Almost the First of May

I'm going to approach the following topoi as a multifaceted dome as is

my wish and perogative in as much as I do not have an editor or some other person of authority looking over my shoulder and directing me otherwise.

We speak often of context but as well there's the subtext. Joseph Stiglitz , Naomi Klein, Paul Krugman and others have in recent years brought to our attention the notion that for reasons undetermined, officially at least, the American society has left the road it once traveled and now ventures forth upon rocky terrain.

Perhaps unfortunately, or perhaps not the slots allocated for intelligent observation by the system, of the system are filled and so I must add my bit in some other fashion. I suppose I have made too much, in recent years of my humble origins which would justify my taking more extreme measures but I do think that both now and in the future a singularly useful ability will be that of being able to determine when the pronouncements of the system will hurt us and when not.

We must do our best to avoid believing the self serving lies we are too often told. These lies have been so successful because they are now part of information systems, propagandic paradigms which seem to have the virtue of provability when in fact they do not.

Secondly we have to learn to inject into the information state such formulae as will paralyze said state should it embark on procedures that will be to the detriment of our lives and happiness.

To do otherwise, to stand by and do nothing, is to relinquish our birthrights as human beings.

PROLOGUE;

                  You know you’re venturing into academia when you start asking about the state of your subject. Eg “Is the theatre really dead?” or is “Psychoanalysis relevant to the online community?”

                 Unfortunately the study of myth has reached the point where every one from Noam Chomsky to Guns&Roses claims expertise in the necessity of illusions and that can’t be good. Me I start to freak out when I start sounding like John Stewart Mill to myself. Long ago I strove for that sort of elaboration to mask my ‘umble beginnings but It’s no good if it does it’s job too well.

                     Blame it on Indiana Jones. There are rings of power but they are only used to change color in the presence of poison. Mostly myth is fiction at any given point. Much current academic study laments “the absence of myth”. I suppose it’s transmutation into advertising has not bode well.

                           It’s a little creepy but one may suggest that the emphasis on using mental leverages to sway weak minded individuals is in reaction to the awareness, or near awareness of the fact that society has nothing else to do with it’s time. Great art tends to appear a little past a societies high point.

                               In the following I wind up stressing the fact that metaphysics notwithstanding, life is about who gets laid and who doesn’t. Words don’t count. Less conclusively most illusions are created for a purpose and some even go by the far less flattering names of “That which is not true”.

And we ought not mistake the volume of the song for the tone. It’s an age old problem that I trust you will bear in mind.

Panic/ don't panic/ alright relax

                  Before strolling off to our usual obscurities I’d like to make an observation about the scope of subject here at the Tamlinmediaco.

           Many times in our earlier incarnations I jested about being the world’s most important website. This was an obvious reference to the idea that anyone can call anything anything they like. It was an homage’ of sorts to the show biz tradition of hyperbole as in the case of The Rolling Stones, whom apparently someone decided were “the worlds greatest rock and roll band.” In the modern parlance it was a brand imprint, albeit clumsy.

                           It was meant to be clumsy as opposed to facebook which brands you in a far more sophisticated and profitable way. As a rule if one company has exclusive control of one field they own your ass.

                       But I’ve never intended these writings to be concerned with the immediate present. I learned from when I reviewed software that such writings are quickly out of date. Even now it doesn’t bother me so much you don’t read me in 2012, as long as what I am saying still has merit in 2020 (When presumably I will *really* need the money)

                        Entertainment is like this. Mariah Carey’s first single debuted at number one. That’s not usual and the tune was forgettable but she benefited from the fact that her fiancé, Tommy Mottola, was the president of the record company. A similar thing happened with Obama and Romney.

In systems as complex as the Technostate persons who will have influence and access to the levers of information are not so much elected as anointed. Otherwise there’s too much at risk and suffice to say the allegiance of these voices is to those who put them into power. For awhile at least. Poor Mariah – such heartbreak.

If you keep struggling and fail constantly it destroys the soul. People havr at times said to me the don’t understand how I keep going in light of continued non recognition and it’s difficult to answer other then I’ve had an unusual and varied life and don’t know what else to ask for.

                  What this comes down to in in an election time the attempt is nearly always made to stampede the voters – to make them respond not as thinking individuals but as an emotional mob. Plus, it stands to reason that the worse you portray the current situation, once, if you get elected the greater the “Improvement” will be when you get to put your policies into place.

              A comparatively small amount of disinformation, if correctly placed distorts results far beyond it's merit and we must guard against that.

            So if you care to do so, currently you can find material about the coming economic disaster of 2011 which of course never happened but was useful in getting people to invest in gold. It helps to look at the numbers and consider as well the US has a lot of things going for it not the least the size of it’s internal market and the degree of social and intellectual interconnectedness of the society.

              We cannot and ought not pass laws forbidding panic and part an parcel of where I sit is the prohibition against being overly judgmental but when panic appears it pays to ask yourself if there is not someone benefiting from it.

Where da Indians?

Incidently, one might surmise that all things considered I’d have a few well thought out opinions about the copyright actions PIPA and SOPA. Actually I do and I don’t . Being as a content creator in the heart of the issue I cannot take a simplistic all good or all bad position. By the same criteria however we have to take into consideration the questions of what will work and what won’t. Unless you want to turn the
US into a totalitarian, isolated state, consideration has got to be given to the legal structures in the rest of the world. As a practical matter the magic word is jurisdiction and with some firms shopping for favorable judges and jurisdictions is something of a high art that they are going to be loathe to relinquish.

American Congressional legislation also has not exactly been the gold standard since 1980 – in fact it’s been pretty terrible and noted both for hypocrisy in titles and double dealing in result. What is worse then being morally despicable however is it hasn’t worked. Many of the cockamamie schemes have done nothing but encourage crime on a scale hitherto unimaginable- beginning of course with the 800 billion dollar savings and loan scheme in the Reagan days, which seems tiny in comparison to the damage by latter administrations.

