Lenten Thanks

pk & Jan, Elks Mardi Gras ’12

Authentic New Orleans Mardi Gras
Jan provided the clothing. She has boxes of Mardi Gras stuff, New Orleans. Her scarf, like my shirt, has the right colors but the scarf, could you see her moving, is iridescent and shimmers gold / green / purple. We both wear gold “King” crowns on necklaces. She wears a gold Bacchus pendant: god of wine, god of the feast. Neither of us wears our gold mask in this pic. Jan provided His & Hers Mardi Gras umbrellas. (They use those in Rio too!) I here twirl mine — ooo, more color (hers is back at our table: when dancing we used only one at a time). Note the crawdad on the cap she provided me: New Orleans, Mardi Gras again.
But what you really had to see in person was Jan in her gold skirt … and how well she shows off the dance floor.

Jeez, I thought she had us looking great for Valentines Day!

Yesterday was Mardi Gras, “fat Tuesday.” Hoowey, let’s party.
Today is Ash Wednesday, first day of Lent: repent, you sinners!

One doesn’t say Happy Ash Wednesday; the prescribed emotions are the opposite: yesterday we danced; today we’re sober, somber, God fearing. So instead I’ll hail Lent as a thanksgiving.

Give thanks at Lent: or don’t. But I do. I grew up Protestant. Protestants had Lent but we didn’t ritualize it, that’s for Catholics. But in the sixth grade or so I was making a new friend, John. One day, marauding my turf on my bicycle, I spotted John, on his bicycle, recognized the kid from school. He came right onto my block! first time I’d ever seen him there, Come on, he said, let’s ride. And we did. I went further afield that day than I’d ever gone before. John lived several blocks to the east, and from that day my jaunts expanded east as well as west, north, though not too much further south: south was Sunrise Highway, the RR … busy, busy: death and destruction. John, an RC, a year of so later asked, Wha’d you give up for Lent? I gave up candy. An hour later he was crunching on a candy bar, so much for Lent.

But I remembered it: and a year or so later, in the spring of the ninth grade, going out for the track team, I and all my WASP future alcoholic friends were laying claim to the team’s high jump, sprint, broadjump … I took the mile: leave me alone, let me be alone. But: by then I smoked. Milers aren’t smokers.
Thanks to John and his two hour sacrifice of candy I knew what to do, I’d digested it: I gave up cigarettes for Lent!

By the time Easter rolled around, I had some of my wind back, I’d placed second or third in races. One more third and I had my letter. I lit up, and inhaled. I did get another third, just barely.
But the real point, I now see, sixty years later, is that I’d successfully given something up: for Lent: for forty days, even if I hadn’t given it up permanently. I knew I could do it. I knew I could give it up permanently if I had to. Through high school I gave up smoking every year. In fact I gave it up for longer than Lent. I now believe that Lent concludes on Palm Sunday. I held my discipline till Easter: after church: 47 days! then inhale.

So: when the booze was buzzing my head too often, business suffered, I’d give it up: for a week, for two weeks, for a month … Finally I gave it up for good: gave up smoking too, long before I gave up the booze.
Did my WASP friends have such luck? I don’t know: I haven’t seen any of them since 1977.
first draft, second, more may come

Heaven & Hell

Seasoned metaphors for alternate universes

I say uncommon things. Sometimes I use uncommon metaphors. The culture uses all too common dodges to deflect what I say from fertilizing the common mind.
I define my terms, saboteurs ignore the definitions. Oh well: the Temple scuttled its own laws to prevent what Jesus said from changing anything. The Christ sterilizers still rule: not for much longer, but still.

K. had many pk scribbles in its Heaven / Hell menu. I jot an idea from yesterday 2012 02019:

Hell is being saturated with lies that no longer work;
Heaven is wall to wall lies that don’t need to work, because the saved are immune to them.

Naturally, today’s earth, like yesterday’s, is choking with the damned, denizens of hell, immune to learning: but there are a few blesseds: helpless among them.
Now I see that the old material said very much the “same” thing.

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2006 01 10

Can any two people have the same ideal of heaven? Even if they believe in one God, one Bible, one translation, one original …? Can any one person believe in the same heaven at time₂ that he believed in at time₁? Those questions actually are not very different from similar questions asked about belief in God, period. Is God the same god at time₀, time₁, time₂ …?

What I want to say something quick about is my heaven_today. Whatever I thought heaven was when I was a kid, when I was thirty, what I thought yesterday, gets shoved aside by today’s thought.

I recently recollected C. S. Lewis declaring heaven to be the sight of God, hell to be the lack of the sight of God, all other views mere superstitious rubbish. But my heaven today would be not the sight of God, but the sight of all gods, all evidence, and some god proving to you and me and to all other gods, nobody bound and gagged, helpless in the dungeon, helpless to object, to counter with flaws, that any one thing is true, then that some second thing is true …

AND the god must then swear before all that if any fallacy is EVER found with any item of his proof that he can be punished forever, that he is somehow bonded against failure, that if he is wrong all victims of his mistakes can be compensated to THEIR satisfaction.

I want to see some god reveal the whole cosmos, all universes, including all alternate universes. I want this god to show Eve’s contemporaries on earth that Eve was the mother of humans for the next one hundred fifty thousand years and counting, that they failed to breed the future but that she succeeded. I want her contemporaries to see their shortcomings compared to her. Then I want all other planets which evolved sentient life to show how their Eves fared in comparable circumstances. Maybe Eve bred on earth, took over the gene pool, but failed to breed on Aldaberan, or at least failed to take over.

Heaven would be seeing a planet on which Jesus wasn’t crucified, but rather supported in establishing the kingdom of God: or whatever it was that Jesus would have done had he succeeded. I’d like this god to show that Jesus was unique; or that he appeared again and again: just on earth. Maybe Jesus was crucified or otherwise tortured and executed many times and only once got written about. Maybe Jesus among certain cannibals never got as far as the Sermon on the Mount. Maybe they had no mount in the jungles of Warabey on Bezeltreen.

