This was heady stuff when I was ten years old. If God knew everything, how could Adam be hiding? Why would God pretend to Adam that he didn’t already know? …

When I was an infant I never questioned my mother’s right to look in my diapers, to spread-eagle me … (And what could I have done had I objected? As an infant I believed that my mother had a right to inspect my hygiene.) At ten I believed that God knew this and that, that rights were irrelevant where God was concerned. But Jan and I just watched Heavenly Creatures: cops arrest two girls for murdering the mother of one of them: after they’d pried into the dairy of one of the girls!

Note: Two and a half years ago Jan and I began watching DVDs together. Two and a quarter years ago I started assigning my recommendations, starting with the greatest movies from the 20th Century, from around the world: Japan, Italy, Sweden … as well as Hollywood. For a year or so plenty of secondary and tertiary movies have been mixed in. This and that oddity from Down Under has been given a chance …

In Heavenly Creatures a story based in the News is told: two girls, early 1950s, the film from 1994, form a close attachment, authorities, parents, worry about their intensity, mutter about homosexuality …
Note: I paused the movie to tell Jan of the first woman to tell me I “made love like a woman”: Marcia, in 1959 or so. I asked her if she knew whereof she spoke. Oh, sure, she assured me. All the girls at Vasser were at each others’ pussies all the time. She assured me that it was the same at Smith, at Barnard …

(And that reminds me of a great Dorothy Parker joke:
How many bricks to reach the moon?

End parenthesis, end note.

I ask: what business is it of ours what the friends in the film were to each other?
I admit that fictional characters may be our business — like I see no harm in staring at the genitalia of the illustration in the medical book, but how does it follow that real people are?
If we have a right to read their diary, to peek through their keyhole, to poke in their garbage, to inspect their underwear, do we also have a right to know their bank balance, to forge their signature, to read their e-mail?
Or should we mind our own business (while the FBI pokes in the garbage for us)? (See a number of related posts on Proxies.)

I sure love Orwell!

Meantime: notice how I began: what “Bible” we’re fed as children, what propaganda the state feeds us in school, will determine a great deal of what we assume, what we answer, what we believe …
Note: Of course I didn’t know George Orwell’s work till I was older than ten.

Also on Privacy.

PS Of course I agree that murdering your mother is wrong, as is murdering your friend’s mother, or father … or neighbor, or enemy. (Unless the state tells you to!) But reading the girl’s diary is also wrong, whether she’s suspected of murder or not!
Besides, the Bible (among many things) tells us to let God do the judging. Has any society ever respected that admonition?
I don’t care if a “pagan” is ignorant of God’s recommendations and commands, or if a pagan defies them; but how dare a Jew? or a Christian?
(Or are Christians just Jews with a new accent?)

Culture

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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.

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

Notes

Official Results:

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.

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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.

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.

1958ish

There are already a number of stories here that reference the apartment I disastrously tried to share with musician friends (read junkie) while in college at Columbia. This file will now give me a place to add more and tie it all together. The trigger for doing it today [2002 11 27] was a memory that came to me while I was enjoying hypnopompic moments in bed while the coffee brewed.

Suddenly there was a pussy right under my nose: not one I wanted to dive on; one that revolted me. Then the scene jelled: West 118^th Street, right off Morningside Drive. Dawn, or damn near. Tony and Darlene have emerged from Tony’s room. Why? To spend a little quality time with Paul? Darlene has wrapped herself in her cute little trench coat. Tony looks like the cat that stole the cream: some time after that cat has fallen asleep. Tony smiles dreamily. Darlene curls herself up in the window space, the sill providing just enough purchase for her outside buttock to keep her from tumbling back into the room. We gathered at the window. The exposure was east: where the dawn was displaying: up there, over Harlem. Tony stood by Darlene’s shoulder. I took the space by her knees, commanding the best view. After all, the living room, adjacent to the dining room I used as my bed room, had been all mine until a moment ago. My name was on the lease. The pad was mine more than anyone else’s here present. Darlene pulled her coat up around herself tighter, showing her superb bosom, her sleepy, dopey, feline facial beauty …

What’s a tiger?
That’s a pussy that eats you.

… and her bare snatch, the labia folded contentedly into their sheath amid her black hairs: a system Tony had presumably been paying prodigious attention to through the night.

I fumble:

“Umm, err, your … um …”

Darlene says “Oh, excuse me,” realizes that no adjustment of her trench coat will cover either her cunt or her behind while she’s curled like that in the window way, gives up, just tries to cover quite how revealed her vulva is by how she positions her legs, gets up, walks around smiling in the dawn, trying to act still like she belongs in this space, and she and Tony leave me in peace: peace of a sort.