To be fair the Clinton people can say that without corruption they could not have survived, but this argument is not very persuasive. Obama’s taking a lot of flak and much of it seems deserved but the really chilling thing is after thirty years of decimation there many not be that many people in Washington with clean records. They played the game as they knew it.

There’s a side of the social collapse that gets very little play. Bad guys are promoted until they are caught – and that makes the news. The underprivileged give us heartwarming tales of success against all odds and that makes the news. But a truly tragic thing develops when the conflicts take on the more serious aspects of warfare.

A real tyrant, one who’s is intent on success knows that the corrupt people are everywhere. The number of people who would sell their mothers for a dime can’t be counted. So one doesn’t have to bother looking for them, they will make themselves noticed. It is the uncorrupt persons that have to be sought out and systematically destroyed. And guess what ? That doesn’t make the news.

Plus there’s the issue of whether good intentioned, or not, the scheme will work. Remember
I want to be paid and I want to work in an environment where everyone else is paid and I’d prefer to be engaged in projects of substantial budgetary demands. Call me simpleminded for instance but I do not see how assigning the rights to my songs to a corporation fifty years after I am dead is doing me any good.

And yet another aspect that as an American peeves me, is the law is only as good as it’s enforcement and what we seem to be heading for is a situation where the punishments fall disproportionately on those regions and peoples who happen to live in proximity to American cops and lawyers - In which American essentially subsidizes the rest of the world.

I mean we already in effect subsidize the rest of the world’s military by being the world’s police – do we really have to add to that the case of opening the doors to our retail stores and giving the stuff away for free as well? Because that’s what happening. The Feds have not succeeded in closing down the file sharing sites – what they have done is succeeded in blocking the access of Americans to those sites many of which have material posted by Americans.

They are turning us into the Soviet Union, where if you want forbidden products you have to go though illegal channels which are available legally to the rest of the world. It is in creating revenue streams from the rest of the world that my interest is drawn to. You know the joke, the system has bled the citizens dry in America and now it’s time to give the rest of the world the benefits of democracy.

It works for me.