I would like this god to show whether Jesus was this or that, or more than one thing. Then do the same with Buddha, with Newton …

I would like this god to replace belief — 100% — with knowledge.

Or, I would like the god to show that knowledge is impossible. If so, then I’d like the god to show whether belief can be worth anything.

THAT would be heaven.

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These “proofs” I imagine: would they have to be centralized?

I suspect that I wouldn’t hate all things centralized if things centralized weren’t the default preference for our culture. Centralized management is fine: for some things, some times. The horror comes with it’s being automatic.

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Hell
Mission: to make man responsible for hell

The concept of hell is not exclusive to Christianity. But Christianity has made the concept the most vivid.

No? The Japanese have graphic depictions of a hell. In the movie, Nuske tells the Yojimbo that he’ll see him in hell. I’ve told people that I’ll see them there: and I have never really believed in hell. It’s a vivid image anyway. I always certainly meant it to be. pk has seldom shied away from metaphors that he doesn’t strictly believe in. Today I want to take a fresh view of hell.

Christianity typically blames hell on the devil. The Devil. Satan. Lucifer. The fallen angel. The Morning Star. The Mourning Star.

If God created everything, if God controls everything, shouldn’t we blame everything blamable on God?

Not me. I want to blame hell on man.

Here’s how. Sometime, when we’re all dead, when we’ve failed to adapt to our environment, when we’ve changed our environment so radically that even adaptable us can no longer live there, I like to believe that somehow we’ll still have a fragment of consciousness: like the light doesn’t always go off altogether the second the electricity stops. In that moment, God (god) won’t have to judge us: we’ll judge ourselves.

And that will be hell enough.

We failed. We needed air, water … freedom, honesty … a true assessment of our condition … and we filled everything with bullshit instead.

But we won’t accept it; we’ll deny it. Always denial. Even in extinction. And flames will be our final illusion: flames that cover consciousness.

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2005 12 19

In the Twentieth Century Christianity had one striking spokesman among English dons: CS Lewis (in fact a big deal Hollywood fantasy based on his children’s fantasies just opened in theaters). CS Lewis said in no uncertain terms that heaven was the privilege, earned, of seeing God; hell was the failure, earned, to qualify: all other beliefs were superstitious balderdash. I agree with him there, except as we must allow for freedom of metaphor. And I like his stark Either / Or simplification: and I shall adopt it: here, right now, evolving it into better sense.

Heaven is the ability to learn new patterns in new circumstances;

Hell is old habits that no longer serve.

Jesus got his skin flayed off him, then got nailed on a cross. But he was already in heaven. Those who got him scourged and crucified already were and still are in hell. In heaven Jesus had a vision of how we could live better together. His tormentors saw that his vision threatened their bad habits. They were right: and we still have the bad habits: not knowing when to cooperate and when to compete, not knowing when to push and when to yield, worshipping greed, deifying bullies, not taking time to smell the grass …

Every devil in hell was taught as a child that Jesus would save them.

See my module on Learning: Hard Learning, Soft Learning in my Thinking Tools section: learning₀, learning₁,learning₂ …

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2006 09 02

I saw a trailer for a movie, at least part of one. Rosie O’Donnell was dressed as a nun. She headed a class of children: all similar ages, the two genders, but of varied ethnicity. The children looked fearful. Rosie nun, her voice riding more smoothly with duress than another’s voice might have, was assuring the children, “Nobody is going to hell.” What had she told them last time? What had all of the nuns told the kids last time? and the priests, and the whole church? for centuries and centuries?

Well, we live in a world. We know that world to some extent, so we know the answer, with a fair degree of probability: the nun had been telling the children that every human has a soul and that the soul of every human not baptised by the One True Church, of the One True God, was going to suffer hell fire forever.

In another circumstance a Rosie nun of that same One True Church might have been telling the same thing to a class exclusively twelve years of age and exclusively boys. In another time the class might have been exclusively girls. In still anther age, no nun, Rosy or not, would have been allowed to address any boy older than six.

In another circumstance the population of the class, whether eight or ten, whatever the gender, would have been exclusively Italian. or French. Or specifically Northern Italian. In Milan. Or Provence.

Whatever the ethnicity, or age, or gender, of either the students or the religious heading the class, functionaries of the Church, this One and that One, of this True God, and of that True God, having been telling children, boys and girls, of all ages, that everyone not in that immediate circle of baptised is going to hell. Forever.

When I was a kid there was no damn Rosie nun. But my Mr. Dade assured us boys, sitting in a room labeled Presbyterian, that everyone not in Grace was going to hell: and that there were no Catholics in Grace.

Now why was this Rosy O’Donnell nun in this trailer for this movie suddenly backing off from what had obviously been hammered at the kids as gospel? (The Catholic Church has a long history, going back to the 300s, of enthroning this gospel and chopping up that one.) To me the answer is obvious: because there was no solid ethnic majority in the class. There were kids there from groups that other groups had been assured were 100% damned.

Psst! Notice. The Church claims that its God will do the damning, or at least that its God will let Satan have them (everything, even what Satan succeeds with, being up to God), but the faithful never hear God say it. The faithful never heard the God say anything. All the words are from the mouth of a priest. But back to the main point here: ethnicity.

The kids believe the nun: at first. At first, the nun, the church, has authority. And that authority is safest if the subject being dictated about is far away, very far. There’s a difference between Herodotus telling Greeks about a race of men with heads growing beneath their shoulders that live on the other side of the world than if he says they’re just across the bay: and then his audience winds up trading across the bay. Where are the people with their heads in their chest? It’s one thing to tell Florentines that all black Africans blow fire from their ass and another to make similar claims about Genoans. And once everybody is having breakfast in New York and lunch in Paris and watching the rocket to the moon by supper time, then you’d better not tell any such stories to anybody.

