|
August 2004
In this issue:
Chaos
The whole universe is completely insane! – R. Crumb, The Book of Mr. Natural
On my morning walk I pass a woman working in her yard who asks, “How’s it going?” “Good,” I say. “Alright,” she says, “let’s keep it that way.”
One of my mother’s expressions: “I’m going to cloud up and rain all over you.” Said to children who were being annoying.
What men do with women: say dumb things.
A friend says she has a tattoo of a butterfly on her hip, where people can’t see it, but it makes her feel sexy.
Enlightenment must be the opposite of writing – a quiet mind, rather than a chatty one.
Perhaps depression is just the crisis we go through, over and over, when we realize we have no place in this world.
I have a form of cancer, in remission. Wild cells. Of course I can’t expect my cells to follow the rules.
Understanding that there is no point frees us to be, well, pointless.
You have to change your patterns every now and then or they take over. Patterns have a life of their own.
I’m trying to get up by 10, two hours earlier than my habit, get dressed and go for a walk around the neighborhood. Groggy. I feel like a fish out of water, gasping for air. But hey, at least the fish is awake. (The analogy breaks down completely at this point. We have lost all contact with the probe.)
Morning air has, I think, negative ions. Smells alive. The sun hasn’t yet taken all the bounce out of it.
It takes a couple of hours, and a cup of coffee, before my brain comes fully online.
When I retired I wanted to live unscheduled, outside of time. The sun, alas, keeps the same schedule as always. If I want to see much of it, I need to get up in the morning.
Past 60, you will find yourself using the word “still” a lot. As in, “I can still walk a few miles,” or, “I’m still interested in sex.”
I’ve Never Been Right BeforeDue out August 1, 2010
Lately I’m trying to resist the impulse to pin labels on myself. “Hi, I’m a hippie radical working-class poor intellectual introvert activist writer.” I’ve worn all that out. There is only so much you can do with an identity based on labels.
Over the last few years I’ve been infatuated with the label “old,” as if it might really, finally, explain something. It doesn’t.
Sometime in the late 1960s I asked my friend Bill if he thought the counterculture really existed. He just laughed.
Tis a gift to be simple and complicated at the same time.
We need to cultivate a can’t do spirit. We’re doing too much.
There are days when I just don’t feel like it. (I made a banner out of that and hung it on my wall.)
You could say I’ve been “obsessed,” which is widely regarded as a bad thing. Or you could say I’m “very determined,” which is usually considered a good thing.
My guess is that they’re the same thing.
Sex is an important part of an effective program of oral hygiene.
Joan Baez on PBS. When she sang “Diamonds and Rust,” she changed “ten years ago, I bought you some cufflinks” to “forty years ago….” She’s about my age.
The purpose of existence is novelty-generation, and our culture is generating novelty at an accelerating rate. – John Horgan, paraphrasing Terrence McKenna, Rational Mysticism, 2003
Horgan says McKenna has created a mathematical model to track and predict novelty. It predicts a peak on December 22, 2012. Only a little over eight years away. Okay gang, let’s start planning the party. I’ll be 72.
McKenna’s timewave theory:
Existence emerges from the clash of two forces, not good and evil but habit and novelty. Habit is entropic, repetitious, conservative; novelty is creative, disjunctive, progressive…. As novelty increases, so does complexity.
Dreams
M, a woman I knew a long time ago, is visiting me in my apartment. She tries to heat water in a steamer – one of those things you put in a pan to steam vegetables – on a stove burner. I ask her about it and she leaves, possibly offended.
Later we’re both at an event, people she knows showing videos. We kiss. She asks if she were willing to marry me would I marry her? I say I would give it serious thought.
Movies
Coffee and Cigarettes is a seriously annoying film by Jim Jarmusch. People sit around and have dumb, irritating conversations. I finally walked out.
The Bourne Supremacy – empty action flick. I went to see it because I was in a bad mood. I’m still in a bad mood. The movie did keep me awake, but it was like being repeatedly banged on the head.
The end result of too much input like Bourne seems to be that my mind starts “skipping,” and it’s hard to focus it on anything worthwhile.
Bourne is recreational violence. Doesn’t work any better than recreational sex.