                              Just like we did to the American Indians.

  `````````````````````````````````````````````11111111111111111111111111111111111Other then that – another joke I resort to when I encounter a particularly wacko mentality is “As a trained psychoanalyst I get three hundred an hour but in your case I can sit and listen to your problems for only a hundred more.”

                 I was speaking the other day with someone, a lawyer, about how living in an academic mileau, which is almost overbearingly liberal I’ve come to realize how that draws a certain type of overbearing personality, often from people’s otherwise oppressed, to express domination.

People who would otherwise be the victims of racial or religious profiling take out their hostility on the meek and mild neighbors who in sympathy for their afflicted compadres grin and bear it.

                         Which is to say, please understand I am not from the favored class and hence am not prone to accepting guilt that is laid on them. AL Jesson, a friend, used to tell a joke about two monks , drunk, in a basement and one says “I can out forgive any monk in this monastery.”

                    `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` ````````What the two things have in common is typical of a bully. When you can’t beat up on the people that really are making your life miserable because they will kill you, you beat up on whoever you can.

When I consider the level of discourse about business in America I want to go to sleep! It is infantile. The rest of the world is waking up and that’s that.
Jesus Christ, they should put me on a board of directors for a quarter mill a year and how much you want to bet I’m not the smartest person in the room?

Yes, I know it sounds like and is hubris and yes, I admit there may be , scattered here and there others – but they are either sucking their thumbs or their thumbs are stuck up other orifices.

I don’t pity them because in many cases they are getting paid and I am not, but they think to themselves. “Gee it would be nice to have an educated workforce. It would be nice to live in a nice environment.”

But, rather then delude ourselves and search for Quakenbushes Magical Elixir say this. America is going off the rails. I speak here in mythological, epistemological and even economic terms.

It’s possible there will be some sort of Progressive resurgence. I live in the northern northeast corridor from whence came abolitionists, Witch burners and transcendentalists; so I have no idea how enlightened the rest of you are. Maybe we’re too intellectual.

Todays Mythic Cowboy Movie of the Week is

“The Man who shot Liberty Valence”

First off let’s clear up the difference between myth and fantasy. Myth is a permutation of truth. It is truth to which some extra element, often uncomfortable, is tagged on.

Fantasy, as in the case of describing defense mechanisms, is the unsubstantiated belief that something, often beneficial, will happen. Fantasies of persecution, for instance, are both similar and dissimilar to the more common fantasies of some great boon. A fantasy can be described as a shallow experience, a wish of a afternoon, whereas myths, as we speak of them are handed down through generations in some cases for thousands of years.

The Man who shot Liberty Valence is one of the last movies made by the great director , John Ford. In the wild west of a territory two men vie for a woman. One of the men, John Wayne, represents the common morality which is that justice and only be had by the use of the gun. The other, James Stewart is a lawyer who believes in the use of courts and written laws.

The movie opens with a Stagecoach being held up by Liberty Valence and his gang of robbers. Jimmy Stewart talks back to the thief and for his efforts is soundly beaten, pistol whipped and kicked. They make it to town where it becomes apparent that Liberty has been terrorizing the vicinity for years but no one is willing to stand up to him.

This is a classic western mythical element. In a certain sense all cowboy stories are creation myths in that they detail what it’s like to go where there’s no rules and bring order to the scene. Also the Western movie genre is something of a sanctified ground where film makers can say things about society that would be rejected in a more immediate approach.

A good example of this is “High Noon” made at the height of the McCarthy/Nixon black list and red scare the town’s law man, once again is being threatened by a gang of outlaws. He goes from person to person in the town seeking aid against the bad guys, but everyone else is too afraid. Finally he has to face the bad guys alone. He wins but leaves town in disgust.

Hollywood was not that naïve about what High Noon was about. Ronald Reagan had changed from a Democrat to a Republican and President of the screen actors guild presided over the purge alleged red sympathizers though out the industry.

The same story was told fifteen years later in the Clint Eastward movie, I believe it was “Hang ‘em High” Only in this instance the townspeople agree to join the stranger in the poncho to defend the town.

Joseph Schillinger in describing the rules of sequential melodic and harmonic development takes pains to say that even though music of created in many societies and times, all music follows some elementary rules, which the composers are largely ignorant of.

The same holds true with myth. The central and ny far strongest taboo in the human species is incest with the mother. That is nearly always expanded to a prohibition on incest with siblings and close cousins. In primitive tribal customs quite often the hero figure is from another totemic group. One might even suggest it adds a little dramatic interest to have main character from monkey totem rather then Anteater.

This also makes things a little easier to explain. The stranger shows up in town. The stranger guns down the bad guy. The stranger leaves. That is basically the whole plot of the movie “Shane” (There’s one other thing. Shane is idolized by a little boy who we may presume will grow up to carry on the tradition)

In The Man who killed Liberty Valence the stranger is Jimmy Stewart – the bringer of the law. Valence .in it’s older usage meant power and strength. Liberty is just that; strength unchecked by any sense of right or wrong. There’s also a minor subplot when the question of statehood arises. Liberty is in the pay of the large landowners “up north” who want to retain the region as a territory

But the townspeople want schools and highways and most of all laws. It is the same issues we face today. Those who holler against government really are upset with law. They don’t like like it. Most of these free marketers are criminals anyway so they hate the law.

The problem is if you stop then by shooting them then you are no better then them.

The story comes up with an elegant solution and itcomes about when the “ good” Gunslinger realizes that essentially Liberty Valence has got to go.

But Ford shifts the movie into overdrive when he introduces an element that breaks the chain of cause and effect. In other words in the rational world, or so called rational world , we do things in the expectation that other things will occur. Sometimes they don’t but mostly they do . But that’s the easy part to explain.

The difficult part to explain is when we do things that do not directly benefit us just because something in us can’t stand it being any other way. The word for this is sacrifice.”

There’s a scen in “Sawdust and tinsel where the ringleader is humiliated by the strong man in front of the woman he loves. We half expect him to shoot himself but instead he goes to the cage of his beloved bear and shoots the bear. Ingmar explained it as “Well he had to shoot something.”

The “The MAN” theres a shootout between jimmy Stewart and the bad guy and unbeknownst to anyone john wayne, standing off to the side shoots the bad guy making it look like Jimmy Stewart did it and giving the Stewart character the credit as “The Man who shot Liberty Valence.”

Ordinarily the movie would end here. But instead we follow Wayne back to his ranch house. John drinks a bottle of whisky and then burns his house down, beginning with the extra room that was going to be the nursery for the children he would have with the woman – thewoman he had loved all his life.

