Dyer and Garnes "Memories of Heaven"

Wayne Dyer's last book (written with Dee Garnes) “Memories of Heaven:Children's Astounding Recollections of the Time before They Came to Earth,” has so much behind it that I felt overwhelmed by the time I finished reading it this morning.

The authors explicitly built it around Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, collecting thousands of anecdotes via their Facebook appeal for accounts of young (mostly under five) children's memories and visions of heaven. Dyer and Garnes then made a selection of those accounts, wrote them up and present them in this astonishing book.

We are all pretty much familiar with the main points of such accounts - the heavens of light and love, loved ones who have gone on, angels, choosing one's parents-to-be, etc. – and it would be easy to say as many do, “OK, we've heard this all before, there's no proof, it's all wishful thinking or fraud, it's all so simplistic and naive and childlike and dangerously unrealistic.”

I think it's as equally dishonest just to dismiss these accounts as it is to believe them uncritically. These children's reports may well be true and the materialistic scientist's view untrue.

The “a-ha,” the “click,” the “eureka,” that sense of opening and solution and release that comes with discovery, seems to be part of the scientist's experience as well as the non-scientist's experience. It's certainly one of the acid tests of when you've finally discerned what a dream is trying to tell you.

Dyer and Garnes like good quotes, from poets as well as scientists, and here are two of them from the book with which you may feel that “click:”

p.195, Albert Einstein:

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

p.198, William Blake:

      “The angel that presided o'er my birth

      Said 'Little creature, form'd of joy and mirth

      Go, love without the help of anything on Earth.”

Wayne Morse of Oregon

Senator Wayne Morse spoke the truth when it was needed, not just quietly coming around years later to say it, sheepishly, when it was safe to say it, and only when prodded, mincing words about it as much as possible.

Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon (1900-1974)

I once went to a speech he gave in the middle 1960's in which he said these words:

My grandchildren will be proud of me that I was one of only two people in the Senate who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

Ernest Gruening of Alaska was the other Senator who voted against it.

I see videos from time to time of the abuse Muhammad Ali took when he spoke out against that war, refused to participate in it, and lost his job and more for doing so.

I experienced the same kind of thing for telling the truth and refusing to participate in it: infinite abuse, subject to arrest every night I came home for years, wondering what the hell is wrong with everyone around me that they supported the horror with such superior fervor – I think you have to have lived it, experienced it yourself, in order to understand and to believe that it is even possible, never mind so very real.

It's been a long time since then – fifty years – and probably very few USA'ers remember Wayne Morse's name. But I remember his face when he said his grandchildren would be proud of him for voting against that resolution, against all those people posing as patriots around him. I can see his face as he said it, even now. Just to remember it brings that thrill of recognition of reality.

Grandma Moses Was Good with Snow

There is currently (21 Nov '15 through 21 Feb '16) an exhibition of her paintings and her needlework at the Dayton Art Institute, and seeing her delightful treatment of snow is still in my mind. There was a lot of old-time New England in her paintings that also went deeply with me.

There is a continually-running video at this exhibit of the Edward R. Murrow interview with her in 1955, during which you can see her painting snow into trees with pure delight. She was, by the way, 95-years old at the time of that interview and Murrow was 47 – twice his age – but she is far more youthful, alive, intelligent, exciting than Murrow. He sits there chain-smoking, unutterably sad, asking stupid questions while she is bright-eyed, full of fun, and painting snow with sprightly dabs into her trees.

But what struck me most at the exhibition was a stitch sampler done, not by Moses but by an 11-year-old girl named Elizabeth Sharpe, in 1809. There were several old samplers like that which the museum used to build context around Moses' needlework. Eizabeth Sharpe's piece had some faded samples of the letters of the alphabet and the following words:

By this piece of work you will see

The care my parents took of me.

When I'm dead and in the grave

This piece of work may you have.

I looked at that, came back to look at it twice again, and keep coming back to it in my mind as being right at the heart of the truly human life.

Making A Mark On The World

A very intelligent, able, enthusiastic student whom I admire very much said it to me exactly this way: “I want to make my mark on the world.”

Her words struck me as strange, even as incomprehensible, although I've heard them for seventy years. I've heard the expression many times and the sentiment is commonly held to be  good, normal, healthy, a sign of good promise and respectability.

It's not clear to me what “making a mark on the world” means. It could mean putting graffiti on a wall, or putting up a building in a beautiful field where there was nothing but green grass and trees and sunshine and vistas. It could mean getting yourself a tattoo or getting your name in the news or donating money so that your name appears on a building. It could mean getting noticed by others by some outrageous dress or act. It must be related in some way to “fame,” being “famous,” recognized, like becoming President of the United States of America. It could mean bringing children into the world who “amount to something.”

