environment.
Great article full of paradox and irony and so shot through with deep meaning!
"Editorial scribes and hacks" indeed! Just the kind who would put out such hot air about the law clearing out and attacking the OWS for health reasons!
The allusion to J Edgar Goerring as Eleanor Roosevelt called him really cuts through the BS.
"We need our poets more then we need our Science. They see what we can not and put it into words for us."
Do you mean the poets or the scientists?
Poetry and science are two paths that lead us to a deeper understanding of our world.
WE have enough Scientists and not enough poets. Schools will not even teach the arts anymore.
Science focuses on the material world. There is enough of that to go around.The latest ipad built for us can not bring to me the same amount of joy and the feeling of connectedness as a work by Keats or that feeling one gets when seeing a sunset over the ocean.
Science teaches us nothing of love and compassion. It instead tries to tell us that such things are merely chemical reactions and that something like our greed is driven by the selfish gene for the good of us all or that those that believe in the spiritual are mentally ill.
It certainly has its place in describing the material world and can help make this a better world, but its limited by its own dogma and it creates things like the Atomic Bomb and like Genetically modified crops and like cluster munitions because it refuses to believe in something other then itself and believes the world of the spiritual is poppyock because it can not be defined by a mathematical formula or measured with its intruments.
It has become like the god of the old testament caliming itself the only GOD and tolerating no other paths to wisdom or knowledge.
We may have enough people with degrees in science, but we don't have enough scientists.
Your description of science is actually a description of something else - the ideology of scientific materialism, and technology. There are those who claim the mantle of science to preach the ideology of scientific materialism, but in doing so they corrupt their own cause, and the blame should be laid on those individuals and institutions, not on science as a way of understanding. If you are angry at finding money changers in the temple, blame the money changers, not the temple.
You can find eloquent refutations of scientific materialism in the writings of several of history's leading scientists (e.g., William James, Thomas Huxley, and especially Erwin Schrödinger's "Mind and Matter").
I find it curious that you wrote "Science teaches us nothing of love and compassion." In my view, the study of science leads to an understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, and inspires a profound sense of wonder and astonishment with regard to the workings of the world we inhabit. The knowledge that we are a part of the living universe, in a state of perpetual transmutation, leads inevitably to a less egocentric and more compassionate worldview. In this sense, the study of science leads us in the same direction as great poetry and the great religious teachings.
"The changing of Bodies into Light,
And Light into Bodies,
Is very comformable to the course of Nature,
Which seems delighted with transmutations."
Is that poetry or science? Or both?
Why elevate one and denigrate the other, when both disciplines are paths to truth? They are different paths, and they lead to different kinds of truth, but there is no intrinsic antagonism between them.
Excellent and inspirational points.
You open the door for science to grow far beyond it's current (primarily) materialistic paradigm.
What most folks are yet to consciously understand, is that the philosophic underpinnings of most everything that we imagine and think about, is formulated out of a very limiting materialistic reductionist paradigm -- thats now thankfully dying.
We needed grieve or be apologetic about the long ago formed social, cultural, and political choices and mindsets, that stemmed centuries ago from Bacon and Descartes.
We're here today exactly where we need to be, to understand that profound limitations ALSO stemmed from that thinking -- eroding and demeaning the sacred feminine principles that inspired and sustained reverence, that matter is instilled with spirit, as is ourselves, and our fragile Earth, and LIFE itself.
The new paradigm emerging reunites are minds and hearts, our actions and our principles, our spirits and our lives' purpose.
In that exchange, we benefit from sustainable and ever growing love (expelling fear), selflessness (expelling selfishness), abundance (expelling scarcity), peace (expelling war), interdependency and connectiveness (expelling isolation and separateness), collaboration and coalescence (expelling competitiveness and being fractured), and hope (expelling resignation).
Yes we can console each other that sadly, we made the best choices we could at the time, in handing over irresponsibly so much of our spiritual wholeness in the hands of organized religion. Instead of responsibly retaining our individualized faith in God, many people chose instead having and/or acceding disproportionate faith in institutions that were incapable of acting unconditionally in our favor.