If he had done nothing Valence would have killed Stewart and John Wayne would have gotten the girl, and the family and his rival would be taken care of. From any logical viewpoint then John Wayne did the wrong thing. He did not advance even his genetic line. So if you’re going to understand this myth, just like in understanding many legends properly you have to see that then ending is not simple. It is ambiguous.

We the coffin of the Wayne character and it is obvious he never married, never went anywhere – the only one from the old days was his colored friend and Jimmiy Stewart and the woman who married him.

You know. It seems I’m surrounded by cheap hustlers – back in the day – when I was on politics I used to remark that it was not surprising that people would sell out their intergrity- what was surprising was how cheaply they’d do it.

When poverty comes down you’ll see what I mean. The scales become meaningless in light of survival. People will lie without a second thought because that is what they must do. They won’t look you straight in the eye but I’ll tell you something – comes a time, sooner then you think, when you don’t want or need for them to do so. You wanna let them keep that one lost bit of self respect.

What kind of sick person is he who would force a starving old lady to confess nicking a few coins?

Yeah, The train is off the rails and we shall see what we shall see.

               Next  I’m going to move to one of the more powerful question/difference/realities in the universe. First,  a little context.

                       Many if not most people speak of that which they refer to as “Truth” but in the field of psychology, meaning the unconscious or dreamstate, such a term is liable to get you into trouble.

                          Staring in to an open coffin and seeing myself lying there does not necessarily mean I have premonitions of my immediate demise. One of the primarily alchemical axioms after all is “all things are their opposites” which is good to remember when one is dreaming.

                            As well, as far as logic goes, my training is western but my predilections have always been zen and by this it is held that one must hold always in the mind the thing and the not thing. It is not an exclusively zen premise but it is with zen that I tend to associate the idea since it was in that school that I first noticed it.

Specifically, “Kiechu, master wheel maker of ancient China makes a wheel with no huh or spokes. Is he still the master wheel maker?”

                                                   Myth does not, to my mind, lend itself well to the case study method although I suppose it could be done. I’m not sure where in the conceptual food chain myth lies. Behaviors become customs and customs become laws , but where do myths come in? They are almost, conceptually, without (outside) the immediate dimensions of law.

                  For instance raping and killing women is, in most cultures, barring extraordinary factors, considered wrong; customarily and legally it is so, but also, beyond the bounds of specific societies it is considered so. Of course in times of war the strictures are suspended and myth, being a far more subtle instrument then law also understands that there is little difference between rape on the battlefront and rape in the boardroom.

Correspondingly to continue this specific analogy justice, as a concept falls dead at the feet of myth – meaning that if you enslave or falsely imprison someone for years there is no actual way of making that up. Youth once gone is gone. Much of justice is a poor substitute and that may be why so many of us are criminals.

Myth is not about what should be, but what is. So when Persephone is abducted by Hades to be made Queen of the underworld the earth suffers until she is released. This is ordinarily considered an “eternal return” myth since by eating food of the underworld Persephone must return every year but as well one may note that the result of her abduction is a diminution of the quality of life.

This is a major myth of course. Other women, spurned or assaulted resort to simply maiming or assaulting their attackers.

In any case, for me at least, it seems easier to study the various inquisitor theories rather then the cases. Like music, different regions seem to create different breeds of researchers.

Claude Levi-Strauss made his name in the study of south American Indian tribes and specifically into the ways they categorized their foodstuffs. The South American rain forest is perhaps the biologically most diverse place on Earth and so methods of categorization could well be needed to separate that which can be eaten and that which cannot.

So the Indians divided food into that eaten raw and that eaten cooked. Then they took it further into that which was salty and that which was sweet. The tropical jungle does not allow for the survival of large animals other then the relatively scarce tigers of India. Sunlight does not penetrate the canopy to provide grazing material. This lowers the caloric intake and created a situation in the past where the people are very small and tend towards cannibalism.

Head hunting which is the appropriation of the Mana, or spirit, of one’s neighbor was the primarily myth as in the case of many primitive societies and as in most cases. It served both a religious and practical purpose. Indeed I am often surprised at those who refuse to see religious,or national characterization, either as victim or oppressor in other then moral terms.

It is almost like when we engage in ethnic cleansing we save the best, which is taking the property of the cleansed for last.

Argumentative minds may be upset at my bringing this into the paper but I do so to focus the readers mind on an essential fact. Myth, what ever else it is, is a weapon, a tool, a device by which one person, or group my dominate and control others.

To return to what I said in the beginning of this post about one of the most difficult and potentially powerful questions it is “How do you measure the soft with the hard?” or again “How do you measure the qualitative with the quantitative?” And again “How do you measure the real world of continuous existence and action with the man made mathematical tools comprised of monads?”

It’s the old digital verses analogue issue on a cosmic scale.

Answers can be generated that cannot be disproven yet are not the answers we want and what is more they are not more provable then others. It’s like the container of Gödel’s Theorem

There are brutal essential realities involved her. If Asia would fall to the man who unravels the Gordian knot then why not slice it? By the container of Godel’s theorem, (which has application in other fields and specifically language) I mean that while it says essentially nothing can be proven the other side, in agreement says, you can disprove anything.

This is true as more then a rhetorical boast and unfortunately it comes down to the notion that, temporarily at least, the winners write history.

I had a associate in the 1990’s who was a big fan of John Stewart and pointed out that Mr Stewarts audience included many Harvard students. While I agree that John is funny the humor doesn’t strike me as funny because while for them the scene is a mad hatters tea party, or aggressive debating society I look back and I see the youthful friends who could not handle the new economics. Perhaps they weren’t prepared but ours was a society that did not forgive weakness. It trumpeted strength power and wealth and saw all others as roadkill. Again, myth is a weapon and it killed many of those I grew up with who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

First you kill the soul and then the body dies easily.

I may be paranoid and lonely and poor but I am still alive and my thoughts are more valuable then others.

Consider this thought experiment. We will take a hard question and place it in a soft environment.

Google the words “Liberal economic theory” and the first half dozen replies you get will replicate the conservative hierarchy, as created by the economic order and they will inform you of the flaws of Liberal economic theory.