Notice again, doubly now that I’ve clarified my intended context, Churches have never told tall tales about home; the tall tales are always over the horizon.

Here be dragons.

Ethnic Hedges

Churches never tell about heaven or hell as on this side of the hedge. Heaven and hell are always on the side of the hedge you can’t see, can’t visit, can’t hear from: except from the Rosy nun.

I’ve already told elsewhere how I’d been told ghastly things about Jews as a kid. In the seventh grade I learned something the Sunday school teacher may still not have known: there were Jews all around us! Half the people we knew (or at least would soon meet, once the class from this grammar school was shuffled with the class from that grammar school into one big junior high school class, were Jews! Maybe no in your town, but for sure in mine.

I’d heard that Jews had cloven hoofs. Then one day Dorothy, whom I’d known for years, and now knew up close, including now with her blouse off and her hand in my pants, tells me that she’s Jewish. I paled. I reeled. I nearly lost my balance. But then I realized, then it was clear as clear: I didn’t know what a cloven hoof was, But I was sure that Dorothy didn’t have one. I knew what a hoof was: and Dorothy had feet!

Chaucer’s English were very good at telling tales about the horrible Jews in the horrible ghetto. But Chaucer and his English had never seen a Jew, had never seen a ghetto. There were no Jewish ghettos in London. (And no Jews that I know of. None.)

Slave owners told their children tales about their slaves but also never let the children mix with the slaves, let alone study them. Even so, their distanced experience was further distanced by the self-protection of reluctant testing. If your identity depends on believing that your slaves are stupid, or subhuman, or have half moons for cuticles, or that they dance naked on All Souls Night, never mind who let them out of the slave pen, you won’t be too anxious to test your believes against experience.

That’s the problem that authorities always have eventually. That hedge that had seemed so far away last year is creeping ever closer.

PS I also get a kick out of how Christianity starts with dogma about Original Sin, everybody’s a sinner, everybody’s naturally damned, and then flip flops that into Everybody in this room is saved: thanks to the magic of our very special priests. For the One and Only God.

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Heaven & Hell

In contrast to the bulk of my half-century plus of writing, Knatz.com to date has very little exposition about heaven and hell. Judgment comes up a few times, but those uses are anemic compared to my fiction and my notebooks, which are saturated with such things. Some of the heaven-hell obsessions will start to trickle in here. If much more follows, the dam better be tall and strong to hold the flood.

This file will merely begin. Additions will temporarily go to a scrapbook from which any number of modules could devolve.

Just out of college and waiting to be drafted, my hotdog partner [Link to be restored] and I accepted a gig (where we were misled to believe we would earn big equity, a commensurate share of the profits) mass-reproducing the photo-finish at New York’s flat tracks for sale at the cigar stands. So: we spent six days a week at Belmont, then at Aquaduct, an August at Saratoga, then back to Aquaduct, Belmont … David’s older brother Rennie showed up one day and remarked (Catholic upbringing) that the track reminded him of Limbo: all these lost souls wandering around.

bkMarcus has a one act play in which, just before fatally crashing a car into a wall, the protagonist argues that earth is really hell, Jesus having taken the saved with him two millennia ago.

And today I shall merge those metaphors. First, note this contrast. Christianity posits a binary universe of Time and Eternity. In Time, we live before Judgment. We don’t know anything: we’re just laying wagers: fighting wars against infidels before the official results of who’s right have been announced. Indeed, in our wars, we’re following leaders who say they’re right, but of course it’s all bluster.

Anyway, in this Christian binary, Time is subjective as well as full of vicissitude, mutability: it’s a Renaissance, a Shakespearian universe. Eternity includes Time, but also supercedes it: after Judgment, everyone, including the damned, will know everything: perfectly: the number 9 horse won race #1, the number 6 horse won race #2 … Until the race has been run, and until those results have been posted, and until time has elapsed for all challenges to be reviewed, until the results are official … it’s all just numbers on a board. Once the results are official, once the state pays off, losing tickets become worthless permanently. Until the results are official, fights over who’s going to win are ludicrous: which doesn’t mean they can’t take place. Will anyone really fight over their bet after the posted results have been deemed official?note (Not unless it’s a presidential election which has be decided by a court after it’s been demonstrated that the State does not know how to count: neither do the voters know how to vote.)

Science, in contrast, has posited Time to be extensive (Prigogine posits it to be infinite), with Eternity being just a local, temporary pathology.

In History, even official results are temporary, not to be trusted. You lose in the local court, but what will the county court say? You lose in the county court, but what will the State Supreme Court say? You lose in the State Supreme Court, but what will the United States Supreme Court say? You lose in the United States Supreme Court, but what will that ahem, same Supreme Court say once there’s a change of administration and new appointments? … And even then … just wait to lose a war? After Hiroshima, who cares what the Japanese Emperor said before Hiroshima?

New York’s tracks had a binary universe of their own. First, there was the grandstand; then there was the club house. In 1960 it cost $2 to get into the grandstand, $5 to get into the Club House. (As a runner of product as well as the manufacturer of the product, I was back and forth between the two worlds throughout the day. It was only slightly less crowded in the Club House than in the grandstand, only slightly more spiritually impoverished in the grandstand than in the Club House. The tailoring was only slightly better on the average Club House ticket holder … Though if I recognized Steve Allen or Count Basie or a Rockerfella or the Mayor … they were in the Club House, not the grandstand.) Of course within those two binary worlds there were sub-binaries: maybe the guy in the Club House had a year of college, but there were other guys there who’d had two years: other guys who’d graduated … All trivial compared to this binary: there were some ticket holders in the Club House who knew a trainer! Man, now that’s the inside track!

