Just Another Cultural Visionary

J T Monro - 1982 - brush and ink - 22x30

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:34:34 GMT

because the work is the healing . . . .

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:29:00 GMT

Friends and others wonder why I have refrained from publishing, except in private editions - mostly pamphlet versions of the essays - and why I have then only distributed them to a handful of friends and not to experts in the various fields that I touch on. And why have I refrained from publishing in the larger world, why have I refrained from submitting to journals or established publishing houses? The questions are almost never direct. They tend to hover in the air, like small insects that may or may not sting or bite.

I did not set out to do what I have done. The only vocational desire I ever had was the desire to be a poet. But as I have said repeatedly here, something was missing in the culture. And if I am a poet, I am a typically peculiar and paradoxical poet. I needed to know the ground of my craft, not simply intuitively, as so many poets seem to do, but consciously and, insofar as possible, structurally. I am not speaking simply of technique here. Something structural is missing in our understanding of aesthetics. In poetry, the sign is first of all the chaos of technique that appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then the gradual reduction to a prosodic artifice so miniscule as to be laughable, if it were not received with such seriousness in the present society.
But it seems that asking the question was the key. Or, rather, the question seemed to ask itself before I was fully conscious of it. The desire to be a poet and the question that it raised almost instantly opened a door. Before I fully asked the question, I had been given the answer, but an answer couched in a most ambiguous form.

My childhood was anything but happy. But, then, saying that places me with the legion of memoirists who now seem to dominate the nonfiction lists. And the fact of their sales suggests that we loners are not that isolated. But my childhood was such that I did not expect to live beyond my 25th year - a conscious thought! My behavior was out of control - a fact that I witnessed with at least as much chagrin as those around me. I had no peace. While I have an elephant's memory for fact - and now find that I can recover much of the emotional content of given moments of memory - my 'true' life consisted of a handful of instances when time stopped, the noise in my head momentarily ceased, and I had some sense of breathing naturally. Usually, they occurred in the embracing presence of nature.
But when, nearly 40, I entered formal 'recovery', I found that I had been working on my recovery from the time of that first adolescent awakening, that first answer to the question that I had not formally asked. 'Recovery' finally gave me the models for addiction and family dysfunction that explained my behavior and the behavior of others - the great conundrum that had driven me out into the wilderness, away from human contact. But the knowledge did not bring me back into society. It simply validated and rationalized my bewilderment. My new understanding basically changed nothing - except my understanding.

But what I had done in the meantime was undertake the great journey.

            Everywhere in my life, I can hold up a double-sided mirror. On the one side, for example, is the depth of my suffering. And on the other side are not only the hunger for answers, but the answers given in deep allegory, and the long process of unfolding their values. These two are the same.
            If philosophy were only philosophy, a thought-system game, it would be meaningless. The worlds of chemistry or of the subatomic are simply a child playing with slime unless they have some direct value for our consciousness. Antibiotics and X-ray technology may remove some of our insecurities about life. But it's not simply an argument between life enhancement and nuclear weapons. Knowledge is vital.
            It may cost me points with the initiates, but I did not approach western philosophy from the west finally. When I was 17, I had a beautiful used copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. And I began reading it without a crib. I did not get all that far before I thought I disagreed with him and laid the book aside. But the only philosophy course I took, an introductory history, consisted primarily of extended readings in the primary sources - at least for me. The professor was a Humean scholar and an analytic philosopher and his precious commentary struck me as totally irrelevant. What grasped me was the incredibly empirical - the incredibly experiential - nature of philosophy. Leibnitzian 'monadology' made total sense to me, not as a trick response to the problems of causality, but because if we understand that time is both sequential and altogether contained in the moment - something inherent in Einstein's Special Theory of relativity - the monadology is simply a reversal of that with respect to individual 'entities'. Every entity is wholly complete in its own moment. This is something that Buddhism tries to point to. The shunyata doctrine ultimately points to the fact that abstracting value is precisely abstract. Value cannot be separated from what is. And what is is complete and self-contained, whether we consider the whole or the part, since any part is also the whole in itself.
            Where Buddhism came from is Upanishad. Buddha was an Upanishadic teacher, with his teachings incorporated in the tradition, as much as he stood the tradition on its head. And where I finally found the core understanding of philosophy is in Upanishad.
            But if you go to Upanishad and try to see what I saw, you will be hard pressed even to find a clue.
            As part of my pre-recovery recovery, I found myself involved in yoga. And I made a lark / serious journey across the country and wound up with a teacher whose ultimate predilection was Sanskrit and the sound of Sanskrit. And while I never formally learned the language, I learned to read the script relatively fluently and to hear the language in a peculiarly intimate way. When I finally returned east and sat down with the ten principle Upanishad in dual language editions, I found a most extraordinary presentation of the moment of experience, using gods, symbols and a recondite philosophical vocabulary, but nevertheless clear and precise in its terminology and understanding.
            And it is from this that I entered into the heart of the Idealist moment.

