Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Section 1

By Brian George

“Coming into this particular body, and being born of these particular parents, and in such a place, and in general what we call external circumstances; that all happenings form a unity and are spun together is signified by the Fates (Moirai).” —Plotinus, II.3.15

1

Is human meaning something that can be objectively established, like the structure of a molecule or a natural law? Or is the sense of meaning closer to a physical sensation, the perception of a self-evident truth, a preexistent certainty, an ontological connection to the primal core of our natures?

Recently I helped to lead a discussion on Thomas Nagel's “A View from Nowhere”—a text that looks at the problem of human meaning in relation to the subjective and objective modes of understanding. One idea caught the imagination of the group, and was repeated in various forms throughout the morning. The idea was: that we are specks of dust on a tiny planet that orbits an obscure sun in an infinitely vast cosmos. Therefore human life has no significance whatsoever.

I was a bit disappointed. This was, after all, a group of artists, who should have been militant in their defense of the importance of subconscious symbols. How could you trust your own creative process if you did not believe that your subjectivity had any right to exist?

There is a song from the 1970s that is often played—inexplicably—at weddings. Its refrain goes, “Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind” While I confess to liking this rock anthem by Kansas, it has been 30 years since I last regarded the concept as profound.

Sipping milk from a glass, I would lie awake at 3 AM. My alarm clock would tick. Its minute hand would move. Shadows thrown by headlights would twist branches across the ceiling. My intellect would soar to the heights and depths of space—only to realize that the self did not exist. Vertigo would then take over.

My head was empty—like a manikin's. I experienced the silence that would one day supersede the accident of our biology. Hormones fueled the experiment in tumescent nonexistence. Annihilation was more intimate than sex. The cold touch of the inanimate transformed me. These experiences of the void were, in their own way, true. My mistake was the all too common one—to confuse spatial extent with philosophical depth.


(Illustration: Alberto Savinio)

The Preexistent Race Descends/ Pythagoras (Section 6)/ Beginning

By Brian George

The void does not acknowledge any single name. 26,000 years escort precession of the equinox. Democracy precedes the egg by 10. Pythagoras was the 5th. As Euphorbos he fought at Troy. At Samos as Mermotimos he probed the sex life of the food taboo. He saw behind the stage, before it.
                                                                                     
Said the birds, "Be warned that you should never tamper with perfection!"
                               
He had the sight. Anonymous bequeathed the gift when he stayed late at Saqqara--in a flash, full access to encyclopedic transport. The back part of his head was popped open by the 12. In his own body the future could be touched. Out of black gold birds have forged his thighbone. 8 observe the strange laws of the Ogdoad: fear--as at once he learned to do.

Palm fronds sprout beyond the scorpionic claws. He came from far away.

Clamorous tides where the sun cast its length. Buildings from the sky hung, like a wedding of murdered archetypes. They cut the path. They exported the palm tree’s trunk. Through a cold sky Saturn rose above the wreck of Mohenjo Daru.
                                                    
What did Pythagoras learn from Zaratas the Chaldean? The age of the sphinx.
                                                                                             
Vast the convoluted curve. Space. The incarnations were concurrent, not consecutive. It was known from the start how many would survive. Enough. It was important that the symmetry broke. Computers electrocuted dead armies to the South. The secret was its own reward. It appeared. The war was old. The grounding of Omphalos--it is not a story fit for Baal Shem Tov’s dismembered children.      

There were many gods involved. Violence was generative. The Earth itself was pregnant. The path of creation was a paradox that no omniscience could untangle.

At Delos as Pyrrhos, Pythagoras collected dreams for naked warriors to perform. Before that as Aithalides, the pilot of the Argo, he brooded on the depth.

Unnatural the Earth’s history. Space was wider than the eye could see. It was made by hand. 1 year was the life span of each god. Teachers had sex with geometry. Space in and of itself encoded all the good parts of the former Earth.

1 memory served the transplanted population. It was traded back and forth, a beloved object, not too much worse for wear, before somehow being lost. The glow from an earlier period had not quite disappeared. "Do you have the time?" a bird said.

Few souls could outrun the centrifugal movement of the wheel.

What was left of prehistory you could put inside your mouth. Prove us wrong.

