The End of 2012

Here are the two realities, best and worst, that are most on my mind now, at the end of this very big year.

Nicolas Kivilinna, Bringer of Happiness:

And then there is this truth, below, and all that it implies. I have learned over the course of my seventy-one years, particularly during the last two years, that there are certain definite things about which I am right but about which only a very few people will agree. For example, I believe it is clear sign of insanity to own a yacht as long as there is one child in my community (which in my case is this world) who needs medical/dental care and food and shelter. Very few, as I say, will agree with me on this and yet I am absolutely certain that I am right. And here is one more undeniable truth:

Gator Stare

This is a true story, not a lie. I'm at this loading dock in Miami one night a few years ago and am standing beside my truck at the dock while the guys are doing the loading. There's a slight slope beside me for about ten feet down into a drainage waterway which is about twenty feet across, full of dark, dirty, greenish water. This strange feeling of danger comes over me, a feeling that something is wrong here, just totally absorbing my attention. I look down into the edge of the water and there is this alligator, about twelve feet away, just staring very steadily at me. All I can see at first are the eyes and the end of the nose, and then I can just make out the head and its front legs which look a little like fins slanting down into the water. I stare back at it, neither of us flinching or blinking or moving for what seems like about five to ten minutes, when finally it very slowly swims off to the right.

That story brings me to Thomas Frank's book, What's The Matter with Kansas?, of which I've thought often since it first came out in 2004.

The question of the book was, Why are low-wage, unemployed, underemployed, exploited, uninsured, ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed poor people out there demonstrating for, and voting for, politicians who demand even greater income disparity - lower wages and benefits for the poor, and more breaks favoring wealthy people?

These poorly-paid people take great offense when you tell them that they are voting against their own interests, and that rich people are not only better off than any time in history but that most are not even asking for these breaks.

I've heard many explanations of what the matter is with Kansas, and my best guess is that more than one of them are true – that it is "over-determined," in psychoanalytic language, rather than having just one reason. Some of the explanations I have heard are: low information, too much exclusive exposure to right-wing radio and Fox News, strong self-reliance and other personal virtues including love of freedom, hatred of the “librul” enemy, “Stockholm Syndrome,” distrust of government but trust of local politicians who are nonetheless 'owned,' fundamentalist/radical Protestantism, provincialism or lack of understanding of the complexity of the larger world which they are necessarily but not obviously a part. I do not doubt that there are further explanations being offered.

I have had a part-time big-truck driving job during the past year for which I get paid about $12 an hour with no benefits, which is the same dollar-amount pay I got when I first started driving in 1988, twenty-five years ago and with a health care benefit. The dollar-amount pay for this skilled, odd-hours, highly-dangerous work is the same as it was twenty-five years ago.

I calculate using the Consumer Price Index that in real value terms I now receive exactly one-half the real pay that I received twenty-five years ago, now with no benefits, an “at-will” clause, vastly more crowded highways, fewer parking places, more rules/inspections/tests, more contempt and more danger. This loss does not include the mortgage-banking and Libor swindles.

Recently, I have talked with some workers about this and what I get is silence. No visible, no detectable reaction. The sides of the face, the mouth, the cheeks, the eyes don't move, but I know something is going on in there. It's the “gator stare” and it has come often to me lately that this image is what I have been picking up increasingly since society went consciously, programmatically, selfish and predatory after the Viet-Nam war.

Strange but delightful to say, I'm also finding more and more people whose smiles, understanding, humor, and whose very existence, near or far away, are protective and redemptive. There seems to be some way in which hard times bring out something good; some way in which darkness makes the stars shine brighter.

Anthem

The thing that is most on my mind, most of the time as well as this Christmas morning in 2012, is the reality of young people's having to face the horror and to figure out what to make of it.

The best hope concerning it that I can draw from this last, passing, year may seem to come through very small cracks, but that's how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen's Anthem puts it:

The crack from this last year that lets the most promise in for me has to be Eben Alexander's simple but profound portrayal of our independence of the brain/body, that we are spiritual beings having an earthly experience rather than earthly beings having a spiritual experience.