            I have never started with cribs, but always with primary texts. As I said, I began struggling with Kant as a teenager. My 'history of philosophy' course involved substantial selections from Descartes to Kant. A professor of religion pointed toward Hegel with a sufficiently suggestive resonance to place him high on my list of intentions. But I never consciously focused on the Idealists until I began to articulate my formal understanding of self-awareness. At that point, I could reorient Kant's understanding in terms of my own experience and engage the lugubrious poetry of Hegel on much the same terms. Both were speaking more or less explicitly of self-awareness, as far as I could see. While Hegel was somewhat more overtly experiential, Kant seemed to be writing around an experiential core, talking about it, rather than struggling to articulate it directly. But Kant seemed to think that it was not possible to express it directly, a sentiment the later Idealists apparently did not share.
            But, discovering Fichte, I had the feeling that he had struck directly on the door, although he too appeared caught in the transition, unable to pass through. But his self-positing of the self points directly to the mysterious but empirical separation at the center of self-awareness, the key, not only to the objectification of 'the self' that is self-awareness, but to objectivity as well. To stand in this place empirically is to wield the essential magic of philosophy itself, the kaleidoscopic window on the revolving structures of thought.
            I felt that this was the place all of the Idealists had touched on at some point, some briefly, others with recurring force over a period of time.
            Because of this empirical sense of them, I suppose that I have a certain arrogance or presumption about my understanding. But sometimes it seems to me that professionalism, with its multiplying flora of the technical - and thus its requisite initiations - tends not only to bypass the larger view, but to miss generalizations that are both obvious and necessary. Eventually the technician begins to assume that all generalizations are inherently false.

I said that I did not begin with the Idealists or western philosophy. And I have said that the framing definition of my understanding of self-awareness - as much as its seed was my first adolescent awakening - devolved from my study of the classical Sanskrit texts. But, in fact, I understand that my openness to those texts depended on my cultural heritage from the Idealists. If I could not go to them directly, it was because of the interpretive misdirections that interpose themselves between the Idealists and our present understanding. I had to return from my Californian sojourn in quasi-India in order to grasp what was already here.

From my perspective, Idealism was even less of a 'rationalist' trick than monadology. The Idealists finally experienced an answer to the dilemmas that had bedeviled philosophy from its reawakening with the Renaissance. But the Idealists were caught in the frames of formal logic, their own peculiar philosophical heritage of 'professionalism'.

The result, of course, in my case, is that I wind up as an 'outsider' in almost every area of my concern. The focus of my writing here, as elsewhere, has always been things that I have found out more or less entirely for myself. At their critical points, they are my experience exclusively, as much as they may involve a specific cultural issue. I look in the double mirror and see that by healing myself I have possibly healed the culture, at least in the areas of my concern. And I have the temerity to believe that the areas of my concern are central.

Just four or five days ago, I closed a notebook of developmental work on a text that is only partially written, and put it back on the shelf for the time being - an act hitherto unheard of in my illustrious career. The book is unwritten, but the developmental work has concluded. I have finished all the developmental process I need for personal healing in terms of purely philosophical delving. Now is the time to publish and find a consonant mode of income, so that perhaps I can return to my first love and the seed of all this bizarrerie.

Submitting work to publication, whether by others or under one's own control, is submitting to the critical consciousness of the age. As long as the work was a healing process, I had to keep it beside me in the cave, and only share it with friends.
I could say: I have completed the core of my objective study. Or I could look into the double mirror and say: I have completed my healing retreat, immured as I have been, for these forty-some years, in a cave in my personal Himalayas.

