Synopsis --- It is a commonplace in commercial fiction that we all must cone to grips and to some understanding of our past, but maybe this is not true so much as we must achieve an raproachmont with the future- with our dreams and hopes. This is in particular important when those dreams, as for so many of us in America, have been shattered on the rocks of actual events. We are the traumatized victims of a brutal warfare against the public and what is worse there is no proceedure in place to aide the survivors in return to normal life. Indeed, if anything the maddening and infuriating thing is that the powers that are presently inplace are unable to face up to the crimes and misdeeds that have been committed. Instead using their positions as virtual jailors they force the prisoners, us, to blame ourselves for their crimes.
If only we had been smarter, if only we had saved more and worked longer hours. In fact they punish us for the very misdeeds that they are the perpetrators of.
For us there will be no second acts, no overcoming of obstacles by will power, a plucky attitude and optimism. The best we can hope for is to avoid despair and point ourselves away from self destructive hatreds.
Specifically the following which is needless to say the effort of someone with too much time and not enough money on his hands is a response to a young black man in his twenties, a Harvard drop out who had his way smoothed and who, after witnessing what life was like on the other side of the fence, decided he liked the easy path better. The last time I saw him I tried to make conversation and yet he had nothing to say. He seemed to be laughing at an inside joke. Here was this chap, before him, me, trying to be interesting, vital, alive and yet he knew the world had no place for me – my kind are a dime a dozen – so he laughed, and I hid my reaction because his was no great sin.
To be young is no sin
This concluding essay of a brief series was to deal with the seeming downfall of the American way of life caused by our inability to conquer our own greed. Furthermore I like to think I’m better then those white people forever on the defensive – always bitching about how hard they have it. It was also in some sense before the world, not so much for mercy- after centuries of theft rape an murder that would be wrong = but for understanding – for when the shoe is on the other foot Indians are as capable of massacres as are cowboys.
I sought initially to preserve and soon realized it was impossible; history shows no evidence, nor does biology. The dominant species or gene will override the others and they will be relegated to dream and oblivion's forgotten fables.
I am aware if this and I won’t insult the reader by pretending they are not.
Intro-
Okay, if you please, take a deep breath, sit back, and we shall proceed.
When I began this “thought experiment” I was extremely apprehensive as to the possibility of triggering untoward emotions toward myself. We live in a world that is filled with people utterly convinced that whatever the best life, the most decent life, indeed the life most beloved by the one true creator God is it just so happens that they live it.
We survive despite having such beliefs by the expedience of politeness and resisting the urge to constantly tell other people what we *really* think of them. (This incidentally holds true both on the large scale and the small scale.) I am aware of this and so beg the readers indulgence if I seem to exceed the boundaries of good taste – not to put too fine a point on it, but these are just words- they will not harm you unless you let them.
The effort I make is no more nor less then one of survival. Knowing the white race, as I do, intimately, I have not the slightest doubt that they will sell me out as long as they can keep their own power bases intact. That is the way it’s always been. The other races are on the upswing and it appears only a matter of time before we are over run . Not that I care; my concern is with the genetic survival. I want the world to be run by people who think like me not by people who think any other way.
I have no justification for this desire – but then I don’t see where it is written that I need any; especially in light of the fact that so many others feel exactly the same way only they lie about it.
Then again, we have always run the world. Therefore we deserve to continue to do so.
My children shall walk through splendid halls. My concubines shall have many mansions, for each of the many seasons that I decree. Your children? They shall eat with the dogs out of garbage cans. This is what my God tells me is good and just and right and who am I to do other then obey?
My God tells me that when I lift a finger thousands shall dance, when I lift an eyelid worlds will explode – for my God is wise beyond all knowing, uncreated, and undying.
Yes, it’s a magnificent new world we are upon the verge of entering; one where the masters all have good teeth and hair, are six feet tall, have ready smiles and shy, wonderful depreciating senses of humor. The girls will love them. They always have. And we will shoot them down before they get a chance to draw. It won’t matter since they they will throw stones and we will direct lasers.