Next Google the words “Conservative economic theory” and the first half dozen replies will replicate the conservative hierarchy, as created by the economic order and they will inform you of the merits of conservative economic theory.

What is wrong with this picture?

Actually nothing. Google works on the number of hits, etc. It delivers apparently paradoxical results – because that’s the way real math is. Real math is not single dimensional and once you add dimensions things happen.

Do this mean the world is coming to an end?

You betcha!

Actually to skew a system like googles is not that difficult. It’s like pump priming. Once you point the system in a certain direction, something that can be easily accomplished with a remarkably small amount of money the rest follows.

It’s like disease. Each meme has an infection quota, which in an of itself is not necessarily tied to actuality, but the winner of the race to infect the largest population is that which is introduced first and by the widest margin.

The quality of the meme, eg what we conventionally call “truth” is secondary which is why we laugh up own sleeves at reactionary clowns but for some reason they don’t go away.

Ordinarily I do not take these exegeses to conclusions. I prefer the “tune in next week” style but this time we are going to go to checkmate. That way if I get hit by a bus at least something of value can be recovered.

In modern science is is not considered good form to resort to the age old dialectic ways of referring to systems. We don’t use the mind/body question or the nature/nurture question because we have discovered the two ends of the continuum are so intertwined as to make them for intents and purposes indistinguishable. (This also holds true with racial issues but don’t tell anyone in asmuch as money can still be made kicking that old dead horse.)

In the study of myths these dialectics could be called form and content, or in the terms of Marshal McLuhan “Medium and Message”. And again even here McLuhan’s discovery was that the two weren’t really so separate.

The disciple that I was subjected to thereby asserted that in syllogistic terms.

“Form is form Content is content

Form is not form Content is not content

Form is form Content is content”

Duh, referencing this is both over and under your head so let’s bring it back to the comprehendable.

We can understand how, for instance the conclusion of the Second World war with it’s rockets, radios and thermonuclear bombs brought an almosy unbearable fear to the population and tjoseven by the movies of the era. War of the Worlds, Earth Invaders! Battle in Space, were typical titles and themes. The form is scientific menace and the content is little green men, or whatever the specific enemy was.

Fifty years on once again the enemy is at the gate but this time it is not science per se – but other people - aliens. A cursory look at the visual media of te day reveals an entirely white, Christian, northern European America – a unanimity that was about to be exploded in the sixties.

Treating the issue anthropologically we know that the totemic groups must intermingle – this is the basic taboo. Biologically even genetically the more wide the gene pool the better off we are and yet it is considered morally wrong to break the beautific models and ideals of the pedigree. I am speaking in a roundabout way of what is essentially racism - but it goes beyond that. We would cling to an idealized golden childhood even in cases where rascism never entered the picture.

Nobody wants to grow up. Nobody wants to die.

Here’s the kicker - the checkmate

Were man essentially a good creature there would be no need for God. Were we born in perfect self awareness there would be no myths. Ah, but such is not possible. However let us waken momentarily from our common sleep. Where a full awareness of reality is denied to all men we must make do with half an awareness, which in the present case is the knowledge that when one removes the content the form collapses. They are in fact separate aspects of the same thing. Dissolve form and content can no longer retain separateness from it’s surroundings.

What this means in practical terms is we must not forget that the ostensive great philosophical revolution can at the same time be a major criminal enterprise. This is the lesson we learned so painfully from Reaganomics. Combined with the difficulties that arise when one side has the ability to control “truth”- as demonstrated by the google experiment then the possibility is strong that resolution, evenness and harmony will not be restored until the next myth cycle.

“But untune one string”

And hark what discord follows”

Shakespear

Glenn Schaefer

New Paltz NY

April 2012

Page's Folly

                   I had initially intended the following section to be included in last weeks dissertation on the modern formulations of myth, but came across “Duel in the Sun” and that, I felt was far easier to comprehend. (Heck it's so easy it may be a little too much so.)

                        Plus one of the characteristics of modern writing is to put the sections out there with intentional “gaps” and leave it to the reader to fill in those gaps. Older writing even as recent as the nineteenth century is very linear; one thing follows another and it's difficult to lose the authors train of mind even if you should want to.

                        (For all you English majors out there, Flaubert, who Vonnegut described as the father of all modern novelists lays his claim to that title not so much because of his plots, subjects or even viewpoints – all of which are fairly predictable – but rather because of the way he wrote – his style which some would go so far as to say is a disjointed prose. Unfortunately I don't read French very well and in the English translations one gets only a taste of that.)

                       We can also see evidence of this evolution of language in religious evolution. Tribal religions are based on stories about how animals or the elements came into being, where as the newer religions, especially the messianic ones increasingly are comprised of a series of commands or laws that are to be obeyed. Religion is about behavior and thus yesterdays custom is todays law and tomorrows religion.

This brings us to the pharmo – ethno- socio- anthro- biologist, Terrence McKenna – who is certainly better known to the younger audience and the global audience then in the United States where he is considered a radical and spent much of his time avoiding drug laws. For our purposes his thesis is that evolution of the human species was often accompanied by the intake of psychedelic hallucinogens.

It does him a disservice to avoid that particular issue; to try to display a McKenna lite version.

He's nowhere near as strong on the history of language evolution as his counterparts in the more respectable academia but his experiences with DMT and more so with Ayuhuasca give him a lot more to say. Much of it is bizzare, strange and new but take away those things and language is going nowhere.

This is why I find his studies invaluable. Perhaps it is only amusing that he must describe his inner voyages in terms of space ships and bubble creatures – but that is not the point.

Okay now on to Terrance McKenna : was he a major thinker of the twentieth century equal to Schillinger and Mandlebrot, or a nut case?

As it happens I’ve been rereading his ‘Invisible Landscape” for the forth time. The thing is most writings I give up on are illogical and unfactual, whereas “Invisible Landscape” is simply mostly incomprehendable.

What salvages his credibility is that the very weird stuff, which is only the one early theory called Timewave is more then balanced out by a lifetime of both research and fieldwork in subjects that although speculative he had made his own,

The Timewave Zero hypothesis may be extremely complex mathematics, or bad math - I am not fit to judge since it’s all over my head. It’s a little like, if yu are familiar wth the subject, “The Bible Code” of twenty years ago in that the alleged instructions from the creator being seem to exist more in the mind of the interpreter then the creator. ( See Appendix for the Pyschological “lure of code”)

(As an aside Finnegan’s Wake for instance becomes far more comprehendible as one ages : especially if you learn a few European languages. “Gödel Escher Bach” is to my mind very much a book of the present era, but like “The Golden Bough” it tends to be encyclopedic.)