But of course the races still had to be run. The windows didn’t pay off because your cousin once dated the sister of a horse trainer; they paid only if your betting ticket’s numbers matched the numbers posted as Win, Place, and Show: and then, only after it was official.

I’m taking a breather. But you see where this could go, don’t you? I hope you see where it’s already gone. Still, I’ll spell out how I believe bk is right: Earth is hell, Jesus took the saved with him two millennia ago. What’s wrong with Earth is that we still don’t know that we’re the damned! We’re still blustering about our silly tickets: our losing tickets.

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2006 09 09

One Size Fits All

Once upon a time all women wore a shift: all women in the culture that wore shifts, that is. In some other culture they might have worn smocks, or gone naked, all the men would have worn kilts, or breeches … Sundays, the woman would put on her one dress.

Beau Brummel taking two hours to tie his tie, changing outfits several times a day: that’s the opposite extreme. I wish all women still wore shifts every day but Sunday: in fact seven days of shifts would be fine with me.

On the other hand, the last few decades, there’s been this phenomenon of One Size Fits All: meaning, don’t buy it, it’s cheap, it’s crap, it doesn’t fit anybody.

But no, wait: One Size Fits All has been the default assumption in many a religion. The Greeks all went to Hades, the Jews had a land of shadows for the dead.

Christianity divided Hades into two parts: Heaven, and Hell. Always, there was death; now there was Reward, and Punishment. One reward fits all the good; one punishment fits all the bad.

The punishment was that you burned: forever. (How long is “forever” to those who think the universe was made by their local god a few thousand years before Jesus?)

Everyone can imagine burning: we’ve all suffered burns. But how do we imagine heaven? We’ve all experience pleasure. We all know it doesn’t last. We all know that no two pleasures are equal. Pain now, pain lasts; but not forever, not undiminished. An injury might hurt worse after ten hours than it did after one hour; but no injury hurts the same after one hour, after twenty-four hours, after seventy-two hours … And memory of pain degrades, fast.

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Ah, but in heaven we see God. In some theologies that’s the ecstasy.

Notes

Official Results:

Mario Puzo tells of degenerate gamblers who buy the paper, see that their horse lost, then buy another paper, hoping the first was misprinted!

Context

There, that’s a fair portion of the heaven hell stuff from K. There I had my Judgment features link from the same menu.
If it gets edited much further, that will be in the future.

Death by Proxy

Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Kleptocracy /
@ K. 1999
Mission: to cure us of kleptocracy

Kleptocracy: Death by Proxy

The Bible tells story after story of the good steward and the bad steward. One story has a landlord in trouble with his land. The wise man tells him to ride out every morning. That’s all: just go out daily and look things over. Magic. It’s a miracle: things get better. “Wha’jda do?” “Nothin’. I just did what the magician told me. And things cured themselves.”

You don’t have to be too bright to see what the problem was and how it was solved: the landlord had lived on the fat, noticed that there was less and less fat coming his way. Of course. He’d turned his back on his business. His stewards, foremen, peasants, lawyers, what-have-you, his representatives, were stealing him … Well, not quite blind: just a lot less rich.

When rich-guy Thomas Hoving accepted Mayor Lindsay’s appointment to direct the Metropolitan Museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue, he commuted to work from his plush digs through Central Park by bicycle. Within a short time he’d had a dozen fancy bicycles stolen. Not any more, he told the reporters: I use the best lock there is. And what lock is that, he was asked. “No lock. Don’t let it out of your sight.” Hoving had learned to carry his bicycle up into his office with him.

In Genesis, God talks to Adam. By Exodus he was talking to the Jews through Moses. By the time of the gospels, he was talking to the Jews through the Temple of Jerusalem, its Sanhedrin of fancy rabbis, through the king: Herod. So who’s this Jesus then? Well, Christians say it was God talking directly to the people again. According to the Christian story, God’s official representatives wouldn’t allow it. According to Dostoevsky’s continuation of the story, Jesus is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor the minute he reappears.

The stewards, the lawyers, the priests … can’t tolerate anything that doesn’t go through them. The same story happens again and again: Martin Luther, for example. The Bible is a book, God’s book. It’s available. People can read. Let God do his own “talking.” No no no.

I say and repeat again: whatever God is, whoever Jesus was, regardless of the facts … the story is true. It’s got us to a T.

Our institutions betray their own supposedly sacred purpose: the priest stands between you and God, the teacher stands between you and the book you want to read, your congressman stands between you and your social order, your lawyer stands between you and justice …

Without kleptocracy, there’d be no way this biosphere could feed six billion costumed Homo sapiens cabbages: the sheeple. Kleptocracy can operate only by the majority accepting the proxy of stewards. Homo sapiens doesn’t ride out and survey its lands each morning; we watch television. The MS-NBC sky cam does our surveying for us: exactly what the landlord in the parable had let happen to him.

Oh, but we’re not landlords; we’re only schmuck employees. Well, whose fault is that? What makes anything theirs any more than it’s yours? I know. Stories you’ve been told. And were dumb enough to swallow. This land is your land … This is a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people …

When Nixon resigned instead of being arrested and tried, our stewards told us, “See? The system works.” Wouldn’t the true story go This is a nation of the stewards, by the stewards, and for the stewards. Better yet: This is a kleptocracy (among kleptocracies), of the kleptocrats, by the kleptocrats, and for the kleptocrats. (Isn’t that what the war in Indochina was all about? Weren’t we wiping out the non-kleptocrats that we couldn’t convert to kleptocracy? (Of course “Charlie” was doing the same thing: for a different, competing, kleptocracy.)) The kleptocrats have a suite of associates to keep you too busy and befuddled to make your own survey of what’s supposed to be yours: teachers, reporters, entertainers … If you do ride out, it had better be in a armored vehicle from which you can’t see anything. But of course, in order to have such an armored vehicle, you have to be one of the kleptocrats.