But if you take a large, long, perspective on things, say of one million years, it's obvious that any “mark” on the world that one makes is going to be erased without the slightest trace left. Actually, it will take very much less time than a million years for every trace to be erased.

Now, I can't believe that something this obvious escapes my bright young student. Yet she nonetheless acts as if it were not so, as is so very commonly done.

So, why is this? Why should the goal of making a mark on the world be so resistant to correction? 



My own best guess is that love is at the center of everything, including human consciousness!

Bernie Sanders' Age

Senator Bernie Sanders is the same age I am, seventy-four, so I always notice very quickly when someone comments on his age as if it were something negative about him. I think it is probably the standard, most widely-accepted, position in the U.S. that being young is better than being old.

I was accordingly surprised, for example, when I visited a warehouse in Houston a few times not long ago that was staffed entirely by Chinese people - not only “Chinese-Americans” but people native to China. Their respect, or lack of disrespect, for my old age was quite striking to me, and my first thought was “What’s this?!”

It has also been surprising to me to have found, and contrary to common expectation, my old age to be far better than my youth, in every way, even physically.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of old age is that you’ve had the time to integrate those aspects of your own life that are unique, differing from common interpretations. Coming to know yourself, and believe it, takes long experience and reflection. Noting down your dreams every night for fifty years and conscientiously working out what they are telling you are invaluable. Listening over a long time to what the fairy tales symbolize by “the little people” or “animals” or "those in need" is definitely helpful, too.

Then there is this matter of what I think of as an accumulation of burden and accumulation of strength. There is an accumulation of error and malice over the course of a lifetime, each lie or crime entailing a subsequent lie or crime, so that the burden after seventy years does in fact make one “out of it,” a mentally and spiritually deficient monster. And conversely, there is an accumulation of strength that follows every genuine act of love or truth, that brings astonishingly strong, delightful, helpful clarity with age.

Look at Me! Look at Me!

I was awakened one morning last week by loud, repeated shouts of “Look at me! Look at Me!" I got to the window and saw that it was a young boy of about six-years-old performing dare-devil maneuvers on his bicycle, for a somewhat distracted audience who was not paying close attention to his feats and person.

This group of children consists of five or six members, ranging in age from about three to ten years old. They all live within twenty-five yards from my house and run around the neighborhood wildly without any adult supervision or even knowledge. They seem to be very much on their own and get into whatever adventures and explorations or experiments present themselves. They have a really admirable curiosity about everything, lots of energy and no inhibitions that I can detect.

I always find them to be fascinating but what struck me strongly on this occasion was the great familiarity of the shouts of “Look at me! Look at me!” There was the immediate association to the Republican candidates for President of the United States who have been saying the same thing, although in different words and in their actions. “Look at me!”

I note in this connection how Bernie Sanders absolutely refuses to do the shout, and immediately tells the provocateurs and the audience that it is the issues, not himself, nor who is the greatest nor who is ahead in the horse race, that is important.

There is this fact, that I mentioned in a previous post, that the way one comes to know his or her self - the basic project since the Greeks of “Know thyself” - that the only way we can discover who we are is by taking a point of view outside of ourselves. The only way a point can see itself is from outside itself. That’s very basic, but usually completely dismissed or overlooked.

Children need to have someone look at them in order to find themselves. It has often been noticed that children’s attempts to have someone look at them are dismissed as “just trying to get attention,” and that they find it necessary to get in trouble rather than not to be noticed at all.

I also saw this last week the mother of two of these children - a little girl of about four and boy of five - yelling at them in a shrill, high-pitched voice: “Get in the fucking house!” She then slapped the side of the boy’s head. He put his hand on his head, looked down, and was about to cry and then she said: “Well? You fuck me over like that, what do you expect?”

I know, I know. The whole abuse of children thing is just too much for us to bear so I won’t go on about it.
 
It seems to me equally obliterating to think of all the reputed, assumed “adults” around who have never grown up and who are still desperately crying out in all but the exact words “Look at me! Look at me!” It’s not just the young man seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.

Mikey Angry. Mikey Smash.

I often think of the fact that when children first begin to refer to themselves, they do so in the objective case. They use “me” where they later will use “I.”

This is one of those seemingly small realities which hardly seem to merit fifty years of thought, but the implications of this little fact are so fundamental, so numerous, that it would completely overturn present society if it were acknowledged.

It tells us that selfhood, self-imagery, dignity, is built, developed - not given at birth - by taking the viewpoint of the other.

This is why abandonment is so devastating to a child.

This is why “I don’t love you any more” is the most fundamental hurt that a child can think of to use, as well as to receive.

It’s why I just die inside whenever I see adults humiliating a child in public places.

