Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Keran, a Welsh friend, says that one of the stark memories of his childhood in Wales is of his grandfather often crying before his shift going down into the coal mines near Cardiff.

I recognize his grandfather's feeling from some of my own job experiences even though I have had more choices available to me than he probably had. But I recognize the feeling right away from having unloaded fiber insulation from boxcars, having boxed plastic bottles rapidly all night as they were spit out of a molding machine, and having taught in a high school. Death would definitely be better than some of the more than forty jobs I've held over the course of my life.

Robert Burns once said that he could conceive no worse picture than that of a man, looking for work but Thoreau had it that looking for work should be considered a sport.

Thoreau wrote that “You must get your living by loving,” which also seems like a hard teaching and I find a certain impulse inside me to feel that Thoreau's empathy with humans was less impressive than his empathy with nature. But then I know that Thoreau was not shallow.

There are two considerations that give me pause in agreeing with Thoreau and which I have often debated within me over the years.

One is the consideration of having a family to support. I expected my academic colleagues to speak truth to power with me while I was teaching but the representative criticism I received for that came from one of my fellow sociologists who said: “You are right, but you can't ask me to stick my neck out. I have a family to support.” The same might be said of Thoreau, that he could easily talk of taking work as sport because he didn't have a family to support.

The other consideration I have debated within me over the years is whether or not the prostitution involved, doing a job for the money rather than love, was worse than just not surviving at all. Fooling oneself, lying to oneself, on the issue is easy but may probably be the real death.

*      *      *

Lenny Bruce, Jobs and Youth

LennyBruce dedicated his autobiography to the Teamsters because they would hire even ex-convicts. I happened to read that dedication a long time ago, at the height of the Viet-Nam war, and had no idea how important it would be to the rest of my life.

I wasn't able to get a job at the time because potential employers considered me an undesirable, a traitor to my country, for refusing to go to war and refusing to support the war.

It's difficult to recapture the fervor that people feel in support of a war in its beginnings. There is a great emotional enthusiasm in society for it and if you don't share that enthusiasm, society's response is a wild, vengeful, murderous assertion that you're either with them or against them. “Whose side are you on?!” is thrown at you in a such a desperate, wild, urgent, blind, vehement way that you never forget it. It's as if, no, is, that they consider you to be a deadly enemy, as bad or even worse than the enemy “out there” that they wish to kill. The vast majority, almost everyone around you, including your friends and neighbors, have that response. It takes you a lot of depth-work to overcome and alchemize such astonishing hatred, including the fact that they have no sense of accountability for the war or their treatment of you years later when their insanity is broken.

Mark Twain's War Prayer is a memorable piece on the subject. Everyone can look back in awe now at the high-spirited happiness and enthusiasm at the outbreak of World War I. Even the now-much-despised Iraq war was greeted with enthusiasm and an explosion of “whose side are you on?!” anger.

Anyway, back to Lenny Bruce and my not being able to get a job during the Viet-Nam war. I came to understand very clearly that depriving people of a way to make a living is a way of murdering them. And I then happened to read Lenny Bruce's dedication to the Teamsters, because they would hire ex-cons, and concluded that perhaps they would hire even me. So I went down to the Teamsters' office in Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, and was shown into the office of an old union man, an organizer from way back. I told him simply that “I need a job.” He talked with me for a few minutes, eye-balled me a bit, and said, “You come back here tomorrow morning at this time. I'm going to get you a job.” I came back the next day and he had a job for me - not a great job, but something that enabled me to survive.

I subsequently learned to drive big trucks, a fall-back trade that became useful to me for the rest of my life whenever my truth-speaking or truth-living got me in trouble with respectable employers. My father once told me that there was once an old Jewish tradition that one should have a trade to fall back upon, such as St. Paul had. Truck driving has served that purpose for me.

*       *      *

This thing of society's hatred depriving you of a way to make a living is my chief concern about the student debt problem.

A young person beginning his working life with an inconceivably large debt on his shoulders is bad because it doesn't allow him to explore the variety of options out there in an amazingly varied and complicated world. It allows no time for exploring jobs, failures, disillusionment, learning his strengths and weaknesses and the hidden opportunities and duplicities of the world, changing a career to something more suited to the realities of his inner and outer world.