Call in the helicopters Doctor. Fear not we bring food and medicine. We bring technology so that you and your brothers and sisters can speak to each other and decide what color looks best in the recreation room. We bring word of a compassionate one, who will forgive you no matter how much of a bastard you have been.
Historian Michael Wood suggests the reason for European hegemony over the planet was late marriages and small families which concentrated wealth in to comparatively few hands. Pathetic, puny little men, disgusting to our sight! Better yes, nice tall men with smooth skin and long fingers, long fingers, precious, erotic, full headed - make me wanna, make me wanna, make me wanna scream!
AS I've already mentioned in recent weeks one can’t held notice the firebombs and Molotov cocktails in the streets of Athens. It would be Athens, wouldn’t it? (It’s been said God’s supreme virtue is his sense of irony.) The American newspapers carried not a word of such events. Then the long awaited crackdown on the internet happened. The co-ordinated efforts of many police agencies around the world went into play and once again the media did *not* notice. Fascinating.
It makes one aware of how universal is the consensus that the public must be kept in ignorance. The logic goes like this. “The public are children, like all children they must be protected from things they do not understand. It is up to us the responsible, educated people to bear the terrible burden of knowledge of events as they are.”
I’m not sure I wish to be lumped in with the dozens of self appointed saviors of mankind who in ominous tones assure us catastrophe is just around the corner. If we are really engaged in a flat out information war then nothing is for certain. The group that calls itself Anonymous could be the FBI acting for two reasons, to collect names and addresses of potential targets for prosecution or to foment enough meaningless info-noise to provoke a blowback without actually doing harm to data structure.
In this game there is no inside or outside.
The examination room was windowless. The walls had a few posters portraying the stages of recuperation after after tramautic injuries and strokes. Patient had right arm resting. Organic material reached to the wrist, hand and fingers were thermotrak. Nurse rolls orange by patient.
“Please catch the orange if you can”
Nurse rolls orange by patient. Patient catches orange.”
“Very good” says nurse. “See if you can hold on to it.”
Nurse reaches over and easily grabs orange away.
“C’mon Brad, try harder this time”
Patient squeezes orange. Nurse makes half hearted attempt to pull away.
In earlier mentions of Alchemy I sometimes took care to make note that when something big happens and something else big happens at the same time, it’s a good idea to see if there is something going on besides coincidence. European alchemy came into existence, in the form for which we generally know it, roughly at the same time as the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The printing press is important to us today because it is a template of sorts of what happens to a society which is suddenly faced with a massive increase of information - such, as we are at present, obviously, experiencing with the internet.
The usual joke I would tell in mentioning the above was that Alchemy was the result of too many men with a lot to say and none of which made much sense. We can think of them as the spiritual ancestors of todays new agers, or seekers after metaphysical truth; for the metaphysical aspect of things had to be kept in mind, as did the workings of the unconscious.
We know for instance that in some cases when a person has a psychological disturbance, or attachment they will create memories in order to justify the present condition. Classically this was the case in Vienna when Dr. Freud, much to his dismay, realized that the numerous cases of childhood abuse, in particular of girls being seduced by their fathers, could not have have happened. He concluded that perhaps it was a case where the girls had wanted it to happen, ( eg: the Electra Complex) in order to comfort their fathers who the patients felt were not being given enough care and attention from mother.
That deciding to take over the task of caring for their fathers would free young women of the need to break away from the family and form their own mature sexual relationships begs the question. It is easier said then done, as in the case of Sigmunds own daughter, Anna, who never married and spent her entire live caring for her ailing father.
It was Anna who said, “When we view the turbulence of adolescence it’s worth noting that it is the young adulthood that proceeds without difficulty that bodes ill for future happiness.” And thus it was for her.