It’s why the especially Anglo habit of input-output education produces such monsters.

The French Priest and Norman Morrison

"I have seen my faithful burned up in napalm. I have seen the bodies of women and children blown to bits. I have seen all my villages razed. By God, it's not possible. They must settle their accounts with God."

A French priest in Viet-Nam said those words during an interview with Paris Match in 1965. I. F. Stone reprinted them in his I. F Stone's Weekly, which is where Norman Morrison read them and then immolated himself about 100 feet from the office window of Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, November 2^nd, 1965. That was fifty years ago.

The final sentence, “They must settle their accounts with God,” is usually deleted when you find the quote, but it will never die.

There is now a literature about what seems to be the “amnesia” concerning such contributions as Morrison's self-immolation, and the atrocities, but I trust the next fifty years will bring out more scholarship and understanding. A long period of reflection and development is necessary after such events in order to break through the excuses, rationalizations and defenses to settle those “accounts with God.”

I recently finished Deborah Nelson's 2008 book,“The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U. S. War Crimes,” in which amnesia or cover-up is the central theme, and also Andrew Preston's 2006 book, “The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam,” in which we see how Bundy's brilliance, immense talent, connections, experience, information and determination played a crucial part in creating and continuing the war - the connivance and collusion of the “best and the brightest” is not as forgotten as it might seem.

The cover-up of the U.S. killings of innocent Viet-Namese, planting weapons on them, and then claiming them as enemy kills in order to boost one's body count and thereby to look good to one's superiors and thereby to advance one's military career, is much more comprehensible to me now after having experiencing forty years of conscious, progammatic, you-are-on-your-own, selfishness in every aspect of US culture. The recent videos of U.S. police killing unarmed civilians within the US itself also help one to face it and to believe it.

U.S. Ret. Brig. General John Johns has a prominent place in Nelson's book because he was so well-informed, mindful and articulate about U.S. crimes in Viet-Nam. He tells Nelson in an interview why he had not wanted to discuss them in public but then became disillusioned. She writes, p. 181:

“The Iraq war to me is one of the great blunders of history,” he says, and a watershed in his own thinking. He had supported dealing with atrocities internally. But the war in Iraq showed that the government and military leaders had forgotten the lessons from Vietnam – or never learned them. He now believes that the public must be informed and enlisted to avoid another Vietnam in Iraq and prevent similar mistakes in the future.

“We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past. If we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we're doing with Abu Ghraib and similar atrocities, we'll never correct the problem.”

Avril Lavigne and the Doctors

Avril Lavigne comes from that Napanee-Kingston area of Ontario that I like so much, and so I was especially interested to learn of her experience with the bumbling doctors who couldn't  diagnose her Lyme Disease:

I, also, had Lyme Disease about ten years ago and went through a similar experience with doctors as she did. I went to four different doctors who had no idea what was wrong. One of my symptoms was that I had swollen, sore joints such that I could hardly move my right arm and my knees. One doctor said I had “water in the joints” and sent me to a joints specialist. The specialist got mad at me and said “You don't have water in the joints” and just ordered me to wear an arm sling and sent me a huge bill. I didn't have insurance at the time so he was able, like the other doctors, to bill me three times what the insurance schedules specify for his “work.”

Ultimately, it was a nurse friend who correctly diagnosed that I had Lyme Disease. I think that most people who have had Lyme would have a special feeling for Avril Lavigne through this. Her bit about the “computer” is a whole additional story that is worthy of the era's deepest criticism and scholarship.

There was another incident this last week which caught the reality of the medical care experience as I know it. This incident got national attention in the US because it was the subject of a Washington Post article. Many elements of that incident ring exactly with my own experience, but especially the bit about the doctors' contempt and hostility. It's as if doctors, like the police, consider the people as the enemy.

I've thought a lot about that over the years - why it is that they are so contemptuous of us when it is supposed to be their vocation to help us in our hour of vulnerability and need. Avril Lavigne very clearly picked up the contempt and hostility of the doctors.

The best explanation I can come up with is that the “social” philosophy, particularly for the last forty years, has been programmatic, conscious selfishness and being ill, vulnerable, in distress, issues a demand for compassion and otherness and anti-selfishness. These qualities are the exact opposite of the ethos of the era, on which the doctors' substantial incomes depend.

Another partial explanation is that they themselves know at some level about their incompetence and inadequacy every bit as much as we do, probably even more than we do.

Perhaps you can offer an explanation. I think people are often hesitant to speak out the way Avril and the Virginian spoke out, because we think that no one will believe what we are saying. I get that all the time. Whenever I point out incidents like these two that I have mentioned here, or of my own similar experience in the medical world, I find that no one believes me. The usual response I get is complete silence. But I hear Avril's heart in that video. I refuse to say that I don't hear it.

