Friday, February 25, 2005
Parenting: A Radical Notion
I live in an apartment building with many elderly residents. I am aware that my sons' music-making might create an annoyance,
particularly if they practice after about 10 PM in the evening. But as no one ever complained, I assumed that my efforts to
curb the late jam sessions and keep down the amplification were working at least well enough.
A few weeks ago I ran into one of my apartment co-dwellers -- I'll call her Mrs. X. -- in the laundry room, and
we got to talking. It turned out that she and her neighbor had been bothered by the music, and that the neighbor had said
"she was going to call the police." Right then and there I practically dragged Mrs. X back to my apartment, where we sat down
with Son #2 and explained the situation. It was all very friendly and impromptu. Mrs. X. got the message that the issue
of music practice was discussable between mother and son; son got the message that the apartment walls were thin, which made
use of amplification especially problematic; and all three parties walked away from the summit with the conviction that all
faces had been brought out into the open and that no stealth tactics would be employed . Mrs. X. repeatedly assured us she
would "never call the police," and would vociferously discourage anyone else from threatening to do so, Son assured
us he would mind his hours of music making; and mother was pleased that a potential apartmental diplomatic crisis had
been nipped in the bud.
Yesterday in the laundry room I saw Mrs. X. and she was full of gratitude and amazement that "things have been so quiet!"
She was overflowing with remorse for having been the cause of the repression of music, overflowing with astonishment at this
demonstration of parental involvement and youth compliance with restrictions.This apparently is unheard of in America today.I
merely report this incident with the view of suggesting that it might not be necessary to involve the police in every case
of conflict of interest between neighbors. I realize this is a subversive notion. What if Americans should get the idea that
they are capable of governing themselves -- or worse, that good parenting might result in the production of decent children,
even teen-agers? What would happen to our government armies of political correctors, sociologists, and therapists, with
their supporting lackeys of the drug, pharmaceutical, policing, and juvenile detention bureaucracies if such an heretical
notion should prevail?
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Passing Shadows
Valentin Tomberg once wrote that the spiritual counter-truth to the phrase "Nature abhors a vacuum" is "the Spirit abhors
fullness." He mentions that it is the "empty spaces" in or between things that are usable by us - e.g., doors, windows, vessels,
the spokes of a wheel.
Like many insights from the field of spiritual research, Tomberg's comment presumes that the part of mankind to which it
is addressed is "normal" -- or "natural" or at least "sane." But what if the words of spiritual understanding fall upon the
ears of people who are not "normal" -- people who are, in some sense, subnormal, unnatural, insane? Then the words would have
to be turned into their opposites and inside-out in order to express reality. In this case the Spirit would love the vacuum
and Nature would be everywhere a fullness whose presence is experienced as something abhorrent.
I believe that we have arrived at this situation today. Americans seem hardly to tolerate the touch of anything "natural."
The American obsession with sanitation began in the early 20th century and has been escalating ever since, to where we now
have kitchen cleansers the equivalent of antibiotic steroids and rubber gloves that must be worn at all times by food preparers.
"Nature" has become so abhorrent that it has become fasionable among certain sectors of youth to go to elaborate lengths to
alter their biological gender, and modern medicine for years has been doing battle with mere "mortality," as if the human
condition itself were something shameful and obscene. Biology has become the new politics. Just look at abortion, genetics,
and the hubbub surrounding Lawrence Summers' recent remark about the male prepondernce in science.
In this way anything "natural," i.e. not subjected to human choice, has been moved into the area of the despised and the
contemptible.
As for the Spirit: the Spirit today manifests as the relentless pressure to maintain fullness and satiety, a tsunami of
propaganda to forestall any movement into emptiness, renunciation, incertitude, self-limitation, self-questioning. Thus American
life swings back and forth continually between pressure and suction, vacuum and fullness, with the concepts "Nature" and "Spirit"
completely reversed.
This swinging back and forth may be pictured as the shadow of a hanging man. Only we cannot see the corpse. Those of us
who are positioned on the ground watch the events unfold by means of the Internet - which is to say, we watch not so much
with our eyes as with our thoughts. The shadow passes and re-passes above our heads - merely a dead man swinging, or perhaps
a lynched nation. But whatever it is, the pendulum-swing never stops or comes to rest to where we might get a purchase on
it or cut the poor thing down. How could anything be so paradoxical -- both helpless and mechanical? How can something that
exists so lack passion -- that is, real movement, the power to suffer from within?
