Obey's occasional epiphanies

OWS, or What is the sound of 300 million hand signals?

OWS is not your new bicycle.

OWS is not a cute white killer bunny.

OWS is not a Christmas wish list.

It is a zen koan.

This seems like a point worth making, because people are getting confused. The issue at hand is not when to issue demands (if not now, ... now?) nor how (with a smile or a menace) nor what demands to make.

This is not a negotiation.

A square is not a hostage.

Air time is not a concession.

And The People are not terrorists:  they are the sovereign.

The occupation is a zen koan.  A koan presented by the Ninety Nine to ... occupy ... the One. It is a riddle without any particular right answer, but by One’s answer One shows whether or not One is on the way.

The young saffron-robed monk Timmy (or Timmeh for Coloradans) piped up first. “Handsignals must be deregulated, because high frequency hand-signals are good for liquidity”. Ah Timmy, you must meditate some more.

Then came the neophyte Barry, so full of promise. He understood the need to think things over and consider the big picture, as it were, to answer with obliquity:

“To look for hair on the back of a tortoise,
Or hunt for horns on the head of a rabbit,
Or seek redress for financial crimes,
All these things are futile, born of errant desire which is but suffering.”

Barry, you must think not just with your intellect and your financial backers in mind. The entire personality, mind and body, must be thrown into the solution. Only thus the solution shall you find.

Then the novice David the babbling Brooks, after day-and-night concentration, undergoing an increasing mental strain, thought he had unfolded the mystery and reproduced the state of consciousness of the Master:

“True enlightenment is cutting entitlement and freeing the entrepreneurial spirit from regulation and income taxes. Only thus will we be free of the suffering of deficits and market inefficiencies holding back growth.”

Young David, you show dedication to the task at hand, but you must move beyond the world of beltway budgetary illusion. Deficits in a liquidity trap are but fleeting figments of our imagination. Growth, efficiency, synergy, productivity, corporate profits, these things have no grip on reality when their fruits accrue to no one, but obtain merely as digital representations in a file folder in numbered Swiss accounts.

Then there was Orszag of the omb, who threw up his hands and responded, “There is no answer, no matter how many hands give the signal. Because greater than them all is the invisible hand signal that transfers income from labor to capital. It is thus, and always will be, as long as we don’t change the text books.”

Oh Orzag of the omb, despair not. Text books were made to be rewritten. And money need not always and only flow upwards.

Nor were Koans made to be resolved in a day. It takes time and effort. And dear One, it is the Master’s role to ensure that the psychic tension induced by the Koan is neither too little nor too great. The Master cannot give you the answer, the Master is the questioner, and the sanzen – the process – will be arduous and unpleasant and surprising for the One. Since the Koan is impossible to explain - it is not a claim or a proposition, it is an understanding – the Master must resort to unusual practices to guide the student towards enlightenment, most notably through the innen – or the 'incidents': the Master will be forced to tweak, shout, pummel the student with blows, or even cut off a finger or two. The innen, this variety of antics, are necessary in order to provide the final shock that releases the baffled mind caught in a state of psychic tension and lead to satori.

So dear One, persevere and ask not for our demands.

Our demands, like Truth, are both infinite and one.

Primate Portraits

From the Daily Mail (h/t Neuroanthropology)

Perspective is Everything.

Just thought I should share this with the world.

Via The Spoiler. From the Manchester City - Manchester United match, which is generally more fun to watch for the violence than for the football soccer. 

The Land which Mistook its Life for a Hat

  This is not a hat

A. was once a land of distinction, well-known for many years as a champion of the oppressed, a teacher of the ignorant, a beacon of light for the hopeless. Then certain strange problems started being observed. She would confuse the oppressed with oppressors, rail at the poor as though they were welfare kings and queens, lower taxes in order to increase revenue, welcome rising debt as vast new riches, hand out corporate subsidy in the name of free markets, beat down wages for the sake of the workers, invade countries in the name of freedom, and present propaganda organs as ‘news’ channels.

