two fish

           Moog Modular

Thank you Robert Moog!

Moog died today, age 71. In rememberance, the beginning of a piece on Moog (rhymes with ‘vogue’) published April, 2000 in salon.com.

Robert Moog
His invention had an extraordinary impact on how musicians create, and radically changed the way music is made.

By Frank Houston

In the 1920s a Russian inventor named Leon Theremin unveiled the first purely electronic instrument. You played the theremin by waving your hands in the vicinity of two metal rods, controlling pitch and volume, that were attached to a nondescript wooden cabinet. Between the strange arm motions and the instrument’s invisible machinations, the theremin’s overall effect in performance was theatrical and mysterious.

But like the 200-ton telharmonium, the world’s first mechanical music synthesizer (invented by Thaddeus Cahill around 1900), the theremin was difficult to play. In 1955, four years after the theremin’s eerily weepy sound was employed in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” RCA introduced the first modern synthesizer. The machine made sounds by manipulating electrical waves to denote timbre, pitch and volume. Like early computers, it filled a room and was tended by men in lab coats.

Moog Sonic 6

A few years later Robert Moog, a graduate student in physics at Cornell University, published a magazine article explaining how to build a theremin, offering do-it-yourself kits for $49.95. Orders poured in, and Moog sold 1,000 that year. “We had $13,000 in the bank,” he recalled recently, “a humongous cache of wealth for a graduate student back then!” The windfall enabled a career that helped bring electronic music out of the realm of novelty acts and university labs. A decade after the first RCA machine, Moog introduced the first widely adopted electronic instrument – the synthesizer that bears his name.

When Moog (rhymes with “vogue") unveiled the Moog music synthesizer in 1965, his engineering skills combined with a bit of business luck to radically change the way music was made. Synthesizers went from being computers to instruments that could be found in any music store. The flowering of rock music may have come via Leo Fender, Les Paul and the Gibson Guitar Co., but the innovative music of the early 21st century owes far more to Moog and his imitators and successors.

Mini Moog

After getting some exposure to the liberal arts at Columbia University’s Engineering School, Moog began graduate education in the engineering physics department of Cornell University. He took eight years to get his Ph.D., largely because of his part-time hobby: building theremins and other electronic instruments. The degree came in 1965, a year after Moog launched his synthesizer business. Moog built his synthesizer in 1964 after a composer told him about the need for user-friendly electronic instruments utilizing new solid-state technology. The Moog was modular: You used patch cords to select your waveform (the sound’s timbre) and frequency (pitch), and plugged in the interface – a keyboard, instead of the binary code on paper that had defined the first RCAs. Moog’s engineering wizardry did the rest.

Significantly, Moog’s was the first synthesizer to use attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes, set with four different knobs, which control the qualities of a sound’s onset, intensity and fade. Like many of his designs, Moog’s envelope generators became a basic component of later synthesizers. . . RCA synthesizers, intended for an elite market of labs financed by universities and record companies, had cost $100,000 and up. In 1967 the new Moog sold for $11,000. It wasn’t the only synthesizer around; many experts also commend Donald Buchla’s modular synthesizer, built around the same time. But the Moog became prized for its utility and elegance, making Moog the name that brought synthesized music to the masses.

The Moog’s biggest break came in 1969, when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos had a huge, Grammy-winning hit with “Switched-on Bach,” . . . The Beatles introduced a new Moog in the majestic “Because,” on “Abbey Road,” . . . In 1971, Carlos brought the Moog to cinema, scoring Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” with electronic Beethoven [she also scored The Shining, and played Moog synths for TRON] . . .

The synthesizer also boasted the voltage-controlled lowpass filter that came to be known as the Moog filter, capable of making a variety of full horn, string and vocal timbres. The filter was patented in 1968, much to the envy of the competition, who “ate their hearts out,” Moog says. They “all came up with voltage-controlled lowpass filters, but most of them sounded like shit, if I do say so myself.” . . .

         
Wendy Carlos & her circa 1971 Moog studio

Robert Moog

James Hillman in “A Terrible Love of War” (PDF review here) writes of America (pp. 127-28):

Mars is battle rage, an insane red fury in a field of action. Firing the weapon brings Mars immediately into the scene, saving a man from cowering and trembling, from feeling himself a victim, and shakes him from his self-occupied inertia at a loss to himself and to his unit.

Since the god is in the gun, the passionate love for these weapons may express less a love of violence than a magical protection against it. Handgun – a fetish or amulet to hold at bay the fear of injury or death, the passivity of inertia, and, in ordinary civilian life, to have in one’s hands a charm against the paranoid anxieties that haunt the American psyche. The continent is filled with roaming revenants, giant spirits of destroyed forests, buffalo spirits, slaughtered tribes, drowned valleys behind dams, ghosts of the lynched hanging from trees, miasma hovering over rapacious levelings and extractions, unjust executions named “due process,” knifings, abattoirs. The land not only remembers, it is humming with agonies, a pulsing layer of the collective unconscious deposited there by American deeds recorded as American history.

“Iron all of itself works on a man.” The automatic in my hand brings Mars to my side. God in his heaven may not smile on me or deliver me from the valley of death; he might long ago have forgotten my name and I may not be among the chosen, but so long as my gun is within my reach the ghosts can’t get me.

Caputo in Vietnam remembers one of his men who suddenly pops an old woman they were holding. The man later explains, “Phil, you know the gun just went off by itself.” Automatic. The autonomy of the god. Because a god is in the gun it is demonic, so that control of the gun in your hand is not altogether in your hands. The question remains whether control of weapons by humans can ever be achieved without a more radical appreciation of the inhuman factor.

Joseph Rowe writes
In all the excellent material that has been published and broadcast (notably by Bill Moyers) about stories and myths of the hero figure in Campbell, there seems to be little awareness of the fact that the hero archetype is really one pole of a dialectic, one which I also overlooked in my previous post. It cannot be complete without its Other, the Hero’s complement (and in a sense, his opposite) which I shall call the Sage, though there are other possible ways of describing it.

Campbell himself is keenly aware of this dialectic. He continually discusses and alludes to it in many ways in his writings. He associates the strong emphasis on Hero archetypes mostly with Western traditions, and with the masculine pole; and strong emphasis on the Sage archetype with the Eastern traditions, and the feminine pole. Of course this is a generality, with commonsense caveats against reductionism – after all, these poles exist within each of us, psychically. But the historical and cultural manifestations are fascinating, and can perhaps be helpful for dealing with them in our own lives.

In a nutshell, the Hero says : “I will.” The Sage says “I am.”

Action vs. Being.

There is an ineluctable tension, and sometimes even a conflict between these two. This tension will always return sooner or later, no matter how many times we think we’ve “solved” it with truisms such as “true action is non-action.” We can verify this in our own lives. Of course the two poles of the dialectic can (and must) be reconciled. Figures like Jesus and the Buddha are great inspirations. But it’s not as easy as we think! And it’s a process, not a static formula or solution.

It reminds me of something Ram Dass once said (quoting approximately):

“Our human predicament seems to be that we must live with two truths simultaneously: that all Being is One, absolutely and mind-bogglingly perfect, just as it is; and also that there is an experience of suffering, and of wrongness, and that compassion compels us to do something about it, to try to make things better.”