- Jeremy

jewelweed

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:03:49 GMT

            The sadness always starts about now. I could write the catalogue of tristesse, I suppose. Not melancholy, necessarily. Certainly not Keats' full-bodied apparition. Perhaps I'll tackle Burton someday, and find the spectrum I'm speaking of. But, if I use the French, it's because of the peculiar lightness of the autumnal recession. Later it may grow dark, particularly if I resist - something I've written about here before. But there I spoke of the end of the cycle. Here is the beginning.
            Two days ago, toward the end of my walk, at the so-called Sand Island - actually a spit of land between the Monocacy Creek and the Lehigh River, where the creek swings east and nearly parallels the river - I came up on the beautiful low bank of jewelweed that's been growing there all summer. Sand Island has been a proper park for a decade and more, since the city reclaimed the end-of-the-line ballparks beyond the old tennis courts and landscaped paths and lawns, with a footbridge off the end of the spit onto the towpath. I walk up from the towpath below and cross over into the park. The jewelweed is mixed in here and there in the approach. Mostly the river hugs the towpath as it wends up from the Minsi Trail Bridge, with an occasional wider skirt of wooded land. But the ground widens out toward the mouth of the Monocacy as you approach the footbridge. And just before the footbridge, you usually find the first stands of jewelweed.
            But in the last year or two, volunteers have been clearing the ground - first the steep banks of Sand Island that remained tangled with underbrush after the city finished landscaping the park, and then the ground by the river on the towpath side of the Monocacy. They cleared the embankment above, the first area I mentioned, and I was afraid that this summer, the jewelweed would be mown down. But, while the brush and most of the scrub trees are gone, the old lawn line remains. So this year the jewelweed came up with peculiar lushness, unhampered by the bittersweet and honeysuckle that throve in the scrub.
            They left the beautiful pure white rose of sharon on the towpath side of the footbridge, which, for years, I had been clearing of grapevine, bindweed and honeysuckle. Now it stands more or less alone with a few nearby trees. It has been blooming for several weeks. When you cross the footbridge, you pass up under a canopy of trees. The paths split. On the left you pass out into a lawn and reach the cul-de-sac of the road beside the tennis courts. On the right, you drop down briefly, passing by stairs to a small flat above the creek's rapids. Then you rise again, pass out through some young evergreens and emerge at the embankment of jewelweed.
            All of the jewelweed is yellow now, for some reason. This was not always the case. In the past, the orange jewelweed predominated, with the yellow being relatively rare.

For me, jewelweed is the end of summer. But jewelweed is also the farm and the springhouse, a time of great sadness and suffering, of first coming to terms with my aloneness and simultaneously struggling with the driving mania of my anxieties. But the springhouse in particular - the original building on the property - sitting below the back of the house, so the house and the terraced yards rose up like an arbitrarily differentiated world from this small stone building set down over the natural fountain spring, nearly at the level with the creek ten or twenty yards behind it. When I looked out the back windows of the second floor - my refuge - I could see the double-trunked hickory on our fenceline, another ten or twenty yards beyond the creek, backed by a rising lens shape of fields replicated by woods and a small peak in the line of the ridge. What I was looking at extended for little more than a mile, at most, and yet that was the natural shape of my life at the time. The whole valley I lived in was perhaps four or five miles long and two to three miles wide. The ridges might have risen two or at most three hundred feet over the valley bottom.
But the springhouse was enough. And when the summer ended, the springhouse was surrounded by the jewelweed.

But it's not just the jewelweed. The little trumpets of the flowers, suspended from the middle, with their unique shape and mottling, are the harbinger. But summer ends with the seedpods, little gherkin-shaped pendants, with the seeds darkening in them. For some reason, I think of Emily Dickinson. Undoubtedly she could describe, not only the tiny explosion of the seeds when you touch the ripe ones. She could find the language that simultaneously speaks to the tiny detonation, the tiny release in the spirit, that accompanies the act. Something infinitesimal, a feeling without ground, and yet an inner jubilation whose sureness is precisely its smallness. An end, finally, a conclusion.
And so, each year at this time, while I resonate with the flowering of the jewelweed, I will end my walk standing beside the plants searching for the ripe seedpods, touching them, goading them, perhaps, tempting them to their sudden minute fusillade. It's something I do until the first serious frost strikes down these most sensitive of plants. As I say, I find a keen small joy in it. But I also find a tremendous sadness.

- Jeremy

now and the nihil, or 'making value conscious'

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 08:17:24 GMT

This is a new draft introduction to my book, Essays in Reflection, originally published in a limited private edition. God,fate and the furies willing, it will shortly be republished and commercially available.