Are They Progressives Or What?

There is now, strangely, a “progressive” theme among “conservatives” that goes along the lines that society is getting better, people are getting nicer, that we have surmounted racism and sexism, and that there is such a thing as Progress in human affairs.

There is this astonishing popularity among them of Stephen Pinker and his book, saying how much better things are today. Maybe that's even where they are getting the theme.

Normally, conservatives deny the possibility of progress, and are fond of Stop!, taking us back to the way things were, taking back their country, citing how human nature doesn't change and what it was that ruined Rome.

So what's going on with this?

Is it simply that the present inured state of inequality and degradation of the poor so flatters themselves?

And then, strangely enough too, I find myself (a Progressive) thinking from time to time that, yes, the Viet-Nam war fifty years ago pretty much exposed the reality and what we are seeing now, even in this instance, is evidence that things don't really change in any fundamental way.

“The Better Angels of Our Nature “ by Steven Pinker

I read “The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes” and then read several reviews of it.

The most serious flaw in the book is the author's assertion that human action is the resultant of forces. He calls these forces “endogenous” and “exogenous,” which is another way of saying of nature and nurture or heredity and environment or wiring and programming. Another way of stating it, even more abstractly, is to say that human action is a dependent variable that is predictable from an independent variable. This basic scheme can be elaborated by multivariate analysis and weighting of factors, but it's still the attempt to predict human action. The book's numerous linear graphs all display two variables.

But the characteristically human thing is to insert a process of reflection in between the x and the y, during which the human contemplates alternative courses of action, sometimes over a very long period of time, and then chooses or constructs one which he or she may change after further reflection or new developments. This reflection process introduces historicity and futurity into our lives which would be impossible or uneconomical or unnecessary if our actions were just the playing out of forces. It also introduces intentionality, agency, agony, and alterity - phenomena that we all see directly, commonly, but which only academics deny – deny for non-academics, but not for themselves.

Which brings me to the second serious flaw - an inadequate account of what the author variously calls sympathy, empathy and perspective-taking. He devotes a lot of words to the subject and is aware that this is an area of the most persistent objections to the “forces” scheme. The author tries to deal with this and spends a lot of words on the subject which never really satisfy me or him. For example, he says that we get perspective by imagining the other's point of view. He is very careful with his words on that point – that we “imagine” the other's point of view. But this theory involves the epistemological or metaphysical problem of “solipsism,” or the "homunculus argument." The “looking glass self” as well as social darwinism, which he posits, are still very popular but careful thinkers saw through them a hundred years ago or more. He is far from any understanding that people are able to be in two places at once, as in quantum theory.

I was not able to find any mention in this discussion of what is loosely called “projection.” I refer to the idea that humans who refuse to acknowledge their own faults “project” or attribute those particular faults to others. The Freudians called it a defense mechanism and seem not to have accounted for it very acceptably, but I think there is no question that the observation is of something real and common. The existing theories of “projection” may not be very satisfying, or may be very complicated, but I think our common experience is that what gets people really angry and violent towards you is not really you, but something about themselves which they are trying to repress and which your reality elicits within themselves. All the bad stuff within the self is denied, repressed and then projected onto the enemy, thus justifying various forms of violence. I write “various forms of violence” here and reflect that I was not able to find any attempt to define “violence” in this book subtitled “The Decline of Violence and It's Causes.” I looked carefully for a definition of violence, given the scientificky smoke, but just could not find it. But then I found the author writing on his website that he quite deliberately does not define violence. An explicit, careful definition is quite consequential to Pinker's thesis about the decline of violence if you consider, as I do, what the supporters of the bankers and financiers and the 1% have done to us over the last decade or four, to be a form of violence. So Pinker simply and deliberately refuses even to try to define it, sensing that if he did so, it would completely destroy his worldview, his thesis, his book, his reputation, and his comfortable, well-paying, respectable job.

There is one more thing that comes to my mind right now and that is the author's unrestrained use of metaphor and simile. He refers in the title itself to “angels,” but you can see right away that he has no belief nor interest whatsoever in anything remotely like angels. He is clearly aware of the misuse of metaphor, as when he refers in quotes a few times to “hydraulic” theories such as of the flow of libido in classic Freudian psychoanalysis. But he himself is constantly doing it. Anyone who is truly serious about understanding humanity and who has seen how easily a mistaken metaphor can invalidate a sophisticated, highly-elaborated-over-many-years social theory, becomes extremely careful and reluctant about using metaphors. The subtle misuse of one metaphor can destroy an academic's entire life work. Attributing agency to genes, evolution, the system, culture, tradition, instincts, attitudes, needs, drives, forces, history, brains, time, space – a million other "factors" - can do that, too, so you become extremely careful about it. I think now of how Talcott Parsons, another Harvardian, and his acolytes spent so many years and so many words and so many people's lives and funds on positing “system prerequisites” as causing people's actions, and of how B. F. Skinner, another Harvardian, and his acolytes posited there being no such thing as thought or choice or selfhood or dignity, just conditioning.