Organized religions are institutions of the status quo, and thereby have too often become too stridently invested in maintaining a paradigm that drives us all toward unmitigated peril and devastation.
Our individual spiritual connectiveness is that which we re-invest in ourselves and the lives we lead in the world, in order to activate this paradigm shift.
For more similar postings, please see Chris Hedges'
"Occupy Draws Strength From the Powerless,"
at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/13-6
There is much to think about and be inspired by, in the dynamic discussion there.
Wow X 33!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Amazing stuff, Phil.
I love this paragraph:
"It is quite possible, he cannot drive the knowledge from his mind that our species, by means of manic consumption, is destroying our planet--our only home and collective body--yet the allegedly sane go along as if nothing of the sort looms. Given the state of the situation, it might be proof of one's sanity to be driven a bit mad with grief."
I meet this all the time. People who don't get it, feel nothing, are proud to be insensitive and inured to life itself. Even in this forum, there are a few posters who make light of the horrors, as if the orgy of death happening all around us is just one party. So why not smile, and join in.
This paragraph reminds me of Kahlil Gibran (as taken from, "The Prophet"):
"One does not have to be a monk, artist, poet, mystic or musician to approach their vocation with élan and ebullience; yet one should grant oneself the right to surrender to ardor while engaging in work. To derive meaning and resonance from life demands artful labor--the awful daring of choosing to give oneself over to responsibility, thus allowing one to occupy one's occupation, heart and soul."
This essay is chock full of gorgeous, rich metaphors. Wow. It's like a fine meal that comes with a calorie exemption!
On that note, years ago I was driving with a friend in Puerto Rico's rain forest when a dazzling rainbow formed before us. I begged my friend to "drive through it." She laughed at the thought... like it wasn't tangible enough to satisfy that possibility. That night I dreamt that I ate some roses and understood the urge to make beauty palpable. Interesting enough, years later while flying to Puerto Rico in a rainstorm, the plane passed through the perfect circle of a rainbow. For that is how its formation appears... mid-air!
A profound synchronicity, having just viewed "Oprah Presents Master Class: Laird Hamilton," where this legend of water's secrets -- literally plied the storm energy of a 50 ft wave accelerating a sinuous surfing path back upwards -- jumping skyward to pass directly through and meet that wave's just then manifesting beautiful stray rainbow.
Rainbows, such a gracious gift to us, profoundly perceptible to those observers whom geometry of place, sunlight, and water honor us with iridescence.
With the Sun behind us, and life's blessed water spherically transforming that radiance, we ride along the beams of another set of waves' energetic storm expression, with a smile …
In a world designed for the dance of miracles, the first to conceive of, and build armaments left wounds that have reverberated down the centuries. Llike you, I prefer to contemplate rainbows. If you have a chance, I'd be interested in your response to comments on today's Hedges thread. A week ago Mr. Hedges wrote an article that alleged that a group loosely termed the Black Bloc had infilitrated the OWS movement in Oakland; and that members of this group were doing their own assorted "hit and run" activities. Hedges felt the group had the marks of tactical infiltrators written all over them. So far, most comments are attacking Hedges' credibility as they defend Black Bloc, or otherwise suggest that Hedges is off the mark. It's curious because if Hedges is correct in his assertion, then these posters, allegedly rooting for the Left (and/or Progressive causes) are granting cover both to government agents and those at home using violent tactics.
I also pasted 2 comments from Hedges' article that relate to how forums like this one end up similarly infiltrated. Not a peep on those observations. Just the crowd pulling the rug out from under Hedges, as most boast their own versions of "Bring it on!" Violence, that is.
Very strange indeed.
Yes, I read yours and there were perhaps one or two dozen supportive comments, including indirectly one from me. Your comments were about one quarter of the way into the current record setting 760 responses, so very few people will ever be motivated to page down that far …
The degree and depth of obfuscation and superficial deception, is so intimidating on that thread, that attempting to stem that flood is .n.o.t. ACTUALLY LEFT in the realm of the possible.