            When historians look back at our era, they will call it the age of the nihil, the age when value failed. 'The center cannot hold,' said Yeats. But here, the center is gone. Perhaps the usual small percentage of scholars still engages in meaningful work, but the pervasive scholarly understanding revolves around the acceptance of essential meaninglessness. While the last century and a half has produced some extraordinary developments in the arts, the arts have fragmented around the same hard-edged voidness, until what we have now, apart from the assertion of non-art, is the technical rehash of technique itself. Religion has foundered. The worldwide reactionary clinging to cheap righteousness, to the point of violence and murder, tells us that we can never return to the codified value systems of the older spiritual orders.
            Perhaps we could call it a new scholasticism, but medieval scholarship died of inanition and political repression. This is something we have done to ourselves. This is a point of view that we have adopted consciously on the basis of a supposedly rational line of thought and analysis. And it is a death from the center. The sterility of our culture is specifically the product of a failure of philosophy, and the failure of philosophy based on a conscious set of assumptions and presumptions about the nature of thought itself.
            The only problem here is that the assumptions and the line of thinking are inherently erroneous.
            But the break apparently is not.
            What we have lost, here in the center of the dominating nihil, is all tradition. When young families need a book to define proper conduct with an infant, anything resembling historical tradition has ceased. Concurrent with that book, some of us recognized that something essential was missing from the center of the culture. What happened forty years ago was a direct consequence of that sense of absence and loss. If the culture, according to its own lights, has since come to terms with the oppressive null that devours all significance, some of us have not. And some of us have continued to pursue the alternatives.

            The break was necessary.
            The problem with philosophy begins with something apparently small and recondite. In the 18th century, philosophers essentially decided that perception is somehow more or less immediate and immediately valid, and therefore that we can assign value and the sources of value to this immediacy. And their heirs in the 19th concluded that this immediacy is unassailable and unanalyzable, and therefore that only logic and material cause are the valid bases of analysis itself; that we cannot enter the psychology of perception in order to assess the analytical function.
            At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th, an alternative was proposed, suggesting that the whole structure of conscious experience is based on reflexive awareness, the 'self-positing of the self', in Fichte's language. But the German Idealists, the authors of this proposal, could not objectify their conclusions in a way that would directly access the structures of consciousness and thus provide a formal empirical basis for the process of analysis. Nevertheless, they approached it intuitively.
            But, if the philosophical controversy was recondite, the cultural reaction was not. And since it began at the turn between the 18th and 19th centuries, we must assign it to the Idealists, and not their opponents.
            Romanticism, with its veneration and elevation of the self, can only be assigned to the Idealist bloodline. While this is the undoubted source of the modern sense of self, the opponents of Idealism tend to denigrate it in terms of its excesses, the Byronic posturing and amoralism. But such opponents necessarily have to bypass the unique isolation and valuation of creativity, the Romantics' corollary to the veneration of the self. At no time in history has either the self or creativity been defined and elaborated with the precision and penetrating generalizations of the Idealists or the equivalent pragmatic and empirical expressions of the Romantics.
            But, of course, today's analytical philosophers, the direct heirs of the opponents of the Romantics and Idealists, have in fact succeeded in suppressing creativity itself, not by controversion, but by deflection. Creativity depends on an absolute faith in value. With the 'analytical' destruction of value, creativity has died a slow and agonizing cultural death, the explicit history of the present desiccation.

            At the same time, all of this takes place in a larger context, namely, under the aegis of the development of science and scientific objectivity.
            The analytical philosophers claim to be the heirs of science, that their orientation is a direct expression of 'scientific philosophy'. But their whole history is based on the error that 'objectivity' means that value is somehow 'immediate' in 'the object'. This is the basis of the Humean skepticism that grounds their position. But the history of philosophy had shown that all experience is necessarily a function of consciousness, that is, that experience is essentially solipsistic. Even 'sensation' is a report and not an 'actuality' of the 'external'. Moreover, sensation is atomizing. If 'objects' are 'valid', it is not only a function of consciousness and not of the external, the very nature of the object as a formal cogency is necessarily a product of consciousness. Consciousness does not create the world. But solipsism certifies that it necessarily creates the forms by which the world is experienced.
            The experience of objectivity is an experience. While it may 'validate' something 'external', it is not inherently external in itself. Moreover, all science is inferential. Objectivity establishes the validity of principles, not objects.
            But objectivity is also the basis of the Idealist and Romantic explosion, the actual foundations of 'the modern'. Objectivity, as an individual experience, establishes the validity of validity, whatever else it may establish in terms of 'scientific principles'. And, in establishing the 'validity of validity', it also establishes a virtual platform from which to 'objectively' witness both the self and the essential act of creativity, which the experience of objectivity also embodies. In other words, Idealism, Romanticism and the modern are the direct consequences of the emergence and isolation of the experience of objectivity, as much as they seem to comprise a corollary or even an opposing set of principles.