The poles of Hero and Sage have always existed, of course, but different cultures and different epochs of human evolution have placed very different emphases on one or the other. Historically, heroism comes into its fullest expression, according to Campbell, with the advent of warlike, patriarchal cultures, who give priority to masculine, sky-gods. These religions replaced the older Bronze-age, goddess-oriented religions, and their emphasis on wisdom, acceptance of impermanence, and the cyclic, cosmic order of time. Campbell is worth quoting at length here, from the chapter called “The Serpent’s Bride” in Occidental Mythology:

“For its is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth, but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of both wealth and joy. In the older mother myths and rites the lighter and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature-powers the character mostly of darkness — to which, also, a negative moral judgment now was added. For, as a great body of evidence shows, the social as well as mythic order of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed. Where the goddess had been venerated as the giver and supporter of life as well as consumer of the dead, women as her representatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as well as in cult. Such an order of female-dominated social and cultic custom is termed, in a broad and general way, as the order of Mother Right. And opposed to such, without quarter, is the order of the Patriarchy, with a ardor of righteous eloquence and a fury of fire and sword.”

He then goes on to discuss the figure of the Serpent, which was associated universally and intimately with the goddess, and which also represented, in its coiling movement, and its shedding of skin, the ever-destroying, ever-renewing, cyclic nature of Time. It is very significant that a number of patriarchal god-heroes — the three best-known are Yahweh, Zeus, and Indra — do battle very early in their careers with a cosmic Serpent, vanquishing that figure (seen as a monster), and thereby instituting a new, heroic order of things. Not the least of this new order of things is a new concept of time. When Yahweh whipped old Leviathan’s ass, Zeus did likewise with Typhon, and Indra with Vritra, they were not just getting rid of monsters associated with the old Mother Right religious order, they were vanquishing, according to Campbell,

“daemons that formerly had symbolized the force of the cosmic order itself, the dark mystery of time, which licks up hero deeds like dust: the force of the never-dying serpent, sloughing lives like skins, which, pressing on, ever turning in its circle of eternal return, is to continue in this manner forever, as it has already cycled from all eternity, getting absolutely nowhere.”

To me, this brings us close to the heart of the tension between the Hero and the Sage, as well as the related tensions between West and East, and between the Masculine and the Feminine. For the Sage, time is characterized by eternal cosmic cycles and the implacable Law of Impermanence. For the Hero, on the contrary, time is actually GOING SOMEWHERE … there is a purpose, a goal, a meaning in its story, its evolution, and its outcome. It seems to be more linear than cyclical — it may contain cycles, but they are subservient to its over-arching, linear story.

How can these be reconciled? Apparently we are faced with a paradox which cannot be solved intellectually, for this dual aspect is inherent in the very nature of the way we think about time. Campbell’s great virtue is that (like Ram Dass, in his comment about our “predicament") he never really takes sides, though he is fearless in pointing out deluded cultural and religious exaggerations on either side (which has led to a number of misconceptions and fatuous charges against him by some critics). And for anyone who is tempted to take sides, and find easy solutions, he offers copious material for deeper reflection, bringing us always back to the paradox.

I am tempted to leave things here, because this paradox is something that each of us must work out in our own lives. But I can’t resist closing with another short quote (with a delicious allusion to Wm. Blake), one which sympathizes with the Sage and the goddess-oriented aspect. This may seem like taking sides — but after all, we live in an age of unprecedented planetary crisis, when the hyper-masculinization of culture, politics, and economics is so imbalanced in its worship of competition, elevating the market to the status of divinity, and those whom it favors to the status of heroes, that it has become pathological, threatening all life on Earth. In speaking of the exquisitely beautiful figures of Cretan and Mycenaen goddess-figures consorting with serpents in a Garden of Paradise, a Garden which appears in many Bronze-age cultures, and which is much older than the Garden of Genesis which was derived from it, he says:

“… [these figures still] stand as a shrine to this goddess of the early Garden of Innocence, before Nobodaddy made her serpent lover crawl, and locked the Tree of Life away for all time.”

Yesterday I received an eloquent and fullsome reply to the post Hero As Myth: The Freedom To Live, from Joseph Rowe, whose recent artistic activities over are worth taking the time to view, read, and listen to. Visit the website Natural Chant and Rhythm, and have a listen to some of the CD tracks here; Natural Chant and Rhythm is led by

Catherine Braslavsky
 
 
and

Joseph Rowe
Thanks for posting William Indick’s very useful resume and structural analysis of Campbell’s archetypal heroic voyage.

Also, thanks, Richard, for a superb reborn blog, so full of rich images and interesting themes!
For me, Joseph Campbell himself is a hero — and more importantly, a great spiritual, psychological, and literary teacher. I would even go so far as to say that for world culture in general, as well as American culture in particular, he has functioned as a kind of trans-cultural healer, helping (often in an indirect, unacknowledged way) to reconnect alienated, modern (postmodern, paramodern, whatever) humanity with our ancient, universal psychic and mythic roots … and leaves! Ever since George Lucas brought Campbell’s mythic insight to Hollywood with the first episode of Star Wars, cinematic art has perceptibly changed (notwithstanding the usual wasteland of mediocrity and routine mass entertainment, of course) — since that pivotal event of the 1970’s, movies have begun more and more often to dare to attempt the great themes of mythic, archetypal imagination, something which (with some exceptions, of course) was done before only in the most routine, predictable, stereotyped ways.

Strangely, Campbell’s writings are neglected, and mostly out of print here in France, where I’ve lived and worked for over 15 years — yet his indirect, invisible influence is still there, mostly through some of the best films and books of American culture (yes, there ARE a few good American influences in Europe, though I grant you, many more bad ones). But it never ceases to amaze me that only university scholars seem to have read or even heard of Campbell in this extremely literate country. I am certain this doesn’t reflect any lack of potential interest — still less intelligence, or imagination — among general readers in France. (Everyone seems to have read or at least heard of Mircea Eliade, for example.) Rather, it reflects the typical lack of imagination and intelligence of big publishers, which we see more and more of now, on both sides of the Atlantic…

However, what I really want to write about here in relation to real-life heroes is something very often overlooked: the question of the value of hero stories and myths for ordinary people. I perceive a serious and widespread confusion here, and it centers around the issue of amplification. Virtually all lives of heroes we hear about are amplified in some way. They exist on a larger scale than that of ordinary lives — maybe only a little larger, maybe vastly larger, as in myth, but almost always larger. This amplification is necessary for many reasons, but it must not be confused with the essential message. The problem is that many people — perhaps most — mistake this amplification aspect as having something to do with the real value, message, or teaching of the heroic story. This is a serious mistake, as bad as that of a would-be musician who yearns to have the same megawatt equipment as a famous rock group, so as to become a better musician. It also often leads to arrogance, inflation, and megalomania — or their shadow-opposites, lack of self-esteem, self-aggression, shame, nihilism, etc…

Modernist literary fashion sensed something of this, and created the anti-hero, with all the ironic and tragicomic aspects. But this threw out the baby with the bathwater.

What these heroic stories are always whispering to us, and the main reason they move us so deeply, is because they remind us that even the most ordinary and humble human life is inherently heroic — if only because we human beings are the only animal on this planet who are called to live in the conscious knowledge and certainty of our (and our loved ones’) inevitable death and pain. Unfortunately, instead of embracing and living up to this noble birthright (which is ours, whether we like it or not), most of us seem to want to flee it like the plague, and distract ourselves at any cost.