My own earthly experience continues, longer than I expected, and I see the depth and extent of the horror more than ever. The latest glimpse was from reading a new book on deception, trivialization and manipulation on the Internet by Ryan Holiday, Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. He quotes a major Gawker blogger's complaint:

Fake news. I don't mean fake news in the Fox News sense. I mean the fake news that clogs up most newspapers and most news websites, for that matter. The new initiative will go nowhere. The new policy isn't new at all.... The product isn't revolutionary. And journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news....Fake news, manufactured, hyped, rehashed, retracted – until at the end of the week you know no more than at the beginning.

The repentant Ryan says of this: “It is like Kim Kardashian complaining how fake reality TV shows are.”

The crack through which light comes in to me is sometimes something seemingly small like Alexander's book. Another that comes to my mind right now from a few years ago was waking up one cold, gray, lonely, rainy morning in my truck at some muddy, forsaken, filthy truck-stop in Texas. Rivulets of rain were running down the windshield, but – there was some early morning light refracting through the streams and droplets on the glass into countless, sharp, sparkling colors. I remember seeing such refractions through dewdrops like millions of diamonds in the grass around my home in New Hampshire after the loss of a loved one. I've seen even more colors than these in the eyes of a loved one.

That's how the light gets in for me despite my deepening awareness of the horror and darkness. And what comes to me as the large picture is that the horror is necessary in order that we see through it and come out the other side of it, so that we will then be able to appreciate what we necessarily could not have appreciated before, because we necessarily would not have been able to know the difference.

I think it's like the necessity of knowing an other language in order to understand and appreciate your own language, or like the necessity of taking the viewpoints of others in order to be able to know your self.

Frankenstein's Monster

"Mother Monster" Lady Gaga

Mary Shelley wrote the Frankenstein book when she was only eighteen years old, in 1816.

Ellen Moers wrote in 1974 a classic article on the book bringing out for the first time the fact that it is very much a birth issues book:
 

Much in Mary Shelley's life was remarkable. She was the daughter of a brilliant mother (Mary Wollstonecraft) and father (William Godwin). She was the mistress and then wife of the poet Shelley. She read widely in five languages, including Latin and Greek. She had easy access to the writings and conversation of some of the most original minds of her age. But nothing so sets her apart from the generality of writers of her own time, and before, and for long afterward, than her early and chaotic experience, at the very time she became an author, with motherhood. Pregnant at sixteen, and almost constantly pregnant throughout the following five years; yet not a secure mother, for she lost most of her babies soon after they were born; and not a lawful mother, for she was not married -- not at least when, at the age of eighteen, Mary Godwin began to write Frankenstein. So are monsters born.

I recently bought the Norton Critical Edition of the book because I had the idea that it was especially relevant to currents of thought in the nineteenth century in which I am interested: Enlightenment-Romantic issues, post-Revolution and post-Napoleon issues, “Great Man” ambition issues.

I, like most others up until Moers, had the idea that it was principally about the over-reach of enlightenment and science, a Sorcerer's Apprentice kind of book. Many people had noted several other themes in it, including Milton's Paradise Lost and the Prometheus legend. But no one had brought out the motherhood theme the way Moers did. It seems incredible to me that it took almost two hundred years of widespread exposure before anyone realized that motherhood/childbirth is right there at the center of it.
 

One of my neighbors is this morbidly obese woman who has two children under five whom she did not want. I hear her screaming at them sometimes in a blood-chilling, breath-stopping way. They seem like dear, cute little kids from a distance – I've never actually met them – but everyone who knows them says they are “monsters.” That is exactly the word they use, the word Mary Shelley uses for her Creature.

It's so obvious that it's just painful to realize that Frankenstein has been read, seen in plays and film with different versions and sequels, for two hundred years and been so under-appreciated. Perhaps creators/parents can't easily admit that they shouldn't have brought children into the world or they believe that it's somehow “unnatural” to be not wanting their children. Perhaps it's difficult for a child to grasp fully and validly that their creators/parents truly did not want them. I think women are more sensitive than men to the hurt involved in such situations, although Frankenstein's Monster, a male, is highly sensitive, intelligent, perceptive, articulate.