At this point, of course, the cultural force of the impulse produced by these movements has run its course. Analytical philosophy, which not only opposes these movements, but also essentially opposes the inherent nature of objectivity, has now come to dominate, with a death ray gun far more brutal than any science fiction or fantasy, since it destroys both cultures and individuals, living and not fictional entities.

            We can carry our investigation further. Science has a history. And while the experience of objectivity, as a formal experience, stands at the head of 'the modern', when we define the modern as Renaissance and post-Renaissance culture, the state of mind or experience indigenous in it is apparently much older. The alchemical history of science is a truism. But when we understand that the validity of objectivity revolves around its subjective conditions as an experience, as much as it seems to rely on a specific tradition of 'fact', the empirical principles - the principles of consciousness governing the experience itself - extend well beyond mere factual or formal principles for 'the external'. The concern for 'fact' and the analysis of 'the external' was only a small part of scientific history.
            In the purest sense, science was preceded by gnosticism, the orientation focusing on gnosis or insight. Traditionally, gnosticism has been identified with strange and radical cosmogonies that grew up in the eastern Mediterranean about the beginning of the Common Era. But the recovery of the Gospel of Thomas suggests that gnosticism began in a pure focus on self-awareness, and a unique experience that self-awareness offers.
            It would appear that this experience is also unique to the western tradition. But to pursue the roots of this question passes beyond the frame of our present concerns.

- Jeremy

at Double Adobe

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 08:48:17 GMT

something else

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:03:56 GMT

<a href="http://technorati.com/claim/nhm2vz4ynj" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>

Double Adobe Campgrounds

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:43:42 GMT

     I am currently stationed at Double Adobe Campgrounds about 10 miles outside of Bisbee, Az. It's a quiet place with kind residents and good managers. Great amenities with a clubhouse and place to practice guitar and just hang in the uncomfortable day time temperatures.
    It has been a strange and powerful time for me. With the recognition of my blooming neurosis and the underlying heart of it all, I become conscious of my madness and would have it be no other way. For me, it is a time of realizing that there is no way to rationalize the territory of the heart, and no way to justify the same. The heart should be a wild place, in part at least. And just like the beauty of the ocean it is obvious that those waters are also wild.
'the heart is an ocean, always in motion'. (That's my rhyme.)
     Anyway, I find myself in a place of odd renunciation, where I recognize the spiritual lineage I am apart of, being Antonio Salemme's student and a devotee of the art, as well as said renunciation being a function of the current conditions of my life. So in this way, the work I seek to accomplish is in accordance with a devotion to the creative spirit in us all, that art seeks to express, not to discover! While I am no longer living an ordinary life except in the ordinary transcendent functions of being, in an infinite and mysterious universe, I suffer in ordinary ways. So my heart stalks the absolute in the insignificant minutiae of change and impermanence. May all be happy, and may all enjoy the roots of happiness. For now, I no longer name myself.

Bisbee sojourn 20x24 oil

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:47:32 GMT

Bisbee sojourn 10x12 of the mule mountains

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:47:56 GMT

the internet, reading and culture

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:18:04 GMT

            The anecdotal evidence is in. The internet screws up our ability to read. Well, at least for those of us who do our factoid recovery mode forty hours a week, more or less, by leaping and skimming - a.k.a. 'surfing' - on the internet.
            Ah! What a tragedy! The mind is an unconscionable thing to mush.
            Etc. Etc.

Let me share one of my preferred sayings:

Practice alters a person's inclination.
If kept up for a long time, it alters his inmost being.

Hsun Tzu

I've largely forgotten who Hsun Tzu is, other than that he was not quite as ancient and not quite as famous as Confucius, at least for us westerners.

But perhaps I should point out that we were not born reading. Reading is an acquired - a learned - skill. And the reality is that what is generally classed as 'literacy' in this culture - the ability to read 'at a certain level' - is not legitimate literacy at a cultural level. And I am not referring here, necessarily, to 'cultural literacy'. I am referring to the ability to read in the focused and sustained way that involves what I might call 'complete awareness of the text'. By this, I do not mean total recall, by any means. But I mean an ability to read the text with an intensity that if one picks it up at any page ten or twenty years later, one will recognize almost immediately that one has read it.
Very few people read with this intensity. I know from experience that one can not only graduate from college, but one can graduate with honors from a literary major, and still not be able to read with this kind of sustained and focused intensity. Like the basics of reading itself, reading with this intensity is an acquired skill.