So shadows sweep across the landscape with the ghastly phosphorescence of Empire: lust without passion and movement without
change. "Nature" and "Spirit" have traded places in a kind of counterfeit exchange.. I suppose this transaction has
left behind the smell of fumes, like marsh gas, in which the odor of sulphur is unmistakable. At any rate,
we are choking in it.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Literary Update
Today I received an e-mail from a member of the marketing team of the literary agency that is attempting to interest
a publisher in my novel, "After the Crash - An Essay-Novel of the Post-hydrocarbon Age." This individual wrote that "Unfortunately,
we must report that all have passed from the first marketing initiative (some have not responded which is their polite way
of telling us no.) The good news is that we didn't get any 'strong negatives.' Therefore, we continue to believe that your
material is sellable, we just need the right combination of factors to fall into place. We believe in you and this work, so
we're not throwing in the towel if you won't..."
I wrote back to this person to continue by all means in the marketing campaign - but that "I find it incredible that
with the war in Iraq, the escalating prices of oil, the dire reports of climate change and of oil depletion and the obvious
centrality of energy to the Modern Way of Life, that NOT ONE SINGLE PUBLISHER even cared to take a look at my manuscript!"
I assured her that I in no way faulted the literary agency for this state of affairs, i.e. the collusion of the publishing
industry in the collective delusion that is America. The media have already succumbed to it, and the publishers (most of them
owned by huge foreign conglomerates anyhow) are not far behind. Fantasies like Michael Crichton's latest novel dissing global
warming or Dan Brown's vile anti-Christian The DaVinci Code will find easy access to the publishing empire, while
a modest entertaining reality-based fantasy like mine doesn't even get a cursory reading.
Oil depletion is rapidly becoming a metaphor for the impenetrability of mind being shown by our business, government
and media elites. Old Testament prophets thundered about a 'stiff-necked people' who 'have eyes but do not see' and
'ears but do not hear,' about the nation being given over to 'idolatry.' We read of such things in the books of the Old
Testament and we are barraged daily with examples of the insouciant disregard by our elites for geology, economy, limits,
morality, rules of law, and norms of civilization in our life today. But where's the connecting link between the old prophecies
and the modern realities?
As I argue in essays developing on my new website, these connecting links can be traced in matters having to do with
symbolism, religion, and the participating consciousness - that is to say, in the relationship of man's consciousness to the
world of which he is a part. It would be impossible to delve into these matters without considering the history of the relations
that have existed between Judaism and Christianity, just as it is impossible not to notice that the belligerent neoconservatism
that has gripped American foreign policy has been spearheaded by a small but fierce contingent of Israel-favoring Jews.
It should go without saying that this Jewish contingent has little to do with either the piety of God-fearing Jews or with
the religious disaffiliationism of secularized Jews.
But any American who cares about the future of this country should read up on the history of Bolshevism in Russia, the
relations of the Jews and the Polish elites in Poland from the 16th to the 18th centuries, Cromwell's Puritan-Judaic
alliance in England and the regicide of 1649, and the history leading up to the Spanish Inquisition in Spain and the expulsion
of the Jews in 1492. It may seem like a leap to suggest that what happened in the history books is happening here, but it's
a link - not the only link, but an important one - to those wise prophets of old and the modern warnings of oil depletion
which are falling on deaf ears today.
February 10, 2005
Back After a Long Blackout
Several readers have inquired about why this website was shut down for so long. as I explained to several readers by
e-mail, when I returned from a trip to Massachusetts in early January, I accessed my website only to find that all of my recent
postings from Dec. 4, 2004, to January 9, 2005, had been eliminated due to a massive "data loss" on the server. No explanation
was given and apparently the work was impossible to recover. In addition to this problem, I was unable to work on the website
due to the fact that my Internet Explorer browser had been malfunctioning. Plagued by repeated spyware, popups and annoying
viruses, I deleted this browser. The website server was not compatible with the Mozilla browser I now use.
I have finally been able to repair these problems at least to the extent of being able to add to this website again.
I am posting a piece I wrote for the "Alas, Babylon" news group concerning the disrepute of empirical knowledge in today's
world of fiat high finance, corrupt government, lying media and general malaise of unreality.
