Thaumato

I had an intuition today when looking at a small doodle I had drawn - the doodle was of a cartoon bad guy face - the kind of villain’s face that might have starred in a Christmas cartoon I may have watched growing up - like the bad guy in Frosty the snowman.

Anyway - wanted to get this intuition down on e-paper so I wouldn’t forget -
The idea I had was that humans may have an in built set of structures we impose on the world rather than vice-versa. Not exactly ground shaking - but in the context of a culture where corporations are our current villains- and how they manipulate people and steal their dreams and use up their lives and spit them back out at the end - how this may not in fact be the needed, true or chosen role of corporations, but might instead be the inevitable characterization humans paint across their broadside, the vessel of an older pre-built archetype rather than fully the soul sucking current and recently devised evil we all feel them to be.
Just a thought.

Reading Allan Bloom again, his Closing of the American mind, really a great book even if you don’t agree with his politics. One thing he gets to is an explication of how Nietzsche’s wide ranging cultural criticism of religion and science was based on a principled stand. According to Bloom, Nietzsche’s fire and fury are generated from an unflinching intellectual honesty - he knows that god is dead, and doesn’t proclaim it triumphantly but rather gloomily, sadly, because he knows that the religious impulse, the non-rational, is required if the soul of man is to ever elevate past the empty planes and dead conclusions of science and rationality. Sure, there is much to admire in the Enlightenment, but with it also much was lost in the West. Nietzsche’s anger and vitriol were manifestations of this realization, the unwillingness to accept as the ultimate fate of humanity the characterization of the Last Man in Zarathustra - content with a base animal existence, happily oblivious to his lost inheritance. The flip side to this coin of course is that this anger and passion have no authentic target. The artistic impulse, while strong, has no absolute base upon which to build. The foundations have all been weakened and are still crumbling, a hundred and fifty years later. Relativism is like water, like the elements of nature, injecting itself into every crevice, downgrading every faith.

And so, what hope do we have? What hope did Nietzsche have? According to Bloom, Nietzsche’s hope was that the creative impulse, the artistic drive of man will lay the new foundation itself, will create the new religions, the new prophets, based upon where we are now, based upon all that man has been through, something to redeem our fractured doubting present, something to restore and reinvent salvation itself. Yet, who is up to the task? Are we all just awaiting this new messiah? I was thinking about this this morning. Perhaps the Native Americans, with their connection to the land, to the present and not some far away future state where all our problems are solved, had the right idea. Perhaps the modern green movement is the correct way forward, in so far as it engenders a respect and awareness of our current existence, a reverence for the here and now, for the mysterious and ultimately unexplained ground of being. Perhaps in the notion of mother earth, the pagan synch with nature, is the path for our return to sublime harmonies and higher purposes. Perhaps the Native American philosophy of life can tell us the way home.

I had an interesting intuition the other day that humans are not just ’social animals’ but instead actually become new symbiotic selves when they interact -that the identity of a single person in isolation is not a true picture of their underlying self. It is similar to the Uncertainty Principle - people are really only who they are when they are with others. Others make the self what it is. You cannot study the self without taking into account the influence of others upon it.

I think this helps explain the joy I feel when in the presence of a huge singing crowd. I feel a sense of elation. It is as if the entire crowd is morphing into one being, a being with an expanded sense that allows it to experience the music at a higher plane. The abandon that crowd members feel, the release of autonomy into the all-self, or rather the larger self is indicative of this symbiosis. We are actually being assimilated, reconstituting our selves into cells.

Anyway - the crowd example is fairly obvious, but I think the same kind of dynamic is at work in almost every level of human interactions. I have a group of friends from college and when we get together, wherever that get together happens to be, it feels like a home coming. It is as if a friendly spirit has been summoned, our interactions blending together in a fine gestalt. Everyone has old friends that no matter how much time has passed since you last saw them no awkwardness has ever intruded into your relationship. It is as if the bond itself exists in some physical realm. As if the social sense is detecting and transmitting these feelings of love and brotherhood, discomfort and disdain the same way our skin relays the sun’s warmth or winter’s chill.

What is the point of a work of art?

To build something permanent, a structure of mind and ideas and craft and space and time, a structure under which generations of people may pass or pause to take refuge from the rain.