At first these odd mistakes were laughed off as jokes, at least by A. herself. Had she not always had a quirky sense of humor, and been given to Zen-like paradoxes and jests? Her creative powers were as dazzling as ever, she did not look ill. And the mistakes were so ludicrous – and so ingenious – that they could hardly be serious or betoken anything serious. The notion of there being something the matter did not emerge until 2008 when A’s whole financial system collapsed.

A’s accountant decided that there was nothing wrong with the numbers, and referred her to a psychiatrist instead. And yet, to any observer it was immediately obvious that this was no dementia in the ordinary sense. A was a land of great cultivation and charm. And yet, there was something a bit odd. When she faced the mirror to look at herself, she was oriented towards it, yet there was something the matter – it is difficult to formulate. She faced the mirror with her ears, it seemed, not with her eyes. These, instead of looking, taking in herself, in the normal way, made sudden strange fixations – on her deficits, on a downtown community center, on a Medicare comparative efficiency panel, on Senate bi-partisanship, on Tea, on Kenyan anti-colonialism, on the intimate intentions of her founding fathers, on a boy in a balloon – as if noting, even studying, random peculiar features, but ignoring, impervious to, her whole condition and the direction she was headed as a whole. There was a strangeness, a failure in the normal interplay of gaze and understanding.

 

When presented with a homeless jobless man, she was able to describe him in all his particulars,

- “Ah, this is an idle labor resource that remains underutilized due either to the friction of structural adjustments in the sectoral distribution of aggregate production or alternatively due to a sudden preference for leisure, sleeping outdoors and dieting – depending on whether one is more Chicago school or Coastal Elite”. 

-  “Might it not also be a human being in need of some help?” one would prod helpfully.

No light of recognition, however, dawned on her face.

No child would have the power to see and speak of this instance of a structural adjustment in the economy, but any child would immediately recognize a person in distress. A. saw nothing as familiar. Visually she was lost in a world of lifeless abstraction. Indeed, she did not have a real visual world, as she did not have a real visual self. She functioned precisely as a machine functions. It wasn’t merely that she displayed the same indifference to the visual world as a computer, but – even more strikingly – she construed the world as a computer construes it, by means of key features and schematic quantifiable relationships. The scheme might be identified – in an identi-kit way – without the reality being grasped at all.

She was however only in this debilitating alienated state intermittently. She did everything – governing, debating, shopping, entertaining, manufacturing, bombing – singing to herself. When consuming, she would move immediately towards the positional goods, swiftly, fluently, unthinkingly, melodiously, reaching for the Foreman grills, the Vera Wang, the Piaget, taking this and that in a great gurgling stream, until suddenly there came an interruption: a loud, peremptory rat-tat-tat at the door. Startled, taken aback, arrested by the foreclosure notice, A. would stop consuming and stand frozen, motionless in the doorway, no longer viewing the mail-order catalog as a fulfilling direction in which to channel her existential angst. Only the smell of her new gold card would bring her back to reality, and the melody of consumption would resume. For a time.

A. was last seen running down Fifth Avenue exhibiting her recent breast implants (called Fin and Reg, respectively), singing ‘They say I ought to go to Rehab, and I say, ‘no, no, no’…”.

The world community expresses its love and concern.

 

Inspired by (and partially cribbed from) Oliver Sacks’ The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, 1985.

Cutting edge research on religion

Here is a sample of what is considered state-of-the-art thinking about religion:

Is religion more like a virus or a bacteria?

On the one hand, you have the Dawkinsian application of evolutionary principles of selectivity to cultural memes:

The idea is that religions, like viruses, are costly to those infected with them. They demand large amounts of money and time, impose health risks and make people believe things that are demonstrably false or contradictory. Like viruses, they contain instructions to "copy me", and they succeed by using threats, promises and nasty meme tricks that not only make people accept them but also want to pass them on.

On the other hand, you have... the facts: religious people are statistically speaking likelier to be happy and reproduce more. So in light of such considerations, they are less like harmful viruses and more like bacteria that have a symbiotic win-win relationship with their host.

And note how Dawkins' proselytizing Anti-Theism is on this view more like a virus than religion: it makes its hosts less happy and reproduce less, all while 'using nasty meme tricks to make people accept it and pass it on'. Back to the drawing board, Dick.