These consequences of big student debt are bad enough, but what seems to me to be a worse consequence is that it deprives all of us, including the newly-graduated student, of the benefit of the truth-living and truth-speaking that youth can do. Young people have traditionally been in a better position to point out that the emperor has no clothes than older people whose ability to make payments is dependent on the emperor's favor. But now, if you are a young person starting out with a debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars, you just can't allow that black mark on your computerized record that you will get by speaking out against war and any other injustice or insanity of your society. You have to make those payments. As Herman Cain put it in another context, "You want a job, right?"

*     *     *

The Holy Blissful Martyr for to Seek that Them Hath Holpen when that They Were Sick

I saw the spring yesterday, April 23^rd, 2012, in the buds and blossoms and new leaves on the sides of the hills in the Cumberland Gap area of Tennessee. The place has a human and geographic history that could occupy us forever but all that was as nothing yesterday compared to this magnificent, powerful, indescribable efflorescence of spring.

Chaucer's prologue to his The Canterbury Tales always comes to my mind in springtime, particularly the idea of folk longing to go on pilgrimages to the source of our well-being.

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eke with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye —
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were sike.

But all I really have to do to see and to feel that, to know of it immediately and for certain at any moment, is just to remember certain loved ones I once knew, who encompass it all.

*      *      *

"It was the Hippies, they did it!"

I was listening to a call-in radio program while driving through Alabama recently in which they were discussing who the real enemies of “America” are and just who is responsible for the decline and approaching end of the USA. I was not able to follow all that was said but I do remember one caller in particular who said that “It was the hippies who started it.”

No details were given as to who “the hippies” were nor exactly what their actions were that have had such momentous effect. The hosts of the program, “Rick and Bubba,” offered no resistance to the thesis, and seemed to me to be in general empathy with the caller's calm assurance that it was so.

Now, the funny thing is, I also felt a lot of empathy for the remark that it was the hippies who did it, even though Rick and Bubba and their caller would probably include me in their category of “hippies.”

The comment seems absurd on its face. Just think of the horror of the Viet-Nam war and what it did to the country, and anything “the hippies” were or could have done was nothing in comparison. Martin Luther King Jr. was out there saying that the USA was sick with racism and that the USA was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, and yet Rick and Bubba's caller gave “the hippies” the fundamental credit, or discredit, for destroying the country as they saw it.

But if we consider the remark with respect for the subconscious as I have been writing about in recent posts, it makes a lot more sense. The caller who confidently blamed “the hippies” was speaking from something quite beyond any narrow scientific, logical, technocratic, “reasonable” source.

If you take the view, as I do, that people are actually very intelligent and pick up everything, that people have a subconscious mind that is far more powerful than commonly acknowledged, then attributing the USA's supposed destruction to “the hippies” becomes much more understandable.

“The hippies” become, in this larger perspective, not just a very small number of colorful people who disappeared a half-century ago. They become all the people who pointed out that the USA has serious imperfections, a ghastly record in many respects, and not “exceptional” in this respect.

Rich people recently revived the use of “the hippies” to refer to the Occupy Wall Street protesters in just this way. The OWS people are obviously not “hippies,” but the term is a signifier for people who are pointing out a fundamental flaw in the USA that needs fixing. Rick and Bubba's caller and the rich people were using the phrase, “the hippies,” from a much larger perspective which involves very much from the unacknowledged subconscious.

Ronald Reagan and his supporters were only superficially successful, from this perspective, in sustaining such beliefs as “American exceptionalism” and the “nobility” of the Viet-Nam war. The USA, just like any other nation, has serious flaws, serious problems, and just like any other nation, those who point this out are going to be outcasts, considered to be enemies, scapegoated, and have projections hung on them by others who feel they have something to lose if the problems get addressed. The use of “the hippies” as the scapegoat also has the advantage that they were the vulnerable, the despised, the poor, the disrespected, despite the remarkable powers attributed to them.

*      *      *

Sophisticated, Simple, Wild and Weird

The thought often goes through my mind that our dreams during the night are the most helpful resources available to us as well as being fascinating and fun.

Our problems don't get the honor they deserve, but they are only the first step. The next step is the reflection as to possible alternative ways of attending to the problems and it is here that I find dreams so crucial, so great, so fun.

They pick up and present inspiration, visions of the promised land; provide communication with others beyond space and time; provide medical diagnoses; and are witty, fun, sarcastic, loving, faithful, intelligent and indescribable.

Here are a few general rules of dream interpretative that have been useful to me. There are many such rules and many books on them, but these are simply those that I have found most useful.

• A dream that you see repeatedly indicates that there is something particularly essential for you to understand, something that will be particularly liberating for you if you can understand it.