Had I wanted to fuck Darlene? You bet your ass I did: the bitch was choice. But I wouldn’t have. Not just because “my” Naomi came around often enough to assure that she got all the milk from this bull. And certainly not because Darlene was “Tony’s.” Darlene was not Tony’s. At least she hadn’t been before the previous evening. Darlene was Myron’s. Myron was my friend. At least I had thought Myron was my friend. I had hoped Myron was my friend: for years. Tony was just my roommate. Darlene was just Myron’s girlfriend. At least, prior to last night, we’d all assumed that Darlene was Myron’s girlfriend. That’s who and what she’d seemed to be when Myron first brought her over.

Let me begin again. Myron was my friend. Myron’s been mentioned at Knatz.com at least several times. I loved Myron because … because Myron was brilliant. He was only fifteen as a freshman while the rest of us were eighteen. Myron stood sixth in our class of six hundred men: and the reason he was no higher was that he’d been forced to take astronomy, hated it, and got only a C. That had been his only grade less than A⁺! But by this time we were juniors. So Myron must have been around seventeen. Tony was only a freshman. Myron had nominated him to share a third of our rent for us. Myron had found him placing coins to hear John Coltrane on the jukebox in the Lion’s Den: that qualified him. It was a piece from the Blue Trane album: Dee dah de dot dee … pum … pum … Dee dah de dot doh … mum … mum … I forget which title that was for the moment. Maybe it was Blue Trane itself. (The album sits within ten feet of me, but it’s been years since I had the turntable for 33s jacked into the audio system: right now I don’t even have the CD player attached; only the synthesizer, only my beloved keyboard.) Tony’s only importance in either of our minds so far as I knew was to lower our own personal rent from half of sixty dollars a month to one third of sixty dollars a month. Rent in the dorms was a lot higher than that. And here we could feed ourselves: for much less than the cafeteria charged on a meal plan and vastly less than we’d pay in restaurants. And here the chicks came and went. So long as the police didn’t barge in, we were regulated only by ourselves. Tony’s twenty bucks allowed Myron to budget a piano rental for his own room. (Myron, with his piano, put a premium on privacy. So Myron had taken first choice of the bedrooms. He chose the master bedroom. I left the second and third bedrooms for guests and ensconced myself in the dining room. The dining room was two and a half times the size of the master bedroom, but at least Myron had a door. I had loads of space; but no privacy.)

(Jumping ahead: Finally, we had so much freedom, so much economy, so much independence, that we almost flunked out. Seldom has economy been more costly. I did nearly zero work that year, but at least my only drugs were cigarettes and booze. Myron on the other hand, indifferent to alcohol no matter how many cigarettes he was smoking, was simultaneously toking the reefer, glugging the codeine in the cough syrup, and (less visibly) inserting various things into himself.)

Darlene was a senior at Barnard. Or perhaps she had already graduated. Jewish girl from New Jersey. A very neat package: but one which left a wake of chaos around her. One day she disappeared into the bathroom. An hour or two later she emerged. (Thank goodness no one else had needed to pee in that time.) Wow! A bandbox! Beautiful. Fragrant. An ass to sculpt. A smart girl: could quote Faulkner and so forth. The rest of us were speechless: though not half as speechless as I became when I did need to pee. I had spent hours cleaning the house. I’d spent an hour just cleaning the bathroom. She goes in there to shower and the place looks like Francis Bacon’s studio: an abattoir. Her makeup cases are all spilled and bleeding into the sink. $20 on her face, $25 left eroding on the floor … One last thing about Darlene: I don’t really remember what her name was: but Darlene should do for my purposes (she not being the star here). It was a name somewhat unusual at the time: at least to a WASP from Long Island. She sure wasn’t named Suzy, or Betty, or Mary Jane.

---

Time and again I swore that this week I’d really get some studying done. But the more people moved into the pad, the more incessant the parties became. Below I’ll tell about the worst of my many roommates that semester, but first I’ll sketch this little contretemps:

I’m the one guy without any privacy, remember. I live in the “dining room.” Either Bill or Bernie, guys I’ll introduce in a moment, was having a party. All black people. I didn’t know any of them, never seen a one before. It wasn’t like I’d half-noticed them in class or half-seen them in the West End. These party-goers were from Harlem: had nothing to do with me: except that they were holding their party in my room. I told Bernie I’d use his room to study. Sure.

I’m in there with my big fat book of eighteenth-century poetry. Dryden, Pope. Shit, I can’t read this stuff. But I’ve gotta try, I’ve gotta. But how can I? They’re using my hi-fi to play my Art Blakey album. Ooo. Bobby Timmons, man. He’s got that church soul, and he can bounce.