As Nietzsche would have said, Every age has its own divine kind of naïvete for the invention of which other ages may envy it - and how much naïvety, venerable, childlike and boundlessly stupid naïvety there is in the scholar's belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above - he, the little presumptuous dwarf  and man of the mob, the brisk and busy head- and handyman of 'ideas', of 'modern ideas'.

Oh, yes, he did say that (BGE §58).

What only we two will know

I'm not quite sure why, but around the age of twelve I stopped reading. I may have simply turned to, well, the other pursuits of twelve-year olds, or it was the revolting introduction to the 'study' of books at school. In any case, I stopped. Then at eighteen I picked up a book one day, and it was like someone lit the kindling on a bonfire. The book that brought me back was John Fowles' the Magus, a story of mystery and intrigue and sex. It has been so long, I can't actually say how well it holds up, but I'll always be thankful for the fact that it got me reading again. I didn't read any more Fowles, instead turning to Amis, Barnes, McEwan, all the cool boys, and from there to the classics.

A couple of years later I was in Italy and saw an advertisement for a reading by Fowles the next day. I decided to go, and since I was going I thought I had better have a Fowles book in my hand. I bought The Collector and read it that night, like I was preparing for a possible pop quiz. For the uninitiated, it is a nightmarish story of a man who abducts a young girl and keeps her prisoner, written as though it were her diary of events and his, published side by side. I have no memory of what he read that day, nor much about the answers to the questions he was asked. Most questions were uninteresting - 'Why was so-and-so set in Cornwall?' or 'Why is that female character so flat?', and Fowles looked like an English farmer asked to explain Quantum Electrodynamics. He was desperately incompetent at explaining himself. However when he could answer with an anecdote, you could almost see his brain light up again behind his eyes. He could have been describing the changing of a light-bulb, but we were all enthralled. He struck me as a man who was incapable of anything, even changing a light-bulb, except that one gift: firing up people's imagination and carrying them away. He was put on this Earth to tell stories.

After the question-time there were biscuits and book-signing. Fowles sat in a corner and, surprisingly, gave everyone who approached a generous amount of face time. When there was an opening, I walked up with my sped-read Collector in hand, told him my little story about why He as an author had a special place in my heart. He seemed to be genuinely trying to feign interest and appreciation, which was nice. He then opened my book (or his book, I should perhaps say), and, on the title page pointed to a little quote in italics I hadn't noticed. It read 'que fors aus ne le sot riens nee'. Yeah, I didn't know either. And told him.
He explained, "It means 'which only these two will know'".
I clicked. "Ah I see, the man and the girl in the story, we'll never know what really happened, only how they tell it".
He smiled, and started scribbling something in the book. I hadn't asked for any in particular and waited with a kind of astonished excitement.

There it was, in all its non-cursive clarity "Which only we two will know, John Fowles"

I toddled off with my trophy, a bit bemused, wondering whether it was a beautifully kind gesture to a stranger and a fan, or the worst little fraud in literary history. Or a moment of post-modern genius.

Friday Frenchy Festival

Serge Gainsbourg, genius composer and player extraordinaire, a cross between Sartre and Snoop Dogg. He once famously tried to seduce Whitney Houston as only a french lover can. (he failed).

(you don’t need to know much French to get this one)

 

 

Fwiw, ‘je vais et je viens entre tes reins’ (‘I come and I go between your kidneys’) for some reason works better in francais.

Being occupied: not so much fun.

(Hopey McFreedom, ca 1943)  

An ordinary day under the German occupation during WWII: the testimony of a Belgian, Professor van der Essen, who survived the war unmolested, before the court at Nuremburg.

   “I don’t want to dwell on personal considerations or enter into details of a personal nature or of a theoretical or philosophical nature. I should like simply to give an account – it will not take more than two minutes - of the ordinary day of an average Belgian during the occupation.

   I take a day in the winter of 1943; at six o’clock in the morning there is a ring at the door. One’s first thought – indeed we all had this thought – was that it was the Gestapo. It wasn’t the Gestapo. It was a city policeman who had come to tell me that there was a light in my office and that in view of the necessities of the occupation I must be careful about this in future. But there was the nervous shock.