I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced that there are many real-life heroes whose scale of action is not at all amplified like that of the ones we hear of, and is often deceptively humble. Yet their “ordinary” heroism may be just as authentic and grand as that of a Neo, a Frodo, a Luke Skywalker, or even a Christ or a Buddha. I’m reminded of Henry Miller’s claim (I’ve never tracked down his source for this) that there is a Buddhist tradition which says that the greatest Buddhas have come in the form of countless human beings through the ages, who work quietly and in anonymity, so that their names never appear in the annals of the Sages, yet their influence is actually greater than all the famous Saviors put together, and that humanity would long ago have perished if not for their actions … I’m also reminded, somehow, of Wordsworth’s little jewel of a poem, “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.” Strictly speaking, the latter is not about heroism, but it suggests something I’m trying to get at…. that the people who truly get the message of the hero stories, and incarnate that message, are not the kind of people you are likely to hear about in “lives of the rich and famous….”

Views of this movie around the net:

Havana Journal
Che Guevara and The Motorcycle Diaries
“‘In a way, 1968 began in 1967 with the murder of Che,’ says the author and political journalist, Christopher Hitchens, who describes himself as ‘a recovering Marxist, not ashamed, not unbowed, but thoughtful’. Like many who came of age politically in the late Sixties, Hitchens was in thrall to the personality cult that attended Che. ‘His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do - fought and died for his beliefs.’”

Commonweal
EASY RIDERS

Slate
Don’t Applaud this Movie
“In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”

Salon
Lefties demanding their Che or the highway may be disappointed . . .

New York Metro
Che Sera Sera – “The Motorcycle Diaries may be a sophisticated snow job, but it’s also true that the brutalities it serves up are not fictions and, in many ways, still exist in Latin America.”

Interviews

The Guardian
Interview with the director Walter Salles

Film Journal
Interview with the director Walter Salles

THE CUBA DIET
What will you be eating when the revolution comes?
Posted on Monday, June 6, 2005. Originally from Harper’s Magazine, April 2005, by Bill McKibben.

Cubans have as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They’re still short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal—they’ve gotten that meal back. In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth.

Today
It was reported that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay tortured prisoners with the music of Christina Aguilera.

A study showed that the world military budget was about $1,035,000,000,000 in 2004; the United States accounted for nearly half of that.

Scientists in Los Angeles created a fusion reaction at around room temperature using a pyroelectric crystal.

Scientists studying the Devils Hole pupfish, of which only 180 remain, accidentally killed eighty of them.

Police in Nigeria arrested a cow for murder.

    Black-footed Albatross or False Killer Whale? You decide.

From Harper’s Weekly Review:

Saudi Arabia was considering whether women should be allowed to drive.

In New York City, a nine-year-old girl stabbed an eleven-year-old girl named Queen Washington to death. The girls were fighting over a pink rubber ball.

The American Family Association called on its members to boycott Ford, saying that the auto-maker promotes the homosexual lifestyle.

Ralph Nader called for the impeachment of George W. Bush based on reports of the Bush Administration “fixing” the intelligence over Iraq, while John Kerry wondered why the intelligence-fixing, which came to light in a leaked British memo, has received so little attention in the United States. “Is there a way for this to break through,” he asked, “ever?”

    

Five Buddhist monks in Nong Khai, Thailand, were defrocked for brawling with other monks from a rival temple. “When an ordinary person is given a middle-finger sign he will be mad; so am I,” said monk Boonlert Boonpan.

The US Supreme Court ruled that marijuana cannot be used for medicinal purposes.

Seventy-four false killer whales (which are less aggressive than true killer whales, but, like true killer whales, are not whales but dolphins) beached themselves in Australia. One thousand five hundred volunteers worked to return seventy-three of the whales to the sea; one whale died. A volunteer described the whales as “very heavy.”

     

A Christopher Hitchens interview
From the magazine Stop Smiling, issue 20:

SS: You’ve written on a number of occasions, but never explained entirely, that you write in a somewhat posthumous manner.

CH: Write as if it’s your last words. Because then you can be sure that you don’t wonder, “Will the agent like this? Will my publisher say, ‘Well, couldn’t we punch it up a bit more or make it more fancy?’ What will my family think?” All the things that constrain people.
- - - - - - - - - -

SS: If you could meet one author that’s not alive anymore, who would it be?

CH: George Eliot. Eliot or Nabokov. I’d rather have met Orwell, I think. He was the guy who seemed to come the nearest to making journalism into literature, which is what I’m trying to do. . . .

I’m reading this guy. Orhan Pamuk, if you know him. Turkish writer. He’s a very brilliant Turkish novelist who, I think, is on to something. You’ll be hearing about him. And I read George Eliot a lot, whenever I can. And Joyce and [Jorge Luis] Borges. None of them contemporaries. But they really are contemporary. It’s the gold standard, the stuff people will always read.

Links to a prolific array of Hitchens articles and essays.

                 

In these days of haste, you may not want to waste your time reading the merely superb; what you want is the superlative. You need it – ya gotta have it. Whaddaya do, comb through the LRB, the NYT, the ABR, the NYRB? Rely on bestseller lists? Admirable as Adam Ant, yet why not have a quick go at Harold Bloom’s contemporary writer short list: cut to the chase.

Compendia Courtesy of Wikipedia

Bloom’s association with the Western canon has provoked a substantial amount of interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers.

In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: “Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett. He’s certainly the most authentic.” Beckett died in 1989, and Bloom has not suggested who occupies that position now.

Concerning British writers: “Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active,” and “no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Murdoch’s eminence.” Since Murdoch’s death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as John Banville, Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, and A. S. Byatt.

In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named Portuguese writer Jose Saramago as “the most gifted novelist alive in the world today,” and “one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre.”

Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 “there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise.” Claiming “they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works,” he identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. He named their strongest works as Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater, Blood Meridian, and Underworld. He has also praised fantasy writer John Crowley as these writers’ equal – especially his novel Little, Big.

In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975) he identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s he regularly named A.R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian poet Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red. Bloom also lists African American Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets.

Bloom also has something to say about the superlatives in American art–that is, the sublime:

Bloom’s introduction to “Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon” (1987) features his canon of the “twentieth-century American Sublime,” the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Bloom singles out the following works for distinction:

“Miss Lonelyhearts” by Nathanael West
William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying“
The end of the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup“
Nearly all of Hart Crane
Wallace Stevens‘ “Auroras of Autumn“
Bud Powell’s performance of “Un Poco Loco“
“I Remember You” and “Parker’s Mood” as performed by Charlie Parker
“Byron the Light Bulb” from Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”

Happy hunting, Earthers.

Reading my last post, a friend comments:

Do you really think we can’t have definitions and poetry?

I suppose it depends on the spirit of the definition and its type. If the definition is used to erase, abort, short circuit, replace a feeling-sensing soul-process, then it’s truly problematic, i think. Hillman critiqued the Jungians this way, because of their habit of symbolically interpreting dreams, and thus determining the meaning of the dream. Hillman said (as an example, think of a nightmare with a scary monster), to paraphrase, ’stay with the dream figure, re-enter the dream, feel the energy, re-enter the story.’ In other words the reason the figure appeared is to relate to you, there is a ‘face’ of psyche – and the face – the actual FACE in the WORLD is the depth. Not, “oh, that dream figure is actually a figuration of Hades, and you are in the underworld, and, and and – so the dream MEANS, ta da.”