There’s a soft knock at my door. Yes? One of the girls comes in. Bernie’s girlfriend’s friend? Good looking girl. Long hair. Decent features. Bright makeup. Tight skirt. And oh that African heinie. Are you busy? she asks. I’m studying. Oh. I don’t mean to disturb you. But I’ve got such a terrible headache. May I lie down in here? I’ll be real quiet.

No, it’s wasn’t OK. I had to study. We were a couple of months into the semester which meant that I was a couple of months behind: not counting the couple of months I was still behind on the previous semester or the couple of months I was still behind on the semester before that one. I don’t know how I ever passed any course but French: I did the work in French. French (and chemistry and physics) were the only subjects you couldn’t just fake it in. (I didn’t care about faking chemistry and physics, so I didn’t try; but coming up blank in a language somehow embarrassed me. If every class had been French, I’d have worked all the time.) But I didn’t then know how to say that it wasn’t OK: especially not to a girl. (This “girl” may have been in her early twenties.)

Um, OK. I bury my face in the book.

Um, Paul? You’re name is Paul, isn’t it?

Yeah.

I feel just a little stuffy. Do you mind if I take my panties off? I’d feel so much more comfortable.

Sure. And no of course I have to watch her. She gets up. Slips her panties off. Kind of discrete, angling her hips away from me, not giving me a direct beaver.

And I try, I really tried to get my face back onto this impenetrable book. Finally, she gets up, takes her panties, and goes away. But by that time I was so exhausted I needed Bernie’s bed to sleep myself.

Uh oh. Was my narrative clear? That last line might imply that I fucked her after all. No, I didn’t. First of all, I hadn’t been sure that that’s what she really wanted. (It’s now, in hindsight, from decades away, that I’m certain that she’d come in to get laid.) Second, I’d sworn I’d study. Now I didn’t study, but I did MEAN to study. And also: getting laid was the last thing I’d had to worry about that semester.
My regular girl (link temporarily suspended) had kept me out of her pussy for months and months while she was determined to remain a virgin. But once she’d decided to try adult life, the decision was irrevocable. She came around to get stuffed several times a week, sometimes more than once a day, wouldn’t go away for days at a time. This girl who had so loved to hold me while I came now loved to hold me while I came inside her.

Oh, yes: and I never did get around to reading much Dryden or Pryor or any of those guys but Swift: I read a lot of Swift: poetry and essays as well as Gulliver. Someday I may share a really obscure Swift poem at K.. A beaut. On the other hand, don’t get me wrong another way: I never finished the school work within a year or three of its being assigned, but most of it I have eventually finished: very thoroughly; just not in time to get credit beyond the generally OK grade they gave me anyway.

Back to tell about Bernie and about Bill another time. I’ll just say in preview that Bernie was Myron’s base player. No one told me that he was a junkie: he was just a black bass player from Jamaica. Every one of Bernie’s checks bounced. He never made a one of them good. Bill’s checks also always bounced but Bill I came to learn was a professional check bouncer. His mother supplied him with huge qualities of blank checks from some bank in South Carolina or Tennessee. I forget which state he was from. At least Bill had the FBI on his tail. They tailed him to my apartment. They tailed him from my apartment. (Doin’ a dime in California, the last I heard of him.) Don’t you think the FBI could have warned me?
And Brian. There’s a bunch of characters still to introduce. Lyn Halliday, the great reed man: another stupid self-murdering junkie.

I mounted a string of related files. As I get them up, make time, I’ll link here: ignore temporary code notes
fuller.html#pad”>Naïve Cops
musy/manque.html”>Dope for Brains
Myron & Plato
Relates to Nightmare, up 2012 02 10

]]> http://pknatz.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/student-pad/feed/ 0 pknatz http://pknatz.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/nightmare-on-9w-nyack/ http://pknatz.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/nightmare-on-9w-nyack/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:50:03 +0000 pk http://pknatz.wordpress.com/?p=8089 Continue reading →]]> Black Ice
One of my life’s worst experiences.
First, the characters present:

Myron and I agreed to share an apartment for our junior year. I was elated because I’d sought Myron’s friendship since first seeing that he was a jazz musician. Almost immediately we all also realized that he was a genius: Myron was fifteen years old while the rest of us were the standard eighteen, he scored thirty points of A+ our first semester, a previously nonexistent grade at Columbia, the professors insisting that they didn’t know what else to give him. I was anxious to know him; but he was elusive, I don’t think anyone knew him. Every once in a while I’d go someplace with him, but never felt we were becoming real friends: he’d borrow money in inappropriate ways, he’d ditch me on the street, two in the morning, when some whore passed: fifteen year old kid jumping into a taxi for a blow job from some garrish thirty-five year old! I thought rooming together would be my chance, see how his mind worked. Uh uh: all I found out was that he was a junkie, could barely complete a sentence by junior year, none of his checks cleared … Myron was by then not only a junkie, but was also addicted to opium-based syrups and smoked pot constantly. And through him I met others who also popped pills, would take anything … if told it would fuck them up.