My own view is that the a depiction of the reality of this book, and of the reality of social sciences in the academy, would require a fiction/fantasy author of the highest ability.

What Is Remembered Most

I can no longer remember who took this photo, or even the exact location of the event, and I've never seen a single reference to it other than it's original publication several years ago.
 
It epitomizes the U.S.'s invasion of Iraq, and so much else the U.S. and, yes, many other countries have done. It appears for all the world as if it has putatively been forgotten, put behind us while we move on, forward, not looking to the past.

But now, as the hour of death draws close, I think less of the effects of the crime on those who did it and in whose name it was approved or allowed. What I see more is the love that the surrounding men have for the father and his son.

Val

Erich Maria Remarque's “Im Westen Nichts Neues” ("All Quiet on the Western Front”)

This book should be read by every first-year high school student, before Shakespeare or math or science.

It's a first-hand account of an 18-year-old boy's going off to fight in World War One, and has stood the test of time. There are a lot of other books about the basics of that war, like “The Good Soldier Švejk," but this one has especial depth and perspective.

Here are three quotes from “Im Westen Nichts Neues” that were especially exciting to me during my recent reading of the book:

• p. 10: "And perhaps more of us thought as he did, but no one could very well stand out, because at that time even one's parents were ready with the word 'coward'; no one had the slightest idea of what we were in for. The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas people who were better off were beside themselves with joy, though they should have been much better able to judge what the consequence would be.”
  
  
• pp. 11-12: ...”The idea of authority which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and manlier wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to believe that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. The bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they taught it to us broke into pieces...We were all at once terribly alone, and alone we must see it through.”
  
  
• pp. 266-267: “How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their handreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is...
  
  “I am young. I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.”

First Days of May and Selecting Bush Twice

The first days of May here in Dayton, Ohio, have been ineffably beautiful: new leaves and buds and blossoms, fresh and light green leaves, perfectly clear skies way beyond anything I could express, more so than ever. I really should be out in this priceless sunshine right now, just looking at the flowers and grasses and trees and skies.

I find it all quite shocking, so much so that I wonder why it is that, now, at this point in my life, it is all so surpassingly and excruciatingly beautiful. 

I suspect that the “excruciating” word holds the key. It is, unfortunately or fortunately, only possible to appreciate something by contrast, by knowing the opposite perspective, the opposing reality.

Appreciating, perceiving, these astonishing, priceless, perfect May days is probably due in my own particular case to my experience one year ago this month of coming close to death because of a bicycle accident, from which I have still not recovered. But there was also “The List” I was composing a few nights ago. I made a list of some of some of the almost-incredible horrors which I doubt that I shall ever fully fathom:

• The USA selected George W. Bush as their President – twice.
  
  
• The Viet-Nam war, and following it by the Iraq war, and the Afghanistan war.
  
  
• Pat Buchanan on TV recently, smiling and gloating over the fact that the USA voted in every state except Massachusetts for Richard Nixon, a known criminal who was unconscionably pardoned, over George McGovern, a known decent man who said that the Senate walls reeked with blood.
  
  
• Recently reading “The Good Soldier Švejk” and “All Is Quiet on the Western Front,” particularly the bit about the widespread joy when that war broke out.
  
  
• The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments.
  
  
• Fox News, Limbaugh, Malkin, Savage, Falwell, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Bremer, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, et al.
  
  
• Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman.
  
  
• The Christianists and the Jihadists.
  
  
• The oil and coal industries, and the bankers, and the medical industries.
  .
• The “You-can't-ask-me-to-stick-my-neck-out” Academy and the Media.

Please add a contribution of your own to my list.

Inebriate of Air, Debauché of Dew

“Inebriate of Air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew – “

That’s how I felt on waking on this perfect Easter Day in Dayton - the way Emily Dickinson describes it.

And yet, and yet, I find myself in the middle of this delight, thinking of a young man who knocked at my door yesterday morning. He was about eighteen years old, a college student, who announced that he was part of a group of students who had started a house-painting business, and that he was knocking on doors in my neighborhood in search of work. He had a well-organized presentation; a printed hand-out; a hopeful, respectable manner; and that Ohio face.