It appears to me, that this was because those curiously attempting to read those threads, seemingly HAD to have been disrupted and disenfranchised from discovering the beneficial wheat berries of truth, buried under tons of cellu-LOSE-ity.
* * *
On Michael Moore's thread (w/ only 118), this purposefully bombastic and divisive attack against truth continues, and I posted and responded several times there (in a similar vein), in the hope of elevating the discussion and to deflect (& scrap off) some of the crap-storm inundating honest folks looking for answers.
See "A 75th Anniversary for the American Dream, a 25-Year Anniversary for Me"
at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/12
* * *
It's wonderful that Phil tipped his hat towards Chris provocative article, but likely moreover (as I perceive it) to the fetid and purposefully opaque bilge-water that it's massive commentary has been submerged within, saying:
"Oh, what vehement angels and dogma-besotted demons are unloosed by the process, and, often, it is difficult to discern the difference. Apropos, the latest leftist tempest as to whether the Black Block delivers belligerent balm or inflicts carcinogenic rancor to the OWS movement."
It seems that talking directly about agent provocateurs and deceitfulness, is much like 911, that only very crafty and committed writers (like Linh Dinh) can afford to do so. Perhaps Linh was less able to afford such, than he might have thought, as I've not seen him since on CD ?
We categorically know for a fact, that Phil is quite a ways beyond mere 2-valued (either or) logical understanding as in ONLY having involvement of either:
strident angels or ignorant demons.
(OWS' belligerent balm or carcinogenic rancor)
Yes, as you state : "Very strange indeed."
Perhaps Phil posses a "tempest" in a tea-cup game for us to unravel, where at least 'strident demons' and/or 'ignorant angels,' must have joined with the other two characterizations ?
It certainly occurs to me that the respective order is rather odd as well, as seen by matching up :
"vehement angels … as belligerent balm"
________________ vs. ________________
"dogma-besotted demons … inflicts carcinogenic rancor"
* * *
Would not one's initial assignation, more likely go the other way :
vehement angels inflict (accidentally) carcinogenic rancor
________________ vs. ________________
dogma-besotted demons inflict (accidentally) belligerent balm ?
AND
vehement demons inflict (purposefully) carcinogenic rancor
________________ vs. ________________
dogma-besotted angels inflict (purposefully) belligerent balm ?
Thank you for the response. I had no idea that thread grew so vast! I'll have to return to it tomorrow. As always, you say a lot in few words, and I'll have to read it through again to tap the insights fully. I'll respond tomorrow, it's been a LONG day.
In times of obstruction (of truth), obfuscation, and obtuse media disinformation campaigns, speaking of the forces working hard to undermine the public's recognition of the forces pivoted against it is a brave and necessary work. I am grateful that you and a handful of others recognize the presence (and intent) of those who do not make Truth their first or sworn cause.
As for the metaphor Phil used, that you mathematically turned this way and that, oftentimes what streams from the unconscious doesn't conform itself to the realm of logic.
Hope to see you again in these threads. Happy Valentine's Day.
You make an important point, so I metaphorically erase my insistence that Phil would categorically avoid limitations of two-valued logic.
Yes, his poetry is inspirited and beyond the veil of critical thinking (alone) that imposes so many limitations on living in this world (as if the materialistic and reductionist assumptions of existence were inviolate dogma).
Higher consciousness is a melding of the best parts of mindfulness and increasing awareness, where categorical limitations and impositions to conform -- can be overcome.
I love the grounded solidity, of worms' beingness as integral, and encompassing, as a laudatory exaltation of the essence of spirit -- my sincere appreciation and gratitude to such inspirational and uplifting meaning.