McKenna suffers the fate of many extraordinary men in that he made a controversial discovery early on, which cast him outside the norms of science, but then over the next twenty or thirty years wrote so well and extensively about tangential aspects that even the disbelievers are impressed.

In his case the ball and chain he refused to renounce was TimeWave Theory, aka TimeWave Zero. I’m willing to consider waves of probability as possible but nevertheless unproven, and what is more I am not willing to speculate as to exactly what the effects on the present such waves may create.

In some regards he is not completely beyond the bounds of speculative physics, eg, gravity waves which would evidence fluctuations in the time/space continuum. The immediate problem is he hasn’t done the basic work in the field and a lot of his so called research involves taking some very powerful psychoactive hallucinogens such as DMT or Ayuhasca.

What science yearns for in it’s horny little heart is predictability. To say an eclipse will happen and have it happen is what science is about. McKenna can only deliver on this partially.

If I may, Jefferson said it’s better to admit one doesn’t know then to have a bad idea and cling to it. Yet could it not be better to have a stupid idea then no idea? To establish definitions here. A good idea can be proven. A bad idea can be disproven. A stupid idea can’t be either. It just hovers out there- unconnected.

Terrence did take his theory to a respected scientist

And asked the big question “valid thought or speciousness?” The answer? “Does not reach the level of speciousness”

That had to hurt.

Fortunately Terrence did not allow his believing in Time Wave theory to overpower his life. He died of a cranial tumor a few years ago but in an ordinary lifetime he’d have lived to see on of the aspects proven or disproven since he believed that the I-Ching indicates something big will happen in late 2012.

It is my hobby to look for the correlations of metaphysics and measurement. One tries to be unbiased and oftimes, when successful, the results are extremely rewarding. The reality of the unconscious means that all of us, however good intentioned or brilliant are capable of substituting that which we would believe for that which is and to undo the substitution is edifying.

As in any good investigation, when we seek to discover how and why a person is deluding themselves we have to look at who will gain from the illusion.

It’s possible that McKenna sees a parallel between the 2012 date and the day the theory of relativity was verified- but that is a very weak connection so lets move on.

Kurt Vonnegut suggested that an Alien Race of his invention, the Trafalmadorians saw Time as a whole. Like looking at a distant mountain range where the left hand end was the beginning of the universe and the right side, the end.

Things that happen at the same place on this mountain range cannot be said to cause one another – maybe – or it maybe that the condition of one part of the “slice” of space time has an effect on the other parts.

People in public health services, policemen, nurses, ER orderlies know that when the moon is full the activity in the night will be more then ordinary. Suffice to say this increase in activity is also cyclical, relating as it does to the phases of the moon.

In the same way sun spot activity varies on a cyclical basis. It’s a stretch for example, but should the atmosphere of the earth been sufficiently charged sunspot activity may have preceded the electrical charges that activated the nutrient soup to the level of carrying some sort of DNA precursor.

To restate this if it so happened that the initial spark that moved the surface of the earth from a chemical rich bath to one that held molecules capable of sustaining life happened at a time of intense sunspot activity a connection might be made.

How this could translate into a mathematical pattern that predicted activity over time is even more difficult to see. For the record one way we can experience sunspot activity is to listen between channels to an AM radio. The variations in noise are effected by sunspots.

But actually Terrance goes a good deal further. He mixes into his theory holograms consciousness and mental health as well. This needs to be seen in context. The late sixities and early seventies represented, in America, the waning of a belief in the curative powers of psychology and ultimately science.

In some regards this notion, of a return to primitive superstitions had a political aspect as well, Government became evil, the work of the devil and the Keynsian economics which had worked so well were cast aside in favor of the plainly self serving so called “supply side” paradigm.

Hence the emphasis in psychology became one of sustaining and not curative actions. It was as if it was not good enough to prove the “Age of Aquarius” wrong. It had to be smashed to pieces and shown to be a dangerous concept.

The irony, or perhaps virtue, of this, is that when systems are compromised by aggressive behaviors the truly dedicated will either go underground or move out and this leaves them far less inclined to attempt to compromise with those for who compromise is a bad word.

So while McKenna first published in the seventies and worked continually he came to renoun during the nineteen nineties with the resurgance of psychoactive drug taking at raves which occurred almost exclusively outside the United States

While it’s likely he would have remained little more then a footnote to the counterculure if the Time wave was his only discovery he continued to write and explore and essentially invented a new field of science, pharmological anthropology

Even more popular then the writing, which for the average person could be a little dense, his recorded talks made him the Shaman of the Post Reagan generation.

The valorization of someone like Terrance McKenna in a way I suppose was inevitable – like Micheal Jordan in the NBA – he was the guy who escaped! He got out. He did not have to bend the knee before cretins. He did not have to partake in the communal fiction that the largest transfer of wealth in human history was anything but a criminal enterprise. He could just roll a joint or smoke a bowl and whoosh – the multidimensional universe appears!

As it happened the grateful dead were on the road and hardly ever getting busted anymore. But it was not the same.

As we know western math is predicated on the number ten whereas computer’s prefer decimal systems using eight. The I-Ching is also based on the number eight. If sunspots and the I-ching were both comprised of units of eight and had nothing else in common there might appear coincidences.

An incidentally the big day – the day it all comes to a head is Dec 21, 2012. Yop , this year.

Were we even to begin a study of predicted end times, of apocalypses forgone I’d never get off this merry go round. Besides which – it isn’t the being there that counts – it’s the getting there.

At this level I still can’t buy into the notion. It’s a little too close to intelligent design for my taste. What I can go along with is the mathematical constraints placed on one part of an equation (the strange attractor) being able to modify the relative components of the environment (the fractals)

Allowing oneself total speculative freedom McKenna claims there is a way to correlated variations in the I-ching with major events in world history, which would apparently be mirrored on smaller scales by individuals asking about business decisions, etc.

And it all goes round and round and round.

Objections abound. First the correlation between occurrences of the Time wave and world events isn’t that great. One could say that numerical “Wolf tones” could exist that we are not factoring in- but we have to work with what is known and not speculation.

Even more to the point, the Chinese are the experts in this method of divination and theres no indication they are paying the slighted heed to these things

Appendix : The Lure of Code

I’ve mentioned, in varying degrees of depth over the years, my suggestion that the reason for the revival of magic and sorcery movies in the current era is that for the contemporary person one potential explanation for the computer age is magic.