James Hillman:

Both Freud and Jung had enormously rich, huge backgrounds in classical studies. They were engaged in the study of romantic philosophy, they read Goethe. I always used to tell students in Zurich, if you want to study Jung, don’t read Jung, read the books he read. You see, this is completely lost in psychology today. Nobody reads literature and philosophy. They just read psychology . . . what has happened to many Jungians. They’ve lost the capacity or willingness to think very critically. I don’t know. They just read fairy tales. Everything is so damn internal! You especially see this in the way popular culture has come to understand Jung. Everything is literalized. Everything’s about my internal life. The whole point of Jung’s approach is to give free rein to thought, to give the freedom to investigate the different aspects of phenomena. . . . Jung’s gift: the cultural perspective. It [Jungian psychologists] puts it [psychotherapy] deeper into the therapy room. Jung was running around the world talking to Africans and Indians.

I just can’t emphasize enough how much Jung – and Freud – were looking at culture. Jung said psyche is in the world, not inside ourselves. There’s that constantly repeated criticism he made that in modern life, the gods – the voices of the world’s psyche – became diseases . . . This whole idea of “inside” and “projection” is suspicious. Jung knew this. Psyche is in the world. So, the gods are in the world. We are in the world. . . . the way we have banished the gods from consciousness has made what they represented diseases. This is why I have an irresistible urge to attack Christianity whenever I write. Christianity insisted on one god, one voice and everything else is a sin or a disease. The erotic, the Dionysian – all banished to the shadow. I think we all well know the effects of this.

Hillman takes an aesthetically creative, phenomenological approach to psychology. In his books on feeling, he discusses how modern western culture seems to fear hanging out in feeling; meaning can really act as a swift pill, where following feeling and attending to psychic figures and poetic images directly, letting them “speak,” allowing interaction will not always provide the quick solution, or yield a quick meaning.

The point is, when you substitute (literal) MEANING for FEELING the STORY ends. Actually the dream ends, its inroads of communication. Because you have analyzed and “solved” it; you know what it MEANS so the FACE(s) in and of the dream which CAUSE the feeling – become secondary, fade into a background context-category of “solved dreams.”

This story about dreams and dream figures is itself a metaphor for life – in that how we relate to dreams, especially unpleasant ones – the ones that are more difficult to deal with, feel with, stay with – may be similar to how we relate to daily-life experiences.

Normally, DEFINITION is an explanation which determines WHAT SOMETHING REALLY IS. And it implies that whatever isn’t covered by the definition, IT IS NOT. Certainly, FACES cannot be defined at all, and neither can metaphors – they resist definition, as they resist reductions of dimension.

I am not against definitions in all cases, not at all. Definitions clarify and organize concept and thought. They are obviously useful. But the idea of Peck’s psycho-spiritual definition of love – I find that misplaced. It severely reduces human experience – I mean, Shakespeare! That’s where you can get close to definitions of love – in sonnets and dialogues of persons as poems; meetings face to face.

I read Peck on love as pop-psych. of the sort I dislike. At the same time, his concepts, conceived as intermediate organizational structures, may be of aid when a person’s confused, in need of psychological reductions – needing to find a measure of certainty and organized structure in psychological space – but I really detest Peck’s unconditional language – his authorial expressions of certainty seem arrogant.

When Hillman is talking about the faces and figures of (the) psyche, his rhetoric may seem to impart certainty too – but it’s quite a different sort of certainty – because his arguments point towards INDIVIDUAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROCESS. This is not a definitional endpoint, it’s about process and experience and facing that, getting into it. Hillman’s, and my interest too, is to point toward living images, towards the non-abstract, the para-conceptual; the poetry of life, which is non-literal, because any FACE is capable of a multitude of definitions. Non-literality (the de-literalization of the ego function) implies that there cannot be ONE DEFINITION which crowds out others on the plane of meaning, as regards the psyche.

So there are definitions which CLOSE YOU IN and definitions WHICH ARE EXPANSIVE, that are indicative. This sort of logic does not exclude scientific definition, but does relativize it. Increasingly, I read how mood is really brain chemicals, how behavior is really genes – are you happy with such mechanistic-deterministic definitions? The idea that presence and the act of psyche is mysterious, and that mystery itself, the mystery of being, is something plain and ordinary and worth our attendance and interest – not newsworthy.

In Zen there is the instruction which says, “don’t mistake the finger for the moon,” and this seems to be exactly the problem with some types of definitions – they intrinsically announce (like Peck’s) I AM THE MOON - I AM IT. THIS IS TRUE. But his stuff is really just a bunch of finger-pointing. What makes it atrocious for me isn’t the ‘pointing out’ aspect, so much as the implied “my finger IS the moon” aspect. Definitions that know they are pointers, that encourage you, intrinsically, to look beyond the finger, past the concept – there is a great expansiveness in these. This is why I like late Heidegger, for instance his, “Poetry, Language, Thought,” composed of poetic definitions of the deepest sort. Each one sends you on. Check it out.

How to poetically dwell upon the Earth (as Goethe and Heidegger and Hillman, and Jung too, speak of).

There are clues, intentions and practical doings, choices of conceptualization, energy and time which can be made. I wish to bring the unique forth, into the central light to be known.

Here is a face:

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.

(W. Stevens, from The Idea of Order at Key West)

Stevens is contemplating what is unique, even defining the ‘coming to being’ of uniqueness. To me Stevens’ evocation is beautiful – and mysterious. And demonstrates a way of creating poetic definition and poetic definitions. I think we cannot come away with MEANING (through there is some), because as we read and organize his language, dream his images – any singular logic is defeated. There resides some mystery. And how we need that!
 

Addendum: From another interview with James Hillman (pub., “Creative Loafing,” April 11, 1998):

Q. [Chris Bostock:] I’ve wanted to ask this for a long time. Your famous dictum, of course, is to “follow the image.” You talk about psychology as an aesthetic principle. Instead of analyzing the meaning of an image, you say to “follow the image itself.” I have never understood exactly how this is therapeutic or what resolution means in this approach. Ultimately, what does it matter, what story we bring to the image?

A. I am talking about a kind of deconstruction of the image. We turn it until it comes to rest.

Q. Well, how do you know when it has come to rest?

A. You simply sense it and you learn it. How does a painter know when the painting is done? Half of being a good painter is knowing when there’s enough on the canvas. You learn to sense when something is complete. The feeling of completion, of coming to rest, is the point. I think motion is a good metaphor for psychology.

Q. You used the word “deconstruction.” It surprises me that you would use it, since it’s a relativizing process, postmodern.

A. Oh, you’re bringing up the question of essentialism.

Q. Well, yes. Deconstruction assumes you can’t know a thing’s origins.

A. Have you ever heard me have any interest in origins?

Q. Actually no, of course not. But I mean “origins” in the sense of the archetypes.

A. OK, that’s at the heart of my difference with Jung. I don’t use that word as a noun. That’s why it’s “archetypal” psychology. I am talking about action, a movement, a process – not about a set of fixed principles. The origins matter nothing to me. Think of what a different world this would be if we weren’t trying to learn the origins of the universe. Can you imagine a more ridiculous undertaking?

Q. You don’t like the word “hope” much.

A. Hope is an evil. It was the one evil left in the box when Pandora snapped the lid back shut. Hope is about the unknown future. It’s like the promise of salvation in the afterlife.