If the biosphere were indeed a place of magic, a place where saying so makes it so, we could expect to remain as costumed cabbages for ever and ever. When the air, the water, is all foul and the oil is all gone, we’ll just say, No, it isn’t, wave our magic wand, and live on and on. Or pack our delusions into a rocket and go someplace some previous rocket has landed robots to terraform a new asylum for us.

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Thomas is said to have put his finger through the hole in the resurrected Jesus’ hand: a first generation of witness. By the time the Sunday School teacher tells you the story, how many generations have passed? Can “witness” one hundred times removed be considered witness?

If Susan and Julie have a dispute and Susan and Julie both agree to let Mort decide between their claims, if both swear to abide by Mort’s decision, that sounds to me like as good a resolution mechanism as you can find. But what about when Mort then sells his judgeship to Sam? And then Stalin dismisses Sam and appoints Ivan? Are Susan and Julie still bound to accept any decisions of Ivan’s?

No No No No No.

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Links and recommendations to follow.

Social Order

Institutions

Kleptocracy

Proxies

To some extent a species is itself a specialty: this animal digs, that one flies … Humans walk, females give birth, then some other females help the birthing, then male doctors push those midwives aside. The lawyer talks legalese for you, the court doesn’t understand you unless some lawyer talks legalese for you. We’re all aware of this from the earliest age.

But a radio commentary made me guffaw half a century ago when he claimed that one function of priests (and ministers) was to be celibate for us: or chaste: priests celibate, ministers chaste: in the old-fashioned meaning of one partner (at a time).

Wow. Right! Then I laughed harder when he said that some priests alter themselves to suit their roles by stunting their adult development: looking like they’re too young for sex! Ever since then I’ve notice long role calls of baby-faced priests.

The priest who looks too young to be tempted has an advantage.

I got a kick out of that, but it was only the start of a long, continuing series of perceptions: jazz musicians sin for you! Lots of us abuse all sorts of substances, but not at the rate of the Romantic poets, the jazz musicians, the rock musicians, the country musicians, the American action painters …

Billie Holliday
great singer, dead junkie

My jazz musician friends in the 1950s seemed to think they had to become junkies. They played well before they became junkies, they played lousy once there were junkies, they did everything lousy once they were junkies, but junkies they became, almost without exception. Maybe my mother was at least partly right in blocking my pursuit of music.

Hank Williams thought that alcoholism
was dues he had to pay.

My K. domains had beaucoup comments about proxies, I’ll try to resurrect some from their fed censorship as I can. Meantime the above is a start: a summary of one or two aspects.

A K. piece of Kleptocratic Proxies will follow.

Culture Menu

Valentine

Be My Valentine

Some things are so obvious no one sees them.

Valentine 'Heart'

Many, world wide, not just in the West, recognize that graphic to depict a “heart.” No?

Before I discuss how “good” a drawing it is, I must say something about schematics.
(I’ve already addressed this subject. as Cultural Artifacts [Link to be restored] at Macroinformation.)

The oldest schematic drawing known to searchers is one carved in bone from Cro-Magnon times: eighteen or so thousand years ago. It’s a “V” with a bar crossing it two-thirds of the way up: making a “face” with “horns.” That schematic is also one of our oldest sure calendars: the ibex was the first animal known by European ice-age man, huddled in the mountains, to signal spring.

ibex schematic drawing

The symbol wasn’t Chaucerian. We weren’t just waiting to shed our furs and frolic among daises; we weren’t trying to get warm (we wouldn’t have huddled in the mountains if warmth were the primary thing we sought). No: we were in the mountains waiting for the big game to migrate: through the narrow pass where hunting would be surest: and the appearance of an ibex meant that meat would come soon.

The drawing was not a portrait of an ibex. The animal’s ear was not notched for identification. The artist didn’t care to get an individual ibex’s eye color right, or its birthmark. There was no tatoo, no tag, no brand. One ibex was fungible with another: fully fungible: a half of an ibex was worth half of a whole ibex. The eye color, the whole eye, the birthmark … were omitted. The drawing was a symbol: for ibex: a synecdoche for spring: a synecdoche for food!

The schematic lives on today. Eventually, among the Egyptians, it became the first “letter”: though by that time it was no longer a symbol of ibex, spring, or meat; but was associated with a draft animal: used in agriculture: food just the same. The drawing would gradually turn upside down: and become our letter A.

OK. Take a look at our “heart” again.

What does “heart” mean here? We all know what a heart is: ordinarily we’re referring to a muscle — it pumps blood … Do medical schools use the above (or any similar graphic) to teach anatomy? Is this Valentine heart an accurate depiction of the four-chambered organ so central to our survival? No. That’s not what’s depicted at all; that’s not what a Valentine heart means.

Oh. Does that mean that “nothing” is depicted? Or nothing concrete? nothing than can be seen, felt, etc.? On the contrary: I for one find that drawing to be utterly accurate in its depiction of what it depicts: schematically: non-essential details left out. Certainly sentiment, affection … love … are depicted — but they’re associative: there’s something else utterly graphic which is the principal depiction.

What I’m about to say I’ve thought and said for decades: though I don’t recall yet saying it at any pk domain. So here goes, world. Uh … Ah! I’ll come in on the same tack that made me choose to launch this module now, not wait for Valentine’s Day. [2004] I am currently having a private Ridley Scott festival. His Conradian The Duellists was recommended to me on its release (1977) by a classmate whose movie sense I respected; but I never got to see it till recently on DVD. Then I recalled great Scott movies I’ve seen since then, and decided to re-view some, chronologically, starting with a minor film I’d seen a snatch of on TV. So now I’m watching it, (Legend (1985)). Early on, a Lord among devils declares that he plans to eliminate dawn, have only dark. He appoints some goblin to effect this, initially by stealing the horn from a unicorn, using Innocence as bait.