Serendipitous destruction. The dead threw their weight around. Populations thronged the Theban gates. In search of bodies they have multiplied the most ancient of explosions. Exact the arcade. It echoed with the march of giants. Like the seeds of some hallucinated growth, survivors of the great flood planted memories of their trauma. Shadows hardened into the code of Hamnurabi. Inside became outside. Zeus developed breasts. Ishtar put on her technocratic phallus.


(Illustration: Giorgio de Chirico, Head of a Philosopher)

Excerpts from the Reality Sandwich forum for "The Goddess as Active Listener"/ Revision of Part 1

By Brian George

(Note: I have expanded and revised the first section of "Revolution by Night." Also, I have added an epigraph by Henri Michaux.)

“I also saw there the Auroch, the Parpue, the Darlette, the Epigrue, the Cative with his pear-shaped head, the Meije, the Emeu with pus in his ears, the Courtiplian with his eunuch pace; Vampires, Hyperdruches with black tails, Bourrasses with three rows of stomach pockets, Chougnous in a gelatinous mass, Perfils with beaks like knives; the Cartuis with his chocolate odor, the Daragrues with damascened plumes, the Purpiassses with green and trembling anuses, the Baltrees with watered silk hides, the Babluits with their pockets of water, the Carcites with crystals on their mouths, the Jamettes with saw-toothed backs and tearful voices, the blear-eyed and almost decomposed Purlides, with their two venom jets, one looking haughtily down, the other up towards the sun, the Carjax and the Bayabees, rarely emerging from their parasitic life, the Paradrigues, so agile, surnamed jets of stone…Wide avenues suddenly opened up and the view dipped past crowds of spines and rumps to fall on the voids which were howling at the bottom in the universal confusion…”—Henri Michaux, from “Zoological Notes”

1
Strange bedfellows/ 6 questions about aliens

Hi Joan of Art, 

You wrote, “I really appreciate your imaginative matriarchal approach to narrative and recognition of the necessary threads we spiders weave into the cracks' of each other's psyches through imaginative hooey flab. I marvel at how you managed to present the game-changing wisdumb of aliens from a human perspective—WITHOUT being alienating, which is always my problem, but at this stage in the game I don't seem to care. What is your relationship to extra-terrestrials?”

—Please, will you watch your language! The ones I know prefer the politically incorrect name of “aliens,” which they take to be a kind of inter-dimensional joke.

Who, you may ask, is the butt of this black humor? That is the never ending question. Perhaps the eight-armed egg of Moebius knows, but he/ she cannot be tempted to say much, and we humans seem to have lost our keys to the grammar of the once universal language.

You could argue—as so many in search of re-virginization do—that certain aliens are “bad,” while others, more properly called E.T.s, are “good.” Vampiric Grays from Zeta Reticuli, for example, are out to tamper with our DNA. They are fond of cattle prods. To them, humans are a type of god that is powerless enough to eat. They can taste fear. They will shrink when we call them out. Nordic 7-D Pleiadeans are a particularly attractive group. Their white skins are translucent, and gleam. 4-D Snakes from Draco are the masterminds behind the International Monetary Fund. Their hearts are black, while the race of 9-D Ambassadors from Arcturus have no shadows.   
 
I can’t help but ask: doesn’t this just re-format the traditional light/ dark opposition that has made such a hash out of human history? How are alien or E.T. traits in any way distinct from the mix of forces that we struggle with each day? Instead, let me echo the Roman playwright Terrence, who said, “I am a man; thus nothing human is alien to me.” I would tweak this as follows: there is no part of the Macrocosm that is not—at least potentially—a part of my own body.

In the Ptolemaic cosmos, one argument for placing Earth at the central point was that it could not have an orbit. Circles were a perfect form, while the Earth was an impure mixture of four elements. If this is true, then the center of the body would seem like an odd place for a navel. The gods would disdain to communicate through such an opening. A hex would be placed on Omphalos. They would not want to catch germs.

Sal Rachele, in “The Truth about E.T.s,” argues that close to 100 percent of the Earth’s population is made up of species from other star systems, and he even gives an exact breakdown of the figures. Not only do E.T.s walk among us, but, according to Sal, they are most often indistinguishable from the average pedestrian on the street. All the better for those who would prey on the unsuspecting, and who hide their unnatural wet dreams under hats.