I myself couldn’t use his service, for I had recently painted my house. Most of the houses in my neighborhood, which is poor, are owned by slumlords who will not put a penny into maintaining their properties unless you seriously threaten to take them to court. I tried to tell this young man about the house three doors down from me that really badly needs painting. I told him the name of the guy who owns it, a “respectable” lawyer here in the city, who made the excuse to me for the shabbiness of his property that “My wife told me not to put any money into that house.” The dearest little five-year-old girl and her mother live there, by the way.

The young man didn’t acknowledge what I was saying, and as presentable as he was, I could see that he didn’t really care what I was saying, either. He had this uncomfortable look on his face as I was talking, and most likely thought I was an eccentric and an old fool. Ohio!

My heart went out to him nonetheless. I felt for the two-hundredth time in my life that old question of how it is that anyone can bring a child into a world like this. But then, for the two-hundredth time I came to see that the message of Easter is true – “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” is followed with appreciation of how much better it is all designed than we could have imagined.

There is this simply astonishing Psalm, #22, that begins with those exact cries of those who feel forsaken, but ends with words, “They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.”

"Cradle of the Best and the Worst" USA

The first two days of this week were so inspiring to me that I'm still in a bit of shock.

Sunday, there was Gail Collins' article in the New York Times about the effort to have a woman's face on the new US twenty-dollar bill to replace Andrew “Indian Fighter” Jackson. She mentions some good possibilities – she herself would like to see Gloria Steinem there – and her readers/commenters suggested many others. Emily Dickinson – my first choice – was mentioned a few times, and Helen Keller. Could you just imagine Emily Dickinson on the twenty-dollar bill? With a line from her poem 788?

      But reduce no Human Spirit

      To Disgrace of Price.

Then there was Monday, and the appearance of Seymour Hersh's article in the March 30, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, entitled The Scene of the Crime: A Reporter's Journey to My Lai and the Secrets of the Past.

Hersh is the reporter who first disclosed that particular crime on March 16, 1968. This present article in The New Yorker is a sort of review and update forty-six years later.

Hersh relates here how he subsequently gave a speech at a college where Hubert Humphrey was teaching:

After my speech, Humphrey asked to talk to me. “I’ve no problem with you, Mr. Hersh,” he said. “You were doing your job and you did it well. But, as for those kids who march around saying, ‘Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?’” Humphrey’s fleshy, round face reddened, and his voice grew louder with every phrase. “I say, ‘Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.’”

Humphrey's resentment has pretty much epitomized the United States as I have personally known it over the course of my lifetime and as I have come to understand its history. It has committed these almost unimaginable crimes and slowly but surely the awareness of them has increased. The Viet-Nam war was one big My Lai, one big crime, so egregious that only a very few openly now deny it. But there is some level on which perhaps half the country is still repeating Humphrey to those of us who have fought the long fight for this awareness. Facing up to the reality takes a long, long time, particularly for those who have derived so much financial and other self-interested benefit from it.

But here we have the Collins article and people actually suggesting, openly, in the NY Times no less, that someone like Emily Dickinson or Helen Keller should replace the old Indian Fighter on the twenty-dollar bill! Elizabeth Warren? This is possible in the USA, but even if we do not succeed, it has been a priceless privilege to participate, and yes, a joy despite all the horror.

I can not embed the YouTube video of Leonard Cohen singing his "Democracy is Coming to the USA" but here is a link to it.

“Our Stupid Infantile Press”

Bill Maher's recent reference to “Our stupid infantile press” has stuck in my mind during the past week since he said it. I immediately feel skeptical these days of harsh words like that but I also felt immediate agreement with this thought.

I can not now remember the writer's name but I also recently read a journalist's defense of the “despicable press,” using the phrase sardonically. His reference was to Patrick Kennedy's famous indictment, “The press is despicable.” I remember our stupid infantile press responding to it at the time with “Patrick has a drinking problem” and I thought they had forgotten it, but I now see they have not forgotten it.

One of the reasons this has been in my mind so much is the perspective that comes from being near death, from which you can more easily see the trivialities for what they are, since acknowledging them as trivialities and idols of the tribe no longer endangers your ability to survive.

I've also just read Nicolai Gogol's Dead Souls, which seems more annihilating of such things than anything else I've ever read.

You read Gogol, then flip through the TV channels before you turn out the light to go to sleep, and you're struck by the stupid infantile newscasters trying to appear as if they  were otherwise. It's really draining just to watch them try to do it. It also seems as if every other, non-news, channel at that time of night has films with a lot of murders and gun-fire and pointing of guns at people's heads.

"...In That They See Strength"

Leo Tolstoy wrote a lot about war but there was one short passage that held special meaning for my entire life, beyond anything I would have expected.