This thing about a child feeling abandoned by its Creator in some way is clearly a fundamental issue. It's the issue of “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Some people are able to work through it, but many are definitely like Frankenstein's Monster and become fiendishly murderous despite, perhaps even because of, their great sensitivity - desperately lonely, unhappy, destructive of self as well as others in this situation.

I was struck by Eben Alexander, in the last chapter of this Proof of Heaven which I recently discussed, writing about how the matter of his being adopted was so important to him. My first thought was that a man of his experience and education and wisdom would have got beyond that concern. But no. And I've noticed this, without understanding, in the cases of many other people whom I've known who were, or felt they were, abandoned in some form or other by their natural parents.

I feel embarrassed that it took me this long, seventy-one years, and a reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for the “click.”

Lady Gaga with Kiss

Lady Gaga is very much about acceptance, and coming to terms with being born this way. She comes out and tells her “Little Monsters” that It's all right, you're OK now, I'm here. That's what Frankenstein's Monster longed to hear and asked to hear and needed to hear.

Gaga's Little Monsters in Indonesia

Language Is Social

"There is no such thing as society"

A language is an accomplishment of, and gift from, others who came before we were able to speak it. It is social by nature, consisting of symbols requiring mutuality, participation in and importation of the other.

A language has a history going back centuries. It develops through the contributions of many people in real-life practical situations that involve cooperation with others. This is as true of its rules as it is of its symbols. It exists before we are born and is given to us by others, by society, for free.

Language is our most valuable tool. Meaning itself is a function of language. Language capability is one good definition of humanity itself and it makes possible higher levels of complexity of organization and accomplishment than any individual could even imagine by himself.

“Republicans/Conservatives/Independent Rugged Individualists/Freedom-Loving Real Americans” like to think that they were never given anything for free by society, that everything they have is from their own individual initiative, that nothing is free, that they owe nothing to others, that they may grab what they can from others, especially the “weak,” for themselves and their own immediate kind - that "There is no such thing as society,” as Margaret Thatcher encapsulated the ethic.

There was a time not long ago when they labelled anyone who was aware of the fact that humans and human group life are social to the core as “a commie” but that symbol lost its communal value and their current substitute is “a socialist.”

Nicolas Kivilinna and The Fifth Floor Band

Nicolas' band has a new album just out entitled ”All My Life” that I like a whole lot. His recent solo album is also excellent.

You can find more on these at his website, Nicolas Kivilinna, by plugging the URL for the Finnish-language pages into Google Translate. The words on the tabs “Keikat” and “Lyriikat” are cognates of the English words “Gigs” and “Lyrics.” Google Translate literally translates his name Kivilinna as “Stone Castle” and makes other mistakes but you get the idea of what's being said.

Here, for convenience, is a video of them doing "All My Life" from the new album. Nicolas is on the right in the initial frame below:

Student Debt

The incident that I recall most often from the recent Presidential election campaigns in the United States was Willard Romney's suggestion that students who want to go to college might borrow the money from their parents.

Many people made comments on the remark as proving that Romney was out-of-touch with the lives of ordinary people, naïve, nasty, stupid, or just plain old goofy. But I am always very cautious about any explanation which involves the explainer asserting superiority – morally, intellectually or in any other way – to someone else.

People are far sharper than they are commonly given credit. They pick up on things, even better than the animals. The idea that people are stupid, particularly about highly consequential matters like choosing a President, is very misleading. The temptation to it goes: “How could any intelligent person vote for George W. Bush [or Barack Obama] twice?”

Julián Castro

But Romney was clearly a highly intelligent, “successful” person. I think he very well knew that his suggestion about borrowing money from your parents to go to school did not apply to students' reality. A response to Romney by Julián Castro was “Why didn't I think of that?” Castro knew. Romney knew. Everybody knew.