Q. So you’re a pessimist?

A. Not in the least. In fact, I think I’m quite the optimist. I just think we should pay attention to what is here right now. It’s this hope thing that has gotten the planet into such a mess. If we paid attention to what was true right now, instead of what we hoped would be true in the future, the world would look very different. … I’m thinking about something I said at the lectures I gave on aging last week. You experience this thing growing old of having your prostate enlarge and you have to get up in the middle of the night several times to go to the bathroom. Well, you can call this hopeless or you can say you “hope” it will get better. What I prefer to say is that in old age, I “wake up to the night.” Do you see? This is a metaphorical reading of it. I think it’s optimistic. It takes care of the problem and gives my experience meaning. But it’s not a hopeful position.

M. Scott Peck writes:

I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or anoth­er’s spiritual growth . . . . Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action.

I have heard that Peck has helped many; a good friend has applied Peck’s dicta with success in her work. This rant is less about Peck then a general observation about definitions of things larger than we are.

Perhaps the first question about love to contemplate is – might not any definition primarily reveal the reductive thinking of its author? Is the very idea of DEFINING love passé? Definitions turn metaphors, sensations, into literalisms, turn the intuitive and ‘irrational’ into rational logical proposals, things you look up. Definitions replace feeling with meaning; image with cause and principles.

When the day comes that we can adequately accept a definition of love there will be no need for poetry, little need for metaphor. Knowing will be secure, that is, securely contained. It may be this is where society’s headed – I choose to resist this sort of existential center.

There may be some aspect of love represented in Peck’s definition, some small part. To me, it’s highly rejectable. I completely disagree with much of what he’s saying–or the way he’s saying it–his totalist certainty. Love is a highly charged word, but if you take a less charged word, like adoration, it’s pretty clear that you don’t choose to adore something. Adoration is an aesthetic reponse to being touched by the world, through the senses. Being touched (a very different perspective than “the will to” do ~); it isn’t something we choose, except in the sense of choosing to be or remain sensitive. To attend to the world (psychology [to find the the ‘logos’ of psyche] is defined, phenomenologically, as “an attending to, an attendance” by Hillman – i like that) as it lives (an animistic possibility); how much more so, for love. And what is love, without the presence of adoration (adoration in its deepest sense). Adoration isn’t a feeling, it’s dissimilar to, say, anger or happiness. It’s related with value . . .

Without a sense of adoration, is “caring” about the environment enough to “save” it? And, what are we trying to save – if not that which we adore? And, not adoring, is rational logic alone enough to find us truly caring, with power and intent and sticktuitiveness? That is, to value not from the head merely, nor merely from the heart (that’s right), but from our guts as well? It’s an ecocritical question; so far, social results suggest “No.” The idea of love, its extension, feeling, sense, is as much about a leaf as the cosmos as another human being or bug or rock or tree – as Heidegger said, the revealing of existence in its essential being through “projecting into nothing.” If we don’t have a love of that, what’s the point, really?

It is only through “projecting into nothing” that our Dasein [an attunement with Being, but as being-in-the-world] relates to what-is, in other words, has any existence . . .

(Heidegger, Essence & Being, Regnery Press, 1967, pp. 336-340; Wallace Stevens & the Seasons, Lensing, U, Louisiana Press, 2001, p. 140).

The first principle of psychological method holds that any phenomenon to be understood must be sympathetically imagined. No syndrome can be truly dislodged from its cursed condition unless we first move imagination into its heart (James Hillman, A Terrible Love Of War . Penguin, 2004, p. 2).

On the lighter side, with thanks to kc:

The Washington Post’s Style Invitational asks readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s winners:

Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.

Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease.

Karmageddon (n): It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.

Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

Glibido (v): All talk and no action.

Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you’re eating.

Ignoranus (n): A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

Returning to the 2005 edge.org question, mentioned in my last post,

WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?

Joseph LeDoux
Neuroscientist, New York University; author, The Synaptic Self, reminds us of how little science can prove with judicious veracity, regarding consciousness and feelings. He writes,

For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. We can’t even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky territory because the hardware is different.

Because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional feelings.

There’s lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with emotional disorders. And there’s lots we can learn about feelings from studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging techniques. I’m not a radical behaviorist. I’m just a practical emotionalist.

The 2005 annual edge.org question, with some answers recently reported in the New York Times is:

“WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the esprit de divination). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

David Buss, Psychologist, University of Texas; author, The Evolution of Desire, answers

True love.

I’ve spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I’ve documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I’ve discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I’ve studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I’ve remained unwavering in my belief in true love.

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It’s difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can’t prove it.

Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens by Gyorgyi Voros is a wonderful book reframing Wallace Stevens as a poet of nature. This book seems to have met with but a peep from the literary community, though praised by John Ashbery, who wrote, “a dazzling, multi-tiered account of the poetry,” and Harvard Prof. Lawrence Buell (known for his works on 19th century literary transcendentalism), notes her work is “incisive, ambitious, original, timely.” If you’re into haiku and/or Stevens, or wish to contemplate a modern philosophy of nature, a sensible ecocritical adventure, you could do worse.

Gyorgyi

    Voros

First,

The Idea of Order at Key West
    (Stevens reads it here)
      Wallace Stevens (1935)
 
 

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Below, an excerpt from Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (University of Iowa Press, 1997), partly commenting on the poem:

Stevens’s sense of the American experience of the Nature / culture relation was that modern awareness of Nature – whether Nature be manifest as wilderness, as the human body, or as the human unconscious – had diminished dangerously. Stevens complained, “The material world, for all the assurances of the eye, has become immaterial. It has become an image in the mind.” Human preconception had so blunted the human experience of and relation to nonhuman Nature, upon which the human rested, that indeed nothing but empty anthropocentric image remained. Stevens knew that a cancerous humanism diminishes human experience. “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real,” he asserted.

This interdependence of imagination and reality is, of course, the subject of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The poem’s speaker, walking on the shore, listening to the singer, posing questions and propositions about the nature of art to his companion, posits a series of antinomies which can be reframed as usefully within the categories of Nature and culture and human and nonhuman as they can within reality and imagination. The speaker pits mind against Nature’s “body wholly body,” singer’s song against the “meaningless plungings of water and the wind,” the glassy lights of the town against the darkness of the sea, and language against the “words of the sea.” While he asserts the mutual influences between sea and song, he emphasizes an essential discontinuity between them and averts any suggestion of an easy synthesis: “The song and water were not medleyed sound / Even if what she sang was what she heard,” he cautions and stresses that “it was she and not the sea we heard.”

The poem’s central question asks, “Whose spirit is this?” That is, what interface exists between human and Nature in song, the poem’s metonym for art? The speaker has already shown that the singer’s song fails as direct translation of the sea’s “constant cry,” nor can song effect a seamless identification between singer and natural elements. Is it then a production of individual vision against the spectacular stage set of Nature? After all, “she was the maker of the song she sang. /… [the] sea / Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.”

The poem’s final third is customarily read as an avowal of the romantic doctrine of the mind’s ultimate superiority over Nature: after all, “It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing” and the aftermath of her song that answers to the human “rage for order.” In the resounding silence that follows the song, the lights of the fishing boats

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Indeed, Helen Vendler’s reading of this poem places it within the Wordsworthian mind / Nature dichotomy and reads it as asserting the romantics’ sense of “the power of poetry over nature.” Similarly, Harold Bloom writes that the poem “remains equivocal and perhaps impossible to interpret” because it simultaneously “affirms a transcendental poetic spirit yet cannot locate it, and the poem also remains uneasily wary about the veritable ocean, which will rise up against Stevens yet again.”