I first read it at the time I refused to participate in the Viet-Nam war, but have thought of it many times over the fifty years since then. I lost the original source in Tolstoy's writings but was very pleased recently to find it in his “Two Wars:”

"The people of our time, especially the scholars, have become so gross that they do not understand, and in their grossness cannot even understand, the significance and the influence of spiritual force. A charge of ten thousand pounds of dynamite sent into a crowd of living men--that they understand, and in that they see strength; but an idea, truth, which has been realized, has been introduced into life to the point of martyrdom, has become accessible to millions--that is according to their conception not force, because it does not boom and you do not see broken bones and puddles of blood. Scholars (it is true, bad scholars) use all the power of their erudition to prove that humanity lives like a herd, which is guided only by economic conditions, and that reason is given to it only for amusement.  Governments know what it is that moves the world, and so, from a sense of self-preservation, unerringly and zealously monitor the manifestation of spiritual forces, on which depends their existence or their ruin."

The most persistent and astonishing reflection that I have had over those fifty years about the “broken bones and puddles of blood” has been about how many people love and defend war. There was such widespread joy and celebration when World War One broke out – an almost inconceivable catastrophe. I think that anyone who takes seriously the stopping of war, very quickly has to face that reality – that people just love it and bring up every excuse they can to go for it and see strength in it and accuse you of weakness and cowardice and lack of perception and wisdom and lack of concern for your society's existence and future.

Truth Spoken by Elizabeth Warren: A Poem

She might not have conceived it as a poem but it is a poem. When the truth is spoken cleanly, simply, thoroughly, thoughtfully, it becomes a poem.

This jewel from Elizabeth Warren appears in an Huffington Post article, with a link to its origins, and with some excellent, well-worth-reading comments on it:

I'm worried a lot about power in the financial services industry and I'm worried about the fact that basically, starting in the '80s, you know, the cops were taken off the beat in financial services. These guys were allowed to just paint a bull's-eye on the backside of American families," Warren said. "They loaded up on risk. They crushed the economy. They got bailed out. What bothers me now, they still strut around Washington, they block regulations that they don't want, they roll over agencies whenever they can.

Still Alice, Still Steiner

Rudolf Steiner had a great appreciation of “the Easter mysteries” and always comes to my mind around Easter. I read him a lot at one time in my life and still find him very helpful in the spiritual quest, despite there being certain things he writes about which are difficult for me to understand, such as the bits about re-incarnation, the etheric body, and Atlantis. Still, I think that a study his life, works, and writings is well worth the time and effort, and I have kept coming back to him over the years.

I recently read Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and some Steiner commentary on it in The Mysteries of the Holy Grail, from Arthur and Parzival to Modern Initiation, Compiled and edited by Matthew Barton, 2010.

Here is a nice sample of Steiner:

“When someone becomes cleverer and cleverer, in the sense in which it is fashionable to call people clever today, he develops certain forces in his soul which, in this incarnation, may render him very acute when discussing materialistic ideas; yet certain vital forces necessary for the human organism are worn away. And when such a person has only absorbed these, typical, dregs of modern education, in his next incarnation he will lack the forces required to build up the human organism. The 'cleverer' a person is by the standards of our day, and the closer his intellectual attunement to them, the more of an imbecile he will be in a later incarnation. Those categories and concepts which relate only to the sense-perceptible outer world and the ideas which constitute it, set up a configuration in the soul which may be ever so fine intellectually but lack the force to work intensively on the brain and to make use of it; and to be unable to make use of the brain while in the physical body is to be an imbecile.”

I think it is possible to get a lot out of his statements like that, even if we use the word “incarnation” to mean just a particular phase of our present life on Earth. In fact, we often do use the word in that sense, such as when I myself refer to my previous life as a bookseller or as a sociologist.

But there is another reason that Steiner was in my mind today: I saw the contemporarily highly popular film entitled “Still Alice.” Alice is stricken with Alzheimer's Disease in the story, and we witness her decline from being highly capable and intellectual to basic incompetence, not to say imbecility.

But her daughter relates a spiritual vision to her in the last scene, the essence of which is that this isn't all there is, that we are spirits, and that we still exist beyond this. “Nothing is ever lost,” the daughter tells Alice.

I walked home from the theater in bright sunshine, with harbingers of spring all around, the first buds on trees, with Easter on its way, thinking of my dear old friend, Betty Stocks, whom I lost to Alzheimer's not long ago. Those last words just felt right, rang right, in every way!

"This God-damned Dog and Pony Show"

My father was very angry at the way he was treated in his last few days before his death at the Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire, and referred to the situation as "this God-damned dog and pony show.”

An article in the NY Times, "Doctors Strive to Do Less Harm by Inattentive Care," and the comments on it this morning remind me very much of his experience.

Dad's vocabulary was dated, and it could easily appear to the unperceptive that he was being harsh, due to his being under stress, rather than as being truthful regardless of the consequences on the occasion of death.