What prompted this:

I was listening to ‘Alone in Kyoto’ by Air today and was looking at the cover. The two men are wearing gloves as if they are about to engage in some kind of esoteric labor. A diagram behind them hints at the hours of research and experimentation which they have spent building their sound.

I was struck by the wistful, far off look on Dunckel’s face (the guy on the right) - the prototypical dreamer, and for a moment my thoughts turned unkind. I began to chide his lofty aspirations as being all style and no substance, immaterial castles of air, upon which his gloves would find no resistance. But, as the music continued on I understood that I was in fact listening to the realization of his efforts, and that a castle of ideas had in fact been constructed and was not flimsy or fleeting but quite whole. The structure had been built and the photo is of an artist admiring his creation.

Just started reading Accelerando by Charles Stross (culled from this list) and its a really fun book, just packed with ideas, intellectually exhilarating, philosophy inducing joyride through the near future as predicted by proponents of The Singularity.

Anyway - highly recommended. I’m through 2 chapters so far and find my mind pleasantly buzzing, awash in the idea-after glow.

Kind of having trouble finding the form here. Again I have to keep reminding myself to lower the bar, mentally, otherwise I’d post nothing.

So, here is a short quote from Spengler’s Decline of the West, Part II

“it is not products that ‘influence’, but creators that ‘absorb’.”

Got it from a section of JC where he is going over the different cross cultural exchanges that happened between Islam and Christianity, which got me thinking about the larger point, this quote in particular, which calls to mind the point of happy accidents of misunderstanding, that cultural exchange is an incredible fuel for the creative engine. The context of the Spengler quote is a criticism of the dry manner in which academics compare the shared influences and motifs they find 2 works of art from separate traditions share. He contrasts this with an evocative description of the process of the cultures coming into contact..
“with each other, whether in mutual admiration or in strife, but also as between a living culture and the world of forms of one dead, whose remains still stand visible on the landscape.”

This description of the past as one of dead forms “whose remains still stand visible on the landscape” rings very true today. This is a recurring theme from JC and one that is just as true today as it was 40 years ago when he wrote the book - that we are living amongst a great raft of cultural debris, the pieces having come unmoored by science, the institutions of the past broken upon the rocks of globalization, lost without their True North of absolute authority. Instead we are all left to pick and choose from the wreckage, we are tasked with protecting this outpost or that, with continuing this tradition or that when many of the keystones have become loose and in a time when the skills to make and apply mortar are in short supply. Or we can rebuild, or choose to no longer build at all.

So, the point of this post, what got me out of bed where I was happily reading away and into my office where I now suffer next to a bowl of rotting soybeans, was that I had an interesting idea, a bit of creative misunderstanding. I was skimming through a rather long and twisting argument JC was making wherein he tied St. Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant with Dante. In his Paradiso they repose at the station of the sun, while the philosophers who inspired much of their back and forth: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Anaxagoras, Zeno, Orpheus, Euclid and others remain in Limbo, the first circle of Hell. Its not the juxtapostition though that sparked the idea as much as the term Limbo itself. It seems like such a fitting description of the world today, and of the people who are in it. But we aren’t in Limbo because we have far yet to climb, we are in Limbo because it seems the mountain itself has disappeared. Every step we attempt to take upon the ghostly slope passes through too easily.

Ok - so I think one of the major problems with the last attempt (at least for me) was that I got intimidated by the format. The goal of recording wonders and ,oh if you can’t find any wonders we’ll take miracles, was kind of a tall order. I think a better, closer to earth goal is to just kind of reconnect. Maybe ignite a future recollection. Hopefully there are more to come.

Anyway, with that in mind I thought it would be a good idea to lower the bar. To just sit down and write the way we used to. Heck I’ll even fire up a little Live on Rhapsody (highly recommended if you don’t have it - 9.95 a month for access to millions of songs) while I’m at it. I’m sure each of us could be doing a million other things, but part of me thinks this is important.

In the marvelous thirteenth-century legend called La Queste del Saint Graal, it is told that when the knights of the Round Table set forth, each on his own steed, in quest of the Holy Grail, the departed separately from the castle of King Arthur. “And now each one,” we are told, “went the way upon which he had decided, and they set out into the forest at one point and another, there where they saw it to be thickest.” (la ou il la voient plus espesse); so that each, entering of his own volition, leaving behind the known good company and table of Arthur’s towered court, would experience the unknown pathless forest in his own heroic way.