Wisdom of the aged: avoid movies whose length exceeds your bladder capacity. Near the end of one of the Lord of the Rings movies I kept hoping it was over. Okay that was a good finale speech, now shut up and let me go pee.
Matchstick Men is a clever movie, but also a nonstop smoking commercial.
Low-rent economics
A chart in the book White Trash (Doug Henwood’s essay “Trash-o-nomics”) shows a per capita income change from 1973/74 to 1993 of:
· Men –14.4% · Women +29%
This may be misleading for women, since this was the period when large numbers of them were moving into the labor force, going from zero income as housewives. But the male reduction may explain a lot of their resentment, especially for lower income men.
Between 1979 and 1993, he writes, white men in all educational categories except “college plus 2 years” lost income. In 1993 he writes that, “Real average hourly wages have been falling for 20 years….”
In another White Trash essay, Matt Wray points to an economic tipping point in the early 1970s:
Many theorists have argued that it is possible to isolate certain events of the early 1970s which gave rise to the end of one historical period and the emergence of a new one. The first major global economic recession of the postwar period occurred in 1973.
Between 1970 and 1977, one million jobs disappeared.
Corporations were shifting to horizontal mergers and diversification, global labor and commodity markets, small-scale batch production, and computer-driven technological innovations for sources of new profits.
Changes which made our labor much more expendable. Over the last 30 years we’ve become progressively more obsolete, leading to “serious cultural upheavals.”
One of which is the decline in the economic utility, for women, of marriage, although most of the middle-aged married women I know would be poor without their husbands’ incomes.
The rapid and massive displacement of capital and jobs due to increasing globalization and deindustrialization caused immense human suffering for those on the lower levels of the economic ladder, compounded by chronic stagflation and deep cuts in social spending under the Nixon administration.
I finally got my BA in 1971, dropped out of grad school in 1973. So the years Wray is describing are the years I was trying, and failing, to get a toehold in the American economy.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, it wasn’t my fault.
I remember in the late 70s, in Eugene, a friend talking about how the government was going to put us all in concentration camps. I guess because we were different and radical, although I and the people I knew were apolitical at the time. Apparently it was thought that our mere beliefs put us in danger of repression, since we weren’t doing anything political. I was impatient with this talk, thinking it was stupid. Since we were no threat, why would the government bother?
Now, reading Wray’s essay, I can see my friends were displacing the economic threat onto the government. We were actually threatened by the corporations, and business in general, which didn’t need us.
There was also a displacement of focus onto psychology and New Age spiritualism. Walking around Eugene in the late 70s to early 80s I would run into people who would tell me, after I asked how they were doing, that well, their moon was in Saturn and their something was transiting Uranus, and that’s why they were having a shitty week. Never mind that money was in short supply.
This all came to a climax in the recession of 1982, when there were no jobs, which kicked me and most of my friends out of Eugene. The joke going around was that the last person out of Eugene should turn out the lights.
My impression is that Eugene has always been a hard place to make a living, especially for people on the fringe. Which some writers in the 90s were referring to as “marginals.”
Like the New England fundamentalists Wray is describing, we relocated our financial troubles to our inner world, where we could believe we had some control. Also an obsession, which continues, with food, diet being something else we could control.
And now? I think there is a widespread recognition that we don’t have much control.
Wray writes that in his fundamentalist church, which became a defensive, close-knot community, “Self-sufficiency became the key. Need upon need was met and money was seldom exchanged.” They set up a barter system, trying to withdraw from the economic system as much as they could.
Eugene’s countercultural community had something similar in the late 70s, a food buying cooperative (which still survives) and a barter organization. Neither did me much good. The skills I had to barter were not in demand.
What seems relevant to me now is local organizing aimed at forcing employers to pay a living wage. Enforcing “community standards.”
Wray points out that a lot of what his fundamentalist church did was good: creating community and mutual help to deal with an oppressive economic situation. “We created a circuit of spiritual capital which compensated (in some ways) for our lack of money.”
White Trash alternates some really good personal writing with strained essays full of academic gobbledegook. If you read it, just skip the latter. I guess the academic editors just couldn’t help themselves.
The academic parts tend towards complex theories about how middle-class white guilt about white racism is somehow eased by projecting negative stereotypes onto poor whites, who are seen as ignorant, destructive savages. The same way they see blacks. Dragging racism into a discussion of classism seems pointless to me, a diversion.