Even I , who refer to computers as machines, am not immune to this in some degree. The journey of the strange attractor, like the arrow of time, permeates the known universe and transforms chaos into order via fractal motion and infinite regressions. This idea, which perhaps you’d be more likely to believe if Arthur C. Clarke told you, is mind boggling.

It is a true alchemy, even as it is further disguised by those who misuse it for personal gain.

And , of course analysts who have actually spent time with patients can tell you that schizophrenics adopt whatever terms are contemporary to describe their maladies.

In the past that was blue devils and hell hounds an today it’s aliens and the CIA.

Personally while I can objectify the inside “outness” of polydimensionality I still am terrible when it comes to remembering phone numbers

This is one of the keys to assuring ourselves that although the written word is rapidly going to become obsolete, we still will have to think and analyze our situations.

Modern life comes down to two things. Remembering or knowing where we keep strings of numbers and solving puzzles. In the social spheres especially solving puzzles, the “traps for troubadours who get killed before they reach Bombay”(Mick Jagger) is critical.

An ape upon finding food may go to the periphery to keep from sharing it and so too modern man seeks to camouflage whatever boons he achieves

The DaVinci Code was indicative of this way of thinking – only added to it was the notion that someone in the past could be bothered to elucidate the future in such a way = but other then in the arts there’s little evidence this is so.

Appendix two Conditioning and Myth

Conditioning and myth are similar processes. I use the advertising paradigms because essentially, it is in terms of advertising that the battles for economic supremacy are being fought and it is in terms of advertising; whether or not we succumb to the conditioning that will determine whether we live or die.

Conditioning In axiomatic terms is formulated as such. “Negative stimulus (pain) introduction of desired belief (cure) – removal of negative stimulus. “

If we were rational creatures we’d realize that the removal of the negative stimulus is only something done by the ones who set up the conditioning formula in the first place – but we are not and so, unconsciously at least, we believe that the removal of the negative stimulus is the result of the presence of the thing that the advertiser wants us to believe.

Myth is not so simple to describe. Often it is thought of as an idealized or metaphorical reality – but that doesn’t tell you much, especially when it comes to counter programming mythic intelligence. One interesting, workable definition is a case where the medium and the message are interwoven. Germans heard the magic of radio and assumed the words spoken were equally magical.

Likewise, in the modern era, through the extensive censorship and information control available to centralized media, one is able to grant the quality of truthfulness by the simple omission of information contrary to ones desired belief structure. To accuse such systems of lying is therefore incorrect. They are simply “forgetfull.”

I’ve been trolling youtube recently looking for info on economics. There’s the usual assortment of right wing apocalyptic doomsayers but more then I had suspected also a large cadre of over verbose liberals. In particular Chris Hedges speaks from a perspective I go along with. Probably as Catholic, upper middle class, post industrial males we are among the most pissed off (See Micheal Moore)

Likewise, Clinton was supposed to be a Democrat but if you look at the legislation signed during his Presidency it’s all right wing stuff, as even the Republicans will admit. At the time they [ut on a show of trying to impeach Clinton which amounted to nothing. Essentially what we now realize is that the idea that the two parties represent different approaches to government is a myth.

The hammer that has been used to control the former middle class is the idea that there’s no alternative to the Democrats, but this seems to be a coy bit of playacting on the part of both parties. To use a medical analogy if one medicine doesn’t work why must we assume another will?

Nevertheless the reason I draw you attention to Hedges in the immediate context is he, like I call our attention to the fact that the world is increasingly run by symbols and not words

This process has been going on for well over a hundred years and will have profound implications for the away we live. Two other periods to which it can be compared are the invention of writing and he invention of the word, or language.

Technos, the invention of the city, the invention of the word and the monogamous marriage all came into being in Europe about five thousand years ago. Plato, who was on the tail end of things lamented the fact that people’s memories were never the same after books were invented.

The only other invention in that magnitude was the invention of language. Two things First, we can go with the idea that evolution is not slow and steady, but , as Steven J Gould points out, sporadic. The evidence indicates this. Secondly there may well have been some sort of social innovation that accompanied the growth of language.

One of Terrence McKennas many ideas that seemed to be more likely then the other was the notion that the advent f language was the result of drug induced orgiastic ritual dance ceremonies. The fact that he delivered this message to large groups of persons raving on DMT and Ecstacy. Certainly did not hinder it’s communication.

He suggests that people learned to speak by hanging out together , getting stoned, eating, dancing and having sex. This was long before the notion of individual monogamy was a common thing.

There’s a story I tell often, so bear with me if you’ve heard it already.

Once upon a time apes lived in the forest. Then came a hot, dry period and essentially the larger apes pushed the smaller ones out of the forest to the savanna. The smaller apes became scavengers, eating whatever they could find including, weeds, grubs and meat. That branch of the primate species became the human race, whereas the ones that stayed in the jungle remained apes.

The point being that the change over from non verbal animals to humans with the gift of speech ought not be dismissed. And it is very likely that in the next thousand years, a drop in the bucket of evolutionary time, the physical as well as mental definitions of what it is to be human will change.

We must be careful who we label as mutants

 New Mutations

                      The central theme of Darwins theory of evolution, after all is that a mutation

that remains long enough without being made extinct thereby becomes the new norm

and all other characteristics are then called mutations

Grs Apr 20 2012

00 Last section of today

              There's an old saying used by flirtatious females.

       "When I'm a good girl I'm a very very good girl

          But when I'm a bad girl ---  I'm better"

    & the Ice caps R melting oh ho ho ho !!!

            Tiny Tim wuz rite   - the sky  *is*  falling

         And I'm smirking and giggling all the way to eternity

       sorry bout the formatting  - for some reason word doesn't translate to googlerama

            I I am too lazy  ettc and don't have a cow because someday you may need the milk

                  Lubberly weather here and I can't control meeself and hope you do too---

                       The last section of today’s essay is the easiest to understand and I daresay the one that needs the least external verification. It strikes me that something that is often said of ancient anthropology, that based on the collection of artifacts is that we know how people lived but we still haven’t that good an idea as to what they thought about things.

                   Today we have the far more modern science of psychological anthropology where we not only seek to discover the way people perceive and understand the world around them but as well we have begun to be sensitized to the notion that an understanding of these processes has become more and more critical, lest we discover that, having relinquished the capability of being able to think for ourselves we have ceded that capability to others and those others may not have our best interests at heart.