There is wisdom sometimes in not avoiding conflict. As the koan says, Chop wood carry water, don’t chop wood, or carry water, chop wood carry water.” This is to say that after ones trials and tribulations one may find themselves very much the same person as before.
And this brings us around to Alchemy, or the quest for enlightenment writ large. Prior to the fifteenth century there were no alchemical works – if anything the writing of an Alchemical opus is likely to have gotten you hanged for heresy. Nevertheless there were works written in that first era which purported to be of ancient lineage. Here opinions vary, Gerald Manley Hall, a scholar who made Alchemy his life’s work takes a hard line on this insisting all such “back dated” works, like back dated checks, were mere fabrications meant to deceive.
I’m willing to go so far as to suggest that there were earlier writings dedicated to the essential psychological opus as portrayed in chemical metaphor but they were not as of yet part of an organized school of thought such as Alchemy. Furthermore Hall goes on to point out that when we view Alchemy as the ur form of chemistry we are incorrect, in that chemistry, of a sort existed prior to the fifteenth century. Did not early physicians such as Aristotle and Galen prescribe chemical cures in the forms of herbs and elixirs?
What Alchemy did,as evidenced by the name itself, is reflect the influence of the Arabic world which for several hundred years after the coming of the prophet experienced an intellectual renaissance; one which interestingly was characterized by it’s lack of metaphysical, spiritual constrains. It , in essence, began the suggestion, which we still adhere to, that that body and mind are one and that they are in the final analysis combinations of chemicals and electrochemical reactions in a unique and complex form.
After a few hundred years then chemistry returned to it’s original form being considered something alien to the human life form.
As indicated, obliquely, at the beginning of this essay I was very concerned about being accused of racism, or nationalism, but having gone this far I am a little further at ease. Consider the Brits – to go from world rules to second tier in a lifetime. But then again they may have ruled India but as to whether they truly owned India – that is another question. In any case, I lived there for almost ten years and it is not something people go around crying about.
Let’s for the sake of argument suggest there is a God. God is the determinant. He decides what happens. As we know, some societies, particularly in the west, chose to represent God as a human, be he the one eyed Odin, randy Zeus, or Mild mannered Christ, tribal cultures, through masks prefer to make the human appear in the form of the God.
The truest apprehension, one I am, as a hypothetical Alchemist am fond of is, "God is water." This would solve the God/man pseudo issue once and for all. Land on a planet, empty a can of humafibe and a few gallons of water into a tube, let sit a few days and presto, a human being. This could prove useful in seeding distant planets.
There’s also a horror there. William Butler Yeats wrote a story called Rosa Alchemical where, somewhat after the style of Faust, the main character is visited by an old friend and given the chance to transcend his mortal shell. But things get mixed up. Our relinquo, the conjoining of heaven and earth, the religion, or ritual, presupposes that the soul, the bridegroom, yearns for the comfort of the bride, or God.
In some Protestant theology, as in real life, the two rush for each other, the soul to the embrace of God. But even water, when frozen as ice, has form and attempts to make God of man are always doomed. The Alchemical Rose is symbolic of the fleeting perception of such unity as it can be known , at least on this side of the veil of life and death
To take this to a lower mundane plain for a moment what Yeats is saying is that the mystical experience is wonderful and powerful, but it doesn’t last – hence the Rose, which must decay.
But the poet is not to despair. We have the two logical forms of apotheosis, to change the outside to resemble the God or to convince others that the God resembles oneself. Both of these methods are viable but they are, as the mathematicians tell us “not elegant.” They require above all the transmutation of the God spirit into the soul of the human.
A third method remains, the God fills the form of the human, neither changing nor being changed.
The Agnostic and Atheist often has a strong argument in listening to the proclamations of a believer. Not only do two believers in the same God differ but event the beliefs of a single person about God can seem, incongruous.