“I hadn’t ever imagined,” Wray writes, “the Apocalypse would be such a personal event.” Yeah, if you don’t have any community support economic collapse gets very personal. You’re on your own. What has usually saved me, the few times I’ve been saved, is family and friends.
In 1982, after moving to the San Francisco Bay area, struggling to make a living the first few months, I remember thinking that it would be real convenient if sometime, when I was crossing a street, I would get run over by a truck. I also remember, after being fired by Radio Shack for being totally unsuited to retail, fantasizing about living in a tent in the Berkeley hills, planning how I’d do it.
Last summer, when I was about to be kicked out of a house I was living in, I thought about buying a van and living on the street. Instead I moved to Eugene, lived with my sister and saved up money for a few months, then rented the cheapest apartment I could find.
The only freedom I’ve ever found from economic pressure is mental, learning, and comes mainly from the local library. No matter how poor I am, off and on, I can still read and think. Getting a longer-range perspective. Works better with books.
Leftists & fundamentalists
… the onset of apocalyptic fantasies, in individuals and in groups, signals a kind of resistance to mainstream culture and politics, offering a means of voicing protest against existing or emergent social orders. – Matt Wray, White Trash
So leftists and fundamentalists have something in common: we are so sick of the society we live in that we imagine its violent demise.
Another interesting thing he says is that many of these “end of” theories, both religious and secular, “point to the mid-seventies, especially the years 1973-1978, as the beginning of the end.” 1973 is often cited as a turning point by the left, the year when working-class income started its downward slide. I remember those years as bad ones, a hard time to make a living. I was divorced in 1976, mainly because I couldn’t afford to support a family. And it never got much better.
Ecstatic Christian practices are popular (by no means exclusively so) with the economically downtrodden – the poor and working classes who inhabit the margins of social life.
The counterculture of the 1960s was, in a sense, a religious movement, although we certainly didn’t think of it that way. We thought we could transform ourselves by dropping out, taking drugs, practicing “voluntary” poverty, psychotherapy, living in communes, etc. In the early 1970s there was a terrible crash of our spirits, when we struggled to make a living, the Vietnam war dragged on, and the transformation we thought we were a part of didn’t happen. We had succeeded in scaring the culture we were embedded in, and it turned around and ate us for lunch.
Like the fundamentalists, we imagined a different world, and we couldn’t live in this one.
In reality, few of the members in our [fundamentalist] church were financially secure…. Few had any sense of control over money – money, it seemed, controlled us. More than anything else, lack of money set our limits, defined our educational horizons, determined the level and quality of health care we received – poverty deeply affected our life chances. This often lead to attempts to control money spiritually.
The same idea penetrated the counterculture. The idea went around that if we just got our thinking straight prosperity would follow. I still hear that, and it’s wrong.
As far as I can see, the road to the middle-class life (forget prosperity) is taking some job that is tolerable, although you don’t much care about it, and pays well, and sticking with it, if they let you, for decades. Your youthful dreams of something different are then projected on your offspring.
Those of us who could not let go went down the tubes.
But it would be a mistake to romanticize this [fundamental Christian] movement. Despite its clearly counter-hegemonic potential, charismatic Christian belief is in many ways regressive and usually has the political effect of demobilizing and tranquilizing the economically oppressed.
In so many different ways, the oppressed tend to retreat into a private world, rather than confront our oppressors.
Confrontation is simply too painful, as we can see now with all the liberals going back to being Democrats. They can’t stand to be on the outside, to be in the minority. Better psychologically to be on the “winning” team, even if that team violates your principles and will never give you what you need.
On the other hand, radicals need to confront, to fight. We’re too aware to have any choice about being outsiders, and we can’t stand feeling completely powerless. We are tired of being ignored.
Fundamentalist Christians have been encouraged by Republicans to displace their anger, caused by economic pressure, onto secular liberals, Muslims and immigrants. They are taught to see their problems as cultural rather than economic.
Likewise working-class people in general are taught to fear cultural liberals, foreigners, immigrants and the poor.
As for immigrants, I’m opposed to unlimited illegal immigration because these immigrants compete with poor Americans for jobs. The fault, however, lies not with the immigrants but with the wealthy Americans who employ them.
Peace and Freedom Party
The California Peace and Freedom Party, of which I was a member in the late 1960s, was in the news recently because they choose to give their presidential ballot line to a native American who has been in jail for years, instead of Ralph Nader. Ah the American left, eternally eccentric.
In 1968 PFP ran a black man, Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul On Ice and a convicted rapist, for president. Cleaver was too young to be on the ballot so we had to do a write-in campaign. Part of our platform was letting all black men out of jail. Poverty-stricken blacks in the cities were rioting and we felt something had to be done about American racism. We had an uneasy alliance going with the Black Panther Party. PFP brought Panther leader Bobby Seale to speak in Riverside, California. When someone from the large but mostly white audience asked what we could do to help, Seale replied, “Guns, baby guns.”
You had to be there.
The American left is eternally hung up on racism – it worries about “diversity” – when it should focus on economics and classism.
PFP was a rebellion against the Vietnam war, president Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic party. Johnson had declined to run again when an early primary showed just how unpopular he was. The Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s vice president, a liberal who supported the war. Or maybe he just wasn’t willing to go against Johnson, who once said that he had Humphrey’s balls in his pocket.
The article I read last night gave the name of the current PFP chair, Kevin Aiken. Kevin and I put out an “underground” newspaper for several months in the late 60s in Riverside, California. Haven’t seen him since. He was in his late teens then, bright and unconventional, I in my late 20s. So he must be in his mid 50s now.
“Progressive”
A dictionary definition I found said progressive means favoring progress or reform. I first heard the word used politically in the mid to late 60s. Well-known liberals, such as Hubert Humphrey, were supporting the war in Vietnam. We therefore had to differentiate ourselves from the liberals, so we revived the historical word "progressive." It is still used to differentiate us from the liberals, with whom we have serious differences.
As presently used, I would say that "progressive" is somewhere to the left of "liberal." We believe in more fundamental changes, while liberals tend to be reformist. The safety net programs -- welfare, unemployment, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. -- are some of the finest liberal accomplishments, which progressives also support. Progressives, however, are more interested in forcing employers to pay a living wage, and universal health care. We want to regulate capitalism so it isn't so destructive, not just compensate for its excesses with safety net programs. We want to redistribute income and power downward.
We also part company with liberals on strategy. To us, liberals seem to settle for much too little.
Nader
I read that the Democrats are studying Nader voters to see how they might win us over. They say we’re older and angrier than other voters, and we don’t care about social issues like abortion and gay marriage. We’re fiercely against globalization and corporate dominance. Yes, that describes me, but I think also we’re poorer than most Democrats, so we vote on economic issues, and we hate war.
Mysticism
And while some mystics feel a blissful unity with all things, others perceive absolute reality as terrifyingly alien. – John Horgan, Rational Mysticism, 2003
Horgan’s book is mainly about mystical experiences, which are, he says, according to William James:
I like this book. A clear-eyed account of a subject I usually wouldn’t pay much attention to. I’ve relegated mysticism to the same mental compartment as flying saucers: early in my teens I decided they were, sadly, never going to land in my back yard.
The book is also a rich source of ideas. Good for months of speculation.
Horgan writes that “mysticism,” as something separate from religion, is an invention of the 20th century.
I think the theologians have made a mess of the human spiritual quest. They have made it too cumbersome, too unbelievable. – James Austin, quoted by Horgan
About four percent of the population, mostly females, have “fantasy-prone” personalities that make them highly suggestible. They “have a higher-than-average tendency to report mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences.”
At a New Age conference, people “exuded an almost palpable yearning for the transcendent, the marvelous, the mystical.” Yes, because so-called real life is so disappointing.
The recent and very popular documentary What the Bleep Do We Know attempted, not too successfully I thought, to connect quantum physics with a spiritual view of the world. Commenting on similar efforts, Horgan writes:
Part of me bridled at these efforts to transform physics into a feel-good religion. I tended to agree with the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg that “as we have discovered more and more fundamental physical principles they seem to have less and less to do with us.”
Mystical experiences, writes Horgan, “can be blissful and life-enhancing, but they can also trigger paranoia, narcissistic delusions, and other forms of madness.”
There is no predicting how you will respond to such a vision. Seeing life against the backdrop of infinity can evoke joy, madness, terror, revulsion, love, gratitude, hilarity – or all of the above at once.
To see infinity, we have to project a form onto it.
The risk, it seems to me, is twofold: (1) being driven deeper into yourself until you contact your fears – all those things you’ve been trying not to think about; and (2) having an experience that contradicts your sense of reality. Reality may be boring and unsatisfying, but we all depend on it to stay oriented. Stepping outside it needs to be done in small doses, or perhaps with some guidance if you’re planning to go far.
One would think that getting rid of the self and feeling united with other people would promote morality, but Horgan says there is no necessary connection between mystical experience and morality. Apparently feeling a unity with the rest of creation doesn’t make you care about the welfare of other people. Maybe unity raises you above the level where individuals matter? We are indifferent to the fate of individual cells in our bodies, unless too many go bad all at once. I’ve read that the life of an ant is not important, even to the ant. Perhaps in a mystical experience you become the nest, which you then see as the “real” organism.
Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, using brain-scanning technologies, “traced sensations of unity to suppressed activity in a particular part of the brain, and they discerned a biological resemblance between mystical ecstasy and orgasms…. The common element in all spiritual experiences, Newberg and D’Aquili contended, is a sense of unity deeper than that conveyed by ordinary consciousness.”
One of the functions of sex, when it works, is to help a couple feel unified, together. Sexual unity only works if the couple are already together. Hard to come together sexually if you can’t talk, although I hear some couples do. As Dory Previn sang, “Talk to me please in bed, where it matters.” Perhaps we emphasize sex so much in America because we don’t know how to talk.
The more alienated we feel, the more we wish for unity.
Horgan says that a mystical experience is a “paradoxical state of ecstatic serenity.”
… mystical experiences can reveal not God’s presence but his absence.
Moreover, self-dissolution [as part of a mystical experience] may be experienced in a positive way, as a unification with something larger, or in a negative way, as fragmentation, as “the actual death of the ego,” Newberg said, “which is a horrible, scary thing.” Although popular books on near-death experiences make them sound universally heavenly, several studies have show that as many as half of them are hellish. Some people find themselves trapped in a “terrifying emptiness.”
The self dissolves without finding a home in a greater reality.
Or maybe the self was always an illusion. Horgan suggests that there may be no “unified self at the core of each individual,” that what we perceive as the self may just be an emergent property of a complex mind system.
We do not perceive the world directly, as it truly is; we actively construct it. We construct ourselves too. Our ordinary waking self is as artificial, invented, and illusory as the ethereal double selves we hallucinate in dreams and out-of-body experiences.
Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine, 1999) sees the self as a collection of memes – ideas that are passed from one person to another through culture – and therefore having no reality of its own. “The self is just a flowing story constructed by memes acquired from other people, and nothing more.”
[Blackmore] called religions “memeplexes,” intellectual viruses that have survived not because they are true but because they excel at replication and infection. To put it another way, religions are just extremely successful chain letters.
Religion, he says, has a deadening effect on mystical experience. Religion’s belief system excludes mystery.
The trouble begins when we translate our visions into ideologies….
The problem is that any truth or anti-truth, no matter how initially revelatory and awe-inspiring, sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world.
Meditation and mindfulness – “paying full attention to the present moment” – help us to experience the self as an illusion. If you see that the self is not real, and are able to maintain the awareness, then it somehow sets you free. Free, I guess, of your self-centered preoccupations. Free to cease being the sum of all those memes you’ve imported from other people, and woven together into a simulated self.
… Zen aims not at acquiring knowledge, insights and capacities but at shedding beliefs, obsessions, and other psychological encumbrances.
The self is also what divides us from other people and the world around us. So the ideal is to be selfless. I can’t picture that, except as a possibility. The self is our defense mechanism against all the other selves. So selflessness is unilateral disarmament. I can also see, however, how it could be very disarming.
Horgan believes that the greatest danger in mystical experience is that we might be “left with a permanent case of derealization and depersonalization.”
Sensations of unreality are quite common, enough so that psychiatrists have given them labels: derealization and depersonalization. In the former, you become alienated from external reality; everything seems unfamiliar, strange. In the latter, you become a stranger to yourself as well; you become detached from your own emotions and perceptions.