It really does help to understand as well circularity and feedback processes. This holds true even in such seemingly determined instances as market economics. Soros has labled his method of dealing with the variation of prices “Reflexivity”. It calls to mind the old song title, “My heart has a mind of it’s own.”

The more convinced we are of the correctness of our idea at the outset then the less willing are we to consider alternatives. In ordinary understandings of feedback we assume the sender, like the German foreign service in 1938, will only be attuned to hearing the answer that it expects to hear. There is a good deal of power in this notion. The ninja philosophy, for instance is based, to some degree on humans being contortionists and thereby assuming shapes not thought of as human and hence unrecognized.

An even better analogy, to my mind, is the feedback caused when microphones are placed too close to amplifiers. Not all information distortion requires some evil genius spinning lies. A far greater percentage of information feedback is when the system takes control and not only places an inconsequential message “at the head of the loop” to drown out all other messages, but distorts the message itself.

In recent decades a controversy has arisen between advocates of the unfettered free market and regulations. The regulators can say, in effect “What good is ideological purity if it hurts people and prevents actual growth?” Be that as it may it is not always a strong argument on paper. The enticements of logic can be devastating.

What has be labeled “the selfish gene” sees little benefit in anything approaching morality, lest it be the morality of those shams created to debilitate and castrate one’s competition. In the battle for survival it is difficult to make an argument for the survival of the weak. Unless one understands at the core of their being a sense of all having worth it is impossible to convey the truth of the matter.

You can take a step away from such despair by using a game theory. Split the world into predators and prey and you’ll realize that a world of predators alone is unsustainable. And, as an aside one can without great difficulty group entire societies into one category or another. When a city state pays three wagons of silver to pay off a band of marauders it is not difficult to choose the predator or prey.

To judge accurately one must stand outside the duality and gain a sense of context. I digress in the previous few paragraphs because for many years which I labeled “the wasteland era” the control of thoughts and actions was so complete that one felt like a fool to carry on. A plague had settled on the land and I now know it was the same plague that faced the American Indian – to wit – both sides understand that one side is lying but there is nothing the weaker side can do. The law had failed as it had so many other times in the course of human history.

But as Edmund Burke, a Irishman who lived while his country bore the yoke of English tyranny would say, “Despair if you must but work on through despair.”

What then is this golden calf; that measures a man by the worth of his possessions? It must be done I suppose but let’s not disgrace ourselves and call it humane.

      

01 Duel in the Sun

        The thing about the unconcious is that by definition it remains hidden from us.

    To the degree we recognize it it becomes something else, and the premise of psychoanalysis is this something else is less powerfull and hence less able to control us in ways we may not care for.
       A lot of what this website is about is about just that. There are professions where this sort of knowledge comes in handy. We take it as axiomatic that the master is aware of things consciously that the servant only knows in a subconcious way and that, of course, is how the master gains control over us and convinces us to give them our money and/or to kill those who rival the masters domination of our ability to think.

 There's no trick to it in the sense that it can be used for good or evil as long as the basics are covered - and the most basic of these is the illusion that we are retaining free will even as, all the while, we are subject to the will of the illusionist.

       Quite often as well there is the sense of the truth having been "hidden in plain sight." For instance for me it's a good idea if I leave my wallet in the same place always. Or otherwise I will lose it, even if it is right before my eyes.

   The same thing holds true with subliminals, for instance the line "semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel tower" is easy to decipher once you realize the pilchard is a small fish. Not that even that need be known. The semen climbing the tower ought be sufficient.

     Anyway I am a fan of old cowboy movies because in their heyday the villains and good guys had easily identifiable motives; it didn't take a rocket scientist to understand greed. Then there was the second great era of cowboy movies, the fifties, when color came in and the films began to get very heavy, philosophical even, which is understandable since every other theme had been covered by then.

    A film I saw this weekend is called "Duel in the Sun" and it's very sophisticated.  There is no gun duel per se. The dual is about the dual personality of the leading character, Jennifer Jones. She has a dual or split personality  which we see in the beginning.
     Her mother is a saloon dancer and her father a fancy gambler. He shoots the mother when the mother is in arms of another man. Then instead of running, in a case which in those days was almost justifiable homicide, he insists on taking the death penalty.

  So little Jennifer grows up to have a crush on Joseph Cotton, who is the nice guy, but she gets caught one night by Gregory Peck, who in a role that must have given his agent conniptions  assaults and practically rapes Ms Jones.in the next scene Peck is seen taming a particularly wild horse and the parallel is obvious since the girl just looks on and doesn't say anything.

     The nice guy realizes that somethings going on an he decides to go back east. Life goes on theres a subplot where the ranchers band together to hold back the railroad, and an open range war is narrowly averted by the arrival of the cavalry. Again there's basically only one story here - love verses lust. Civilization verses the individuals instincts.

   Jennifer gets a dress. The nice guy returns from the east with his new girl friend in tow.This infuriates little miss split personality because   she wants, so to speak, to have it all. It also sends Peck into a fury because he thought he'd gotten rid of the sissy for good.

       Peck calls out Cotton one day in the middle of town. Joes not going to fight, Pecks a crack shot. So Gregory Peck throws a pistol at Joe Cotton but Cotton still won't take the bait. So Peck just shoots him in disgust and rides off.

      A little while later   the girl climbs the mesa where she knows the shooter was hiding out. She shoots a rifle shot. He comes out and shows himself.  At a along distance she shoots him through the chest. He stumbles down, rights himself up and shoots her.

      So now the girl has to climb the mesa to be with the man she loves, which she does.   Just as she makes it to the top they take each other in each others arms and die.

       Now that's nice consistent plot work.  Selznick produced it an I've long felt hes underrated because he had a real ability to get the right film at the right time - most famously GWTW. King Vidor directed and he was one of that great class of european directors that showed a puritanical America that theres more to sex then tight sweaters and socks in your underwear.

     The sun is, of course, usually masculine, yang, and sometimes like in "The Sun King" by the Beatles an object of ridicule. Very rarely does one see solar imagery used in a pure sense, uncontaminated by other factors.
The sun is presumptuous and in the characters who identify with it they are often only allowed to do so because they overbearingly  force those who contradict them into submission.