   At seven-thirty the postman arrives bringing me my letters; he tells me that he wishes to see me personally. I go downstairs and the man says to me: ‘You know, Professor, I am a member of the secret army and I know what is going on. The Germans intend to arrest today at ten o’clock all the former soldiers of the Belgian Army who are in this region. Your son must disappear immediately’. I hurry upstairs and wake my son. I make him prepare his kit and send him to the right place. At ten o’clock I take the tram for Brussels. A few kilometers out of Louvain the tram stops. A military police patrol makes us get down and lines us up – irrespective of our social position – in front of a wall, with our arms raised and facing the wall. We are thoroughly searched, and having found neither arms nor compromising papers of any kind, we are allowed to go back into the tram. A few kilometers farther on the tram is stopped by a crowd which prevents the tram from going on. I see several women weeping, here are cries and wailings, I make enquiries and am told that their men folk living in the village had refused to do compulsory labour and were to have been arrested that night by the Security Police. Now they are taking away the old father of eighty-two and a young girl of sixteen and holding them for the disappearance of the young men.

   I arrive in Brussels to attend a meeting of the academy. The first thing the President says to me is: ‘have you heard what has happened? Two of our colleagues were arrested yesterday in the street. Their families are in a terrible state. Nobody knows where they are.’

   I go home in the evening and we are stopped on the way three times, once to search for terrorists, who are said to have fled, the other times to see if our papers are in order. At last I get home without anything serious having happened to me.

   I might say here that only at nine o’clock in the evening can we give a sigh of relief, when we turn the knob of our radio set and listen to that reassuring voice which we hear every evening, the voice of Fighting France. ‘Today is the 189-th day of the struggle of the French people for their liberation’, or the voice of Victor Delabley, that noble figure of the Belgian Radio in London, who always finished up by saying, ‘Courage, we will get them yet, the Boches!’ That was the only thing that enabled us to breathe and go to sleep at night. 

- From The Trials of the German War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Vol. VI. Nuremberg, 1947-9.

 

   I remember talking to an amiable old couple in Vilnius, Lithuania in the mid 90’s. The husband was a retired music professor and had been a dissident in the time of the USSR, before playing a part in the first post-Soviet government. He was telling me about the mundane differences in life after the fall of the Wall: the price of bread, academic culture, the delicate and almost comic politics of getting the Russian army to leave. His wife remained oddly silent. Then all of a sudden she blurted out, “You don’t understand, every evening we would go to bed and I would wonder – ‘will it be tonight that they come for my men [her husband and two sons]?’”. There was just a flash of frustration, and then it was gone. But it was enough to give me a glimpse of the ‘nervous shock’ piled up over the years.

Crushing one’s conscience: when wrong is right.

This little snippet from P.G. Wodehouse’s Little Nugget (p. 179) could probably pass as a piece of flash fiction. In any case I liked how it illustrated the way in which Conscience can lose all authority:

   As she spoke, there came to me the knowledge that I could never do what I had come to do. I could not give her up. She needed me. I tried not to think of Cynthia. I took her hand.

   ‘Nothing matters except you, I won’t give you up […] Can you deny that you need me?’

   ‘No’.

   She said it quite simply, without emotion. I moved towards her, thrilling, but she stepped back.

   ‘She needs you too’, she said.

   A dull despair was creeping over me. I was weighed down by a premonition of failure. I had fought my conscience, my sense of duty and honour, and crushed them. She was raising them up against me once more. My self-control broke down.

   ‘Audrey … for God’s sake can’t you see what you’re doing? We have been given a second chance. Our happiness is in your hands again, and you are throwing it away. Why should we make ourselves wretched for the whole of our lives? What does anything else matter except that we love each other? Why should we let anything stand in our way? I won’t give you up.’

   She did not answer. Her eyes were fixed on the ground. Hope began to revive in me, telling me that I had persuaded her. But when she looked up it was with the same steady gaze, and my heart sank again.

(In passing, this is by far the best of the thirty-odd Wodehouse novels I’ve read to date.)

I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for this

Heard on CNN while channel surfing:

 

“His face-licking abilities must be unparalleled!”

 

Which brings me to my working definition of the Sublime:

-         Precision without context.