Naomi was the girl I slept with nearly every night without ever once having asked her out. She came up to me at the frat party, she asked me to dance, she led me to a room upstairs … I worried that I’d never meet a nice girl because this parasite was aways attached to me. I’d tell her to get lost in the most unflattering terms, two days later she’d knock on the door, holding a flower. … She was a dancer, had a world class ass, the ass would win.

Marty was a year behind us but everyone on campus knew what a great trumpet he played. Our favorite Dizzy, Miles, or Lee Morgan lines would waft over the quad as he practiced at the open window. Marty became the backbone of the great Mongo Santamaria band, that’s his trumpet on the immortal Watermelon Man.

Mongo Santamaria band

That looks like Marty, but I can’t be sure. He split his lip and couldn’t play. How and why is a different story. Mongo kept him on salary forever. Hell, Marty was everything to that band: A&R man, arranger, rehearsal director … as well as soloist, incidental percussion, vocals … Mongo was great, but the band was Marty‘s creation.

Tony was also a year behind us. Myron met him as he fed the jukebox in the Lions Den playing Trane’s Blue Trane. Hey, why not split the rent three ways? We would up splitting it four ways, five, and six. I paid the rent, Tony’s was the only check that did clear: and it was Tony who told us we could have his family’s furniture if we just went up to Nyack and got it. So: Tony is the origin of this experience.

My mother loaned me her Buick. I rented a trailer to hold the stuff, and off we went to Nyack: me, Myron, Naomi, Marty, and Tony. We got there all on schedule, a winter evening, the second semester just beginning. But we couldn’t get at the furniture. Tony’s parents rental house was all taped off, cops all over the place. Mr. Renter was lying on the kitchen floor, blood all over the place, with a big French chefs knife sticking out of his chest to the vertical, cops holding Mrs. Renter. Finally the cops let us get to the shed, take the stuff, load up the van. A mild winter evening was turning cold. We got on the road. Just over the hill would be the connection to the NYS Thruway, we could see the toll booths from where we ascended.

similar but flatter turf near 9W

Halfway up the mountain though traffic ahead of us was stopped. Five minutes later it was still stopped. We didn’t notice at first, but no traffic was coming the other way. It got darker, then real dark. Not one car ahead of us had moved one inch. “I’ll walk ahead and see what’s up,” I said, to no objections. I got out of the drivers door and was a hundred feet back down the road before I realized I was sliding, fought for balance, fought for purchase, got none: until I slid toward the mountain, away from the sheer cliff to the other side, kept sliding down the gutter, slid over the first root or two I contacted, finally stopped at a bigger root. I heard nothing from the car. I was way down the hill. No additional traffic had joined us though. We, Buick and trailer, were the last vehicle in the line. Still no cars ahead were advancing. But now I had a fairly probable explanation why: you could slide down, but not advance upward.

Crawl and scratch my way up, I did, very slowly, with plenty of back sliding. I reached the car, my friends seemed to have all gone into comas. Naomi was silent but seemed awake. She wanted to come out to join me. No, absolutely not, stay right there. “But I,” I emphasized, “have to call my mother. It’s past the time I vowed to have her car back. She should know there’s a problem and not just an irresponsible son. I’m going to try to ascend to one of those homes we can see a light from. Plead for help. Borrow the phone.”

We, and the car, were headed uphill, the Hudson was east of us, the Thruway toll plaza was also east of us there. Looking uphill the mountain was on my right: east. I scratched and scabbled. I tried to hold onto twigs, the twigs were covered with ice, the grass was covered with ice, the ground was covered with ice, nothing could be held onto. Yet ascend I did. Once I felt myself to be in someone’s backyard, their upstairs light on, I started to call out for help. “Hello, the house. We have a problem here, Please help.” The upstairs light went out.
Now I sensed movement behind the curtain, saw what could have been a rifle barrel poking the curtain. Maybe I should have written this all down in 1958 when it happened: winter 1959 maybe. I kept calling the house. “Help. I need to make a phone call. All traffic is stuck on 9W. Please call my mother, reverse the charges. In Rockville Centre …” and said our number.