But I think he was precisely, validly, on the mark. The comments on the NY Times article are in today's vocabulary and emotionally "careful," but clearly confirm my own serious experience of this last year with the medical industry.

The comments on articles and letters to the editors are usually the most interesting and helpful parts of newspapers for me, although not always.

Here is one comment on this article:

Paxinmano

Rhinebeck, NY

"... and I will take care that they suffer no hurt or damage." This from the oath all doctors swear, the Hippocratic oath. Or was that the hypocritic oath? Ah close enough. You can see how they might have gotten it confused. This is 2015 and doctors are finally thinking from "the patients perspective" instead of their own perspectives. Well, wonders will never cease as my grandmother used to say...

What goes through my mind now is that the horror of the last forty years of programmatic societal selfishness has been so extreme and relentless and radical, that people are being forced to face it and to rethink it. The fact that the NY Times has been running a series of articles like this one brings hope that this might be true.

Reminders by Cenk Uygur, President Obama, and The Medical Industry

I woke up this morning with an old familiar question in mind: Why is it I so easily lose sight of how backwards, upside down, the situation is?

Cenk Uygur's column

Cenk Uygur

on Brian Williams and the Media a couple days ago is what caused the question to be in my mind during the night. His column is well worth reading. It's like President Obama's recent talk on the ghastly history and Pride of so many people who have considered themselves to be “Christians.”

The remarks by Cenk and the President are obviously and undeniably true. But, as Mark Twain put it, we are able to stumble over the truth, then get up and run along as if nothing had happened.

These two reminders of the absurdity, or whatever it should be called – the insanity? - are just the easiest examples that come to mind immediately right now. I've also been dealing with the medical industry during the past weeks, too, and have had to go through the reawakening for the umpteenth time to the reality that we are more likely to be harmed by it than helped by it.

I don't admire insanity, I don't like it, and I believe it's destructive to everyone who does it. Better just to go ahead and to die than to participate in it, I say, and then, at that very point, I become just so grateful and pleased that I have been allowed to live as long as I have, without having been killed or even being put in prison.

How Frugal Is the Chariot that Bears the Human Soul

This little poem of Emily Dickinson has had a big place in my mind since I first read it a couple months ago. I've thought of it every day since then.

     There is no Frigate like a Book
     To take us Lands away
     Nor any Coursers like a Page
     Of Prancing Poetry -
     This Traverse may the poorest take
     Without oppress of Toll -
     How frugal is the Chariot
     That bears the Human Soul -

I have seen, having been both bookseller and teacher for many years, how much a book can mean to a life, particularly the life of a young person.

That talk of “the human soul” brings so much light and mystery and hope. It rarely occurs in financial and material affairs, or in scientific and academic discourse, and is light as a feather.

The Glory of the World

Everything was sparkling and clear when the dawn broke over the snow this morning. It was as if it were a presentation of the Grail or heaven or something.

So I searched the Internet for various attempts at expressing the vision of the Grail, particularly through the visual arts, but nothing seemed simple enough, nothing seemed humble enough, despite such prodigious efforts and talents.

In fact, the heroic attempts to express it had the opposite result. How is one to express the face of an old friend, an old loved one, for example, by any human art? You get a sort of trespass instead. So I immediately stopped the search and was reminded of an old Alchemist from the fifteenth or sixteenth century AD, who had this to say in the Gloria Mundi:

“I will that all those who possess this book be admonished and besought for the love of Jesus Christ, that they conceal this art from all such as are puffed up, vainglorious, unjust oppressors of the poor, proud, worldly, scoffers, contemners, false accusers, and such unworthy folk, nor permit this writing to come into the hands of such, if they would escape the wrath of God and the punishments which he is wont to bring down upon those that are presumptuous and profane.”

Hard to Hide

I keep thinking of a TV documentary I saw during the weekend. It showed photos of US soldiers in Afghanistan, posing one to three at a time, kneeling behind their “kills” as if the “kills” were deer or game animals.

There are many similar photos available on the Internet to which I could establish links for you, but I know that you know already.

I realize that everyone knows about such things, but we still manage to go on with our lives.

I go on with my own life. But the hiding from them, the justifications of them, the acceptance of them, the suppression of the people who make such statements, and then the moving on as if nothing had happened, bothers me as much as the killers and the killed. It creates a self-perpetuating circle.

There is also some way in which such photos do stop us, inside. Our subconscious minds pick up everything and never let it go. There is, on that level, no hiding.

The almost inconceivable cruelties all around us just have to have a deadening effect on us despite our “moving on.”

We do whatever we think we can to stop them despite what seems like the futility of even trying. My own view is that the most effective action to take is to bear witness, privately and publicly, to the atrocities.