Let us say that you are standing at a crosswalk near the docks of the Generic City, above which a wave towers. There, you are attempting to determine the significance of each sign. Two signs—“Walk” and “Don’t Walk”—flash, but, above them, there are lights of three different colors, and the streets lead off in four directions. So: is it safe to cross?  FYI: that is not a Wagnerian helmet. Instead, those are Brunhilde’s horns. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.

In Chapter six of the Tao Te Ching, we read, “The great state should be like a river basin, the mixing place of the world, the feminine of the world.” And, in Chapter 49, “The sage has no fixed mind. She treats the mind of the people as her mind…I treat the good as good. I also treat the evil as good. This is true goodness. And in Chapter 41, “The great square has no corners.”

One can only wonder what other Earth species, such as cows and fish, would say about the benevolence of humans if they could speak. The verdict of an alien board of judges on our race would no doubt be severe—if they were to look at such things as Auschwitz, the bombing of Hiroshima, the BP oil spill, the Stalin purges, or the institutionalized violence of the global “free market.”

There is a statement that I think is from Moses Cordovero’s “Pardes Rimmonim,” or “Pomegranate Garden.” I can’t remember the exact quote, but it goes something like: “If each thing were allotted the judgment it deserved then the world would cease to exist. Let us hope that love is the operative principle, and that we will all clap when the actors take their bows.

Joan of Art, you had asked, “What is your relationship to extra-terrestrials?” Let me respond to your question with six questions of my own: 

1) How “alien” are they, really, and is the shiver of uncanniness we feel a tribute to the closeness of our bond? 

2) Why do “aliens” approach humans in the most intimate of settings, such as bedrooms, which they enter with no prior notice, almost as though some long standing relationship were in effect, of which their Earthly counterparts, only, remain unaware? 

3) If they are exobiological, then why do they have such an interest in our bodies, which they violate with impunity, leaving only a few hieroglyphic scars, as we find that their zany transplants and their Fascist interventions often do more good than harm?
  
4) And how should we interpret this incestuous family drama: heads or tails, love match or Greek Tragedy? 

5) Are they the servants and we the masters, now grown senile, on whose behalf they perform their initiatory rites? 

6) Is our categorization of these presences as “aliens” a kind of magical act to avoid confronting the full fear and wonder of the dimension that they come from, the home that we left some indeterminate time ago, on which a door slammed shut?

(IllustraVictor Brauner, Eventail du Poete)

Excerpts from the Reality Sandwich forum for "The Goddess as Active Listener/ Part 3

By Brian George

The 12-step curriculum of the wormhole; only two lines
could be saved from the Mahabharata

Hi Lance,

You wrote, “I just realized that George's writing parallels the layers of dreams I just saw in the movie 'Inception'. There's a time-release / time-differential thing going on where some parts you get immediately and some just 'pop' in when you're not even thinking about it.”

It amazes me how moments of great significance can pass almost unnoticed at the time, and yet something has been seeded and set in motion in such a way that it will later smash and then rearrange your world. I, very luckily, became aware of this early on, and ever since have been reluctant to describe any potential teaching moment as being either a “positive” or a “negative” experience, until—at a minimum—several years have gone by.

When I was a senior at Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Massachusetts, I had a “Cultural and Intellectual History of Europe” teacher called Samuel Sleeper. He was gruff but not especially loveable—a classic professorial type, with a tweed jacket and Meerschaum pipe, brilliant but absent minded and more than a bit disgruntled, since he was teaching at a high school and not a college. He seemed to forever be picking some piece of mucus or tobacco off of his lip.

His eyes fixed on a point known only to himself, words almost but not quite exiting from his mouth, his hand half-raised in some archaic gesture, Mr. Sleeper would drift through the corridors of our shopping-mall-style school—as though drawn by the field of a Nietzschean magnet, as though each door were the cover of one of the Great Books. At times, he would sense some strange disturbance in the field, as when, for example, a student might flag him down to ask a question about homework. He would pause, annoyed, as his eyes refocused on the third dimension, before answering a question that the student did not ask.