That God cannot be changed by a human seems fairly evident. It is in our struggle to remake the God to fit our own conditioning that weakness and sorrow and sin are born. And Pain
Stay tund next week when we return to our regularly scheduled programming.
End of ptone
What Yeats was pointing out was something new; something obvious to the experimental Alchemist, which is that when two chemicals are conjoined they do not always remain separate but rather often mix into yet another element. This is the answer to the global racial problem.
The ordinary way of thinking of things is dualistic, binary, or cyclical binary, on/off, life/death, winter/summer and repeat until fade. When we add the aspect of motion we speak of the dialectic, the ever revolving cycle of opposites.
Conventional religious thinking postulates the soul directing the actions of the body, or in earlier metaphor, the rider controls the horse, in the same way the man penetrates the woman and the superior man controls the man without direction. These also have their place in the mind/body questions that we no longer ask because we have discovered there is no line of demarcation between the mind and body, between the chemicals of thought and the excrescence of thought.
This is likewise carried to the nature nurture question which has vast political and social implications . The believers in nature, the blood, are the conservatives, believing that innate abilities are the major factor in who we becomes – the believers in nurture, the secular humanists, believe that one’s environment is dominant – the kicker is, of course, both sides can prove to seemingly irrefutable evidence proving their correctness.
Let’s think of form and content. Form can be thought of as the circumstances we exist in; content being our genetic constitution. Previously we often believed that the two aspects of being were not always in harmony. The saint begged us pity him who knew the correct path to God and yet fell constantly to the weaknesses of the flesh.
We ought not get carried away with the forms of being. It is not that they are unreal, they are no more unreal then any other forms in the universe, but they have no existence without material inhabitation. I call to mind the cartoons of my youth where one character would pour darkness into the shadow of another.
Now the dragon or water/fire lizard is usually thought of as the symbol of what we might call the life force. It is far more directed then what we think of as the ID yet never reaches the level of ego, per se. It is, as we musicians like to say, “Daemonic.” In the west the goal of the hero is to slay the dragon, as Paracelsus tells us the wood of a tree is of little use but for burning until we shape it into usable form.
This idea of forcing the submission of nature is allegedly, philosophically abhorrent in the east, but I’m not sure I see much evidence of it. One thing is for certain however the dragon symbol in the east is considered not a demon to be slain but a harbinger of good luck.
In China for instance strict customs applied to how many toes pictures of dragons may have – with seven or more reserved for the emperor. The penalty of digression was, of course, death.
Note: I am aware that I am leaving the sexual connotations out of this discussion but the implication of the rider and the mounted is not difficult to ascertain.
Still, it all comes round, in the earlier forms, to a dualistic, “he said/she said”, issue. Who shall have control? I am reminded of Sartre’s comment that in every love affair there is the lover and the one who consents to be loved.
I can’t read William Yeats mind and he’s no longer with us so there’s no assurance what I say is correct. Maybe it doesn’t need to be. I mentioned a slight Faustian connection between the main character of his story Rosa Alchemica and the mysterious, seemingly allwise stranger. Perhaps this is over done. Yeats was very aware of the limitations of the corporeal world and like many he sought to somehow surpass them.
We are forever reaching beyond or attempting to reach beyond the barriers of what we know and are therefore often extremely permissive in allowing ideas without proof the benefit of the doubt. Yesterdays speculation is todays truth and tomorrows illusion. In any case , if we have not truth we have what we like to think is truth and who knows but that dream, like that of the afterlife is for many the prerequisite for living on earth.
So we are, according to this thesis, the result of the Gods pouring themselves into our shadows. We may like to think that we will be judged, that we think for ourselves, but actually we are the echoes of the whims of God who is the sole animating force.
As to the athiests among us, including to some degree myself- you can't get away with suggesting that since you don't believe in God that you therefore should be absolved of any questions of self interest. God, in the current sense, is a figure of speech.
GR Schaefer
New Paltz, NY Feb 2012
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