Placing this poem too squarely within the romantic framework of mind over Nature, however, discounts the poem’s true dynamic, which does not rest solely on the dichotomy between singer and song. The two listeners themselves engage in creation (song making) by attending to sea and singer. The stimuli around the speaker – singer, song, companion, “bronze shadows heaped / On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and sea,” night descending, lights emerging – engender in him a flow of propositions, questions, and highly charged perceptual experiences. Rather than depicting the power of poetry over Nature, the poem depicts the power of the sum of perceptual experiences created by human and nonhuman components in the speaker, whose main role in the poem may be summarized as that of creative listener. . . .The night deepens after the song has ended; the resounding silence, as it were, heightens the effects of song and what might be regarded as the visual analogues to song, the lights, boats, town, and other human productions that order and “portion out” the natural scene. This difference – the juxtaposition and interface between before and after – is more significant than any element of the experience. It is finally the speaker, not the singer or the song, who effects the enchantment of the night . . .

Gyorgyi Voros

Amanda Kidd, writing Sex On Wheels, the post just below, seems to be following many of the ideas presented by Georges Bataille (theological scholar, novitiate; librarian; anti-Facist; surrealist officially excommunicated from its inner circles), concerning eroticism.

In the Foreword to his final work The Tears of Eros (1961) he writes:

In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!

In the final chapter of this work, Bataille wrote about Chinese torture and presented photographs of an ecstatic man who is cut to pieces. André Malraux, then [French] Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, condemned the book [link].

Especially in his Erotism: Death And Sensuality, Batialle viewed “eroticism an aspect of man’s inner life, of his religious life.”

Amanda is observant of a paradox contained in our dual nature regarding the erotic: need and fear – at the center of this paradox is a point of extreme anxiety, which Camille Paglia discusses in Sexual Personae as the juncture between culture and biology. Bataille extends this juncture into unfolding landscapes: hundreds of pages defining and illustrating the lost spirituality of eroticism, blasting through bourgeois limits of propriety much as (to continue Amada Kidd’s metaphor) a sport bike wails through the legal speed limit on a country road in less than four seconds.

The thrill of speed on a good bike is about a lot more than risk, it’s about the blossoming of erotic landscapes, and FLOW; the erotic liberation inherent in “suspend[ing] a taboo without suppressing it. . . . the taboo and its transgression;” that is, entering into a zone of strong juncture – rapture. “Unless the taboo is observed with fear it lacks the counterpoise of desire which gives it its deepest significance.” “The anguish at the heart of the taboo” yields poetic significance, human significance.

Man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels that he is tearing himself, not tearing something outside that resists him. He goes beyond the objective awareness bounded by the walls of the chrysalis . . . (the quotation continues, below)

One of the most provocative writers of the 20th century, well-translated into English, Erotism languishes forgotten. Here are a few excerpts from early on in the work:

FOREWORD

The human spirit is prey to the most astounding impulses. Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him. The saint turns from the voluptuary in alarm; she does not know that his unacknowledgeable passions and her own are really one.

The cohesion of the human spirit whose potentialities range from the ascetic to the voluptuous may nevertheless be sought. . . .

The inner experience of eroticism; the degree of objectivity connected with the discussion of it; the historical perspective in which this must be seen (p. 31-2):

My purpose is to see in eroticism an aspect of man’s inner life, of his religious life, if you like.

I said that I regarded eroticism as the disequilibrium in which the being consciously calls his own existence in question. In one sense, the being loses himself deliberately, but then the subject is identified with the object losing his identity. If necessary I can say in eroticism: I am losing myself. Not a privileged situation, no doubt. But the deliberate loss of self in eroticism is manifest; no one can question it. I intend to discuss the theme of eroticism quite deliberately from the subjective point of view, even if I bring in objective considerations at the start. But if I do refer to erotic manifestations in an objective way, I must stress that it is because inner experience is never possible untainted by objective views, but is always bound to some or other indisputably objective consideration.

Eroticism is primarily a religious matter and the present work is nearer to “theology than to scientific or religious history.

I repeat: if I sometimes speak as a man of science I only seem to do so. . . . My theme is the subjective experience of religion, as a theologian’s is of theology.

True, the theologian talks about Christian theology while religion in the sense I mean it is not just a religion, like Christianity. It is religion in general and no one religion in particular. . . . The Christian religion I lay aside. If it were not for the fact that Christianity is a religion after all, I should even feel an aversion for Christianity. That this is so is demonstrated by the subject of the present work. That subject is eroticism. I am making my position clear from the outset. It goes without saying that the development of eroticism is in no respect foreign to the domain of religion, but in fact Christianity sets its face against eroticism and thereby condemns most religions. In one sense, the Christian religion is possibly the least religious of them all.

(p. 36-7) Erotic or religious images draw forth behaviour associated with prohibitions in some people, the reverse in others. The first type is traditional. The second is common at least in the guise of a so-called back-to-nature attitude, the prohibition being seen as unnatural. But a transgression is not the same as a back-to-nature movement; it suspends a taboo without suppressing it. Here lies the mainspring of eroticism and of religion too. I should be anticipating if I were to spend too long now on the profound complicity of law and the violation of law. But if it is true that mistrust (the ceaseless stirrings of doubt) is necessary to anyone trying to describe the experience I am talking about, this mistrust must also meet the demands I will at this stage formulate. Let us say first that our feelings tend to give a personal twist to our opinions. This difficulty is a general one . . . . connected with the taboo on which they are based and this duplicity I mentioned, the reconciling of what seems impossible to reconcile, respect for the law and violation of the law, the taboo and its transgression.

(p. 38-9) Eroticism as seen by the objective intelligence is something monstrous, just like religion. Eroticism and religion are closed books to us if we do not locate them firmly in the realm of inner experience. We put them on the same level as things flown from the outside if we yield albeit unwittingly to the taboo. Unless the taboo is observed with fear it lacks the counterpoise of desire which gives it its deepest significance. The worst of it is that science whose procedures demand an objective approach to taboos owes its existence to them but the same time disclaims them because taboos are not rational. Inside experience alone can supply the overall view, from which they are finally justifiable. If we undertake scientific study indeed, we regard objects as exterior to ourselves; we are subjects: in science the scientist himself becomes an object exterior to the subject, able to think objectively (he could not do this if he had not denied himself as subject to begin with). This is all very well as long as eroticisrn is condemned, if we reject it in advance, if we rid ourselves of it in this way, but if (as it often does) science condemns religion (ethical religion) which is patently fundamental to science, we are no longer justified in opposing eroticism. If we do not oppose it we must no longer consider it objectively as something outside ourselves. We must envisage it the stirrings of life within ourselves.

The inner experience of eroticism demands from the subject a sensitiveness to the anguish at the heart of the taboo no less great than the desire which leads him to infringe it. This is religious sensibility, and it always links desire closely with terror, intense pleasure and anguish.

Anybody who does not feel or who feels only furtively the anguish, nausea and horror commonly felt by young girls in the last century is not susceptible to these emotions, but equally there are people whom such emotions limit. These emotions are in no sense neurotic; but they are in the life of a man what a chrysalis is compared with the final perfect creature. Man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels that he is tearing himself, not tearing something outside that resists him. He goes beyond the objective awareness bounded by the walls of the chrysalis and this process, too, is linked with the turning topsy-turvy of his original mode of being.