• There are some dreams, particularly if remembered from early childhood, that are far more important to understand than others.

• Sometimes you will have a series of dreams that is trying, from different points of view, using different perspectives and imagery, to allow you to appreciate one particular problem.

• Almost everything a dream tells you can help you uncover and integrate bits of your identity.

• Even the smallest details or fragments of a dream can provide more insight and delight than you normally would expect.

• Your dreams, as the subconscious in general, have a much better understanding of time and space than you normally have.

• Your dreams quickly pick up whether you are respectful of them or not, and yield their bounty accordingly.

• Dreams do not obey rules!

*      *      *

The Vengeance of Dionysius

So much has already been written in the world about it that writing more may seem strange. But what matters is the way each of us sees it, and especially not the way the experts see it.

Still, I have a lot of feeling for the way Euripides described it 2600 years ago in The Bacchantes. Euripides' protagonist, Pentheus, denies the divinity of Dionysius, tries to jail him, to prohibit celebration of him, and as a result his mother tears him apart.

It probably takes a proper or developed love of Dionysius, the subconscious, the language of dreams and fairy tales and myths, to appreciate the symbolic way Euripides' describes the debacle but here goes (Hadas' translation):

Dionysius says:

“Young women, I bring the man who has cast ridicule upon you and upon me and upon our holy rites. Take vengeance upon him.”

Pentheus has climbed a tall tree “to get a perfect view of their wild obscenities” but “the Bacchic horde” uproots his tree:

“Then they applied countless hands to the fir and wrenched it from the ground. Down from his lofty perch, down whirling to the earth, falls Pentheus. Many and many were his moans; for he knew his hour was near. His mother attacked him – the priestess commencing the sacrifice...She seized the hand of his left arm and set her foot against the poor wretch's side and tore off his arm at the shoulder – not of her own strength; it was the god who made easy the work of her hands.”

The details of the description are as important, apt, brilliant, and powerful as are the details of a dream – the tree, the mother, the left arm. Pentheus was also wearing a disguise at the time of his comeuppance, dressed up as some kind of lion. How often have we seen that: "powerful" men posing as lions but actually the pathetic, despised, victims of their mothers, their pretences, their immaturities, their repressions!

Hypnosis and the Subconscious

Two of my students came up after a social psychology class in which we had been speaking of hypnosis, and told me that they had a friend who was a professional hypnotist whom they would bring to class to talk about it, if I wished. This small event turned out to be one of the most important things that ever happened to me.

The hypnotist friend came, gave a lecture on the history, nature and uses of hypnosis, and then a short demonstration. It was brief but big. The very last thing he did, anesthetizing the palm of my hand to pain of small pin pricks, finished it and my life was transformed.

I subsequently read everything I could find on the subject of hypnosis, took a seminar in it, and went around for three or four years hypnotizing anyone who was willing. I had many interesting and useful experiences with it but the greatest thing was that I learned beyond any doubt that we do indeed have a subconscious, that it is deep, real, helpful and powerful.

And that made possible, above all, the interpretation of dreams, then fairy tales and myths.

Finally, there came the appreciation of how deeply daily life consists of the play of the subconscious by a public that refuses to honor it or even try to understand it.

The Stars in the Sky Look Down where He Lay

There are certain phrases from old songs that keep coming back to our minds from time to time without our really knowing why. Sometimes these phrases are fragments of songs but sometimes they may be bits of prayers or even something someone has said to us.

It's always fun for me to try to make the connection between their arrival from my memory and whatever the current event is that brought them up.

The single such phrase that has popped up from my subconscious most often in the last tumultuous years is a line from an old Christmas carol that goes:

        "The stars in the sky look down where he lay...”

I think that the connection, the reason it comes up so often, is to remind me that God does not abandon us. The feeling that God has abandoned us is clearly an old theme of song and story. It seems to me, as I mentioned in an earlier post, that this feeling is probably a much more serious issue than is commonly understood as in the reference of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The Black Death of the mid 1300's brought about a great crisis of faith that seems comparable to me to our current loss of faith in almost all of our institutions and in each other. I recently read a work of Western European and North American history that was written in late 1890's, and the confidence of the author in the progress of mankind was so brazen and smug that it is nauseating even now to think of it. It was beyond laughable. It was pathetic. I feel the same way whenever I watch news presenters on television. It's like looking into the abyss.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to it in his masterful, thrilling, unforgettable “Knock at Midnight” speech, when he hears the voice say,“Lo I will be with you always even to the end of the world.”