Reply to the List Manager of Alas Babylon, who sent out a posting asking the question – where
are all the other list members? Only a few were writing in.
Thanks for your invitation to write in. I am not doing anything about the collapse of civilization at the
moment. Actually, I am waiting to hear about a job I applied for. If I get it, I'll likely be moving to western Mass. in the
coming months. If I don't get it, I'll probably move to an apartment in Philadelphia, and may decide to get rid of my car.
That's assuming I can get some kind of job in Philadelphia. That's assuming that I, Philadelphia, my possibly-soon-to-be-gotten-rid-of-car,
and the world will still be around in the foreseeable future to allow me to make these plans.
There is so much impacting - physically and spiritually - that just taking it all in is a day-long job. What
am I thinking about? With the Party of Satan now in power, it seems incumbent upon individuals to commence a practice now
almost universally fallen into disuse: i.e., thinking. I am not exactly joking, but things are so horrible -- really the reptilian
in man occupying the stage of the world -- that I find myself edging into a humorous, if not sarcastic tone. Basically I am
just another fiddler on the Internet while Rome burns.
However, I do have a few "thoughts," which I will shoot your way out of my pea-shooter brain. You may recall
a recent New York Times interview in which our Chief Mouthpiece uttered the immortal words,to the effect that "we
are an Empire now... we create our own reality."I don't know if you've followed the New Age circuits of the past twodecades,
but this thought came right out of Jane Robert's Seth books, which claimed to be the channelled wisdom of this Entity, Seth,
who lived in a superdimensional reality. They were quite persuasive in their way, appealing to the semi-literate neo-Emersonian
strain of belief in untrammelled possibility, which alas, seems to be a perpetual American heresy. But it is also true that
this thought – I repeat it again, in case you have forgotten it, thanks to my verbiage, that "we create our own reality"
-- well, as I say this this thought has made more respectable circuits through the groves of Academe, trailing the mud of
Descartes, Kant, Thomas Kuhn, and numerous other thinkers of postmodernist bent who landed in the modern era replete with
tenure and academic appointments.
My point, longwinded though I seem, being that this thought has arrived on the doorsteps of the Empire, we
will not say how it arrived-- a letter bomb or a singing telegram? I mean the idea had a past, and one not altogether clean.
Perhaps an out-of-wedlock birth? But whatever the antecedents, the idea (i.e. "we create our own reality") has now been taken
up by the withered fingers and trembling grasp of our High Lords of War, and they are so eager to put it into practice that
they do not even take a moment to wipe the smirks off their faces! Oh how they snort and they smirk, they are so delighted
with it. For you see, it relieves them of the tedious necessity of bowing to the "reality-based community," those poor suckers
who actually live in this world -- cowering, no doubt, under the rain of hellfire and bombs so deliciously brewed by these
same Lords of Annihilation and Apostles of World Reconstruction.
Pardon my rambling. It would be a mistake to dismiss the idea altogether because of the unfortunate fact
that the people who dreamed it up had the wrong idea about it, and the people who have taken it up also have the wrong idea
about it. Might it not be the case that the third time is the charm?
The idea is true - in a spiritual sense, and only in a spiritual sense. Mankind is indeed the creaturely
being with the capacity to create new reality -- that is to say, to change his historical circumstances - if he thinks about
it enough, and bestirs himself, and exercises his honor, his imagination, and his passion. But it is these spiritual qualities
which the Lords of War want to stamp out!
Beware! this is the significance of my tale!
Addendum: The misuse of spiritual forces is called, in occultism, black magic. A useful
article to read in conjunction with my humorous diatribe is Bill Ridley's "China and the Final War for Resources," published
in http://www.321energy.com/ (February 10, 2005). While the American powers-that-be dally with the dark forces, China is operating in the light of rational
regard for its future. Makes you stop and think.
Dec. 4, 2004 "...dim, green, well-beloved isle..."
Those who were planning to take a vacation to Ireland might want to think twice. Apparently the people in Yeats' "dim,
green, well-beloved isle" are destroying their country, their heritage, their history, and their soul in a frenzy
of highway construction and suburban sprawl. You can read about the "Concrete Isle" on today's EnergyBulletin.net --
if you can stand it. It will make you very, very sad. It seems that an unspoiled and beautiful environment is a result
of poverty. When a society becomes wealthy a logic is set in motion that leads to the destruction of the character of the
landscape, leading ultimately to the destruction of the character of the people.Such is the "gnosticism" of money: it
causes a kind of "excarnation," a repudiation of the material, a disdain for the earth. Materialism is actually a disdain
for matter, in the sense that any material expression, whether of a landscape or a human countenance, is a work formed under
the influence of cultural dispositions and ideals bound by energetic necessities and limits. The "expressiveness" of anything
material thus can take place only between these two poles, between the spiritual inclination and the energy reality
that both enables and constrains it..
Thus the material world, the earth and the landscape as we know it, is the place of historical and time-bound relationships.There
is nothing more beautiful than a landscape formed over a long period of responsible human habitation, cultivation, and
stewardship.One can also admit that, historically, it has taken money to build beautiful environments and buildings. This
was no doubt true in Renaissance Italy, for instance. But, arguably, it was not wealth per se as the spiritual vision
that enabled such a use of wealth.
For this reason, there is nothing more horrible than the landscapes being created by Hydrocarbon Man in the waning days
of the Hydrocarbon Empire. The materialism that now oppresses the world is a grotesque counter-image to the spirituality
of incarnation and relationship. Gigantism and aggressive conquest have replaced the imperatives of mere living
-- which involve the relational awareness, not only of my own life, but of the lives of others and of the total relationship
to the land. But the new "McMansions" -- and now they are springing up all over Ireland -- proclaim no relationship
but the reality of visionless egotism.
When everything beautiful and simple has finally been obliterated, the words "Blessed are the poor in spirit" will take
on a whole new meaning. Those few with surviving humanity will long for it and perhaps even begin to practice it, for
the sake of the rest -- the discarnated, dehumanized mass despoiling the globe into a hideous oblivion. .
December 1, 2004
Statistics of the Rapture
My letter to the Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday regarding public transit funding sparked a little
flurry of interest and correspondence. It seems that a recent episode of the TV program "West Wing" mentioned Hubbert's Peak,
so that my letter's mention of "peak oil" was not, for some readers, their first encounter with this concept.
I was reading the December '04 ASPO Newsletter this morning - the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, the
Swedish organization that has done so much to bring Peak Oil to public awareness. The Newsletter, published every month, is
available on
www.peakoil.net and other oil depletion study websites. The newsletter is an invaluable educational tool, containing news of the oil world
from all over and across many disciplines - history, geology, politics, culture, business. Each newsletter contains a "country
assessment" -- this month was Canada's turn. The Newsletter also usually contains humor, I mean sarcasm of one kind or another
- usually reports from "flat earth" economists who think that the world resources will never end and that we can drive cars
forever on endless ribbons of pavement.
This month certain remarks were quoted from the former head of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) Mr. Sadad al-Husseini,
regarding America's penchant for fanciful oil thinking. Mr. al-Husseini was referring to the U.S. government's oil-supply
projections, published in the EIA, the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy. "The whole industry laughs at it,"
he said, adding that "they are perhaps unaware of how unrealistic these numbers are."
Now that we have leaders in America who are in imminent expectation of Rapture, why bother with statistics? Mr. al-Husseini
says that the U.S. government includes in its oil projections "nearly unusable pitch," which is hardly the thing to put
in your gas tank.How much of the billions of barrels of oil they think remain include pitch? Maybe the government agents
will get their feet stuck in the tar, which will prevent their elevation to the Kingdom, but in the meantime these are the
figures driving our government's policy. Mr. al-Husseini thinks we should be worried.
We pride ourselves that we live in an age of Information, and collecting data, analyzing statistics, and getting
the facts straight are tasks that have evolved to a high level of accuracy in the Modern Age. But what if "modernity"
has lost its edge? What if we fail to do well what we have historically succeeded in doing? How do you explain the decline
of a certain level of mental capacity? It is one thing to ask Americans to moderate their high-consumption, high-entropy
lifestyle. It's an uphill struggle there, everyone agrees. But it is a different thing to realize that you can no longer continue
to expect a high level of performance in the things that have traditionally been reliable. Which is my beef all along: cognitive
performance, standards of achievement, are affected by emotional dispositions and wishes. The doctrine of Entitlement has
migrated from Economics to Metaphysics - and that is why America is about to become the Tar Baby among the nations.