To contine the “motorcycle” thread – let’s take a look at some contemporary social issues. What do women riders think of male motorcyclists? An article by Amanda Kidd, which appeared in a Super Streetbike editorial is revealing.

Everyone from feminist scholars to third-rate rock stars has identified motorcycles as potent metaphors for sex. The speed, the danger, the leather clothing, the excitement of a good ride are all very similar to the sensations most of us associate with great sex. And who would argue that a Ducati 998 isn’t every bit as gorgeous as a naked woman, or that the rush of going knee down or carrying a sick second-gear wheelie isn’t orgasmic? Motorcycles are damn sexy. So guys, it goes without saying that the motorcycle you ride makes a powerful statement about your sexual prowess. Quit snickering–you’d be surprised at how much a savvy woman who rides (and what savvy woman doesn’t?) can tell about your skills between the sheets by just a quick glance at your bike. For instance, intelligent women know that ratty stunt-bike riders make the best lovers. Their, um, “services” are in such high demand that they’re barely able to find time to lube the chain, much less hand-rub 30 coats of clear lacquer. Keeping this in mind, it might be helpful to consider the particular statement your own scooter makes about your sexuality.

I’ll start with those cruiser guys, because aside from a red Corvette and a pneumatic, 19-year-old “personal assistant,” nothing screams midlife crisis quite like a chopper. Start with the pipes–even a nun knows a rider’s package measurements are inversely proportional to the length and girth of his exhaust pipes. Other accessories can betray as well. See mudflaps tacked onto the fenders? He irons his socks and wears them to bed, too. Naked-lady murals on the tank? Never seen a real pair of breasts in his life. And ladies, watch out for Harleys with sky-scraping sissy bars out back. His favorite bedroom accessory straps around your waist.

You sportbike guys are almost as bad. A Gixxer with a neon-lime windscreen and polished wheels screams, “I’ll pick you up for our first date in a jacked-up Cutlass with a silly sticker of a cartoon character pissing in the back window, and we’re going to Red Lobster.” Race leathers worn on the street are another red flag, especially those pasted with phony sponsor decals. You still buy Underoos from the little boy’s department and play Dungeons & Dragons. Online. Other sportbike warning signs: fender eliminator? Castration anxiety, and he’s only gonna get off if there are garden shears in the bed. Stealth turn signals? Subscriber to Close Shave. Rollin’ on 190-series rear tires? See “exhaust pipes” above. And pity the poor fool rockin’ a Ducati 9xx with a tank bra and a color-matched seat cover–his bike just screams cross-dresser with a possible secret diaper fetish.

Sport-tourers are definitely the worst, though. VFR/ST4/Sprint ST riders are perpetual adolescents–they play like they’re down with the mortgage and 2.5 kids, but every other Saturday they’re slurping tequila from the navel of some girl named Mindy and conducting field research on the “Mutation and Proliferation of Common STDs.” And nothing says poseur like an adventure tourer. He’s a wannabe rugged individualist who spends all night downloading maps of exotic destinations he’ll never see. Speaking of that GPS clamped to the handlebar–gadget fetish, and definite robot-sex fantasies.

No matter what sort of bike you ride, it broadcasts a crystal-clear message about your sexual peccadilloes. Naked bike? Exhibitionist and nude-beach freak with more hair on his back than his head. Dual-sport riders like to get freaky outdoors, not to mention that they’re not very good about washing “down there.” If you ride a V-Max you’re an S&M enthusiast with a flogger made from spark-plug leads. If you ride a Warrior (or other “performance cruiser") you’ve got the same S&M inclinations, only you repress these by coaching Little League on the weekends. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

So where, exactly, does all this leave a worldly woman rider wishing for a motorcyclist with just the right mix of studliness and sensitivity to sexually satisfy her for all eternity? In my experience, wheelying off into the sunset, solo, astride an SV650. (Which, by the way, boys, is definitely not a girl’s bike!) Most of you biker boyz are too busy standing around the parking lot at some Hooters bike night comparing one another’s “camshafts” to even notice a classy babe like me.

On the money and some fine writing. Got to admire her choice of bike, and therefore man, but I wonder if she’s a bit “cc shy,” choosing a putter like an SV650 as a mount for her perfect guy, when the SV1000 its big brother crouches like a jaguar and handles like Nureyev.

Two links concerning design today.
A long article about Harleys and image that seems largely on the money, from

American Angst.

Well worth some consideration, in terms of the larger picture – described by:

James Dyson in his Dimbleby Lecture [PDF]. He states in part:

We have no choice but to shake off our obsession with styling.

And,

It was this disregard for the engineer’s creation - the manufactured object - that led me to stand down as chairman of the Design Museum a month or so ago. . . .

Random quotes from the above articles:

You’re still the pathetic little balding, overweight, middle aged accountant married to the fat, overdemanding nag that you were one second before you signed the papers on your new Harley and the ink dried. You always will be. Owning a bike isn’t going to change that but this is a moral that so few people today are smart enough to comprehend! Once you crank the engine, you aren’t going to change one bit, except that you will have become a slave to the media, you will have allowed yourself to willingly accept a brand association, and you will have admitted that you’re a gullible fool who doesn’t know the first thing about what a REAL motorcycle is.

Simply put, a Harley is God’s way of saying that you have too much money and not enough brains.

Our only chance for survival is better engineering.

Harley gave up. They quit racing. When their bubble was burst, and new and faster motorcycles were entering the market, Harley simply walked away and never went racing again. Harley left the real world and gave the go ahead to European and Japanese manufacturers that America was out of the performance circle and that America was out of the game. Soon what the British and Japanese engineers were learning at the race tracks, they were applying to their brands of motorcycles, making them faster, better handlers, lighter, more durable, more reliable. Their technology was advancing by the year, with each victory, with each innovation, each design breakthrough.

Milwaukee, you should hang your head in shame for letting down the American people the way that you have. How could you do it? Or better yet, explain to me how you could fool the whole country into believing that it was okay to quit and that you are still the number one motorcycle maker in the world.

We have created a strange society.

When you show off some thing you’ve bought, I guarantee the first question will be ‘Where did you get it?’, not ‘Who made it?’. The inference is, that if you bought it somewhere expensive and exclusive, then it must be good.

American Thunder?

What a joke! You should be scared of thunder. The only thing I’m scared of when a Harley is near is that either a piece is going to fall off and cause me to wreck, or I’ll slide in a patch of oil that the Harley leaked onto the road ahead of me. American Thunder my ass! Thunder is powerful and loud. Harleys are just loud. I think the truth in advertising should apply to Milwaukee as well, if so, it would be called

Harley Davidson.
It’s not a motorcycle company.
It is a pagan cult religion for brain dead trend humping fashion lemmings.

And the future belongs to those who use their brains best.

Rise up engineers!