The reason student debt is such a big issue to me is that I think young people need time to explore the world, to read and to think and to experience the failures that are necessary to achieve wisdom. Once you have to make those monthly payments, you can't do that fundamental reflection: further obligations accrue on a highly complex course of life; justifications accumulate and harden; unanticipated expenses arise; alternatives are closed off; enemies do their thing; the depth and antiquity of our psyches become apparent; time passes quickly.

Bucky Fuller

Bucky Fuller held that society should provide tuition for every person as long as he or she wants to study. He said that “knowledge” is the real “wealth,” ultimately, which was part of his comprehensive philosophy of what it is that actually allows us to solve our problems. This seems to me to be the right direction, however distant it may be, if knowledge can be defined as implying or involving the “other.”

"Proof of Heaven" by Eben Alexander

Eben Alexander's new book, “Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife,” contains an account of his near-death experience during an attack of e. coli meningitis, and his reflections upon that experience.

It became an immediate best-seller; many words have been written about it; the author is with Oprah this weekend; and Raymond Moody says that “Dr. Eben Alexander's near-death experience is the most astounding I have heard in more than four decades of studying this phenomenon.”

The book is well-written and the bibliography at the end of the book is only six pages long but lists all the really good, current, most significant, books on the subject.

My main thought after reading it is about whether or not it will make any difference. I appreciate the old Russian proverb that says that one word of truth can change the world, but it seems to me that often when truth is told, it doesn't have the slightest effect on the world except to destroy the earthly life of the person who tells it. “You'll never work in this town [or profession] again.” “We know where your children go to school.”

I can barely begin to imagine what might happen if, for instance, all the intellectual power in the scientific establishment and the academy came to see that love is the most important scientific fact, as Alexander says it is:

Not much of a scientific insight? Well, I beg to differ. I'm back from that place, and nothing could convince me that this is not only the single most important emotional truth in the universe, but also the single most scientific truth as well.

So the book's great popularity does give me some pause. But my best sense of it is that it is a source of light and comfort and joy.

A later addendum: Oprah's interview with Eben Alexander is actually well worth watching. It's broken into segments but you can access all of them from this link.

Celine Dion's Ave Maria

Celine Dion's rendition of Schubert's Ave Maria strikes me more than any other version I've heard.

Two thoughts come to mind of why this touches me so deeply. One is the French-Canadian thing. My own grandfather was French-Canadian; the city where I was born and first worked was highly French-Canadian; I went to university for four years in Montreal; I've visited French-Canada many times over the years; and it has just been in my mind seemingly forever. I recognize it in Celine immediately. She sings this Ave Maria in English, but I recognize that immediately also, as part of the French-Canadian experience.

The other reason it strikes me so strongly, I think, is the way she sings the phrase “Oh Mother hear a suppliant child.” I share that vision, for those I love in their hour, especially for that one woman whose humanity it was given to me to know most deeply.

Joan Baez

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Joan Baez has done so many good things that it is difficult for me to pick out any of them to share with you without feeling parochial.

Her work in the effort to stop the US's war in Viet-Nam has to be one of the best and she was also very much at the center of the civil rights fight, one of "the civil rights crowd," as Clarence Thomas puts it. I often think of her and Martin Luther King Jr. together, constantly vilified and under the threat of death.

Here are two songs in which she particularly reaches me. They are both highly compassionate and visionary. “Be Not Too Hard” helps me against self-destroying anger and bitterness toward the guys and their supporters who did all that killing and napalming and the torching of poor peoples' hooches with their cigarette lighters, smiling for newsreel photographers as they did it, supported by an ideology of doing it for their own good, and elderly poor people begging them not to do it. Hatred is so subtle, so Fiendish. “The Green Green Grass of Home” is very visionary the way she does it and allows me to imagine and to hope beyond the horror. 

Redemption of a Bad Situation

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One of my experiences that repeatedly astonishes and delights is to find a situation joyful and right that seemed lost, wrong, backward, devastating, awful. I suppose this a variant on the alchemy idea that I've blogged about before: what seemed a defeat turns out to be a blessing.

It's on my mind a lot because of last year, an “Annus Horribilus.” Last year was devastating for me, when everything went wrong that could go wrong, and I felt that I died in a very real sense.

But I not only recovered but am now humbly grateful, not just for surviving that year or so, but for having the devastation.

So I'm reading Huston Smith's “The World's Religions” last night and I come across this passage in his discussion of Hinduism:

Hindu literature is studded with metaphors and parables that are designed to awaken us to the realms of gold that are hidden in the depths of our being. We are like beings who, falling victim to amnesia, wander our kingdoms in tatters not knowing who we really are. Or like a lion cub who, having become separated from its mother, is raised by sheep and takes to grazing and bleating on the assumption that it is a sheep as well. We are like a lover who, in his dream, searches the wide world in despair for his beloved, oblivious of the fact that she is lying at his side throughout.

There is a story like that in the Lotus Sutra, where a father sends his son out into the world with just a ragged overcoat, but has sewn a valuable jewel into the back of it, unknown to the son.

Smith's book is fifty years old but is clearly a classic. Bill Moyer's blurb on the jacket says “This is the one book on world religions I can't do without. I return to it often – and always with reward.”

Here is just one more quote, this time from the introduction, in which he expresses caution about the institutionalization of religion, or of many other things, I imagine:

Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain, and standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him: but when the demon reported with alarm the man's success – that he had seized hold of the Truth – Satan was unperturbed. “Don't worry,” he yawned. "I'll tempt him to institutionalize it.”

Laughter

You will laugh at this. I came across it while looking for something else and got to laughing so much I couldn't bear it. There is something very human about laughter and the “contagion” you see here. I tend to be too serious and this was good medicine.

Oh, well, I've gone this far in making a fool of myself, I might as go all the way. Here's one more:

 

George Jones

I bet you didn't know that George Jones was the US's second-best singer, after Frank Sinatra. Neither did I. But Keith Richards, in his recent memoir, “Life,” quotes Sinatra as saying exactly that.

So it gives me great pleasure to be able to present right here for your heart George Jones singing what is probably his most loved song:

Be true! Be True! Be True!

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 book, “The Scarlet Letter,” is often on “Great Book” and academic reading lists. Some people absolutely hate the book. James Dickey once dismissed it as “all this pother about fornication.”

But I was born, raised, and lived many years in that area just outside Boston in which the book is set, and am deeply familiar with its Puritan background. The fundamental problem of authenticity was, is, stark in that culture, as you see in “The Scarlet Letter,” but exists everywhere even if less easily noticed.

I first read it exactly fifty years ago and then again this last week. There was one sentence in the story which I had remembered verbatim over all these years and which perhaps catches the central point of the book:

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

Multi-faced Mitt Romney comes immediately to mind and Cornel West recently rather harshly described Barack Obama as “a Rockefeller Republican in black-face.” I suppose it is difficult to get elected President of the United States or anything else, or to have any other socially important part, if you tell the truth. You and your loved ones will be “living under the constant threat of death,” to use Martin Luther King Jr.'s words. But Hawthorne writes:

“Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence:-'Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!'”

You get the feeling when reading Hawthorne's book, or Thoreau's “Walden” or Steinbeck's “The Grapes of Wrath” or Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye” that the author himself has managed to remain authentic. I'm sure there are many more such authors, but what you more often see and feel are those whose true intent is to get published, make a mark, make money, feed the ego, be famous, please ancestors who lived many years ago, or a thousand other shallow things.

Alchemizing Suffering

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One of my friends has been suffering deeply.

This suffering thing, the horror, seems always to be close at hand, as the First Noble Truth.

The first inkling, the first clue, that I can remember in my own life that suffering could be alchemized, lead turned to gold, was when one of my teachers, a chemist, once said in an offhand way that “The only problem that does you any real good is the one you can't solve!”

The next clue I got was in studying The Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law wherein one encounters the lovely Lotus Flower growing from the muck at the bottom of the pond.

Then there was Solzhenitsyn's writing in “The Gulag Archipelago” that there is this secret that defeat in war does you more good than victory. His sentence was short, small, but for some reason it really stuck. He also describes in there how he wanted so badly to get a certain outside job at the labor camp, prayed for it, thinking it would enable him to survive, but someone else got the job – who quickly died from the resulting exposure to cold. He marvels at how often in his life it happened that getting what he wanted turned out to be disaster and not getting what he wanted turned out best.

St. John of the Cross goes over and over and over it again in “The Dark Night of the Soul,” saying how indispensable annihilation is for us. I spent a lot of time with that book over the years.

Oh, and then the “Alchemists” and “Alchemy” – even the Incomparable Newton himself spent a lot of time on that. Old Newton was something else. Frances Yates once told me that Newton was far more interested in angels than in physics.

All this is very humiliating to me. What the hell do I know?! One could read such things forever and still suffer like a pig. A quote from Nietszche – the rogue – now comes to mind: “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.”

But it does creep up on me in time, if I am patient, that things work out better than I could have imagined, as I was saying in my recent post, It Gets Better, Better than Before.

Hobo's Lullaby

This Pete Seeger version of “Hobo's Lullaby” brought me to tears last night:

My best guess as to why it hit me so strongly is that it reflects the experience that I, and so many others, have had as the result of trying to be true.

Several other versions are around – I think of those by Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie in particular – but what I think makes Seeger's version so powerful is that it is so utterly sincere, basic, un-sugared, yet with understanding, and with a feel for the relentless rails.

Leight, Rasch und mit Feuer

It was a bright, cool, perfect Tuesday morning this election day in Dayton, Ohio, when I got out my old bicycle and went over to the polling place. The people there were quite civil and friendly despite both sides feeling that major issues were at stake. No waiting, no lines, computer voting but with paper printout.

I can understand the thought of “What does one vote mean?” and “My vote won't make a difference.” And yet, beyond the remote but real effectiveness of that one vote, there is the additional fact involved that voting is an acknowledgement and reaffirmation of the fact of humanity, and all that it entails, which is infinite. I came out of the polling place feeling “Light, Rash, and with Fire:”

It seems almost incredible now that women were excluded from voting in the United States even during my mother's lifetime – a fact that she mentioned with anger even beyond the year 2000. The new suffrage law that resulted in the 19th Amendment passed the House by only one vote in 1918, because one representative's Mommy called him and told him to do the right thing. Just incredible. Florida and South Carolina did not ratify the 19th Amendment until 1969, Georgia and Louisiana until 1970, North Carolina until 1971, and Mississippi until 1984.

John Knox published in 1558, “The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” pointing out among other things that it was un-Biblical to allow women such decision-making. Apparently Queen Elizabeth felt that Knox was, shall we say, a person in error. I heard when I was living in the UK in the 1990's that phrase “the monstrous regiment of women” used by women with that high-level, refined irony and sophisticated sarcasm of which the British seem so well endowed.

About Thirty-Five Years Ago

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Many people have asserted that something went wrong with the USA “about thirty-five years ago.”

USA Conservatives think that there was a turn to the Left, likely caused by “the hippies,” and are yelling “STOP!” They see “America” in decline and say they “want their country back” and perceive an increase in communism and threats to their individual freedom.

USA Progressives, like ElizabethWarren, say there was a turn to the Right:

And then about 30 years ago, our country moved in a different direction. New leadership attacked wages. They attacked pensions. They attacked health care. They attacked unions. And now we find ourselves in a very different world from the one our parents and grandparents built. We are now in a world in which the rich skim more off the top in taxes and special deals, and they leave less and less for our schools, for roads and bridges, for medical and scientific research — less to build a future.

I think it is true that something happened about thirty-five years ago and have given it a lot of thought during that time, particularly because it was the reason I left my primary career teaching sociology and social psychology. I was interested in social problems and issues but my students and colleagues turned consciously and committedly selfish. I had been involved in civil rights and the anti-poverty program and the community college idea and anti-war activities, but my students, their parents, administrators and my colleagues distanced themselves from all that. It became clear to me after sufficient battles and blood on the ground that I didn't belong there. I think the straw that finally broke it all for me was one of my fellow sociologists saying to me, “Val, you're right, but you can't ask me to stick my neck out, I have a family to support.”

It seemed to me at the time that the country had rejected decency and concern for the others, particularly for the vulnerable, and had made a turn to desultory and even hostile selfishness. But the sanctimonious selfishness thing had always been there, of course, hidden behind “fine Christian teachings” and such – all I needed to do is remember Huckleberry Finn.

Fascinatingly to me, I recently saw a young student in the seat beside me on a train reading Howard Zinn's “A People's History of the United States, 1492 to the Present” and learned that it is now a widely-used textbook!

I think that what happened “about thirty-five years ago” was not a turn to selfishness – selfishness has always been there, hidden by self-serving, hypocritical rhetoric – but rather that there were many widely-publicized events that made selfishness more conscious. Elizabeth Warren is correct in that there was a conscious commitment to selfishness, exemplified in the works of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and the Malthusian/Social Darwinian ecologists. And the Conservatives are correct in that one of the necessary concomitants of any consciousness is differentiation from the contrary view: in this case, by consciously exalting selfishness there has been a concurrent understanding that this means the destruction of the most vulnerable among us, perhaps even 99% of us. Consciousness of the reality that somehow “we are in this together after all” is in fact a “loss” of the country as it was.

Here is a short list of some of the events of “about thirty-five years ago” that made the selfishness question more conscious:

• “The civil rights crowd,” as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas calls us, brought about desegregation and many other social changes despite widely-publicized resistance, beatings, riots, killings, and assassinations.
• The resistance to the Viet-Nam war succeeded to the point where even Robert Macnamara admitted that he “was terribly wrong,” from a time when Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening were the only Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The domestic and world-wide effort to stop that war succeeded, despite highly-publicized beatings, jailings, insurrections and killings.
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  And, Yes, “The Hippies,” if by that I may designate all the visionaries in the arts, especially in popular music, film, and literature; people who spoke out, who stuck out their necks, who came out and said No, this can not go on, life doesn't have to be like this, this is wrong. Neil Young's “Ohio” immediately comes to mind, and Daniel Ellsberg, and so many others. The counterculture has been so successful that there is now the possibility that, in some States at least, innocent and responsible people will not be given mandatory jail sentences for personal use of marijuana.

Much more could be said on the subject of what happened “about thirty-five years ago” and why both Progressives and Conservatives both see that as a critical, crucially consequential time. I will be spending a lot more time thinking it over, so if you have any observations that you think will help, please leave a comment!

It Gets Better, Better than Before

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Wendy Lustbader's book, Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older, is one of those books that I wish I owned when I was young and was going through those horrible years when the angel-headed had no place to go and no hope, except for a word here or there from one person or one book.

Here is the first paragraph from the front flap of the dust jacket:

From our earliest years, we are told that youth will be the best time of our lives and everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is often not the golden era it is made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with tension, confusion, and the angst of uncertainty. As we get older, Lustbader asserts, we gain self-knowledge, confidence, and an increasing capacity to be true to ourselves.

U.S. President Obama recently gave an excellent talk on the subject:

That is what I would like to say to every single young person who sees the truth of how insane, upside-down, the world is in which we are living, where the first are last and the last are first, where those who are respected and supposed to know things are not what they seem, and that the stone that was rejected ultimately becomes the headstone of the corner. I would like to write a book like Lustbader's and just say what she and President Obama are saying here, only more so!

William James once wrote “I take it that no man is truly educated who has not dallied with the thought of suicide.”

I think this is why Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye” has been the most important book in so many people's lives. The protagonist, a young person, Holden Caulfield, sees how screwed up and insane the world is. He's still in it at the end of the book, with work to do before “it gets better,” but if he doesn't get too discouraged or too hurt, he can come out to a place that is not only “better than before,” (one of Cohen's “Old Ideas”) but is magnificent beyond what he ever could have dared to believe. It's a very real "Going home to where it's better than before."

Lustbader says (p. 1), “Everything gets better – you just have to get through your twenties.” I think it's a life-long struggle but the worst of it seems to be, I would agree, when you're young.

Jung Again

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This video of an interview with Jung in his old age kept me up late last night:

I come back to reading Jung every year or two and have just finished reading the second edition of his Symbols of Transformation.  Freud is very much in the background of this book, first written in 1912, which precipitated their estrangement. I appreciate and identify with Jung's warmth, humor, enthusiasm and personal character, that are so evident in the film, much more than with Freud.

Sigmund Freud

Auden's ode, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” written at the time of Freud's death in exile in London in 1939, humanizes Freud's “autocratic pose” and “paternal strictness” as being “a protective coloration for one who'd lived among enemies so long” and acknowledges that “often he was wrong and, at times, absurd.”

Carl Gustav Jung

But there is something about Jung, so evident in that video, that rings my bell, whereas, when I think of Freud, the first thing that comes to my mind is his statement in The Interpretation of Dreams that the tunnel-to-light-and-loved-ones vision in near-death experiences “is nothing but” (sic) a memory of coming down the uterine canal at the time of birth. That statement is not just protective coloring or absurdity. It's mean, in my opinion.

Anyway, what struck me most during this reading of Symbols of Transformation was that both Freud and Jung accepted, at least at that time, what is basically a hydraulic imagery of the mind! Freud used the word “libido” for the fluid, and Jung preferred the phrase “psychic energy,” giving it a broader and less sexual connotation, but still frequently used the word “libido.” They speak of this fluid as becoming “blocked,” “dammed,” “canaled,” “reverting,” “flowing to other outlets,” and such, just the way you would speak of a system of pipes or canals or some other hydraulic system.

This may seem like a little cavil, not worthy of notice given the great matters involved, but once you have studied any subject really deeply you find that it is just such a metaphor or analogy that destroys what is most crucially important in the subject for you or brings a lifetime's work to nought!

Here are just a few quotes from Symbols of Transformation that tell the story:

p. 132. “the libido appears subject to displacement, and in the form of 'libidinal affluxes' can communicate itself to various other functions and regions of the body which in themselves have nothing to do with sex. This fact led Freud to compare the libido with a stream, which is divisible, can be dammed up, overflows into collaterals, and so on.”

p. 169 “The blocking of the libido leads to an accumulation of instinctuality and, in consequence, to excesses and aberrations of all kinds.”

p. 135. “An interpretation in terms of energy seemed to me better suited to the facts than the doctrine set forth in Freud's Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It allowed me to identify 'psychic energy' with 'libido.'”

p. 139. “This brings us back to our hypothesis that it is not the sexual instinct, but a kind of neutral energy, which is responsible for the formation of such symbols as light, fire, sun, and the like.”

Now, this sort of hydraulic imagery has its usefulness, its real-world practicality. It could be argued, and has been argued, that just about everything we know about dreams today is footnoting to Freud and Jung. I myself can't imagine my own life without having read Jung on dreams. But a true understanding of symbols involves what I believe to be missing in almost all current theory, namely the fact that the mutuality of a true symbol requires that that both parties to the sharing of it have to be able to put themselves in the place of the other in order to see what that other holds the significance of the symbol to be. That “putting oneself in the place of the other” is not hydraulics. It's love!

My Friends' Magnificence

My dreams always surprise me but one of last night's dreams asked me to go to a website where people discuss what they would do if they had only one hour left to live! So I did Google up the idea this morning and was further surprised to see how much more has been written on it than I had imagined.

The most common reading reference was to a book with the title “An Hour to Live, an Hour to Love,” by Richard Carlson, the author of the “Don't Sweat the Small Stuff” series, with his wife.

And the most common among the fifty to seventy-five answers that I read was communicating with loved ones. Most respondents would spend that last hour with loved ones.

My own personal thought about what I would do in my last hour is to do what I do almost every single waking moment now, which is to try to write down something for my loved ones, something that would enable them to share my perception of their magnificence.