two fish

 
 
depression
may be defined as
an experience of ‘loss of significance’
that there is no there there
- rather different than
     say
meaninglessness

in that meaninglessness impends with significance
depression seems a difficult state or zone precisely for
its psychological sense (or landscape)
of no landscape.
there is no there there means
there is nothing to work with - the psyche
works with and through images - not necessarily
visual, but made of substances
here there are none.

                   

a word for depression might be anomie
taking a process approach
in looking at depression -
as depression is
at times extreme suffering,
most extreme pain -
it’s worth working towards an answer - from within
the landscape of depression (a non-landscape)

    – even in a black hole, there remains
the imprint of the falling, and it’s this falling
that may have set the gravity well
in motion

                   

following this logic, one of the psychological
approaches to depression works with the question
of triggers. To try to think or find the beginning of the feeling
of being depressed, and look to what was happening
or happened just around the time before that
– it may have
been incidental thoughts, may have been
a day of suck-off work a day
of freedom

the important thing is not to judge but just
to jot – so, a diary or journal is useful,
because it’s not nearly so useful to interpret later
(a slippery business) as to look back and see
the thing happening in writing,
and to write the transits out.
In the above,
what may or may not be found
is that there are
absolutely real and important concerns
that are triggers;
if these are known precisely these can be addressed.
these concerns do not cause depression, but, as mentioned
are triggers – this is one notion.

                   

if the cause of depression
remains mysterious, still one can usually find
triggers, if observing carefully, in a workable manner
without aggression.

Another mode of psychological thought concerning depression
is related to emotional process
there is an aspect of frustration and anger which is healthy
in that, separated from blame, anger for instance is often
     smart –
the sense of knowing in your bones that something
(situation or theme) is wrong , that
     you won’t put up with it,
     whatever that may be –

                   

not ascribing blame means, psychologically, it’s not
that it is wrong, so much as
staying with the self which feels

     – however, say, politically speaking,
     the thing may be wrong.
– But often we can’t change the thing,
reasonably or quickly,
looking at how to work with anger is important here.

the point is that anger (even frustration alone) left to brew
and stew, may turn later
to resignation.
one cannot
get out of the situation
change
the thing
or
change oneself
in relation to it
and so
there is defeat

                   

this sense of defeat i’m talking about happens beneath the awake mind
even beneath the subliminal
it is unstoppable
it may happen in both extremely minor, or major ways;
- working in this mode: to consciously
recall and list truthfully those things
that are really pissing you off
this would not be any ‘approved’ list of
what should rightly be pissing you off,
but an idiosyncratic list.

      it may be
Egg McMuffins and the size of one’s living room
     the color of a carpet:
the list must be honest, or it’s a useless exercise
in other words, depression must be taken seriously
as all really true and complete things are
which is a way of ‘attending upon . . .’

                   

     (all psychological means have to do with
proper attendance, to attend upon psyche,
a key to the nature of how healing happens)

   a ‘not’ or a ‘non’ -
beyond the issue of friend or enemy;
i mean, one can rail against depression
or try and befriend it, but neither works.
actually, coping doesn’t work well either

one issue about depression,
a mild or minor episode of depression may seem manageable
but this is a false impression of depression, based on
a seeming transience or brevity, a
‘lighter’ level of psychological suffering.
     When depression becomes chronic (incl. episodically chronic)
when this cosmos of depression becomes
   a powerful sense, a real element of life
it cannot be ‘managed;’ some seek
amelioration via drugs or vacations or changes of
scene – at times to a certain effect,
though these treatments
often prove to be disturbingly temporary – and as such
may be interpreted as failures, thus reinforcing the depression,
because one of the truisms of depression, as every depressed person
absolutely realizes, is that
nothing works

                   

another mode of working with depression is cognitive
     – based on an RET approach (rational-emotive therapy)
represented in the book, “Feeling Good,” by Burns. it
is a skillful approach, presenting an
‘applied contemplative-philosophical lens’ to daily life,
     and
deals with what we are saying to ourselves, moment-to-moment -
As we honestly look at these moments:
     i was surprised
very
     surprised
–
in this way of working,
by teasing out momentary
thought,
we may find
depression is
a cascade effect, with
beginnings
that don’t feel
at all like
depression
–
it’s not
so much
about anger or frustration
as seemingly ‘rational’
messages
to ourselves,
which might include
a thought
somewhere
already down
the cascade
like:

‘I can’t do anything.’ or
‘I’m a failure.’
This is the sort of
globalized,
black-and-white thinking
that marks depression.

                   

the point isn’t to change that thinking – which doesn’t work –
so much as to track it: back, on the one hand, and, to redirect, on the
other. for instance, when a thought occurs like, “I can’t do anything,”
you think of something you can do – cook an omelet perhaps.
and it helps to actually cook one.
so
then,
maybe
you
can’t
do
anything,
but
you
can
cook
an
omelet,
and
you’ve
proved
it
– this may seem
a bit innane, but it’s not,
it’s
quite serious

                   

RET or cognitive psychology (done right)
is quite effective in that it’s a
powerfully direct awareness practice.
the point is that depression is
a cascade-effect of certain kinds of thoughts, and each minutae of
thought

triggers an emotion, and that emotion encourages a further thought(s)
which triggers a further emotional environment(s), and so it goes
through the cascade – until the landscape is more solid
than a planet.
Burns’ book articulates depression
diagnostically, presents a means to self-examine, and outlines
a series of processes by which a person can basically work with
and often cure their depression. a self-help book in the
real sense.

there is another aspect to depression, which is archetypal,
something that western psychology and certainly medicine
do not touch on or really agree with. This involves the necessity
of depression.

In other words, depression may not be at all
like a bad cold you get rid of or wait to get out of.
When the universe pulls apart falls apart,
when you have no energy, when all of life is drained
from life. When even despair is an energy which seems
impossibly lively

                   

we can ask, but cannot know, wish to leave but be completely
stuck, or sunk in a quicksand, a morass. Something is
binding us, and we cannot rise, we cannot return to
easy ideals, cannot move on, go to the next step,
    so
we lose all that is cavalier. In the pain of no significance.
this itself, unbearable, is a destroyer of everything that is
cheap and american, so to say, every bullshit romantic
movie, every cheery, false newscaster on TV; every smile
hurts as does every grief

depression also eliminates death-metal gothic-fantasy overlays -
this is because depression cannot be willfully sublimated
into images and story – if it can, it’s not really depression but
something else.

So, galling limitation, as the I Ching says. such galling limitation
may be complex, composed of outer, inner and relational
(inter- and intra-psychic) realities;

the point is,
we can always work with
our mind
with depression –

                   

     an aggressive attitude doesn’t seem to work:
the ‘let’s get rid of this’ attitude – the fighting against, the
battle to ‘remove’ depression.
actually, depression is unworkable
this is why it’s called depression, what the word means
and not something else,
so we don’t work on depression per se,
but on how we think or feel, and what’s happening in our life
situation – depression feels totally solid, but the moment, like
the conscious mind, persona, isn’t at all solid, there’s space;

     the situational factor is likewise important
as are the social-cultural factors
and we can track, and in gathering certain valuable nuggets of
thought, information, process, a certain psychological horizon
may appear (no guarantees, but generally speaking)
often, related to depression is a deep and profound despair, grief,
pain. These we can know. find and know and attend.
But depression itself cannot really be found and known in the
same way.

It may turn out that real changes are necessary
but these needs may be quite small, nearly infinitesimal
it may be that a subtle pattern of thought can be reframed

                   

                   or

                   /

                   and
other changes may be necessary
– something inimical to
depression –
a plan – a later stage of work
may be formed and implemented
over months or even years of time.
Sometimes
the honest formulation
of a reasonable plan
is an antidote
(though usually not the antidote, alone)

The I Ching says,
“Galling Limitation should not be persevered in.”

                   

Why did the band Harvy Danger decide to release their entire September, 2005 album, Little By Little, for free P2P distribution and download, on the net? Read the full statement here. The precis begins:

Why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Of course, the CD will also be for sale on the site, as well as in fine independent record stores across the country, in a deluxe package that includes a 30-minute bonus disc that serves as a companion piece to the record proper (retail price for the package is $11.99).

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record. However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign . . .

Also of note,

Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of “outrage", and deceptive business practices, Ms. Andersen’s counterclaims demand a trial by jury. (List of 65 allegations against the RIAA follows, in original article)

(As reported by isohunt:) This follows another recent US court ruling that mum can’t be held responsible for 13-year old daughter’s file sharing. While the RIAA’s lawsuits to protect its copyright is not “illegal” and are within their right (under laws they lobbied for), perhaps this case will shed some light on their extortionist behaviour.

Emory College hosted a debate on war, between James Hillman and Deepak Chopra. Here are a few summations, reported online:

Psychologist James Hillman based many of his arguments on the theory of basic personality types proposed by psychologist Carl Jung, whom Hillman studied with in the 1950s.

Hillman said people in general, and Americans in particular, lack imagination, which causes conflicts to lead to violence. He said more creative solutions to conflicts can be found, [and that] part of the blame falls on lack of education. “If we don’t imagine, we get Iraq, we get New Orleans, we get criminal irresponsibility,” Hillman said. “Where does imagination go to school in the U.S.?”

A sold-out crowd of about 1,200 people, mostly local residents not affiliated with Emory, packed the pews of Glenn Memorial. Jean Houston, a researcher in human development from New York, moderated. According to both speakers, aggression is so ingrained in human nature that war might be inevitable.

Chopra said the “fight or flight” response originates in the limbic system, the same part of the brain responsible for instinctive behaviors such as eating or the urge to procreate.

Hillman mentioned that the prevelance of wars outnumber years in recorded history.

Chopra said peace might be more likely to occur if nurturing female archetypes replaced the violent male archetypes now dominant in much of human popular culture and mythology. But Hillman saw no such reason for hope. “Why are we talking about evolution, about the future?” he said. “We don’t know what the hell’s coming. It’s pretty bloody serious, what’s here. It does no good to be hopeful.” He added that humanity must be mindful of the struggle it faces in attaining peace to make peace possible.

Chopra and Hillman also disagreed in their definitions of peace. When Chopra identified the passive resistance of figures such as Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi as peace, Hillman said such actions constituted strength, not peace. “That’s a Judeo-Christian interpretation,” Chopra said. “Peace in the East is a transcendence of opposing energies that allows one to dwell in a state of pure consciousness.”

Both participants and the moderator offered numerous criticisms of President Bush and his administration’s foreign policy, and Hillman called for “doves” in the audience to take over the business of war. “You must turn to war and give it deep thought,” he said. “Otherwise, it will be left to the hawks, to Kristol and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.”

Tuesday’s event was organized by the Mythic Imagination Institute, which seeks to foster understanding and respect through stories and archetypes, as well as the Alliance for a New Humanity — a forum co-founded by Chopra — and the Emory Public Issues Forum.

   N’Kisi

“Fascinating story about Alex, but there is another grey parrot even more amazing than Alex, called N’Kisi. Why is Alex now a star and N’Kisi still obscure after years of amazing scientific results? Simply because the scientist who studies N’Kisi happens to be named Rupert Sheldrake, and the scientific establishment has quietly agreed to ostracize and marginalize Sheldrake as much as possible. N’Kisi is not only the most highly accomplished animal speaker known today — of any animal species — he is also very gifted telepathically — at least with his owner, a woman with whom he has a unique bond. Check out this link: sheldrake.org/nkisi” – JR

Hear N’Kisi Speak!          Interview, and more about Sheldrake
  

Interspecies Telepathy Experiments
N’kisi would often describe what Aimee was thinking about, reading, or looking at in situations where there were no possible ordinary clues. When Aimee saw Rupert Sheldrake’s book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home she contacted him, and they collaborated in designing an experiment to try to replicate and document this phenomenon under controlled conditions. . . .N’kisi has already shown aspects of intelligence that animals were thought to be incapable of, particularly a species that shares so little genetic similarity with humans. Globally, parrots are the most endangered of all birds, with the greatest number of species currently facing extinction due to poaching and habitat destruction. We hope our work will help people to realize the amazing abilities and awareness of these intelligent birds, and encourage greater care of these precious beings and the planetary environment we share.

The BBC reported on N’Kisi, Chatty Parrot Stuns Scientists ( 26 January 2004).

Interview, and more about Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake is best known for his controversial theory of “formative causation ” which implies a non-mechanistic universe, governed by laws which themselves are subject to change. Born in Newark-on-Trent, England, Rupert studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He took a Ph.D in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967, and in the same year became a Fellow of Glare College, Cambridge. He was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology there until 1973. He was a Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society and at Cambridge he studied the development of plants and the aging of cells. From 1974 to 1978, he was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, and he continued to work there as a Consultant Physiologist until 1985. Rupert is the author of A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past, in which he presents his theory for explaining the mysterious process of morphogenesis. In 1981 the British science magazine, Nature described A New Science of Life as “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years, ” while the New Scientist called it “an important scientific inquiry into the nature of biological and physical reality. “

Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness
($10 new, under $5 used)
by Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Jean Houston
(2001).
  
  

ONE VERSION OF INFINITY

You run so fast, round and round and round, that finally the fastest way to
run is to stay still. You run so fast that you begin to see your own back,
and you begin to become still. At that point, the whole thing begins to
become infinite. When you hold still, you supercede any kind of speed at
all. You become the ultimate and utmost winner of that particular race.
From that point of view, being back to square one is one version
of infinity….In this case, back to square one is the infiniteness of
immense immeasurable space and expansion that you experience. Therefore, it
is absolutely absurd to try to search further – and the only way not to
search further is to be, to stay, to stand or sit still.

From “Cosmic Disaster,” in GLIMPSES OF REALIZATION: THE THREE BODIES OF
ENLIGHTENMENT page 14. Edited by Judith Lief. Published by Vajradhatu
Publications.

Afraid I’m more of the “seraching further” type (d monk)

           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
 
 

     Halfway squared equals twice back to zero. Primordial rhythms surge against the neonate. Blue hall, blue wall, blue crystal ball. I don’t know yet what I am. Always returning, resurging, resurgence. Gathering documents from an internal realm. Ali Akbar Khan showed his tabla player how to become more powerful, how to pulse with a new beat in the midst of metaphysical ecstacy. Damaged hands re-enact helplessness.

Past life):

     I sit there with my fallen self, heiroglyphic belt trapped outside. Dark tall cell, golden wall, window-slit of light above. The room is a three-dimensional trapezoid. A woman dances in red on a stone-covered courtyard. Children with golden halos, around their small heads. Was it a priest, lost them

         –  remainders .

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.

Zero is an abstract notion
that humans don’t typically understand
until ages 3 or 4.

Parrotic Zero

Alex, a 28-year-old African grey parrot, lives in the lab run by comparative psychologist and cognitive scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg. The parrot spontaneously and correctly used the label “none” during a testing session of his counting skills to describe an absence of a numerical quantity on a tray.

The discovery prompted a series of trials in which Alex consistently demonstrated the ability to identify zero quantity by saying the label “none.”

The findings, published in the current issue of The Journal of Comparative Psychology, add to a growing body of scientific evidence that the avian brain, though physically and organizationally different from the mammalian cortex, is capable of higher cognitive processing than previously thought.

Girls with Guns in Cinema

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.”

Watching The Source, there’s a moment when Norman Mailer appears (in 1990s present), offers a short poem to Allen Ginsberg, and says

He may be the bravest man in America.

Jay Stevens

The hipster, Mailer wrote, was the man who understood the central role Death had come to play within life—in the Fifties death was personified by the concentration camp (cultural death) and the H‑Bomb (species death)—and as a result had decided “to divorce” himself from society, “to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” But for Mailer these rebellious imperatives did not include looking into the face of God, which was the whole point as far as Ginsberg and Kerouac were concerned.

In Storming Heaven, Stevens continues
It was ironic, but … at the height of their fame the Beats already were mutating toward what a later generation would call hippies. But a few heard a peculiar siren song amid all the bad poetry and smelly feet. Writing in Playboy, Herb Gold, who was considered an expert on the Beats largely because he lived in San Francisco, was reminded of some lines that William Yeats (another nineteenth‑century man who had thought Homo sapiens was in the process of climbing the evolutionary ladder) had written:

What rough beast, ifs hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Could the beatniks, Gold wondered, be Yeats’s proto‑gods? Naw. “When Yeats looked into the future to find a terrible savior, an evolution up from animality into something strange and wonderful—he did not mean James Dean. Perhaps, as they claim, the tunneling hipster’s avoidance of feeling can lead to a new honesty of emotion. Perhaps a ground hog might someday learn to fly, but man O man, that will be one strange bird.”

Precisely the point Yeats was making.

In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s second Beat novel, there is a moment when the Gary Snyder character experiences a vision of the future comparable to Yeats’s. What he sees is “a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh … wild gangs of pure holymen getting together to drink and talk and pray.”

That was the Beat fantasy, and it was one that Allen Ginsberg was using all of his market research skills to bring about. Ginsberg became the public relations director of the Beat movement, which irritated some of the more self‑reliant poets. He badgered the intellectual journals, particularly hostile ones like Partisan Review and Hudson Review, to publish the work of his friends; he contacted agents and editors and was rarely without a selection of manuscripts that he was trying to place. If the Beat movement was a modestly glowing goal, he was going to do everything within his power to make sure it burst into flame. Years later Ginsberg described the potential of this moment this way:

We’d already had, by ‘48, some sort of alteration of our own private consciousness; by ‘55 we made some kind of articulation of it; by ‘58 it had spread sufficiently so that the mass media were coming around for information, and by that time I realized that if our private fancies, our private poetries, were so serious that they absorbed the attention of the big, serious military generals who wrote for Time magazine, there must be something strange going on.”

What was happening, Ginsberg thought, was an alteration of consciousness that was filtering up through the young into all levels of society. It was as though the country was just catching up to where the New Visionaries had been back in 1944. “That year on the literary scene in New York it was all in fashion to go crazy,” remembers Barbara Probst Solomon. “It was the fashion to push things to their ultimate extreme—all kinds of sexual and drug experimentation. Once, at a party, someone put LSD in my drink, and I went home and woke up seeing things. I thought I was going crazy until someone phoned later in the afternoon and asked how I liked my acid trip …. It was the beginning of the Sixties, really, and I used to say to Larry Roose, a Freudian friend of mine, that it was all very violent, that I didn’t like being part of it.”

America, thought Ginsberg, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

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

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….”

I’m interested in perusing the meaning of heroes for individuals these days. A couple weeks ago I sent out an email asking for personal stories – if you have personal, intimate and honest reflections of who your heroes are, and reflections on why, please send them, if inspired.

The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again–if the powers have remained unfriendly to him–his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).
– from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces

The text below, which I hope to comment on in the future, is exerpted from:
Classical Heroes in Modern Movies: Mythological Patterns of the Superhero
(Journal of Media Psychology, Volume 9, No. 3, Fall, 2004)
By William Indick, Ph.D.
Dowling College

The hero is the integral archetype in the collective unconscious of American culture. He is at once a collective and personal encounter, as each individual in the audience identifies personally with the hero’s story, while the hero simultaneously embodies the collective hopes and ideals of the culture that creates him. It is this compound phenomenon – the personal identification with the collective hero – that makes the hero archetype so psychologically powerful. This compound identification with the hero fulfills what Carl Jung called the “transcendent function” of myth and dreams.

In Jungian psychology, myths are collective dreams, the communal expression of a culture’s goals, wishes, anxieties and fears. Dreams, on the other hand, are personal myths. They are the individual expression of personal unconscious issues, amplified into visions and projected onto a screen in the “theater of the mind,” in the form of a personalized movie. Experiencing a modern myth in the form of a film is, in a Jungian sense, a transcendent experience, because when we identify with the hero and vicariously experience his journey, we transcend our own private conscious existence and integrate a collective cultural archetype. Furthermore, as a function of the film-going experience, we transcend our own individual neuroses, allowing ourselves to commune with the rest of the audience through a shared understanding, integrating the collective encounter on a personal level.

Joseph Campbell: The Hero’s Journey

Campbell’s model of the mythological hero, from his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), is by far the most influential, especially in the field of screenwriting, for several reasons. First, Campbell himself delineated clear stages of the hero’s journey, providing a distinct structure for screenwriters to follow when devising their plots and character development. Secondly, Campbell’s model is the most eclectic of the major studies, integrating Freudian, Rankian, Jungian and Frazerian theory into a cohesive pattern of heroic elements. And finally, Campbell arranged his model in three broad units, (“the nuclear unit of the monomyth”), which corresponds quite nicely with the three-act structure that most screenplays follow.

Campbell’s term “monomyth” is a reference to a term originally created by James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake (1939). It refers to the basic elements of myth, the archetypal qualities of all legends and heroes, that transcend individual cultures and specific periods of time. The monomyth is universal and timeless. Hence, the hero that Campbell explains is not one particular hero from one particular myth, but the universal qualities of all heroes from all myths… the “hero with a thousand faces.” The monomyth is universal and timeless because its basic form fulfills a psychological function for both the mythmakers and their audiences. Campbell explained it as follows:

“The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.”

The formula of the monomyth is then summarized as follows:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

And the specific actions within the three parts of the formula are explained as follows:

“The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle is lured… to the threshold of adventure… then the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of his mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), or his own divination (apotheosis)… The final work is that of the return… At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread… The boon he brings restores the world.”

Campbell went even further in his account, breaking this three-part, (or three-act), formula down into seventeen specific stages, each of which he explains in detail. The stages of the hero’s journey are as follows:

Act One: Departure

1. The Call to Adventure

2. Refusal of the Call

3. Supernatural Aid

4. The Crossing of the First Threshold

5. The Belly of the Whale

 

Act Two: Initiation

6. The Road of Trials

7. The Meeting with the Goddess

8. Woman as the Temptress

9. Atonement with the Father

10. Apotheosis

11. The Ultimate Boon

 

Act Three: Return

12. Refusal of the Return

13. The Magic Flight

14. Rescue from Without

15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold

16. Master of the Two Worlds

17. Freedom to Live

   Dying Hope

You’ve been dreaming of this moment all your life. An entire city and its beleaguered citizens are in desperate need of heroes. You have the powers. You have the talent. You have the heart. You are a hero.

Dual Identities & Anonymity

Dual identities and anonymity can be found in modern day comic book heroes. Some would say that their masked identity intrigues us because we want uncommon heroes with virtues and powers we only dream of; that like the Greeks and Romans, we must have our minor gods too, even if belief in them sprouts only in the entertainment of our imagination. However, it is possible the real appeal of these dual-identity heroes is something else. . . we have an opportunity to imagine ourselves in yet another role. And since nobody is supposed to know who the masked one is, it is easy to believe for the moment it could be us. (The Ant/Henry Pym)

Avatar Lawsuits

Is it a violation of copyright to make up a character in the virtual world or is that fair use? This is really untested ground in the courts.

.

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.”

     

It’s a bit tragic that, if glimmers become dreams and dreams become social realities, if the realities are consuming enough, the manifestation appears as organic, simply part of the existing landscape, thus relatively unnoticed. The glimmer of a dream - instantly being able to freely access those most-condensed fonts of human wisdom: books, works of intense labors, devotion – just beyond reach. No more! A panoply of sacred texts translated, straight no chaser.

Just now the golden-sandled dawn has called.

(Sappho, Fragment 18)

Sacred Texts Online

Sacred Texts: Timeline

World Mysteries dot com

Bibliography of Sacreds Texts - with online links

Comparative Religion dot com

Some 2000 free eBooks - relating to Asian cultures and and cultural studies generally

here at the U Virginia eText Center

Beyond Reading: Papyrology Links

Sappho and

Other Women’s Voices: Translations of Writings Before 1700

What greater good can be done for the future without learning, growing into knowledge. Even without a friend, impoverished, with only food, an Internet Cafe and a few bucks – open your mind.

A napkin dripping.

(Sappho, Fragment 110)

Several friends of mine are associated with the Zen teacher Cheri Huber. I’ve heard some of her lectures, and will be doing a 5-day retreat at The Zen Center, in March. Speaking of which, The Peacemaker Institute will also be hosting a workshop with Cheri Huber, titled “There is Nothing Wrong with You,” February 18-19, in Boulder, Colorado. Although I am not, strictly speaking a Zen practioner or associated with these groups, I support their work wholeheartedly and want to call your attention to their excellence.

One of the exciting and interesting projects Cheri Huber is doing, The Peace Project: Assisi is worth checking out. They are asking for one-dollar donations, and you can read more about it here and here and here.

The Peacemaker Institute is part of the Peacemaker Community. One of the upcoming activities of this community will be Bearing Witness at Auschwitz Birkenau, November 7-11, 2005. “Originally conceived of by Zen Master Bernie Glassman, this is the tenth annual Auschwitz-Birkenau retreat. . . . The retreat will be guided by Bernie Glassman, Andrzej Krajewski, Eve Marko and an experienced group of international leaders representing diverse cultures and religious traditions.”

 

 

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).

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.

A friend recently asked the question,

“What’s the least expensive reasonable espresso machine
and grinder that I can buy for the home, to make
a decent espresso?”

I’ve tried to provide some answers, and
also wanted to research the field, with a thought
to what I would like to own, at each given price point –
and more definitively, what I hope to purchase myself.

In researching the list below I’ve included a full range of recommended equipment, from least expensive to the “ultimate,” reading the many reviews, comments and tutorials available online. I apologize in advance for omissions; I’ve tried to keep only highly recommended machines with several reviews. At the high end there are many great machines, usually of interest to aficionados who do their own extensive research, so I have included only a sampling of very popular machines, offering good price/performance. My orientation is the North American market.

The more challenging area is in the lower end, where there exist questions of quality, reliability and trade-offs. I’ve tried to provide several options.

One of the most important things to know is that without a good espresso grinder, you should best have your espresso at the café, no matter what level of espresso machine you buy. I found a recommended grinder for $100., and as my friend is a college student, it seems an okay start, but spending around $180.-$200. at a minimun is advisable (see the recommendations). Last, please write to corrent any errors, and offer any alternative recommended set-ups.

Here is the list.

I’d like to thank all the sites (and reviews) I linked to in the above page for providing such excellent information!
Much of the information was gathered from these four sites (alphabetically),
 
Coffee Geek
Whole Latte Love
Chris Coffee
Coffee Kid

Personal experience & caveats:
I haven’t had experience with the machines I reviewed, except the Rocky grinder. My coffee background:
I was a roaster, cupper and espresso trainer for a medium-sized specialty coffee outfit in Colorado for two years, roasting 250,000 lbs/month at the time. Previously, had barista experience, managed a café, travelled Europe tasting, etc. My sojourns in the coffee world as a professional ended about 8 years ago. However my love for coffee culture and ritual remains! My experience with equipment is limited to commerical espresso machines, mostly Rancilio, and commercial or industrial coffee grinders. I am not associated with the coffee business in any way.

I hope the research proves helpful to anyone looking into the marvelous possibilities of espresso, and the bountiful bean.

Seen in Poetry (Magazine) January 2005:

Sunday Morning Percodan
By Austin Hummell

There are days when a big wind kills her son
calling long distance from Uz, Oregon
and even the sunny throne of coffee won’t do
for a mood.
. . .
What is faith
if not this, this opiate reaching its
tiny hands into the lobes of euphoria,
this hymn that dips or psalm that lifts
her eyes, this heart like the swollen
heart of Christ astride a donkey,
with lazy palms of Sunday waving hey.

Austin Hummell is poetry editor of Passages North.
This is his first appearance in Poetry (Magazine, p.286).

The Zen monk Ikkyu seldom painted landscapes, preferring instead such subjects as birds, orchids, prunes, and especially poems and Zen parables written in his powerful calligraphic brush manner. These bokuseki (ink traces) are revered in Japan because they reveal the spiritual character of this eccentric cleric’s life and thought (Cleveland Museum of Art).

It’s nice to read something beautiful from 15th century Japan:

Natural, reckless, correct skill;
Yesterday’s clarity is today’s stupidity
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.

(Ikkyu Sojun, number 291 in Sonja Arntzen)

Ikkyu also ponders sexuality, passion, as Jusin Hall writes:

There’s something nicely saucy about sex poems that last five or six hundred years. Ikkyu wrote graphically, straightforwardly, about a woman’s vagina as a beautiful, alluring, important place, “the birthplace of all the ten thousand buddhas” and his own penis and the joys that could be found playing in his loincloth.

A Woman’s Sex:
It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.

A Man’s Root:
Eight inches strong, it is my favourite thing;
If I’m alone at night, I embrace it fully -
A beautiful woman hasn’t touched it for ages.
Within my fundoshi there is an entire universe!

(A fundoshi is a type of loose-fitting underwear once worn by Japanese men.)

Definitely a different take, for a Zen Buddhist Priest, on the age-old Buddhist precept, expressed in contemporary language in Thich Nhat Hanh’s 14th Precept: Three Sources of Energy

Do not mistreat your body. Learn to handle it with respect. Do not look on your body as only an instrument. Preserve vital energies (sexual, breath, spirit) for the realization of the Way. (For brothers and sisters who are not monks and nuns:) Sexual expression should not take place without love and a long-term commitment. In sexual relationships, be aware of future suffering that may be caused. To preserve the happiness of others, respect the rights and commitmennts of others. Be fully aware of the responsibility of bringing new lives into the world. Meditate on the world into which you are bringing new beings.

One zen priestess writes glowingly about Ikkyu:

One of the miscellaneous koans is, Why are perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas attached to the vermilion thread? The vermilion thread is the red thread, and the red thread is symbolic: I have recently learned that it is not the line of tears , as I used to think, but it comes from early China, where the geisha girls and courtesans would wear a red garter on their thigh, as the line of passions. So: Why are perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas attached to the vermilion thread? One of the characters I want to introduce you to is a wonderful character in the Zen tradition, called Ikkyu, who is one of my longstanding and favourite Zen masters and who appeals, I guess, to the wild woman in me. He was born in 1394 and was an illegitimate son of the emperor Go-komatsu. He was known by some as the emperor of renegades, a wild wandering monk and teacher, sometimes called Crazy Cloud. He was a lover, a poet, and he could write very tenderly about the beauty of women. He relentlessly attacked the hypocrisy of the then corrupt Zen establishment, and even had women as his students. I think he was one of the first Zen masters to have women as students; that was considered quite radical. It was in the brothels and geisha houses that he developed the Red Thread Zen, a notion he borrowed from the old Chinese master Kido and extended to deep and subtle levels of realisation.

This very body is the lotus of the true law. This very body is the lotus of the true law, linking human beings to birth and death by the red thread of passion. This approach was closely related to Tantric Buddhism, that used sexual union as a religious ritual. Ikkyus Red Thread form of Zen practice was a radical approach, a non-dualistic interpretation of the sexual act, realising this very body is the Buddha-dharma. Ikkyu wrote a poem after his first realisation experience:

From the world of passions returning to the world of passions:
There is a moments pause.
If it rains, let it rain; if the wind blows, let it blow.

Ikkyu’s Red Thread Zen and wild, poetic, passionate nature was also tempered, though, by his extensive training in the Rinzai school, very intense training. Rinzai was a very strict master, and Ikkyu was very strict and demanding with his own students.

At the age of 77, Ikkyu had a passionate relationship with a mistress named Lady Shin. She was a blind singer and composer and a very skilled musician, and she was in her late thirties. He wrote lots of beautiful graphic poetry celebrating their love, and it was in Lady Shin that Ikkyu finally located his own missing female self.

As Manfred Steger commented in his book Crazy Clouds [Crazy Clouds: Zen Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers (with Perle Besserman: A cross-cultural study in Zen Buddhism and Politics; Shambhala Press, 1991], Ikkyu incorporated bold elements of the physical relationship into his teaching of Zen, playing on koans in an erotic context, and bound the manifest and essential worlds in a love-knot. His radical methods and practices honoured women and the red thread that binds even the most enlightened Zen masters to passion, birth, and death.

Ikkyu celebrated the joy in human love, and within sexuality there lies a profound sacred practice, similar to Tantric Buddhism. He infused Zen for the first time with a feminine element that had long been missing. When Ikkyu was about 80 years old that he was asked to be the abbot of Daitokoji, which is one the great temples in Japan. At that time it was completely in ruin from a civil war, so it was an extraordinary thing to do at 80 years old, to rebuild Daitokoji: which he did. He had an extraordinary enlightened mind.

Ikkyu Sojun, Crazy Cloud, Zen priest and haiku master, (brief bio; 1394 - 1481), is one of the most eccentric figures in the history of Rinzai Zen. He has become quite a cult folk-hero in modern Japan. He once defended masturbation by quoting the Sixth Patriarch (who had written that “outside of licentiousness there is no true Buddha-nature").

Links to Zen poetry
Buddhism – free eBooks
Chan Buddhist texts – comments
online Zen Buddhist texts.

Shin-ju An Temple, dedicated to Ikkyu

Shichi Butsu Tsukaige

Ikkyu inadvertently
omitted the character
zen
and so wrote it in smaller
at the side. He later said
this accident gave
the calligraphy its
tasteful feeling.

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.

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

“American Noise“.

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”

Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement

Nobel Peace Prize, 2004
“for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”

Nobel Lecture
(excerpt)

As we progressively understood the causes of environmental degradation, we saw the need for good governance. Indeed, the state of any county’s environment is a reflection of the kind of governance in place, and without good governance there can be no peace. Many countries, which have poor governance systems, are also likely to have conflicts and poor laws protecting the environment.

In 2002, the courage, resilience, patience and commitment of members of the Green Belt Movement, other civil society organizations, and the Kenyan public culminated in the peaceful transition to a democratic government and laid the foundation for a more stable society.

Excellencies, friends, ladies and gentlemen,

It is 30 years since we started this work. Activities that devastate the environment and societies continue unabated. Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.

In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.

That time is now.

Links

Full text: Reasons why Wangari Maathai was selected

NPR audio interview

BBC Dec. 10: Kenyan collects Nobel Peace Prize

On climate change

I was asked, “How does this zeal for life shape your haiku and haiku spirit?” (what zeal you ask . . .) by Robert Wilson, co-founder of the new and exponentially growing site Simply Haiku. His question inspired the below speculations on haiku and sacred space.

What is poetry, why do we need it, what does poetry do—to us, for us? In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde affirms a sense that the poem, indeed all art is created fundamentally as an offering. Our culture commodifies artworks, a rather aberrant activity, apparently. Hyde reminds the reader of a truth concerning artwork – the desire to offer a gift, not only to humanity but to the cosmos, the sky, sun, moon, animals, plants, universe, to the moment, to history, one’s ancestors, to the invisible. To offer in a sacred way. Mircea Eliade discusses another aspect of offering in The Myth of the Eternal Return, the means for constructing sacred space, and of enacting life within that space (and timeless time) of the sacred. Experientially investigating the absence and presence of the sacred has been a high value in my life, and also a “saunter: a sense of being sans terre, without Earth, has involved a meandering desire for holiness, a goal echoed in the last stanza of Goethe’s The Holy Longing:

And so long as you haven’t experienced
   This: to die and so to grow,
   You are only a troubled guest
   On the dark earth.

A portion of my research has been concerned with oblivion: the figure of Lethe, mother of the Graces. Why might Forgetting give rise to Splendor, Delight and Blossoming, the three Graces? Heidegger writes,

       The oldest of the old follows behind
   us in our thinking and yet it
   comes to meet us.

      That is why thinking holds to the
   coming of what has been, and
   is remembrance.

      ("The Thinker As Poet,” Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 10)

To remember that thinking is remembrance. . . It seems the sacred is easily forgotten, and entering again, in the encounter is a sense of remembrance, a return of “the oldest of the old. I’ve been interested in why not only the sense of poetry but the experience of poetic dwelling becomes lost. The danger inherent in a world, in any society, which loses poetic dimension and thereby becomes overtly literalistic, is a danger perhaps greater than that of terrorism. To know or feel the sense of poetry in life is to know “the coming of what has been, to desire remembrance: to re-member the world, cosmos, oneself, a leaf, a tree. It may be that a necessary means of entering the zone of the sacred is the experience of oblivion.

Haiku are not always instantly irruptive, do not always enact a sudden shift, yet they seem to draw us into a new resonance, creating a sense of the sacred, a context. Hoshinaga Fumio’s haiku,

nigemizu e sengo no chichi wo oitsumeru

      towards the mirage of water
the postwar fathers
            chasing after . . .

       (Kumaso-Ha, Honami Shoten, 2003)

is a haiku which seems to have layers (allusive adumbrations) of mirage: of image, time and space – heads curling Esherlike around tails. It’s a haiku I work into, never quite out of. There is an unfolding which I sense as lament, echoing back through millennia, through a myriad of cultures. I recall this haiku,

spring evening -
   the wheel of a troop carrier
   crushes a lizard

        (Knots: The Anthology of Southeastern European Haiku Poetry, Red Moon Press, 1999)

by Dimitar Anakiev. Its main image is violent, shocking. But this haiku is not merely violent. There is also a sense of sacredness, the context or field of reality which is only partly given by the poem; the haiku also requires rapprochement on the reader’s part:

The genre itself indicates the boundary lines of the sacred, as context, and it is within the landscapes of the sacred, oriented by the genre as a whole, in which image and action occur.

Concision, disjunction and image elements largely contribute to a haiku’s effect, but these elements alone aren’t enough. If one reads the above poems without a pause, they quickly lose much of their drama and vividness. So, what happens when we slow down, allow this unique poetic form to come to life? I would argue that in some measure we experience oblivion(s), if for instants, and through such psychological moments, remembrance. Mnemosyne, anamnesis, Lethe’s sister, is mother to the Muses. Such may be said for any art one becomes absorbed in and passionate toward; nonetheless, haiku are quite uncompromising in the way they cut into reality. There is extreme and concise rupture. To my knowledge, the phenomenology of poetic process has not been explained by science. In fact, qualitative conscious experience itself has not yet been demonstrably elucidated—there is so much we experience and feel which is immeasurable. Without being able to precisely measure or define, it is nevertheless apparent that haiku becomes a genre due to demonstrably unique modes of poetic encounter and dwelling. I should say that what is truly unique isn’t the experience itself, but its prevalence and intensity, when compared with other poetic and artistic forms.

We may tend to devalue the significance and importance of poetic movements which open us to the sacred, to remembrance because of their immateriality, contrastive with the predominant materialist cultural ethos. I know I have, and it is one reason for my returning to the wellspring of haiku. The haiku genre (which includes a reader) constructs an environment within which its language (i.e. symbolic representation) uniquely occurs. It may be a zest for life that draws me to haiku, but likewise a zest for oblivion and erasure. Though not erasure in itself so much as what happens through it.

Some years ago, Barbara Dilley (a Merce Cunningham dancer, Naropa teacher and former Naropa President) introduced me to “square work, in which a length of bright red yarn is made into a large square on the dance floor, tacked down with a few bits of masking tape. What is within the square is defined as sacred space. Dancers (people) relate to the fact of the square, and to entering and exiting that space. It is quite difficult to remain conscious as one steps across the boundary, quite hard indeed. A gap in consciousness nearly always occurs right at the apotheosis of transition. This is one of the consciousness research-questions we explored in an embodied manner as dance. There’s nothing much to taking some twine and making a square on a patch of bare ground. The square has only as much meaning and significance as is intended by the participants; and, what grows from experiences of many crossings and movements (object and human arrangements) within and without. After the dancers have gone, seeing that red twine on a darkened stage, would an aura exist? Is there a magical quality to that bare ground, so carefully demarcated? I would say, yes, to a sensitive reader there is, because there is an intentional architecture, much like a temple or church, just much more minimalist. Haiku likewise possess an intentional architecture; hence, natively embody natural and nuministic aspects of being.

These days I watch Sumo on television; the dohyo, or fighting square, is a sacred space. Rikishi (wrestlers) climb the steps and enter throwing salt, an act of purification, as they step across the sacred rope boundary embedded within the clay ground, into the inner ring. Above, a temple roof hangs suspended, emblemizing the divine. Such an arrangement of objects in space is an example of an archetypal sacred architecture, explored in detail in Eliade’s works, among others. The sense of sacred space existing or inhabiting cultural constructions is no doubt a deeply archaic if not an intrinsic aspect of the human spirit. Haiku as poems are a bit like that length of red twine, though the boundaries and evidences of sacrality may appear more subtly. An objectively intentional aspect exists, not necessarily in the poem itself, but in the fact that sacred space inhabits the poem, out of which the poem presents new ideas of reality. Isn’t this what is implied by the term, “poetic tradition. The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking and yet it comes to meet us.

mirai yori taki o fukiwaru kaze kitaru

From the future
   a wind arrives
   that blows the waterfall apart

      (Ban’ya Natsuishi, A Future Waterfall, Red Moon Press, 2nd. ed. 2004)

In that art is an offering to the cosmos, the reader is returned by that offering to a cosmic sense or scene. Returned to the world purified and renewed by the “first moment, the moment before creation.

Rising out of the sea and shedding the tank it’s a bit surprising to not be with fish, feeling weightless in the strangeness of air. What was that dreamlike place, filled with unblinking creatures, turtles with flippers, sharks large enough to blot out the far-off sun? The twine, like sunlight is imaginal, extending along an invisible line between land and sea. Returning, instants of vivid memory quickly fade. But a drop of ocean coheres within, adamantine. It is for that one drop, so pure and crystalline, that haiku seem to speak.

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:

BAGHDAD YEAR ZERO: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
Naomi Klein (Harper’s Magazine, September 2004)

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 apart from tanks and humvees. Then I saw it: a construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding anything - not one of the bombed-out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines that remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULA: HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia.

Seeing the sign, I couldn’t help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that’s attracting a lot of flies.” The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq’s famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.

Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn’t have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn’t true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush’s Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.

The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.

Torturers believe that when electrical shocks are applied to various parts of the body simultaneously subjects are rendered so confused about where the pain is coming from that they become incapable of resistance. A declassified CIA “Counterintelligence Interrogation” manual from 1963 describes how a trauma inflicted on prisoners opens up “an interval - which may be extremely brief - of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis . . . At this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply.” A similar theory applies to economic shock therapy, or “shock treatment,” the ugly term used to describe the rapid implementation of free-market reforms imposed on Chile in the wake of General Augusto Pinochet’s coup. The theory is that if painful economic “adjustments” are brought in rapidly and in the aftermath of a seismic social disruption like a war, a coup, or a government collapse, the population will be so stunned, and so preoccupied with the daily pressures of survival, that it too will go into suspended animation, unable to resist. As Pinochet’s finance minister, Admiral Lorenzo Gotuzzo, declared, “The dog’s tail must be cut off in one chop.”

That, in essence, was the working thesis in Iraq, and in keeping with the belief that private companies are more suited than governments for virtually every task, the White House decided to privatize the task of privatizing Iraq’s state-dominated economy. Two months before the war began, USAID began drafting a work order, to be handed out to a private company, to oversee Iraq’s “transition to a sustainable market-driven economic system.” The document states that the winning company (which turned out to be the KPMG offshoot Bearing Pint) will take “appropriate advantage of the unique opportunity for rapid progress in this area presented by the current configuration of political circumstances.” Which is precisely what happened. L. Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. occupation of Iraq from May 2, 2003, until he caught an early flight out of Baghdad on June 28, admits that when he arrived, “Baghdad was on fire, literally, as I drove in from the airport.” But before the fires from the “shock and awe” military onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, describes Bremer’s reforms as “an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world.”

The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”

One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Bremer’s economic engineering had only just begun. In September, to entice foreign investors to come to Iraq, he enacted a radical set of laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations. There was Order 37, which lowered Iraq’s corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order 39, they could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years. Order 40 welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under the same favorable terms. All that remained of Saddam Hussein’s economic policies was a law restricting trade unions and collective bargaining.

If these policies sound familiar, it’s because they are the same ones multinationals around the world lobby for from national governments and in international trade agreements. But while these reforms are only ever enacted in part, or in fits and starts, Bremer delivered them all, all at once. Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in the world to being, on paper, its widest-open market.

At first, the shock-therapy theory seemed to hold: Iraqis, reeling from violence both military and economic, were far too busy staying alive to mount a political response to Bremer’s campaign. Worrying about the privatization of the sewage system was an unimaginable luxury with half the population lacking access to clean drinking water; the debate over the flat tax would have to wait until the lights were back on. Even in the international press, Bremer’s new laws, though radical, were easily upstaged by more dramatic news of political chaos and rising crime.