Quotes from a Suzuki SV1000S (V-Twin) Rider, who goes by the moniker “Weekend Cruiser”

“I’d rather ride my SV than push my Harley”

“Chrome doesn’t add more horse power”

“Fringe isn’t cool”

“Chaps and Vests are for Blue Oyster Club patrons only”

“A bandana does not double as a helmet”

“The oil leak shouldn’t be standard equipment”

“I don’t like riding in the “child birth “position”

Will murmurs turn to outcries? Is the issue of vote fraud and election machine rigging in the recent US Presidential election heating up? In the Guardian, Nov. 5: Group Finds Voting Irregularities in South. Yesterday, the topic was given some space in Harper’s Weekly Review online:

Senator John Kerry was narrowly defeated by President George W. Bush in an election that was marred by irregularities and unanswered questions about the integrity of electronic voting machines . . . Election software in Onslow County, North Carolina, miscounted the votes for county commissioners. Some voting machines in Broward County, Florida, started counting backward once they reached 32,000. An electronic voting machine in Ohio added 3,893 votes to President Bush’s tally in a district that had only 800 voters. Four thousand five hundred and thirty early electronic votes in Carteret County, North Carolina, were lost. Votes were also lost in Palm Beach County, Florida, and in Tampa. Journalists were still trying to figure out why exit polls – which projected that John Kerry would win in Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa – turned out to be completely wrong. “Exit polls are almost never wrong,” wrote Dick Morris. “Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.” It was noted that anomalous voting patterns in Florida (where a disproportionate number of Democrats apparently voted for George W. Bush) were all confined to counties where optical-scanning machines are used to read paper ballots. Such votes are tabulated by Windows-based PCs that are vulnerable to tampering. A poll taken just before the election showed that 75 percent of Bush supporters still believe that Iraq either was a close ally of Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the September 11 attacks.

This November 6 post, which has been circulating the globe via email: Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked by Thom Hartmann

Mark Crispin Miller writes in salon.com:

First of all, this election was definitely rigged. I have no doubt about it. It’s a statistical impossibility that Bush got 8 million more votes than he got last time. In 2000, he got 15 million votes from right-wing Christians, and there are approximately 19 million of them in the country. They were eager to get the other 4 million. That was pretty much Karl Rove’s strategy to get Bush elected.

But given Bush’s low popularity ratings and the enormous number of new voters – who skewed Democratic – there is no way in the world that Bush got 8 million more votes this time. I think it had a lot to do with the electronic voting machines. Those machines are completely untrustworthy, and that’s why the Republicans use them. Then there’s the fact that the immediate claim of Ohio was not contested by the news media – when Andrew Card came out and claimed the state, not only were the votes in Ohio not counted, they weren’t even all cast.

I would have to hear a much stronger argument for the authenticity, or I should say the veracity, of this popular vote for Bush before I’m willing to believe it. If someone can prove to me that it happened, that Bush somehow pulled 8 million magic votes out of a hat, OK, I’ll accept it. I’m an independent, not a Democrat, and I’m not living in denial.

And that’s not even talking about Florida, which is about as Democratic a state as Guatemala used to be. The news media is obliged to make the Republicans account for all these votes, and account for the way they were counted. Simply to embrace this result as definitive is irrational. But there is every reason to question it … I find it beyond belief that the press in this formerly democratic country would not have made the integrity of the electoral system a front page, top-of-the-line story for the last three years. I worked and worked and worked to get that story into the media, and no one touched it until your guy did.

I actually got invited to a Kerry fundraiser so I could talk to him about it. I raised the issue directly with him and with Teresa. Teresa was really indignant and really concerned, but Kerry just looked down at me – he’s about 9 feet tall – and I could tell it just didn’t register. It set off all his conspiracy-theory alarms and he just wasn’t listening.

Talk to anyone from a real democracy – from Canada or any European country or India. They are staggered to discover that 80 percent of our touch-screen electronic voting machines have no paper trail and are manufactured by companies owned by Bush Republicans. But there is very little sense of outrage here. Americans for a host of reasons have become alienated from the spirit of the Bill of Rights and that should not be tolerated.

The Diebold difference?
2004 US election - True vote or computer fraud?

Athan Gibbs died under suspicious circumstances in a two-vehicle collision just north of Nashville on March 12. He had begun marketing the US-government-certified TruVote voter validation and verification system, a touch screen machine that gives voters a verifiable paper audit trail. The machine issues a number that the voter can verify through an election office printout, a toll free number or a secure site on the internet. The machine rectifies voting irregularities cited by a joint study conducted by the Carnegie Corporation, Cal Tech and MIT. The joint project found that between four and six million votes were lost in the 2000 election. The Tennessee General Assembly presented Gibbs with a joint resolution honouring his invention.

The dreams
of all children
open us to the eyes
of space.

On November 3: A word from Camille Paglia,

The Democratic Party bureaucracy and A-list consultants need to be disassembled like matchstick men. After Kerry’s failure to win crucial states in the great red sea of the South and Midwest, it should be obvious that party strategists have lost the national war of ideas. First step: Fire DNC chief Terry McAuliffe, a shallow hack whose political expertise is at the Chamber of Commerce level. This is no way to pick the leader of the free world.

Democrats have got to go cold turkey on their tedious old rhetoric about the suffering masses in their World of Pain. The Democrats’ condescending portraits of African-Americans and the poor are manipulative, patronizing and ultimately self-destructive. The humanistic vision of progressive liberal politics (which I subscribe to) needs to be projected in inspiring, poetic language.

Democratic principles should not just be a litany of complaints, a fracturing of the body politic into pockets of greedy self-interest. This is an energetic, creative can-do nation: Democrats must celebrate independence and individualism (the spirit of the 1960s) and stop encouraging infantile dependence on the government.

In the weeks leading up to this election, the Northeastern major media (network news and urban newspapers) were caught in blatant displays of liberal bias and overt conspiracy. This can’t go on: It is unprofessional and unethical, and it alienates the heartland. But conservative talk radio and TV must admit that they too are now part of the media – and a very powerful and richly compensated one too.

Progressives must do some serious soul-searching. Too often they are guilty of arrogance, insularity and sanctimony. They claim to speak for the common man but make few forays beyond their own affluent, upper-middle-class circles. There needs to be less preaching and more direct observation of social reality. America is evolving, and populism may be shifting to the Republican side.

And don’t look to Hillary Clinton to be the party’s savior. I hope Hillary will run for president in 2008, but I am skeptical of her willingness or ability to endure a punishingly long campaign on the stump and, as a New York senator, to win more states beyond the Gore/Kerry list. We Democrats need to groom a far wider slate of national candidates, above all talented women from the Midwest and South who can make inroads into the Republican base.

BAGHDAD YEAR ZERO: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia.

I was reading statistics recently from the University of Maryland:

A new survey by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes shows that 72 percent of President Bush’s supporters believe that Iraq, before the invasion, either had WMD or a major program to develop them. The survey also shows that three out of four Bush supporters believe Saddam was “providing substantial support to al-Qaeda” or was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks - and that solid evidence of this linkage has been found.

Also, the Program on International Policy Attitudes which did studies of Bush voters:

75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.

It’s not hard to see that imagination plays an important role. People choose to live in fantasies of all sorts. We might ask, what are the reasons for fantastical choice, particularly when the fantasy structure is literalistic and reductive - a primitive story, with one hero (and cohort) one villain (and cohort), which allows for no gray, no uncertainty – a story that is a substitute for thought. There’s certainly plenty of information out available contradicting the story. Somehow all that information is viewed as tainted. Ironically a closed mind is an imagining mind, in this permutation of society.

The waters of power and need are murky. Vietnam did seem, fundamentally, to be an ideological war involving communist cold-war containment (tinctured with fantasies of imperialistic necessity). This war is different. Half the American populace seem convinced of its ideological necessity - the other half does not. The variance in fantasy begs the question, why was this war really fought? The best on-the-gound answer I’ve found:

It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what I was looking for. I had traveled to Iraq a year after the war began, at the height of what should have been a construction boom, but after weeks of searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery