The White Lodge

Accept No Substitutes

2011-08-22T07:43:00.000-07:00

If I mention Lu now and then I’m referring to a real person rather than a White Lodge denizen. She’s not Luna. Her name is Luanne. She is my… girlfriend is too juvenile and lover is too Tolstoy. We have little clear idea of what to call each other, but whatever it is we are we’re really quite good at being it.

You may recall that in my last post I wrote about the gal down the street, about how I was going to plant a kiss on her mug before she got away. Well. I did. She kissed back. And here we are.

We just got back from Mass. I sat in her kitchen for several hours, eating steak and drinking grape juice, returning here for a while to write before we take our evening walk.

My grand plans for the house are beginning to take shape. I’ve contacted the Darling Toms about doing the work. They are my old business partner’s step father and step brother, incidentally, and they are both named Tom Darling. Some of you may fondly remember the White Tornado. They are her people.

I have an absolutely horrible toothache right now. (As opposed to what – a pleasant one?) I shall see my favorite little dentist down on Long Island next week – assuming there is a sufficient quantity of pain killers in this universe to carry me along to that point. In the meantime I am quite irritable, and I wondered if Father was prolonging the Liturgy just to punish me for only showing up at his church when I have a new lady friend. I hadn’t been there since Sarah, ten years ago, although I frequently encounter the pastor at breakfast.

When it comes to television I may have to bend, or break. My hatred of pop culture is so advanced – absence in this case not making the heart grow fonder – that sharing my life with a plugged-in woman may not actually be possible. For the sake of her company I endured an hour or two in front of the tube a few weeks ago. It was enough. I felt filthy afterwards. She was hardened against it the way people are, the way I used to be. It is like being shat upon. I set up a little flat screen TV in my own bedroom where I could screen “Night of the Hunter,” “Dracula,” a collection of 1940’s Daffy Duck cartoons, the first season of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” a couple of old “Star Trek” episodes, and last night Kenneth Brannagh’s “Henry V.” She will watch “I, Claudius” with me, she says. So I’m not opposed to all television. There was a point in time which seems to be a line drawn in sand, a point in time when the monkeys rose up to rule the world and squabblers went into hiding. I seem to enjoy television produced before that point in time.

Politics follows culture. The decadence of our civilization rises in time to the beat of the Bully’s drum. Those of us who are immune to hypnosis by the Monkey Mind have become a thing I never imagined America could contain. I am a dissident, and in time my thoughts will be illegal, and I will be hunted. You see, Socialism cannot abide dissent. The Lord of the Ring does not share power. To speak of Liberty, to speak of individuality, of self reliance, of personal responsibility; to speak of justice rather than fairness, of logic rather than emotion, and of cause and effect rather than intention, or to speak of God at all, is to be a racist, an enemy of “the people,” an enemy of the State. The culture despises us because the State cannot tolerate us. Hillbilly has become like Jew to the Nazis of old; a term applied to anybody who speaks of freedom and the right to prosper independently of the mindless mob.

What the Lord giveth the Lord taketh away. That saying applies to the gift of Life. What it means, in a nutshell, is that we die. When the Lord becomes the government, the State, life itself ceases to be an unalienable right. In such case there can be no such thing as an unalienable right, for whatever government gives government can take away. When promoting the general welfare is interpreted as providing the general welfare the founding principle that the State serves man, rather than the other way ‘round, is for all intents and purposes invalidated, for a man must appeal to the State for his sustenance, and who provides for him owns him. Satan himself could not have devised a more cunning dissolution of all that is good in humanity as Socialism, for its appeal is so very tempting to the weak minded majority that follows blindly any messianic thug who speaks the secret password to their hearts.

Socialism requires of its slaves something called “consensus.” We’ve been hearing this word lately from the mouths of progressive politicians. Consensus can broach no dissent. Dissenters must be re-educated or they must be otherwise eradicated. It’s very simple: when the mob rules those of us whose walk follows a different beat become a palpable threat to its power. When the State is the provider of Life and the dispenser of Liberty there is no right to these things. When you must appeal to the State to provide you with sustenance, money, medicine, and so on, the State owns you, and there is no such thing as Liberty.

What then happens? What did we learn from Nazi Germany, from the Soviet Union, from China, from Cuba? We learned nothing, apparently. The rioters most recently in London are people who have been dehumanized by Socialism. The material things they are looting have no value in and of themselves. Value is determined solely by merit, the achievement of the individual pursuing his rational self-interest. Money, and the things it may buy, is owned solely by the person who has earned it. The merit of earning it is its only real value. Here in London are people, by and large, who have never known what it is to earn; they own nothing, having been given all their worthless lives a pittance of mere sustenance doled out by their Socialist overlords. A welfare check isn’t earned; it isn’t something a person may say that he has achieved. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, (depending perhaps upon the strength of his spirit), he inevitably loses his soul, his self-ownership. John owns John, and John is responsible for his own happiness. That statement at the center of the human soul is forgotten, no longer true. He that provides for you owns you. He that takes responsibility for you is your lord and master. What then are you, slave? What is happening in London is a slave uprising. That’s all it is.

Am I making myself clear?

Are you diversifying into gold? You’d be well advised to invest in lead.

But, life goes on. People continued to build houses together and live their lives as well as they could during the Roman Civil War when the Republic fell to the rise of Empire. People continued to go to the movies together while the swastika flags were being unfurled and draped over city buildings. People continued to fall in love while the tanks entered Prague. People chatted with each other about their crops as they waited for the Redcoats to come into range on Lexington Green. And tonight, Lu and I will take our customary evening walk together while our Treasury prints money of no actual value to deliberately bring about a collapse of the American – and by extension, world – economy. I told you so.

(And you morons are trying to figure out how many libertarians can dance on the head of a pin. I know the answer to that: thirty two. Now shut up.)

Our failure to see our own lives in the context of history is… what it is. The greatest strength of any enemy of Liberty is his ability to appear as a savior of “the people,” a protector, and a friend. He is the Bully with the Club who stands at the hidden heart of all Government. His sole aim, purpose, and goal these 230-odd years has been to escape from his Constitutionally constructed cage. We were warned of this rise of the Bully by our founding fathers but we became confused, and grew complacent. And he is now free, and marching behind him is his army of useful idiots.

Are there people who want a dictatorship to replace republic? Yes, of course, and you may be one of them. It’s not only those who work in government and hope for greater power over the people that desire this change, but also many of the people themselves who desire it. Socialist democracies always come to power on a surge of popular support. The Nazis rose to power on the crest of a wave of popular sentiment. The Russians cried out in sufficient number for justice, for change, in 1916. The people of Cuba rose up against a corrupt regime; and in Cambodia, in Central and South America, and wherever else the State replaced God as the provider of rights. In other words, a majority of people vote dictatorship into power, and where they can’t vote they revolt. Why is that? Well, in the past these revolutions rose up mainly in countries where oppression and hard tyranny were the order of the day. Those people had no model of economic liberty and self ownership to aspire to. Their choice was between two types of tyrannies, a hard one and a softer one. Why on earth, if that is the case, is it happening here of all places? It is because Liberty is… hard. It’s difficult to be free. It’s challenging to have to provide for oneself, to be responsible for one’s own happiness. Self ownership is hard. Slavery – that is, being provided for and controlled by a higher authority – is for most of us far more appealing.

On the level of personal anecdote, the three women I’ve had the honor of sharing my life with over the years were steadfastly in favor of benign dictatorship, or one that they at least hoped would remain benign. They would have supported a police state for the sake of safety and security. They supported the political candidates that presented the best case that their basic and essential needs were going to be met by somebody – anybody – (even me, gulp!) – And the fulfillment of that good end justified any means. Even now, my new lover, who has professed to be non-political, seems to favor personal and financial security over the daunting prospect of individual Liberty. I could search for a woman who shared my ideals but Ayn Rand is dead, and besides she was married. And ugly. (I did like her accent, though.) I am sure that such women exist in small quantity, but it’s a big world and I’m 50 years old. My point is that totalitarian states rise to power because of their appeal as providers of wealth, health, security, and happiness. It doesn’t matter whether or not a government should rightly fill this role or even can fill this role; what matters is the promise, the declaration of good intent. The results only become apparent once its supporters have become its victims.

Most of my friends are elderly folks. Perhaps I relate more readily to them because they think like I do – not necessarily in ideological terms, but in regard to values, the difference between right and wrong, and so on. I’ve always had a difficult time relating to or identifying with my contemporaries. (I’d have used the word peers, but I haven’t any.) One lady I know, in her 80’s, was last year asking me what I thought about the current events of the time, politics and so on. We didn’t normally speak about such matters together. I was gentle with her – not like I am with you hardened squabblers. She caught on, though. When I suggested that receiving a material “benefit” from the government was to be complicit in an act of theft she looked at me quite wonderingly, saying with obvious fear and awe, “But… but… It’s the government…” as if to say it can’t be stealing when they are the ones doing the stealing. Let’s follow that logic down into its rabbit hole. In 1940’s Germany, for instance: It can’t be murder because government is doing it. Here was an 80 year-old woman, educated, vastly experienced, who probably never applied critical thinking to anything in her long life, (and most of us don’t), who had only then come into contact with the idea that a thing being legal and a thing being moral really don’t have much to do with each other.

She grew up during World War II. She was taught to obey any command or request that her government made, based upon the unquestionable premise that government is capable of naught for the ill, and that even where it is imperfect it is at least well-intentioned. The greatest casualty of that war had little to do with the vast numbers slain overseas. She will easily be the person that would turn me in to the authorities – the secret police or whatever the case will be – when push comes to shove in a few years. Dissidents are only romantic when they are far away and only celebrated after they are dead. So it will also be for the squabblers. But who will be left to think that we were romantic? Who will celebrate anything about us other than our defeat? This is the last stand of Liberty on Earth. There is no other country to flee to.

I mentioned Ayn Rand earlier. She arrived here on a visa from the Soviet Union, and stayed, having no intention of returning. For her it was an escape. It was for millions an escape. The first thing she learned was quite disquieting: that our intellectuals, our leaders of art and culture, film, and so on, were trying to turn the United States into the horrible place she had only just fled. The American liberal hasn’t changed much between the late 1930’s and today. He (or she) still thinks on the childish level that “if only I ruled the world, and everybody believed as I do, we would have peace, prosperity, justice, and happiness.” I’ve always got to ask the grown-up adult who is thinking on the level of the 5 year-old, “Then what on earth are you going to do about me? Because I don’t believe as you do. And I have no desire to live anybody’s life but my own.”

Oh – I can talk about this stuff until I’m blue in the face. Lu possesses that ever so rare commodity, an open mind. I catch myself dominating the conversation and apologize, but she looks into my blue eyes with her green ones and says, “Don’t stop. I’m learning so much!” Well, she’s learning mainly that I like to talk. It isn’t a fault except to one who chooses to find fault with it, and what people may think of me is absolutely none of my business in any case.

I will leave you now for perhaps a few more weeks. I’m still the Squabbler. Accept no substitutes. As usual, the pictures I’ve chosen to ornament this post are by fantasy art photographer J.K. Potter.

The Squabbler Tries His Hand at Raising Goats

2011-07-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

Their films are less… well, less like their films. I mean the Coen Brothers, of course. Since “Fargo” they’ve been less interesting. That was the last one I saw in a theater, so I must have been married because I haven’t been to see a movie alone since… well there was “Atlas Shrugged” a few months back, but that was on the Island and in the New York City vicinities there are plenty of people who go to the movies alone, and dine out alone, and so forth; but here it is a remarkable rarity, and I’m not very comfortable doing it, I suppose, so it doesn’t occur to me to try. Oh I’ve had Chinese alone, but that’s because the Chinese family sits all together at the table nearest the kitchen and I sit up at the window overlooking the street, and because this is a small town – (or, perhaps I ought to say it was a small town since I don’t live there anymore) – people will come by and chat with me through the window, or used to; and I’m Harrison Ford in “Blade Runner” because it’s Chinese. But, to make a long story short, I rented “True Grit” last night and enjoyed it greatly. My son had told me it would probably appeal to me, and he was right. Few indeed are the films made in the last twenty years that do appeal to me, and there are so many in my collection of old favorites here that I can no longer abide because I have become much more sensitive – to profanity mainly. Sex and violence? Bring it on. Just speak like a human being; it’s all I ask. It isn’t much. The song played over the end titles is the theme from the 1955 Gothic-noir masterpiece “Night of the Hunter,” which I must imagine the Brothers Coen know frame by frame, so I assume it was intended as an homage. And that’s a minor point, but in particulars major and minor it was a jewel of a film – very straightforward though, very… unlike them. Gone are the delirious pans and wacky edits that were the signature of their earlier movies where the camera was itself a member of the cast. Who can forget the shocking and darkly comical machine gun battle in the burning house in “Miller’s Crossing,” or the dollied long shot of John Goodman in “Barton Fink” running down a hotel hallway that is burning with a shotgun in his hand shouting “Look upon me – I’ll show you the life of the mind!?” The most memorable of all those marvelous inventions was perhaps the simplest: in “Blood Simple” the paperboy tossed newspaper smacking the screen door just as the line “He was still alive when I buried him” is spoken. That’s one of those movies I simply cannot watch anymore, which may seem a great pity, but I remember the best of it with photographic mind.

Well anyhoo, they are already honored richly by the world for their great talent. I will now move on into the subject of my post, which is death and what comes after. The pictures I’ve chosen for this post, and almost all of my more recent posts, are by fantasy photographer J.K. Potter.

“Ah have taken his teeth…”

OK...

Our popular idea of Heaven and Hell comes from many sources. The people of King David’s time didn’t think as we do. The Afterlife is very possibly a gift of the Magi, for it was only after the Babylonian Captivity that Salvation theology as we understand it starts to become evident in Scripture. The ancient Hebrews had much more of a life-continuing-through-descendants way of thinking. Only the most elect, the prophets and Moses, Abraham, and people like that, would sit at the right hand of God in Heaven. This was folklore. The promises of God to His people were primarily concerned with this world and the descendants of Abraham in this world. It is most unlikely that children were taught that they might go to Heaven if they were good or Hell if they were bad. Who was teaching that sort of idea to their children at that time? The Zoroastrians were teaching that – Dualism, basically. The Zoroastrian tradition in Babylon was sometimes in favor and sometimes out of it, sometimes in power and sometimes persecuted by the power, but ever present to influence Babylonian culture. The Jews came into contact with it several times to be sure, but during the Captivity we might presume this contact was prolonged and extremely influential. I’m not running down the idea of an Afterlife – quite the contrary. I’m saying that our current understanding of it has a history; it evolved over time through revelations, with numerous influences. Certainly when we use a term like Judeo-Christianity we are being quite general, for we may divide Christianity into a Jewish influence and a Pagan Greek influence, and then we might further discern the influences of other traditions and cultures with which the teachings of Christ Jesus would come into contact. We may also divide Judaism into a conglomerate of historic influences about which little may be known but much can be supposed and imagined.

Surely the early Martyrs believed above all that their sufferings were not in vain. There can be no doubt that they believed with a conviction which is difficult for us in these eclectic and relativistic days to wrap our minds around that a Heavenly reward awaited them; and as it was described by Jesus it certainly does seem to be worth every effort. I have heard much high-falutin talk over the years, (adding to it some of my own), about the moral and philosophical, or intellectual, persuasive power of Christianity taught in the Hellenist tradition, of the Early Fathers’ passion and unassailable logic. But, all the logic in the world isn’t going to willingly abide dismemberment, or being roasted to death, or being torn apart by starved wild animals to entertain a crowd. Those people believed with a level of absolute conviction we may find impossible to imagine that they were shortly to be received into Paradise for eternity.

I have obviously been thinking of my father, and hearing his last heartbeat on that machine in the hospital, a month ago. Just two weeks before that I had looked for Mom’s grave – on a whim, out for a drive, and stumbling upon the hidden away cemetery saying to myself, “Isn’t this where she is buried?” I wandered all about, looking for her headstone. Where on earth, I wondered, did we put her earthly remains? I read each and every stone in the section where I seemed to remember her to be. The next day was a Sunday, and I mentioned to Dad that I hadn’t been able to find it, so we stopped there together on our way to Planting Fields. I wrote about that trip here – “It Happened in the Lilac Arbor.” And hers was the first stone in the first row of stones, the most obvious, and the most visible. I recalled with total clarity reading the name next to hers when I had been there on my own and the one in the row directly behind hers – Fagan it was – and how I had thought at the time that maybe the Irish were all together in their own ghetto. But I had not seen hers, which was the most prominent, until I returned the next day with Dad. He remarked that the stuff he had planted there didn’t take, and we didn’t stay long. We continued on together to the Coe Estate and the azaleas, and the rose walk, and the lilacs, and the fountain. We drove round the statue of the Holy Family as we left the cemetery because he told me it was his favorite statue.

Two weeks later my sister told me outside his room in Huntington Hospital that the dialysis didn’t work, so now it was a “waiting game.” Waiting? For what? What will we be waiting for, I wondered, thinking at the same time that it can’t be waiting for him to die – he that had only just taken me to lunch at a senior center where his friends hung out, he that had just shown me where Mom was buried, and then tramped all over the arboretum in the spotty rain talking about how there’s a picture of me as a baby in my grandfather’s arms under that same gigantic beech tree. I was thinking would that only the world still made sense, and the monkeys still in their cages – not running things. The beech tree has “seen” us grow, and seen our decline; it will see our end. We drove down into Oyster Bay and he pointed out the little hot dog shack where he would sometimes, or even only one time, stop with Mom back in the day. We stopped for dinner at the Golden Dolphin – or whatever it’s called – in Huntington. Having finished Huck Finn – the last of my year-long reading of the complete Mark Twain – I started a Bruce Catton Civil War book that Dad had lying around. I had my teeth done the next day.

Many people believe that when we die we experience something immediately. Others say that we simply “shut off” and cease to experience anything at all – no pleasure, no pain, no awareness forevermore. I’ve never been able to develop enough faith to entertain the latter position. Finally, there are those who tell us that we do indeed “shut off” and wait until the Final Judgment – whenever that might be – when we are raised again from the dust of our decay. We might then suppose that being “shut off” we would have no concept of time’s passage, so two thousand years would differ not at all from a single moment. Perhaps the first proposition in that case isn’t really much different from the third. They are both horrendous and terrifying. I think that if we knew with total certainty that death brought nothing more or less than absolute extinction of all consciousness, awareness, sense of self, we would be forever in a state of total carefree bliss. And, as I have said, my faith isn’t strong enough to believe the unbelievable. King David’s faith was apparently that strong, but not mine.

No, suffering continues for eternity – or it well may. Who, aside from a complete psychopath, would actually want that to be true when the alternative – oblivion – is infinitely more attractive?

This Sunday morning I am remembering all the aimless driving I had done during the years I lived in the village. In that big beautiful apartment I thought of nothing but escape, of getting out into the hills where I seemed to belong. I took all those pictures and posted them on my blog. I made up names for the different areas – the Hollow Hills, the Haunted Hills, and so on. I was actively searching for an affordable house, and when winter came before I found one, with one deal having fallen through before it was even formalized, my frustration found new boundaries to push against. One day I drove down into the Catskills, taking only back roads over mountain and dale, and found out it was impossible to get completely lost. My sense of direction is too good. All roads must lead to somewhere, which is unfortunate. Eventually I ended up in Walton thinking here I will meet a weathered old skinny girl who will love me, and we will live in complete anonymity and obscurity in her unpainted house among the giant lilacs, raising goats. Now I live in the hills. I only drive when I must, but I still enjoy driving. The old girl lives down the street. She speaks with a six inch thick Yankee accent. That’s the one I mentioned in my last post. Her house is aluminum clad and there are no goats, but otherwise it’s a match. We might raise snapping turtles instead. They cross the road to her house from the beaver pond. The stream from my beaver pond runs down the mountain through her fields, and under the road into her beaver pond, and thus are we joined by the element water. I should go down there and lay a kiss on her mug before she finds a buyer and moves away because no one around here gives her the time of day.

Happy Independence Day. From my cell phone I greeted those of you who are also on Facebook. It’s a little Nokia slide, by the way – quite limited when compared to your fancy shmancy “I” gadgets. But, as I was typing in my message I gave a thought to the fact that I was sitting in my automobile on the Mill Dam bridge in Centerport, early on a beautiful summer morning with my home parish church across the bridge and the big Colonial houses showing their gables between the trees, and the fishing boat bobbing harbor just a few yards across the bridge and 50 years away; and I thought my my my, look at me all moderned-up like some kinda playboy of the Western World. (That blends two rather different literary references, but heck – they’re both in a basically Celtic tradition.)

Stop some time, and throw a thought at Time and all his wonders working, and all the cucumbers he has shat.

So, here it is: We close our eyes to this life, and (let us imagine) no more than a moment passes before we are – or we are not – dead to life, yet somehow living. Ten thousand years have passed. Will we wonder “What has become of my children?” No, we will not wonder; we will merely know. Outside of time the beginning is the end and there is neither beginning nor end. After this life will I be with Mom and Dad? Will I be with my own two sons? Outside of time I already am – always was. Eternity doesn’t have a beginning. We no longer think in terms of being born on such and such a date and dying on such and such a date, with the promise (or threat) of Eternity beginning at the moment we die. No, life is seen for what it is: the fluttering shadow of a butterfly’s delicate wings on a summer day when you have dozed off and the book has fallen. Eternity can only confound a mind that has no other context than the context of time.

Anyhoo, I gotta go now.

Just the Two of Us

2011-06-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

Once again the library computer is not allowing me to respond to comments. It turns out "cookies" are not enabled and may not be. Thank you all for visiting - Bupu and Sherry, Rosie, et al. I'll have quite a lot of catching up to do when I can next get onto a less restricted machine. And Sherry - my Yahoo account is also inaccessible to me. It has been so many years since I used it, and none of my passwords are working. Once again I need "cookies." Yummy. I will see if I can beg the use of a customer's machine tomorrow. In the meantime, here follows my latest offering.

I am settling my affairs. That’s an old-fashioned way of saying I am making amends and paying restitutions. It is traditionally a process associated with the end of life. But, St. Paul tells us that we must die every day, and of course what he means is that we must die to self daily to be born again in the Spirit. This requires daily settling of affairs, or at least a periodic “housecleaning” – the house in this case being the consciousness. The Church recommends frequent personal use of the Sacrament of Penance, otherwise known as Reconciliation, for this very purpose. In days of old (when knights were bold…) the necessity of being “shriven,” or absolved, before going into battle was well known, for in the event of death to stand before God with all of your sins was not desirable. If we were to fast-forward five hundred years or so to a period better known to us, in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” the ghost of Marley appears to Scrooge wearing the “chains he forged in life” – that is, the burden of his sins holding his spirit earthbound. In short, the practice of settling one’s affairs isn’t a new one. The benefits are spiritual, psychological, and to whatever extent even physical – assuming that mental and spiritual well-being has a positive influence on physical well-being. So, there it is. I don’t usually call it “settling my affairs.” I usually call it “unplugging.”

What do I “unplug” from? Well, the AA Twelve Step method, which is most illustrative, recommends examining first my resentments, then my fears, and then the harms I have done to others either willingly or unwillingly. Of course, the genius of that simple method may already be apparent to you if you’re sharp: what angers me is usually what I fear, and what I fear makes me angry; and the harms that I have done most frequently are a reaction to threats either real or imagined which I have perceived through the prism of those fears and resentments. Whether a resentment or fear is justified or unjustified is irrelevant. It must be disposed of, either way, being poisonous. The final step in this particular method is the following appraisal: “What did I do – if anything – to set in motion trains of circumstance which would later put me in a position to be hurt?” And of course if you’re looking for sins that’s the money part. It’s the closest to making an objective examination of self that I’ve found, or more correctly making an evaluation which is by definition subjective in the most objective way possible. You know, sins are really just words – words that mean something. You can easily mistake one for another and not come to any great harm by it. They are abstract categories of common human faults which were devised to help us understand this noisy piece of wood between our ears so that we might make the best possible use of it. That’s all they are – limitations, or bugs in the works; things that hold us back.

How’s about a joke? It’s a rare event when I can remember one. A fellow moved – just like I did – into a little house in the middle of nowhere to get away from It All, whatever that may be, and after a coupla three weeks or so he started getting a little lonely. Right about then an old mountain man stopped by – a guy with a big white beard and flannel shirt, and so on, and he said he lived a mile or two up the mountain – very near by – and thought he’d come down and say howdy-do to his new neighbor. And that was awfully nice of him. And the old mountain man said, “I’d like to have a little get-together at my place tomorrow night, if you want to stop by.”

“Well, that sounds just fine,” said the newbie.

“Do you drink?” asked the mountain man.

“Why sure, I’ve been known to have a few.”

“Well, that’s good cuz there’ll likely be some drinking,” said the old mountain man, “Do you fight?”

“Do I what?”

“You know. There’ll be some drinking so there might be some fighting.”

“Oh, I see.” The newcomer laughed, “Well, I reckon I can take care of myself.”

And here the old mountain man drew closer to him and winked in a conspiratorial sort of way and said, “And there’ll likely be some sex too.”

At this the new fellow’s face lit up, and he said, “Well I’m definitely up for that! Say, is there anything special I should wear or anything I should bring?”

The mountain man replied, “No, come as you are. It’ll be just the two of us.”

Anyhoo, I told that one to my neighbor down the road here. She thought it was funny, but… she never let me get behind her. No, no – I’m kidding. We had a great time talking out on her porch for about two hours or thereabouts, till the dew came. But at one point she did observe that anybody who chooses to live in such an isolated place “must have something a bit wrong with him,” and I must assume she was including herself in that category since she lives here too. Indeed she does have something wrong with her, and so do I. We are broken by the world and want no more a part in it – or as small a part as we can stand. In her case it was a nasty divorce, and this and that, and the other. In my case it’s… well, the White Lodge. I quoted Robert Burns at her and she didn’t wince or run away like the normals generally do. And I told her I’d been on a few blind dates with women who looked at me with the sort of expressions across the table that you’d expect from across the field fence in dairy country, and if she didn’t slap her knee at that one she did something very like. And eventually she said, “Now about that sex…”

You see, whenever I “settle my affairs” or “unplug,” or examine my conscience, or go to Confession and make my amends, or whatever you want to call it, I become quite happy and care free afterwards, and I feel like telling some stories and cutting up, and that sort of thing. It certainly seems that dying – even if it’s the dying to self sort of dying – is a truly liberating experience, and I recommend it.

But what about the dying to life kind of dying – the Real McCoy? Well, I recommend that too, seeing as how I’m already absolutely certain that you will some day follow my recommendation. And, just so you know I’d never recommend doing anything I wouldn’t do myself, I’m just as absolutely certain that I’m going to die too. Settling one’s affairs in preparation for that event comes under the jurisdiction of what the Church calls the Last Rites. It’s plural because there are several rites performed, including Communion and Reconciliation – the biggies – with a confirmation of your Baptismal vows as well. And where your direct participation isn’t possible, as in the case of my Dad who was comatose at the time, these latter rites can be received on your behalf by another. In Dad’s case my sister was on hand to receive the Blessed Sacrament for him, and I must assume she also rejected “Satan and all his works,” and so on, and so forth. This too is not an entirely subjective matter; otherwise no one else could receive the Rites on your behalf. If my relationship with my Creator is entirely and exclusively subjective then there wouldn’t be any necessity for Sacraments at all. Instead, it would be a pure case of “me and my buddy, the Alpha and the Omega,” and the heck with you and your silly friends. And it is not that.

What is it that sustains a faith? Is it, as many seem to think, a function purely of the individual consciousness detached and separate from Logic (or morality) and Tradition? I think that if such were the case the Church Herself would have faded into the obscurity of the footnote long, long ago. I’m not doing Church apologetics today, however – not after that joke. Another time, maybe.

I often write about unplugging from the world, and here I’m writing about unplugging from the self. If you try doing the one without first having done the other you’ll get lonesome in a hurry – lonesome and quite depressed. The world – defined in brief as everything other people may be doing – is after all a distraction from whatever is wrong with you. It’s also a distraction from whatever is right with you, but we’re not bothered by the things that are right with us. Staying plugged into the world enables us to ignore our own faults; it gives us bright, shiny objects to distract us from our troubles, and numerous fatuous and irrelevant examples of people that appear even more flawed than we are.

Why, just yesterday while I was minding my own business I was attacked by a television that was turned on in somebody else’s house, specifically a News feature concerning the relative merits and dangers of allowing toddlers to wear skimpy bikini swimwear. There are, apparently, people that are troubled by this “trend.” What occurred to me is that the great thing about being a toddler (besides not having to shave) is the freedom to go without any clothing at all. Really, who gives a rat’s ass? But this sucked me into the vortex, and other equally ridiculous stories followed. Most of them had to do with fear – that is, with people being afraid of each other and people being afraid of themselves, their own appetites, their own faults. It provided a vivid picture of the Hungry Ghost Realm where most of the people in this world reside – people that are plugged in, perhaps plugged in so securely that their souls are trapped irretrievably (at least by human effort) within the nightmare of the unreal.

On the practical day-to-day walking around level what troubles the world is the absence of morality. When the Moral Law is obeyed no other laws are necessary. When the Moral Law is obeyed people may be free and independent. When it is ignored people become enslaved to the multitudinous restrictions of petty human governments presided over by bullies – gangsters, thugs, and bureaucrats. Here in the state where I reside, for instance, a local city’s legislature is considering (or has perhaps already passed) a law requiring restaurants to post, on a sign where their potential customers might see it, a notice of any Health Department violations they may have been cited for in the past. I’m sure you can see the evil intent of such a law and the opportunities for corruption and greed that it offers. It is just one of a million examples of geometrically increasing government tyranny. In my state also there will very likely be enforced a statewide ban on natural gas drilling. The stifling of individual human liberty, the limiting of free enterprise and the advancement of the human condition, the confiscation of personal wealth constituting a declaration of open warfare against progress and industry – these are tantamount to murder. In fact, they are far worse than simple murder. The lives they destroy, the livelihoods they eviscerate, the personal wealth they steal, and very soon we will see the mass murders they must inevitably begin to commit in order to maintain their hold on power, are really nothing more than the inevitable and predictable result of willful ignorance of Moral Law. Nature abhors a vacuum. When you remove the Moral Law an almost infinite number of petty human laws must rush in to try in vain to fill the void, and the result is what we are seeing. The time has come when any free and independent private citizen could potentially kill a so-called lawmaker and make a reasonable case for having acted in self defense.

Our servants are trying to become our masters. They must be stopped at any and all cost.

What is it after all that inspires and creates Progressivism? Simply stated it is resentment and fear. It is a reaction of the mob mind, the Monkey Mind, to unresolved and unredeemed personal human flaws – sins, in other words – without the benefit of a moral framework in which to address and correct them. This is what stands at the heart of the insanity of Nazi Germany. Progressivism, also known these days as the new sort of Liberalism we are seeing, is a sickness of the mind and soul which is trapped in the Monkey World – hypnotized in a sense – and unable to find its way out. The cure is “unplugging,” or settling your affairs – becoming free of the resentments and fears that cloud the higher mind. Perhaps there are other methods, but that’s how I managed to find the way out.

When the world attacks I must periodically unplug to save my soul, for no less than that is at stake. And it begins with the process I’ve described – although there are several – of the examination of conscience, resentments, fears, harms, and so on. It was through this process that the equation “John owns John, and John is responsible for his own happiness” was invented. You may think of it as a mantra which can be called to mind whenever the attacks of the world become overwhelming. It’s a short-cut to moral thinking when distractions threaten your rational mind, a method by which you can say to yourself, “Hey – wait a minute. John owns John, and John is responsible for his own happiness, and no one else. This stuff isn’t real.” Paul owns Paul and Sherry owns Sherry; Rosie owns Rosie, and Whit owns Whit; TR owns TR, and Bupu owns Bupu; and Chrimson owns Chrimson, and Jaime owns Jaime; and Darla owns Darla, and Ron owns Ron, and so on, and Connie owns Connie, and so on.

And doing this – going through this process – always makes me feel light, happy, and free. It restores my strength for the battles ahead, just as King David was restored in his desert hiding places. I want to get into King David and King Solomon, and what they believed – and didn’t believe – about the Afterlife; and also Zoroaster and Father Abraham while I’m at it. As a matter of fact, it’s already written. But that’s the next post. Perhaps I’ll remember another joke by then as well.

Monkey Think, Monkey Do

2011-06-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

The storm blew away my goldfinches. I haven’t seen one for a week. I think it was the night of the power failure down in the supernatural Hamlet of Hickwick. The next day the convenience store was giving away ice cream. They lost their entire perishable inventory. I am upset about it – the goldfinches, I mean. The ice cream was delicious.

Time is just zipping by. I wrote that paragraph last week, saved it, and re-opened it today. Is that how my post will begin? Perhaps. But I am happy to report that the goldfinches have found their way back in the meantime.

(Also, my time on this library computer is limited to about 10 minutes, and I am not being allowed to comment on my last post in response to PaulV and Rosie. Thank you both for reading, as always. I was unsure about whether or not to mention Dad, knowing it's a deeply personal matter, and also knowing it might scare off regular readers from leaving comments - awkward and all. But dying is something we must all do, thank God. You two know - and heck, everybody who reads The White Lodge must know - that I regard death as being born into Eternal Life. It is a time for sorrow, yes - for those of us who mourn - but it is also a time for rejoicing. Back to my post...)

My father died on May 30. I’m not going to write about the funeral today – another time, maybe. I often wrote about him – memories of him, that sort of thing. I don’t think there is any reason his death will change that. I think of him frequently, for he was a great influence on me, and I’m sure he will continue to inspire my writing.

But I will say that as long as he was living – and I suppose I had always thought that he would outlive me – he stood between me and my troubles, whatever they were. Even though I’m nearly 50 years old there is part of me that simply won’t grow up. Well, perhaps now that part of me will have to. When Mom died it was quite different. She didn’t leave me. She’s with me more in death than she was when she was alive. How can I explain that? Her spirit surrounds me. I talk to her daily, without needing a telephone, and she answers me. Dad, on the other hand… Dad left. You can say that it is my perception and my perception will very likely change, and evolve. OK. So what?

I’m viewing the 1962 film, “Carnival of Souls” at this moment, a favorite. I’ll find a picture for you when I get to a computer. The film offers more than a few great frames.

I would like to explore the varieties of perception, returning to a subject I’ve touched upon in previous posts with greater detail. I’ve compared perceptions to radio waves. We might also think of streams. Our lives follow whatever courses they follow because of our decisions, and our decisions are informed by our thoughts – whatever they might be. Our thoughts come from many places. We can all understand that our thoughts are born of our experiences, but to look into it more deeply is to realize that our thoughts are the creation of our perceptions of our experience. Two people may share an experience but perceive it quite differently, and think therefore in very different ways about it, making quite different sorts of decisions as a result.

I’ve written about the Monkey Mind and the Man Mind, or the God Mind. Most people reside in the Monkey World – that is, their decisions are informed by monkey thinking. Monkeys are governed by bullying, and their reactions to reward and punishment are predictable. This is why the bully with the club stands at the hidden heart of all governments. Governments are, by definition, in the Monkey World, concerned with the least common denominator in all matters great and small. Just as the torturer or interrogator controls his victim’s thinking a government controls the thinking of a majority of people. From that control it derives its power. This power is artificial, depending upon maintaining the oppression of that majority.

Mark Twain observed in “The Mysterious Stranger” that people are governed by minorities. Correct. In the story a woman is about to be stoned to death by a mob for the crime of witchcraft, which most of the people in that mob understand perfectly well she did not actually commit. She was innocent. But anybody who showed reluctance to throw a stone might well have been suspected of witchcraft himself, and so fear led them to throw their stones with gusto so that it would not appear that they were reluctant to do so. In reality, most of that mob – as individuals – would just as soon not kill an innocent person. What they are demonstrating is the presence of an artificial identity that overrides and controls their thinking, and therefore their decisions. That’s what I call the Monkey Mind – that identity. It has been given to them – laid over their true individual identities – by the bullies with the clubs, a minority of “leaders” whose ability to dole out rewards and punishments has put them in a position of power over their weaker neighbors. People are governed by minorities.

On a relatively small scale a crowd gathers to throw rocks at an innocent person until she dies of trauma. On a larger scale, Nazi Germany. It’s the same thing. People in the Monkey World – people who think with Monkey Mind, which is most people – are governed by the bully with the club. They are in an hypnotic state. The identities that long established patterns of reward and punishment have given them override their God Minds. Often, these artificial identities are so well established that such people will commit all kinds of unspeakable atrocities to protect it, reacting with violence when it is threatened by reality. What is the nature of this reward and punishment? Is it merely physical pleasure and pain? In the case of the torturer and his victim this may be so, but in the case of an entire nation, or an entire world, the rewards and punishments are social, cultural. They are very complicated, and diabolical. They are insidious. The natural instinct to be accepted by other monkeys, to be loved, to be well thought-of, almost entirely determines the perceptions of such people. The Monkey Mind erodes their true identities to the point of no return, and in some cases the soul seems to depart such a person many years before physical death.

Why do people believe in whatever it is that they believe in? Is it because the ideas they believe in are true? No, not necessarily. People often believe the things they believe because they want to be liked; they want to be well thought of. They want to be rewarded for thinking correctly because they have been trained that punishment is the result of thinking incorrectly. And you can hardly blame them. In the old days punishment for incorrect thinking involved being roasted alive over an open fire, or stoned to death – that sort of thing. In modern times, during the dark days of the monkey mob rule called the French Revolution the penalties were served by Madame Guillotine. Those of you who have some knowledge of the world outside your own home towns may be quick to point out that in many places beheadings, stonings, and burnings are still the favored methods of bullying. But here, in the USA, most of the monkeyshines are social. The difference is superficial; the principle is the same. And the solution is the same, even if the possible consequences are less frightening. The solution is to question everything.

What do I mean by “everything?” Well, the Dictionary is still a most useful recourse when it comes to figuring out the meanings of words. The best place to begin is with God, naturally. That’s where everything begins. Or… is it? If you believe in God, stop. If you don’t believe in God, stop. Now you’re an agnostic. That’s a word that literally means without knowledge. Your task is to find out whether or not there is a God. Check all the usual sources, questioning each assertion, challenging every statement. Regard all declarations of truth on the matter as opinions subject to scrutiny. OK – if you’re a believer you’re probably not going to be able to simply make yourself disbelieve, and if you’re a non-believer you’re probably not going to change radically, as if you were turning off a light switch. The point of the exercise is to discover why you believe or disbelieve. You may be like so many people who have believed in God for their entire lives without having any idea what arguments there are for believing in Him. You may be surprised to find that the process of reasoning called Logic provides several classic arguments supporting the theoretical existence of God that have not been adequately disproved. The first of these comes from Aristotle who is considered the founder of Logic. You will also find some excellent arguments against the existence of God. Something is true: either there is a God or there isn’t; and your belief – whatever it may be – will have no bearing on that truth. Again, the point is to find out why you believe what you believe. It changes nothing, except the mind, which is to say it changes everything. It changes perception.

Challenge everything. Question all authority. What’s an expert? An expert is a monkey who is paid to be wrong. The expert deserves no respect until he has earned it. Studiously practice contempt for academic degrees and titles, and remember there is no such thing as a consensus of opinion. For every viewpoint that can be imagined there is an opposing viewpoint. Here are some good rules of thumb: the truth always stays on topic. The truth never calls you stupid. The truth never hides; it is people who try to hide it. The truth will never refuse to answer questions. The truth never changes the subject. You know, some people say God is truth. I say God is a pretty little girl who has a pretty little curl, right in the middle of her forehead; and that when she is good she is very, very good, but when she is bad she is horrid. Question it. Asking questions is the difference between a monkey and a man, between a mob and an organization, between a revolt and a revolution, between superstition and Science, between… Aw, you get the idea.

Here's another still from “Carnival of Souls.” The whole film is available for viewing on You Tube, but I would recommend getting the director’s cut DVD, or downloading it from Netflix, or a similar source.

I’m late for something… Gotta go.

It Happened in the Lilac Arbor

2011-05-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

It’s much easier for me to speak Spanish than English with this thing in my mouth. The consonants don’t whistle and click for some reason. I am reminded of the retainer I wore briefly as a teenager. It is inconvenient and uncomfortable, but this is my reality until I go for the dental implants. In another week my gums will have healed – assuming this million dollar anti-biotic works as it should – and then I will be able to use adhesive. Oh goody, says I.

Gripe gripe gripe…

At last the plants may go outdoors. Our danger of frost continues into late May, early June in these parts. I’ve seen snow late in May. A few years ago we lost most of our lilacs. It’s not the cold that gets them – they like cold; it’s the weight of the snow. But this year, wet as it is, the lilacs are magnificent and quite smelly. Their odor is nothing like the odor of the laundry detergents and air fresheners that pretend to it. Frankly, I’ve long found those rather nauseating. The real thing is… the real thing. Is there more to be said on the subject? I suppose not.

Should I get a dog? OK – trivia question. You’ll never get it. What was the B side of the Monkees single “Last Train to Clarksville?” You know the song. I’ll bet Sherry knows. She knows things.

Ah well, to my point. I have one. I’ve finally discovered what it is that I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a billionaire investor. I’ll let you know how I am progressing.

Such a decision is meaningless unless it is at once followed by a course of action. This may be said for any decision I might make. On a whim, although I had hemmed and hawed for some time, I finally decided to get my teeth taken care of. While I was down on Long Island last month to see the opening of “Atlas Shrugged” Dad mentioned having a very good dentist. A few days after I returned I was standing in my kitchen waiting for something to cook and it occurred to me that I could return in a fortnight if I chose to do so, and if I did return it would be a small matter to make an appointment with that same dentist. He regretted being unable to fix Mom’s teeth during the final year of her life because her sickness had robbed her of so much substance. He had hoped she would regain enough weight so that it would be safe for him to proceed, but of course Divine Providence had in mind that she should rest in eternal health rather than to be restored in this life. In my Uncle Ted’s last days this same dentist apparently called at his home to treat him. Dad explained that the man was a “minimalist.” Health was his main concern; the cosmetics being secondary but certainly a factor in maintaining health. It is healthy to feel good, to feel that one does not offend; to be comfortable with one’s appearance. I suppose that is what appealed to me. So, I made the decision while standing in my kitchen that day, reflecting on these things. That decision would have meant nothing if I had not followed it with action – i.e. getting in my car and keeping that appointment, and then more action – returning again two weeks later.

This may seem like a small matter, and I suppose it is. What I am saying may also seem to be obvious, and I’ll concede that point as well. But I have known people to say that they are “born again” because they made a declaration of faith in a church – a decision to live their lives based upon a new premise – who nevertheless neglect to follow that decision with any sort of action at all. The result seems to be that nothing really changes about them. I have known people to resolve and solemnly swear to do all sorts of things, when in reality their resolutions and oath-making were never followed by taking steps to achieve anything. A decision really isn’t a proper decision unless it is followed by action. A decision without action is just fantasizing. We do it all the time – I mean to say we who call ourselves human (on a good day). I’ve done it. You’ve done it. So perhaps what I am saying is really not so obvious after all, when you consider the power we seem to have to delude ourselves into a state of hopeless inaction with extreme ease. It is this – not the limitations Nature may so capriciously impose upon us – that cripples us, and holds us back from achieving our personal ideas about what constitutes happiness.

You can read that sort of thing in a million different (but not so very different) “self-help” books available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or – gosh, anywhere, for it is well known and often said that most of our personal limitations are self-imposed. If any of these books offer solutions that can help to alter the reader’s perception sufficiently to bring about a personality change, that’s just ducky. But, if I were to take a survey of the three or four of you who are reading this obscure little blog I’ll bet you money that one or two of you has read a book or three in the “self-help” category, and found them wanting. Such books can make a lot of sense, especially since most of them are founded upon that same basic idea that most of our limitations are self-imposed, which seems a valid statement, but it’s a heck of a long distance from the brain to the heart – or better yet, to the gut. Courage isn’t a function of the brain, nor even necessarily of the heart, but of the gut. My father is fond of talking about the guts of the ancient Israelites. They were very gutsy people. Our Scripture is absolutely loaded with references to bowels. In our time we seem to prefer to ascribe courage to the heart. The heart has become the organ of every attribute not exclusively belonging to the head. (And it also pumps the blood – hoorah!) The point is that the brain may believe a thing but a deep belief is “heart-felt.” Our minds may understand an idea, but it doesn’t become a conviction until it reaches the gut – or, in other words, until it is acted on.

The books don’t work if all we do is to read them. We might just say to ourselves, “Oh that was very interesting,” and then remain inert. We hope that someone will come along to take away our difficulties. Many of us like the idea of living under a benign dictatorship that provides a not uncomfortable level of sustenance. Just so, many of us would favor living under a police state that provides us an illusion of security. You know who you are. It’s human nature, yes? But most of our difficulties are self-created, most of our limitations self-imposed, and security comes at an extremely high price – too steep for my slender billfold.

By the way, I’m glad God chose to harden Pharaoh’s heart rather than his bowels. That would have been a very different sort of story.

A radio commercial is what gave me the idea. A billionaire investor apparently predicts that gold will rise in price to 4000 dollars per ounce. It occurred to me that there are such people in this world. I don’t happen to know any of them personally, and I don’t happen to know any archaeologists or deep sea divers or astronauts, for that matter; but I do know that such people exist, and somebody has to do jobs of that sort. I could certainly be a billionaire investor if I set my will to it. I mentioned in my last post that there are things I cannot do. I cannot, for instance, play professional basketball, no matter how sincere is my longing to do so. No decision to become a professional basketball player will make me into one; no number of actions I might take towards achieving that end will result in success. Becoming a billionaire investor is infinitely easier by virtue of the fact that it is in the realm of the possible.

Dad and I visited the Coe Estate while I was last visiting with him. We saw millions of azaleas, and a beech tree that was six times larger than my house. The greenhouses were full of exotic tropical trees. My favorite feature of the grounds was, however, the lilac arbor. Although they had just started budding here in the frozen North, down on the Island they were already past their peak. Their perfume was almost overpowering. I walked through; gasping for air by the time I traversed its length. Dad doesn’t really care for houses, being an outdoorsman, (although he is not Canadian,) but I like houses more than trees and bushes. I like houses more than I like people. So I insisted we explore the house. Being a billionaire investor would mean that I could build such a house. Such houses improve upon Nature, and they are a gift to the world.

It was as I was passing through that lilac arbor that I came to my decision. I had left Dad to catch his breath next to a cherub that was standing guard over the Roman pool, in the shadow of the tea house by the rose walk. I entered the arbor as a man who had not yet decided to become a billionaire investor, and emerged a momentous moment later from the other end of it so overcome by the perfume of lilacs that my moussaka several hours later would do nothing to rid me of it, and also as a man who had decided to become a billionaire investor. Now what is needed is action, and more action.

The first thing I shall need to do is to find a billionaire and figure out where to invest him. I should say “invest him or her,” though, shouldn’t I? Surely there must be female billionaires that want investing somewhere…

And I have a personal note to add to this clownish post. I’ve been so extremely blessed these last few months with the opportunity to visit with Dad rather frequently, and most of what I’ve managed to write – including this post – was inspired by our conversations during these visits. I’ve been going to visit him every other weekend, beginning with the April 15 opening of “Atlas Shrugged,” and then going back twice more to follow up on the dental visits. I had also managed to enjoy a long(ish) visit with him just before Christmas, and a few of my Blogstream “John owns John” essays make reference to that experience.

I’ve just returned from an unexpected fourth visit during which I was reunited with my little sister, whom I haven’t seen in a few years, and my brother – their spouses, and so on. Dad died this morning – Monday, April 30, at around 7 o’clock – following a very brief and sudden illness. I was able to get down to the hospital last night to wait with him for the end, (which I have always regretted not having been able to do with Mom back in December of ’06.) My sister and brother, and their spouses, were also with us. Dad was comatose by the time I arrived – it happened that quickly – so I am doubly, trebly grateful to have been able to spend all the time together that we did this spring.

Allow me to return the topic of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” and what it really means: the meaning and purpose of life, or simply doing what we want to do. Our lives are not about survival, for none of us ever have, and none of us ever will. Forget about surviving; put it from your minds, and live.

The Last Laugh

2011-05-23T07:52:00.000-07:00

I was becoming worried that these new teeth wouldn’t… ouch! They do go in all the way, after all. I think I’ll not do that again right away.

Let’s move on to other matters.

I’ve been using Facebook more frequently than I ever thought I would because it just so happens that my telephone allows me to use the site with ease, whereas The White Lodge requires a full-sized computer and I am not often in the vicinity of one of those. The number of my “friends” has grown a little bit. Another old Blogstream friend has just arrived. Some of you may remember POH. She is as garrulous as ever, perhaps a little more politicized than before. That’s good, I think, because she will help to counter the contributions on my “wall” from the Princess and a few others on the liberal side of skating rink.

I’m watching a Barbara Steele horror movie while I’m writing this, by the way. I found a box of very bad DVD’s for $3 at a head shop, and when I say that they are bad I mean that they are good.

From Facebook I learned of the “Rapture” prediction by that Camping fellow. I didn’t know at first that that was the preacher’s name. I wondered what pitching a tent and rubbing two sticks together to make a fire had to do with the End Times prediction. Any topic from current events is likely to be past its expiration date by the time I find a computer from which to post, so I’m a day late and a dollar short – or several days late and several dollars short. But the end of the world doesn’t come every day, so I reckon the topic is always a timely one.

What? Oh yes, of course. You caught me there…

That’s right, Squabblers. You’ve been reading the White Lodge long enough now to know that the end of the world does come every day. You and I, and every other human being of woman born will one day die, and that day may be today. The end of the world comes every single day God sends.

I have never fully understood the peculiar brand of theology that invented the Rapture and following it the Tribulation. Since you know that I am interested in Christian eschatology, I realize that this is an admission which may surprise you. I’ve made a few half-hearted stabs at educating myself on the subject, but each time I’ve abandoned the quest because there doesn’t seem to be a single authority on the matter. Seeking to unravel the mysteries of life – which is indistinguishable from seeking to unravel the mysteries of death – is one of the things we Tiggers do best, as we wander through the Hundred Acre Wood, the ever-faithful Piglet at our sides. But in this case I seem to be stymied by so many streams of teaching on the subject that the concise explanation is impossible to discern.

Row row row your boat

Gently down the stream,

Merrily merrily merrily merrily –

Life is but a dream…

When I die I want to die in a state of Grace. The details are otherwise unimportant. As to the where and the when, there is little or nothing I can do to control it. Whether dying is something I do all by myself or something I do in concert with many others does not seem all that important either. Every day I row row row my boat gently down the stream. And I ought to be merry. I ought to eat, drink, and be merry, for today or tomorrow, or some day soon I will die. Life is but a dream.

There are things that I cannot do in this life. When I was a boy I was told “There is nothing you cannot do, if you set your mind to it.” Well, that’s rubbish. For instance, I can’t suddenly up and decide to play for the NBA. I’m nearly 50; I’m only 5 foot 10… Perhaps, if I had “set my mind to it” when I was younger… But I didn’t.

I cannot row up the stream.

People were expecting the return of King David in the time of Jesus Christ. They – many of them, anyway – were looking for the Messiah whose coming was foretold to be a worldly as well as a spiritual leader. They had suffered under various oppressive foreign regimes that had occupied their land. They had endured many privations as a result. Doesn’t it seem perfectly reasonable, therefore, that they should hope that this injustice would be amended? I’ve always thought so. Well, I suppose we could argue about whether such a hope was reasonable or merely natural. If you want to say it was merely natural I’ll concede the point for the sake of not getting sidetracked. So, wasn’t it perfectly natural then that the Jews of Christ’s time were expecting a political sort of Messiah – someone who could right all the wrongs and restore the fabled greatness of the Kingdom of David?

There is in all of us, then as now, a perfectly natural (though perhaps not perfectly reasonable) desire to see justice served upon our enemies. The Apostles came from varied backgrounds, but a few – Judas in particular – were of the Zealot persuasion, or so we are told. They were brimming over with hope that Jesus would raise an army to march on Jerusalem. Today many of us are also dreaming of the day when the colossal evils we must daily witness should be crushed for all of time by the righteousness we perceive so clearly yet practice so imperfectly. We still long for the Messiah – in the case of us Christians the Second Coming of the Messiah. Our Creed declares “…Until He comes again in Glory, to judge the living and the dead, And His Kingdom will have no end.”

During the period after His Resurrection Jesus foretold an apocalyptic event which has been interpreted to mean both the end of the world for everybody, all at once, and the end of the world for each individual person – one at a time – since the very beginning of Christian philosophy. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70 many came to believe that that was the event Jesus had foretold. And yes, there were specific details in common with His prophesy which would have born out such an idea. That would mean the period following A.D. 70 – right up to our present day – may be called post-Apocalyptic. St. Augustine would allow that view to evolve hundreds of years later, by his effort to heal the divide amongst Church members on this and many other matters. His famous apology that the Church Herself is the mystical Body of Christ on Earth laid the philosophical groundwork for the Church’s role as the preserver of civilization throughout the Dark Ages following the fall of the old Roman Empire, (during which there was also no shortage of apocalyptic qualities.)

Saint Ambrose of Milan, who had died a few years before Augustine’s “City of God” was written, may have been the last of the Early Church Fathers to believe that the Second Coming was to be a physical return of Christ which would presage the end of the whole world, and that it was imminent. Ambrose was absolutely correct that the end was near. His end was near.

But if all Christianity depended upon the philosophical premise that the Second Coming and the final judgment were imminent, there would be no such thing today as Christianity. If the substance of Christianity was no more than an Apocalyptic prophesy, as a religion it would have failed as soon as it became evident that the final conflagration wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. And of course in the case of several streams of Christian thought – or denominations – back in those early days, that is precisely what happened. They failed because they were too heavily invested in the fulfillment of a prophesy that didn’t materialize according to their precise instructions. The Church, as we know, continued. As She does to this day.

I think the people who believe in the Rapture and the Tribulation, and what have-you – (these being new terms for a very old idea) – are merely in the tradition of Ambrose. Just as so many Jews had longed for a political Messiah who would right wrongs in a worldly way and on a worldly scale that inclination – perfectly natural – is still with us today.

Of course, there is also a dark side to the idea. Some of us long to be able to say “I told you so!” Some of us long to be rewarded for our suffering in this life, and our righteousness in the face of our enemies. “Take that – all you non-believers!” As they are consumed by the flames of Eternal Torment we righteous folks can watch as we are lifted into Paradise. Is such a notion really appealing? Really?

No, of course it isn’t. Do we all follow our beliefs to their foundations to see whether they are founded upon anything other than empty air? No – in fact, very few of us do. If Christians are worthy of Paradise there would have been no need for the Christ, for the only Christian worthy of Heaven is the one who offers to take the place of another that is condemned in Hell.

To this day my Church tells me the end is near; that the end is always near. If I ask, “Do you mean my own personal end?” the answer is yes. If I ask, “Do you mean the end of the whole world?” the answer is yes. Is there a contradiction? No. If there will come a mass Apocalypse does it mean that there is no personal Apocalypse? No. If there will come a personal Apocalypse does that mean there will never be a mass Apocalypse? No.

The real question, therefore, isn’t when or precisely how the end will come, but how should I row my boat in the meantime? The answer comes: gently down the stream, and merrily, for life is but a dream.

Religion isn’t really about life after death. How could it be? Nothing is known about life after death, so how could a religion be about something like that? Religion is all about life after birth.

And here we go again. Somebody’s going to comment that “life after birth” sounds too much like “afterbirth” – as in the remains of muck that follow us out of the womb when we are born. OK – have your fun. But someday, when I’m being lifted into Paradise and you’re falling into the flames of Eternal Torment we’ll see who gets the last laugh. So there.

Why Fiddle Faddle?

2011-05-14T04:55:00.001-07:00

Robins are not overburdened by intelligence. I’m watching him now. He has been fluttering himself into the same window for three days. It seems to be his full-time occupation. I don’t know where he is finding the time to eat. I can see that he is eating, however, and I also observe that he is not suffering from constipation. This morning again, at first light, he has taken up his station.

I had told my story of the robin to a couple of customers. It was the first who said that robins are not “overburdened by intelligence,” and I thought the phrase was cute so I repeated to the second customer, and she reacted by defending robins from what she thought was my assault upon their characters. “How could you be so judgmental of robins?” Well… I… I… What do you say to that?

Anyhoo, the silly daft bird is still at it. I don’t have pets because I live alone and pets would limit my freedom. But there’s an instinctive desire in human beings I think to adopt and befriend non-human beings. In my case I adopt and befriend birds. They are lower maintenance creatures than a dog or a cat would be. I’ve observed that the smaller birds – hummingbirds, finches, chickadees – are generally less easily frightened than the blackbirds, jays, robins, and so on. The chickadees in particular seem to be completely unafraid of me. Yesterday morning one lighted on top of the shepherd’s hook about six inches away from my face as I was filling the feeder – just waiting for breakfast.

But feeding wild birds is impossible without also feeding chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons; skunks, rabbits, deer, and Lord know what else. I never know what sort of non-human being I’ll meet on my front porch in the morning. At what point do they become pets? This morning as I’m preparing to leave for Long Island I have spent about an hour filling up feeders, making sure the nyjer seed socks on the apple tree are full, the black oil sunflower feeders are tied up so the raccoons won’t drag them away – (the greedy blighters) – and also insuring there’s a sufficient quantity of cracked corn in the trough for the crawling creatures.

Jimmy cracked corn, and I don’t care…

I don’t play God with people, though. If birds can take care of themselves then I’m quite certain that people can too. In one of my last Blogstream posts I had written about radio dude Glenn Beck’s perennial question, “Are we capable of governing ourselves?” and my answer to that: No. “We” are not capable of governing ourselves. “We” are not capable of anything but destruction and madness, tyranny, oppression, warfare, torture, and all sorts of evil stuff. That’s what “we” do. “I” am capable of governing myself. “I” am capable of goodness, of kindness; “I” have the ability to love, to create, to produce, and to contribute. Are “you” capable of goodness too?

Beck asks the wrong question. The answer to his question will always be no. It is not the Liberty of “the people” that fuels the engine of human goodness; it is the Liberty of the individual person, self-owned, self-governed, that advances the human condition. That very common misconception is what is called populism, I suppose. Last month I had written about my personal liking for Trump, but I believe that he is essentially a populist. Huckabee is definitely a populist. Some of the most likable people are. There is a terrible danger, however, in substituting the “we” for the “I.”

Sure, likable people can be wrong. Why do I like certain people? I don’t know. The other day on Facebook – and I’m still trying to figure out the point of it, and beginning to realize there isn’t one – I wrote that I was going to have my teeth fixed on Saturday, (which is tomorrow, as I write this), so I’ll just start screaming in pain now, in anticipation of the event – “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh…” Later in the same day I added more “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh’s.” I’m being “cute,” right? I’m reaching out, being sociable… whatever. My post attracted a comment from a friend, and we chatted a bit, back and forth. And my ex wife, who as you may know lives a few miles down the road here, “liked” my screaming in pain. On Facebook “liking” something could mean any number of things. I like all sorts of people in the Facebook sense, in that case.

I could post “I just cut off my toe” on my Facebook “status,” and a concerned friend might then hit the “like” button to let me know that my statement was acknowledged. So, the next time we spoke I would say, “You like it that I cut my toe off?” Well, no, no – he or she was just trying to say… never mind.

So who do I really like? I like Cain quite a lot. Being a dreamer and an idealist in writing, however, I am a realist when it comes to politics. I don’t give much for his chances, based on the usual barometers for the sort of thing, speaking objectively. But we must dream. (See my last post.) Driving on the bridge, with the skyline of Manhattan visible in the hazy day, I will observe, as ever, that the city is made of dreams. Those buildings are dreams; somebody dreamed them. The bridge is a dream; somebody dreamed it. Things are thoughts, and built things are things imagined.

But anyhoo, I’ve got to get on the road so I don’t end up stuck on the Cross Bronx Expressway at five o’clock in the afternoon. I’ve done that. I don’t ever want to do that again. I think the birds will be alright on their own.

And here I am. (It is the next day.) I had bought a box of caramel Fiddle Faddle to munch on for my drive. Why Fiddle Faddle? Am I insane? I have teeth that are extremely sensitive to sweets. They are also extremely sensitive to hot and cold, lukewarm, and Wednesdays. So, for four hours I drove with exclamations of “Yum yum, OUCH! Yum yum, OUCH!” Why didn’t I get beef links?

Reading “Tom Sawyer,” the last book in my year-long exploration of the complete works of Mark Twain, I came across this description of Huck Finn: “Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time that is not money.” I thought that was enormously funny – troublesome superabundance.

The Most Beautiful of Dreams

2011-05-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

Mark Twain

I have a new stereo amplifier. It’s cool. It’s got pots. I like pots. It’s a hybrid between digital and analog. I guess that would make it a digi-log or an ana-dig, or… something. Gentle Giant’s “The Power and the Glory” (1973) is playing right now. Envy me.

Yes, the hummingbirds are back. I saw the first one today. He buzzed right by my head to say hello. I have a new feeder for them. I also found a cottage style wild bird feeder on the side of the road. My younger son was freaking out when I stopped to pick it up. He said, “You can’t take that – It doesn’t have a ‘free’ sign on it!” My first reaction was to snap “Watch me,” but instead I reassured him that things left on the roadside don’t always need a sign. If it was a grand piano I might feel strange about throwing it in the back of my car, but… Anyhoo, it needed a little duck tape to put it back together, and it ain’t pretty up close, but the birds won’t mind.

It’s a beautiful world, isn’t it? A doctor’s visit costs about 25 or 35 bucks. Gas is under a dollar a gallon. Everything’s affordable again, even luxury yachts and jet airplanes if you’re fabulously wealthy. Mom gets to stay at home. She doesn’t have to go out and slave away at some demeaning job. There are plenty of them to be had though, if that’s your thing. As a matter of fact, there are so many jobs we’re importing people from places like Iran and Syria to do them. There’s a steady flow of immigrants, and even here in the country I’ve got a couple of neighbors from… oh, Lord knows where, who come by to practice their English over coffee.

The best part is you can go from one long, beautiful week into the next, from one long, beautiful month into the next, from season to season and from year to year without ever once coming into contact with the government, or without ever once having to think about it. There are some exceptions, of course. Down the street from me is one of the fifty people in this county that have to be on public assistance. I guess she must have to deal with the county government at some level. Some people actually like it. I know at least one former congressman. He wasn’t mine – came up here to raise alpacas. He was there when they scrapped the income tax. He could tell you a few stories.

I went over to a friend’s house to watch the space launch last week. You know I don’t care for television but I couldn’t miss seeing the United Nations building launched into orbit. It’s a small world after all, so pretty and blue…

Now, tell me about your dreams. What kind of world do you want to create? I like mine best, of course. I call it America. I doubt you’ll be able to do better. But I love hearing from others. The White Lodge is all about ideas. I guess my question is when did we stop dreaming? When did we forget that we are gods, and all of us children of the Most High?

I don’t pretend to have a great mind, but by definition great minds are concerned primarily with ideas, or principles. Ordinary minds – sort of in the middle – are mainly concerned with events. And small minds – probably the majority or at least a very large minority – are concerned with people, or personalities. That’s the breakdown, as far as that goes. I don’t really have a great mind, but I aspire to it. My heroes are people like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Theresa Avila, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, George MacDonald – people like that. I’ve always wanted to be like them, ever since I was a little boy wondering what I should be when I grew up.

You know, when you kill a man you kill a man, but when you kill yourself you kill every man. So said G.K. Chesterton. When you kill your dreams you’re killing everybody’s dreams. There’s a world of difference between acceptance and resignation. We must learn to accept a less than ideal reality for one reason and one reason only: to understand what must be changed about it. The purpose of this life is to make reality resemble the most beautiful of dreams, and when you stop doing that you are dead inside, just a useless husk occupying space. When you give up on the dream, that’s resignation. When you say “It doesn’t do me any good to dream,” that’s resignation. When you give up the idea to the mob, to the small-minded, you’re finished. Do you see what happens when you do that? Don’t do that again.

Anyhoo, I have a new stereo amplifier… a coupla birdfeeders…

My younger son is the originator of “pickle monkey,” by the way. He also once quipped “Amish leads to nothing but trouble.” He is a natural epigramist.

And I was going to write more but I had one of my sleepless nights, and that puts me in a rush this morning. I’m losing the use of this computer later on today, so I’ll be going back to quite periodic posting, but before I do I thought I should spend some time visiting you. I have your blogs bookmarked on my phone, by the way, and I can read them every day. But I can’t comment on most of them. Sometimes I can get through on PaulV’s. So, even though I can’t actively participate all the time you should know that I am reading, and it inspires me to write so that a few times a week I can post something from the library.

I felt like posting an old picture of the White Tornado because when I think of beautiful dreams, and regrets, it is she who comes to mind.

Gotta go.

No Man is an Island

2011-05-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

Being able to smile again – that’s the ticket. What shall I not do? It seems a small thing, but it’s not. The thing is, I never thought of myself as vain, and still I don’t think I am. My son is often impressed that so many people know me, and greet me warmly. Perhaps he’s more impressed because of their variety. He knows about my being in AA, and I’ve explained that like as not I know many of them in that context, and he knows about the jail and why the deputies all seem to know me. But I’ve long felt self-conscious around people because of my teeth. There’s a few I’ve mentioned it to who have said they’ve never noticed, and I know they’re being sincere. It’s hard to believe, but I believe them. I was at Our Lady Rosa Mystica a few years ago, and there was a fellow there who told me he prayed fifteen Rosaries every day, and I believed him. Why not? But there’s some as would say such a thing and I’d know they were bragging. This particular fellow was not. He had passed beyond caring whatever impression he gave. He was just saying a true thing in the hope that others would join him, for the sake of all the people in the world that don’t. You can tell sincerity by certain means you’re not fully aware of. It’s still a deductive process rather than an intuitive one, but you don’t necessarily know what your mind is observing in order to reach its conclusion. Long experience gives you what you call a “sense,” for lack of a better word. In that way a few people told me they never noticed how bad my teeth were, and I knew they spoke true. But nevertheless, it bothered me. There were times when it would have been all that I thought of, and I was unable subsequently to act as I should. It seems a small thing, but it’s not – it’s a big thing. It’s everything. It’s perception.

How many times have I said it? We live on wavelengths of our own perceptions; we live within separate but parallel dimensions. A person that was once invisible to me may become visible, or vice-versa, because something about my perception has changed. I sit here in a semi-dark room writing, and somewhere far away one of you is thinking about me. Down on Long Island Dad is thinking about me, or my sister. High over the Pacific Ocean the Princess gives a thought to me, and where she’s headed there’s a fellow who thinks of me now and then, too. No man is an island. Giving a conscious thought to that sort of thing is a doorway in perception. When you pass through such a doorway you alter your wavelength just a little bit – like fine tuning an old radio. Stop thinking about me! I’m becoming quite paranoid now. But I can’t stop you from thinking about me anymore than you can stop me from thinking about you. I’m thinking about my Aunt Joan right now, this minute, and there’s not a darned thing she can do about it. Changing my perception changes how I relate to people and situations, what I choose to do, and even who and what I see. That’s why religious people pray – it changes perception. My prayer tonight is the Scotsman’s Prayer: “Lord, grant me a good conceit of myself.”

Who would think such a minor thing as new teeth could change so much? Well, ten years ago a minor thing like quitting drinking changed the entire world for me. Suddenly I lived in a new town populated by new people – people I had never seen before. And, the people I knew, and had known for years, gradually began to disappear. There was only a handful that existed in both worlds. That was a small act that opened a big doorway from one dimension of existence into another. I wonder if you have any idea of what I’m talking about.

It is time I moved on to something else – to general relief. I wish to grow black-eyed Susans in the front of my house, so many of them that you would see little else when you approached; so many of them that you might be inspired to say “Now there’s a man who likes his black-eyed Susans!” People who drive by on the road may know nothing else about me, except that I like black-eyed Susans, and also totem poles and crosses. I also like the deep yellow-gold that some people call saffron because when it is combined with the rich, dark red of my doorways and trim it compliments the goldenrod that grows profusely around me in the autumn and makes the dark green of the grass pop out starkly. Today I looked at pictures of lilacs, which grow best in climates like mine that feature very cold winters, and I thought a hedge of those might be nice on the eastern side facing the big view and the beaver pond.

And speaking of beavers, I’ve seen Leopold out and about a few times, once crossing the road in front of me. I said “Hiya Leopold!” and he looked at me before disappearing behind some rocks at the pond’s edge, and I knew if he had been in the water he would have slapped his tail at me. He really should know by this time that if I had wanted to eat him I would already have done so.

Yesterday there were turkeys under one of my birdfeeders and several large, colorful migratory birds with beaks large and distinctive taking their turns traveling from the feeder to the apple tree, and back. I don’t know what they are called because I have no interest in birds – except to look at them – but they were here for a short while last year too, so I am assuming that I am a stop along their way. I think I may have mentioned the goldfinches and red finches are sometimes so numerous that you might think my apple tree had blossomed in birds. They join the chickadees on my porch rail, watching me carry more seed out for them. But for me it is the hummingbirds I await with the greatest sense of momentousness. I expect them soon, and I expect that they will be the same birds who settled here last year. Scrawny and drab when they arrive, I am pleased to contribute to their plumpness and restoration of hue. Hummingbirds are not easily affrighted once they get to “know” you, and they will come quite close – just a foot or so away – to allow you to get a good look at them. They follow the sap-suckers north because they feed from tree sap through the same holes the bigger birds are able to make with their woodpecker beaks.

Is this the White Lodge or Walden Pond?

My favorite little critters are the myphets, of course – oh it is the White Lodge, after all – but they are here all the year round.

I know a man who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for immortality. He reasoned that if he were given infinite time he could work great wonders and do many beneficial, altruistic things. The Devil warned him he would become very bored, but this fellow I know wouldn’t listen to him.

Well, once he had immortality – his soul being the price – he set about trying to work his wonders. He worked for many, many years to solve the problems of the world, hunger and warfare, sickness, and so on. But after about a thousand years he became extremely frustrated. His efforts, though well-intended, managed to change conditions only a little. An improvement wrought in one area somehow caused a problem in another area, and this man I know was spending his immortal life racing around the globe to fix again the same problems he had thought he fixed before. At last he wondered if the Devil had not tricked him somehow. He wondered if the Devil had given him immortality but taken away his natural ability to be great and to do great things.

So he summoned the Devil again, and challenged him about this very thing. And the Devil told him, “You’re a fool. Throughout all of history the people who accomplish great things do so within the course of their natural lives. In many cases they do so in the course of lives that are shorter than most others. The quality of their character has nothing to do with how long they happen to live. If you are great then you are great despite your circumstances, but if you are ordinary you are ordinary no matter what may happen to you. If you were capable of accomplishing the things you’ve set out to do you wouldn’t have needed immortality to do them.”

So, the Devil gets the last word today. Awesome.

My Thirty Minute Porridge

2011-05-03T05:12:00.000-07:00

Good morning.

No eggs. I had porridge and bacon instead, a good Victorian breakfast. Dad puts off-brand instant oatmeal in the nuker for two minutes, and he has a full kitchen with a four burner gas range and all. I simmer McCann’s on my two burner hot plate for thirty minutes, stirring it occasionally, stirring it impatiently. And there’s no real temperature control on the hot plate. It’s either full on or off. You can boil water and you can burn up anything you’d like, but simmering is a matter of switching it on and off periodically. Getting the timing just right whilst reading a book is a matter of long experience.

A man without a mate is an unpredictable creature; some will tell you an undomesticated one. But I have always been a duster of surfaces and a stirrer of simmering porridge, not the instant oatmeal in the nuker sort but a maker of waffles from his own proven recipe sort. Still, I am undomesticated in my way.

In my case it’s not having anybody to answer to. That’s the beauty of living alone for a decade or more. A guest is never an intrusion, but rather a treat. And that’s a rarity. But to awaken every morning beside some other person whose manner and smell of flatulence I know as well as my own is alien to my understanding and only dimly remembered – like punching a time clock. Did I ever live that way? Yes, and no – it wasn’t me; it was somebody who became me, and those memories are like remembering a movie I’ve seen, without feelings connected to them, nor even regret.

The difference between the man that is domesticated and the man that is not domesticated is really all about ritual, and that’s not to say it is a minor difference. No indeed, it is a major one. Some people will tell you the rituals we human beings create are artificial and superficial, but some people will tell you all sorts of ignorant things, (and having children teaches us how to listen without hurting their feelings.) Ritual imitates Nature.

I like going to weekday masses where there is little singing and the order of the liturgy is all I see. I like being able to play my part without being distracted by variety, or delays in the cadence as we wait for some new untried theatrical element to get into position. My Dad goes the other way with that sort of thing, preferring the spontaneous to the learned by rote. He substitutes “You” for “Thee” in his prayers, as if it matters, but the difference is distracting.

We had a conversation about this very thing a few days ago. He had long ago eschewed the sort of marathon prayer style of his youth in favor of a less formal and deeply personal approach. I grew up in a Church experimenting with all sorts of daffy digressions from tradition – sometimes it seemed merely for the sake of digressing – and it was from that visible and too visibly flawed Church that I wandered away for so many years, not the Invisible One.

I long for the most profound anonymity in prayers recited as though they were incantations, while he raises and lowers his voice in inflections intended to draw attention to the meanings of individual phrases and words. I pray like a Buddhist and he prays like a Protestant. But, paradoxically, I think the more rigid the form the more latitude it offers the individual who seeks enlightenment the opportunity to receive; and the more loosely fitted the ritual is the more distracting it is to the efficacious transmittal of God’s Word to the individual’s heart. In my experience there is greater benefit in the trance-like repetition of formal prayer than all the spontaneous outbursts of enthusiastic sentiment you can shake a stick at. (And why on earth do you go around shaking sticks at people? Stop that!)

But, goodness gracious – is Dad’s way “wrong?” No, of course not. I just don’t happen to relate to it. But the problem with the American Church in the 70’s that I wandered away from was that She tried to make everybody conform to Dad’s way; She tried to become trendy when that was the trend. This created an environment more limiting to individual enlightenment rather than less so. And where did I go? I went into Buddhist centers where I found prayers in a language so alien to my own that there would be very little danger of becoming distracted by their meaning.

Finally, I said to him, “What is it ultimately that prepares us to communicate with God – is it our own intellectual understanding and our own personal enthusiasm, or His Grace?” And of course we both agreed it is the latter.

We create ritual – his two minute Oatmeal, my thirty minute porridge – because it is the way of Nature. The sun does not vary in its daily track across our sky. All Things are ordered in Ways. And, if I were a married man – domesticated in that married way – my rituals would be rather different. They wouldn’t be “my” rituals, but rather “ours,” my every thought and word, and action being that of a spouse. For instance, I would most likely be wearing clothes right now. That would be awfully uncomfortable. On those rare occasions when I have a guest it’s a treat, but every day? Forget it.

My telephone dinged me when Rosie’s comment on one of the last couple of posts came through, so I read my e-mail. I get automatic morning updates from Newsmax and the New American, and from those I see that Osama bin Laden is dead. Immediately an e-mail message arrived from one of my leftist friends asking me if I was happy to hear that bin Laden was dead. Well, no – of course not. How could one person’s death make another person happy? The death of each person diminishes me.

If the death of one person could bring victory over the ideas he represents then it would make no difference if we just waited until he died of old age. Everybody dies. But no – his successors were chosen and trained years ago. It is ideas, not people that are good or evil.

If you’ve decided you’re going to fight a war there is only one valid reason: to win. Winning may be defined in different specific ways but generally one side wins when the other side loses the will to continue fighting, and surrenders. The result is called peace, and it is not the war that is sought as an end in itself but the peace that is sought, the peace that follows victory. Many people say, although they do not really believe it, that peace is what happens in the absence of war. But there is no such thing as the absence of war, so by that definition there can be no such thing as peace. No – in the absence of war there is oppression. War commences once again just as soon as those that are oppressed become willing to wage it to overthrow their oppressors. And, just as death comes to each of us, no matter what form it takes, it is only a matter of time until war recommences.

My pacifist friends say “Why must there be war?” and I say “Because I will wage it when you threaten my Liberty.” That’s all. It’s very simple.

So I have a question for you. Can you name the two (or more) free-market capitalist republics with constitutionally-limited governments respecting the individual rights over the common good that have been at war with one another?

World peace is theoretically possible when all people live in such a way as is briefly defined above. I say theoretically, for how can we know until it is tried? But under any other circumstance it is not even possible theoretically.

What are we really saying when we say that we are “anti-war?” Are we saying that we are anti-sunrise-tomorrow? Are we saying that we are anti-death? Most people who say they are anti-war are really saying they are pro-oppression. They think, mistakenly, that their elitist wisdom will enable them to oppress the whole world permanently, to crush freedom in the world so thoroughly, that its people will never again gain the will to fight them. They don’t know that’s what they are saying, but that is what they are saying.

So, can you name the two (or more) free-market capitalist republics with constitutionally-limited governments respecting the individual rights over the common good that have been at war with one another?

While you’re thinking that over I’m going to run down to the store and buy some eggs.

The Hole Tooth, (And Nothing But)

2011-05-01T05:47:00.000-07:00

This is Timmy Tooth.

Say hello to the people, Timmy.

Timmy and his brothers Tommy Tooth and Mister Bloodpuss, (not pictured here because they’re too damned ugly), will be pulled out root and branch in two weeks, (which sounds excruciatingly Biblical), and temporarily replaced by something called a “partial,” (to which I am not particularly partial), and then replaced more permanently once the ground from which they have been so violently uprooted stops screaming with something called “implants.” And to say that these implants will be more permanent is to understate the case somewhat, as they will be made of the same sort of material that archeologists take such delight in digging up after 2,000 years and declaring “This was part of a ceremonial tea cup – we think, or maybe a testicular guard of some kind, but anyway it’s really old.”

So, long after all of Timmy’s other relatives – and it’s not a small family – have disintegrated into tiny dust particles these implants will be intact to be misrepresented by archeologists in the distant future. Or, perhaps they’ll get it right and say that these were dental implants from way back in the day when we still had teeth, and these – ah – implants came from the subject we’ve named Clarabelle because we think it was a woman – and of course in those days we still had sex. And we are still testing the – ah – implants to try to determine whether the subject we call Clarabelle did indeed have sex, but so far we have only been able to – ah – determine it wasn’t very recently.

Anyhoo, I would play the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” in the background here if I didn’t hate it. But if you like the song, just imagine that it is playing in the background because it says what I need to say, and also I want my Mommy. (Or, perhaps in keeping with the archeology theme, my mummy).

When my children were teeny things we kept a teething toy in the freezer which we called the Boo-boo Bear because it was shaped like a friendly bear, (and Lord knows there are so many of those). And when the boys suffered a boo-boo of any kind – it might have been a cut toe or a skinned knee – they would demand the Boo-boo Bear to suck on, which did their skinned knees absolutely no good, but at least it stopped them from bawling.

So I came back to my Fortress of Solicitude today, after having the impressions taken and sent off – along with Curtis Mayfield – to the lab where the “partial” will be assembled, I think completely, and made ready for my return two weeks hence.

The dentist Dad recommended was quite excellent, and also fashionable. On him the black executioner’s hood looked good. When he was saying “I’m going to ask you constantly about your comfort” I was hearing him say “I’m going to show you the instruments of torture.” In the adjacent surgery I saw a man strapped to a table with a giant blade swinging like a pendulum over him, back and forth, and forth and back – (it’s bisexual) – and a massive black pit nearby where I am assuming the yucky stuff goes whenever the dentist says “Now spit.”

But the whole process was entirely stress free and painless. Taking the X ray and the impressions was the easy part, needless to say. The goo the impressions are made of – a sort of modeling clay mixed with toothpaste flavor – actually removed things from my teeth my own brushing had apparently missed. I had no idea toothbrushes missed so much. There were the usual particles of stuff I’ll not describe, but also an airline boarding pass from 1985 – (I always wondered what became of that) – a ticket stub from the movie “Chicago” from a few years back, a curling iron – (in case I should run into women in straitened circumstances) – and a certificate of live birth issued by the State of Hawaii, as well as a few unidentifiable and indescribable items.

I then had the choice of either joining my brother and his family at the Bronx Botanical Gardens or racing back here to tell you all about my adventure, and obviously I chose the latter.

So there it is, in a nutcase – that is, nutshell. I’ll be returning in a few weeks for the main event and living in abject terror of it between now and them. And in the meantime I’ll be certain to share some of my neurosis with you because I know how much you enjoy it.

I Now Have the Head of Herod the Donald

2011-04-29T04:45:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post about the New York subway system and the Empire State Building; how these are marvels of engineering and architecture, and how I seriously doubted that such wonders would be built in this nation today. You may remember it: “Bring Me the Head of Herod the Donald.” Under the oppressive weight of self-created fear, self-inflicted and self-destructive regulatory humbuggery, and all the other nonsense of our currently trendy nanny-state mentality, Americans lack the will to build a marvel of anything – unless it’s a marvelous new law forbidding any individual achievement at all. In my post I called for the great builders of old to return from wherever it is they are hiding – (which is unlikely to be Galt’s Gulch, so I suggested we might look in Dubai) – and restore us to our former greatness.

Like all White Lodge posts the title was chosen from either a word combination within the body of the post, or a play on words, or some such thing. My titles are often ancillary to my point, and that’s something I do more for my own amusement than for any other reason. In this case my title was a reference to Donald Trump, the real estate giant, developer, Reality TV show personality, and possible presidential candidate. I’m not getting into politics – don’t worry. But I will say I’m really warming up to him personally.

I don’t watch TV. I don’t have one. The last time I was really connected to the pop culture he was being divorced, or was divorcing – I can’t remember which – somebody with very big teeth named Ivana. (That will tell you how long I’ve been away from the chatter.) I knew about his show, “The Apprentice,” and I knew that saying “You’re fired!” was his commercial hook, or catch phrase – just like “You’re a haaaaaaaaard man, McGee!” for Hal Peary back in the day. I never saw “The Apprentice” but I once saw an ad for it. In other words, I knew very little about him, but I did know one thing for sure: Donald Trump would have the courage and the will to build an Empire State Building or a New York subway system. The point of that post was that it is individuals that create great things. Groups may tear down great things, but only individuals can create them. All goodness begins not with the “we” but with the “I.”

My interest is in principles, not personalities. Of course there are personalities I like, but I tend to choose such likes and dislikes based on my own moral compass, and I couldn’t give a rat’s ass what the trend of public opinion may be once I’ve set my mind to a thing. I decided to personally like Trump based on the handful of interviews I’ve heard him give. He says just what he means, which absolutely does not define the politician, and he demonstrates confidence and a sense of humor. It is those qualities, rather than his ideas, that make him quite popular as a potential candidate in these absurdly early days to be polling such truck. I’m sure you’re reading a massive number of in-depth political analysts explain the anti-politician sentiment behind that data. I have nothing to add to their shallow perspectives unless it is to say that an anti-politician sentiment is like anti-dismemberment sentiment. It rather goes without saying.

I think people like him because they know he is capable of building something. I am being serious about that. Here’s somebody that has achieved much standing in a field of others who have achieved little, or worse, others whose business is not achievement but rather the suppression of achievement. Why do Americans like achievement? Because it is what we do, dammit. We are damn sick of hearing all about what we can’t do, or what we oughtn’t to do.

I know about ideology and how to articulate it, and most people don’t, and I get that. I sometimes despair of people’s inability to grasp ideas, preferring instead to dwell upon the addle-headed vacuity of personality. But frequently people intuitively grasp principles their minds are not large enough to name. Why is Trump so popular with potential voters so ludicrously far out from the election? Perhaps it is because people do intuitively understand that this is a nation of rogues, giants, leaders; and that such people built it. Only such people can rebuild it. We don’t have “workers” here; we have employees. We don’t have any “masses” here; merely people. We don’t suffer fools gladly either, as a general rule – or at least not for long. But the bottom line is we appreciate achievement.

Achievement is not a thing a group does. It is something each individual in a group may do, but great achievement is a rarity of certain select individuals. Ayn Rand is much in focus once again, owing to the recent movie, and owing to the dreadful consequences of our follies. Say what you’d like about Rand’s philosophy, but she is right to say that it is such individuals that move the world. This is just basic basic basic basic basic moral principle.

Could the man I dubbed Herod the Donald make a good president? I don’t see why not. Experience in private enterprise ought to serve a nation quite well that is founded on private enterprise. But, for a number of reasons his nomination and ultimate victory are extremely unlikely. A politician will be elected president next year. A politician – the lowest form of human life, down there with lawyers, journalists, and bloggers – will be chosen to sit at the helm of a nation of people a hundred times his worth. Perhaps it is God in His wisdom that makes it so.

Politicians aren’t born, as you know. They are made. The reason? They have no balls – can’t breed. It’s very sad.

Just for today, however, I am heartened by the popular interest in Trump because I think it indicates the type of qualities people are looking for. They are looking for an American, which may come to mean that the winner will be whichever politician acts most like one.

Being an American means believing in an idea, or a number of related ideas. That’s my bailiwick. That’s what the White Lodge is interested in – ideas. Being an American has nothing to do with a person’s skin coloring or sex. It has little to do with his or her personality. Religion matters insofar as religion is also about ideas, but it’s not religion that defines an American either. Being an American isn’t even about nationality, technically-speaking, as we are most of us mutts of so many mixed origins. Being an American has everything to do with believing in individual achievement – the ability to build things, to create, to innovate. Having the liberty to do what we do, the nation advances, the world advances; the human condition advances overall. Lacking that liberty, or stifling our own better natures, the nation crumbles, the world suffers; the human condition devolves into chaos. So Trump’s popularity gives me cause for optimism. Let us hope his unscripted candor and fearlessness sets the tone for the politicians to follow.

If You Should Meet The Squabbler, Kill Him

2011-04-28T05:14:00.000-07:00

Why, this is the first day of the year that’s hospitable to human life – about 80 degrees, sun shining most of the time. I’m in a very good mood, overall.

I’m going back to Long Island this weekend so that a man I’ve never met can put his hands in my mouth. (He’ll get paid to do this, too.) I’m talking about a dentist, of course. I guess we are supposed to try not to think of it that way, but I also suppose it could be much worse. He could be a proctologist, or an urologist, for instance. He is neither of these things. You know about me and my mouth, right? I hate kissing because it involves putting my mouth against somebody else’s mouth, and just writing about it gives me the creeps. I’m not a good dental patient. But my teeth are very, very bad. It has to be done.

I’m missing both my eye teeth so I’m thinking of getting vampire teeth to replace them. That might be worth the agony. I’m already beginning to resemble Nosferatu the Vampire, what with my shaved head and my great love of long black coats with fur collars. Knowing when to turn into a bat is very important. If you do it at dinner that’s bad, but as an entrance it’s tres recherché.

Anyhoo, I’m looking forward to that – or looking forward to being able to look back on it, to be precise. You know I like to be precise. I hardly ever achieve it, but I do like to be precise.

I have very little time to write this week. I did have time to read “Huck Finn,” though. As you may know, I’ve been plowing through the complete works of Mark Twain. That was my wintertime project. I’m nearing the end, having three major novels to go, and one more book of collected stories, articles, and essays. I saved the most well-known for last, though not for any particular reason really. Oh what fun! I feel so connected to Mark Twain. Nobody tells it so tall and so bald-faced. I laugh until the tears come.

Hey, I may go see “Atlas Shrugged” again while I’m there. I see how the distribution has increased from 300 to 1,000 theaters now, owing in large part to some great web marketing, and plugs from Sean Hannity and a few others. There’s no doubt curiosity is playing a part in it, too. I know I panned it, but I pan everything. That’s the way I appreciate it. I criticize, I pick apart. It’s the same with music. I can’t listen to music properly when there’s another person around who doesn’t happen to be critically minded as well. He (or she) will end up saying, “Why can’t you just enjoy it?” And of course I am just enjoying it, but this is the way I do it. This is my mind. It’s not like most other minds. Between my ears there’s a piece of wood that just happens to be infested by very intelligent and highly quarrelsome termites. I’ll disagree with a phone book.

Yes, and I’m handsome too.

During the height of The White Lodge on Blogstream I interacted with more people than I believe I ever had before. Half of my visitors didn’t read my post and half again of that half merely skimmed enough to be able to leave a comment pertinent to what they seemed to think the post was about. In result their comments were sometimes hilarious. A smaller number read what I had written entirely through, and their responses reflected it. A handful of them got the jokes, and out of that number perhaps only one of them thought they were funny. (Today I find that I keenly miss a fellow who went by the name Biggie T because his comments not only demonstrated his grasp of the content but he would also pick up on my most obscure joke and take it a step or two further.) I loved them all, especially the ones that disagreed with me. A few of us are here. I guess that’s the only reason I go on. But my purpose in writing about this is to say that I got a sense, a kind of cross-section view, of how my fellow human beings tend to flow, what they respond to, what matters to them, or whatever it is that drives their trains. If you should ever meet the man who has the key to every human mind, kill him.

When I was in Grade School learning about Ralph Waldo Emerson I observed aloud in the classroom one day that if “To be great is to be misunderstood” then most of us have that qualification clinched. My teacher tried to explain that to be great is to be misunderstood among other things, but I let on that I couldn’t grasp that and proposed the corollary: that to be misunderstood is to be great. And she, the poor silly thing, thought that I was demented. In reality I was merely misunderstood. But my subsequent mirth earned me an extra homework assignment. The one other person in that class who found the exchange humorous became a close personal friend of mine.

Anyhoo, I’ll leave you in the Squabbler’s hands as I “man up” and get my teeth fixed. This is from “Out of the Blue.”

The Age of Reason

The Moral Law is not a law in the same way the seat belt law is a law. It is a law the way the Law of Gravity is a law. What Socialism failed to take into account is John owns John. That’s all. When you attempt to defy gravity you fall down. When you attempt to do a thing opposed to the Moral Law you meet resistance, and then you are forced to resist the resistance; hence the wars and conflicts of the Twentieth Century. John owns John, and John is responsible for his own happiness. Deeply planted into the heart of each individual human being – in fact, at the very point of Creation – is the yearning for liberty. It is like gravity. It can’t be broken. That yearning is called God by some religious people, but non-religious people also understand that it exists, like Paine attempted to postulate in “The Age of Reason.” The best way for a non-believer to approach Moral Law is through the equation, “My liberty is God,” or Liberty = God. In other words, I believe in my freedom; I worship my freedom; I defend my freedom.

Now this is interesting, as long as I’m wandering into religion: Judeo-Christian tradition is fundamentally and universally constituted by the essential idea of man’s relationship to God being one of a child to his father, that God is the father of man and that man is therefore His son and heir. Islam is based in the foundational belief that God the creator is not the father of man, but rather the master of man; that the relationship that exists between man and God is that of a slave to his master. The premise is completely different. We must bear this most significant fact in mind as we grapple ever so slowly but inevitably with the obvious conclusion that commonality between these points of view is an impossibility. Individuals belonging to these fundamentally different traditions may find all sorts of latitude for the exchange of love and friendship, as I know from my own experience, but institutionally these belief systems cannot peacefully coexist. There will always be conflict between the premises John owns John, which is essential to all Western morality, and God owns John, which is the Islamic idea. Several years ago I began to study the Koran under the guidance of a Muslim friend who has helped my understanding tremendously. The reason Islam is compatible with Socialism is that the latter by definition replaces God with the state, and an Islamic state is a theocracy in which God is represented by the authority of government. Modern day Socialists have found themselves inexplicably allied with deeply religious people, which appears quite contradictory, but in reality it is not inexplicable at all. Socialists attempted many times to infiltrate and co-opt Christianity – liberation theology, for instance – but found that the philosophies were fundamentally at odds. In Islam they have a religion that can be used theoretically to serve their ends; and the ends, as you know, justify the means in their way of thinking.

I remember hearing the word “polarization” quite a lot last year and in the year before, and I think it’s important to understand what it means. Nothing about whatever the reality is changes because people think differently about it, or because their perception of it has been altered. As you know, I am a former member of the Progressive Movement, specifically a communist when that was the fashionable word, and most of my interest in these matters stems from those years of experience. And, like any convert, I tend to be more passionately interested in my subject matter than many who have never questioned or significantly challenged their own beliefs. So in a sense, I was always polarized, first on the one side, and then dramatically turning to the other. Now millions of others are just beginning to see aspects of their realities that were obscure to them before. That’s an indication that fundamental conflicts within the society are less obscure, or closer to the surface, than they were. But the conflicts were always there. It was inevitable that it would escalate, and it will continue to escalate until there is a winner in the conflict. It is a moral conflict, as I’ve said time and time again. What does that mean? That means it is a conflict between truth and untruth.

Now, there is no compromise between truth and untruth, despite whatever the so-called moderate person might say. A person who identifies himself as a moderate between such theoretical extremes is merely saying that he is still ignorant – and I don’t mean that as a pejorative but merely as a logical conclusion. He is agnostic, or without sufficient knowledge to make an intelligent decision about which side to be on. If he doesn’t believe that there is such a conflict between extremes as I have described I can’t blame him because he honestly doesn’t see it yet. I believe he will. Everybody has his “tipping point” – that’s a term I’m hearing quite often these days. Until then I cannot argue with him, because until then we are speaking different languages. I can attempt to persuade him, but my efforts will have little effect until he is able to recognize the moral nature of the conflict. Polarization is merely the process people go through as the moral conflict becomes more visible so that they can now recognize it and make a decision about which side of it they are on.

You may recall the movie “Independence Day.” I’ve made this reference before. In the movie aliens from another planet attack the Earth, and at a certain point one of them is captured and interviewed by the president. When the president, in an effort to find common ground with the alien, asks “What do you want from us?” the alien responds, “We want you to die.” That’s the nature of the moral conflict. It is a conflict that cannot be concluded without one side winning and (obviously) the other losing. There is no possible compromise. There is no accord. There is no common ground between the opposing sides. In our case the sides are ideas, freedom or tyranny, self ownership and self governance, or totalitarian absolutism based in a moral falsehood. In a moral conflict, just as may be the case between my Muslim friend and me, individuals have the option to “agree to disagree” with love, which means understanding that they cannot ever possibly agree, but on the institutional level the sides cannot peacefully coexist forever. There will come a reckoning, just as surely as tomorrow follows today, and just as surely as each of us travels towards the inevitability of a personal apocalypse. Polarization is one sign that it is nearing.

I would add to what Squabs says here that there will always be people who cannot be made aware of the existence of a moral conflict. He doesn’t think so. He seems to think he holds to key to every human mind. Maybe he does. I don’t know.

My Plutonic Relationship

2011-04-24T11:44:00.000-07:00

For days I have been casting around for something to write about. Forsythia is all that keeps coming to mind, and driving the three and one half miles for coffee at the 7-11 in Halesite with sleep covered eyes. Visiting home used the mean trouble – sweet trouble like leaving my wife for a pretty, skinny girl who would give me two children, and trouble always happens in the forsythia full springtime.

Our conversations – Dad’s and mine – keep coming back to mind as well. They were mainly philosophical, for what else does a squabbler discuss with his father? A few topics of a personal nature came up as well, but mostly my interests centered around those points you already know of, as I have discussed them here. I showed Dad this blog on his laptop computer, and read a few passages. His favorite topic was Mom, and their relationship is Platonic. What does that mean?

A Platonic relationship has somehow come to mean a close, intimate relationship that excludes physical sex, but that meaning is ridiculous. Plato proposed that each of us is incomplete in and of ourselves, and therefore longs to find completion in a union with another. That this union should not include sex is a preposterous Puritan addendum that finds no footing in Plato’s premise. A Platonic relationship means more generally an ideal or “perfect” relationship, and any man is blessed beyond measure who might claim he has such a thing with his wife.

I intended to write about that but it makes me quite sad because… Well, you know the because. I’ve search my dream from birth to grave to birth again these 3,337 years and found it not – this relationship, this completion.

Are my emotions genuine? No, they are not really. This is what comes of being the Squabbler. I have never experienced a genuine emotion. At back of them is the constant realization that this life is a dream and real thoughts don’t happen here but merely their reflections. (Dad and I were caught up on a snag about emotions being no more than a form of thought, until eventually I realized he was defining thoughts differently than I was; but by that time the point had become fatuous anyway so we let it drop).

Dreams: I love to write about dreams, which is exactly the same as my saying that I love to write about life.

My wife is being pursued by an amorous fellow from Virginia who is an electrician, the saints be praised, because I need an electrician here to hook up my 220 V current so I can use my new range; and he took one of the cookies she had baked (burned) for me, but I didn’t mind that because it was Lent. When he took his leave of us – we were in a public place – he leaned over and kissed her goodbye.

“You like them to be assertive,” I observed in the car later, or next. She told me again (and again, and daily again) how she wished I were more assertive, and how the boys are too much like me and not enough like her. In the back of the car, with the seats folded down, was my father’s body being preserved for the undertaker in a bathtub full of brine. It had been my older boy’s task to take care of it, and he was doing a good and conscientious job, but he had to get to somewhere – perhaps to his job, (and that is how I know I am dreaming.)

Why should I care about these trivial things that people seem to care about? You may remember I wrote about my view on Sports, and how I was unable to pretend to have an emotional connection with one team over another team for the whole matter to me is meaningless. So it is with many other things, like who gets into the parking space first, or like the curious and irrational notions of women. I can’t make myself think as they do, so what do they value or esteem? It is a mystery.

By the way, a cadaver has never left our house except in the care of Pink Floyd, which is the name of our undertaker. He “sets the controls for the heart of the sun,” and that is how you know my age.

Earlier we – my sons and I – had gotten off the elevator on the wrong basement floor of a hospital, and the windows were tinted in such a way that the sunlight gave off a quality of darkness which was quite remarkable. To get back across the lake we had to find the RV camper, which was parked amongst others so very tightly that maneuvering it was very difficult. Fortunately, it was also a boat. It was a house-boat-car. What a wonderful world it is that has such things in it!

I was trying to show my son the video comment that the Princess had left on my Facebook page responding to Whit’s contribution about Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Have you seen it, by the way? It’s remarkably funny.

I was at first anxious about the Princess becoming a White Lodge reader since I tell so many tall tales about her, but it really has worked out well.

In the video she is trying to back her car out of a garage to the tune of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” with many fits and stalls because she famously cannot drive for love or money and is banned in fourteen states and six other nations or principalities from doing so.

Our last meeting was strained, actually, so I’m pleased that I am forgiven. I had in my pocket the broken plastic egg, and it only occurred to me when I showed it to her that it would hurt her feelings to see it – to be reminded. We had words then. She accused me of being jealous of her affair with a fellow we both know. I reminded her that she had declared she hated him – that he was despicable – but that her protestations meant she was in fact attracted to him, (which is so typically the case with absurd females); and reminded her too that I am incapable of experiencing jealousy.

I said, “How could you sleep with him? You always told me he was repulsive.”

“You’re jealous,” she shouted, “You and your broken egg…”

“I’m not jealous. I don’t get jealous. I’m incapable of being jealous.”

She replied, “When you are awake, yes, but you are dreaming right now. You’re free to be jealous in your dreams. You’re free to have feelings.”

I was unable to get the video to run on my mobile device, having seen it only the once, and my fear – this was early this morning – was that when I awoke I would find that it never existed at all. But my son didn’t mind if it turned out that such was the case because my description of it was vivid enough – perhaps even better.

There is a fellow I know a little – an older fellow, “salt of the earth” sort – who frequently complains that he has trouble with what he calls Plutonic relationships, and I keep meaning to set him straight about his pronunciation but haven’t yet gotten the chance to take him aside. I know how it happened. He has never heard of Plato but he has heard of Pluto, so when he first heard the term defined by its context he processed it according to his own lights. If he is having trouble with Plutonic relationships indeed, he means that he is having trouble with his relationships with dead women, for Pluto is either the god of the underworld or an animated Disney dog, or an asteroid that used to be a planet but has since become merely an asteroid again.

Is this real or is it dream? It’s all dream, my friends – all dream – just on different levels.

I think of Lou Reed’s song, “Satellite of Love,” which was playing in the car yesterday and has been playing in my head ever since then. Can you hear it too? I hope so. I want to be able to make you hear what I hear and see what I see. I hate it that you cannot come into my mind, and that my words are so inadequate to our perfect union, for such a thing is all I have ever wanted – that is, to be a part of something. But, since I am the Squabbler, it is more fitting to say I long that everybody should become a part of me.

I hate it that we are not the same.

We were out at Sand City – Dad and I – watching an osprey build a very large nest atop the cabin of an old boat that was moored close by when my phone informed me the Princess had commented on something. I tried to take several pictures with that cell phone in the fierce wind, but managed only to take pictures of my eyeball because I was looking through the wrong orifice. I thought, “To thy orifices, be all my sins remembered.”

Later, as we sat down to eat at a place in Northport, I read her comment. Something about my page was “unnerving” she said. I fired back with, “What do you find unnerving, my dear? Namaste.” And several moments later she replied with, “Namaste the YIKES doll. Catch you in August.”

What in the blazes?

Well, Pepe the Horrible Man Puppet strikes again. Somehow he had become my profile picture, which means that somehow I had managed to make him my profile picture whilst fumbling with my big fingers on this teeny tiny cell phone keyboard of mine. How on earth do millions of teenaged girls manage to skip their fingertips over these devices with such speed and accuracy as they text message about their Platonic love affairs?

St. Augustine tells us that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and this is really what is meant by the Platonic relationship. Our longing to find completion in our “other half” cannot be satisfied by another mere person, but only by Him. That some of us are called to seek Him through marriage is evident, for such was the case for Mom and Dad, and the perfection of their union – unique in my experience, and impossible to imitate or to duplicate – was formed not by their well-intentioned efforts but by their God himself who ordained that it should be so with them.

I would say that their marriage was exemplary except that an example is something that can by definition be duplicated or imitated, and I have never seen anything approaching the perfection of their union – not in all my experiences of observing others, and certainly not in my own twisted, tragic, comic relationships with women.

So I have found something to write about at last.

On Palm Sunday – one week ago – we ended up going to the children’s mass because the church was full. Actually, the way it happened was this: We arrived to find there was only one space in the parking lot left, and Dad told me to get out of the car so that he could pull into it (for it was narrow), and just as I was getting out another car darted straight into it. Dad shrugged and drove off to find another space across the bridge that spans the Mill Pond, and out of that aggressive car there spilled a nuclear family with the wife saying, “Hurry, or we’ll get stuck in the children’s mass!”

When I met Dad halfway on the bridge, and we walked together to the church, it suddenly seemed that the children’s mass was just where we belonged that day, and that is how it came to be that we were later seated on metal folding chairs without kneelers in a very plain basement that resembled a Grammar School auditorium, surrounded by notes we could not possibly project the range to sing.

Happy Easter to one and all. He is Risen, so that we might be. For our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee. When this dream ends our thoughts will be real and our feelings will be genuine. The world of dreams and shadows will grind to its end. There will be no more need to dream and pretend.

Save the Myphets

2011-04-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

My visit home was quite good. How could it be otherwise? I didn’t see anybody other than Dad. My brother was horribly sick with some kind of tummy flu, and my sister was out of town. What did I most enjoy doing after driving for four and a half hours to get there? Why, more driving of course. I absolutely love to drive. The forsythia is beautiful at this time of the year down on Long Island. It grows here – to a point, but nothing so full and as profuse as it does there. Apart from the daffodils which seem to do rather well almost everywhere, our blooming season doesn’t really get going until lilac time, and that’s a month off yet. It’s enough just to see some greenery appearing out of the mud. So this is a very good time of year to travel a temperate zone southward, just to get a preview of what the coming weeks will bring our way. We have hearty azaleas here too, but again they are nothing like the dense house-sized hedges that grow on the Island.

That does depend on the size of the house, of course. Several years ago I was contracted to do a window washing job on a new 10,000 square foot house hereabouts, where a place of such size is quite unusual. As one approaches the neighborhood where I grew up on Long Island, however, houses in the 6,000 to 10,000 foot range line both sides of the road by the dozens. Many are quite old and rather stately looking. Mixed in between them are the inevitable “McMansions” or hodgepodge houses of no particular architectural style because they attempt to show off features of every architectural style. I see a new one each time I visit. It doesn’t bother me until I see one that blocks one of my favorite views of a better house. There’s a brick Storybook mansion on that road that I’ve appreciated ever since I was a child. When the front door is open you can see through the house the setting sun over the harbor. I like that it takes full advantage of its position because nothing so improves upon the pristine beauty of Nature as does a beautiful building.

My own neighborhood is not so grand, but its geography is just as picturesque. Dozens of smaller houses, each in its individual style, are arranged on the hillside overlooking the bay on haphazard, twisting terraces joined by steep one-lane roads. Our house stands at the top of that hill. It has a look that I would describe as… lived-in. My Dad calls it “Tree-tops” because… well, because that’s what you see when you look out the window – the tree-tops, the roofs of the neighbors’ houses marching down towards the beach, and the wide waters of the bay beyond, a peninsula or point of wooded land on the other side, and the distant shoreline of Connecticut floating on the Long Island Sound beyond that. (That’s what you see when there are no leaves on the trees. During the summer you see… tree-tops and that’s about it.)

Anyhoo, he doesn’t want to sell the house because of that view, among other reasons I’m sure anybody who has lived in a family or ancestral home would understand. He grew up there too. So it’s very special. At top is a picture of the general neighborhood. The mansion pictured here at left is Coindre Hall where I once worked as the projectionist for the Suffolk County Indian and Archeological Museum which was at that time housed within. My job was to show the film “I Shall Fight No More Forever” over and over, and over again. A great film – and I should know. Also pictured is the Immaculate Conception Seminary where I was employed for one horrible month as Third Cook. The highlight was being able to walk the grounds on break, or visit the lovely chapel, or the fascinating crypt.

I didn’t see any political campaign-style signs on the lawns, come to think of it – you know the type, like Real Estate signs. (And there were certainly plenty of those.) Where I live such signs are ubiquitous. I’m in a state which is being (hopefully) developed by natural gas exploration and drilling companies. As I’m sure you can imagine the fight is contentious between the opportunity-seekers and the “Got-mine-already-too-bad-for-you” crowd. I characterize it that way because I think that’s what it really comes down to in most cases. The villages, predominantly populated by medical professionals, teachers, state employees, and the like, are chock full of signs reading “No Drill, No Spill,” which when I first saw it I assumed had something to do with sexual abstinence as birth control, and the hill country, where the “help” lives, is peppered with signs reading “Friends of Natural Gas.” The division between “classes” – if there is such a thing in a country with unlimited movement between them – is stark. Why is that?

I am reminded of a phenomenon I observed a few years ago when I was covering the Town Board and Planning Board meetings for the local newspaper. Most of the inhabitants of this area are transplants from – well, from down where I originally came from. I’m a transplant too, (even though I’ve “gone hillbilly” as one might say ‘round here). People moved up here – and I moved up here – to find something we had lost. As the pace of life in the suburban centers of New York and New Jersey increased, we longed for a past we seemed to recall when alarm systems were unheard of and you could let the kids wander hither and yon without fussing too much over their welfare. It’s the old cliché – we moved up here to get out of the “rat race.”

Well, I observed over time that mostly everybody running local governments wasn’t from around here. They moved here and then they said, “OK – no one else is allowed to join us.” Never you mind whatever the genuine or indigenous “locals” might have made of this invasion of full-time tourists; we were here to stay, and just as soon as our 10,000 square foot home on the hill is finished we’ll be damned if we allow any more of them to be built. I was bemused.

When I moved up here I didn’t bring myself with me – which is a good thing, by the way. I wasn’t a very nice person. I moved up here to find something I had lost too, but what I had lost was myself. Being a “local” is a state of mind, really. Instead of changing the place I moved into to make it resemble as closely as possible the place I had just fled, I embraced what is. I moved into the house pictured below.

Yes, this is the cover story of “Country Living” magazine – or it ought to be, if the editors gave a damn about reality. This dwelling happens to be abandoned, but there are many like it that are inhabited. This is what it’s like in the hills where I live. This is where we need not a hand-out from a corrupt, immoral government that can at best provide no more than a survivable poverty, but an industry that can provide opportunity and growth. The people in the villages can declare “No Drill, No Spill,” and I suppose it makes them feel good, but the “help” wants a chance to make a fortune too. Perhaps that’s why the issue seems to be divided along those demographic lines.

It’s curious, really. “We” – meaning Americans – have been able to afford to import almost everything we consume from other countries. We have triumphed over the brutal sweatshops and belching smokestacks of our nation’s adolescent period, having now grown into maturity and moved beyond them. That seems to be the narrative, in any case. The reality is that we’ve just farmed out the sweatshops and smokestacks to countries we don’t have to offend our delicate “go green” sensibilities by looking at; we enjoy our lives in the god realm, in the Garden of Eden, because others are doing the dirty work for us. People living under Socialist regimes that have no recourse, no rights, no liberties, are toiling for low wages in horrific circumstances so that we don’t have to toil at all. In places where the people can’t complain the natural environment is being polluted in ways that we haven’t seen here in… well, perhaps we’ve never seen the like here. And, if we really care about “the planet,” what do we think that must mean? I think it must mean the whole planet, not just our corner of it. Our corner of it is very pretty, and very clean, but only at the expense of the rest of it. When it comes to defending the natural environment our protestations are utterly symbolic and ultimately idiotic.

What disturbs me most is that we can support ourselves entirely if we still had the will to do so. And we would do it better, more responsibly, more efficiently than anybody else in the world. Let us ask ourselves, if it really is “the planet” we care about, who is more trustworthy? Aren’t we better equipped to extract the gas, the oil, or whatever it is, than the rogues’ gallery of inhuman monsters – dictators, gangsters, and the like – that comprises the United Nations? I think so.

Why do I think so? I don’t think it’s because we’re better people. I think it’s because we have a better idea. That better idea, over time, may have made us into better people, but it’s the idea that makes all the difference. Between private and public interests there must be an adversarial relationship, as we enjoy here. That’s the better idea. This is the right function of government – to be the adversary, because only when government is the adversary can it be controlled and properly used by the people to defend their personal rights.

Wherever the private and public interests are the same, such as in a Socialist country, or wherever they are in collusion, there is nothing to prevent the excesses of industrial development. To whom can the people bring their grievance when the government is the industry and the industry is the government? This is why the filthiest places in the world are in Socialist countries. Regulators don’t regulate themselves, as we often hear it said; but it is absolutely true. In such places it is the environment that suffers just as the people do. I think we can do it better, cleaner, more productively, enriching ourselves in the process rather than enriching the demons in the outside world.

Do you follow my polemic?

I don’t actually live in that house pictured above. Y’all get that, right? No, mine is up the road a piece from that one. That’s an old deer camp, actually. I took that picture a few years ago. I think the structure may be gone now. I haven’t been by there in a while.

But to get back to the lawn signs, it seems like just about everybody has caught the craze, and I wonder how it is that these signs aren’t considered pollution. I’ve wondered the same thing about “Posted” signs. There’s a fellow in my son’s class at school who shot another student last year, and then himself – in the village police station of all places – who has become a local cause celebre. Both kids are OK, coming away from the confrontation with minor injuries. The shooting was prosecuted as a “hate crime” by the local powers-that-be because the boy that was shot is black, and I gather that everybody involved, including the victim, (and excluding the aforementioned powers), thinks it ought to be reversed and the young man either released from jail or treated for his mental illness somewhere less like a jail. I have my own ideas about so-called “hate crime” laws, which you can probably guess at rather accurately, considering my literalist tendency. (Which is why you love me.) But what I mean to say is that he has a lawn sign too. I noticed them popping up everywhere a few weeks go – “Save Anthony” is what they proclaim. I’m going to make one of my own because I feel left out. I’ll have to come up with a good epigram. My front yard may be littered with signs by the time you hear from me again.

No Short Cut to Objectivism

2011-04-19T06:01:00.000-07:00

J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” novels were famously impossible to adapt to film and for decades we endured animated cartoon treatments, but the impossible became possible eventually and Peter Jackson’s three very faithful and extremely successful movies were the result. Who could have imagined that Disney would produce C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” without dramatically altering the story’s message? But they did.

I had dreaded the release of David Lynch’s adaptation of the epic Frank Herbert Science Fiction novel, “Dune.” It was terrible, but visually and stylistically stunning in parts. A made-for-television version which came out almost a decade later turned out to be quite good, however. A BBC production of Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” was… fair. These were all stories which were considered impossible to realize on film. Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” was another, though definitely for different reasons. And now, as you know, that’s been done too.

“Atlas Shrugged” is difficult to bring to the screen for different reasons. In the case of Tolkien’s stories it was mainly technology that was lacking. “The Rings” was an allegorical fable about a fantastic place populated by fantastic creatures. But in 1957 “Atlas Shrugged” might easily have been realized cinematically without the aid of computer graphics technology and the other special effects innovations that would eventually make “The Rings” possible. The difficulty presented by “Atlas” was its message, and “Atlas” is not an allegory. There is no way to deliberately ignore what “Atlas” is telling us. While perhaps millions of people over the years – and this may apply especially to the Hollywood film community – are too stupid to understand that they are the Orcs and other evil nasties of the Dark Lord in “The Rings,” there is nobody who can either misinterpret or merely miss the fact that “Atlas” is exposing many of the same cherished falsehoods about the promises of Socialist collectivism. In other words, you Progressives know who you are. Perhaps you are able to enjoy the wizardry and elfin magic of “The Rings” without understanding that you are the enemy because the message is couched in allegory. But when we read “Atlas Shrugged” – although it was written over fifty years ago – we cannot help but recognize in the words of Rand’s villains the talking points of Progressive liberals in our own time. They don’t change. “Atlas” goes to the heart of the moral conflict which is polarizing the nation and Western Civilization as a whole. Reading “Atlas” today is particularly chilling because it would seem that Rand must have written president Obama’s speeches for him, and the people in her book who are giving voice to those speeches are the bad guys.

If I wanted to introduce somebody to “The Lord of the Rings” – somebody who has never read the books and is never likely to read them – I could with confidence direct him (or her) towards viewing the film versions. A Tolkien purist can point out their inadequacies, but the meaning of the stories is there, and the spirit of the stories is there. I wish I could say the same for the film version of “Atlas Shrugged” that I recently viewed. It cannot replace the novel for the non-reader, so if I had a friend who simply refuses to read a book – much less a novel of 1,100 pages – and I wanted to introduce him to Ayn Rand, this film simply would not suffice. It seems there is no short-cut to Objectivism.

Having said that, it’s not terrible either. If you’ve seen the preview and the two selected scenes that have been available on YouTube for a few weeks, you’ve seen the best of it. This movie is “Atlas Shrugged” flavored, as if it were a type of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. There’s nothing in it that isn’t “Atlas Shrugged.” The problem is that there is so little of it. The audience for this film has been significantly underestimated by this treatment. There is no reason to leave out what this film has left out. There is no reason to turn “Atlas” into a fast-paced tale of corporate intrigue and political corruption. It is that, yes- but it is so much more. The bones of the novel – or some of them anyway – are well enough delineated by this film, but the “so much more” is almost entirely absent. Do I recommend it? Yes I do, provided it inspires a person to read the book. And it may.

Produced on what I understand is a very low budget – $10 million being low, apparently – and brought to the screen with breathless speed, the film manages to present a slick look. I’ve read some reviews that poke fun at the film’s use of stock images, but I wasn’t bothered by them. (If critics like a low budget film its low budget is the thing they mainly like about it, so taking that angle is specious.) No – what I didn’t like was the film’s fast pace, which guaranteed the subject matter would get only superficial treatment. Missing is Francisco D’Anconia’s “Money, the Root of All Evil?” speech, for instance, which I had hoped to see (and hear) in at least an abbreviated form. The scene is faithfully enough reproduced otherwise. (On my sidebar is a link to a full reading of the speech on YouTube, in two parts. It is essential to an understanding of “Atlas.”)

I could pick apart a few more disappointments, and I know that doing so will put me in the same category as the Tolkien purists I mentioned above. Perhaps I am an Ayn Rand purist. So be it. I will say this, however: The novel would have to be adapted as a multi-part television series in order to depict all of its events, but the childhood story of the main characters can’t be merely skipped without a subsequent lack in understanding of their relationships to one another, and this movie merely skips it. In the book, Dagny Taggart, the protagonist, is revealed as a young girl possessing very definite attributes of character that can’t be inferred from Taylor Schilling’s portrayal of the adult Dagny by itself. As for that portrayal, I think more skillful editing would do wonders for her. She has the character. She knows Dagny. But there are several scenes in which she seems to be carried along by Grant Bowler (who plays Hank Reardon) and Graham Beckel (Ellis Wyatt).

Bowler and Beckel are the real talents in this movie, by the way. Bowler is an actor with skill, and if Beckel may be limited in range the character of Ellis Wyatt is perfectly suited to that limitation. And speaking of which, when I re-read the novel last summer (whilst working on my tan, which was magnificent by the time I got to Part 3), I pictured Joe Don Baker as Wyatt. Who wouldn’t? He is of “a type” without question. Beckel does a great job.

Jon Polito as Orren Boyle does that amazing thing with his tongue that made him so irresistibly slimy and sinister in “Miller’s Crossing,” and Michael Lerner does credit to Wesley Mouch. I imagine that bringing Ayn Rand’s villains to life must be good fun for an actor. He can imagine his “favorite” congressman, union boss, or corporate lobbyist, and just ham an impression until the cows come home. I’ve read several viewer reviews on line, and two professionals, who see Barney Frank in Lerner’s Mouch. (I see the physical resemblance, but dude you got to get the voice down!)

Overall however, the performances don’t rank with the best of the art. Again, I think much more could be done by way of fine tuning the film edit. As the film races too quickly towards the conclusion of Part One, our heroes drive from Colorado to Wisconsin without it seeming as if it took three and half days to do it; and then Dagny by herself drives similarly epic distances cross country, perhaps without making a costume change. I’ll have to watch it again to be sure. The problem there is a classic one of film continuity. You can do that sort of thing in a novel because the reader will fill in the blanks from his or her own life experience. But film is a different kettle of fish. I didn’t go to film school, but I don’t need that qualification to see that was surely amateurish. After taking so many liberties with removing great chunks of the story you would think the filmmakers might have risked changing a few things as relatively unimportant as the settings for the sake of having a climax that doesn’t run the risk of being unintentionally funny. Why not put the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Idaho? What difference does it make where it is? You can’t be a stickler to the least important aspects of “Atlas Shrugged” while gaily skipping over some of its most important ones.

I’m not telling you not to see the movie. I want you to see it. Do it… for me… because… because you love me. At the very least, get the DVD version when it comes out. Or better yet, read the book.

If after seeing this film you are inspired to read “Atlas Shrugged” then this surely was a great film. No other consideration is important, in that case.

By that same token, if after reading my (largely) bad review of the film you are inspired to read “Atlas Shrugged,” then this was surely a great blog post.

My point is that even a top-notch film adaptation – which this was not – can’t replace the novel. The best any film of “Atlas” might have done is to promote the book. It cannot substitute. There is no short-cut to “Atlas Shrugged.”

And that goes for this little blog of mine too. I can’t do for you what Ayn Rand did for me, and has done for so many others. The best I could hope to say with this post I have already said: read the book.

The success of the novel over the decades has very little to do with its literary merits, which are audacious even if they are technically clunky in parts, but has everything to do with its message. “Atlas” changes the reader’s perspective by offering him an intellectual challenge he has probably never been offered before. It directly attacks the reader’s a priori biases, many of which he has been educated to believe without question, thereby opening his mind to thinking – perhaps for the first time in his life – in a critical, objective way. Progressives, people on the political Left, largely the people of Academia, the mass media, and so on, have brought “contempt prior to investigation” to a level of high art. Their approach to “Atlas” is predictably hostile and just as predictably void of substance because they have no argument. They have hatred; they have prejudice; they have deliberately cultivated and perpetuated ignorance, just like the villains of “Atlas.” But they have no argument. “Atlas Shrugged” opens the reader’s mind where it had been closed, replacing indoctrination with persuasion. “Atlas Shrugged” respects the reader’s ability to grasp the moral challenge it offers. It doesn’t “dumb” itself down to preach a set of magical principles that have no foundation in logic – “floating premises” as I call them here in The White Lodge.

I had so profoundly wished the movie would impart that same gift. Sadly, it falls short. But if it leads us to read the book upon which it is only superficially based then I will gladly continue to promote it.

A Nice Pear

2011-04-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

The next time I post I hope to be able to share my review of “Atlas Shrugged.” I am going to New York City to see it, and to visit Dad while there. The film is being distributed independently, with theaters being added as demand allows. (Only in Marketing could the word combination “demand allows” have any meaning.) The DVD ought to do quite well. Of course, there is opposition to the film’s release from the Progressives. The “good-hearted” political Left excels in obscenity, death threats, and the usual nonsense. This stirs up further excitement for the picture, of course. The distributor will be able to sell the film as “the movie they don’t want you to see,” which should guarantee them a brisk business. Provided the filmmakers have done the book justice, I do certainly hope it does well. Coen Brothers alumnus Jon Polito is in the cast. I loved his psychopathic Italian gangster performance in “Miller’s Crossing.” I suppose that is what he is best known for.

I associate “Miller’s Crossing” with courting my wife, so I’m sentimental about it. There are several films we saw together that I can no longer enjoy as I once did because I seem to have become more discerning since then. When it comes to excessive film violence and other assaults on our souls from Hollywood my former callousness has all but vanished. Scenes of carnage and bloodbath that I used to be able to take in stride now disturb me. I think a conscience is like the human lung. (What!?) Well, I understand that when a smoker quits smoking his lungs begin to clear up almost immediately, and that within five or so years they can recover to a point where it would seem he had never smoked at all. I also understand that sometimes the damage is beyond complete repair, but it is nevertheless a seemingly miraculous phenomenon that occurs more often than not. The human body is amazing, but more so the human soul. Just as the five senses are to the mind of a man, his conscience is to his soul. No matter how far down a person has gone, no matter what his depth of worldliness and depravity; he begins to recover immediately upon turning his sight to the good.

I know people who admire worldliness and believe it to be a virtue. They believe it is good to be connected, or plugged in, to the “culture.” That’s in quotes because it’s a word to conjure with. What does it mean? Well, it used to be that to “have culture” or to be “cultured” meant being able to appreciate the Opera without nodding off. Being cultured was a good thing. (And if you were milk, being cultured would turn you into yogurt.)

When I was young my school field trips would take us – my class and me – to see things like the Opera. Or, we might go to an art museum. Exposure to our culture was, my teachers believed, an integral part of a Liberal Arts, or Classical, education. I may be remembering it all wrong, but I don’t recall ever hearing the word in any other context. It would certainly never have occurred to me to think of my favorite television programs as being part of culture.

At some point I heard the term “pop” culture, short for popular culture, and it didn’t mean the Opera. What did it mean? Well, it seemed to mean everything that wasn’t culture. Anything ephemeral to the actual culture seemed to be lumped under the catchy term “pop culture.” In other words, if culture describes everything we choose to keep and cherish, and preserve for generations to come, pop culture describes everything we throw away. It describes disposable arts, disposable entertainments, and disposable and ever-changing fashions – trends. Pop culture describes trends, basically.

I think people may have started to use this rather technical term to elevate their own art work or entertainment for marketing purposes. They would say, “This is culture” a hundred or so years before we would ever be able to find out if it was indeed culture; that is long before we would know whether it was culture or ephemera. After all, determining what a society chooses to keep and cherish, and preserve for generations, and what it will merely throw away, takes some time. Artists and entertainers have to eat – same as the rest of us – and nobody should expect them to wait a hundred years to get paid, so… it’s culture. Never you mind whether it’s really culture – we’ll call it that, just for giggles. We’ll call it Pop Culture, (with capital letters, thank you very much), because it represents the way “we” live now, or five years ago, or two weeks ago. Oh Hell – did we ever live that way? I don’t remember.

When somebody uses the word “culture” you’ll probably want to ask him what he means, otherwise the rest of your conversation may be ridiculous. What I started out by saying, before getting sidetracked, is that many people believe that it is virtuous to be plugged in to the Pop Culture. I will sit in my reading chair of an evening, and if the climate seems to call for one I’ll burn a fire in my fireplace. I have a nice stereo. I like all kinds of music, but profanity in lyrics is an immediate turn-off for me. So, let us say that I am listening to Arvo Part’s “Litany” while reading Aldous Huxley’s “Those Barren Leaves,” and drinking green tea in my reading chair by my fire. Am I plugged in to the culture? I suppose it must depend on how you define it. I think I’m hard wired into the culture when I do that. Am I being worldly when I sit in my reading chair by my fire listening to Arvo Part, drinking green tea, and reading Aldous Huxley? Or, am I only being worldly when I’m sitting in my hot tub, getting a back rub from a prostitute, and viewing on my gigantic flat screen TV the video of “My Milkshakes Bring the Boys to the Yard?”

(Damn right, they’re better than yours…)

I don’t know. What do you think? Perhaps I am being worldly either way; but it’s just that there are two different worlds. Now, if I could afford the hot tub and the prostitute perhaps I could combine those two worlds by reading Chaucer while receiving my back rub in the hot tub. There’s a thought…

Perhaps it is my parochial school upbringing that is the inspiration for my knee-jerk negative reaction to “worldliness,” or being worldly. I’ve long associated it with ending up impoverished and dissolute, slopping a pig sty in some far-off land, like the Prodigal Son. That doesn’t sound like something to aspire to. My culture – defined as the way persons in a society of persons relate to their God – seems to value austerity and renunciation, which is the opposite of worldliness. Of course, there’s the “balanced” approach. That would mean I have milkshakes better than yours and a fashionable string of prayer beads around my wrist.

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. I can give you several much better reasons.

Anyhoo, St. Augustine is next to my bed. I’m reading it a chapter at a time, after flying through the first book. He confesses the sins of his infancy, though he cannot personally recall them, by observing other infants’ behaviors and assuming that his own were roughly the same. Of course, what he was doing was trying to establish that we are not born free of sin, that we bear the stain of Adam’s sin ancestrally. This was to further establish and consolidate the power of the Church. We’re still arguing about it, and if I used his argument in a debate on the subject, word for word, without changing it all, it still wins on the basis of its logic. (And, what other basis is there for an argument?) This is what I do for fun. Am I a freak? Yes.

He also confesses to stealing some pears with a group of other youngsters. He was a teenager then. Teenagers got up to the same sorts of things in the Fourth Century as they do today. His sin was the greater, he reasons, because he did not need the pears. In fact, he had better pears growing in his own family’s garden. His sin was the greater because he was led by the cajoling of his peers to commit a theft that had no purpose except that it was a theft. Stealing the pears was far more delicious than the pears themselves, most of which they threw away. A pagan would call that impulse the Imp of the Perverse, or to do wrong for the wrong’s sake. It’s human nature. But that’s Augustine’s whole shtick, after all – sin.

What impressed me was how much he would go on about it. Their idea of sport in those days was gladiatorial combat and atrocities, and here’s Augustine crying out from his dung heap of remorse over a few pilfered pears. I thought that gee, my Twelve Step inventory didn’t go back quite as far as that. Maybe I should do another one including all my youthful peer pressure sins. But the good news here is that it leaves us absolutely no doubt that IRS agents go straight to Hell. Of course, I could have told you that without dragging St. Augustine into it.

Pears are interesting, aren’t they? I had a pear tree at The Little Dump on the Prairie. They tasted absolutely horrible. They looked nice, though.

I’m thinking of the woman (Eve) in the C.S. Lewis novel “Perelandra” who couldn’t at first understand why if the first bite of the fruit was delicious she ought to take a second bite. She asked if the second bite would taste better than the first. The answer was no. So, why in the world have another bite? Now, there’s somebody without sin. I believe her milkshakes were probably better than yours, as well. We are told that she had a nice pear.

Those novels would be very interesting on film – The Space Trilogy, as they are called. And wonder of wonders, it may someday happen. I’ll go see it, in that case. But, first things first: “Atlas Shrugged” is being released on Friday, April 15. I’m making my pilgrimage, on my knees. And I’ll return to tell you all about it.

But I’ll tell you one thing right now, for free: It had better not suck

The Intelligence Spinners

2011-04-03T06:14:00.000-07:00

I’m about to lose my daily computer, so I’ll be back to catch-as-catch-can posting, but I’ll try to be here as much as I can. I had considered hooking up at my home, but now that this blog is well established I realize that it is unnecessary to compromise my commitment to renunciation in order to continue writing. There are grave dangers inherent to being “plugged in,” which you know I abhor.

It has been wonderful to find a new home here on Blogger, and to find so many of my friends here. And it has been fun to play with the widgets and the page elements. Take your time with this one. It’s more Squabbler than John. Most of you know my life story which is like a crazy quilt of clashing patterns and colors, and that I have some credibility from my personal experience when it comes to this subject. I have laid my head down many a night in strange places, safe houses, and the like; and for several years I was dedicated full-time to a Communist secret cell organization, a mere splinter in the vast Progressive cult movement. I will never forget what I was trained to think, and how. I know these people like I know my family. Bear that in mind.

I’ll probably be able to read comments on my cell phone, but I won’t be able to reply until I can find a live computer. Perhaps I’ll come across a library at some point. As I said, take your time.

I’m not exceptionally intelligent. You can tell from my writing style that I’m too impatient for true scholarship, which focuses on minute details and finer shades, and all-stuff-like-that-there. I like “big picture” thinking. I’m into the “wow” factor.

I’m very impressed by scholars. They bore the hell out of me, and the more bored I am the more impressed I become. But intelligence is by itself no guarantee that a person possesses the wisdom to discern the true from the false. Some of the most intelligent people in this world are some of the most confused people in this world. It takes a great deal of intelligence to rationalize and justify obvious falsehoods so that they can be presented as truth. I’ve known incredibly intelligent people who have tied their thinking up in so many knots to rationalize nonsense that they’ve become for all intents and purposes nonsensical themselves. They have begun with a pre-ordained “truth” which is really an article of their faith – whatever that might be – that must at any cost be protected against honest and objective examination because at its heart it is false. All of their powers are then dedicated to spinning a set of imaginary principles by which it might be true. But nothing has changed; it’s still false. When intelligence is pressed into such service it is a terrible thing. Spinning a set of imaginary principles by which something that is false may be presented as true is known as subjective thinking. We so want a thing to be true that we’ll figure out a way to make it sound true.

Everybody does this sort of thing to some extent or another. For instance, I might wish that a particular girl was in love with me. She isn’t. That’s too bad. But I can’t face that truth. So I start spinning. I tell myself that true is false and false is true. I launch my premise – she is in love with me – and then twist my mind into all kinds of knots to justify that belief, that article of my faith.

Let us consider the example of the man who, guided by his lust, is chiefly interested in being able to pursue its fulfillment without guilt, shame, and remorse. He looks about him until he finds the philosophy that tells him he is free to do so, and once he does find it he says “That is what I believe in,” and then becomes an apologist for it. Well, nothing about the truth has changed – whatever it might be. But he has meanwhile devoted his mental energies, his intelligence, to do the bidding of his crotch. He may have quite a lot of intelligence to work with. He may be articulate, (and we hope for his sake a big hit with the ladies). But, of what use is his intelligence when it is his crotch that is guiding his life?

A public opinion pollster may wish to get a particular result from a poll, but in order to do so he must phrase his questions in a leading or misleading way, or overbalance his sample with people more likely to express the opinion he would prefer to report. By so doing he will probably get the result he desires, but his intelligence is devoted to perpetuating the false.

My point is simply this: that the greater the intelligence the more resources may be available for delusion and self deception; that intelligence by itself is no guarantee a person possesses the wisdom to discern the true from the false. In fact, it is often the case that intelligence is focused on doing just the opposite.

I am not an exceptionally intelligent thinker, but I am a moral thinker. That seems to mean that with my average intelligence I can often comprehend what more intelligent people cannot comprehend. And, since I don’t suffer from whatever it is that makes a person a scholar I ought to be in a good position to articulate ideas in an accessible and entertaining way rather than bore the hell out of people.

I mentioned a few Blogstream blogs that I liked in an earlier post, and I wrote about how those that were concerned primarily with people – that is, personalities – tended to be the most popular. So I invented some personalities to write about in the hope of attracting readers to my ideas, with results both comic and tragic, as I have previously reported. But there was one blog which stood out an exception to this rule. It was “Theology for Dummies,” which wasn’t for dummies as I soon learned. That was a blog written by the pastor of a Christian church whom I would describe as a scholar. Well, the truth is that since popularity was measured by the proportion of comments to blog posts “TFD” rated quite well in popularity because with one post a week and the same six or seven people leaving multiple comments on each post – for conversations are what ensued – the blog wasn’t actually as popular as it was active. Sure, each post had over a hundred comments attached to it, but those hundred comments came from the same group of six or seven readers who conversed back and forth during the course of the week. But remarkably, it was devoted to ideas, and nothing but ideas. And it was fascinating to read. I read it every week, though I seldom left a comment.

Elsewhere on the “stream,” (as we fondly called it), reading without leaving a comment would have been considered bad manners, by the way. There was a strong social aspect to it, which explains why we Blogstreamers are so tight.

I’m not that guy – that “TFD” guy. I like to clown around at least as much as I like to talk about Augustine. And I like to clown around with Augustine too – for which I may be held to account someday. But I am someone whose distrust of authority leads him to try with only average intelligence to understand what much more intelligent people are saying to determine the true from the false, knowing that intelligence can be used just as handily either way.

Our culture respects intelligence just as I do. It may not seem that way sometimes, but it all depends on where you’re looking. People very often abdicate their own rational abilities to intellectual charlatans of the type I’ve already described – those whose intelligence is devoted to promoting fashionable falsehoods. Such people appear regularly on television to tell the predominantly vacuous and lazy television audience what to think. They are called “experts” because they possess college degrees, and the “man in the street” viewer who doesn’t have a degree, or perhaps doesn’t have as many degrees, tends to respect that. I do too. But so often when I listen to what these “experts” have to say, I, without a degree and possessing only average intelligence, can easily discern that what they are saying is either utterly false and contemptible or incoherent and subjective.

Well, have you ever considered that having a degree from a college that teaches not how to think but rather what to think may only qualify an “expert” to regurgitate the falsehoods he has been taught? The Academy – the institution of higher learning – from which he has earned his degree, may certainly be just as much a charlatan as he is. After all, he had to learn his incoherent, subjective blather from somewhere. Our “knee-jerk” respect for the university, which it earns merely by virtue of being a university, really needs to be re-examined in that light.

All I am saying is that if it doesn’t seem to be true it may not be. Question everything.

Liberty is too great a burden for many people because it requires too much responsibility. You have to do tedious things like, for instance, questioning everything. The word “democracy” is a little like the word “love.” It seems to mean so much that it ends up being meaningless. A Democracy can easily be the enemy of Liberty. Oh Lord! – How can that be? It’s very simple: if a majority of people all vote to do a particular thing that doesn’t make it right.

For instance, if a majority of people decided to arrest and execute the Squabbler and confiscate his property that would be wrong, even though the majority voted for it, because it robs the Squabbler of his Life and Liberty. You see, his Life and Liberty are protected against Democracy by the Constitution.

“Protected against Democracy? But Democracy is like fluffy puppies and ice cream, and Love, and…”

Tomorrow, once everybody has sobered up and begins to realize the Squabbler wasn’t such a bad fellow after all – but there he is, hanging, dead, oh well, don’t you feel just awful now? – the majority might think better of its folly.

OK, so let’s say a majority of people decided that Liberty requires too much responsibility. That’s not too much of a stretch as hypothetical scenarios go; in fact, I think if such a vote were taken today there would be plenty of things more attractive to most people than Liberty. What Liberty really means is to have control over your own money, how you make it and how you dispose of it. Being at liberty to travel from point A to point B without interference, or being at liberty to say “fart” on television, are secondary to that first liberty.

If a majority of people voted to dispense with this antique notion of Liberty in favor of something more attractive – personal comfort and security, for instance – what will protect and defend the minority of people who would (for obscure reasons of their own twisted reasoning) wish to remain free? The answer is nothing. Those people – that freedom-loving minority – would have to conform to the majority view and give up their Liberty or face negative consequences.

I offer this hypothetical scenario because it is exactly and precisely what is happening right now. Whether they knew it or not, that is exactly and precisely what the majority of people voted to do a few years ago.

You might say, “Well, now we have the power to change our minds because this is a Democracy, and last year we fixed that by voting for the other guys.” Wrong. That only works when both sides respect and adhere to that democratic process. What if they don’t? What if one side discarded the process by which the rights of the freedom-loving minority were defended? What if they didn’t believe in the idea that individual autonomy rather than collective virtue is the center and source of goodness? What if they didn’t believe that John owns John and Shannon owns Shannon, and Paul owns Paul, but that they own everybody by virtue of their power? In other words, what if they believe that they – not you and not I – have control over all the money, how it is made, and how it is disposed?

You might say, “But what about that Constitution you mentioned? Won’t that continue to defend the freedom-loving minority?” I’m getting to that too.

To these folks – these folks we’ve elected – the results of any election occurring after the one that propelled them into power are irrelevant. When that process works for them they will promote it, and when it works against them they will disregard it. When it delays them, or it becomes troublesome to their continual pursuit of absolute power, they will work around it. If the Constitution as interpreted by the courts decides in their favor they will applaud it, and when it decides against them they will ignore it. To them there is no objective truth, and to them there is no higher legal authority. To them, the ends justify the means. That’s their basic moral platform. Commit it to memory. Set them back a few steps now and they’ll take ten more steps forward tomorrow. A good way to remember this is by the name they call themselves: Progressives.

These are extremely intelligent people, but they have a weakness: all of their intelligence is committed to spinning a set of imaginary principles by which something that is false may be presented as true. In other words, they are instantly exposed by Reason. They have no argument. They can’t win an argument, not even against me. They create endless paperwork, mountains of meaningless paperwork, to obfuscate any trace of their larger purpose – in their own safe houses they do this, the very places they meet, it’s crazy, you should see it. They hide purpose under layer upon layer of redundant policy, illustrating perfectly that the larger the government the smaller the minds of those that belong to it. But they can be instantly defeated on substance by just about anybody with a heartbeat because all of their intelligence is committed to spinning a set of imaginary principles by which something that is false may be presented as true.

Shine the light on them and they will scatter, like mice.

They will go to any length to avoid argument, but usually by accusing opponents of being hateful or unintelligent, or unenlightened, and so on; or by attacking their personalities, their accents, the way they apply make-up, or what have you. You’ve heard it. We all have. That’s what evil looks like, and sounds like. It is irrational so it must depend upon making its appeal to the basest aspects of humanity, to the “group” mind, and from that brutish level of thinking – from the crotch – is all its power truly derived.

They will go to any length the avoid argument because their entire argument, in fact their entire reason for being, is based on a falsehood. I have called this falsehood the most evil idea that has ever been concocted by the mind of man: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Ultimately, that's all they have.

Thank you for reading.

The Smiley Face Book of the Dead, and Squabs on Money

2011-04-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

Government is the natural enemy of Liberty. The two are perpetually at war and between them there can be no compromise; only victory for one and surrender of the other.

Squabbler

I enjoyed that last post, so I'll start off in the same spirit.

One night a few years ago I was at my computer, alone in the cavernous village apartment I used to rent before I bought my house, and I heard a man’s voice call out “Hello!” I was startled, of course, and looked about me. “Hello!” came the voice again. It was mysterious. I was very near the point of dropping to my knees and saying “My Lord and My God – I’m not dressed.” But as the mind seeks an explanation for such an occurrence that suits its experience and its predispositions regarding reality, I very soon discovered that the source of the voice was my own computer. The web page I was viewing was topped by an advertisement featuring audible emoticons, and whenever my cursor would pass over one of them it would emit a sound like as to its image; and my cursor happened to be resting upon an emoticon that said “Hello!”

It was then that my investigations led me to the fateful discovery that has haunted me since; the gruesome yet magnificent and dreadful discovery that has redefined my life’s work – yea indeed, my very life itself – the discovery of that legendary book of arcane wisdom, The Emoticonicon, or Smiley Face Book of the Dead.

My sense of humor has been described in ways that would flag an adult content warning if I were to repeat them here. But it has also been described by such euphemistic terms as “dry” and often “obscure,” and sometimes in combination with “macabre,” “corny,” and “remarkably unfunny.” As I am writing a White Lodge post I often wish that I had the ability to allow the reader to hear my laughter. Perhaps, if instead of an emoticon I could insert by means of some whiz-bang computer nerd HTML code a recording of my laugh when your cursor passes over certain highlighted words, you might at least know when I’m intending to be funny – or, at which points it is safe to assume that at least I think something is funny – so that you may try to understand yourself why it might be. Besides, I have an infectious laugh, and even if my writing falls short of inspiring the same sort of response from you, the sound of my laugh might itself inspire at least a smile.

I suppose that’s the purpose of the abbreviation LOL, which I abjure using. Why? Do I believe that it is beneath me? Perhaps I am a little stuck-up, at that. I might express the opinion that having to tell your reader when to laugh by using LOL must indicate that whatever you are writing is unfunny, and yet I’m perfectly prepared to use technology to essentially do the same thing.

In Vaudeville, and later during the so-called “Golden Age of Radio,” when a one-liner went flat with an audience, the performer generally recovered by going for pathos. He would react to the fact that the joke didn’t work by saying something unscripted like, “Gee, that one worked in Peoria.” Being pathetic can be very funny. W.C. Fields made a career of it.

I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that I need a laugh track, or at least a live audience so that when all else failed I could go for pathos.

“Obscure” is the definition that probably fits my sense of humor best. There are three people in all Christendom who would know that The Emoticonicon is a reference to The Necromonicon, or Book of the Dead as invented by Horror author H.P. Lovecraft in the 1930’s, whose work continues to fascinate a very select group of readers, I among them. So, if the other two happen to be reading the White Lodge I’m sure it’s a hit.

I’ve heard this argumentative approach several times – that because “my” guy has made a mistake I ought to applaud whenever “your” guy makes the same mistake, only worse. I have been told that I cannot complain that the current president has rung up massive deficits when his predecessor – “my” guy – also rang up deficits, albeit not as massive. At fault in both cases, regardless of which “team” these presidents played for, was their guiding philosophical premise about money – what it is, how it works, and to whom it rightly belongs. A person can actually have an awful lot of money without having any idea what money is, how it works, and to whom it rightly belongs. This is very like knowing how to drive a car without knowing anything about the properties of the internal combustion engine, or more generally, the Law of Motion. Most of us have some familiarity with operating computers, obviously – if you’re reading this you can operate a computer – but only a few of us know how the computer works.

I think in the 2008 Election there was not a single candidate who understood what money is, how it works, or to whom it rightly belongs. The answer isn’t really technical; it’s moral. In other words, it has to do with some very basic philosophy that a person does not need to be an “expert” (with a degree to demonstrate the exact pedigree of his ignorance) to understand. Earlier this year the Squabbler stopped by to explain what money is, how it works, and to whom it rightly belongs. This is from “The Golden Rule,” which was written on January 10^th of this year.

The Squabbler:

1. John’s Value

John’s moral value, to begin with, is John owns John. That’s the value he is born with. That’s what he has to work with – Life. Somebody may want to call this John’s intrinsic value. All people are created equal. Now what? Well, the thing John owns – his life – may be traded, like any value may be traded, in exchange for something John wants, needs, or desires. The first thing John may trade is his labor. This is the first thing most people trade because in most cases it is the easiest thing to trade.

2. John’s trading value

OK – John wants three good things, or three things that benefit John. He wants a pack of smokes, a bottle of whiskey, and a case of ammo. He is willing to trade his labor, which he owns, for these things. Somebody who has these things – let us call him Bill – wants to have his house painted. He hires John. So far, so good – right? Except, in our slightly more complicated world, we have invented something called money, and it is much more likely that Bill will pay John for his labor in money rather than directly with a pack of smokes, a bottle of whiskey, and a case of ammo. This works out very well for both John and Bill because it increases their trading freedom, or Liberty. For instance, Bill doesn’t have to know precisely what things John wants in exchange for his labor. He doesn’t have to have a supply of smokes, whiskey, and ammo on hand. And money also gives John the freedom to change his mind about what he wants. Money is wonderful when you take these freedoms into account.

3. What Money Is

Money is very easy to understand. It has no value, in and of itself. It “stands for” a value. Perhaps the actual material money is made of is paper with something printed on it, or perhaps it is clam shells, or rocks somebody has dug up out of the ground called gold. None of these materials have value separate from whatever value they “stand for.” (Not even the gold, ultimately.) Paper money, which is the most common form, is exactly the same as a Diploma. A Diploma, also called a certificate, is a document that states a person has fulfilled certain requirements that were necessary for him to achieve something – a college degree, for instance; something of value. The bearer may use the Diploma to trade on the value of that achievement. The Diploma “stands for” the achievement. In exactly the same way, money is a certificate that states its bearer has achieved something, or that he or she did something to earn it. The bearer may use the money to trade on the value of that achievement. In the case of John and Bill, the value of the certificates, or money, John now bears or has earned, is the value of his labor.

The value of the money is not the money itself, but of John’s labor.

Once the money is made – or earned – it may be transferred as a gift, or as an inheritance, without losing its value, but its value is always ultimately determined by the measure of personal achievement it “stands for,” or represents.

This is why wealth is infinite, for all intents and purposes: it is limited only by whatever limits personal achievement. In other words, there is not a fixed supply of wealth that is kept in a box somewhere that must eventually be used up. It is not a fixed supply of a limited resource that must be divided up in some way between everybody that lives. Wealth is limited only by individual achievement. The significance of Liberty is that when it is present there are fewer limitations on individual achievement, and therefore greater wealth, and when it is absent there are more limitations on personal achievement and consequently less wealth.

4. To Whom Money Rightly Belongs

Getting back to John and Bill, John may now go to a store and trade his certificates of achievement, or money, for the pack of smokes, the bottle of whiskey, and the case of ammo he wants, needs, or desires. And, it just so happens he has a certificate or two left over to trade for a microwave burrito, which is fortunate because painting Bill’s house has given him an appetite. Now John can smoke, drink, shoot, and suffer indigestion to his heart’s desire. Yum yum.

John has increased his value beyond John owns John by trading his labor. John also has taken on a relationship – with Bill. Such relationships are what ultimately create new wealth – to create meaning to make something from nothing, for the wants, needs, and desires to achieve a better life are the better part of being human. Life, defined as John owns John, and Liberty, defined as John’s freedom to trade value in exchange for value, are now explained.

John is now entitled to share in the fruits of other people’s achievements – i.e. the smokes, the whiskey, the ammo, and the burrito – because John has achieved something himself. The more he achieves the more he increases his value, and the more he is therefore entitled to. John owns John’s money, the fruit of his labor. Nobody else has any just claim to it, at all.

The Squabbler and the Princess

2011-04-01T04:38:00.000-07:00

“Thou hast granted to man that from others he should come to conclusions as to himself, and that he should believe many things concerning himself on the authority of feeble women.”
St. Augustine, Confess, I, chap. VI.

Lookst, Thou my joy, at how some foolish Squabbler will twist my words 1700 years from now…

OK, so I’m a foolish Squabbler, but didst not thee write “Lucretius is a turd” on the lavatory wall?

One of my favorite Blogstream White Lodge pictures is here. The photographer is J.K. Potter. Sister Midnight modeled for him quite a few years ago for some book covers.

Be very careful with those buttons at the bottom of your own posts, by the way, and after clicking one of them when the dialogue box opens be sure it is the service you want, because those dialogue boxes all look the same. For instance, if you are like me and have one password for everything, make sure that it is to Twitter that you send your link – assuming that is where you wish to send it – instead of the Facebook account you have twice unintentionally reactivated clicking the F button instead of the T button and signing in again. I have only one Facebook “friend,” (the other two being themselves inactive), and she doesn’t want to feel obliged to do a lot of heavy blog reading. But I know her, and I know her sense of obligation to friendships.

Of course it is the Princess I am speaking of, famed of song and story, whose social circle is composed of hundreds of people I have positively no desire to know unless I am paid to know them… and me.

So I belong on Facebook as a peacock belongs in Antarctica, as I wrote to her this morning when prompted (once again) to do so upon my deactivation. And to my sister (who will never see the message anyway since she grew weary of Facebook years ago) I likened myself to a horseshoe in a swimming pool. To my wife I wrote nothing, obviously, since I see her every day. Those were my friends.

Each time I tried to deactivate the account a page would appear with their pictures captioned by the words, “Christine will miss you,” “Faith will miss you,” “Darla will miss you.” They looked like such sad little puppies, staring at me with their sad little puppy eyes. My conscience yelled at me – “How can you leave them? They will miss you. They will cry.”

Baloney.

(I just read that passage to my son, and he said, “Mom doesn’t get a fake name?” No, she doesn’t deserve a fake name.)

As you know, or may know, I have an aversion to being touched. I don’t shake hands if I can help it. I don’t hug. And, as some of you may know, more intimate personal contact has been a problem for about seven years – eight now, since time keeps on slipping… slipping… slipping… Well, since my last actual “girlfriend” ended our friendship by e-mail. Since then I’ve dated three different women. Their White Lodge names are Tammy, Tina, and most recently, Luna. They each found out, sooner or later, that I don’t touch without unease and discomfort. For me the fact was merely reaffirmed, each time being more unpleasant than the last.

There was a time I can well recall when I enjoyed that sort of contact immensely, rare as it was. My fine sons are the result. My old business partner – (or merely helper, depending on her mood) – known to the White Lodge as the White Tornado, was one of the few, apart from the three aforesaid, who knew the full extent of my touching aversion. She asked me to touch her early in our acquaintance, and although she was married I was eager to try. We happened to be in the Princess’s house at the time, her sweet Highness being away – out shopping, perhaps. Although I was eager to try, my horror was apparent. My eyes adore but my flesh abhors, and my mind is more appreciative of architecture than it is of movement.

The other person who knows is the Princess herself, although not by the same means. I told her. I guess with the WT gone there was a loss in my life, the person who knows my secrets missing. A few years ago the Princess tried to give me a social hug – with fair prior warning – to see for herself, I suppose, just how far gone I was.

How should I say it feels? It feels like touching something dead. She looked beautiful. She looked huggable. I happen to know it is something she does easily and casually because I have been in positions to observe her social behavior on and off for six or seven years. I’m not concerned about germs or any of that obsessive-compulsive-in-the-movies stuff. I don’t feel the need to wash. I never get sick.

I’d like to say Luna was “the last straw,” or the last time I’ll make the attempt to find a touchless love – like a brushless car wash – for who besides me wants such a thing? Ironically, since my eyes work just as well as they ever did the physical attractiveness of this potential companion is as much a factor as ever, making my quest truly improbable. Despite the better part of reason, however, I am almost certain I will keep trying. This prospect is dreadful. Why am I made to be drawn against my will to seek out a type of companionship that cannot be found? I don’t “like” women; I worship them. The eyes adore, the flesh abhors. When the psychic foreplay that is for me the whole point of erotic love, both its purpose and its reward, inevitably leads into the touching of skin to skin it is just the same as life turning inevitably to death. Why must it be so? But it is so. The gay party must eventually wind down, the fellowship and laughter must cease, and there comes a deathly silence after the guests have gone home. One may think that it were better not to have had the party at all. Why must they leave? Why must we die? Why must women insist that I destroy the relationship that we have built up by manhandling them?

The Princess is the most gifted flirt I have ever known, and for me flirting has always been like a beautiful war fought with words. After years of our casual friendship, and after she learned I was “safe,” I suppose by virtue of my eccentric infirmity, she began flirting with a sort of carefree flair. She even held my arm from time to time, tentatively at first, to measure my reaction. Through three layers of clothing it wasn’t unendurable. It was even pleasant. I found out she did actually have a deeply hidden sense of humor, and when I found it I tickled it frequently. Very quickly each of our meetings turned into a form of playful psycho-drama, sometimes “deep” in the High School way – like a song by the Shangri-La’s.

“Do I like to dance?

Of course.

But don’t try to touch me –

Don’t ever touch me –

Because that will never happen… again.

Shall we dance?”

That was really the first ever “Goth” group, by the way – the Shangri-La’s. They were brilliant.

We talked about things I hadn’t talked about since High School – reincarnation and witchcraft, and all stuff-like-that-there. We went into a “head” shop one day last summer, and she asked to see several decorative daggers. To see her handling those skull-topped weapons like a teenager with the store owner’s eyes lit by dollar signs, while I casually inspected items I had no intention of buying, brought me back to another time and place where I was young and free.

By that time I knew I loved her. And now, after having a few winter months here in my wilderness to reflect, I know that love is the missing piece, and that because of its absence I have suffered from this awful aversion to being touched. Could this strange, magnetic, sometimes frightfully silly woman unlock the secret door in Duke Squabbler’s Castle? Or, isn’t it fair to say that she already has?

And that, dear friends, is a proper “old school” White Lodge story. It has sex, trauma, death, and redemption. And the picture fits it, or it fits the picture. There’s a musical reference – very important, and a literary allusion or two. That’s the kind of story that attracted readers. That’s the kind of story that made Sherry suspicious, and POH quote Scripture, and TR pour out his magnificent heart in a comment longer than the post itself. And, damn it, it’s what I do.

Most importantly, however, it has a moral; and the moral is this:

“Thou hast granted to man that from others he should come to conclusions as to himself, and that he should believe many things concerning himself on the authority of feeble women.”

The Devil's Advocate

2011-03-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

I was having an e-mail exchange with an old school friend a few years ago in which I remarked that I’ve learned a great deal from the old TV show, “Star Trek.” I meant the late 1960’s program that I grew up watching, of course. My friend fired back, “But Gene Roddenberry was an atheist! How could you have learned anything from that?” – Or words to that effect. I’m a Catholic, as you know, Roman Rite, and my friend was a Lutheran pastor. He probably still is. We’ve lost touch. And this is one of the reasons we lost touch – we think so differently that we ended up having very little to say to each other. How can I, a Catholic who believes in God, learn anything from an atheist? I don’t know. How did St. Thomas Aquinas learn anything from Aristotle?

It’s time that I addressed Ayn Rand’s atheism, in which she was outspoken and confident, because I’ve been lately posting from the perspective of one of her “fans.” And I am that. But obviously, I’m no atheist. How can I reconcile my religious belief with Rand’s ideas? My answer is that I see no need for reconciliation. I understand Rand, but Rand didn’t understand religion.

People have asked me from time to time, “Don’t you ever question your faith?” I’ve never not questioned it. Questioning my faith is all I ever do.

My faith is… well, let me explain it. I have spent just about all of my adult life trying to remove it, dislodge it, upset it, refute it, disavow it – to no avail. Why did I do this? I’m a skeptic, apparently by nature.

I called myself an agnostic, but agnostic means “without knowledge” and therefore may apply to us all in many ways, so it is meaningless.

I called myself an atheist, but found that being an atheist required my putting faith in something, a proposition that was merely a negation without an assertion. That’s just silly.

I tried calling myself a Buddhist and studied Dharma for a while, and meditated, and so on, but nothing I learned there discarded my own unwanted faith; and in fact it did everything to further confirm it.

Theologians speak of Faith and Reason, not of Faith opposing Reason. They are not opposites. You could say that my God is Reason itself and you wouldn’t be far off the mark. And it’s true that I have a faith almost entirely free from sentiment. In other words, it doesn’t make me “feel” any particular way to believe or not to believe, but I have devoted all of my mental energy over the years to removing a tenacious faith that only strengthens as a result of my efforts, and I have found that not believing is irrational because it makes no sense to either fill in the blank with something less than God or to simply leave the blank blank. I have to complete the equation.

What do we learn from Ayn Rand? Check your premise. As far as religion is concerned, hers was based on information I apparently haven’t seen, or perhaps she ceased to investigate after reaching a very superficial point, reacting not to what religion really teaches but to the sort of rubbish most church-goers seem to think it teaches. If I were to stop at that point, assuming that’s the case, perhaps I would be an atheist too. But I doubt it even then, because I seemed to be born the enemy of faith, and atheism requires too great a leap of faith for me.

There was a “thing” put into my head before I was born – perhaps a homing device of some sort – that gives me this strange life-long passionate desire to find God not on my terms but on His. I never believed on face value what I was told. I’m like that – I question everything. I was interested, to an extent, in knowing what you thought God was, or what he thought God was, or what she thought God was, but that told me more about you, or him or her, than it told me about God. I had to find out what God thought he was.

I am; therefore, I think.

My e-mail friend was a sports fan, by the way. I have no idea what it’s like to be a sports fan. I’ve tried – I really have. But why on earth would I root for one team rather than another? The teams don’t represent anything important. They don’t represent opposing ideas. So, how do I invest myself emotionally without a personal connection to Team A or Team B? It’s mysterious to me. It always has been.

Sure, I understand that if my son is on Team B then I “feel” connected to Team B, and I will root for them. I get that. I have feelings – despite what my ex-wife will tell you. But, can I form feelings for a group of complete strangers? Tell me – how do I make that leap? How can I bring that about in myself? I have asked sports fans, “Why do you root for – whatever – Team A?” They always have some kind of answer. The most common is “It’s the home team.” OK.

So what?

I’m sorry – my mind doesn’t work that way, and I don’t know how to make it work that way. If you’re reading this and you follow sports – great. You can appreciate something I can’t – at least not at that level. Displays of athleticism are interesting. The body and mind of man are beautiful to see in action. I know that what is done with the body is also done with the mind, and that working together they do amazing things – things I can’t do in many, many cases. That will hold my interest for a few minutes, and no more.

My friend reacted to my appreciation of an atheist’s ideas as though I was letting the “team” down. I think it wasn’t really about ideas taken on their own merits so much as it was about the identity or the name, or the group – the team. Atheists are the away team, I suppose. I don’t think that way, and I can’t imagine what it must be like to think that way. But I’ve observed that many, many people approach their own faith this way, (or lack thereof), and approach their politics this way, or their philosophies in general. When I demonstrate patriotism sometimes a friend will say I’m “nationalistic.” No – it’s about supporting morally superior ideas. The name isn’t superior. The place doesn’t matter much. The people are much the same as other people.

Very often a person’s political affiliation is entirely social, and his ideas are formed not by his reason, but by fashion – what his friends think, or by what he thinks will get him the loudest applause. And very often people in churches are there for the same reason. Of course! They’re rooting for the home team. What do they believe? They haven’t a clue.

Aristotle was a Pagan. Many people suppose he was an atheist who was just ahead of the curve. Rubbish. That’s revisionism. He was a Pagan; they worshipped Nature, Reason, and Causality. Many people have the premise is that religion is irrational. Aristotle was certainly not irrational. Therefore Aristotle was an atheist. So I ask, “How do you know religion is irrational?” The answer comes back, “It just is,” or “My college professor told me so,” or, “Everybody knows it.”

Yea team. That’s their faith, I guess.

Christianity learned an awful lot from that Pagan. And I, a Christian, have learned an awful lot from atheists.

People who think in the group are confined forever to the group. And, I think for every idea there’s the group way and the true way. Practicing Compassion, for instance – very important – is by definition an individual choice, and when it is practiced by individuals it is good. When it is given to the group it becomes oppression. Altruism when it is practiced by the individual can be a motivation of the highest aspiration, and combined with other aspects of the human character; it may lead to great inventions and discoveries that advance the human condition overall. But, in the hands of the group Altruism becomes tyranny.

God is the I Am, not the We Are. A is A.

“Use discernment when you read the White Lodge, my son, lest you be led astray. In fact, perhaps it is better not to read the White Lodge at all, lest you be led astray…” Oy vey iz mir – that’s funny!

I live in a country where I can do this sort of thing all day long without getting shot. (I almost wrote “without getting stoned,” but I thought it might be taken the wrong way.) That’s not because of something “we” did. “We” do nothing but evil. “I” am capable of good.

John owns John, and John is responsible for his own Pursuit of Happiness. It is in John’s self-interest that he should be compassionate, or he is not compassionate but oppressive. It is in John’s self-interest that he should be altruistic, or he is not altruistic but tyrannical. John is endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights; and among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. You touch that, baby, and I’ll shoot you dead without a pang to my God-believing conscience.

(You can put a twang in that sentence if it amuses you.)

But that’s where we are today. We’re standing on Lexington Green, and if the one standing to my left is an atheist, and the one standing to my right is a Jew, and if the one standing behind me is a Buddhist, and the one standing in front of me doesn’t know what the hell he is except that he’s where he needs to be, that’ll do.

Once Upon a Time; Vintage Squabs

2011-03-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a weblog that very few people read called The White Lodge, written by a man who called himself the Squabbler. This weblog was hosted by a small web site called Blogstream which was run by a fellow in Connecticut. Blogstream made very little money, and its continued maintenance was largely a labor of love for its creator. Blogstream writers were fanatical about their little blogs, The Squabbler among them, and over the years a true sense of fellowship grew up around them. Although their blogs and their ideas were often quite different, fast friendships were formed of the type that last. Some of us are here today.

On April 30, Blogstream will go dark. I, John Aufenanger, author of the White Lodge, speaking on behalf of the Squabbler, do not believe that any enterprise that doesn’t make a profit ought to continue existence, so I well understand the necessity of closing it. I wish Blogstream’s owner and founder all great luck in his future enterprises. May they be blessed with success. And I want to say thank you, John, for everything. Blogstream has changed my life, and I know there are others who will say the same.

Rather than downloading all of the Squabbler’s Blogstream posts from the beginning of the White Lodge in order to post them somewhere else – here, for instance – I have decided to let the past keep them. I own them all, every one, as they are the fruits of my labor and my creative effort. I have them copied in safe keeping for my own reference purposes. I would, however, like to share some of the highlights from the most recent series. I’ll do this sort of thing as the mood strikes, or when it seems appropriate. There follows such an excerpt from “Out of the Blue,” which was written on February 4 of this year.

The Squabbler:

Are you apprehensive about the outcome of world events? I am, right now.

And when I write of the present please bear in mind that you are reading this several weeks later. Outcomes have already been reached, or various things have dramatically changed for better or worse, by the time you are reading this. So it doesn’t make much sense for me to comment on specific events in the Middle East, on the African continent, and elsewhere, even if it were within the mission of this blog to do so.

The principles I have been writing about – you may call them philosophy if you wish; I just call them valid – are not negotiable. That John owns John is not a thing to compromise. The world is governed largely by people of no coherent moral code, or by those whose principles are cogent but anathema to the interests of free and independent people. This is the reality that I began this series by speaking about, that ultimately the only authority anybody may claim over us is the authority of the bully with the club.

The notion of voluntary participation in, for instance, the paying of income taxes is nonsense. Try not paying them, and see what happens. Try not complying with regulations you know will destroy your business and take away your livelihood, and see what happens. Moral laws supersede the laws of government, and when governments implement immoral laws they become illegitimate.

Slavery was perfectly legal. Abortion is perfectly legal. In the guise of providing for what is inappropriately called “the common good” theft is perfectly legal. That something is legal does not change the fact that it is immoral. But as long as the bully with the club who stands in the hidden heart of all governments – even ours – remains stronger than the efforts to resist him, it continues to stand, and we call it tyranny. Evil, or immorality, irrationality, illogic continues to grow and spread. The bully with the club is king.

Where he is out in the open for all to see we call that a dictatorship; where he is hidden under layers of so-called good intentions and rationalizations we call that the United States of America at this time. This needs to be understood, for only then can we decide whether or not it is a reality that we can accept. Are we ready to say, “I am willing to be ruled rather than to rule myself?” Are we ready to say, “I am willing to be owned by the state as a resource rather than to own myself and rely on my own resources?” I dare say many people are perfectly willing to make such a declaration, and to surrender their wills and their lives to the bully with the club, but most of them make it tacitly by remaining inert, remaining ignorant.

The old saying that ignorance is bliss remains true for how long? How long will the bully with the club be content to remain hidden? What about his day in the sun? It has been said over and over again by deposed dictators, “I didn’t mean to be a dictator. I only meant good,” and I believe them. I believe that evil isn’t something people choose if they know that evil is what they are choosing. I believe that we often think, as children do, that if only we were in charge of everybody else’s lives, if only everybody behaved the way we told them to, we would have a perfect world with everybody joining hands together and being happy. Whenever we try to do so we stand against the entire universe of truth: John owns John, and you don’t.

Things rapidly fall apart. All the wonderful plans we had made for everybody’s common good begin to unravel because of some malcontents who are too stupid to understand what is good for them, who resist being owned, or perhaps because there are just too many people for the resources available and if we killed a certain number of them we’ll arrive at the perfect world of harmony and contentment, the peaceable kingdom. It is always the most intelligent people who come up with ideas like that, the academic elite, the liberal intelligentsia, the “enlightened,” the “evolved.” They mean only good for all, right? “Why oh why did it all go so horribly wrong?” they ask as their soldiers gun down uprisings in the streets – soldiers carrying the flag that depicts hands joined around the world in harmony superimposed over the familiar symbol of the heart.

Signs and wonders…

What was the promise of Socialism in the 19^th Century? Was it intended to inspire the murders of tens of millions of people? Was it intended as the primary cause of the next century’s wars? Did Karl Marx sit in his chair in London intending that his idea should inspire the deliberate murder by famine of thousands of Russian farmers, the mass executions and forced marches in China, the wholesale slaughters in Mexico and throughout Central and South America, the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields in Cambodia?

Could he see into the future to imagine such monsters as Joseph Stalin, or Mao, or Fidel Castro, or Hugo Chavez? Did he know that based on very similar principles Adolph Hitler would rise to power in Germany and light the fuse that ignited the most devastating global war in human history? Did he know that without exception every implementation of his idea would inevitably lead to economic catastrophe, ecological destruction, and previously undreamed-of levels of oppression, mass murder, and genocide?

More compellingly, could he have imagined that even after the implementation of his idea led to these things each and every time it was tried, and proven therefore so utterly irrational and foundationally false, millions of people would continue to believe in it with religious fervor as if his idea represented some sort of twisted, demonic faith? And could he have imagined that such people would be considered intelligent?

I don’t think so. I think he set out to create something good, but his premise was false. I think his premise is demonstrably false and that those who continue to support it are either one of two things, stupid or evil. Am I surprised by this? No, I’m not. The history of humanity, reaching back all the way into the mythological past, is the history of stupidity and evil, of the bully with the club no matter what he calls himself, and he is both.

Thank you for reading.

The Squabbler's Mid-life Crisis

2011-03-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

I came late to the Internet, late to blogging, and now I’m late to social networking. My plan is to go on being late until I am late, and then perhaps I’ll be late to realize it. I received one Facebook comment on my last post, however, meaning the cat’s out of the bag. I don’t believe she was here for long before she was sucked screaming back into the vortex of the ordinary world, but the fact that the portal is now open means we must behave ourselves. The bullets are real. No more of this duck talk. Why a duck? And there is to be no mention of the anchovies – not a single whisper, Heavens no…

Welcome to all who come here on the wings of a magical hyperlink, innocently expecting wondrous delights and finding instead… whatever this is. I never lie intentionally, unless I intend to.

I revealed in my last post on Blogstream – (what anybody who has read the White Lodge since it began has already guessed without my having to say it) – that I am a latent homosexual who has a crush on Vin Diesel, and that is why I shaved my head last year. Oh I’m sorry – did you miss that one? Read it here. I’m also a member of AA; not as the Squabbler, of course, but in my real life persona. When I first used the clippers to “shave” my head down to about an eighth of an inch or so of hair – or however much is left by the clippers – three or four other guys in my AA group did the same thing shortly afterwards. At that time I chalked it up to coincidence, (or coinkeedink, as Dad might have said), but more recently, in the middle of winter, I decided to start using the razor. I figured that since I was shaving my face every day I might just as well use the same implement on my head, eliminating the necessity of following a more arduous two step process. Well, for the entire winter my head was concealed by a woolly hat. When it began to warm up a bit – and it did, despite the extreme cold that returned last week – I walked into one of my AA meetings without the hat one day. And now, there are several other members of that group who are also shaved on top. I seem to have released some sort of mysterious mid-life… thingy. Perhaps they reckon that I’ve been sober for ten years, and so if they would like to also be sober they ought to do as I have done. Of course, they don’t know about my Vin Diesel obsession, or of its cause.

One fellow was quite offended by my shiny dome – no doubt a fallen-away Catholic who resents having been beaten up by nuns, (while I, on the other hand, sort of liked it), because it reminds him of St. Peter’s. He expressed the opinion that men who are capable of having a full head of hair in middle life ought not to despise or wantonly disregard that gift when others – and he spread that word into about five syllables – spend the second half of their lives trying to make what little remains to appear full. In my own defense I burst into song:

Samson was a mighty strong man,

The toughest in his day,

But along came Delilah and clipped his wig

And it looks like she got me the same old way,

And I’m shakin’

I’m so jittery…

Today the termites in my head are gnawing on the word “intent.” No, I’m not about to leap into Aquinas. I have Chesterton in mind. A Christian tries never to do harm unintentionally. That’s the difference between the Christian and the Buddhist, depending on the cut and the butcher’s skill, of course. The Buddhist tries never to do intentional harm but the Christian tries never to do unintentional harm.

How many times in my life – and I am 49 years old, and I intend to remain 49 years old for the next thirty years – have I done intentional harm? I am sure that I could count that number, if I remember correctly. Does it count that I set fire to some of my little sister’s toys? I suppose it must. OK, even supposing that some of the silly, childish cruelties I practiced and immediately regretted are counted, my best guess would make the number of my intentional evils about ten. The simple fact is that most of the harms I have committed in my life have been unintentional. The number of unintentional harms I have committed is in the thousands, assuming that we are counting harms both miniscule and enormous – from the slight ruffling of feathers to the decapitation of the bird. When I was sorry for doing harm – and I admit to being sorry for every harm – I was sorrier still for not meaning to do any harm at all. And that’s a sorry case, indeed.

But the corollary is that the Christian is prepared to do harm intentionally under certain special circumstances in which such action is justified, and the justification for that sort of action is usually our first lesson in moral ethics. The short form is this: Christ teaches us that when we are struck we must turn the other cheek, (perhaps as my father would say “to even up the swelling”), but we cannot turn our neighbor’s cheek for him. So, if in the defense of innocence we strike with intent it is in the intent to defend rather than the intent to kill. The fact that we have killed is a negative double effect of our intent to defend. Surely we have done harm, and surely we had to intend to do sufficient harm – or apply sufficient force – to defend innocence. But such circumstances might never come up in the course of our lives. Who can say? In all likelihood it is with our unintentional harms that we cause the more widespread damage. That was certainly my case.

To my wondering (and often wandering) mind this falls under the responsibilities inherent to self-ownership. If John owns John then John is responsible for what John does, either intentionally or unintentionally. Of what possible good is it to go through life never stepping on a bug, and assiduously avoiding any act requiring force, only to leave behind a trail of corpses harmed unintentionally despite one’s good intentions, or perhaps because of one’s good intentions?

We all know the story of Sergeant York, who was a conscientious objector. He would do no intentional harm – that is, he believed to kill anybody would imperil his immortal soul. But when the machine gun began killing hundreds of his comrades he reasoned that by killing the machine gunner he would save many lives. You can argue that his intent wasn’t to kill but to save, and that killing was the negative double effect of his intent to save. OK. That’s the way the Church would look at it, that although he killed he did not commit murder thereby. Choosing to do nothing – that is, allowing the massacre to continue so as not to imperil his own soul – would have been quite selfish, for he would have been saving his own soul at the expense of many lives, and it may be therefore argued that he is complicit in the slaughter of his fellows rather than righteous in his intentional inaction

My contention is that it is only the self-owned individual who is morally equipped to assume the sort of responsibility that Sergeant York demonstrated, and that the assumption of personal responsibility inherent to the claim of self-ownership – John owns John – is the foundation for right action in all interactions and relationships with others. When I examine my own conscience, looking back over my 49 years at the multitude of unintentional harms I have committed, I see a clear pattern: that my unintentional harms were caused by my lack of personal responsibility. Very often it was my fervent and well-intentioned desire to act “selflessly” that did the greatest damage, bringing to mind that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

One cannot give to others something he doesn’t possess. John didn’t own John in those days. I believed many silly things. I believed my wife owned me. I believed that God owned me. In the depths of depression I believed the devil owned me. I believed “the world” owned me. I believed that I was the hostage and victim of all these people, ideas, institutions, or what-have-you. In such a state a person can do little of good, and a whole lot of unintentional harm.

At the basis of Western Civilization – that pesky thing – is this strange idea of God as a Father. That idea is blasphemy from the Muslim point of view, alien to all of the Eastern traditions, and now under direct assault from the Progressive or Socialist factions. Not surprisingly, none of these other movements or forces asserts a belief in self-ownership as being central to morality, (which is just a fancy word for truth.) When responsibility lies in something other than self the principle of individual liberty is either irrelevant or downright anathema. But that we are made in the image and likeness of God, and that further we are children of God, our highest aspiration is to claim our birthright, and in so doing assume responsibility for our own divine selves.

Now, getting back to being bald, (and sometimes bald-faced), my son tells me that I’m having my mid-life crisis, which is delightfully optimistic, and that I shaved my head for much the same reason that he has grown his beard – because I can. It’s my way of saying “Hey, look at me!” John owns John, and John is responsible for his own ghastly personal appearance.

What I Would Really Rather Believe if the Truth Would Only Let Me

2011-03-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

I was writing to Sherry about my Facebook experience earlier today, and how my only friends were my wife and the Princess, and since both of them are accessible by telephone it seemed silly to keep the account. But then, this afternoon my own telephone informed me that I have somehow managed to reactivate it. I think in my enthusiasm to keep in touch with the “Atlas Shrugged” movie news I might have done that. These things seem to be linked together – Twitter and Facebook, and Yahoo, and Lasso, and OhHell, and whatever else. I don’t suppose it matters one way or another how many ways there are to squabble. I deliberately (rather than accidentally) signed up for something called Disqus so I could comment on something that caught my eye. That might also have pulled the hair trigger on my dormant Facebook account. I guess I’ll keep it open and just keep flinging links to this blog at it. If either of my “friends” should read what I’ve written I speak of them well enough. God help me if they started blogging themselves, though. The only difference between one of my stories and a lie is that the latter has witnesses. I still don’t quite get the point of Twitter. Could I say the sorts of things I say here at the White Lodge on Twitter? I will tweet, “Love is an infinite readiness for revelation and change,” and see what, if anything, may happen.

Now my son tells me he will “friend” me on Facebook if he should get a request. That is kind of him. I can learn all about what goes on his circle of 17 year-olds. When I began writing a blog in 2007 I had no real expectations, but on my very first day a fellow who called himself “trust the rust” left a comment and I realized that I had communicated with a living person. Well, living he most certainly is. He is known here as Hubert Rainfield. I am a fiercely loyal friend, though not a particularly needy one, and “TR” seemed to earn a special chair in the White Lodge not only by virtue of his being the first to arrive but also because his comments were often much more interesting than my posts. Sherry, by the way, was my second visitor.

I write principally about ideas rather than people, and I noticed right off the bat that the most popular blogs were about people and events. So I began to invent people to write about drawn from characters in my own life, combined with characters I had previously invented for Fiction, mixing this up with events both real and imagined. It was good fun until I began to meet several of my fellow bloggers face to face, which is a form of contact with very different requirements, and when I tried to kill off a character I had grown weary of – the White Tornado – two or three of those I had met took it to mean that my real-life inspiration for her character had actually died. Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive… Well, I obviously couldn’t let that stand, so I then had to write to those folks in private to inform them my then business partner Ruthie had not actually died, and then I deleted the offending post, causing a little more confusion. I’m sure you get the idea.

But very few people ever really got the White Lodge idea. It was life mixed with dream, sprinkled with parody, and stirred with smiling lies. But I did learn to stop killing my characters, lest the clamor for their return should lead me to reanimate them as poorly as Agatha Christie did in the case of Hercule Poirot. While I still offer a cast of characters whose resemblance to real-life people may be noticeable, I continue to carefully guard their actual identities wherever that is the case. Often I give them character attributes of several real-life people. It is still ideas that I’m primarily interested in. My characters arrive at the White Lodge conveniently to introduce a discussion of whatever ideas are obsessing my termites at that time. Personalities bore me. Biographies bore me. Fiction really drives my train, and Fiction also ignites my brain.

Having said that, I’m reading Non-fiction at the moment, which is unusual, but whenever I do I take it in small doses, having something fantastically trashy right at hand which I’m reading at the same time – a murder mystery, usually, something light. I’m reading St. Augustine’s “Confessions” and “City of God.” And, if I were to write about my discoveries from those sources I would probably not attract a single reader. That is, at any rate, how my thoughts run on the matter. But when I read what I have written I think twice about it. It’s really quite accessible and almost interesting.

It can take a million words to say the simplest things, and sometimes the most complicated of things can be said in a word or two. In the old White Lodge I once wrote about how the power of two words – “I do,” or “I will” – totally alters the course of one’s life when they are said in a wedding ceremony. It’s very simple to say, but back of it is a world of intricate and unique individual experience as well as incomprehensible cosmic power. (I almost wrote “inconceivable,” but decided it was inappropriate, considering that I am speaking of a marriage.) We often say “it’s only words,” or “talk is cheap,” yet can any of us name the civilization that exists without its codes, or the religion without its law, or…?

I’m still the little boy who learned to read not slowly but by sudden revelation, that ended up cowering on the floor covering his ears with his hands and crying “I’m surrounded by words!” Every sign on every wall, on every bottle, on every box; every billboard, and every road sign – in short, everything I saw that contained somewhere on it written words was… shouting at me. I heard the words in my head, and from that moment I had no peace. I think in words and I hear my thoughts as clearly as I would hear your voice if you were speaking. I’ve grown up, but the little boy is in me.

There are some things so profoundly simple that vast, cavernous libraries are devoted to explaining them, and arguments can turn into open warfare over them.

So it is in the case of Augustine’s arguments, which always seem to begin as the soul of simplicity. What we may not be able to recognize until further investigation makes it apparent is that he is offering us the end product of an argument that may have begun years before in his personal quest for the truth, which took him down several strange roads. His first ventures into controversy were against his own beloved youthful philosophies, Paganism, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, etc.; or in other words, he argued with himself – which is, in fact, what every good controversialist must do.

Frankly, I would be more inclined to follow Pelagius if he were alive today – and in a certain respect he is – because Pelagius taught: (1) that Adam’s sin was purely personal, and affected none but himself; (2) that each man, consequently, is born with powers as incorrupt as those of Adam, and only falls into sin under the force of temptation and evil example; and (3) that children who die in infancy, being untainted by sin, are saved without baptism. St. Augustine spent many years in “debate” with Pelagius and his followers, and in those days to be deemed heretical wasn’t a friendly matter. Pelagius, by the way, was by all accounts a great and good man, and his teachings probably arose from his compassion in direct personal experience with Fourth Century Christians who were seeking comfort after an infant’s death. I for one would really like to believe Pelagius. I think a person would have to be a psychopath not to want to believe Pelagius. I would suggest that Augustine would also prefer to believe Pelagius – that is if it were possible to pick your beliefs based upon what you wished were true rather than what is true. Augustine’s thinking was ruled, of course, by the latter. What I find so interesting about the Pelagian controversy is that, as attractive as the Pelagius view is, it could not have succeeded in building a Church. It’s quite modern, yes. I dare say most Christians today, even those within the Church, believe something like what Pelagius believed. But, in his own time, with Alaric the Goth in the process of sacking Rome, with ten year-old children stoning one another to death for an edible pet dog, with the Dark Ages approaching visibly like a storm cloud on the horizon, civilization may not have survived at all without a Church, and it certainly would not have survived as it did.

To make a long story short, Augustine won his argument and the Catholic Church became in time the Roman Catholic Church, which for the next thousand years preserved and protected the philosophy, history, languages, and culture of the formerly Roman (or Western) world because there was nothing else left standing that could. Original Sin stains us all, dead infants go to a not-unpleasant limbo if they are not baptized, we must have a Church to attain Salvation, and the rest is… history. It’s very simple. Would any of us be here if Augustine’s less sentimentally appealing view had not triumphed? God moves in mysterious ways, and sometimes in not so mysterious ways.

*******

“For Thou hast made us toward thyself, and our heart is without rest until it rest in Thee.”

Love is an infinite readiness for revelation and change. When you try to define it more narrowly you end up foretelling the death of love, but in a sense you have to in order to find it because to look for it requires having some expectation of where it might be found. We seek it in the shadowy periphery, afraid to show our weakness to the world, little knowing that that need is our greatest strength. We seek in the love of others our own lost and unfulfilled selves. The fact is I can say nothing new or inventive, and no voice from my own barren wilderness will open minds that are closed. Every thought that I think has been already thought, and for thousands of years has been readily available to any and all who wished to examine it; that, and so much more. It is staggeringly beyond comprehension.

(I originally wrote “staggeringly beyond conception.” It’s an illness.)

Our time has no monopoly on suffering. I think of how the most faith-filled of men and women who come to mind are those whose suffering is greatest; and why should that be if suffering is proof against the existence of a God? I think of all the atrocities and cruelties inflicted and endured from men to men throughout the ages, and how in such times the faith of those that suffer grows rather than diminishes, and I can only stand in awe. It seems that evil doesn’t oppose and contradict goodness but rather defines goodness to razor sharpness, renews it with a greater vigor, and spreads it further out in space and time. I think inwardly the same is true, for while no one person, nor even the whole of the universe, may contain the whole of God, the whole of God is nevertheless able to enter into each and every thing. Of course this means that goodness may enter into suffering, and for this reason there is no evil that man can do to man that can obliterate the good, though it may certainly seem at times that that is what is happening.

Yikes – did that come out of me?

That’s what is rumbling around in this piece of wood between my ears today, which is inert, but infested with quarrelsome termites. I can’t meditate without wisecracks. I couldn’t be a monk because some one of my brothers would strangle me as I slept after a few weeks of my punning. My Dad tells the story of being shown ‘round a seminary near to where we lived years ago that has a beautiful chapel, and the priest whose unfortunate job it was to lead him on this tour pointed out with obvious satisfaction the gorgeous tabernacle which was covered with gold and surmounted with a gold cross. Dad said, “So Our Lord truly has taken our gilt upon Himself.” That priest was unfortunately without a sense of humor.

Oh yes – in the time it took me to write this post nothing has yet happened as a result of the tweet I… twote?

Forth from his den to steal

He stole,

His bags of chink he chunk,

And many a wicked smile

He smole,

And many a wink he wunk…

An Eye for an Eye

2011-03-23T04:59:00.000-07:00

Dreams! From the moment I closed my eyes last night to the moment I opened them this morning I was the protagonist of several short films about the printing industry. It is more accurate to say they were short films about me being in the printing industry, and it just so happens that was my field for twenty five years before I retired from it and entered service. The dreams were troubling and refreshing to my soul at the same time. They brought me back to my life as it was – working twelve, sixteen, or twenty hour days, taking my meals standing while looking over color proofs, and being always reachable when I was away. I had no time to write a blog in those days, if there had been such a thing, and I suppose towards the end of my career there was. I saw with vivid clarity the production board with its colored index cards, job tickets, proof sheets, color separations, and all the strange, specialized machines of that great trade. I was greeted by shop managers I didn’t seem to know, but they knew me. When could I work? What did my schedule look like? How could I help them to finish the job on time? When people say that death is like a dreamless sleep they have no idea what they are talking about. Dreams are sometimes the better part of life, and when they are, we glimpse the eternal continuation of our own consciousness. I was more fully alive in those dreams in which my purpose was fulfilled than in any waking life consumed by idleness. Do I miss the printing trade? Yes, and no. I’m happy doing what I do today; I was happy doing what I did yesterday. Happiness has been constant, perhaps especially during times of stress, and even in the midst of emotional turmoil amounting to misery. How can that be? It is because happiness has very little to do with bad feelings, which come and go for all sorts of reasons, most of them resulting from foolish decisions. Happiness is having purpose.

I’ve also made my share of foolish decisions and have known my share of misery. Pursuing pleasure rather than purpose makes a ruin of one’s life, and it also hurts the people around us. Sometimes it was my job, and only my job, that gave me direction and sanity. I would say that I hated it at times, but my personal life was a wreck of my own making and the job offered me some sanctuary from it. I learned this strange truth during my divorce. I learned that I loved working. It suddenly dawned on me that the better part of me was the part that practiced competence and took pride in a job well accomplished, not the part that sought out diversions and sensations. I wasn’t entirely ready to fully understand this lesson at that time, but I received something of that clarity in the midst of my personal turmoil, and later when I would have the experience to recognize it I realized that the story of life is the story of seeking a purpose. That purpose is the indwelling God.

A man I greatly admire once told me the money he makes is “God’s money.” He said this with a shrug. I know what he means, or what he is trying to say. Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh often tells us he has “talent on loan from God.” I also know what he is trying to say. But they’re both wrong, technically. If life is a gift from God – and atheists may want to replace the word God with the word cheese – then it must be something understandable as a gift. Words are supposed to have meanings, and the last I knew the recipient of a gift becomes the owner of whatever it is that is given. The giver doesn’t remain the owner; it now belongs fully and completely to the person it was given to. The Princess once gave me a rather expensive (for me) work of art that I casually admired one day while we were in an art gallery a few years ago. It hangs on my wall today. It is mine. I would never dream of spending so much on it if I had wanted it for myself, (though I routinely spend the like on my children, and there may be a correlation there), but it is mine nonetheless. It is mine just as completely as might be the case if I had bought it for myself. Now, the fact is the giver is remembered by the gift, and that’s primarily why we give gifts in the first place. Every time I see that picture I think of my friend, and it is a good thought. That’s what these others mean by saying it’s “God’s money,” or that their talent is “on loan” from God. They are merely acknowledging their creator; however they understand Him, for this gift of life. But God doesn’t own them; they own themselves, just as certainly as I own that picture hanging on my wall. It’s the image of a dancing naked woman, in case you were wondering. No, I wouldn’t call it erotic. Goodness… get your mind right.

The rest of my dreams are scattered images representing fears: at one point a row of lady friends are sitting together on the other side of a long table; their teeth are perfect, calling to my mind my terror of dentistry and how I procrastinate about getting my own fixed, but their ghastly appearance holds me back, professionally, socially. They are wearing some sort of dangly jewels on chains that hand from each tooth – that is, the more fashion conscious among them – and I wonder how they eat. For some reason the Princess is in my kitchen as I fetch coffee. I say good morning and return to my room to drink it, and ponder the reason for her presence. Friendships are a source of great joy, but they are also the source of much bewilderment and wearisome obligations, especially with women because it is almost impossible to know with certainty what my obligations are, specifically.

My favored relationships are those in which I perform a service and am paid. My conscience seems to seek the moral balance in all things, the eye for the eye, the tooth for the tooth, and I have ended many relationships on the basis that I cannot find the balance that ought to be in them, or see the use of them. That said, I don’t like to receive gifts because of the moral obligation attached to it. I feel compelled to return, in kind, what has been given, for that is right. So it must also be in the case of the great gift of life, and this compels the human consciousness to search for God. But it is within. The consciousness is itself made of the same “matter” as God, for He has given us Himself in the act of creation. This is maddeningly impossible to repay.

But it is intellectually dishonest to merely return the gift, as if we have no use for it; to throw it back in God’s face and declare, “I have no use for this, it is yours!”

No, it is mine. John owns John, and John is responsible for his own happiness. And that can mean nothing other than John’s purpose: discerning it, doing it, living it. Do you see?

Thank you, goodnight.

Bring Me the Head of Herod the Donald

2011-03-20T07:33:00.000-07:00

“Pickles” remains the most popular reaction button choice, so far. I’m referring to the comments section now, down at the bottom of each post. If there were room for it I would create a reaction button for “This post gives me an impenetrable sense of loss, an abiding weariness, the death of my resolve,” and other button for, “Loved it; especially the ducks.” It’s all fun and games until someone gets locked into an iron mask for 20 years for a crime he didn’t commit… or, loses an eye.

What was so great about Herod the Great? He wasn’t a very nice man. He was a great builder, though. He was also called Herod the Builder in his time. The man behind the Slaughter of the Innocents re-built the Temple of Jerusalem. He built cities, roads, opened new seaports. He did a number of great things to earn his title. He advanced the human condition, in his way. Did I mention he wasn’t a very nice man? OK.

For many, many years I wrote my short stories and my novels, and my school papers, and my love letters, on an Olivetti typing machine that was made in 1914. The “o” struck clean through three sheets of 20# bond. In the 80’s I switched over to a Canon word processor which I continued to use until 2005, when I bought my first computer for $15 at a garage sale. It ran Windows ’95. It ran quite well. It had a game called “Descent” on it that I wish I still had today. Why, I used to wonder, did it take thousands of years to invent the printing press and only two centuries to pile mind-boggling man-made technological advances one on top of the other with such rapidity that even the most up-to-date and savvy amongst us can’t hope to keep up with them? Nothing about the size of man’s cranium had changed. We are no smarter than the Ancients, or the people of the Ages – Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, or the little known Water Fowl Age. What changed? What happened? The United States happened. That’s all. For the first time in human history people were free to pursue their personal definition of happiness. We have our Herod’s, our architects. They were not born to be kings, and their genius a happy accident of fate. They would have been born to be slaves, never to have the ability to advance their potential. But instead, they were born as ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. The ordinary had changed. No longer was it true that the person born poor had to remain poor, and no longer was the person born to greatness necessarily great. Merit determined that value, and nothing else. Age-old prejudices that had been the guiding forces of human events for all of remembered time were suddenly cast to one side.

But where is Herod now? Where is the great builder? Where are all the great builders and inventors? Where have they gone?

Well, I had done a brief post about my anticipation of the movie version of “Atlas Shrugged” last week, and since there’s a movie coming out I decided to re-read the book. It is much as I remember. The section titled “This is John Galt speaking” is just as annoying as it was when I first read it. Try reading it out loud. It takes two and a half hours – just a man giving a speech over a radio frequency he has pirated. Ayn Rand’s whole entire shtick is in that section, and as such it is the most important part of the book, but the drama is utterly lost. We must suspend our disbelief that people – much less the entire nation – would have the endurance for a speech of that length. Earlier, another of the novel’s central characters launches into a speech not quite as long – but long enough – at a high society party. His theme is denouncing another guest’s off-handed declaration that “money is the root of all evil.” I would reproduce it here for you, word by word, so beautifully does it express my own thought on the matter, not to mention with (somewhat) greater brevity than the John Galt speech. I watched a video featuring the head of the Ayn Rand Institute saying that the movie remains faithful to Rand’s philosophy “in a simplistic way.” My interpretation of such a statement spoken by an egg-head intellectual is that the movie must be good, in that case. Perhaps the filmmakers knew better how to make a movie than Rand knew how to write a novel, but it isn’t a book we value on its literary merits. It isn’t a book we read again and again to re-live a ripping good yarn, or to be bowled over by its lyric quality. It isn’t a book that changes the lives – perspectives – of those who read it because it’s a great novel. It’s a work of philosophy in the shape of a novel. What it says leaps with unbelievable ease over how it says it. Another G.B. Shaw one-liner that I’ve always liked is “Who you are is so loud I can’t hear what you’re saying.” In the case of Ayn Rand the opposite is true: What she said was so important it doesn’t matter who she was.

I recently included the story of my first-ever barber shop haircut in a novel I’m writing. My grandfather took me on the New York subway from 207^th Street to 42^nd Street on the A Train. I was six years old. It was my first experience of the subway, frightening and full of magic. That trip takes about 45 minutes, by the way. We never went above ground. The barber shop was located in the subway station. My grandfather came from Ireland in 1924, worked for a while at the most menial jobs you could imagine in Boston, and then eventually landed a job in New York working on building the elevated subway lines. You may recall King Kong tearing the Third Avenue El to pieces, and then climbing the Empire State Building. Those engineering marvels were brand new when that film was made, and they were being promoted by that film as the great achievements they were. Well, my grandfather was involved in building the elevated rails – (I know: elevated subways – only in New York. I’ve heard it. I’ve said it. We all have.) – And he was intimately familiar with every tunnel in that incredible spider web of a complex underground. As I was re-writing that story to fit into the plot of my novel it occurred to me that the only reason the Empire State Building is still standing is that nobody has flown a passenger jet airplane into it, and if somebody had it would not have been rebuilt. Hundreds of feet below the street there is an engineering marvel even greater than the city’s tallest spire, a complex city-beneath-a-city like a honeycomb within a hive, with rails carrying trains at dangerous speeds to move millions of people from here to there and there to here. If something happened to the subway would we rebuild it? No, I don’t believe we would. With technology far advanced and tools greatly improved over the crude implements used by those great builders we inhabit these monuments to our former greatness as maggots inhabit a corpse. We would know how to rebuild these things but we wouldn’t have the will to rebuild them. We are stupid and lazy.

The truth is, however, that “we” always were stupid and lazy, really – most of us. It took the Herods of this nation to build these things. Some of them were nice people, others not so nice. Who cares? There are among us people who build and invent, and innovate, and their talent, and their greatness, isn’t merely knowing how to do a great thing but having the will. They are in the God Realm, those kinds of people. “We” didn’t build the Empire State Building. “We” didn’t build the subway. “I” did. When “we” are left to our own devices the result is laziness and stupidity, not to mention cruelty, murder, warfare, and oppression; but when “I” am free to pursue my individual happiness great things can happen.

We talk a great deal about having respect for the people who built the buildings and the subways, and the bridges – people like my grandfather – who toiled in the millions to achieve these great accomplishments, and yes, deservedly so. But, think about this: Was the Empire State Building built because a group of laborers happened to be standing around on 34^th Street one day and one of them said, “I’ve got an idea! Let’s build the tallest structure in the world?” No, that’s absurd. Most of us relate and identify with those laborers because that’s what we are too. That’s natural. But wasn’t it really the man they all ultimately worked for who built the Empire State Building? I live near a shrine to the classic American pastime, Baseball. We all know Jackie Robinson made history by breaking the race barrier in that game. But wasn’t it really the team’s owner who broke that barrier? Did Jackie Robinson just decide to walk out onto that field with bat in hand? We’re always talking about giving credit where it’s due, but we don’t actually. In fact, we tend to think of the builders, the inventers, the bosses, as beneath our contempt, as being by nature greedy and mean-spirited, while in the meantime driving across their bridges happily enough, and zipping through their subways as if they belonged to us. And like Herod the Builder, they might be not-so-nice. But all of us work – or, those of us who have that good fortune – alongside people we don’t like very much, and in that context we seem to take it in our stride. But we often think of the “builders” as being somehow bad by nature. In reality, the opposite is true, and “we” are living a lie.

Now, in “Atlas Shrugged” the sort of people I’m talking about – the people who had the will, the courage, to build the subways and the bridges; the people who employ millions of us to labor at these magnificent achievements went on strike – basically. In the novel the wealthy, powerful, despised industrialists begin to disappear one by one – bankers, oil tycoons, manufacturers, scientists. As a matter of fact, many of them aren’t terribly wealthy but exceptional in whatever they do, which is the point really. In the book their “leader” isn’t wealthy, for instance. But where they have wealth it is earned wealth, not plundered from the efforts of others, not taken immorally through taxation and subsidy. I’m not suggesting that the same thing is happening to us here in real life, but why is there a massive hole in the ground where the World Trade Center used to be? Why do I get the very real sense that nobody today would have the courage, or the will, to build something like our subway? In the book all the “builders” go to a secret canyon in the Rocky Mountains to wait until the progressive government that has taken over the country implodes upon itself, as they all eventually do. In real life perhaps they all went to Dubai. Have you seen that place?

OK – Trump is still here. We have one. We have Herod the Donald still in our midst. As far as I know he’s a nicer man than Herod – that is, if we can find it in our hearts to forgive him for “The Apprentice.”

Perhaps the least important thing about people is their personalities. We are obsessed with personalities, meaningless likes and dislikes about largely meaningless people. One of actor Martin Sheen’s sons captures our imaginations because he… what? What serum did he invent? What war did he win? What bridge did he build? The best of our heroes are essentially gladiators, athletes. That’s fine – as far as it goes. But the balance of people who captivate our attention are useless.

So what’s the big idea? Age-old prejudices that had been the guiding forces of human events for all of remembered time were suddenly cast to one side. That was the American Revolution. What changed specifically was this: the individual person gained control of the Moral Code; the “we” of human history that kept us in chains of prejudice was usurped by the “I” that represents the godhead. Liberty means nothing except this. It has nothing to do with being free to say “ass” on television. Liberty means that wealth is no longer fixed in quantity as if it were a pie with a limited number of slices. Previously in our world history wealth could only be transferred, redistributed; it could not be created. It was won in war, stolen, plundered, given, and taken away by governments; and the history of the human race is the history of government abuse, corruption, and greed. Liberty means that there is no pie. It means that the creation of wealth is now in the hands of the individual instead of the state. This is why the computer I’m composing this piece on is already obsolete, though it is only five years old. This is why there is a subway underground and a beautiful spire reaching into the sky above it. This is why diseases that formerly wiped out races are now treatable with a single dose of medicine. This is why babies that would have died in birth, killing their mothers in the process, are routinely brought forth alive, to live, perhaps to build something good. This is why… automobiles; this is why… airplanes; this is why… toothbrushes and Kleenex tissues, and fingernail clippers, and bottled beer, and ice cream, and television, and rockets to the Moon (Alice), and central heat. This is why… everything you can think of, what you are wearing, what you are eating and drinking. The unbelievable and unprecedented surge in the advancement of the human condition is due to one thing and one thing only: the United States of America. Before it came to be these things would not have been invented, discovered, created, and built, and after it ceases to be these advances will not continue. We will return to human business as usual, to continue our history of darkness, with that strange, brief glimmer of light being an oddity in the midst of it.

Pickles, anyone?

We have our fun here in the blog universe. I love to clown around. I enjoy posting pictures of Uncle Fester, and all that sort of thing. Life goes on.

Thank you, goodnight.

What to Expect When You Arrive in Newark

2011-03-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

I’m settling in here, getting the hang of it. Thanks for coming today. I’m very glad to see you. Make yourself at home. I have no idea what I’m going to write about.

My ideas are very ordinary today – Death attends a community bring-a-dish dinner at the Methodist church – that kind of thing. Mark Twain begins his story “A Dog’s Tale” like this: “My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian.” That’s the sort of thing spinning my cogs this day. I did run into a friend I haven’t seen since the fall who told me a story I’m trying to summon the power to share with you. It’s a sincere and quite moving tale, so I’ll have to get the giggles out of my system before I’m equal to it.

He observed my… no, it is more accurate to say he was blinded by my shaved head, for I had a closely cut but full head of hair when he last saw me. For my part, I almost didn’t recognize him because he had grown a full beard and had let his silver hair do whatever gravity determined it should do. I thought he looked like Moses come down off the mountain. It was not until he spoke that I was certain of his identity. He said that he expected me to have a wife and four children, or that is to say he had no clear idea what to expect as I can sometimes be mercurial, but he did not expect that I should be bald. Frankly, I was puzzled, for the odds of my having acquired a wife and four children between September and March… well, no come to think of it; I might have married a woman who had four children from a previous marriage. Or actually, if she had two children to add to my two children there would be four children all together. When I think of it that way I realize the odds may be even. But let us never forget the factor of my capriciousness, and that given the choice between having a wife and four children and shaving my head I will choose to visit an art museum in a distant city that happens to possess a particular Sandorfi painting I’ve always wanted to see. So, that’s clear.

By the way, if something is true then I can be persuaded of it. I want to be persuaded. A lot of people seem to go ‘round saying “I, I, I…believe…” OK, now make me believe. I want to believe. Pitch it. Cast your pearls, and I’ll oink at all the appropriate moments. If you have the truth with you down there at the deep end and I’m still clutching onto the ladder I’ll learn to swim out to you – I’m a quick study. If I start to go under just throw me a few metaphors as buoyant as that last one and I’ll be just fine.

I picked my younger son up at the pool today. The chlorine is with me still. As I write, the boys are on the other side of the wall behind me dragging a rhinoceros and a Steinway baby grand across a gigantic pile of random organ pipes that were confiscated from every church in the land where the organist couldn’t play to save his life – which is most of them. Or, they may be playing Halo. And my friend thought that I might have two more? It begins to sound as if I already do. I’ll have to bang on the wall… back in a flash.

I wonder: What dish did Death bring to pass at the dinner? (If I said that aloud you would know I’m sober.) Yesterday I closed my post with that lovely passage from the novel I’m reading by a fellow named Robert Reynolds. The setting is Rome in the 390’s A.D. Pagan and Christian Romans co-exist in the eternal city despite their conflicts, caught up in a sweep of events that may utterly destroy the world they share – or will, but the greater problem is not knowing for certain. A Christian emperor is followed by a pagan one, leading a renaissance of their traditions; but then his successor is once again a Christian, a man who has deferred much of his authority to the growing Church under the governance (for all intents) of Ambrose of Milan, and all of this within a generation. It’s interesting to imagine putting yourself into such a situation, which is essentially what you do when reading an historical novel. I might examine a timeline somebody has charted, or read an account of the events of a particular period – say 50 years, or a hundred years, anywhere in History – but that doesn’t necessarily inspire my imagination to envision living a natural human life in that period. It’s not a very mysterious period in History that provides the setting for this book. Much is known, for much was recorded and preserved, not only by the authorities who must attempt to provide an “official” version but also by the ordinary citizens, many of whom were at that time well educated and inclined to record their comments, observations, and personal histories. In many ways their society resembled our own in its eclecticism as well as its decadence, but in positive ways as well, being the center of trade, culture, wealth and power of the known world. Like a massive tree that looked as though it might stand forever but which is rotting from within, now even the outer bark is beginning to betray the weakness that must bring it down to the next strong wind – and that wind, barbarians growing in might and political prowess, formerly conquered, enslaved, and then educated in the ways of Empire by their own conquerors, are massing on the ever-closing frontiers. A person could live the course of his natural life in the period covered by this story – and in fact it appears to be the story of just such a person. That person is me. That person is you. When I read a novel I identify with the characters. That’s what they’re for. I’m there. (No, don’t give me Walter Cronkite right now, I’m in no mood).

All of this we understand about the value of historical novels, and why they are so damned entertaining. What’s really interesting is applying the same type of perspective we can learn to acquire from historical novels to our own lives, right now. That is, to put our own lives in our own historical context can be achieved by meditating upon our own experiences and knowledge as though we are the readers of a story about ourselves. Somebody will write that story someday, long after we’re dead, but why wait? Read it now. Which side of the conflict are you on? Who are your heroes? Who are your villains? Are you so unimportant that you have no place in history? Or, are you so very important that time began on the day you were born, and will simply end on the day you die? The honest answer is neither of those things can possibly be true. I’m not trying to brow beat you. I just think it’s quite interesting, and the questions I’m asking you to ask yourself are the questions I’ve asked myself. The idea is merely to acquire a perspective that allows us a less limited, less impeded, less prejudiced view.

I like looking at views. I like climbing mountains to look at a view. You can accuse me of going to extremes, but the extreme is where you’re going to find it – whatever it is. It’s never in the soggy, foggy middle where the vultures circle afterwards. Let me say this before my head explodes: there is more to be learned from Fiction than all the dry, dead, venerable tomes of somnambulistic earthly wisdom – Philosophy, Philology, Science, History, Theology, Mathematics, Religions, How to Toilet Train your Cat – if they were stacked end to end, with a Doctor of Divinity sandwiched in between each one to glue them together, from here to the Horsehead Nebula. Why is that? It’s because you can read all about a thing and know nothing about it until you’ve seen it and touched it; learn all about a place but know nothing until you’ve smelt it; and memorize all the theorems ever conceived of without the slightest idea of what they mean until you become the one that conceived them, and Fiction allows – demands – that deeper contact with all of man’s experience. It has been said of music – (Who said it? The Squabbler said it, right here) – that great minds have conceived of great truth, and greater minds have turned it into song. The Mathematician and the Alchemist, and the Philosopher only wish they had the power to communicate the way a storyteller does.

The Squabbler has a pagan mind and a Christian heart. The former abhors all suffering and turns away from it as Reason demands, but it is that very abhorrence that when coupled with the primitive impulses to love and to kill creates in the soul of a man or a woman his fatal fascination with atrocity and lust, greed, and all sorts of depravities that the pagan mind can only understand as the imp of the perverse. That understanding is inadequate, or else the seeds of his death ought not to be sown by his strengths, but they are; for Reason demonstrates that death is not our weakness but the culmination of our powers. We die as we lived; but why on earth do we suffer? The answer cannot be supplied by the unaided intellect, not even with the help of the gods. So, there is Christ hanging on his tree; there is Siddhartha meditating under his. The latter seeks emptiness for in it is perfection, and in that clarity suffering – the root of suffering – cannot hold dominion. The former redeems suffering – the root of suffering – not by dying as he lived but by living as he died. With both, the tree is Life; the seed that grew it is Sin. While his reason naturally runs from it, knowing itself to be outmatched, it is only the heart of man that can perceive the impenetrable contradiction at the center of being, and so it is the heart that must decide. Christ was not the first and only perfect Christian. It was his mother Mary who achieved that distinction. (And it was an agnostic Jew who taught me that.) “Let it be done to me” is a choice that only the heart can make. With my pagan mind I can see that all love is tragic; that happiness is no more than a form of suffering. Only with my Christian heart can I approach a love that is triumphant, and it is also completely and utterly terrifying. Only the heart can embrace what terrifies the mind. That same dead Christ in his impossible triumph is a majesty too horrifically luminous to look at without the soul itself dying of fright. Again, it is the heart that comes to the aid of the mind when the limits of the latter are reached.

What has ended our Western Civilization – and I say that it is ended, not that its end is coming – is the failure of its heart. The civilization that loses the connection with its God will end, has in effect already ended. The search for truth has been replaced by the machinations of policy. This appalls the pagan mind of the West who is called Aristotle, and it breaks the Christian heart of the West, whose name is Thomas Aquinas. Salvation? There is none – not for a civilization. Salvation isn’t comparative. Salvation isn’t collective. Salvation is entirely individual; the judgments rendered upon the individual merits of an individual human soul are entirely separate from the judgments rendered upon others. At that moment of judgment, of Salvation or of damnation, it is as if there is only one living soul in the entire universe – mine. John owns John, and John is responsible for his own happiness. Whether we come to it in great masses all at once, or if you or I, or any other person, comes to it with complete singularity, Salvation is an entirely individual thing, just as life was.

I think I’m ready to tell my friend’s story now.

To begin with he spoke in an off-hand way about telling… well no, I’m going about this wrong. This fellow is in his 70’s now. He’s kind of a tough guy, and he has a blunt way of talking. He’s more connected to his God than most people are. I find that irresistibly attractive in people. It is a trait, or an attribute of character, that no “type” of person – if you know what I mean – can claim to have a monopoly share of. The best way I can describe it is to say you’ll know it when you see it. Such individuals radiate confidence and kindness. The confidence can take the form of courage and decisiveness when called for, and the kindness is genuine. You don’t have to see it in action to know that it is there because merely being in the vicinity of such a person – well, I should speak for myself; when I am in the vicinity of such a person I feel peaceful and very much at ease. So, he spoke of the death of an old friend of his. He knew this fellow who was dying and he went to visit him in the hospital to see him for the last time and to “let him know what to expect when he closed his eyes for the last time.” Those were his exact words, and they were spoken matter-of-factly, as if he was saying “Let him know what to expect when he arrived in Newark.” It is that very matter-of-factness that indicates the presence of the quality I am speaking of. It would be madness coming from the lips of anybody unqualified to say it, but when he said it my reaction was to think, “But of course.” His faith is strong. We sometimes think that faith is a thing that overcomes all doubts, but no, it isn’t. Only delusion can overcome all doubts. Just as courage isn’t being without fear but rather taking courageous action in the midst of fear, faith is giving assent to something you know with certainty in the midst of doubt. Like courage, you either have it or you don’t, and also like courage, we usually don’t realize we have it until it is called for.

So, the man died as had been expected. His friends and family were at his side – including my friend, the fellow telling the story. It had been a brief but aggressive illness that killed him. He had wandered in and out of lucidity for several weeks, but as often happens he revived considerably at the very end as if to settle his affairs before leaving on a long trip. On his last night, according to my friend who witnessed it, he fell into a restless sleep and after several hours seemed to have finally expired. But, suddenly he opened his eyes widely and sat bolt upright, and said “Wow!” And then he immediately lay down and died.

After telling me this account – and there were several others also present who knew him – he said, “I know what that man saw. I’ve seen it.” He talked about being the most blessed man in the world. He talked more to that little group than I think I’ve ever heard him talk before, and I’ve known him for about ten years.

That’s all.

Here are some pictures of where I live, from the old White Lodge.

Thank you, goodnight.

And the Flight from Sorrow Was the Death of the Heart

2011-03-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

The radio public service announcement informs us that there is an underutilized resource on this “planet” – that’s the new word for “world,” but it doesn’t really mean “world;” it means dirt, basically – and that resource is… women.

I’ll pause here for a moment because laughing always makes me nauseous when I’m pregnant.

OK. First of all – and you know me, or you are about to know me – the very existence of public service announcements is abominable. Money that I have earned is stolen from me in the form of taxes and used, partly, to produce advertisements the basic purpose of which is to insult me. Women are the single most utilized “resource” in the world, and utilized so efficiently and perfectly (to 100% of productivity) that without them there would be no world, nor any human mind residing in it to imagine things like planets. Yet, the creators of this particular piece of public service drivel must have set out to mean something. Whatever can they mean? They begin by disregarding the contribution of women not only to our society but to our very existence from our theoretical and imagined dawning to our theoretical and imagined night; a contribution that eclipses with its significance the combined achievements of the human race not only throughout all of its history but into its conceivable eternity. And that reminds me when George Bernard Shaw was asked his opinion on the difference between women and men he paused to think deeply for a moment, shook his head, and replied “I can’t conceive!”

I should save this one for Mother’s Day, come to think of it. I’ve done special posts for Christmas and Easter, and Independence Day. I wrote about the history of Santa Claus a few years ago. My Blogstream friends may recall that series. It was great fun. Then I got into Zoroastrian eschatology for the Feast of the Epiphany, in honor of the stately Magi who, starting on Christmas Day, traversed my living room when I was growing up, from the kitchen door across the mantelpiece, through the rugged mountainous region of the stair banister, to finally arrive twelve days later at the site of Bethlehem and the birth of Our Lord, which was represented in miniature under our Christmas tree. Every year a tiny bone china lamb lost its leg and we had to prop it up against a shepherd. If I were a prophet I would probably be Zoroaster. And on Independence Day each year I posted the Declaration of Independence. But I don’t think I ever observed Mother’s Day at the White Lodge. My mother didn’t much care for the secular holidays – or, more to the point, wasn’t really aware of them. I would have to save this post until May, and I don’t think I want to do that. But I’m done griping about moronic PSA’s anyway.

The insidious Advertising Council began its existence as the War Advertising Council in 1941, which is an illustration of Reagan’s observation that government agencies are the closest a man-made entity can get to achieving eternal life. Its purpose was to provide war-time information to support home front morale against the Axis powers during World War II. Today we are the enemy, apparently.

Here is a breathtaking subject change.

Why do we do good things for people? To receive a reward. A person who gives to a charity, and then broadcasts to everybody within ear-shot that he has done so, has received his reward. He is raised in esteem. That’s fine. The person who gives of his value, whether in the form of money or something else of value, anonymously, or in secret, receives his reward too. Buddhists would call it the acquisition of merit. There is greater merit – and on this point we Christians are usually inclined to agree – in giving in this latter way. There being no reward to the ego in this case, it is believed the soul of the giver is rewarded. Apart from whatever benefit the recipient of our generosity may receive – and it may be of considerable benefit – we who are doing the giving often associate very positive emotions with the act, and a genuine perception of our interconnectedness with other human beings, perhaps even with the world at large, or the “spirit.” That’s also fine. It’s something I practice, endorse, and recommend. But I don’t for a moment pretend that I expect no reward, for to do so is intellectually and morally dishonest. It is intellectually dishonest because of its manifest illogic. It is morally dishonest because it is impossible. If I were to pretend that I don’t expect a reward I would, in a sense, deny or invalidate the value of giving in the first place. I would also be guilty of pride.

In short, not all things of value are material, but giving cannot occur without something being received in exchange. In Nature vacuums are abhorred.

What was that line from the character Frank Burns in the TV show “M.A.S.H.” – “It’s nice to be nice… to the nice?” (Did he mean Keith Emerson? Whoever gets that reference – let’s get together and listen to some music, soon.) I have friends who believe that if everybody was given a million dollars the world would become a happy place. Well, the first thing that would happen is obvious: you would need your million dollars to buy a package of cheese – in other words, the money would become very quickly worthless. There are economic reasons for this which many of you know, or at least know of, and these economic laws are true because they depend, as does everything, on moral law. In this case, if everybody was given a million dollars then everybody would be guilty of receiving stolen property. To put it plainly, the money would have to come from somewhere. It would have to be taken (by threat of force, or coercion, if necessary) from people who have it in order to give it to the people who don’t have it, and this would be a monumental injustice. My friends who believe that everybody ought to be given a million dollars are not bad people. Very few people are. In fact, I don’t believe I have ever met any bad people. But they are stupid.

To read the White Lodge it isn’t necessary to believe in God, but to exist it is necessary to believe in God. Everybody does, even atheists. What they don’t believe in is a concept that is not their own. They don’t believe in a particular way of understanding what can only be understood in the abstract, and the way they prefer to approach it addresses the abstract principle called God by names other than the traditional ones. Abstract ideas are usually represented by symbols. The purest example of this is Math. When a person rejects the idea of God what he is rejecting is a tradition of symbolism known as religion, or the religious way of conceptualizing this abstract principle. In Aristotelian logic – much like Math – God is the Uncaused Cause, as we all must know from Grammar School, and a thing that must exist if anything else can be said to exist. This is a non-religious way to conceptualize the abstract principle known as God. When an individual, whose very existence is proof of the existence of this principle, chooses to reject one symbolic system for understanding it, he by necessity accepts an alternate one. His God, in other words, is something he chooses to address by a different name. Again, Nature abhors a vacuum, and we all exist in Nature.

Isn’t that interesting?

Yes, Squabbler. Talk about ducks.

Anyhoo, to get back to this business of everybody being in receipt of stolen property, which drives down the value of that property, we need to understand that it is merit that gives money its value in the first place. The money – the million dollars – is only worth something because it has been earned; and the value of money, going ever up and down, depends not upon how much of it is available but how much merit it represents. If it is taken in an act of theft and injustice from the earners (who have merit) and given to non-earners (who have no merit) on a grand scale, as my not-bad-but-stupid friends would like, that money would lose its value. Inflation would be the inevitable result. Detaching monetary policy from moral law is disastrous. Detaching any decision from moral law is disastrous. I compared moral law in a previous post to Gravity. The consequence of “breaking” that law?

…Splat.

Quack.

(There’s your duck.)

Oh Lord – look at this. “Draft Marco Rubio” is following me on Twitter. There’s nothing to follow. I tweeted twice and completely lost interest. I have Cuban cousins, by the way. I wish I was clever, so I could tweet. But all I can do is quack. Rubio has only been a senator for a few months. Let the man do his job. Maybe I should quack that to them. I think it’s silly to draft brand-new senators. He won’t know the ins and outs of that body for two years yet.

You know, one thing I admire greatly is competence. I don’t care what a person does for a living as much as I care for how well he or she does it. There is a competent way to sweep a floor, or to run a company, or a battleship. I always hear “You have to do what you love.” Wrong. Very few of us get to do that. You have to love yourself so that whatever you end up doing is well done. There’s no job too small, too menial, too dreary and mechanical, for excellence. When somebody working at a job is saying to himself “I don’t really want to be here” he is telling the story of his life, because no matter where he ends up going – and it’s not likely to be very far unless the prison is on the other side of the state – that statement will remain true. “I don’t really want to be here.” He doesn’t really want to be alive. It’s that simple.

While I’m (sort of) on public officials, do you remember Squabbler for President on Blogstream? It was one of my female readers who advanced that apocalyptic idea. I’m including the campaign slogan concept below. “Vote for Squabbler. Why choose a lesser evil?”

From Mar 17, 2011

Every now and then I flatter myself to think that I am a good writer. Whenever such occasions arise, however, I am shown something that corrects this perspective, usually the work of an author whose skill with language makes my efforts seem – well, what they are, and no more. In this case the author is Robert Reynolds from his novel “The Sinner of Saint Ambrose,” which I bought at a used book sale last year (because the title had the word sin in it, I suppose). There is no publication date that I can find in this volume. I close with a short passage that caused my heart to miss a beat:

“For how could a man who feared death and shunned grief know the meaning of human life at all? The desire for a safe, a secure and prolonged mortality was a blind, cruel, and deceiving passion, and the flight from sorrow was the death of the heart. Love – love of man and love of God – was lighted by grief and made pure by the presence of death, and the very essence of immortality was the utter suffering frailty of my moment of mortal being in the flow of infinite time.

“I had worked my way to a vision of human life more penetrating – and more dangerous – than I had as yet the character or the experience to sustain. We sometimes see a truth beyond our strength to bear, when our spirit strains to enlarge our life.”