He says a better use of mysticism is to “make this life seem more real, not less.”
Derealization and depersonalization are common side effects of mental illness, mind-altering drugs, and lack of sleep.
Common symptoms of depression. Everything becomes distant. One woman wrote of watching her distant hands make a sandwich, sending them mental messages about what to do next. I’ve done that. You lose your connection to the world, because you don’t want any. The world is a source of pain. Sometimes drugs can provide the necessary distance. Suicide is the ultimate cure.
Mystical detachment sounds more benign, letting go without the pain.
I believe the reason I gave up psychedelic drugs, 22 years ago, is that I was already too lightly bound to this world.
Simple preoccupation can also cause a mental distance from the world. Walking around the neighborhood in the morning I’m often aware that I’m not fully seeing the beautiful (this time of the year) world around me, because my mind is so busy. Sometimes getting up early helps me past that, because my mind is still too sleepy to think much.
Usually I’m going full-tilt boogie at the job of figuring things out.
I’m also so lightly bound to my body that I’ve had trouble discussing symptoms with a doctor. I wasn’t paying attention. Outside of sex, bodily sensations don’t seem important. Thus also, not much interest in food, perhaps a blessing since food has become a curse for so many of us. We weren’t designed for plenty.
Perhaps one thing sex does for us is pull our awareness back into our bodies, so we can feel our physical reality. Maybe athletes get the same thing from exercise. Years ago a friend wrote that childbirth had made her aware that she was an animal.
The ancient Hindu texts the Upanishads claim that the only reality is the formless, infinite, eternal void from which all things come and to which they return. All else, including your mortal self, is unreal. Doctrines such as this give us a perverse sort of immortality: We cannot die, because we do not exist in the first place.
I’ve been interested in the boundary between reality and unreality for a long time, in dreams and in science fiction – virtual reality, nanotech buildings that can morph into something else. Entertaining as long as I don’t have to actually be there. In complexity theory, I guess this would be the “chaordic” – edge of chaos – boundary, which is also supposed to be the most creative state for complex systems.
[Christian] Ratsch defined enlightenment as “a state of complete understanding of everything, that total loss of ego structures for a while, and just being one with everything.”
Horgan says it’s a quick peak experience, like an orgasm, not a mental state you stay in for long periods of time.
At the core of the mystical experience, he believes, is a sense of awe or wonder. “Mystical awakening infuses our vision with awe, which ‘may be the distinctive religious emotion.’” (Horgan/Huston Smith) “Beyond our mundane, material world lies an infinite, transcendent realm.”
Horgan relays Huston Smith’s idea that a mystical experience is a sudden connection with the infinite. Which we don’t ordinarily sense. Like living in a box with no top, and lifting yourself up to look over the edge.
Another possibility, though, is that you might stay in the box, staring at it and thinking, “Wow. This is some amazing box!”
Horgan says that both mysticism and science come to the conclusion that “there is an irreducible mystery at the heart of things.”
Mysticism involves finding some way, and it isn’t easy, to directly sense a central mystery. If you succeed, it’s hard to say how it will affect you. It may or may not be a pleasant experience. It won’t necessarily make you a better person. It will be memorable.
The mystery, Horgan writes, is not cozy. You can project a concept like “God” onto it, but it’s really more like an infinite vacuum, a nothingness, nonhuman, nonentity, fundamentally unknowable.
It’s the background for our existence, so miraculous and beautiful. But also frightening, because it reveals the improbability of our existence and continuation. So mystical vision balances us on the “knife edge” between heaven and hell.
Anything that helps you to see – really see – the wondrousness of the world serves a mystical purpose.
Fortunately, life itself is so wildly weird and improbable that sooner or later it is bound to get our attention. And if life doesn’t grab our attention, death will. Whenever death intrudes upon our lives, we feel the chill of the deep space in which we are suspended.
Perhaps the main problem I have in extracting wisdom from books is wanting to pass it all on.
I’m beginning to suspect that the only way to really “get” an intellectually dense book like this one is to read it twice.
Does God care? Who knows? But we care. Our solace – and salvation, if we can be saved – will come not from God’s compassion but from ours.
I have no choice but to choose free will. |