In part, it is the result of an eclectic and ungoverned pattern of reading. But it may also be the consequence of a defect. Lately I have come to wonder if I am not at least slightly dyslexic. I still have to (silently) sound every word when I read. Perhaps it's the mark of the poet, since, for the legitimate poet, the sound of the language is an imperative. To lose the sound is to lose the poetry. Perhaps the reading habits of the society at large explain the bulk of anti-poetry that passes for poetry nowadays. But that may also draw down from the 'art is ugliness' philosophy that seems to dominate and radiate from the small island in the Hudson. In any case, one has watched the growing cultural acceptance of 'speed reading' from the Kennedy publicity for Evelyn Wood to the present dominated by the 'net.
There is no doubt that deadline writing under factoid search on the net results in a flash-bang consciousness akin to that of a five year old watching Sesame Street. What fascinates me is that our anecdotal writer is not acknowledging that he has lost the sustained reading power required to absorb the unabridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He says he has lost the ability or the taste for all sustained reading. As a consequence, one wonders just how sustained his original power of reading was. Precisely what purpose did it serve? If he was a reader always reading as a writer under deadline, perhaps it's not surprising that the altered mode alters his perception of how he reads. But I would suggest that what he has lost is the hunter's patience for the elusive creature. If his blind is on the flight path and the ducks are always landing, he no longer needs the farmboy's patience at the pasture pond. He was never engaged in sustained and focused reading. He was always just waiting for the significant factoid.

And, of course, this is what they teach at school, finally. The better students quickly learn what the given professor expects them to read for. But there are generic principles in any case. In literature, we look for the turning points of character and plot, the moments of vivid or - even better - of epigrammatic or capsule description, and so on and so forth. The same holds true in almost every field. We don't read. We search. What the internet does is dispense with the pointless dry ground between the significant factoids, the testable oases. In other words, we have not lost a certain ability to read. We have found the substitute for extended reading that we were always searching for, the personalized, the interactive, Clifford Notes.

            All of this would be pointless if I did not have some ulterior motive in bringing it up.
            Elitism, when it comes to culture, is not an ideology or political or socio-economic orientation. It is simply a fact. Go read the wonderful epistolary dialectic between the conservative and the radical engaged shapers of the American federation in their old-age letters, discussing their ultimate consensus on the 'natural aristocracy'.
            I have a notion that the TV foray into the 'lifestyles of the rich and famous' folded up in part because of the uniformity of the pretension. 'The very rich are not like you and me,' wrote Fitzgerald. And Hemingway said, 'Yeah, they have more money'. But then the old Dr. Hemingstein was well on his way to inordinate wealth, and the same cocooning and pretension that always go with it, including the cocooning in his addiction that probably caused his death. The arrogance and pretension of the wealthy, of whatever generation, are incredibly predictable and boring, only fit to delude the poorer students in the lower forms at boarding schools. What it tells us is that the rich have no better idea why they are rich, finally, than we do. But, of course, since we place such a great false value on wealth, the wealthy have to live the part, don't they?
            But cultural aristocrats are real and unpredictable. Not a few are insufferably arrogant, at least for those who have no clue how to approach them. We are so saturated with education, we have forgotten how to be students. But the system itself is part of the problem. When freshmen are encouraged to critique their peer's work, what we get is not connoisseurship, but dysfunction. And so those who have actually attained some level of legitimate mastery have done so outside any identifiable framework, whatever their outward career. Getting close to such a teacher, one discovers a peculiar melding of arrogance and humility, since the only way to attain mastery is through true study, a path of absolute, inward humility. But evincing mastery in a culture that venerates drones invites aesthetic and intellectual murderers.

Legitimate reading is not a skill we can lose. But it seems to me that now that the typical student has lost the incentive to develop the skill, we should celebrate rather than bemoan the fact. Our schools do not teach us how to read in this cultural sense. It is only something the individual can develop - in this society, at least - as a consequence of a personal vocational impulse - vocation being equated with a creative personal development that commonly eschews the concept of 'job'. With our locked-in system of accreditation, it is not altogether clear how we can convert this fugitive condition for mastery into something simultaneously systematic and anti-institutional. But the defection of the non-readers may begin to clear the field.

- Jeremy

blog on, blog on

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:54:10 GMT

            I was tempted to pull the Obama and Hillary posts. Nothing like politics to make you wind up looking like a jerk. . . . . Reason? What does reason have to do with it? . . . . . just to coin a phrase.
            In the run-up to 1980, I looked at Reagan and said, 'There's no way he can get elected. There's nobody home.' The diagnosis was spot on, if a tad prescient. But the 'Murikan electorate evidently wanted to party like it was 1999. And the dancing scarecrow was the primo party exec.
            Finally, the so-called conservatives are so obviously what they are that no one should vote for them. But, now, we want the greed screed at any price, even raw on the half-shell. . . . . The hypocrisy you can feel good about.
            Only a few legitimate Christians seem ready to balk at it. . . . .But what does that signify? As the Republicans have discovered, politics is not just the lie you can live with, it's the lie you want to hear.