His lack of immediate focus was the sign of some deep philosophical assault on the Abyss. He would spend five minutes in tamping the tobacco into his pipe, and then stare at it, and then just as studiously remove all of the tobacco he had just put in.

Due to my inadvertent courting of the power of the World Snake, the egg that had contained the small city of my childhood was just about to be smashed apart. One night, at around 2AM or so, I experienced a kind of volcanic upsurge in crude visionary energy, which led to the creation of my first true poem—a 16 page megalomaniacal teenage Mahabharata. Very foolishly, perhaps, I turned to the most self-important teacher that I could think of for assistance. Mr. Sleeper agreed to serve as editor for these 16 pages of archly literate hallucination.

Slowly puffing on his pipe, and pausing every few minutes to pick a piece of food off of his tie or sport jacket, the Incarnate History of the West, the Living Sculpture of Praxiteles pondered, as the up and down wagging of his enormous head came finally to  rest. He said, “Well, here is a good line down at the bottom of page three, and here is another one on 16 that has a bit of potential.”

I was crushed, as might be expected, and did my best to immediately forget his assessment of me as a self-deluded dilettante. This I managed to do—to some extent, and with variable success—for the rest of the school year. But his judgment haunted me. I found good reasons to ignore it: Mr. Sleeper was a snob. I was a working class kid from the wrong side of Worcester who had somehow stumbled into an affluent school. His most immediate concern, no doubt, was to put me in my place. The fact that such reasons were accurate helped to cover but not to heal the wound that had been so casually opened up. In retrospect, however, this was a crucial teaching moment and key turning point. Mr. Sleeper, in his arrogant and blissfully accidental way, had offered me a gift—a great gift—a fact that I came to acknowledge almost immediately upon graduation.

I was smart, yes, and reasonably well read, but there were nonetheless gigantic holes in my knowledge. During the two years before I went to the Art Institute of Boston, during which I was working as a janitor at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette—cleaning ink off of every imaginable surface, only to find that it had reappeared—I would spend almost all of my free time going book by book through the stacks at the Clark University Library. My teenage grandiosity had been killed by Samuel Sleeper, and I had turned into a kind of ghost.

But these two years of contemplative solitude were the womb from which my mature creative vision would be born.


(Illustration: Max Beckmann, Beginnings)

Excerpts from the Reality Sandwich forum for "The Goddess as Active Listener"/ Part 2

By Brian George

Moebius revisited; our stories return from the world of light to haunt us

Hi rodomontade,

You wrote, “Historical and artistic references don't usually have much resonance in my own search...I'm certainly intrigued by the ‘What if’ question, as my own life seems to have been altered by late-term, arbitrary intrusions/suggestions/interventions by others. However, that interest is an offshoot of questions about ‘decision-making,’ and whether decisions, as generally construed, are actually possible.

“‘Decisions’ seem unrelated to acts of ‘free will’ and are generally simply retroactive explanations, justifications, rationalizations, etc. Is there some knowable nexus between events, meetings with mentors, etc., and what, for lack of a better term, is called ‘fate?’ Many of us have experiences of the type that you describe here. Does the acting out of such an encounter at the time—and especially in retrospect—simply constitute the fulfillment of a need—an addiction, really—for stories with a narrative arc?”

So, to summarize what I understand you to be saying: you distrust conventional modes of interpretation, whether artistic, historic, or personal, and suspect that the world may be a kind of three-dimensional Rorschach blot, upon which we project our needs. Yes, what appear to be “meaningful coincidences” do occur, but perhaps these have less to do with Fate than with our desire to read the random patterns of our experience as a narrative.

For many years I avoided telling stories, for reasons similar to your own; the bits and pieces of the contemporary world did not seem to fit together, at least not on the level that I lived. Events were signs, to be read, but it was clear that the Ur-Text—if such a thing existed—was not set up to be user-friendly. Then too, my stupidity did not seem like an accident. If our pea-brains are the result of random changes in our DNA, as we have been told, then why would we not be content with sex and food, instead of yearning for their metaphysical equivalents? Large scale myths had meaning for me, yes, but there appeared to be a gulf between the larger patterns and the smaller ones.