Now we meet Mia Sara (just out of high school, and looking like she’s just out of her first Communion) playing Princess Lily. In the forest, a forest teeming with fecundity, so fertile that if Scott had saturated the air of the set with any more blowing “seeds” or “pollen” scudding about, then we wouldn’t be able to see the forest, or the trees, or Mia Sara: or her Jack, whom she summons when frightened. Jack, played by Tom Cruise, out of diapers I guess, veteran even by then of several films already, but looking sooo young, falls out of a tree, out of the sky, and lands on all fours before her. Lily is a princess; Jack is clearly no prince: except in his incredible genetics, his perfect face, his symmetrical bod …

Lily throws Jack a parcel. “Look inside. See what you can find.”

Jack pulls out a pair of cookies: Valentine cookies: brown, not red, as in the schematic above, but perfect Valentine shapes: the paired curves of the upper side annihilating into that mystic cleft. Jack holds the curves and cleft above his fingers right into the camera’s focus.

“That’s something to eat,” Lily advises him.

Immediately Jack bites off one of the curves. He holds the second cookie for the camera, while munching his bite from the first.

“I made that myself,” Lily says. (Then adds something my aging ears didn’t catch perfectly: “Well, I took it from …” that woman, her friend in the forest, I guess.)

Jack eats: always showing us the obverse end of the Valentine.

“You like it?”

Jack holds the curves of cookie number two right at his delectating lips as he munches: still smack in the focus of the camera.

“Is it sweet?”

Well, that depends on how old Jack is, how far into, how far past, puberty. I won’t say that every human recognizes the Valentine heart for what it depicts: not in the cortex, at least. And human genders are skewed on the subject. The schematic is definitely a male view: of something very common. And that view is shared by the mature males of any number of species: certainly all mammals.

The Valentine heart is not a schematic of any particular animal, or of any particular organ; it’s a drawing, wonderfully accurate, of an environment (as the face is an environment): an ecology, involving a suite of organs. If you haven’t known what I’ve been talking about all along, take another look:

Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?

… before I spell it out: risking more opprobrium, more shunning, on top of the pandemic of such I’ve chosen for my whole spill-the-beans life. The Valentine heart is an utterly efficient, minimalist schematic of …

PUSSY!

The nether face of the female:
prone:note bending over (in humans), aligning yonis for phallus, sheath for sword. Enflamed, both blood-flushed, the fleshy cylinder prepares to snug for the fleshy piston: the female (for all other mammals (but man on occasion)) on all fours . Ass, quim … any of the synonyms.

We’re not used to seeing with our deliberate mind what everyone sees with our real mind: and if we do see it, we’re used to keeping mum — people who talk out loud about what we’re repressing don’t fare well. (Oh well, we honor myths of dead heroes: while we’re tormenting the living ones: myriad real brave people, a handful of half-fictitious dead ones.) But: in the last century or so, Freud (for one) sold phallicism to the Edwardians (who weren’t half as phallus/Valentine obsessed as the Victorians). Now everyone sees phallic symbols everywhere. And of course we see bosoms everywhere. After all, we’re the super-sexed primate: the only apes not in a population decline (while everything else’s habitat declines to sludge). (Don’t worry: it can’t last.) Anyway, for a century we’ve talked and talked about the phallus: while we show the Valentine everywhere: see it where we aren’t showing it. What we don’t do is talk about the Valentine. Ass, man. Pussy. (Same thing: the female nether-face: the ass-pussy
continuum.)note

Scott continues the eating theme: One demon says of Lily, “I could eat her brains.” His companion, a pig-like demon, says, “I could suck her bones.” A bit later some other demon tells Jack that he’s about to be dinner: clearly the film’s interest has now turned literal, a common trick when you don’t want to take responsibility for the atmosphere you’ve saturated. (I’m not faulting Scott: that’s the kind of art we want.)

So. The unicorns are phallic. Even little girls see that. The unicorns are magical. It’s the unicorns that are the magic that makes the sun “rise.” But nearly the whole of the movie (no, that’s not a pun) is yonic.

“Yonic” is a word invented by Professor Max Patrick (loathsome faggot). He did it believing that the word “phallic” needed a feminine complement: counterpart. I don’t agree. That spoils the neat contrast of how we talk about the one, are silent about the other (substituting boobs), while obsessing with all of it.

Anyway, pk no longer writes with subtlety. (At least I no longer write with subtlety alone.) So: I spoil the simplicity of the schematic drawing by sketching in a few details:

diagram of Valentine heart

That’s not nearly as nice, is it? But it’s utterly true. It’s ugly because we don’t want to see certain things in the cortex. Especially not with that anus right where Jack was smacking his lips. Ah, but that’s where it is anyway.

Fortunately for our super-sexuality, the anus is the last thing on the rutting male’s mind as he targets the Valentine: the bulls eye.

I grant that human females are extra round in their female parts. We’re the one mammal with extra breast flesh. But then no other animal packs so much fatty tissue in with the gluteus muscles either. (The amount varies with race (Darwin’s Sexual Selection (on top of Natural Selection) as well as by individual.) (There’s one African group where the women store all of their reserve fat in the buttocks!)

Something very much like the Valentine is what a stallion sees just prior to the peak of his rut. The mare swings her tail aside for him — no more being coy — and bingo, there it is. Same with a bull. Same with the pig, the bison, the armadillo … any mammal. Of course the stallion had already smelled her from a mile away, seen the red flash from two hundred yards.