            The fact that the so-called conservatives have gotten the respect of the supposedly sophisticated media is one of the salient reasons that I cannot weep for the demise of print journalism. It was our last line of defense against purchased propaganda masquerading as unbiased reporting. And it abdicated its responsibility, not just in the face of the polls, but in the face of the 'financial engineering' that was one of the non-media instruments instigating this corporate communism that now rules our nation, under the aegis of so-called 'conservatism'.
            When the newspapers first began to feel the pre-digital crunch of the airwaves, more than thirty years ago, one of the first things they did was buy into the financial engineering. The financial engineers came into the newsroom and said, 'What is that 30 year guy good for? He doesn't produce any more inches than your summer college intern here. Get rid of him.' And with him went not only the 30 year memory of his tenure, that vivified the morgue, but the thirty year tenure of his mentors, who not only taught him the basics but regaled him with stories from their own history and the histories of their mentors.
            Suddenly, 'local' newspapers had no more local memory. Without the local memory - the local history - the newspaper from Allentown or Bethlehem or Easton, Pennsylvania, might as well be coming from Heidelberg or Dusseldorf.

            The only comfort, at this point, is that the monsters created by financial engineering, the 'successful' monsters, so-called, are brittle dinosaurs. Newspapers were dying because of cable and the digital. And wherever the financial engineering overtly entered in, whether in its original guise or its subsequent incarnations as corporate raiders, arbitrageurs and so forth, one presumes that it was generally into the arenas of essentially vulnerable or wounded corporate enterprises. But even the presumptively non-vulnerable industries and commercial and financial ventures found it necessary to adopt, internally, the structures and principles of the financial engineers and their offspring, with the result that the corporate aegis became an umbrella structure of corporations, each taking its profit at its own level.
            In a bull market in the particular arena, it both looks good and produces dividends. It's protected against the predators, who were originally the financial engineering consultants. But it is not protected against a bear market. The protective structure is about a false enemy.
            Real profitability depends on real conservatism. But because of the inherently predatory nature of the 'neo-conservative', we have forgotten what legitimate conservatism is.

            But the Democrats are no better, except that they have a more difficult time lying - not so much because of the traditional liberal concern for the factual assessment and fact-based solution of typical social and political problems, as because that tradition allows the Republicans to hold them to a 'higher standard' while the Republicans themselves lie with impunity. Since the Republicans, more or less admittedly, have no commitment to the truth, they can respond to any exposure of their lies by simply reasserting their lies, until the ignorant assume that assertion and truth are one and the same.
            It's enough to make a liberal teach elitism.
            But, of course, the liberals wound up teaching elitism. 'I'm a liberal and therefore I have the reasoned solution, so I'm better than you. Shut up and do what I say.'
            FDR was on the side of the people. But, by 1960, the liberals had lost the people, as much as they could still elect Democratic candidates. But Johnson made the mistake of assuming that the liberal label meant something. The 'southern strategy' was not Nixon's genius, but LBJ's mistake. . . . . a mistake some of us are still glad he made, although what happened to Hillary when she tried to point this out is undoubtedly a cautionary tale for all of us.

            LBJ may prove to be the last leader we had, even if his 'leading' was based on the presumption that there was actually a liberal left in the land.
            But certainly liberalism meant something more than a fact-based approach to politics. It was about a dream, a dream that the founders could articulate, but could not put into practice.
            The 'strict constructionists' and 'anti-activist judges', who have now sworn every paranoid weirdo with a gun into the local militia, undoubtedly want to return to slavery, since it's the only way we can return to the 'pure' Constitution as it was written, with the three-fifths clause.
            The founders came down from heaven and wrote their charter on tablets of gold, apparently.
            Meanwhile, the peculiar human wilderness that we have created is not only a specifically American creation, it is a consequence of our politics, as much about our prima donna dance around gun legislation as anything else, perhaps, but also about the political gerrymandering of our economy.

But today, of course, dreams, whether those of founders or of anyone else, have a standing slightly below half-dried dogshit on the sidewalk.

I had intended to talk generally about the blog, but I guess I'll have to save that for later. Presumably, this is my farewell to blogging about politics.