Phil reveals to us:
<< "At our best, we are graced by the type of moments … that an earthworm knows as earth passes through its body, as its body, in turn, passes through the body of the earth…Now, that is perfection achieved through labor; beauty incarnate; a living line of verse. … when one's character is aligned with one's destiny… one’s heart’s calling to passionate engagement, … May we all be so graced as to be granted an earthworm's portion of fate." >>
The purity of an earthworm's reverence in life, where it's material veil is so poignantly revealed, as merely a stretched mechanism to enrich earthly assets.
Why not us ?
To be surrendered to one's purpose unceasingly, to have Earthly life going on within and without oneself whilst embracing and moving toward greater abundance for what comes next.
What a blessed existence -- to enfold and savor life's elixir -- to eat up life itself in service to the greater.
Why not us ?
And when life ends, to have created fecund trails of ever growing spirals of life's sustainable makings, in passing through it.
We can learn much from nature's passion hidden and penetrating deep within, and then borrowing out so that flowers might bloom their radiance.
'the meek shall be bequeathed the Earth'
To consume life holy and not be consumptively rendered insignificant, is a passion I can sink my teeth into.
Despite what seems to be an uneeded purple tint laid over this prose, sometimes creating a fog, I join so many others in saying Wow! and Thanks.
I am passing this around as a must-read.
It must be the early signs of spring that many of us are identifying with metaphors like the earth, earthworm, and seed. Earlier today I finished an essay that had been on the drawing board for weeks, and its final sentence uses the metaphor of the seed of Light.
In any case, Phil's mind is a treasure! The poet has the rare capacity to link together the very items others would never consider, in relationship.
RE: "The architects of neoliberal imperium have built gleaming towers and sterile high-rises into the pure, blue heavens to avoid our perceived reek. What they detest, in fact, is the musky redolence of humanity..." ~ Rockstroh
ALSO SEE: "The Architecture of Doom" ("Undergångens Arkitektur")1991, NR, 119 minutes (on YouTube in 12 segments & available for streaming at Netflix)
This chilling documentary explores how artistic, cultural and historical trends forged the National Socialist aesthetic, which in turn contributed to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust.
Swedish-born filmmaker Peter Cohen, whose parents escaped the Nazis, examines Hitler’s failed career as an artist, his fascination with Wagner, the Nazi obsession with cleanliness, the paradoxical link between “beauty” and evil in the Third Reich, and more.
NETFLIX – http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The-Architecture-of-Doom/60000313
YouTube (12 segments) – http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=architecture+of+doom+Prometheo1&aq=f
Life and the madness of love! Yes indeed!
The decisive factor in the world is wisdom not knowledge, for wisdom is the awareness of what to do with knowledge. In fact, knowledge, ungrounded in wisdom,
is often stupid. Consider all the knowledge that has gone into the making of predator drones and depleted uranium weaponry. Consider the knowledge that goes into mainstream political strategizing. Bereft of moral compass and completely lacking in humanistic values, such knowledges are utterly stupid. Phil Rockstroh reminds us that wisdom requires imagination. For the wise are those who are capable of having visions. The knowledgeable people who are running our planet (into the ground) follow plans and projections, but they are incapable of entertaining visions. As Mr Rockstroh points out, such people don't have enough poetry within their souls.
A vision is something you can cultivate. Don't let elites tell you that some are visionary and others are not. This another hyped/irrelevant factoid among the elites' mountains of irrelevant idiocy. Visions are works of art, and visions of healthy societies are most valuable works, when conceived most broadly, and independently. Eveyone is a potential visionary, and we need everyone's enlightened, independent vision. We need the correlation of all visions to be our universal vision. We can't depend on the elites any further. It's suicidal to depend on psychopaths.
Georg Fuerstein:
"The technological 'progress'- the rational conquest of nature - has assumed irrational proportions....The world populations is continuing to grow exponentially, as is the tragedy of world hunger, and therefore the probability of political upheavals and oppression
"…Even the privileged suffer: from a fundamental disorientation…a marked decline of psychic health and physical fitness… a virulent consumer mentality - fed by 'hidden persuaders,' a stagnant morality, and free-for-all pluralism that governments seek to counter through totalitarian measures."
Phil's pathogen-to-the-establishment metaphor makes great prose, but what the picture caption refers to as "authorities dressed in hazmat suits" are, in fact, sanitation workers and Park Service grunts who were ordered, as part of their less-than-ebullient jobs, to clean up a squatters' camp. I would demand a bio-hazard suit as well.
What Phil's eloquent treatise neglects to mention, however, is that many (most?) #occupiers feel similarly about the 1% - that they are vermin and a plague upon the earth. What goes around comes around.
Eckhart Tolle:
"The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the evolution of consciousness. We need to go on to the next stage now as a matter of urgency; otherwise, we will be destroyed by the mind, which has grown into a monster. I will talk about this in more detail later.
"Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought." (con't below)
(con't from Tolle, above)
"Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before. You use it mostly for practical purposes, but you are free of the involuntary internal dialogue, and there is inner stillness.
"When you do use your mind, and particularly when a creative solution is needed, you oscillate every few minutes or so between thought and stillness, between mind and no-mind. No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power.
"Thought alone, when it is no longer connected with the much vaster realm of consciousness, quickly becomes barren, insane, destructive."
I wonder where are those who wish to trash and thrash Rockstroth: Are these words so perfect that the ill conceived baboons of contemporary finance are caught contemplating their naval? Are they rendered speechless, witless and feckless as they look deep into their own worm, and see that the good earth does not pass through them, but looms outside their gloominess shell? Do you think those yellow suited monkeys feel more safe inside? Ah yes, that's it. No longer do all them good Merikans need to fear Terrorism, just suit up and let your fears die away!
It is amazing how Rockstroth brings out the poetry in us! A gift bringing forth more gifts. Thanks again.
My son, a senior in High School, was a National Merit Finalist and won an AP Scholar Award. He is a writer, and has always defined learning as a wonderful way to conquer the complexities and beauties of the world. Last semester, the last one to count for college admission, he failed two classes and sucked in the rest.
I was shocked, and asked him why? He told me 'I suddenly realized all this was just to get me some stupid job somewhere. Now I have 4 more years of the same thing. My grades are supposed to define who I am and what difference will it make in the end? There are no jobs anymore and I can't think of a singe 'job' that I want to do. I just want to write.'
It was so sad. And so true. I hear myself coming to the same realization 30 years after he did.
It's not a bad idea to dis-invest from a dying paradigm, shades of getting out of a building before it collapses, and watching for falling debris as one exits. That is an apt metaphor for our times, as the systems put in place largely bring misery and rabid resource depletion to all... at great peril. However, amid the inevitability of this vast collapse, it doesn't mean that those who hold natural aptitudes, be they artists, writers, teachers, carpenters, inventors, healers, chefs, massage therapists, farmers have no place to plant their talents!
Thousands have attended The World Social Forum, and its motto is: Another World is Possible makes sense to me. Although it's not easy (swimming against the current to get to shore never is), it is timely for those with skill-sets to begin to look for ways to utilize them. For years I used to write articles and hand them to publications either with no pay or for a ridiculously small amount. (Try $25 for 2 full pages of the San Juan Star, i.e. a centerfold special edition.) Amassing a body of published work led to paid work. The student teacher may not yet hold a salary, but s/he can still teach. I believe we will move to a BARTER-based economy when the big Disaster Capitalism Tent implodes. It's in the early stages of this process now. And just as the broken pieces of Humpty Dumpty could never fit back together again, the old models suit that metaphor.
Your son evidently has a fine mind... I'd encourage him to use libraries and the Internet to study up on the subjects that most fascinate him. Let him self-educate, and seek part-time work until such time as the CALL for his unique brand of service sounds. If we survive the methane and CO2 levels rising, that call will come.
This wonderful essay reminds me of an incredible song--"Slip Inside This House" by the 13th Floor Elevators.
Thank You for writing this - this moved me so much very beautifully written - you are a writer whose work will live