That's what “The stars in the sky look down where he lay” tells me, with the same sort of "strange" overtones that King mentions.

Easter

Easter is, I suppose, one of those “correspondences,” things on earth as in heaven, that I mentioned in my recent post on Swedenborg.

My impulse, after the first surge of delight, is the feeling that this is way way beyond my power to understand. So much has been written and said about the Easter mysteries. You sense right away that the celebration of new life goes way back in the human heart. This is very old, and yet it is immediately now, all together.

I can't help thinking of Thoreau's observation that a child plucks its first flower with more insight into its significance than the subsequent botanist. And, yet, every day that passes bringing me closer to my death brings me to a deeper, fuller, appreciation.

Appalachian Spring, Ability and War

It’s a spring day of just stunning beauty here in Dayton. Even the flowering trees seem to be wonders far, far beyond my power to appreciate. I see why the lilies of the field can be considered more beautiful than Solomon and all his glory.

I drove through parts of Appalachia last week, the mountains and valleys of West Virginia between Charleston and Bluefield, WV. Those places seemed so bleak, harsh, craggy, unyielding, during the winter. But now there is a delicate, multi-colored bloom of buds and early leaves spread all over them, transforming what seemed like a Moon-scape or Mars-scape into the most delicate, endearing metaphor for the love and beauty at the heart of the true life itself.

                                              *     *     *

Here is a thing that has bothered me all my adult life. I’ve never been able to figure it out, even though I believe that there is no problem that is more important.

It is the clear and obvious fact that killing another person is a very serious act, with infinite consequences to self and others, and that before one kills others, or supports the killing of others, or consents to the killing of others, one should be very careful, very circumspect, very informed, very humble, as to whether or not the killing is absolutely necessary.

World War One was one of mankind’s greatest catastrophes and yet its outbreak was greeted with extraordinary joy. Those of us who refused to go to Viet-Nam were very much a minority, at least during its early years. The widespread support and enthusiasm for the U.S.’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has now dwindled.

What baffles me is that it was easy to see right from the beginning that these mass killings were insupportable. Even kids knew they were wrong. If I could see they were wrong, anyone could. It wasn’t rocket science.

Jim Webb, the retiring Senator from Virginia, recently said that he may now be the only person in the Senate who thinks the Viet-Nam war was a good idea. I admire and like Jim Webb. His record of accomplishments is astonishing. Colin Powell’s is, too. So what went wrong? Why, with all their power and abilities and connections, were they not capable of doing that preliminary reflection and inspection before they went off to kill, which almost everyone now can see was wrong?

The best I can come up with in answer to this question after many years of reflection on it, is that it probably has something to do with love, which is our core, love in one’s early, formative years, where something false is told or believed. All the ability, intelligence, courage, character, vision that the person has is subsequently vitiated and become something which would have been better never to have existed.

                                             *     *     *

Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg is one of those authors who so touched me that I tried to read everything he ever wrote. There were several other authors along the way who had the same effect on me. My usual experience was that I couldn’t read all they wrote because it was just too much, and also because, sometimes, the authors’ core ideas became so familiar to me or were so limited that I no longer felt the excitement.

I think it is a characteristic of a “classic” that you can keep coming back to it over the course of your life, bringing new experiences to it, and thus finding new vistas in it. 

Much of what Swedenborg wrote is also classic for me. I am aware that many people have considered him to be a madman. But I keep going back to him over the years with new appreciation, just as someone might go back to the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes, whom many might also take to be a madman.

Swedenborg writes, among other things, about his experiences of entering into spirit form and going off to have discussions with angels and people who have died, often long ago, and with other beings in spirit form. He writes about these experiences in a very matter-of-fact way, simply, directly, profoundly, without the remotest trace of affect or pretense of any kind. He writes them down the way I might write to you about how I went to a café in downtown Dayton and had a discussion with a friend.

His accounts of these experiences are scattered through several places but one particularly good repository is his two-volume work, The True Christian Religion, first published in Latin in 1771. There are seventy-five accounts, which he calls “Memorable Relations,” in it with an annotated index to all of them at the end of volume two.

Emerson, one of his early admirers, said that few would read Swedenborg for long because of the lack of poetry in the writings, but I feel lots of poetry in Swedenborg. Just the “correspondences” he finds between the things of heaven and the things of earth seem excruciatingly poetic to me.




                                           *     *     *