In August of 1986, however, I had an experience of being lifted out of the solar system by a tornado, as I mention in “A Brief Biography,” for “energetic realignment by a race of acupuncture manikins.” In a kind of anteroom to the created world, I was shown the wheels which contain all of history, in which the beginning, the middle, and the end of every story are perceived as being simultaneous. Upon my return, after crashing through the roof of my apartment building, I had the sense that everything around me was about to spontaneously combust. I reached up and out to touch the lamp beside my bed, but had to yank my fingers back; the metal was too hot to touch.

For weeks, I kept finding evidence of a change. Shelves of books at the Copley Square Library appeared to have been moved, and everything in my neighborhood was just a little bit off. As in the movie “Dark City”, some things had been added, and other things left out. A subtle breach between dream and waking had occurred, which rendered both terms obsolete. The gulf between the upper and the lower worlds began to seem like a theatrical effect.

A revolution had occurred by night. My family, friends, and countrymen were unaware that a change in the narrative voice had removed the Earth from beneath them. For my own part, I felt seized and violated by my subjection to the small hands of the larger pattern. But then again, it would be easy to convey the wrong impression; the experience was one of equal ecstasy and fear. The seed of my current orientation had been planted: that our stories are more real than we are, and that the already complete story creates our lives retroactively.

Still, I can see the wheels, and feel the violence of the tornado, as the solar system tumbles into the three rings of an atom, and I can hear a soft voice asking, “Brian, do you know who I am?” I often wish that I had an encyclopedic memory—or, at the least, a half-way adequate one. Perhaps the Ur-Text operates on a need-to-know basis; it could tell us more, but it would have to kill us. Enough remains of the experience that I shiver when I think of it, as the force of the swirling energy begins to draw me back there.


(Illustration: Brian George, Time Spiral, 2004)

 

Excerpts from the Reality Sandwich forum for "The Goddess as Active Listener"/ Part 1

By Brian George

Revolution by night/ 6 questions about aliens

Hi Joan of Art, 

You wrote, “I really appreciate your imaginative matriarchal approach to narrative and recognition of the necessary threads we spiders weave into the cracks of each other's psyches through imaginative hooey flab. I marvel at how you managed to present the game-changing wisdumb of aliens from a human perspective—WITHOUT being alienating, which is always my problem, but at this stage in the game I don't seem to care. What is your relationship to extra-terrestrials?”

—Please, will you watch your language! The ones I know prefer the politically incorrect name of “aliens,” which they take to be a kind of inter-dimensional joke.  

Who, you may ask, is the butt of this black humor? That is the never ending question. Perhaps the 8-armed egg of Moebius knows, but he/ she cannot be tempted to say much, and we humans seem to have lost our keys to the grammar of the once universal language. 

Let me respond to your question with six questions of my own: 

1) How “alien” are they, really, and is the shiver of uncanniness we feel a tribute to the closeness of our bond? 

2) Why do “aliens” approach humans in the most intimate of settings, such as bedrooms, which they enter with no prior notice, almost as though some long standing relationship were in effect, of which their Earthly counterparts, only, remain unaware? 

3) If they are exobiological, then why do they have such an interest in our bodies, which they violate with impunity, leaving only a few hieroglyphic scars, as we find that their zany transplants and their Fascist interventions often do more good than harm?  

4) And how should we interpret this incestuous family drama: heads or tails, love match or Greek Tragedy? 

5) Are they the servants and we the masters, now grown senile, on whose behalf they perform their initiatory rites? 

6) Is our categorization of these presences as “aliens” a kind of magical act to avoid confronting the full fear and wonder of the dimension that they come from, the home that we left some indeterminate time ago, on which a door slammed shut?


(Illustration: Roberto Matta, Being With)

Habits of the Heart/ Part 9

By Brian George

Telos; the Wayward Comet

Revolting against fate, we can also project our desire for completion on the future, as though it were somehow different from the past. Six of one, a half-dozen of the other. The more things change the more they stay the same; it is not so easy to escape from the habits of the heart. We are the ghosts who inhabit the dead bodies we create. We are haunted by the Real. It is possible too that our habits are the teachers that we search for, however bad they may be. We are the archeological footnotes to a world that never was, the memory of which has been implanted in our genes; thus each act of our history has already been recorded. We, the slaves of post-traumatic stress, are true experts in the renovation of the labyrinth. But this is not the "future world" of which I earlier spoke.