I remind us what I’ve dealt with elsewhere: all mammals except man copulate from the rear. What we call “doggie fashion” is the universal: until the last hundred thousand or so years, when man moved around to the female’s front. Still, the signals, the memories, the urges, the associations, that drive the male from the brain stem are mostly unchanged. We want to see the girl bend over: show us the Valentine. We’re super-sexed because women look all red, all curved, all receding to the mystery … whether they’re coming or going. Desmond Morris recaps the arguments that the human breasts are an extra set of buttocks, transplanted to the front.

But, I shouldn’t need to go into that here. Morris’s books were popular (I am referencing The Naked Ape in particular): and I’ve already recapped parts of his arguments:

Synecdoche Scrapbook [Link to be restored]

Shlain’s Sex, Time, and Power [Link to be restored]

Or try a pk Search on “Desmond Morris,” on “vagina” …

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2004 10 17: I just caught a snatch of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat on WUSF, directly followed by a WC Fields movie I hadn’t seen since my mid-twenties: the one where WC (as in water-closet) plays a dentist wrecking havoc on the golf course: the one where he keeps telling his caddie, “Don’t stand there, stand there.” Back in his operating theater a tall blond comes in, complaining not only of her teeth but of her leg, her lower calf, her ankle, where some dog has supposedly just bitten her. She turns her back on WC and bends over to point. Then she does it again. The audience doesn’t get the direct Valentine flash; WC gets it. But anyone in the audience over ten sees him getting it: and imagines it for themselves: the nether face, the Valentine.

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What’s harder than to address frontally what everyone skirts obliquely? I’m pleased with how I’ve done this so far.

Some appropriate feedback I’ll cite in a satellite file. [Link to be restored]

2011 04 14 insert I’ve written since 1948, didn’t get published till 1971, seldom been published again since then, have been censored, after being fired, blackballed, shunned … This module got put at K. 2004 10 15, when I was reading Leonard Shlain on Women, Sex, Power. In 2006 the FBI arrested me, in 2007 the fed court censored everything I had online, destroyed my business, obliterated nearly 3,000 text files, whole books by Ivan Illich, destroyed several thousand graphics files: logos, paintings … by several dozen artists! Now I’m recreated those K. files at blogs. What made me shove this Valentine piece in ahead of other more important modules was this pic: at another WordPress blog.

Isn’t that neat? I love this woman!

Notes

Prone:

For supine, the conventional human copulatory position, the Valentine would have to be inverted: mons up, bottom down: as the cartoonist in the linked file saw.

I can’t emphasize emphatically enough: the core association for mammals is the pussy prone, not the pussy supine. For actual penetration I too like the missionary position best; but that is irrelevant to the original programming. Males are wired to respond to the rear, prone view.

And visual stimulus is merely in passing. The stallion, the bull, don’t stand there gaping; they get busy.

Context

Continuum Synecdoches:

We speak natural languages: fuzzy, ambiguous, precision impossible. Where we learn or create artificial languages, where we can define precisely, the artificial language will quickly merge with the natural language, the precision blunting.

I’m watching Swann in Love, for the second time, specifically to check out Fanny Ardant after adoring her (and all the women) in Balzac, not at all minding another gander at Ornella Muti. Fanny Ardant’s Duchesse de Guermantes says, “To the dog in love the bitch’s ass smells sweet”: and I recoil. The dog is sniffing the bitch’s cunt, not her ass; completely forgetting my own point: they’re the same! Dogs do sniff anuses, but not when they’re aroused by estrus. There, it’s the vaginal pheromones they’re after.

But my precision is inappropriate. Ass, quim, cunt … it all smears.

Context

George Carlin: Another Celebrity I Don’t Know

My jokes land me in poverty, have landed me in jail, people go out of their way not to get them, I make them anyway.
I just wrote a zillionth joke piece on whether or not I know Madonna: maybe, probably not. Here’s one on Geroge Carlin: maybe, probably not.
I skied with a pretty blond named Madonna in 1970 or so. If it was the famous Madonna, she’d have been very young. And if it was, I still don’t know her, I just met her, skied one run with her.
It’s possible I’ve seen George Carlin: when I was young, and he was very young (note): we lived in bordering neighborhoods. I lived on Morningside Heights, Manhattan, Columbia turf. Later, like everyone, I came to know George Carlin, the great commedian, philosopher, unique wit: vulgar, of the people. I learned that he grew up on Cathedral Parkway, sort of the southern border of Morningside Heights. I and any Columbia person could have crossed shadows with him a dozen times, a hundred times.

I’ll report one brush I had with Cathedral Parkway youth. I wish I’d been able to tell it and mount it when George-the-great-philosopher/commedian was alive. He could have said, “No, Doofus, that wasn’t me; though I know a hundred guys just like them.” Or, “Yeah, that was me. How come you didn’t say Hello? We could have busted your nose for you.”

I’ll tell the incident in a second. Context: I’m just about to watch a DVD of George doing standup. I ordered it to introduce George Carlin to my beloved Jan. She’s out of town till tomorrow, I’m taking a peek in the meantime. I know I’ll love seeing it again with her no matter how much of it I sample first. And I’ll probably want to comment on how great it is: unless I change, unless I have changed, no longer love him. Don’t hold your breath.

I was walking along in the upper part of Riverside Park. Riverside Park runs parallel to Riverside Drive, from 72^nd Street to way the hell uptown, bordering the Drive on the east side and the Hudson River on the west side, the West Side Drive (or Henry Hudson Parkway) actually on the river bank. The Drive is elevated, naturally. Periodic stairs connect the park to the side of the Drive and the lower park, which buts against the highway, making sure New York pedestrians can’t swim, fish, boat … So: I’m walking along the upper park, along around Cathedral Parkway: where it’s separated from the Drive by an extension of park, and steep stairs, on the east side of the Drive, park on the residential side of the Drive.