Some people were paying attention, of course. That autumn was awash in “rebuilding Iraq” trade shows, in Washington, London, Madrid, and Amman. The Economist described Iraq under Bremer as “a capitalist dream,” and a flurry of new consulting firms were launched promising to help companies get access to the Iraqi market, their boards of directors stacked with well-connected Republicans. The most prominent was New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, former Bush-Cheney campaign manager. “Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine,” one of the company’s partners enthused. “One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country.”

Soon there were rumors that a McDonald’s would be opening up in downtown Baghdad, funding was almost in place for a Starwood luxury hotel, and General Motors was planning to build an auto plant. On the financial side, HSBC would have branches all over the country, Citigroup was preparing to offer substantial loans guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil, and the bell was going to ring on a New York-style stock exchange in Baghdad any day.

In only a few months, the postwar plan to turn Iraq into a laboratory for the neocons had been realized. Leo Strauss may have provided the intellectual framework for invading Iraq preemptively, but it was that other University of Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, author of the anti-government manifesto Capitalism and Freedom, who supplied the manual for what to do once the country was safely in America’s hands. This represented an enormous victory for the most ideological wing of the Bush Administration. But it was also something more: the culmination of two interlinked power struggles, one among Iraqi exiles advising the White House on its postwar strategy, the other within the White House itself.

As the British historian Dilip Hiro has shown, in Secrets and Lies: Operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’ and After, the Iraqi exiles pushing for the invasion were divided, broadly, into two camps. On one side were “the pragmatists,” who favored getting rid of Saddam and his immediate entourage, securing access to oil, and slowly introducing free-market reforms. Many of these exiles were part of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, which generated a thirteen-volume report on how to restore basic services and transition to democracy after the war. On the other side was the “Year Zero” camp, those who believed that Iraq was so contaminated that it needed to be rubbed out and remade from scratch. The prime advocate of the pragmatic approach was Iyad Allawi, a former high-level Baathist who fell out with Saddam and started working for the CIA. The prime advocate of the Year Zero approach was Ahmad Chalabi, whose hatred of the Iraqi state for expropriating his family’s assets during the 1958 revolution ran so deep he longed to see the entire country burned to the ground - everything, that is, but the Oil Ministry, which would be the nucleus of the new Iraq, the cluster of cells from which an entire nation would grow. He called this process “de-Baathification.”

A parallel battle between pragmatists and true believers was being waged within the Bush Administration. The pragmatists were men like Secretary of State Colin Powell and General Jay Garner, the first U.S. envoy to postwar Iraq. General Garner’s plan was straightforward enough: fix the infrastructure, hold quick and dirty elections, leave the shock therapy to the International Monetary Fund, and concentrate on securing U.S. military bases on the model of the Philippines. “I think we should look right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the Middle East,” he told the BBC. He also paraphrased T. E. Lawrence, saying, “It’s better for them to do it imperfectly than for us to do it for them perfectly.” On the other side was the usual cast of neoconservatives: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who lauded Bremer’s “sweeping reforms” as “some of the most enlightened and inviting tax and investment laws in the free world"), Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and perhaps most centrally, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Whereas the State Department had its Future of Iraq report, the neocons had USAID’s contract with Bearing Point to remake Iraq’s economy: in 108 pages, “privatization” was mentioned no fewer than fifty-one times. To the true believers in the White House, General Garner’s plans for postwar Iraq seemed hopelessly unambitious. Why settle for a mere coaling station when you can have a model free market? Why settle for the Philippines when you can have a beacon unto the world?

The Iraqi Year Zeroists made natural allies for the White House neoconservatives: Chalabi’s seething hatred of the Baathist state fit nicely with the neocons’ hatred of the state in general, and the two agendas effortlessly merged. Together, they came to imagine the invasion of Iraq as a kind of Rapture: where the rest of the world saw death, they saw birth - a country redeemed through violence, cleansed by fire. Iraq wasn’t being destroyed by cruise missiles, cluster bombs, chaos, and looting; it was being born again. April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell, was day One of Year Zero.

While the war was being waged, it still wasn’t clear whether the pragmatists or the Year Zeroists would be handed control over occupied Iraq. But the speed with which the nation was conquered dramatically increased the neocons’ political capital, since they had been predicting a “cakewalk” all along. Eight days after George Bush landed on that aircraft carrier under a banner that said MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, the President publicly signed on to the neocons’ vision for Iraq to become a model corporate state that would open up the entire region. On May 9, Bush proposed the “establishment of a U.S.-Middle East free trade area within a decade"; three days later, Bush sent Paul Bremer to Baghdad to replace Jay Garner, who had been on the job for only three weeks. The message was unequivocal: the pragmatists had lost; Iraq would belong to the believers.

A Reagan-era diplomat turned entrepreneur, Bremer had recently proven his ability to transform rubble into gold by waiting exactly one month after the September 11 attacks to launch Crisis Consulting Practice, a security company selling “terrorism risk insurance” to multinationals. Bremer had two lieutenants on the economic front: Thomas Foley and Michael Fleischer, the heads of “private sector development” for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Foley is a Greenwich, Connecticut, multimillionaire, a longtime friend of the Bush family and a Bush-Cheney campaign “pioneer” who has described Iraq as a modern California “gold rush.” Fleischer, a venture capitalist, is the brother of former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. Neither man had any high-level diplomatic experience and both use the term corporate “turnaround” specialist to describe what they do. According to Foley, this uniquely qualified them to manage Iraq’s economy because it was “the mother of all turnarounds.”

Many of the other CPA postings were equally ideological. The Green Zone, the city within a city that houses the occupation headquarters in Saddam’s former palace, was filled with Young Republicans straight out of the Heritage Foundation, all of them given responsibility they could never have dreamed of receiving at home. Jay Hallen, a twenty-four-year-old who had applied for a job at the White House, was put in charge of launching Baghdad’s new stock exchange. Scott Erwin, a twenty-one-year-old former intern to Dick Cheney, reported in an email home that “I am assisting Iraqis in the management of finances and budgeting for the domestic security forces.” The college senior’s favorite job before this one? “My time as an ice-cream truck driver.” In those early days, the Green Zone felt a bit like the Peace Corps, for people who think the Peace Corps is a communist plot. It was a chance to sleep on cots, wear army boots, and cry “incoming” - all while being guarded around the clock by real soldiers.

The teams of KPMG accountants, investment bankers, think-tank lifers, and Young Republicans that populate the Green Zone have much in common with the IMF missions that rearrange the economies of developing countries from the presidential suites of Sheraton hotels the world over. Except for one rather significant difference: in Iraq they were not negotiating with the government to accept their “structural adjustments” in exchange for a loan; they were the government.
Some small steps were taken, however, to bring Iraq’s U.S.-appointed politicians inside. Yegor Gaidar, the mastermind of Russia’s mid-nineties privatization auction that gave away the country’s assets to the reigning oligarchs, was invited to share his wisdom at a conference in Baghdad. Marek Belka, who as finance minister oversaw the same process in Poland, was brought in as well. The Iraqis who proved most gifted at mouthing the neocon lines were selected to act as what USAID calls local “policy champions” - men like Ahmad al Mukhtar, who told me of his countrymen, “They are lazy. The Iraqis by nature, they are very dependent . . . . They will have to depend on themselves, it is the only way to survive in the world today.” Although he has no economics background and his last job was reading the English-language news on television, al Mukhtar was appointed director of foreign relations in the Ministry of Trade and is leading the charge for Iraq to join the World Trade Organization.

I had been following the economic front of the war for almost a year before I decided to go to Iraq. I attended the “Rebuilding Iraq” trade shows, studied Bremer’s tax and investment laws, met with contractors at their home offices in the United States, interviewed the government officials in Washington who are making the policies. But as I prepared to travel to Iraq in March to see this experiment in free-market utopianism up close, it was becoming increasingly clear that all was not going according to plan. Bremer had been working on the theory that if you build a corporate utopia the corporations will come - but where were they? American multinationals were happy to accept U.S. taxpayer dollars to reconstruct the phone or electricity systems, but they weren’t sinking their own money into Iraq. There was, as yet, no McDonald’s or Wal-Mart in Baghdad, and even the sales of state factories, announced so confidently nine months earlier, had not materialized.

Some of the holdup had to do with the physical risks of doing business in Iraq. But there were other more significant risks as well. When Paul Bremer shredded Iraq’s Baathist constitution and replaced it with what The Economist greeted approvingly as “the wish list of foreign investors,” there was one small detail he failed to mention: It was all completely illegal. The CPA derived its legal authority from United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, passed in May 2003, which recognized the United States and Britain as Iraq’s legitimate occupiers. It was this resolution that empowered Bremer to unilaterally make laws in Iraq. But the resolution also stated that the U.S. and Britain must “comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907.” Both conventions were born as an attempt to curtail the unfortunate historical tendency among occupying powers to rewrite the rules so that they can economically strip the nations they control. With this in mind, the conventions stipulate that an occupier must abide by a country’s existing laws unless “absolutely prevented” from doing so. They also state that an occupier does not own the “public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural assets” of the country it is occupying but is rather their “administrator” and custodian, keeping them secure until sovereignty is re-established. This was the true threat to the Year Zero plan: since America didn’t own Iraq’s assets, it could not legally sell them, which meant that after the occupation ended, an Iraqi government could come to power and decide that it wanted to keep the state companies in public hands, or, as is the norm in the Gulf region, to bar foreign firms from owning 100 percent of national assets. If that happened, investments made under Bremer’s rules could be expropriated, leaving firms with no recourse because their investments had violated international law from the outset.

By November, trade lawyers started to advise their corporate clients not to go into Iraq just yet, that it would be better to wait until after the transition. Insurance companies were so spooked that not a single one of the big firms would insure investors for “political risk,” that high-stakes area of insurance law that protects companies against foreign governments turning nationalist or socialist and expropriating their investments.

Even the U.S.-appointed Iraqi politicians, up to now so obedient, were getting nervous about their own political futures if they went along with the privatization plans. Communications Minister Haider al-Abadi told me about his first meeting with Bremer. “I said, ‘Look, we don’t have the mandate to sell any of this. Privatization is a big thing. We have to wait until there is an Iraqi government.’” Minister of Industry Mohamad Tofiq was even more direct: “I am not going to do something that is not legal, so that’s it.”

Both al-Abadi and Tofiq told me about a meeting - never reported in the press - that took place in late October 2003. At that gathering the twenty-five members of Iraq’s Governing Council as well as the twenty-five interim ministers decided unanimously that they would not participate in the privatization of Iraq’s state-owned companies or of its publicly owned infrastructure.
But Bremer didn’t give up. International law prohibits occupiers from selling state assets themselves, but it doesn’t say anything about the puppet governments they appoint. Originally, Bremer had pledged to hand over power to a directly elected Iraqi government, but in early November he went to Washington for a private meeting with President Bush and came back with a Plan B. On June 30 the occupation would officially end - but not really. It would be replaced by an appointed government, chosen by Washington. This government would not be bound by the international laws preventing occupiers from selling off state assets, but it would by bound by an “interim constitution,” a document that would protect Bremer’s investment and privatization laws.

The plan was risky. Bremer’s June 30 deadline was awfully close, and it was chosen for a less than ideal reason: so that President Bush could trumpet the end of Iraq’s occupation on the campaign trail. If everything went according to plan, Bremer would succeed in forcing a “sovereign” Iraqi government to carry out his illegal reforms. But if something went wrong, he would have to go ahead with the June 30 handover anyway because by then Karl Rove, and not dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, would be calling the shots. And if it came down to a choice between ideology in Iraq and the electability of George W. Bush, everyone knew which would win.

At first, Plan B seemed to be right on track. Bremer persuaded the Iraqi Governing Council to agree to everything: the new timetable, the interim government, and the interim constitution. He even managed to slip into the constitution a completely overlooked clause, Article 26. It stated that for the duration of the interim government, “The laws, regulations, orders and directives issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority … shall remain in force” and could only be changed after general elections are held.

Bremer had found this legal loophole: There would be a window - seven months - when the occupation was officially over but before general elections were scheduled to take place. Within this window, the Hague and Geneva Conventions’ bans on privatization would no longer apply, but Bremer’s own laws, thanks to Article 26, would stand. During these seven months, foreign investors could come to Iraq and sign forty-year contracts to buy up Iraqi assets. If a future elected Iraqi government decided to change the rules, investors could sue for compensation.

But Bremer had a formidable opponent: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq. al Sistani tried to block Bremer’s plan at every turn, calling for immediate direct elections and for the constitution to be written after those elections, not before. Both demands, if met, would have closed Bremer’s privatization window. Then, on March 2, with the Shia members of the Governing Council refusing to sign the interim constitution, five bombs exploded in front of mosques in Karbala and Baghdad, killing close to 200 worshipers. General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, warned that the country was on the verge of civil war. Frightened by this prospect, al Sistani backed down and the Shia politicians signed the interim constitution. It was a familiar story: the shock of a violent attack paved the way for more shock therapy.

When I arrived in Iraq a week later, the economic project seemed to be back on track. All that remained for Bremer was to get his interim constitution ratified by a Security Council resolution, then the nervous lawyers and insurance brokers could relax and the sell-off of Iraq could finally begin. The CPA, meanwhile, had launched a major new P.R. offensive designed to reassure investors that Iraq was still a safe and exciting place to do business. The centerpiece of the campaign was Destination Baghdad Exposition, a massive trade show for potential investors to be held in early April at the Baghdad International Fairgrounds. It was the first such event inside Iraq, and the organizers had branded the trade fair “DBX,” as if it were some sort of Mountain Dew-sponsored dirt-bike race. In keeping with the extreme-sports theme, Thomas Foley traveled to Washington to tell a gathering of executives that the risks in Iraq are akin “to skydiving or riding a motorcycle, which are, to many, very acceptable risks.”

But three hours after my arrival in Baghdad, I was finding these reassurances extremely hard to believe. I had not yet unpacked when my hotel room was filled with debris and the windows in the lobby were shattered. Down the street, the Mount Lebanon Hotel had just been bombed, at that point the largest attack of its kind since the official end of the war. The next day, another hotel was bombed in Basra, then two Finnish businessmen were murdered on their way to a meeting in Baghdad. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt finally admitted that there was a pattern at work: “the extremists have started shifting away from the hard targets … and are now going out of their way to specifically target softer targets.” The next day, the State Department updated its travel advisory: U.S. citizens were “strongly warned against travel to Iraq.” The physical risks of doing business in Iraq seemed to be spiraling out of control. This, once again, was not part of the original plan. When Bremer first arrived in Baghdad, the armed resistance was so low that he was able to walk the streets with a minimal security entourage. During his first four months on the job, 109 U.S. soldiers were killed and 570 were wounded. In the following four months, when Bremer’s shock therapy had taken effect, the number of U.S. casualties almost doubled, with 195 soldiers killed and 1,633 wounded. There are many in Iraq who argue that these events are connected - that Bremer’s reforms were the single largest factor leading to the rise of armed resistance.

Take, for instance, Bremer’s first casualties. The soldiers and workers he laid off without pensions or severance pay didn’t all disappear quietly. Many of them went straight into the mujahedeen, forming the backbone of the armed resistance. “Half a million people are now worse off, and there you have the water tap that keeps the insurgency going. It’s alternative employment,” says Hussain Kubba, head of the prominent Iraqi business group Kubba Consulting. Some of Bremer’s other economic casualties also have failed to go quietly. It turns out that many of the businessmen whose companies are threatened by Bremer’s investment laws have decided to make investments of their own - in the resistance. It is partly their money that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs.

These developments present a challenge to the basic logic of shock therapy: the neocons were convinced that if they brought in their reforms quickly and ruthlessly, Iraqis would be too stunned to resist. But the shock appears to have had the opposite effect; rather than the predicted paralysis, it jolted many Iraqis into action, much of it extreme. Haider al-Abadi, Iraq’s minister of communication, puts it this way: “We know that there are terrorists in the country, but previously they were not successful, they were isolated. Now because the whole country is unhappy, and a lot of people don’t have jobs … these terrorists are finding listening ears.”

Bremer was now at odds not only with the Iraqis who opposed his plans but with U.S. military commanders charged with putting down the insurgency his policies were feeding. Heretical questions began to be raised: instead of laying people off, what if the CPA actually created jobs for Iraqis? And instead of rushing to sell off Iraq’s 200 state-owned firms, how about putting them back to work?

From the start, the neocons running Iraq had shown nothing but disdain for Iraq’s state-owned companies. In keeping with their Year Zero - apocalyptic glee, when looters descended on the factories during the war, U.S. forces did nothing. Sabah Asaad, managing director of a refrigerator factory outside Baghdad, told me that while the looting was going on, he went to a nearby U.S. Army base and begged for help. “I asked one of the officers to send two soldiers and a vehicle to help me kick out the looters. I was crying. The officer said, ‘Sorry, we can’t do anything, we need an order from President Bush.’” Back in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

To see the remains of Asaad’s football-field-size warehouse is to understand why Frank Gehry had an artistic crisis after September 11 and was briefly unable to design structures resembling the rubble of modern buildings. Asaad’s looted and burned factory looks remarkably like a heavy-metal version of Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, with waves of steel, buckled by fire, lying in terrifyingly beautiful golden heaps. Yet all was not lost. “The looters were good-hearted,” one of Asaad’s painters told me, explaining that they left the tools and machines behind, “so we could work again.” Because the machines are still there, many factory managers in Iraq say that it would take little for them to return to full production. They need emergency generators to cope with daily blackouts, and they need capital for parts and raw materials. If that happened, it would have tremendous implications for Iraq’s stalled reconstruction, because it would mean that many of the key materials needed to rebuild - cement and steel, bricks and furniture - could be produced inside the country.

But it hasn’t happened. Immediately after the nominal end of the war, Congress appropriated $2.5 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq, followed by an additional $18.4 billion in October. Yet as of July 2004, Iraq’s state-owned factories had been pointedly excluded from the reconstruction contracts. Instead, the billions have all gone to Western companies, with most of the materials for the reconstruction imported at great expense from abroad.

With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And Iraqis don’t have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it’s on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the occupation: the blast wall. The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced concrete are everywhere in Iraq, separating the protected - the people in upscale hotels, luxury homes, military bases, and, of course, the Green Zone - from the unprotected and exposed. If that wasn’t enough, all the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther afield, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily be again. There are seventeen state-owned cement factories across the country, but most are idle or working at only half capacity. According to the Ministry of Industry, not one of these factories has received a single contract to help with the reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and meet other needs for cement at a greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to $1,000 per imported blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make them for $100. Minister Tofiq says there is a simple reason why the Americans refuse to help get Iraq’s cement factories running again: among those making the decision, “no one believes in the public sector.” *

[* Tofiq did say that several U.S. companies had expressed strong interest in buying the state-owned cement factories. This supports a widely-held belief in Iraq that there is a deliberate strategy to neglect the state firms so that they can be sold more cheaply - a practice known as “starve then sell."]

This kind of ideological blindness has turned Iraq’s occupiers into prisoners of their own policies, hiding behind walls that, by their very existence, fuel the rage at the U.S. presence, thereby feeding the need for more walls. In Baghdad the concrete barriers have been given a popular nickname: Bremer walls.

As the insurgency grew, it soon became clear that if Bremer went ahead with his plans to sell off the state companies, it could worsen the violence. There was no question that privatization would require layoffs: the Ministry of Industry estimates that roughly 145,000 workers would have to be fired to make the firms desirable to investors, with each of those workers supporting, on average, five family members. For Iraq’s besieged occupiers the question was: Would these shock-therapy casualties accept their fate or would they rebel?

The answer arrived, in rather dramatic fashion, at one of the largest state-owned companies, the General Company for Vegetable Oils. The complex of six factories produces cooking oil, hand soap, laundry detergent, shaving cream, and shampoo. At least that is what I was told by a receptionist who gave me glossy brochures and calendars boasting of “modern instruments” and “the latest and most up to date developments in the field of industry.” But when I approached the soap factory, I discovered a group of workers sleeping outside a darkened building. Our guide rushed ahead, shouting something to a woman in a white lab coat, and suddenly the factory scrambled into activity: lights switched on, motors revved up, and workers - still blinking off sleep - began filling two-liter plastic bottles with pale blue Zahi brand dishwashing liquid.

I asked Nada Ahmed, the woman in the white coat, why the factory wasn’t working a few minutes before. She explained that they have only enough electricity and materials to run the machines for a couple of hours a day, but when guests arrive - would-be investors, ministry officials, journalists - they get them going. “For show,” she explained. Behind us, a dozen bulky machines sat idle, covered in sheets of dusty plastic and secured with duct tape.

In one dark corner of the plant, we came across an old man hunched over a sack filled with white plastic caps. With a thin metal blade lodged in a wedge of wax, he carefully whittled down the edges of each cap, leaving a pile of shavings at his feet. “We don’t have the spare part for the proper mold, so we have to cut them by hand,” his supervisor explained apologetically. “We haven’t received any parts from Germany since the sanctions began.” I noticed that even on the assembly lines that were nominally working there was almost no mechanization: bottles were held under spouts by hand because conveyor belts don’t convey, lids once snapped on by machines were being hammered in place with wooden mallets. Even the water for the factory was drawn from an outdoor well, hoisted by hand, and carried inside.

The solution proposed by the U.S. occupiers was not to fix the plant but to sell it, and so when Bremer announced the privatization auction back in June 2003 this was among the first companies mentioned. Yet when I visited the factory in March, nobody wanted to talk about the privatization plan; the mere mention of the word inside the plant inspired awkward silences and meaningful glances. This seemed an unnatural amount of subtext for a soap factory, and I tried to get to the bottom of it when I interviewed the assistant manager. But the interview itself was equally odd: I had spent half a week setting it up, submitting written questions for approval, getting a signed letter of permission from the minister of industry, being questioned and searched several times. But when I finally began the interview, the assistant manager refused to tell me his name or let me record the conversation. “Any manager mentioned in the press is attacked afterwards,” he said. And when I asked whether the company was being sold, he gave this oblique response. “If the decision was up to the workers, they are against privatization; but if it’s up to the high ranking officials and government, then privatization is an order and orders must be followed.”