Habits of the Heart/ Part 8

By Brian George

Nostalgic Industries Reconstitute the Ideal

Right and left change places; unconscious myths create unnatural alliances. Perception lags behind the fact of interdependence in this technologically most complex of societies. The Human Genome Project has stamped its seal of approval on the engine of our descent. Reverse engineering will remaximize the conditions for our growth.

Why should it be so difficult for each good individual to explain the meaning of his actions, or to put her purposes—already clear—into the context of the macrocosmos, or to talk to a tree? It should not be difficult to create a circle out of stories, as other cultures have, or to celebrate the mute expressiveness of objects, or to touch the Earth, or to recognize the full existence of the other. It should not be difficult, but it is. The hand of a demiurge has intervened. We do not inhabit space. We are new—although ancient evils corrupt us. Reality is virtual. Homeland security depends upon the reproduction of the logo.

"Character is fate," said Heraclitus. The external world provides each subject with the nurture he deserves. Accidents enforce the law. The subjective world turns inside out. Values diverge. Paths intersect. Is there anything human for which the self is not responsible? Does good character compel us to speak truth to power, to correct injustice, to defend the orphan and the widow? There would be a price to pay; our arrogance would upset the predetermined order.

Though wealth is no proof of providence—as nothing could be—perhaps poverty is a more certain sign that one is not of the elect. Luck is a tribute to the true values of the self. Injustice is the price of a civilized society. Hard labor teaches the unenlightened to obey. Exploitation by the Carlyle Group improves the net value of the wilderness. Exxon will transform the demonic wastelands of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. Grace cannot be earned. Wealth cannot be redistributed. The transcendent watcher legislates from above. Emerson wrote, "Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?" 150 years later we are waiting for an answer.

Luckily, the past does not exist. The future has not yet been created. A golden egg floats on the ocean. Archetypes are unmanifest. Symbols cannot act. There was no race before us. America is itself a dream. Do we have some obligation to those not present, to the dead or the unborn, to those who cannot speak for themselves? In his draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that our settlement here was "effected at the expense of our own blood and treasure, unassisted by the wealth or strength of Great Britain"—forgetting how recently the British had defended the young colonies from French and Indian attacks. Fathers exist to be killed. Mothers more quietly disappear.

So too we are convinced that we have given birth to ourselves—"ex nihilo." There is no one like us! There never was, never will be, and therefore we owe nothing except what we choose to give to anyone. The self is good. The other is—at least potentially—bad. The best government governs least, and all schemes to relate the self to the macrocosmos are suspect.

This approach provides us with a maximum of latitude to act. We "do what we will," but it is only chance that interprets what will come from the subconscious. We are free to create a place for ourselves, a hermetically sealed space to which no gods have been invited, and, if we are not happy, then we are free to walk away. The approach makes it difficult, however, to determine the true meaning of an action. If a part exists—however perfect its autonomy—the fact that it exists implies also the existence of a whole, as well as some just proportion between the two. If the whole does not exist then the part means almost nothing. Moods arise. Phenomena come and go.

Let us now return to “Habits of the Heart.” Again, let us ask what freedom is for; we should ask also if we serve some end beyond the self, and, if so, whose. Are we parts of one living whole? If we are, does this interconnectedness limit or expand the true potential of our freedom? Can the one be many? It is not that the four contemporaries from chapter 1 do not share in a common moral language. This language does exist—the authors refer to it as the "first language of individualism”— but it is not adequate, in and of itself, to allow them or us to address the nature of success, the meaning of freedom, and the requirements of justice upon which the creation of a good society would depend. As the power of the multinational conglomerate grows, it is paradoxical that our response is to define ourselves more narrowly. To each his own.

There is an almost tragic contradiction at the heart of the American Dream. If each of us is endowed with ultimate freedom—not only to pursue our own happiness but also, if we choose, to ignore any demands that might be placed on us by others—then it becomes difficult if not impossible for us to collaborate on any common project. Society becomes a blind accretion of competing interest groups. Reconciliation is projected backwards as the dream of a simpler time --that never was, in which the corrupt industrialist lay down with the wholesome worker to be exploited.