The house door opened. If it was a gun the guy had held, he wasn’t showing it now, but seemed very mistrustful, very nervous. Cut to the first of a series of chases, I reached my mother. “You’re late,” she said, competing against the ice outside for coldness. “We’re still in Nyack,” I began. “I don’t want to know about it,” she interrupted. There’s one conclusion I’ll jump ahead to: when she died, thirty-odd years later, my mother still didn’t know what happened that night. She wouldn’t let me tell her, she never was told.
(However, now I realize that my mother is not the only person who can’t be told this, that, and many a thing: and I’m the guy who specializes in telling, trying to tell, what can’t be told.

No U-Turn!

Back at the car, downhill being just as hard as uphill, harder maybe, I realized how little help I was going to get from my car mates. Naomi was petrified, more for me I think than for herself. Myron and Marty had reefered themselves into a stupor, Tony only half-way behind them. I’d seen no one else from the line of cars ahead of us getting out and sliding off the mountain: maybe they were locals, maybe they were familiar with this behavior of the mountain. Still no one came the other way, still no one came up on us from behind. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I believed I knew that I had to turn the car around, slide down hill, get to the lowest point, try another route. I restarted the engine and very gently tried reverse. Instantly the trailer started to jackknife toward the precipice, the west side of the mountain road. Somehow I managed to stop before the trailer went over the edge, uprooted the guard rail, and yanked us off the mountain into kingdom come. Uh uh, not possible. Somehow I got the car heading back up the mountain, more or less in line with where we’d been. I turned the engine back off. We’d sit there and freeze, but still have gas. Dawn, warmth, a thaw would be slow to come: we had every reason to believe.

But no: along about 2AM we saw headlights appear at the crest of the road ahead of us. A car tiptoed over the crest started downward. Immediately the car turned oblique to the road, out of control, another car swishing and sliding right behind it. Third in line was a big gas truck. Man, when that baby turned sideways we were all petrified. The truch somehow staid on the road, didn’t nudge us off into the beyond. The cars and trucks, like they were linked together, slide down the mountain and crumpled into a big pile at the bottom. Maybe it’s a good thing we weren’t down there after all!

While that was happening we saw the cars at the top of the crest ahead of us restart their engines, creep forward. One by one the cars moved. We didn’t have good traction but we had a little bit. Topping the crest was eagerly anticipated but it didn’t afford relief unmixed: the next section of road was thick with fog. We didn’t turn utterly sideways, didn’t careen wholly out of control, we crept downhill, but we couldn’t see. And the lower we got the thicker the fog became. Zoom, from the other direction, headlights appeared, zghoom he was swallowed in the other direction, seeming to go eighty: I hope he had radar. We didn’t.

Inch by Inch by Feel

That cowboy give give a glimmer of hope that things couldn’t be so bad ahead. Well, whatever they had been, they became high impossible: the fog was unrelieved, the fog grew worse, and, unbelievably, worse yet. I announced that I had no idea whether I was on the road, in lane, half off it, or in the oncoming lane. Tony said, “Locals call this black ice.” Ah. Tony hadn’t quite left the world for a dope fantasy. Or, he was inching his way back toward the conscious. Tony got out. Holding the front right fender so he wouldn’t get lost, fall off a cliff, relaying information through Naomi who kept her ear cocked at the passenger side cracked open window, Tony felt where the road, with its right lane, seamed at the shoulder. Half-step by half-step, foot by foot, he eased us forward. A car coming, actually, from either direction, could eclipse us. We had our lights on of course, but that meant nearly nothing. Tony was right at the front side of the front right fender, holding the fender, I could hear him a bit, but I couldn’t see him at all.

Eventually the fog thinned, we still haven’t been creamed. Tony got back inside, got a very grateful for all of us hug from Naomi, who, a day before had only barely met him. I was going twenty, then thirty … Then we were at the Thruway plaza, and back on highway, speeding toward the Apple as dawn approached. We got to our pad on W 118^th Street, sixth floor apartment. Even Myron and Marty realized they had to help.

The stuff unloaded, piled wherever it would fit, I was ready to shoot myself. I had to return the trailer. get the car back to my mother in Rockville Centre, on Long Island. Naomi though insisted that I sleep for a half an hour. She lay on the hard wood floor, offering her bosom as my pillow. I did: sleep for a half an hour, maybe three-quarters. Then I gritted my teeth, got the trailer back to the rental place on 1^st and 125^th, got onto the Triborough Bridge, and from Rockville Centre, back onto a train for Manhattan and this damn doomed new home.

Visit that apartment, those characters, and more, in Student Pad.

Stories (Personal)

Themes

Stories by Age

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