I left the plant feeling that I knew less than when I’d arrived. But on the way out of the gates, a young security guard handed my translator a note. He wanted us to meet him after work at a nearby restaurant, “to find out what is really going on with privatization.” His name was Mahmud, and he was a twenty-five-year-old with a neat beard and big black eyes. (For his safety, I have omitted his last name.) His story began in July, a few weeks after Bremer’s privatization announcement. The company’s manager, on his way to work, was shot to death. Press reports speculated that the manager was murdered because he was in favor of privatizing the plant, but Mahmud was convinced that he was killed because he opposed the plan. “He would never have sold the factories like the Americans want. That’s why they killed him.”

The dead man was replaced by a new manager, Mudhfar Ja’far. Shortly after taking over, Ja’far called a meeting with ministry officials to discuss selling off the soap factory, which would involve laying off two thirds of its employees. Guarding that meeting were several security officers from the plant. They listened closely to Ja’far’s plans and promptly reported the alarming news to their coworkers. “We were shocked,” Mahmud recalled. “If the private sector buys our company, the first thing they would do is reduced the staff to make more money. And we will be forced into a very hard destiny, because the factory is our only way of living.”

Frightened by this prospect, a group of seventeen workers, including Mahmud, marched into Ja’far’s office to confront him on what they had heard. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t there, only the assistant manager, the one you met,” Mahmud told me. A fight broke out: one worker struck the assistant manager, and a bodyguard fired three shots at the workers. The crowd then attacked the bodyguard, took his gun, and, Mahmud said, “stabbed him with a knife in the back three times. He spent a month in the hospital.” In January there was even more violence. On their way to work, Ja’far, the manager, and his son were shot and badly injured. Mahmud told me he had no idea who was behind the attack, but I was starting to understand why factory managers in Iraq try to keep a low profile.

At the end of our meeting, I asked Mahmud what would happen if the plant was sold despite the workers’ objections. “There are two choices,” he said, looking me in the eye and smiling kindly. “Either we will set the factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will blow ourselves up inside of it. But it will not be privatized.”

If there ever was a moment when Iraqis were too disoriented to resist shock therapy, that moment has definitely passed. Labor relations, like everything else in Iraq, has become a blood sport. The violence on the streets howls at the gates of the factories, threatening to engulf them. Workers fear job loss as a death sentence, and managers, in turn, fear their workers, a fact that makes privatization distinctly more complicated than the neocons foresaw.*

[* It is in Basra where the connections between economic reforms and the rise of the resistance was put in starkest terms. In December the union representing oil workers was negotiating with the Oil Ministry for a salary increase. Getting nowhere, the workers offered the ministry a simple choice: increase their paltry salaries or they would all join the armed resistance. They received a substantial raise.]

As I left the meeting with Mahmud, I got word that there was a major demonstration outside the CPA headquarters. Supporters of the radical young cleric Moqtada al Sadr were protesting the closing of their newspaper, al Hawza, by military police. The CPA accused al Hawza of publishing “false articles” that could “pose the real threat of violence.” As an example, it cited an article that claimed Bremer “is pursuing a policy of starving the Iraqi people to make them preoccupied with procuring their daily bread so they do not have the chance to demand their political and individual freedoms.” To me it sounded less like hate literature than a concise summary of Milton Friedman’s recipe for shock therapy.

A few days before the newspaper was shut down, I had gone to Kufa during Friday prayers to listen to al Sadr at his mosque. He had launched into a tirade against Bremer’s newly signed interim constitution, calling it “an unjust, terrorist document.” The message of the sermon was clear: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani may have backed down on the constitution, but al Sadr and his supporters were still determined to fight it - and if they succeeded they would sabotage the neocons’ careful plan to saddle Iraq’s next government with their “wish list” of laws. With the closing of the newspaper, Bremer was giving al Sadr his response: he wasn’t negotiating with this young upstart; he’d rather take him out with force.

When I arrived at the demonstration, the streets were filled with men dressed in black, the soon-to-be legendary Mahdi Army. It struck me that if Mahmud lost his security guard job at the soap factory, he could be one of them. That’s who al Sadr’s foot soldiers are: the young men who have been shut out of the neocons’ grand plans for Iraq, who see no possibilities for work, and whose neighborhoods have seen none of the promised reconstruction. Bremer has failed these young men, and everywhere that he has failed, Moqtada al Sadr has cannily set out to succeed. In Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, a network of Sadr Centers coordinate a kind of shadow reconstruction. Funded through donations, the centers dispatch electricians to fix power and phone lines, organize local garbage collection, set up emergency generators, run blood drives, direct traffic where the streetlights don’t work. And yes, they organize militias too. Al Sadr took Bremer’s economic casualties, dressed them in black, and gave them rusty Kalashnikovs. His militiamen protected the mosques and the state factories when the occupation authorities did not, but in some areas they also went further, zealously enforcing Islamic law by torching liquor stores and terrorizing women without the veil. Indeed, the astronomical rise of the brand of religious fundamentalism that al Sadr represents is another kind of blowback from Bremer’s shock therapy: if the reconstruction had provided jobs, security, and services to Iraqis, al Sadr would have been deprived of both his mission and many of his newfound followers.

At the same time as al Sadr’s followers were shouting “Down with America” outside the Green Zone, something was happening in another part of the country that would change everything. Four American mercenary soldiers were killed in Fallujah, their charred and dismembered bodies hung like trophies over the Euphrates. The attacks would prove a devastating blow for the neocons, one from which they would never recover. With these images, investing in Iraq suddenly didn’t look anything like a capitalist dream; it looked like a macabre nightmare made real.

The day I left Baghdad was the worst yet. Fallujah was under siege and Brig. Gen. Kimmitt was threatening to “destroy the al-Mahdi army.” By the end, roughly 2,000 Iraqis were killed in those twin campaigns. I was dropped off at a security checkpoint several miles from the airport, then loaded onto a bus jammed with contractors lugging hastily packed bags. Although no one was calling it one, this was an evacuation: over the next week 1,500 contractors left Iraq, and some governments began airlifting their citizens out of the country. On the bus no one spoke; we all just listened to the mortar fire, craning our necks to see the red glow. A guy carrying a KPMG briefcase decided to lighten things up. “So is there business class on this flight?” he asked the silent bus. From the back, somebody called out, “Not yet.”

Indeed, it may be quite a while before business class truly arrives in Iraq. When we landed in Amman, we learned that we had gotten out just in time. That morning three Japanese civilians were kidnapped and their captors were threatening to burn them alive. Two days later Nicholas Berg went missing and was not seen again until the snuff film surfaced of his beheading, an even more terrifying message for U.S. contractors than the charred bodies in Fallujah. These were the start of a wave of kidnappings and killings of foreigners, most of them businesspeople, from a rainbow of nations: South Korea, Italy, China, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey. By the end of June more than ninety contractors were reported dead in Iraq. When seven Turkish contractors were kidnapped in June, their captors asked the “company to cancel all contracts and pull out employees from Iraq.” Many insurance companies stopped selling life insurance to contractors, and others began to charge premiums as high as $10,000 a week for a single Western executive - the same price some insurgents reportedly pay for a dead American.

For their part, the organizers of DBX, the historic Baghdad trade fair, decided to relocate to the lovely tourist city of Diyarbakir in Turkey, “just 250 km from the Iraqi border.” An Iraqi landscape, only without those frightening Iraqis. Three weeks later just fifteen people showed up for a Commerce Department conference in Lansing, Michigan, on investing in Iraq. Its host, Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, tried to reassure his skeptical audience by saying that Iraq is “like a rough neighborhood anywhere in America.” The foreign investors, the ones who were offered every imaginable free-market enticement, are clearly not convinced; there is still no sign of them. Keith Crane, a senior economist at the Rand Corporation who has worked for the CPA, put it bluntly: “I don’t believe the board of a multinational company could approve a major investment in this environment. If people are shooting at each other, it’s just difficult to do business.” Hamid Jassim Khamis, the manager of the largest soft-drink bottling plant in the region, told me he can’t find any investors, even though he landed the exclusive rights to produce Pepsi in central Iraq. “A lot of people have approached us to invest in the factory, but people are really hesitating now.” Khamis said he couldn’t blame the; in five months he has survived an attempted assassination, a carjacking, two bombs planted at the entrance of his factory, and the kidnapping of his son.

Despite having been granted the first license for a foreign bank to operate in Iraq in forty years, HSBC still hasn’t opened any branches, a decision that may mean losing the coveted license altogether. Procter & Gamble has put its joint venture on hold, and so has General Motors. The U.S. financial backers of the Starwood luxury hotel and multiplex have gotten cold feet, and Siemens AG has pulled most staff from Iraq. The bell hasn’t rung yet at the Baghdad Stock Exchange - in fact you can’t even use credit cards in Iraq’s cash-only economy. New Bridge Strategies, the company that had gushed back in October about how “a Wal-Mart could take over the country,” is sounding distinctly humbled. “McDonald’s is not opening anytime soon,” company partner Ed Rogers told the Washington Post. Neither is Wal-Mart. The Financial Times has declared Iraq “the most dangerous place in the world in which to do business.” It’s quite an accomplishment: in trying to design the best place in the world to do business, the neocons have managed to create the worst, the most eloquent indictment yet of the guiding logic behind deregulated free markets.

The violence has not just kept investors out; it also forced Bremer, before he left, to abandon many of his central economic policies. Privatization of the state companies is off the table; instead, several of the state companies have been offered up for lease, but only if the investor agrees not to lay off a single employee. Thousands of the state workers that Bremer fired have been rehired, and significant raises have been handed out in the public sector as a whole. Plans to do away with the food-ration program have also been scrapped - it just doesn’t seem like a good time to deny millions of Iraqis the only nutrition on which they can depend.

 

The final blow to the neocon dream came in the weeks before the handover. The White House and the CPA were rushing to get the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution endorsing their handover plan. They had twisted arms to give the top job to former CIA agent Iyad Allawi, a move that will ensure that Iraq becomes, at the very least, the coaling station for U.S. troops that Jay Garner originally envisioned. But if major corporate investors were going to come to Iraq in the future, they would need a stronger guarantee that Bremer’s economic laws would stick. There was only one way of doing that: the Security Council resolution had to ratify the interim constitution, which locked in Bremer’s laws for the duration of the interim government. But al Sistani once again objected, this time unequivocally, saying that the constitution has been “rejected by the majority of the Iraqi people.” On June 8 the Security Council unanimously passed a resolution that endorsed the handover plan but made absolutely no reference to the constitution. In the face of this far-reaching defeat, George W. Bush celebrated the resolution as a historic victory, one that came just in time for an election trail photo op at the G-8 Summit in Georgia.

With Bremer’s laws in limbo, Iraqi ministers are already talking openly about breaking contracts signed by the CPA. Citigroup’s loan scheme has been rejected as a misuse of Iraq’s oil revenues. Iraq’s communication minister is threatening to renegotiate contracts with the three communications firms providing the country with its disastrously poor cell phone service. And the Lebanese and U.S. companies hired to run the state television network have been informed that they could lose their licenses because they are not Iraqi. “We will see if we can change the contract,” Hamid al-Kifaey, spokesperson for the Governing Council, said in May. “They have no idea about Iraq.” For most investors, this complete lack of legal certainty simply makes Iraq too great a risk.

But while the Iraqi resistance has managed to scare off the first wave of corporate raiders, there’s little doubt that they will return. Whatever form the next Iraqi government takes - nationalist, Islamist, or free market - it will inherit a crushing $120 billion debt. Then, as in all poor countries around the world, men in dark blue suits from the IMF will appear at the door, bearing loans and promises of economic boom, provided that certain structural adjustments are made, which will, of course, be rather painful at first but well worth the sacrifice in the end. In fact, the process has already begun: the IMF is poised to approve loans worth $2.5-$4.25 billion, pending agreement on the conditions. After an endless succession of courageous last stands and far too many lost lives, Iraq will become a poor nation like any other, with politicians determined to introduce policies rejected by the vast majority of the population, and all the imperfect compromises that will entail. The free market will no doubt come to Iraq, but the neoconservative dream of transforming the country into a free-market utopia has already died, a casualty of a greater dream - a second term for George W. Bush.

The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer’s reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself.

Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder.

Which is precisely what Thomas Foley has been doing. The former head of “private sector development” has left Iraq, a country he had described as “the mother of all turnarounds,” and has accepted another turnaround job, as co-chair of George Bush’s re-election committee in Connecticut. On April 30 in Washington he addressed a crowd of entrepreneurs about business prospects in Baghdad. It was a tough day to be giving an upbeat speech: that morning the first photographs had appeared out of Abu Ghraib, including one of a hooded prisoner with electrical wires attached to his hands. This was another kind of shock therapy, far more literal than the one Foley had helped to administer, but not entirely unconnected. “Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not as bad as it appears,” Foley told the crowd. “You just need to accept that on faith.”

 

November 3 update: Following the election. Bob writes a brief comment here. A grateful thanks to you for your commitment and energy. It’s time to take on the role of a dedicated opposition – and – not to lose heart.

And, thank you all for voting in this election!

Our collaborative blog mentioned below can be found here.

Recently, Howling At A Waning Moon asked eleven bloggers from around the world to write a short piece and post all the contributions on each of our blogs. The theme:
 
 

There is a Choice
 

From Harpers:

The European Patent Office revoked the patent previously granted to Monsanto on the Indian Nap Hal variety of wheat. It was proved by Greenpeace that the variety was bred by Indian farmers; Monsanto claimed to have invented it via genetic engineering.

More here:
4-Patents: The European Patent Office revoked Monsanto’s Indianwheat patent

And the Greenpeace article:
Chapati Chor Monsanto’s Wheat Patent Withdrawn in Europe Following Greenpeace Opposition: Bio-pirates Beware!

Spoken after one of his advisers briefed him fish that do not control any of the world’s oil,

“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”
- G.W. Bush, Saginaw, Michigan Speech, Sept. 29, 2000

On Bush’s Radical Dismantling of the Environment (October 3, 2004)

( bushisms excerpts ebook download)

The world comes round again, wondering how things are born. One way or another a sense of story is unavoidable, as much as language embodies or is haunted by its own failure. “Now I am ready to tell

how bodies are changed
Into different bodies.

I summon the supernatural beings
Who first contrived
The transmogrifications
In the stuff of life.
You did it for your own amusement.
Descend again, be pleased to reanimate
This revival of those marvels.
Reveal now, exactly
How they were performed
From the beginning
Up to this moment.

Before sea or land, before even sky
Which contains all,
Nature wore only one mask —
Since called Chaos.
A huge agglomeration of upset.
A bolus of everything—but
As if aborted.
And the total arsenal of entropy
Already at war within it.”

writes Ovid, through the genius of Ted Hughes, filtering who in the stuff from the beginning Which contains all. To imagine chaos, not as disorder, not as order’s opposite, not as abstract category but as upset, a fulfillment of abortion: its universe: entropy at war — a grevious roar, unutterable pain. “No sun showed one

thing to another,
No moon
Played her phases in heaven,
no earth
Spun in empty air on her own magnet,
No ocean
Basked or roamed on the long beaches.”

It was a quiet night, unutterable. Unutterability. So, could there be potential. Who can bear this primordial universe which cannot come to be except as the abortion of its own paradox. What strange brood we, to arise from horrid impossibility, taste of ultimate acid beneath the tongue, razor blades on skin, no vaulting dream, a horror so real that “land, sea, air were

all there
But not to be trodden, or swum in.
Air was simply darkness.
Everything fluid or vapour, form formless.”

worse, “each thing hostile

to every other thing: at every point
hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless

resisted weight.” Imagine this endless war, existing in utter lack of revolution. Entropy warring with itself. If A = A, A wars with A. Self against self nature. Weightlessness resisting weight. If there is a hell, part of its horror would be such a stasis, in which psychic energy flows always against itself, not erasing but rather aborting its own life in self mutilation. Ovid declares, following the ancient Greek tales that our universe arises from this hell. It took some Other, a divine being to begin to sort out endless, static confusion. “Some such artist [as God or as a god] began to sort it out. In this way

the heap of all disorder
Earth
Was altered.
It was adorned with the Godlike novelty
of man.

“Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist… Art is a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process. That is why great works of art make us feel good” (Ted Hughes, 1930-1998).

Bloody hell, microcosmic urgencies, the insurrections of man: metamorphoses.

A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar,
Entered his body with the water,
And entered his eyes
With the reflection in the limpid mirror. . .
As the taste of water flooded him
So did love.

(Ovid, Narcissus, trans. Ted Hughes, 1997)

Reading Naomi Klein’s exposé of the attempted selling off of Iraq, wonder what Marx would make of it. That, and G W’s popularity.

Reading Marx, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” Marx’s statement seems overtly theatrical, and a form of ideological double-speak. Postmodern Marxist camps declaim, “they (we, Bush voters, everyone?) are oppressed (without knowing it).” That’s ideology for you. Hell, don’t you feel oppressed? I do. So, I’m oppressed and I know it. The economic game as it’s played is anti-human in some respects (never mind the environmental costs). Options? BBC panels of experts never seem to come up with a sensible alternative to Liberal Democracy, as we have it. Socialism is a dirty word on both sides of the pond. It seems professionals are afraid to rationally discuss more equitable economies between rich and poor, as a concept of sensible economic theory. In a recent debate, a presenter bemoaned “a failure of imagination” regarding alternative sustainable future economics. Maybe Brazil has a better idea, someone on the panel quipped.

I’m happy and lucky, to have a personal economy with which to live without daily economic anxiety. This pleasant experience began three years ago. It’s a pretty refreshing situation – though work is hard at times and I’m oppressed by it. I’d rather be by the beach, near a big research library, writing a book: Right now. Santa Monica would be okay, though I’d prefer Vancouver. Yeah, Vancouver would be great. Vancouver is my mantra. But I’m so oppressed I’ve had a sort of failure of inspiration or imagination. It’s just all I can do to keep this all up, keep it going. How could I possibly leave my work? And if I did, I certainly couldn’t afford to live in Vancouver for a year or two or three and write a book. Perhaps there are grants. My school doesn’t provide any. Well it’s always been hard to write a book, it’s not any easier now. Whether riding a liter bike via ferry to Amamioshima to snorkel and camp out and spend time alone with the elements eating raw fish will help heal the heat of oppression, I can’t say – it’s only a few hundred kilometers away and a few hundred bucks. But having the right bike seems important. A 1000cc twin. A sportbike, but “soft” enough for occasional light touring. Something used, not in demand, something that’s had its day. A bit of history, touch of gray, old man with a story, carburetion and poor mileage rather than fuel injection. Something lithe. Something you get into, not on top of. Something that reaches into your soul, kickstarts your heart, causes the world to disappear.

Everything depends on that new world and how you relate to it. Also, why you sought it in the first place. What is true citizenship, when your soul calls out for self-erasure, and the senses seek immolation in transformation in order to emerge connected again with unknowns.

In that religion comes from religio, meaning, a linking back to the origin, this defines a religious person, even one who denies God/Gods. In this sense Marx performed a manner of religio (Harry Watson and Joseph Schumpeter argued that Marxism is a religion).

Vehicles of transformation, transmutation. We are: for each other. Love is. Sickness is an initiatory requirement in many shamanic cultures. Violence, masochism and death play important roles in psychological transformation. “Like a sickness and its cure together . . . Like rain and sun, like cold and heat” (Shakespeare in Love ). Linking back. How can you renew the soul without death? Even in love, the height of love, the happiness of golden light, bliss of presence in which one becomes with another; unites without thought. What has died, was, might seem unimportant – and often is. It doesn’t hurt to let that old self go after you’ve crossed the threshold, it’s insignificant that old self. It was. Nevertheless, something has died. Death (psychologically) needn’t be composed merely of suffering and pain, that’s the point. But we do become conscious of what we lose when it’s painful to us, and when we desire what presently can’t be attained. As a result the concept that death, that absence, is essentially pain is easily acquired. Though pain may not always be painful – it may become something else; anger, drive, moods, art, an entryway into new worlds – “from pain to ecstasy, including the wounding in which one is ‘delivered’ from the flat ennui of numbing conformity to cultural expectations.” Pain isn’t singular; is mysterious.

Pain wounds, kills, yet also impells a journey through darker lands. Hades enriches with darkness, intoxication, waters of forgetting & remembrance, risk. Pain is no opium, that is, suffering is no opium. Unless the pain becomes subliminal, with the painful state presenting itself as reality, as the table of social interaction. Rules of propriety. Parochialism, codified parochiality. Virtue and pain may become as intimately related as lovers, unconscious Gods. Then, isn’t it a clue, to seek the erasure of all ideologies? In that ideology, in virtu, is a form of parochialism, and parochialism treats pain in a certain way, a limited and one-sided way. If the deepest nature of pain and pleasure both are sought, a sense of poetry arises: “Pleasure is the pleasure of the powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation. The morality of the poet’s radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation” (Wallace Stevens). Nature is profoundly paradoxical. This poetic sense alone, it seems to me, is capable of defeating parochialism, at its root. Nonetheless we live in serious times and have no truck with vapid imaginings. It is precisely for this reason I desire to become one with a particular machine and risk death.

Here’s the abstract from Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding, by Mark Lemley, a paper you may want to download / read if the topic interests you.

Abstract:
Courts and scholars have increasingly assumed that intellectual property is a form of property, and have applied the economic insights of Harold Demsetz and other property theorists to condemn the use of intellectual property by others as free riding. In this article, I argue that this represents a fundamental misapplication of the economic theory of property. The economics of property is concerned with internalizing negative externalities - harms that one person’s use of land does to another’s interest to it, as in the familiar tragedy of the commons. But the externalities in intellectual property are positive, not negative, and property theory offers little or no justification for internalizing positive externalities. Indeed, doing so is at odds with the logic and functioning of the market. From this core insight, I proceed to explain why free riding is desirable in intellectual property cases except in limited circumstances where curbing it is necessary to encourage creativity. I explain why economic theory demonstrates that too much protection is just as bad as not enough protection, and therefore why intellectual property law must search for balance, not free riders. Finally, I consider whether we would be better served by another metaphor than the misused notion of intellectual property as a form of tangible property.