Today the walls and towers of the culture world that then were in the building are dissolving; and whereas heroes then could set forth in their own will from the known to the unknown, we today, willy nilly, must enter the forest la ou nos la voions plus espesse: and, like it or not, the pathless way is the only way now before us.

Wow, just a great passage.

An interesting phenomenon today is that to actually try and reach the trackless way is becoming more and more difficult. Instead of the trackless way being before us, and instead of the time honored path before us, we have instead the consumer path, the corporate path. Into the wreckage of the idol’s fall, into the culture vortex it has left, have crept the advertisers and the infomercials.

Somewhere else in the book Campbell talks about the influence culture has on our lives. And he brings up an interesting point that the Blessed Mother never appeared to a Yogi meditating deep in the forests of India, or that the Buddha never appeared in a vision to a nun praying in a Convent. The point being that the possibilities for people’s lives are set by the culture they are born into. Ruthlessly and without our conscious consent, the corporations, the government, the institutions of the state have crept in to fill the void. The system now proscribes our possible roles, and enlists us to weed and straighten out the mold breakers. Unless what risks you take are somehow profitable society has no place for you. I realize this may not be news to most, but to me the realization is jarring. Its the kind of thing that makes me desperately want to be rich, or to move to France. This guy has a few good ideas on the subject as well.

I don’t mean to end this post on such a negative note though. There are many many opportunities to define our own lives, to create our own mythologies. In fact, one of the other interesting things Campbell writes about is the 12th century philosophical idea of God as being a sphere who’s center is everywhere and who’s circumference is no where. This is a perfect description for the modern world, where everyone has within themselves the incarnate God, within each of us beats the pulse of the universe.

Recently I went to see Arcade Fire down in the city ( in and out that same evening, sorry I didn’t call), and the experience was truly transcendent. Thinking back about how the crowd was really into it, the band was incredible and channeling all of this extraordinary energy that has no place in our everyday lives but is actually the kind of energy which makes life itself worth living I started to realize that Rock and Roll, Modern Music is the newest religion on the planet and one of the most vibrant. We already have our founding legends, who we cannonize and worship. I saw some special the other night on VH1 where Green Day performed Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” and at the end a huge picture of Lennon was shown on a giant screen and the band and the entire audience bowed to it. Ok, they didn’t actually prostrate themselves before it, but they may as well have.

The tradition is very much alive, with new prophets are proclaiming all around us.

I can’t wait to go see another show - was hoping to make the Kings of Leon in NY or Boston but didn’t get tickets.

Well, the last attempt was pathetic.

I put in one post that was almost entirely a massive quote from a Pynchon book that I ended up giving up on after page 350 or so. Honestly the book started out great, mysterious, full of promising analogies and then it just kind of got really boring. It wasn’t as marrow-boilingly opaque as Gravity’s Rainbow, but still the thought of soldiering through another 700+ pages was absolutely demoralizing. So, I gave up. Literary adventures should at least be engaging. Isn’t that the point of story telling?

Oh well. Rob managed to use c/p technology to get a post up from Ambrose Bierce. Just wondering , but were you inspired at all by A Man Without a Country? If not, there went one mighty syncronicity.

And hopefully Mike managed to visit the site.

Anyway, I think a big part of the problem was how slow the Mephisto blog software was. Quite frankly, it totally sucked. On a limited resources host like Site5 the php based Wordpress is clearly faster. Hopefully the increased speed will encourage more frequest visits and posts. I know that I for one dreaded coming to the site since things were so F*cking slow.

Also, I’ve started re-reading Joseph Campbell’s Creative Mythology. Even though I’ve read the book before, about 7 years ago, I find myself saying over and over again, this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. And I’ve already read it!

So, I’m hoping the juice will start flowing.

One more thing - not sold on the current theme. Wordpress has thousands to choose from so its a bit overwhelming, but if you folks find one you like let me know and I’ll upload it. Maybe we could even have a rotating theme. *update - changed the theme today. Very pleasing.

More to come. And thats not a promise, its a threat.