As the perfect is the enemy of the good, so too freedom—as abstract ideal—subverts the potential for true liberation. No conceptual framework exists that would now allow us to translate the American Dream into reality. At the moment, it is best experienced through the golden haze of nostalgia.


(Illustration: Hans Glaser, Strange objects over Basel, 1561)

Habits of the Heart/ Parts 6 and 7

By Brian George

6

The Enigma of the Sign

Though the champion of the common man, the Left can be contemptuous of the superstitions that now hold sway in the Corn Belt. Social science will create a better Average Joe. Red state patriots are happy to return the contempt. The Clear Channel markets propaganda as consensus through the behaviorist technology of talk radio. The Big Lie also spreads like a virus. We must take heart, as even icons of disinformation are not always wrong.

Marxism has been discredited, and has vanished from all but a few strongholds, such as North Korea and Cuba. At the same time, as pure doctrine, its mystique grows ever stronger at the humanities departments of our major universities. The center Left carefully keeps its distance from the edge, but also sacrifices a good part of its passion in the process. Unionized dock workers will not again engage in pitched battles with the police force of San Francisco, as they did in 1934, or impose their alternate order on the streets. Social justice as an immanent aspect of the real has now fallen into disrepute. Unions dissolve; their creators take with them the last living records of that year, of the death of greed, of the flash of mutual self-interest that turned chaos into care.

Their descendants believe that it benefits the economy when a millionaire does not pay taxes. Warfare keeps us safe. Civil liberties are a threat to freedom. It is not cars but trees that pollute the atmosphere. The happy warrior takes a step back in order to leap forward.

A vision of archaic solidarity haunts the progressive imagination. "It takes a village to raise a child," wrote Hillary Clinton, quoting an old African proverb. This proverb was repeated to me by a friend from the Ebo region of Nigeria who, as it turned out, picked it up from reading Clinton's book. One may safely wonder if the anthropologist was told only what she wanted to hear—even if this required the invention of a proverb.

The concept of social justice works better as a description: Deconstructed lifestyle enclaves leap from the pages of a National Geographic. It is important that one not issue ultimatums to the living. One should not pursue an object just because it is good; one should pick, if one so chooses, the least bad or the most attractive object from the great variety that free trade with the Third World makes available. Reluctant to take the moral initiative, to employ the word "should" or to reclaim the language of individual responsibility from the Right, the Left now advances a philosophy of incremental causes. Bold futurist experiments give way to the shoring up of relics from the Great Society.

7

Damned If You Do; Damned If You Don't

The spiked goddess Liberty has a surfeit of defenders. Free traders scream for the growth of corporate welfare. All risk will be public; all benefits will accrue to the one percent, as is only fair. Radical feminists join forces with Christian reconstructionists to eradicate the scourge of pornography. Mind/ body orgasms rape the 144,000. Such violence is an initiation; it does not have much to do with sex. Alien wisdom will enforce the return of a solar cult, to be fed by a species die-off. We are heading nowhere fast.


(Illustration: Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1931)

Habits of the Heart/ Parts 4 and 5

By Brian George

4

Exemplary Lives

Brian Palmer is no longer a workaholic. A period of reconsideration followed the collapse of his first marriage. He is now devoted to his second family—but in exactly the same manner that he was formerly devoted to his work. Things could easily change again—with a new romance, a few gray hairs, or even the most arbitrary of changes in the weather. To Brian, the great thing about California is that anything is allowed. The main requirements are to not harm others, to be affluent enough to afford a house, and to indulge whatever habits you may have behind the safety of closed doors.

For Joe Gorman, the goal or a good life involves service to one's family and community. Oddly, Joe does not choose to see his extended family too often. Suffolk, the town in which he lives, is not really a traditional community at all but rather a "bedroom community"—the majority of whose residents commute to work in Boston or to industrial parks that have landed in the nearby suburbs like large, hermetically-sealed UFOs. Joe inhabits the Suffolk that surrounded him as a boy—a place of lazy afternoons at the soda fountain of a drug store, a place where white males argued politics at the barber shop, a place founded by the pilgrims in 1632. Joe does not see the same Suffolk as his neighbors—upwardly mobile professionals drawn by the momentarily low housing prices—who have no interest in history, and are glad to put Joe in charge of all commemorative celebrations. They will soon move somewhere else.

Margaret Oldham is a therapist, for whom the goal of a good life is for each person to develop a mature sense of autonomy. No external demand should compel us. We are not answerable to the needs of others; in turn we should expect no assistance from them, except what they might freely choose to give.

As nature is red in tooth and claw, no guarantees will be offered to the Calvinist elect. Justice is blind. The modern therapist does not see evil in the machinations of the growing crypto-fascist state. Victims attract their abusers. Margaret says, "I just sort of accept the way the world is and then don't think about it a whole lot." Life is difficult. Relationships take work. Industry brings happiness. Rich frat boys with a history of addiction can go on to steal the presidency. The poor are free to inherit large amounts of wealth. Help is available at fair market value. Freedom, in the last analysis, is no more and no less than the freedom to walk away. Except by law, Margaret does not believe that she is responsible even for her own children.

Wayne Bauer is a political activist, for whom the goal of a good life is the creation of a level playing field—in the form of a society in which not only procedural but also some degree of distributive justice reigns. The poor would be free to compete on equal terms with the rich. He gives us little sense, however, of what a substantively just society would look like, or of what would really change following the day of liberation. The new society might look very much like ours—except that everyone would have an equal chance of getting a good job. Poverty could then be attributed to some genuine moral defect.

Each citizen would be free to live out of a shopping cart beneath the underpass of a highway. There is, after all, only so much land along the coast of Malibu; it could accommodate only a few more than the existing number of houses.

5

Opposites Attract the Past

Freedom can be interpreted as a presence or an absence. As an absence, it is pregnant with a myth—that the overthrow of King George would be enough, once and for all, to create a context for the fulfillment of our dreams. As a presence, no incarnation could be equal to the archetype. Opposites point to a common origin. Divergent readings of shared values lead to an unacknowledged war. Enemies can be found in one's own family.

Conservatives turn radical. Practitioners of the Tao of bait and switch, they objectify mass fears to introduce the Brave New World by stealth. Neo-Federalists advance a strategy to suspend the Constitution. Leviticus replaces Christ. Death by stoning serves many purposes. Torture is again allowed. Militant Calvinism destroys the strategic hamlet it would save.

Wal-Mart uproots the last of the mom and pop businesses. As it laments the permissiveness of 1960s, and the child rearing practices that supposedly led to today's crop of sex and violence crazed narcissistic youth, the right pursues a reductionist agenda of every man for himself—and himself alone, without regard for the social order that gives birth to the individual, the powers that protect him, or the shared resources that contribute to his growth. Born again materialists incite a war of any against all. Answerable to his version of the American Dream alone, the free economic agent is not a situated subject.

It is true that we are not "from" here, are we, any more than we are from "there," but no act of faith can remove the ancient quarantine from the farm. There is no love lost between Earth's overlords and their livestock. Grace manifest as fear has aimed a death blow at each object that once bound the destinies of the young at heart to nature. Omniscient software is at hand. A Federal Freedom Net will soon monitor the e-mail of each citizen—the least of whom could pose a clear and present danger to the corporate fascism of the state. Each suspect word will be tagged. Each insult to the true cross will be color coded for immediate or future use.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," said Alistair Crowley, occult superhero and closet supporter of National Socialism. Here opposites attract. Crowley was also a darling of the counterculture. His books were fun to read after dropping LSD.

Following the injunction to "do what thou wilt"—for his own profit or in service to a cause, who can know—Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush, acted as a financial intermediary for the Nazis throughout the whole of the1930s and into the beginning of the Second World War. For this he was censured by Congress in October, 1942, when five firms controlled by Union Banking Corporation, of which he was a director, were seized under the “Trading with the Enemy Act.” According to Charles Higham, former investigative reporter for the New York Times, it was feared that prosecution on a charge of treason would lead to an untimely scandal—not that any time would have been good—and  “would have drastically affected public morale, caused widespread strikes and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services.” At the war's end, the federal government seized an additional 18 firms that were controlled by the UBC.

The enemy combatant looks very much like us. Six million plus skeletons fit comfortably into the closet of the oligarch. There is space left over. Compassionate conservatism may yet cleanse our homeland of the eugenically unfit.