I submit Justice and Beauty are such [formulations of universal] principles from which an ecological psychology could be derived. James Hillman

Half of a lecture Justice and Beauty: Foundations of an Ecological Psychology is excerpted below:

First, psychology is anthropocentric. Its definition of consciousness, for instance declares (per definition) it impossible for anything but humans to be conscious. The self is still imagined like a pineal gland, a self-enclosed atomistic unit, neither inherently or necessarily communal. The planet is an alien place, essentially nihilistic, into which the individual human is thrown, alienated and anomic. Second, human-centered psychology fosters a disordered, senseless, and enslaved planet. By ripping the human soul from its womb in the anima mundi, the world soul, this mother of all phenomena becomes a corpse, reduced to measurement, experimental dissection and cannibalization of its body parts. Rivers and rocks, flowers and fish, defined as soulless in themselves can find value only by human assessment. For many centuries of our history and in most other cultures, an idea of the world soul endows all phenomena with meaning and intelligible intentions—and their own individual inwardness. Depth of soul lies not just in us; it resides in the planet’s own nature.

Clearly, we need to start again. [We need principles that start not in the human mind but are given to the mind with the world.] We need to imagine an ecological psychology that takes its starting point [not in human concerns only but] in the planet’s concerns and its beings concerns, which we humans serve with our mental capacities. [That is, we do not dig in our philosophy, science, or theology for principles, nor turn only to our human experience; rather] we can attempt to formulate the principles already at work within the cosmos, grounding the value of all participants.

I submit Justice and Beauty are such [formulations of universal] principles from which an ecological psychology could be derived.

Justice and Beauty offer universals of archetypal strength because they are recurrent in time and ubiquitous in place, trans-cultural, immensely fecund. They muster emotive and symbolic expression and are instantly recognizable in daily affairs—and not only of humans. [Justice and Beauty are universals on which cultured communities and human dignity rely and aim to further.] Without them, existence becomes nasty and brutish. With them, the psyche finds itself in a cosmos of value, and psychology becomes the study of the ways any phenomenon measures its place in the world.

An idea of Justice has hardly been important to psychology, which has proceeded as if Justice can be ignored. Yet, Justice is the ruling principle of society, and of the natural world, formulated as natural law. The Greeks considered Justice (Themis) foundational, a great earth Goddess like Gaia, whom Zeus had to obey. She lies at the roots of the polis, the city, making civic cohesion possible, giving each its rightful place and cautioning each not to overstep its bounds.

Justice makes possible an inherently co-related society of beings [where mutual dependency is] based not on mutual usefulness and economic exchange, but on the bare fact of participatory existence. If all beings belong, then all are needed and useful, and justice prevails for each and every. Justice lies so deep, feels so innate, it works like an instinct. Transgressions spring quick to the eye; injustice stinks and wounds long fester. A sense of justice comes with the newest soul: the smallest child cries: “That’s not fair.”

Like this innate response to injustice, so there is an innate aesthetic response. All beings present themselves first of all aesthetically to each other as visible forms, textures, aromas, patterns, rhythms. The world is intelligible by means of these displays, allowing all beings to recognize one another. [The old Roman word for the display of phenomena was ostentatio, a Latin rendering of the Greek phantasia; phenomena show themselves as fantasy images giving impetus to imagination and asking for an imaginative response. The arts are thus the first mode of being in the world and responding to its display. Beauty and ugliness derive neither from personal taste, societal norms, or objective rules of form, but are given with the phenomenal cosmos in its presentation of itself. In fact, the original meaning of kosmos means fitting, decorous, the display of adornment, and is closer to our current world “cosmetics” than to the emptied out cosmos of vast gaseous space in which drift weightless cosmonauts above and beyond gravitas. And, because kosmos also means right order, beauty promotes justice.

I submit these principles are basic to cultures everywhere because they are given with the cosmos itself, and, since primordially given they are ecological guarantors. Psychology’s task is to rebuild its learning and its therapies on these ecological archetypals, so that the great wide world and its beings can never be outside its purview. [Because] justice and beauty [are not merely humanistic, religious, scientific or regional, they] allow many modes of implementation; yet transcend all implementation with an ideal claim of transcendental value, inspiring artistry, dignity and respect, and prompting lasting rectification of ugliness and wrong. For precisely ugliness and wrong are the major cause of a suffering planet, that blue ball wrapped in a whirlwind, so fragily afloat in a sea of stars.

link

Found the Allen Ginsberg Library today, online. It’s brilliant. Filled with audio, video, photos, ephemera, manuscripts, and more.

When alarmed
the leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus)
will open its mouth
to display its red interior.

WWF Announces ‘10 Most Wanted Species’
09/08/2004

“Our list this year reflects the varied nature of the modern wildlife trade,” said Ginette Hemley, vice president for species conservation at World Wildlife Fund. “As well-known species have become overexploited for trade, more-obscure species are increasingly targeted. So lesser-known wildlife like the humphead wrasse,

– a fascinating coral reef fish whose fleshy lips have spawned a dining trend - join the magnificent tiger and Asian elephant on the list of most wanted species in trade.

This year’s 10 most wanted species, based on threats from unsustainable trade and consumer demand, are described here.

Ramin tropical hardwood
from Indonesia and Malaysiais
used to make
mass-produced pool cues
moldings, doors
and picture frames.
Illegal logging of ramin
is driven by global demand.

Link from Howlings Newsletter.

Thank to T for sending this article from salon.com.

Baked Alaska

Sept. 10, 2004: In the Arctic, where flowers are madly blooming, trees are growing to mutant sizes and the snowpack is thinning, researchers are getting an incontrovertible view of global warming. . . .

While it’s unlikely the four horsemen of the apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride, global warming will likely have an enormous and dire impact on human populations in the Arctic and beyond. Already, native communities that dot Alaskan shorelines are seeing villages crumble. Waves, unhindered by large ice chunks, now swell and break against the shore with a ferocity never seen before. Banks are eroding and high water has consumed so many homes and buildings that two villages have been forced to move inland.

Alaska is not alone. In his alarming book Boiling Point, Ross Gelbspan writes that global warming is disrupting “the normal flow of deep-water currents that determine climactic conditions in much of the world.” For instance, Gelbspan reports, extreme effects of the weather phenomenon, El Niño, have caused China’s Yangtze River to overflow, killing more than 3,000 people, leaving 230 million people homeless, and generating $30 billion in damages. Worldwide, warmer weather means more extreme floods and drought, which creates breeding grounds for countless disease-carrying insects.

“There’s strong consensus now in the scientific community that global climate change is caused by human activities,” says Bret-Harte in her kind, matter-of-fact manner. “There are always a few folks that disagree. But mostly they work for the oil and gas industry.”

And apparently for the Bush administration. Claiming the jury is still out on what causes global warming, the president has written a climate change policy that is about as aggressive as a tortoise. Loath to enact measures that would reduce our addiction to oil and gas – and income to his friends and campaign supporters – the Bush administration has spent the past several years misrepresenting the science on climate change in order to justify a path of inaction. For the Arctic researchers who are watching a landscape in flux, this is beyond infuriating.

“We see the possible consequences of no action and the consequences are looking graver and graver and more and more imminent,” says John Hobbie, the tough co-founder of the Toolik Field Station and director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Lab. “We scientists realize that climate change is more than just vague words and models.”

Bush: Global warming is just hot air

The planet’s getting hotter, ecosystems are going haywire, government scientists know it – and still the president denies there’s a problem. Guess which industry continues to fuel his campaign?

Sept. 10, 2004 | Don’t expect President Bush to discuss global warming – the world’s most serious environmental problem – on the campaign trail in the next eight weeks. The former oilman from Texas doesn’t dare alienate his friends in the fossil fuel and auto industries, prime purveyors of global warming. Bush still refuses to admit that burning Chevron with Techron in our Jeep Grand Cherokees, not to mention megatons of coal in our power plants, has brought us 19 of the 20 hottest years on record since 1980.

“You’re talking about a president who says that the jury is out on evolution, so what possible evidence would you need to muster to prove the existence of global warming?” says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author of the new book Crimes Against Nature. “We’ve got polar ice caps melting, glaciers disappearing all over the world, ocean levels rising, coral reefs dying. But these people are flat-earthers.”

In fact, Bush’s see-no-evil, hear-no-evil stance on global warming is so intractable that even when his own administration’s scientists weigh in on the issue, he simply won’t hear of it.

In a report sent to Congress at the end of August, government scientists argued that the warming of the atmosphere in recent decades cannot be explained by natural causes but must include such human sources as energy consumption and deforestation. It’s a conclusion that a consensus of the world’s climatologists reached years ago but that Bush has ignored throughout his presidency.

Bush on Global Warming

On Global Warming:
Ms. Bumiller: Mr. President, why did your administration change its position on what causes global warming?

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t think we did.

Ms. Bumiller: According to —

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t think so, Elisabeth.

Ms. Bumiller: You said that it’s almost certainly carbon monoxide — which you hadn’t said in the past, carbon dioxide.

THE PRESIDENT: I think that was my position during the campaign, if I’m not mistaken.

Ms. Bumiller: It changed —

MR. McCLELLAN: You’re talking about the National Academy of Science report?

Ms. Bumiller: Yes, yes.

MR. McCLELLAN: We’ve always talked about how that would - we’d be guided by their science on the issue, and that’s why the President has done a lot in terms of climate change, advancing the science of climate change, and also doing more research —

THE PRESIDENT: Let me get back with you on that, because I think you might — I don’t know why you said what you just said.

Ms. Bumiller: Well, we had a story in the paper this morning saying that you issued a report saying —

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, okay, well, that’s got to be true.

Hello readers. Creating this blog has been a worthwhile endevor for me. I’d like to continue with it, but wonder what readers like, don’t like, and would like to see more of – please leave feedback or any sort of comment in the next two weeks, by clicking on the comment link just below this post. I’m requesting you take a moment.

twofish heads to Western Canada for two weeks,
the next post should appear September 4.
- - - - -

Yesterday I wrote a rant to a good friend, I’ll post part of it here. The background to the rant has to do with a book. Occasionally a book comes along that affirms ideas and values you didn’t know needed affirming, and the information acts like a chariot enabling further confidence and strength to explore new territory. The slim volume, Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique, by James Hillman, is such a book. The versus in the title codifies a key consideration. Systems, particularly systems that organize persons into “types” (Jungian typology, the Eenneagram, astrological typing, the Buddha familes in Vajrayana Buddhism, the manual of mental disorders, etc.) while useful, worthwhile and therapeutically valuable, also by consequence minimize or ontologically devalue the perception of the unique. There is a polarity betweeen typologic systemization – and the perception of the unique.

The perception of the unique typically becomes subordinated to critical analytical systems of all sorts (categorizations are a means of typing), in order to extract meaning and data from the unique.

T,

if you were to read my haiku writings (i’m not recommending this, as they are focused on a research specialty), you’d find that my strongest “message” is AGAINST REDUCTION. I am interested in approaches which do not reduce the complexity and unknowingness of real experience, but rest in embodiments, flow with it.

Civilization is systems. Language is a system of signs (symbolic representations). So, systems define what we think of as human consciousness. It’s not a matter of getting rid of them, and it’s an impossible task in any case. But we need to have awareness of how exactly, precisely, systemic thinking and perspectives shrink/contain reality. From a Freudian perspective, you could say, we need to investigate how systems are used to defend against the overwhelming unknowingness we swim in.

The most difficult sort of awareness for a fish, is I think, the awareness of water. Water is an unconscious element for a fish, but arguably the most important element or the most primary element. If you were a fish, and you were begining to become aware of water, how would that awareness arise, how would the hints of water enter your senses? I’ll speculate (anthropomorphically): For a fish, water can never be perceived directly, it’s too close to fishness, to what root-fishness is. Hints of water come as unique, idiosyncratically arising psychic landscapes, as dreams, mystical visions, inspirations – in other words, fishness and waterness are “other” to each other – clearly separate, yet paradoxically, one does not exist without the other. You can’t have fishness without water, and you can’t have waterness without fish (because waterNESS, the NESSNESS of water is something only a fish can sense, in its fishlike way).

In a similar sense, as Jung thought, human consciousness is human because uniquely, humans have the capacity to reflection upon perception (some other animals have also a limited capacity in this regard). But the reflector itself, the existential (or ontological) reality of what reflects is hidden, is outside of perception; it’s not in time/space (as reflection occurs in any combination of prior to, during, following perception, is unconscious or an absence). Reflectivity is the water consciousness swims in.

So, notions of reflectivity arise as quasi-forms, perceptions, feelings, straynesses, meanderings, imaginations. That we reflect, that we swim in reflection (and by reflection I don’t mean thinking about life per se, but rather that we know for instance abstractions like “apple” or “time") brings up a useful point about wildness and reality:

I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. ‘Wild’ as in wild ecosystems – richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information. At root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read ‘language’) a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? (Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, 1995, pp. 163-172).

Ecology and wildness and “the grain of things” and complexity and “information” and “the imposition of order on chaotic nature:” these are the active elements of my current aspiration, seeking. I think what we lack in our culture is a healthy relationship with wildness, a valued means for evolving a sense of “the grain of things” (which involves both an art and craft of life). We need to let wildness in, respect this mind, without containing it. Finding the wild always humbles one.

Controlling and containing the life of wildness (i.e. egalitarian typologies, systems), can help with sorting out incomprehensible situations, confusions, reducing suffering, and can also provide tools for knowledge – science, technology, psychology. Certain “new” psycho-spiritual systems (like Ken Wilber’s integral theory of consciousness) use systems thinking and reality modeling extensively. But increasingly, I see the dangers. First and foremost is arrogance. Second is the separation and minimization of the energy and power of the wild and wildness and a lessening of respect for the universe at every level, by consequence.

So, I’m interested particularly in poetic in systems that deconstruct themselves, and that are paradoxical (like haiku, the work of Ammons, Stevens, etc). I think probably Zen philosophy comes closest, in terms of an experiential philosophy (though not institutionalized Zen Buddhism); Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Plotinus, even Plato use paradox and deconstructive techniques: meanings posed are self-erased, potentially leading one back experientially, kinesthetically, to the perception of the unique – I think this is crucially important to incorporate at every level of analysis in the art and science of systems which attempt to describe the psyche of individuals and/or society.

How’s that for a rant?

I know very little about water. This post is a collection of links I found, in no particular order: just scratching the surface.

‘A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar,
Entered his body with the water,
And entered his eyes
With the reflection in the limpid mirror. . .
As the taste of water flooded him
So did love.’

(Ovid, Narcissus, trans. Ted Hughes, 1997)

Gaston Bachelard has penned Psychoanalysis of Fire. Harder to acquire is his Psychoanalysis of Water it’s music actually, perhaps the title in error? Try instead, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, obtainable.

Mythology: The Water Deities

March 22: UNHCR marks World Water Day

Plants give up their secret of splitting water (26 Feb 2004)

WASHINGTON — Researchers said Thursday they had taken another step toward understanding how plants split water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, which may provide a cheap way to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel.

Water hotspots (a clickable map).

Porous paving and The Earth Sucks (Crumb Trail)

Is this Atlantis?

U.N. Warns of Dead Zones in World’s Oceans

Shared Oceans, Shared Future (US State Dept)

Water on Mars

FAVIGNANA, Italy - Over thousands of springtimes, as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, the fishermen of Favignana have battled giant bluefin tuna lured into vast chambers of intricate netting. This year, the nets were empty. Marine biologists say not only bluefin tuna but also other fish stocks are plummeting across the world, upsetting delicate natural food chains. Some fear irreversible damage has already been done. Even worse, international law experts add, little is being done to stop it. Despite all the evidence, high-tech fleets probe the last deepwater refuges, hardly troubled by authorities.

From the Negev Foundation:

The dramatic rise in human population in this century, coupled with over consumption and inadequate resource management, threatens the quality of life worldwide:

World population will double by 2025; nine-tenths of these people will be born in developing countries.

More than half the world’s population is concentrated on 5% of the land; nearly 90% live on less than one-fifth of the land.
About one billion people, one sixth of the world’s population, live in arid or semi-arid lands, of whom just two-thirds practice farming.

90% of world food aid is directed to populations in unproductive arid zones.

Since 1970, food production per capita has declined by at least 20% in Africa and parts of Asia due to desertification and mismanagement of fresh water.

About 800 million people are chronically undernourished because of poverty, insufficient production, inequitable food access and political turmoil.

Each year, an area the size of the state of Kansas, is impoverished due to encroaching deserts.

80 of the 100 countries experiencing increased desertification are developing countries

Here’s a link to Climate Ark, a portal dealing with world climate, sent to me by my friend Tharpa, a lot to look at. The News Links with Summaries is an immense start.

T also sent me an article from Business Week. Global Warming: Consensus is growing among scientists, governments, and business which you can read here. It’s nice to see such an article in Business Week. Here’s the first paragraph:

August 6, 2004

The idea that the human species could alter something as huge and complex as the earth’s climate was once the subject of an esoteric scientific debate. But now even attorneys general more used to battling corporate malfeasance are taking up the cause. On July 21, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and lawyers from seven other states sued the nation’s largest utility companies, demanding that they reduce emissions of the gases thought to be warming the earth. Warns Spitzer: “Global warming threatens our health, our economy, our natural resources, and our children’s future. It is clear we must act.”

Images are from Friends of the Earth.

When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima at 8:15a.m. on Aug.6, 1945, I was 26 years old.

So begins the speech given by Toshie Une. I was visiting Fukuoka two days ago, watching some of the Peace Memorial Ceremony taking place, on TV. In the ceremonies, the giving of water figured heavily.

Toshie Une, 85, of Minami Ward, Hiroshima, watched Yasuhiro Tani, 25, of the same ward, slowly pour water into a bucket in front of a monument for atomic bomb victims.

Une has visited all the atomic-bomb memorial monuments in and around Hiroshima to make offerings of a glass of water for the past 49 years. She has taken part in the water-offering ceremony since it became part of the memorial ceremony 30 years ago. She entrusted Tani, who sympathized with her experience, with this important role of offering water to atomic bomb victims this year.

The Mayor of Hiroshima lashes out at US, reads the Japan Today headline. As well, the Prime Minister received a tepid welcome: “In front of about 45,000 people at the ceremony to mark the 59th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Koizumi reiterated his pledge to observe the war-renouncing Constitution. But in sharp contrast to the reception given to Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and other speakers, the premier received only thin applause after his speech and was even booed by some in the crowd.” As well, Nagasaki marked its anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city today (August 9). “Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito called on American citizens to stand against their government’s pursuit of enhanced nuclear capabilities, and the Japanese government not to take any action that would disturb the peace and security in Northeast Asia.“

Toshie Une’s story is here. A few paragraphs,

Arriving at the shelter, we found so many people there, crowded inside or in front of the shelter, with burns and wounds all over their bodies. “They all look like monsters. Maybe our children were afraid of them and went back to the nursery. We may have passed each other. Let’s go back,” the mothers said. The people were naked, and had swollen reddish faces. From behind it was impossible to tell if they were men or women.

I asked several of the burned people, “What happened? Who are you? How did you get like this? Where are you from?” But their tongues were cut or twisted and they couldn’t utter a word. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. When I tried to hurry back to the nursery as I couldn’t find any of the children there, the people started making gestures, as if they were squatting, scooping up soil and drinking it.

“Uhmmm. . . Waaatt. . . ” They said, in very weak, unclear voices. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. “Waaatt. . . giiiiv. . . ” “What? I can’t hear you. What do you want?” I listened to their appeals and finally I saw what they had been asking for with their gestures. “Water? Water?” I asked them. They nodded. Their expressions changed and they tried to follow me in a gesture of adoration. “Don’t follow me. Wait here! I’ll bring water. Just sit down here!” I persuaded them to stay there and immediately left to get water.

One man, badly injured and bleeding, said to me, “Just now some strange terrible bomb was dropped on the center of Hiroshima. It contains horrible poisonous gas. All the water in Hiroshima is mixed with the gas. If you give them that water, they’ll die straight away. Don’t give them any!” He was shouting at me, repeating his words, “Don’t give them any! Don’t take it!” I was horrified to hear what he said, so I stopped trying to take water to them. They must have kept waiting over there for me to bring them water. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give them that water. I felt terribly sorry, in agony about this. I could imagine the people over there probably would have died waiting for water I was meant to have brought.

One day, around 1955, I was climbing Mt. Dai-chausuyama at Koi with my friend, and we came across the statue of the “Taki no Kannon” or “Mercy of Goddess at Waterfall” at the site of the Kyojunji Temple on the hillside. There we found some very pure mountain water. Then the events on that day ten years before came back to me clearly. An encounter with the purest water in Hiroshima led me to make this wish: I’d like to let the victims drink this pure water. I’ll bring the water to atomic-bomb memorial monuments and apologize to them. Please forgive me. I’ll do it as long as I’m alive and my health allows.

Forty years have passed since then, and I’m now over eighty. On fine days, as I’m pulling my cart with its water bottles, I am still offering water to over 120 monuments in and around Hiroshima. I wish to console the souls of the victims by offering water from a small clear cup with the words Comfort Water for the A-bomb Victims written on it.

I have never seen such an atrocious way of dying. I never want to see such a hell again nor to be forced to see it. Nuclear weapons annihilate all living things, all created arts and culture, not to mention human beings. My earnest desire is that they will never be used.

Two additional eyewitness accounts are here, in French and English.

An atomic bomb resource site for teachers and students K-12 is here. US bombadier Thomas Wilson Ferebee, the poor fellow who dropped the bomb, passed away March 17, 2000. A movie was made, The Beginning or the End (1947).

Bob Whitson runs Howling At A Waning Moon, a blog containing a feast of environmental topics and issues, and it’s getting better everyday. I enjoy the daily compendium of political happenings; a wealth of information can be found and absorbed in a brief time. Howling also has a weekly newsletter (look for “sign up for email updates” on the right side of the blog).

This except of the Kerry speech was posted in the August 6 newsletter (you can find the entire Kerry speech to the Democratic convention here):

“We value an America that controls its own destiny because it’s finally and forever independent of Mideast oil. What does it mean for our economy and our national security when we have only 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves, yet we rely on foreign countries for 53 percent of what we consume?

I want an America that relies on its ingenuity and innovation, not the Saudi royal family.

And our energy plan for a stronger America – our energy plan will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future, so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

Sounds good. But will you be able to keep your SUV?
Snazzily fuel-efficient cars are here, also an
American Auto Fuel Consumption Debate blog
Cars may get smaller.
The world’s smallest car is here.
The size of a rice grain. Maybe the Aussies are on to something.

Oil. Here in Japan regular gas is close to $4.50USD/gallon, I’m happy to be riding a 400cc bike getting 55mpg in stop&go. What is the future of oil, for the world? Today, a scary story comes from Harper’s Weekly Review:

“Analysts at Deutsche Bank warned that oil prices could rise
to $100 a barrel.” For a fuller story, read the article here.

Scary story 2: the Guardian has a freaky what-if oil scenario, which begins:

It’s 2006. Bin Laden conquers Arabia. Crude prices are nudging $100. A far-off fantasy? Don’t you believe it, writes Oliver Morgan . . .

Scary story 3: Arab Media Watch has some dirt on oil and the Iraq war, from the Arab-British angle:

The physical supply and pricing of oil were central concerns, true, but so also was the investment of Kuwait’s share of oil profits in British financial markets. Declassified US documents note that ‘the UK asserts that its financial stability would be seriously threatened if the petroleum from Kuwait and the Persian Gulf area were not available to the UK on reasonable terms, if the UK were deprived of the large investments made by that area in the UK and if sterling were deprived of the support provided by Persian Gulf oil.’

This is not a war for oil. It is a war to control the profits that flow from oil.

Speaking of Kuwait, Scary (for some) story 4: Fahrenheit 9/11 was just banned there. The reason for the ban is logical:

Kuwait has banned Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary, deeming it critical of the Iraq war and insulting to Saudi Arabia’s royal family. An information ministry official from the Arab state, which was invaded by Iraq in 1990, said it could not show a movie that was disrespectful of an allied country. “We have a law that prohibits insulting friendly nations, and ties between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are special,” Abdul-Aziz Bou Dastour, cinema and production supervisor at the Kuwaiti information ministry, told Associated Press. He said the film “insulted the Saudi royal family by saying they had common interests with the Bush family and that those interests contradicted the interests of the American people.”

Scary story 5: National Geographic has an article, “How soon will the vital fuel become so scarce and expensive that we’re forced to make hard choices about how we live?”

Humanity’s way of life is on a collision course with geology — with the stark fact that the Earth holds a finite supply of oil. The flood of crude from fields around the world will ultimately top out, then dwindle. It could be 5 years from now or 30: No one knows for sure, and geologists and economists are embroiled in debate about just when the “oil peak” will be upon us. But few doubt that it is coming. “In our lifetime,” says economist Robert K. Kaufmann of Boston University, who is 46, “we will have to deal with a peak in the supply of cheap oil.”

Scary story 6 is from the future. The Sri Lanka government website poses the question of whether it is truly oil or water that will be the scarier story.

It’s surprising that the future of oil does not seem a highly newsworthy topic. Fish don’t think about water, right.

The images in this post are from the aesthetics + computation group at MIT, at the jarfish gallery page.

“Find out if you are a hero or zero” taking this short quiz on energy efficiency. The questions and answers are worth contemplating, the quiz is short, and when you click for the answers, right or wrong, the rationale for each is explained. Fyi: Prof. James Lovelock, “the Kyoto Protocol, is simply an attempt to appease a self-regulating Earth system . . . [as] the Earth’s attempts to restore its equilibrium [it] may eliminate civilisation and most humans.

BBC online also has a colorful, graphic and intelligible page with a selection of articles on global warming here, including articles like, Why Kyoto Matters, a very cool realtime 100-year video comparison of temp. rise/fall around the (revolving) globe, showing highest/lowest emmisions predictions, plus other tabbed links to articles on the Gulf Stream, carbon cycle, greenhouse effect.

A country chart of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters adds a basic overview:

USA
The US emits more, absolutely and per head, than any other country – although it also produces more wealth. When Kyoto was agreed, the US signed and committed to reducing its emissions by 6%. But since then it has pulled out of the agreement and its carbon dioxide emissions have increased to more than 15% above 1990 levels.

EU
Despite its tough stance on Kyoto, the EU is some way off its own target. It pledged to bring total greenhouse gas emissions to 8% below 1990s levels by 2008-2012, but by 2002 they had dropped only 2.9% - and CO2 emissions had risen slightly. Only four EU countries are on track to achieve their own targets.

JAPAN
A major world economic power, Japan is a leading member of Kyoto, committed to cutting emissions. It was responsible for 8.5% of emissions in 1990 and its support for the agreement is critical in the absence of US participation. Although previously reluctant to ratify the protocol unless the US also committed, Japan ratified it in June 2002. It committed to reduce emissions by 6% from 1990 levels, but 2002 figures showed total greenhouse gas emissions had risen 11% above the baseline figure. The country recognises that its economy could benefit from the Kyoto agreement, as Japanese companies could capture markets for new, clean technology.

RUSSIA
Russia has signed the protocol and committed to cutting emissions. But its economy has shrunk so drastically since 1990 that industrial activity has dropped, leaving emissions reduced by about 35% and well below the level allowed under Kyoto. In the short-term, Russia stands to gain billions of dollars through emissions trading - selling its unused emissions entitlement to developed countries which want to emit more than the protocol allows them to.

CHINA
China is the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, but as a developing country is not yet required to reduce its emissions. With China accounting for a fifth of the world’s population, increases in its emissions could dwarf any cuts made by the industrialised countries.

INDIA
Developing countries like India are not obliged to make any cuts in greenhouse emissions under Kyoto. But as they raise living standards their emissions will increase. India’s emissions are estimated to have risen by more than 50% in the 1990s . . . with India’s economy and population, like China’s, continuing to grow, it is clear that the thorny issue of developing country emissions commitments will have to be tackled soon in future rounds of negotiations.

The groundbreaking Guggenheim Museum motorcycle exhibit displayed a 1901 Indian Single, (16 cubic inch, 1.8 hp), which is about the oldest motorcycle (really a motorized bicycle) made in America (the motorized bicycle dates back to the 1890s). So it’s been about a century of motorcycles and motorcycling, and now Honda has announced the first motorcycle purpose-built for women riders. It is pretty shocking, in a, duh, belated sort of way. Some of the research has been pretty technical. Here’s one of the research items mentioned:

“We couldn’t understand why Italian women said they had no problem with the riding position on conventional bikes, and why they claimed their feet could easily reach the ground, says Dave Hancock, who despite his sex is Honda’s top “female test rider because of his 5ft 6in and 9st frame.

It only makes sense that there are no female test riders. After what might have been decades of study, Honda finally learned that:

“At first we thought they must be taller, but then we discovered that most Italian women wear high heels all the time — even when riding motorcycles.

These Honda boys are truly up on their game. They’ll need to design some radical foot shifters and brakes for their Italian model, if they go with the research. The same article also reports:

It won’t have stabiliser wheels on the back, it won’t have a shopping basket, and it won’t even have sat-nav showing how to get to the hairdresser.

Haha. Cute. At least Honda didn’t write that. What it will have:

Crucially, it will be easier to ride, with a lower centre of gravity to reduce the risk of “toppling , easier to operate controls and adjustable footrests, seat and handlebars. It will also boast a sculpted seat for added comfort.

Also be 500-800cc, and introduced in the Euro market, begging the question of whether America, for all it’s freedoms, might not yet be quite ready for such social radicalism. The ME-XA is scheduled for release in 2005. It’s interesting that “me” is a pronunciation of the kanji “woman.” XA of course, is merely cool sounding. Another online motorcycle rag comments that:

No one has ever marketed a “ladies’ motorcycle” before, mainly because it would turn-off many male purchasers.

Bizarre. Who makes this stuff up? Where is the reference for that eye-popping stat – buried on page 252 of Men are from Mars, Women from Venus? Anyone who hasn’t taken too much acid can appreciate a woman on a bike, so perhaps what’s implied is that if a “feminine” motorcycle is produced, latent homophobe bikers everywhere will be selling their “girly-boy” machines (to quote Gov. Arnold) as soon as they can shudder out of their leathers. Is this the real reason why a women’s motorcycle is a century late? Honda, at least, has decided guys are finally able to cope with the concept. This may not seem like a Kuhnian paradigm shift to you, but in the motorcycle world hey it’s bigger than the radiator. Hats off to Honda for thinking outside the box.

However. I’d like to add that women have been riding bikes for a very long time. The real issue here is what does “a women’s motorcycle” really mean. Reading motorcycle forums, there are plenty of guys bitching about riding position: seat height, bar width and distance, foot peg position, overall stance, weight, etc. There are solutions to many of these issues, which involve aftermarket parts, and when there aren’t solutions, there are plenty of motorcyle models to choose from. My point is, what makes a woman’s motorcycle paradigmatically different from a man’s? Motorcycle fit, center of gravity, model selection has and continues to be problematic for men, is my point. You know, guys come in a lot of shapes and sizes. It really may come down to a question of degree and overall concept, that is, marketing and image concept, rather than a bike made for women (the term “women’s bike” should be resisted) looking like apples to the current oranges – except in the case of the Italian high heel issue perhaps.

Reistance. What I object to is that, in ‘branding’ move, the existing term “motorcycle” now becomes “men’s motorcycle.” It’s hard to imagine Elena, illustrated above, who writes exquisitely about her Kawi ZX-11 rides, trading her bike in for a ‘ladies’ bike. It’s farcical.

While I applaud Honda’s effort, some misinformation and hype is being dished, particularly when beefy scooter-like-bikes, for example the Suzuki Burgman 400cc and 650cc are becoming popular worldwide. These are unisexual machines. Which begs the question, what is a motorcycle? But why get postmodern.

Here is an informational piece relating to the battle for continued digital rights. The EFF has posted an article concerning future control and ‘lock down’ of upcoming digital TV content. Here is an excerpt:

Today, you can use any device you like with your television: VCR, TiVo, DVD recorder, home theater receiver, or a PC combining these functions and more. A year from now, when the FCC’s broadcast flag mandate [PDF] takes effect, some of those capabilities will be forbidden.

Responding to pressure from Hollywood, the FCC has adopted a rule requiring future digital television (DTV) tuners to include “content protection” (aka DRM) technologies. Starting next year, all makers of HDTV receivers must build their devices to watch for a broadcast “flag” embedded in programs by copyright holders. When it comes to digital recording, it’ll be Hollywood’s DRM way or the highway. Want to burn that recording digitally to a DVD to save hard drive space? Sorry, the DRM lock-box won’t allow it. How about sending it over your home network to another TV? Not unless you rip out your existing network and replace it with DRMd routers. Kind of defeats the purpose of getting a high definition digital signal, doesn’t it?

The good news is this mandate doesn’t take effect for another year. We have until July 1, 2005, to buy, build, and sell fully-capable, non-flag-compliant HDTV receivers. Any receivers built now will “remain functional under a flag regime, allowing consumers to continue their use without the need for new or additional equipment.” Any devices made this year can be re-sold in the future.

We at EFF want to do our part to advance the DTV transition – and the public’s rights to receive and manipulate DTV broadcasts with technologies they choose.

We want to keep the right to time- and space-shift that the VCR has given us (against Hollywood’s protest). We want to keep the fair use rights that let us excerpt clips from press conferences or make our own “Daily Show” from the evening news. That’s why we’re encouraging people to buy HDTV tuner cards now and build multi-function receivers and recorders around them.

Here’s where you can help. . . .

Check out Simon Cozen’s page here, he’s translating Sei Shonagon’s 10th century Pillow Book (Makura no Sôshi – from this Japanese source text). A brief informative overview of Sei Shonagon can be found at Liza Dalby’s site (where the above image was found). Boing Boing reports:

It’s easy to forget the fact that these words were written in the tenth century, because the results in this format read – well, rather like a blog. Some dates are fictitous, and some liberties have been taken to produce a coherent narrative stream in blog format – but the content is purported to be a faithful translation of the original.

Here’s a teaser, a post dated November 12, 987, titled Huh, Men!, which begins:

Current music: Banshikicho Netori
   Current mood: Confused

I will never understand men. Their emotions are just really strange, and I just can’t work out why they behave the way they do.

I mean, you’ll hear about a man who leaves a really pretty woman, and . . .

It isn’t easy, these days, to find a deep psychological extrapolation of current events. William Van Dusen Wishard, author of Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning, and head of WorldTrends Research, a Washington-based consultancy specializing in the analysis and synthesizing of global trends, begins his thought-provoking 9/11 commemoration speech to the C.G. Jung Institute of New York, Sleepwalking Through the Apocalypse, with this perspective:

“In 1957 Peter Drucker wrote, ‘No one born after the turn of the 20th century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols.’ If Drucker’s right, and I personally think he is, despite all the political, social and technical advances of the past century, the underlying story of the 20th century was about a world where the historic social arrangements, spiritual underpinnings and psychological moorings that had anchored nations for centuries, have been in a transition of epochal proportions. The tectonic plates of life as we’ve known it are shifting.”

This lecture presents six major points of global shift, and discusses humanity’s future. It’s well worth reading in its complete form here; the excerpts below represent a jumping-off point rather than conclusion. Here are the six major thematic shifts Wishard presents:

First, science is in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as nature, human, and life. Increasingly, scientists are subordinating humans to technology. The faster computers go, the faster our whole tempo of life goes just to keep up. In essence, we may be abdicating our own psychological center of being and handing it over to the computer. Within the next three decades we’ll have reached the point where the question will be, “What are humans for in a world of completely independent, self-replicating technological capability?”

Second, for the first time in history, the Caucasian race is no longer reproducing itself. No European country is reproducing its population; nor are Caucasians in North America reproducing themselves. The implications of this are so far-reaching that it’s difficult even to speculate what they might be.

Third, future ages may view man’s seeing the Earth from the Moon as the defining event of all subsequent history. Joseph Campbell clearly considered it the most significant psychological event of the past several thousand years. Seeing Earth from the Moon vastly accelerated the collapse of all the boundaries that provide identity — boundaries of nation, race, religion, class and gender. Thus everyone, to some degree or other, faces a crisis of identity. This also profoundly affects the underpinnings of all religions, as every religion includes some cosmological concept of how the universe was first created. But space exploration has given us new and different information and perspective.

Fourth, for the first time in history, what constitutes a family is being redefined. This has acute implications for government, education, social cohesion and what we broadly term “civil society".

Fifth, the ability to create change, as well as the attitude that change is desirable, is now a global possession. Throughout history, in all civilizations, continuity rather than abrupt change has been the normal state of affairs. No society on the planet knows how to live with constant, radical change. Thus for the first time in history, every nation is, concurrently with all other nations, in a state of profound crisis as we try to adjust to an ever-accelerating pace of change. Thus there is no global center of stability and order such as Britain provided in the nineteenth century, and America supplied the second half of the twentieth century.

Sixth, our whole symbolic language has been devalued. For example, “Heaven” used to carry a sacred meaning. It was the dwelling place of the gods; a place people hoped to go when they died, our link with eternity. Now we speak simply of “space,” an endless void. Similarly, we used to speak of “Mother Earth,” which gives the earth a creative, nurturing implication. Now we speak only of “matter,” an abstract, lifeless substance. In this way, our symbolic language has been diminished. The function of symbolic language is to infuse into our conscious life some of the transcendent meaning that emanates from the unconscious realm, from the depths of our inner being. That connection has been weakened, so there’s far less transcendent vitality brought into our conscious life.

Barry O’Connell writes, “Recently I was able to obtain a number of these rugs and they are identical to what was available during the Russian war. . . This rug must date to before The Islamic Republic of Iran began sending the refugees home after the war. The assault rifle to the right is a Paratroopers version of a AK-47. The helicopter is the Hip helicopter which was what the Soviet Airborne used most often.”

The anonymous Beluch rug weavers have given us canvases imaging the Afghan War.

From Raw Vision:

At the end of 1979, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan until the spring of 1989. They left behind a determined opposition in the Mujaheddin militias, and a puppet leader who in spring 1992 was forced into refuge at the United Nations office in the capital, Kabul. . . . Like folk-art everywhere, the Beluch rugs woven during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan reveal the makers’ concerns for time and place.

They symbolically depict significant events through the use of easily-recognised motifs derived from a common culture. They swarm with wild animals in fanciful landscapes, and often include portraits of significant local figures, and also patches of text. In this, the Beluch differ from other Asian weaving traditions which strictly follow Islamic law and eschew pictorial work in favour of geometric or arabesque designs. During their now almost-forgotten recent war, the weavers created a body of work which showed the full panoply of modern warfare – guns, grenades, tanks, helicopters, jet planes, rockets and bombs. Most Afghan War rugs are unique, but their imagery reveals common themes.

From Oriental Rug Review:

One of our suppliers called and said he had a World Trade Center rug and it was very peaceful - no airplanes, no fires, no death. We like this rug very much. The weaver pictures the buildings, surrounded by trees, as if they were built in the middle of Central Park rather than in lower Manhattan. We see a nearby mosque. There are several emergency vehicles with red lights flashing, a very normal thing to see in NYC. So here it is - one of the most peaceful war rugs we have seen.

 

Fractal.org is pretty comprehensive. Wikipedia (where the above public-domain image is located) has a good basic overview of what fractals are, with links. “A fractal is a mathematical object that is self-similar and chaotic. Fractals are infinitely complex: the closer you look the more detail you see. Most fractals are generated by a relatively simple equation where the results are fed back into the equation until it grows larger than a certain boundary. Fractal mathematics, thinking and vision have been taken up in various fields. There are a few webrings: UltraFractal webring, the Fractal Artist’s ring, and the Infinite Fractal Loop.
A few online essays:

The Fractal Revolution by Peter Bearse.
Human life is inherently chaotic. People have felt it to be so since the beginning of recorded time. They have sometimes sensed, but mostly prayed, that the chaos may have an underlying structure. Only recently, however, has this hope been expressed in scientific/mathematical terms, as the tracings of an underlying reality rather than merely the subject of deep human yearning. Until the French Revolution, the structure of human existence was an article of transcendental faith rather than human knowledge. The basic “structure” was millennial – the apocryphal City of God, reified by vain men in the form of monuments and causes. The discovery that the “geometry of nature” is fractal has radical implications for human beings’ understanding of their society and of their role in things social and political.

A Man Who Would Shake Up Science by Edward Rothstein.
Mr. Wolfram is finally publishing his work, and his claims surpass the most extravagant speculation. He has, he argues, discovered underlying principles that affect the development of everything from the human brain to the workings of the universe, requiring a revolutionary rethinking of physics, mathematics, biology and other sciences. He believes he has shown how the most complex processes in nature can arise out of elemental rules, how a wealth of diverse phenomena — the infinite variety of snowflakes and the patterns on sea shells — are generated from seemingly trivial origins.

Fractal Evolution by the Leading Edge Research Group.
The physical world, the explicate realm, is structured along the lines of fractal geometry. The basic underlying idea is the idea of repetition of structure in different scales of magnitude. The common example is a coastline. A photograph of a section of coastline from a blimp will show the same ragged contours as a photograph of the whole coast taken from a space station. A photograph of a one-foot-long section of the same coast will also show the same contours. The various coastlines are “self-similar,” each similar to the others in shape, but different in magnitude. . . . “How did nature manage to evolve such complicated architecture?” Gleick asks, rhetorically. “Mandelbrot’s point is that the complications exist only in the context of traditional Euclidean geometry. As fractals, branching structures can be described with transparent simplicity, with just a few bits of information….” “Fractal mathematics” is comprised of the simple formulas by which conversions are made–fractal to fractal.

Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions by Alice Fulton.
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, science has turned away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more chaotic phenomena. Rather than being divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now can be regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of the pattern and repetition that signal structure. . . . It occurs to me that this shift in focus makes itself felt within literature as postmodernism. In any case, the poetry I am calling “fractal” shares many defining traits of that contested term: postmodern.

Fractals in poetry by Lucy Pollard-Gott.
The method seems to stretch the meaning of fractal, but see for yourself. An example from Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Sail of Ulysses (Canto I)” Pollard-Gott took know as the root. Here are the occurrences of know in the poem:

The Sail of Ulysses (Canto I)

If knowledge and thing known are one
So that to know a man is to be
That man, to know a place is to be
That place, and it seems to come to that;
And if to know one man is to know all
And if one’s sense of a single spot
Is what one knows of the universe,
Then knowledge is the only life,
The only sun of the only day,
The only access to true ease,
The deep comfort of the world and fate.

“Note the occurrences of know organize themselves into hierarchical clusters, that is, clusters within clusters.” Click this link to get a more complete picture of what she’s talking about.

In what manner is the Earth remembered, unbidden, how is environment woven into the skein of memory? This post is the first of a series presenting ways the Earth is remembered.

Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow. Washed clean of summer’s dust by days of gentle rain, the mountains wore a deep, brilliant green. The October breeze set white fronds of head-high grasses swaying. One long streak of cloud hung pasted across a dome of frozen blue. It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky. A puff of wind swept across the meadow and through her hair before it slipped into the woods to rustle branches and send back snatches of distant barking – a hazy sound that seemed to reach us from the doorway to another world. We heard no other sounds.
  . . . .
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene I hardly paid it any attention. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that 18 years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. . . . Scenery was the last thing on my mind.
 
Now, though, that meadow scene is the first thing that comes back to me. The smell of the grass, the faint chill of the wind, the line of the hills, the barking of a dog: these are the first things, and they come with absolute clarity. I feel as if I can reach out and trace them with a fingertip. And yet, as clear as the scene may be, no one is in it. No one. Naoko is not there, and neither am I. Where could we have disappeared to? How could such a thing have happened? Everything that seemed so important back then – Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It’s true, I can’t even bring back her face – not straight away, at least. All I’m left holding is a background, pure scenery, with no people at the front.
  . . . .
There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand – where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a film. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. Wake up, it says. I’m still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I’m still here. The kicking never hurts me. There’s no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick.

                         Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Vintage, pp. 2-4)

Over the course of some years of Buddhist-psychology practice and study, I learned that the self does not exist. Anyway, that the notion of self-existence is one of the major causes of confused mind. It was a rather outrageous idea in 1980, when I encountered it; this was prior to my exposure to heavy-handed postmodernist lit. crit. As a consequence, postmodernism was something of a let-down. When you look at concepts like vipassana (a variety of de-centered holonomic awareness) and “suchness” (a development of the Yogacharan Buddhist philosophic school, which offers the scent of immanent uncontained presencing), there is some shock involved. Postmodernism is partial and reductive, seen from such philosophical perspectives. Which isn’t what I wanted to talk about.

The idea that something doesn’t exist plays with language and concept. For something to not exist it must not be real, right? Could something be real and not exist? In the Heart Sutra there’s a section which goes: “no eye no ear no nose no tongue no body no mind no existence no non-existence no birth no old age no sickness no death.” But of course you have an eye? just, it doesn’t exist. Seems pretty paradoxical if not downright inane. Of course, there is – no answer – just like there is no eye. But in the same breath you could say there is an answer as there is an eye. How can something exist and not-exist?

Cute, but maybe serious at the same time; a language game. Serious, but with a sense of wicked humor. The Hindu Atman is conceived as an eternal adamantine atomic substance: the most eternal infinitely dense dot of Self, which is unchanging and eternal – to paraphrase. Buddhism’s revolution, in part, radically challenges the Hindu idea. No adamantine “thing-in-itself” – as long as you conceive of it as existing, a “thing” with basis in “existence.”

If we say “there is an eye,” “there is nature,” it amounts to the same thing – a use of language which habitually buys into (attaches) to the “concept of eye,” “concept of nature,” etc. It’s a problem of identity, and thus, literalism. In a sense, the Buddhist view proclaims that the cosmos in its varieties is not literal. “No existence” is a tease. Because we can as say just as well, “no non-existence.” So far, so good. Turning to the post-Jungian philosopher James Hillman, he refines what appears as the same articulation, saying that “mind is basically poetic in nature.”

I found an uncomfortable sub-text in my early-days-American-Buddhist-community, in that there was a lot of ego-suspiciousness going on. That devilish, suspect ego, fouling the nest. This was unfortunate. It seems that the real issue is the belief in the literalness of the literalizing function. The same thing maybe, but at higher resolution (which makes a difference).

In other words when we lose the world poetically, as the sense of multiple valence reduces to a mere literal, we thus become attached to a conceptual frame. Which isn’t such a bad thing from a pragmatic point of view. After all, what’s the problem in believing in what’s real? Why de-literalize the literal? And, what’s in it for me? Hard questions to answer: the universe, the Earth? Too glib? Something supra- or para- human. It’s possible that postmodernism hasn’t gone nearly far enough.

The postmodern locus (idea) of infinite relativity and decenterdness is fairly said to absolve any agent or agency of responsibility. Both Buddhism and postmodernism seem to say “everything you know is wrong” (a great epithet from the Fireside Theatre); habitual concept is challenged. But the Buddhist view is based on practice, particularly formless meditation practice; in any case, contemplative practices which attempt (by altering consciousness in various ways) to dissolve or irrupt conceptualizing altogether, and as partial consequence, the habitual ignoring of subtle conceptual formation in consciousness. Postmodernism, as theory, seems to offer endless conceptualization, or re-conceptualization: it seems mired in a (recursive) conceptual field of continually recentered and recentering possibles. A glaring example of the problem con be found here in Derrida’s response to the tragedy of 9/11 (from the book Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori).

In Buddhist philosophy, as experiential possibility, you have two things happening, prajna (aka wisdom) and upaya (aka skillfull means). Two wings of a bird (or the bird don’t fly). Here’s one mode of depiction: Prajna is the root: non-dual/non-conceptual mind. Upaya is what you’re going to do with that in the real world. The idea is that if you operate from conceptually-attached dualistic modes (concept and opposite concept: eye/no eye, etc.), your skillfulness or effectiveness is limited. But if your ground is non-dual suchness you work with the irreality of real things, that is, knowing metaphor, images, the soul of things. Soul. Right!

Hillman defines the soul as “that which deepens,” and, “that which turns events into experiences.” Almost as bad as no eye, no ear, but not quite.

Postmodernism seems to offer a means to break free of concept, but ends up with deconstructive/re-conceptual process, ad infinitum, where Buddhism and Archetypal (post-Jungian) psychology both offer teleology, that is, a path toward a goal, which is intimate, individualist and personal (the goal of unconfused mind in one case, individuation in the other). In both cases we are talking about adult development, and what Freud left out. In Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, Hillman writes,

The philosophical problem [of definition] arises from the soul’s own desire for self-knowledge which can best be satisfied in terms of its own constitution: images. . . . The statement . . . that “the primary metaphor of psychology must be soul” attempts two things: (a) to state the soul’s nature in its own language (metaphor) and (b) to recognize that all statements in psychology about soul are metaphors. In this way, soul-as-metaphor leads beyond the problem of “how to define soul” and encourages an account of the soul toward imagining itself rather than defining itself. Here, metaphor serves a psychological function: it becomes an instrument of soul-making (q.v.) rather than a mere “figure of speech,” because it transposes the soul’s questioning about its nature to a mythopoesis of actual imagining, an ongoing psychological creation (Berry 1982).

Soul-as-metaphor also describes how the soul acts. It performs as does a metaphor, transposing meaning and releasing interior, buried significance. Whatever is heard with the ear of soul reverberates with under- and overtones (Moore 1978). The perspective darkens with a deeper light. But this metaphorical perspective also kills: it brings about the death of naive realism, naturalism, and literal understanding (pp. 20-1).

“The death of naive realism, naturalism, and literal understanding.” Powerful stuff, and one can’t go back, hide like an ostritch, head in the sand. So, what to do when it is claimed that one has no literal authenticity, or “authentic entity” in one’s values or philosophy? (With reference to this post from crumbtrail, and the quote below.) Paul Wapner writes that,

When anti-environmentalists claim that, because there is no authentic entity called “nature,” we can choose to use trees, animals, canyons, and rivers as we see fit, staunch environmental modernists have little to say. They can disagree about first principles, complain about ontological and epistemological premises, but beyond this they have little to say. Simply rejecting eco-criticism and reasserting a modernist narrative doesn’t reckon with the intellectual weight of contemporary attacks on “nature.”

I think postmodernist relativism hasn’t got a prayer of finding a solution to its own problem, in its infinite journey toward partiality. An area ripe for further investigation involves qualitative experience: the hard problem of consciousness, a nut that science hasn’t yet cracked. Which brings up the question, what do we really need?

We may need the world in order to dream it.

Jung has remarked,

“It is not psyche which exists within man, but man whom exists within psyche.” “Matter as well as spirit appear in the psychic realm as distinctive qualities of conscious contents. The ultimate nature of both is transcendent, that is, noumenal, since the psyche and its contents are the only reality which is given to us without a medium” (The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, p 215f).

The unresolved play between Jungian Platonic archetypes, the imaginal and empiricism is marvelously resolved in Hillman’s work. “Without a medium” is an intriguing phrase, in association with “nonumenal: “a posited object or event as it appears in itself independent of perception by the senses.” In that human consciousness is reflective, and we cannot see such a similar process to any great extent in another creature (for comparative analysis), what is it that’s doing the reflecting? Perception itself (to go one step further) arises out of/in league with psychic reflection – otherwise it is impossible to language, think about, cognate thingness. All of which implies metaphor as a root of apprehension. The strong position in polar opposition to a literalist/empiricist perspective, is that metaphor is authentic reality. Perhaps a re-estimation of the power and importance of metaphor is in order. As a basis of apprehended reality it can kill, heal, well – how we deepen into apprehension. It may be we are in a state of denial or existential bias against a reasonable regard and valuing of metaphor and fantasy.

. . . “Fantasy” and “reality” change places and values. First, they are no longer opposed. Second, fantasy is never merely mentally subjective but is always being enacted and embodied. (Hillman 1972a, pp. xxxix-xl). Third, whatever is physically or literally ‘real’ is always also a fantasy image. Thus the world of so-called hard factual reality is always also the display of a specifically shaped fantasy, as if to say, along with Wallace Stevens, the American philosopher-poet of imagination on whom archetypal psychology often draws, there is always “a poem at the heart of things.” Jung stated the same idea (CW6: 78): “The psyche creates reality everyday. The only expression I can say for this activity is fantasy.” And he takes the word “fantasy” “from poetic usage” (CW 6: 743) (Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, p. 23).

Gary Snyder, quoted below, has written: “mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild.” As Snyder is an eco-critical thinker par excellence, I’m not sure why “rejecting eco-criticism and reasserting a modernist narrative . . .” would be a necessary reponse to a “literalist” challenge, on the part of environmentalists. At least as I understand Snyder’s stream of eco-critical thought. The real key is not in the classroom, so to speak, it’s in experience – the “hard problem” of consciousness; by which is meant, not purely empirical (that is, measurable, quantifiable) experience. Put the art pedal to the metal. Following this line, any decent synthesis involves aesthetic contact: soul, baby.

(to be continued)

Visiting Cass Dalglish’s page The Textual Dance: Allusion in the Oldest and Newest Poetry, a surprise awaits toward the bottom, a flash-based poem which is a translation of an Ur text composed by Enheduanna (En-hedu-Ana is a title and means The High Priestess [named] Ornament of the Sky). Enheduanna wrote her poem of praise, nin-me-sar-ra, to the female deity Inanna; “pressed into clay over four thousand years ago, [it] is the first document in history to be signed by its author. . .”

She wrote as a poet writes, a poet who has command of metaphor, density and wordplay —— in this case —— sign play. A single Sumerian sign may have five, ten, twenty or more values.

Introductory paragraphs relate the oldest cuneiform poetics to Web excursions:

As we spring and leap and scroll along from image to thought to sight to sound on the world wide web, we leap from one idea to another, tying and untying, twisting and untwisting threads of understanding. This is the use of allusion, the employment of the “leap” to annex one poetic experience to another. It is visible in the works of poets who read their work aloud, and poets who publish their words in the hard-inked pages of a book. It is this very use of allusion that is at the core of every poem. It is this allusive dance which gives the poem it’s energy and its density, regardless of whether the poet fixes a metaphor into paper with pigment, embeds a reference in clay, or floats it electronically in hyperspace.

Ambiguity is essential if we are to understand what the Sumerian poet wrote when she pressed signs into clay, for the signs themselves, multivalent and in some cases embedded one in another, make the poem. This is the Sumerian woman writer’s “feminine text,” which, as Retallack says, “implicitly acknowledges and creates the possiblility of other/additional/ simultaneous texts” . . . When the possibilities of meaning are layered, simultaneously, one atop the other, layers of meaning in a Sumerian text are visible. The cuneiform line seen in this fashion calls to mind what Stephanie Strickland has described as “embeddedness” or “nestedness” in poetry.

Which leads to a discussion of poetry hypertext. Hypertext poet Jim Rosenberg’s Diffraction Through was chosen to illustrate “a cluster of simultaneous thoughts:”

Rosenberg says the electronic poem alters “phrase into super-word, phrase cluster into an ignition where the resonances will seem to move, as a flame moves, though the words are fixed and do not change . . . ” Rosenberg says his images stack “atop one another (as) simultaneities, as the world is full of simultaneities of lives, of thoughts, of desires, of reaching and refusals: the word not as a solo act but as a particle in a field, autonomous, an object in a field where to exist is to be combined, to be juxtaposed, to radiate from a layer, one of many layers: sheets as the great stacks of beckons to the eye call juxtaposed not by design but because to be in a packed cluster of circumstance is the natural condition of being".

This would seem to relate to image schemas, as discussed in Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, and memorably presented in H.D.’s Palimpsest.

(About this web log. Note concerning web presence: you can find my bio here, here are some writings on haiku; a recent music project is here, composed with Jeff Cairns. )

This web log is loosely concerned with the theme of wildness and the wild; its loss, invalidation and voiding, whether this arrives from the personal microcosmically stray dream-image, political, social, scientific perspective (e.g. genomic, cybernetic), literary perspective, cultural noodling, work-stress realm, psychology, etc. So, critique is one purview. On the flip side, the question of what the wild is, how wildness might be touched, moved towards, sensed – what its value might be – these represent arcs of question and aspiration. Rather than answers, I believe relationship is a focus. James Hillman discusses the classical Greek meaning of the word therapy as “therapeia,” “to attend upon.” The meaning of psychology (a logos of psyche: to give psyche an adequate account of itself) then is “to attend upon psyche.” In this sense, the psychology of the wild becomes relevant as an active movement: how to attend upon, give attendance to wilds; to wildness. To attend and enter.

An example of attending to the psyche of something primordial, elemental is Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire. Thoreau found wildness as a highest value, articulating a non-dual awareness of wildness. Wildness as not merely an outer environmental issue nor interior state disconnected from relative extensive reality. This brings up the old question of subjectivity vs. objectivity (with subjectivity, as fancy, often getting short shrift). One response to the subjective-objective conundrum regarding nature comes from modern haiku. The Japanese poet Hoshinaga Fumio comments,

I write about or touch upon human heart and feeling, by creating human mental images. The human mental image does not have a typical form, such as a cake cut into four quarters – a mental picture is not like that; it has no form. . . . Disharmonies lead to harmonies . . . the Japanese sense of nature is in harmony, that is, the harmony of: person (human being) and nature; no separation – in its widest sense. Without the sense of harmony with nature, Japanese literature would become very weak (personal communication).

Hoshinaga’s creation of “human mental images” is directly related to his 40-year oeuvre of acclaimed haiku. How we find harmony, in the sense Hoshinaga describes, seems relevant. At this precise point in human history various writers have sensed we are on the brink of losing the wild, except perhaps as fairytale or entertainment fantasy; this process is happening on a number of levels, imaginative, social, technological, etc. I’d like to present a few phrases from Emerson and Thoreau. Here is the opening sentence from Thoreau’s essay, Walking:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement…

Thoreau includes “person” in his sense of nature, through advancing the idea of a person leaving the three estates of church, government and society, in order to seek direct contact with the wild, not by goal-oriented behavior, but rather by meandering or wandering in or through wild places, spaces, with the sense of never returning.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man – then you are ready for a walk.

Seeking a sacred earth, sacred sense of being. To do this one must become “a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.” A bit later, a statement which resonates strongly 150 years later:

In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Thoreau is often misquoted, with “wilderness” replacing “wildness.” While the two are related, one is external, extensive, while the other is a move towards an aesthetic in which experiences are sought: varieties of contact.

In Nature Emerson wrote, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” A short way down the page he added, “But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical.” Valuing the wild implies sensing, contemplating universals, which tend to be discredited or devalued, in comparison to realistic, pragmatic ideas or goals. It can be argued that strong thinking itself is now held in social question. These lines from Yeats’ Second Coming seem to match the current media climate:

. . . everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
. . .

Gary Snyder writes that mind is fundamentally wild:

I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. “Wild” as in wild ecosystems – richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information. At root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read “language") a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? Observation, reflection, and practice show artistic process to be the latter (A Place in Space, pp. 163-172).

These are some of the ideas that hover, in terms of this web log. I feel that we have reached a time when the perseverance of the wild is at issue.

One of the challenges of cultural existential bias is acknowledging that we possess it. Without looking toward the obscure shadows cast, we may end up destroying or eroding what is of universal value: human identity and meaning, in one instance. I think this is one of Bill McKibben’s points when he writes that,

[Human gene manipulation and DNA improvement is] “Going for perfection,” [as] Watson calls it. But in fact such genetic tampering threatens to destroy the very things that give meaning to human life. From a certain vantage point, meaning has been in decline for a very long time, almost since the beginning of civilization. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors inhabited a very different world from ours, a meaning-saturated world where every plant and animal was an actor the way people are actors, where even rocks and canyons and rivers could speak. We look at that same world and see either silent landscape or pile of resources; either it has gone mute or our hearing is nowhere near as sharp. . . . the context of our lives began to shrink much more quickly in the last five hundred years. As science offered first new explanations and then new technologies, we have traded in the old contexts that informed human lives, bargaining them away in return for freedom, for Liberation (Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age).

As we advance we may wish to turn anew toward the forgotten or abandoned. I would like to extend my brief encapsulation but this post is becoming long. Ursula Le Guin’s A Very Warm Mountain, discusses the personification of the natural world in a way that has provoked my introspection: must we personalize the non-human, incorporate it into society in order to preserve its value, living in an age between myths? James Hillman comments in Beauty Without Nature; Refounding the City that “nature” should not necessarily be equated only with wilderness or non-human zones, that (to reduce a complex story) the crucial experience of aesthetic arrest may be found in the city, in art, as well as within wilderness – aesthetic perception of the wild is qualitative and not mutually exclusive (one zone cannot be sacrificed for another). One of Hillman’s points is that it may be possible to design a sense of the wild into the city – in such a city, it would become less necessary to mass exodus to the beach or “managed” nature on the weekends, in order to seek after the longed-for distance, in Weil’s sense, distance which is the soul of beauty.

The wild and anarchy are dissimilar templates. Gary Snyder points out that sensing the wild involves “the grain of things . . . measured chaos,” ideas also found in Classical Greece. Chaos (lack of pattern) was equated with aesthetic ugliness. So, the cosmos as cosmetic, cosmos as craft.

The above are loosely related speculations. I believe it is possible to go beyond a dualistic psychology that polarizes nature and culture. At the same time, whatever polemic or dialectic might be hashed out, I’m working from an internal poetic course, an unformed and unframed discontinuity, from disharmonies that may lead to harmonies – saunters on occasion, seeming to be a verb.

The cows are no longer simply mad, they are dissassembled. The cowing of nature continues – consumption, dissassembly and transgenic recrudescence: an outbreak of cows. It was recently reported that Britons were harvesting milk as early as 6,000 years ago. Now we shall further cow cows, or resculpt them. What looks like a cow but is not a cow?

Is it reasonable for a cow to have its milk replaced with human milk proteins, that is, to produce human milk for babies to drink? No more artificial formulas! Of course, the calves will be out of luck.

There are a number of potential opportunities for altering the nutritional content of milk. For example, cow’s milk is ideal for calves but not for premature infants. Gene targeting using nuclear transfer will allow milk to be produced in which one or more of the normal cow’s proteins have been replaced by human proteins, thereby improving its nutritional quality for these special consumers.

It is easy to imagine the benefits to humanity. Honestly, why should we stand in the way of ever-more-helpful and healing cows?

Should cows be transgenically altered so that they become disease free throughout the modern industrial cow-processing industry? Mastitis costs U.S. dairy farmers about $1.7 billion annually, including lost milk revenues, and scientists hope that Annie will resist such cellular attacks by secreting an added protein called lysostaphin.

Bill McKibben in his book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, deals with human identity in a transgenic age. It’s possible to keep abreast of the issue here, to some extent. But I am more concerned about the cows. I mean, we will do anything with animals – even give ourselves BSE, a devastating disease which the agricultural insustry continues to hide from our eyes and the law.

The cow is much like a consumer, casting an image passive and dumb: cows seem to be messengers of our future. Is some empathy if not interest called for?

One apparently unresolved question is what is to be done with the transgenic cattle - which do, after all, have a single human gene in them, even if they look like cows, sound like cows, urinate with impressive projectile force like cows, and behave like cows - when the time comes for them to go to that happy meadow in the sky. The Finnish Biotech Commission has issued a statement to the effect that it is not ethically wrong to slaughter transgenic cattle for human consumption. Nevertheless, consumers should be told when the beef on their supermarket meat counter is genetically modified, and when it is not.

Apart from the queasy concept of consuming transgenic cattle, I’m sure we will be told when our supermarket beef is genetically modified. The food and agricultural industry has our need to know at heart. Cow care, cow management; a top priority.

It might be argued that everything is right with this picture: medicines from cows, mother’s milk from cows. If your loved one is dying from a disease a transgenic cow named Annie or Fred could cure, if babies’ lives could be saved and made nutritionally strong from a transgenic cow or so, in the backyard…

It can’t be wrong to change animals into producers, into living software, can it, to re-breed nature?

For a different perspective and response-article to this post read this from crumbtrail. Also related, a consequent post, losing and finding the wild.

An excerpt from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Times editorial:

I knelt directly in front of her and placed my hands on what I thought of as her shoulders. She drove against me, the last human obstacle between her and the gulf. The wind blew, and behind me the surf roared. Then it was time to let go.

When she moved at last, she marched briskly down the sand between a double cordon of beachcombers and tourists who had happened upon the scene. Like me, none of them had ever knowingly come this close to a member of an endangered species before. The turtle rested for a few minutes, then struck out again. She nosed her way over the tidal debris, and then the biologist lifted her over a driftwood log that lay in her path. From there it was a clean break for the sea, down the slick sand and into the pooling backwash of the surf. I watched until the crest of her shell had gone under and the last swirls caused by her powerful strokes had been gathered up in a new inrush of water.

It was one of those rare moments when you suddenly realize, viscerally, the profound otherness – the astonishing sufficiency – of nature. “Habitat” barely suggests the convergence between the turtle and the sea she re-entered. It seemed, at the moment of re-entry, to have the force of an atomic bond.

Printed dated printed books that is. The image on the left taken from the Gutenberg Bible (1455), the text of Book I of the Maccabees, not to get distracted but found on a Houghton-Mifflin site, a whiz-bang 16 chapter history of western civilization. Before I get to the 20,000 free book downloads I wanted to mention for those interested, a U. Texas, Austin site outlining the history of the book. The anatomy of a page of the Gutenberg Bible is neat, even neater, the British Library has a permanent online collection of international texts, a great Gutenberg Bible exhibition, and this version of the Diamond Sutra, (the image just below) the world’s earliest dated block-printed book (868 C.E.), and you can actually turn the pages of these books online in full color, including Leonardo’s Notebook, Sforza’s “Hours,” and Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an, Chaucer, Shakespeare, among others (using the Shockwave plugin). Very cool, turn pages by mouse, and use the “magnifying glass” tool to see fine print. Don’t miss the extremely rare Tyndale New Testament, the first translation of that Testament into English (1526). His work was considered heretical and all copies (either 3,000 or 6,000) were confiscated; Tyndale was strangled and burned on 6 October 1536, for his efforts (that the bible might appear in English for the general reader, rather than Church Latin).

So there really are at least 20,000 books available online, free. The online books page at U. Penn. has that and more: articles, news, reviews, &c. Search by author, title, subject, &c.

The tricky bit is that 10,000 of the 20,000 are from Project Gutenberg is among the most philanthropic online projects of all time. Begun in 1971 by Michael Hart, when he was given $100 million of mainframe computer time, the story goes that,

At any rate, Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of “normal computing,” that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given. . .so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries.

He then proceeded to type in the “Declaration of Independence” and tried to send it to everyone on the networks. . .which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss at creating an early version of what was later called the “Internet Virus.”

A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as Michael stated that he had “earned” the $100,000,000 because a copy of the Declaration of Independence would eventually be an electronic fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000 of the computer users of the future.

9,999 books later, Project Gutenberg has released a DVD and CD download, and you can read the details for downloading it here.

It will take some hardware and software knowledge though, to create the DVD or CD. If you aren’t computer savvy, by donating to the Gutenberg Project here, you will be sent two free DVDs (one to give away, they write). To download and create the DVD or CD, here are some steps:

1) The DVD contains 9,400 books, placed into e-text up to December 2003. The downloads are .ISO files, so you’ll need a DVD burner (like Nero), and a DVD recorder. For the CD, which contains 600 books, you need a CD-R recorder, or you can download a zipped file of the texts to load right on your computer.

2) For the CD, go here read the “readme txt” and download “PG2003-08.zip” which is a zipped .iso (370 megabytes) or the actual readable contents “PG2003-08_files.zip” (371 megs).

I downloaded the ISO file, unzipped it (took a while) and burned it to a CD. Make sure you “burn from an image.” In Nero, the command is (counter-intuitively) in the “recorder” menu. After burning, pop the CD out, put it back in, and let it autorun.

What you get on the CD: a complete “authors” list is here.

3) The DVD is a trickier business, and the recommendation seems to be to load free Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network software: BitTorrent or eMule, and then search for the Gutenberg files.

4) What you need is the “pgdvd.iso” file and it’s a whopper, about 4.14 gigabytes. Seems like a challenge.

Anyway, if you just want a few hundred books or so, try the online books page at U. Penn. or Project Gutenberg links. Definitely, 21st century.

One of Duane Hanson’s most famous works is the sculpture Motorcycle Accident (1967). “I have not seen it but I hear that this shock piece is enough to make you sell your bike” (The Bat Guano Museum of Art).

Unsurprising to those of us who ride: Don’t Be Fooled! Motorcyclists live in a mythic reality. Pleasure-seeking fools, unrealistically optimistic and worst of all, guilty of, that’s right, the newset thing since post-post-modernism:

Relative Realism
 

Perceptions of risk in motorcyclists: unrealistic optimism, relative realism and predictions of behaviour

Rutter DR, Quine L, Albery IP.

Department of Psychology, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.

In the first phase of a prospective investigation, a national sample of motorcyclists completed a postal questionnaire about their perceptions of risk, their behaviour on the roads and their history of accidents and spills. In the second phase a year later, they reported on their accident history and behaviour over the preceding 12 months. A total of 723 respondents completed both questionnaires. Four sets of findings are reported. First, the group as a whole showed unrealistic optimism: on average, respondents believed themselves to be less at risk than other motorcyclists of an accident needing hospital treatment in the next year. Second, optimism was tempered by ‘relative realism’, in that respondents who were young and inexperienced saw themselves as more at risk than other motorcyclists, as did riders who reported risky behaviours on the road. Third, there was some evidence of debiasing by personal history, in that having a friend or a relative who had been killed or injured on the roads was associated with perceptions of absolute risk of injury or death–though there were no effects on comparative risk and no effects on any of the judgments of a history of accidents of one’s own. Finally, there was good evidence that perceptions of risk predicted subsequent behaviour, though generally in the direction not of precaution adoption but of precaution abandonment: the greater the perceived risk at time 1, the more frequent the risky behaviour at time 2. The implications of the findings are discussed, and possible interpretations are suggested.

For more on the topic of risk-taking, visit risktaking.co.uk.

Relative realism – bent toward the absolute?

Lanier, who coined the term “virtual reality,” recently gave a lecture entitled a 1000 year optimistic scenario. In an earlier short article, he advanced the thesis that It is collective self-flattery for members of the computer science community to argue that computers can be conscious. I will take the contrarian position and argue that they cannot.

Lanier’s homepage and bio are here. Some people make sense, he’s one of them. Jaron has written one half of a manifesto, which critiques and exposes various flaws in “cybernetic totalist” views (e.g. computers will soon become more intelligent than us). There are several future-truths posed in the manifesto, and it makes for provocative reading. Although oriented to the world of memes and computers and neural nets, it’s more about society, and worth the hassle of relating with sometimes unfamiliar templates.

In the half-manifesto he discusses such perspectives as:

Why stupid software will save the future from neo-Darwinian machines.

The fear: cyber-Armageddon in our lifetimes, a cataclysm brought on when computers become ultra-intelligent masters of matter and life.

For computers to design their own successors, someone has to write the initial software. Humans have given no evidence of this ability.

He also argues against annoyingly prevalent false or reductive scientistic beliefs, arising from the cybernetic totalist/cognitive-science camp:

Is a person a gene’s way of propagating itself? It would be just as reasonable to assert that
“A person is shit’s way of making more shit.”

Cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.

People are no more than cybernetic patterns.

Reading in the newer theories utilizing the term “evolutionary” (psychology, linguistics, science, biology, etc.) there seems a sometimes pernicious reduction of the human (or sentient) states of affairs to computer models – as if the computational model contains all significance and intelligence in its orbit. This is convenient for those who believe that human intelligence is a variety or even cross-pollinating simulacrum of machine intelligence.

Here is a shot at a definition of reality, which Jaron articulated in an interview, published in the book Mavericks of the Mind (now online):

David: What is your definition of reality, and how do you think it’s created? In that context, what then is Virtual Reality?

Jaron: You’ll be shocked to know that I don’t have definitive answers to all deep philosophical questions. (laughter) I do have some thoughts on it, though. I’ll start with one definition which is a biological one. Reality is the global expectation of the nervous system for the next moment. In other words, the most flexible parts of the psyche and your body mold themselves to a rolling guess of what will probably come next.

The continuous, cinematic-style experience of reality that we have is an illusion created by our nervous systems. Our direct perception of this world is actually highly flawed. For starters, the blind-spot is a great example. Near the center of each of your eyes is this big, black hole where you don’t see anything, but you’re never aware of it. Your mind fills it in perfectly for itself, which it can do because it holds all the cards. Even aside from that, what your eyes actually see is not what you perceive them seeing. Your eyes see edges and boundaries and patterns and they don’t really see the picture that you see - that’s constructed on a running basis in your brain. They just physiologically do not pick up the picture that you’re seeing now.

Rebecca: And there are all those associations you have developed throughout your life that get psychologically attached to what you’re seeing.

Jaron: Yeah. Have you ever had the experience of looking at something and for a moment it’s just an abstraction and it’s weird and you don’t quite get it, then you recognize it, then you can only see it in the proper way, no matter how hard you try to see it `wrong’ again? Sometimes the top of a building in the distance will blend with the sky in an impossible way. That sort of thing. That’s an example of how every level of your being works together to create your sense of reality. What a computer person would call a `high-level’ idea of recognizing objects like building tops and understanding their functions and relationships helps the supposedly very low level function of just interpreting colors and edges and the visual scene.

So, what’s happening is there’s a sort of rolling effect… I hate to use the word model and I’m trying to avoid using it because I don’t really think that your brain represents the outside world in any kind of codified and consistent way. You don’t even need to study the brain to decide that, you can make philosophical arguments to show that that’s an unlikely thing to be going on.

But, I think on a sort of a more global level, your brain and your body together are adapting themselves to the reality and that’s also the process that lets you perceive it. So there’s this moment to moment process where your expectations happen to match up with the apparent consistency of the stimulation from your physical world, and those things together are reality for you.

David: Isn’t that a model?

Jaron: Yeah okay, it’s a model, but it’s not the usual kind of model that can be represented as an abstraction. I don’t want to say the word model, because if I do then a bunch of academic philosophers will write me nasty letters saying, “How dare you say that!?” (laughter) And yet it’s the closest thing you can say easily. Another definition of reality has to do with the mysterious or sublime stubbornness of things. There are a few things that are just intensely, stubbornly there all the time.

David: Philip K. Dick once said that “reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.” [from the novel Ubik ]

Jaron: That’s absolutely excellent. There are only a few things that fall in that category - I think there are three. There’s this everyday, mundane physical world which seems awfully persistent, and the fact that Marin hasn’t made it disappear is good evidence that nobody could. (laughter) And then there’s the world of moods and essences and artistic feelings and styles, and those things are intensely real to me on a deep level; the sense of experience itself including the differentiation of different experiences. The other stubborn item is that mysterious thing called mathematics - it’s just really stubbornly there.

David: And just a brief definition of mathematics in that context?

Jaron: Mathematics is an inevitable path you go down when you start thinking about things in some way other than as an undifferentiated whole - which is any kind of thinking, really.

Gmail, Google’s offer of a free gigabyte of email storage and innovate mail organization, is under attack by civil liberties and pricacy groups around the world. In a letter dated April 19, Thirty-One Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail. More recently, CNET news reports:

Blasting Gmail as a horrific intrusion into Internet users’ privacy, a California state senator has introduced legislation to block Google’s free email service. State Senator Liz Figueroa, a Democrat from the Bay Area city of Fremont, said on Thursday that it should be illegal for a company to scan the text of its customers’ email correspondence and display relevant advertising – even if customers explicitly agree to the practice in exchange for a gigabyte of storage.

“Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers and family members are just another direct-marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa said in a statement, which called Gmail customers’ correspondence “a direct-marketing opportunity for Google.” Google has encountered unexpectedly severe criticism from advocates of more government regulation to control private companies’ business practices. London-based Privacy International has fired off complaints to government officials in at least 16 nations.

Google has reponded, with this privacy statement.

Gmail would use automated technology to scan the content of incoming e-mail for keywords and place related text ads inside the mail. . . If someone sent an e-mail to a Gmail user suggesting they go out for Mexican food, the recipient might see a couple of text ads in the right column of the e-mail suggesting specific Mexican restaurants in their area.

This is from edge.org, who have a section of their site known as the Annual World Question Center. The question for 2004, posed by editor John Brockman:

What’s your Law?

Brockman’s synoptic instructions to the Edge literati (written up in the NYT, WSJ, etc., Jan. 2-10):

There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy. Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy. Remember, your name will be attached to your law. I am asking members of the Edge community to take this project seriously as a public service. . .

Among the slew of provocative Laws browsed so far, I found Alan Alda’s Two Laws to be standouts:

 

Alda’s First Law of Laws

All laws are local.

Alda’s comment:

In other words, something is always bound to come along and make you rethink what you know by forcing you to look at it in a broader context. I’ve arrived at this notion after interviewing hundreds of scientists, and also after being married for 46 years.

I don’t mean that laws are not true and useful, especially when they have been verified by experiment. But they are likely to continue to be true only within a certain frame, once another frame is discovered.

Some scientists will probably find this idea heretical and others may find it obvious. According to this law, they’ll both be right (depending on the frame they’re working in).

Another way of saying this is that no matter how much we know about something, it is just the tip of the iceberg. And most disasters occur by coming in contact with the other part of the iceberg.

 

Alda’s Second Law of Laws

A law does not know how local it is.

Alda’s comment:

Citizens of Lawville do not realize there are city limits and are constantly surprised to find out they live in a county.

When you’re operating within the frame of a law, you can’t know where the edges of the frame are—where dragons begin showing up.

I’ve just been interviewing astronomers about dark matter and dark energy in the universe. These two things make up something like 96% of the universe. The part of the universe we can see or in some way observe is only about 4%. That leaves a lot of universe that needs to be rethought. And some people speculate that dark energy may be leaking in from a whole other universe; an even bigger change of frame, if that turns out to be the case.

It’s now known that vast stretches of DNA once thought to be Junk DNA because they don’t code for proteins actually regulate or even silence conventional genes. The conventional genes—what we used to think were responsible for everything we knew about heritability—account for only 2% of our DNA. Apparently, it’s not yet known how much of the other 98% is active, but I think the frame has just shifted here.

Welcome to Lawville; you are now leaving Lawville.

Samuel R. Delany wrote Dhalgren (1974), a most intriguing and brilliant science fiction novel. My friend John and I today marveled again at the opening lines:

to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind.

In a brief review of the new edition, Joe Hartlaub writes:

William Gibson’s introduction to the new Vintage edition (2001) is as good and as honest as any I’ve ever read. Gibson admits that he doesn’t understand Dhalgren and that it probably isn’t meant to be understood. He describes it as a “prose city” and in so doing pretty much nails the book dead on. Dhalgren takes place in an urban landscape where the laws of nature have broken down and the laws of mankind have as well; there is no way to tell which breakdown preceded the other. It begins in medias res and ends the same way. The characters wander through its mad landscape with no particular effect, with nothing in particular to propel them along, other than the overriding drive to continue existence. Yet. . . Delany’s skills as a wordsmith cannot be denied. The prose in Dhalgren is undeniably wonderful, a feast, an embarrassment of riches.

Taken as an appreciation of the power of language in the hands of a master, Dhalgren has few peers. As a story? Don’t expect to understand it. It is simply there, an account, if you will, of a world and lives that may or may not exist, that may happen or may have happened already. At 800 pages, it is worth the time and effort for the beauty of its language.

A spot editorial:

What is Dhalgren? Dhalgren is one of the greatest novels of 20th-century American literature. Dhalgren is one of the all-time bestselling science fiction novels. Dhalgren may be read with equal validity as SF, magic realism, or metafiction. Dhalgren is controversial, challenging, and scandalous. Dhalgren is a brilliant novel about sex, gender, race, class, art, and identity.

Read the book! (gads)

Microsoft patents human body as power transmitter, from Tom’s Hardware:

Microsoft has been granted a patent on using the human body as conductive medium for the transmission of power and data. According to the filing, the company believes it can network power-sources and peripheral devices by coupling sets of electrodes to the human body. Microsoft lists patent #6,754,472 as “Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body". The company justifies the idea of using the human body as conductor with the fact that “people have begun wearing electronic devices on their bodies. This would include wristwatches, pagers and PDAs, as well as small displays mounted on headgear.”

Years ago, was shocked, reading Gore Vidal’s Burr to discover that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with Sally Hemings, “his” African-American slave. Jefferson-idolizing friends refused my phone calls. Bill Clinton has put this fact into his memoir (page 822), “it has recently come to light that Thomas Jefferson fathered several children with slave Sally Hemings” (quoted from Slate). In 1999, E. M. Halliday, writing in the New York Times, titled his op-ed piece A More or Less Proven Liason. The Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, based on DNA analysis, determined in its year-2000 findings that the evidence:

Indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings’s children appearing in Jefferson’s records.

The pertinent facts are here.

Precious little is known about Sally Hemings, and her image is lost to history; nonetheless, a novelization of her life has been well-received (her fictional image, above). All of which has little to do with Clinton’s affairs, though it was on his mind to mention, apparently. Thank you, Bill, for setting the record straight in such a public manner. Would you mind clearing up the misperceived Iraq-al-qaeda-9/11 connection, while you’re at it. Best of luck.

Hot off the presses: John March has just released some killer mp3’s (downloadable) from The Circuitbreakers, for your musical listening pleasure. Crank these up on your best speakers for a real treat.

John’s also written some thought-provoking articles on the music business. Most recently: Going against the grain of Pop culture; Making music for the sake of music! which begins:

The music business is in shambles. everyone is concerned, or outright panicking. Work is slow and Pop music and technology are killing music. In fact intellectual property and artistry has all been reduced to binary consciousness, zeroes and ones are the beginning and end of the universe and nothing else is sacred. These, and many other sentiments, are the prevailing dialog in our industry at this moment…

Two more excerpts:

To me the music of The Blues is like a Zen art form. Its roots are steeped in tradition, in a history of form and performance, but it is also an evolving form that is both familiar and potentially new at the same time. It requires, at its most fundamental level, absolute attention and presence and a certain moment to moment awareness that requires an emotional honesty and connection to detail that only comes with time and experience…

For the last 15 years I have had a unique and inspiring working relationship with Westlake Audio In Los Angeles. Steve Burdick, the studio manager there, has been a great supporter over the years, of my vision of craft and community. 15 years ago I had a Synclavier room there, and Steve and I became friends. Recently we have been working together with his fantastic idea for helping and supporting new artists and singer/songwriters. Westlake Audio’s Artist Development Program, in conjunction with the fantastic resources that Westlake Audio has to offer as a recording facility. We worked together to create a community effort that joined his vision of artist development with my idea to create a resource for singer songwriters that connected them to great players, called sectionforhire.com. This lead to talks with my fellow musicians and studio players, which in turn has lead us to this project of The Circuitbreakers.

Free culture as an international movement has been instigated by Swarthmore college students, with an offical press release put out April 20. Here are two inspiring pages: What is free culture? and the Free culture manifesto. Also, What does a free culture look like? makes for interesting reading.

Okay, so what about this Free Culture concept? The term and resultant movement is based on the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons license, free download), who has also written other books.

The question of creative freedom and copyright in an advancing digital age. Yesterday, Joi Ito announced that garageband.com “a discoverer of independent music” will offer a creative commons license to its artists. Here’s a who’s who of CC, and this page, which has information concerning the history of copyright law and new approaches to copyright and creative freedom (eg, licenses governing music samples). CC also has a weblog if you’re into it. The frightening Center for the Public Domain is worth a look. Ito writes that,

Alternative distribution of music using CC licenses is clearly a good idea and helps people understand the whole Free Culture concept.

Concerning CC licensing,

I really do believe that the issue will become more and more about how to gain attention, not how to charge for delivery. It is changing from a delivery problem to a discovery problem as storage and bandwidth become commodities. Discovery is cheap only when you have a monopoly on people’s attention. Obviously, media companies… are trying to keep that monopoly, but I think users are going to dump those locked up modes as new modes of discovery become available. I think that the main way to get attention will be to become part of the conversation and you can only do that if you promote active sharing of your music and content.

The GNU General Public License (aka copyleft), legally places software into the public domain, and all later evolutions of that software: to be used freely, in perpetuity. Stallman’s essay, Why software should not have owners reminds me why I am a love child.

“The main way to get attention will be to become part of the conversation,” is an echo of the earlier, highly original and vociferiously audacious thought of RageBoy, which you can find in his Cluetrain Manifesto. Now, RageBoy will definitely clear your head. Check out entropy gradient reversals (copyleft). RageBoy also lists on Nonzero (re: this entry, in two fish archives. Turns out you can read excerpts from every chapter of Nonzero here). More of RageBoy can be found by following this link. Applying the logic of nonzero, locked up modes are definitely not here to stay.

     After reading a review of the Lombard consensus, appearing in the New York Times today, it became clear that some thought experiments are perhaps pathetically timid. “Liberal” seems to be creeping back into the speakable lexicon, but “visionary” has some way to go.

What would you do with $50 billion?… Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and environmental iconoclast, brought eight economists, including three Nobel Prize winners… to rank the world’s 10 worst problems. Forget politics, they were told, just look at how to get the most bang for the buck… Global warming is a serious problem, the group concluded, but regarded every proposal as having costs that were likely to exceed the benefits.

The $50 billion question isn’t bogus, but it operates from a set of intrinsic limitations: conceptual, procedural and economic. There may also be bias, in that acclaimed professionals, if suggesting far-out, visionary ideas, based on possibles and supposeds run the risk of being labeled cranks. While the report seems valuable in terms of certain actualities, there are many unknowns that cannot be easily addressed by isolated programs with limited budgets.

I wonder what answers might be found if we provided a different set of guidelines for a new thought-experiment:

1. You have an unlimited amount of money.
2. You have 50 years to implement your proposals.
3. Your target solution concerns, at a minimum, the 7th generation from the present, in terms of time.
4. You must collaborate with at least two specialists from research fields other than your own.
5. Consider non-zero sumness as a highest value in weighting possible solutions (non-zero-sumness is a higher value than economic gain, though related to it).
6. Non-zero sum proposals which extend beyond the 7th generation receive a proportionally higher rating, vis their effect through extended time.

Non zero sum is based on Richard Wright’s thesis in Nonzero.

Solar Power via the Moon is a concept untouched by the Lombard wunderkinder; only one possible concept for re-inventing the intra-ecospheric paradigm. Lest quackery is pondered, examine the well-discussed article and testimony of Dr. David R. Criswell: Senate Hearing on Lunar Exploration (Criswell’s biography here). A good idea? Unclear. Possible idea? I’m not saying I approve of the above solution; there are environmental concerns and other questions. But I doubt truly visionary projects were considered by the Lomborg-funded group. People like Buckminster Fuller imagined new visions for humanity, new paradigms, with roaring courage. We need to continue looking into the farther future in as non-zero-sum a manner as possible, I ponder. What would be the result of a worldwide, low-cost, renewable energy source? Where to begin? Perhaps, beyond ourselves:

I am reminded of a comment made by the Buddhist teacher Guru Amrit Desai, when he looked out of his car window and saw that he was in the midst of a gang of Hell’s Angels. After studying them in great detail for a long while, he finally exclaimed, “They really love their motorcycles.” There was no disdain in this observation. Guru Desai was truly moved by the purity of their love for the beauty and power of something that was outside themselves,

Ray Kurtzweil recently remarked, reviewing Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. Whether cellular automata rule 110 is the ultimate reductive answer to the question of life in the universe, as 42 was for the computer Deep Thought, built by pan-dimensional mice in Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, only time will tell. The Hell’s Angels might have been consulted by the Lombardians, in this regard:

The Menace is loose again… the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches… like Genghis Kahn on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter’s leg with no quarter asked and none given… Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on (Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels p. 1).

We’re the one-percenters, man – the one percent that don’t fit in and don’t care.

Elena rides her Kawasaki ZZR-1100 through the dead zone of Chernobyl :

I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl “dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads. The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes. In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again… a few centuries from now.

Recently Ulana reported that Elena’s journey might not have occurred quite in the way she describes. Nevertheless, many defend Elena’s art. Take a look at Elena’s site and the feedback.