OK, dig it: I’m walking around where Cathedral Parkway would but against the Drive if it came that far, which it doesn’t. And a couple of pimply Irish hooligans were sitting on the rampart walling the lower park from the upper, and the hooligans were drunk enough to fall over the wall, but were cracking the last couple of brews from the last of a few cases of suds, their debris, empty cans, empty beer cases, cigarette debris, buts, wrappers, littering the rampart top where they sat. “Here, t’row dis shit down inta da pa’k,” instructed the senior hooligan to his junior companion, illustrating his instructions with his hand and forearm, sweeping the trash over and down, where it clattered and bounced amid the trees and shrubs: and where no city employee (or citizen) would be likley to pick it up and clear it away for a long time, if ever.

For the zillionth time in my life I regretted being a Tolstoyan Christian, a pacifist, a leave-evil-be, correct-it-by-example, not-by-opposition, social-and-spiritual saint. See? I wanted to take those two hooligans with their trash and throw them over the wall, down into the park, breaking and screaming instead of clattering, against the stones and the shrubs and the trees. Was one of those little pricks the George Carlin to be? I don’t know. That’s the neighborhood he came from. If they weren’t him or his friends, they were clones of him and his friends.

Point is: you never know. I bet a zillion philosophers ran into me when I was drunk and juvenile and socio-pathic with my pimply drunken friends: and if they had trashed me and mine then when maybe I deserved it as much as many another, who knows, then hell, maybe I wouldn’t have lived to write my Jesus in heaven story, or to have formulated a new, profound, world re-shaping reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or met Ivan Illich, or invented cybernetic social networking to replace the school system …

The 14^th, Valentine’s Day
Jan just gave me a George Carlin book: and other presents too, each precious thoughtful, perfectly tailored to my needs, likes … and poverty.
We’ll dance tonight to a wonderful swing band, the Skylarks.

We watched a few skits from the DVD the other evening. Jan doesn’t normally like vulgarity, profanity … First I showed her the Dogs & Cats piece, then Stuff … Then the famous Seven Words piece: and that’s more than enough for an introduction, maybe too much, but I couldn’t help it.

Note: Ignorance Strikes Again
I check my facts: but sometimes not till after I write. I just check’s the date of George Carlin’s death: and found, the year of his birth. I thought he was a year or two younger than I; uh uh, he’s a year older.

K. Personal

Chat

Art Favorites

Massa Owner

One purpose of school is to keep the potentially productive unproductive while we scan their talents for patents to steal.

a new pk post on School’s “Purpose”: distinguishing claimed purpose from demonstrable purpose:
Note: All pk School’s “Purpose” comments derive from the Paul Lauter, Florence Howe article in the NYR of 1969 reverse engineering schools purpose: the institution pretends that it’s purpose is to educate, to foster literacy, to develop thinking skills; actually, the institution’s purpose is to divide the young between labor and management, training both to be docile, to do what’s instructed, to be on time …

throat clearing scribble of 2012 02 11:If we were intelligent, if we were honest, it would be one thing: if we spoke freely, knew how to listen … it would be one thing, it would be a very different one thing.

We say we’re the good guys? How would we know? We’d have to keep honest records: the truth only slips in sideways, through myths, through myths we don’t understand.
We impoverish those who do understand, and who try to say. Crucify Jesus, enthrone Peter, who denied him, sanctify Mary M., who went hone, hid, wouldn’t tell: then rewrite, saying she did tell.
(Check out Josoph Campbell’s income. Check out mine. Alan Watts made more than a penny, but exceptions are famous.

One purpose of school is to keep the potentially productive unproductive while we scan their talents for patents to steal.

Society pretends to be moral, intelligent … beloved of God … Society is a cannibal and blood sucker, laying in ambush for whatever it can take over to its own perceived profit: the Romans see the Celts mining salt, the Romans conquer the Celts and administer the salt mine.
Stealing the internet I offered in 1970 so the public couldn’t ever have the effects of what I offered, a lever to pry government off our backs, was a monstrous crime, but still, just one of an endless number, stretching back for thousands of years.
Society has to hear a new idea thousands of times before it begins to hear it, then it claims the idea came from one of its own, not from the crucified divine it ambushed millennia before.

When I was a kid my cousin attended Princeton, ’49. I hear that Tommy had discovered something and that the professor got credit for it. Then I was told that this was standard operating procedure. No one in my family seemed to think, with me, that Princeton was a thief.
Of course I no longer believe that Princeton was a thief in that case: if the professor put Tommy into a position where the discovery was inevitable I see the discovery as belonging to the Princeton “household,” the Princeton department … If my father sends me into the garage to find something to gather the leaves with and I bring back the rake, I didn’t invent or manufacture the rake: I was just helping.
Sutter sends men to build a saw mill on his stream, on his land, developing lumber being Sutter’s idea. Sutter’s men find gold in Sutter’s stream … Sure the men get credit, but it’s Sutter’s gold, Sutter’s mill, Sutter’s kingdom.
Or, if Jesus sent Sutter west, then it’s Jesus’ kingdom, God’s kingdom: Sutter, and the men, helping.

Or is Jesus an institution to steal credit from Sutter, from Newton …?

I think we should share, provided we first balance our population with ecological possibility: not monoculture!

Speaking of stealing, school also steals every child’s right to learn by happenstance. The kid’s time should be his own, once he’s finished his chores. Who knows what we’d discover if left alone.

PS: We’re devoted to monoculture, we don’t want to share, we rewrite culture to make a virtue of selfishness … But all that is trivial compared to our kleptocratic ineptness with regard to sustainability: another idea subverted by theft, by inappropriate administration.
The result should be obvious: nature will flush us away. And it is: all in good time.

Illichian 3Ds

Deschool

School’s Purpose