- Jeremy

Obama and the money, June 20

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:20:05 GMT

            Once again, the New York Times, that ostensibly 'liberal' paper, seems bent on electing a Republican president. But with friends like Maureen Dowd, why would the Democrats need enemies? She has been a veritable fifth column in the last two presidential elections, and has shown the same pseudo-liberal cannibalistic tendencies in the run-up to the present conventions. But now we're getting it from the Times' idea of the middle, or perhaps the middle right. I don't read the cropped bio's, so I'm not cognizant of the self- or editorially-applied label for David Brooks. Perhaps he even sees himself as a centrist Democrat. But whoever sets the basic tone, Dowd is apparently the unrepressed expression of the actual editorial spin of the paper: look Democratic, but savage their candidates on the slightest excuse.
            The problem with Brooks is that he has finally hit on something that all of us have been gradually coming to understand about Obama, that is, all of us who have understood that politics is about power and not much else. When I endorsed Hillary earlier in this blog, I was still under the impression that Obama was a latter-day and slightly denatured Kennedy. And I went off on how Kennedy misunderstood power. He failed to realize, when his programs stalled in Congress, that he had one of the greatest legislative geniuses in American history in his vice president. My history may be spotty, but I know of no politician who was able to dominate both the House and the Senate the way Lyndon Johnson did. But the 'best and the brightest' knew that anyone who said 'nukular' instead of nuclear couldn't be a serious politician.
            In this respect, I was mistaken about Obama. But what I thought was a certain thinness in the man was actually a function of the presentation, of the persona, if you will. No one, of course, could be quite that goody two shoes. What becomes obvious, in retrospect, is that someone ran a stunningly brilliant campaign. And while we may find that there is some strategic genius at the center of the campaign who is not Obama, Obama is the candidate and the man at the center. And the very nature of the persona he has shown us, and the effectiveness of that persona not only 'on the inside', in terms of deflecting us from the effective brilliance of the campaign, particularly in its immediate creative grasp of new political techniques, as well as the internet, but also 'on the outside', in terms of disarming his opponents, whether candidates or talking heads, suggests that Obama is the living expression of the strategy - that the functional intelligence at the core of the campaign is not discontinuous with the man.
            What Obama is discarding with his rejection of public funding is precisely the veneer of political innocence, a veneer that has now obviously become a liability. As an act of changing his persona, it will only provoke these horizon-grabbing simplistic judgments with a single class, the self-appointed political junkies. I suspect that the typical voter may have a significantly different reaction. The billion dollar presidential race is a matter of record. Assuming that we have somehow controlled political funding has become a peculiar form of self-satire. But I expect that Obama's rejection of public funding reflects the same intelligence that defeated Clinton. As much as McCain tries to present himself in terms of sincerity, honesty and integrity, what he bought with his kowtow to Bush is the Republican election machine, perhaps the last operative unit created by the achtung political fundamentalism of the neo-con con, but still a viably vicious, uncaged monster. And given who Obama is, we can expect the worst. In retrospect, it would not surprise me if the present maneuver stands with the other creative moments of Obama's campaign.
            Obama obviously will do what he needs to win. In that respect, of course, winning is the only game in town. He is not breaking the rules by doing this. Just the reverse, this is how the rule is written - which says a great deal about the 'effectiveness' of the rule. And to say that he is breaking the 'system' that 'controls' campaign financing, is not necessarily something that I, for one, as this absurdly inconsequential talking head, would care to defend. Where, exactly, have we controlled campaign spending? If Obama wins, he can deal with the issue later. If he loses, the issue was already largely history before he ran.
            But I do not think there are two Obama's. The reason I supported Hillary was the same as the reason I supported the other Clinton, knowing full well who he was. I believed in their progressivism, as much as I accepted their pragmatism. McCain has thrown at least as many of his own personae 'under the truck', in Brooks phrase, as Obama has - more perhaps. And his 'pragmatism' is far more obvious, a pragmatism that allows him to 'reinvent himself' over and over again without necessarily being called on it by the press in particular or the media in general. But, of course, he's just a politician. Obama has set himself up as something - not of an a-political ideal - but of a political ideal. And it's nice to see an idealistic politician who doesn't see losing as a necessary certification of his idealism or progressivism. At the same time, I think the people who set Obama up as an artificial ideal should go back and look at his positions. I supported Hillary because she was a true idealist, a pragmatic idealist, but an idealist nonetheless. In the positions that are important to me, she was strongly in advance of Obama, while simultaneously speaking to the pragmatism necessary to get her ideals realized.
            Obama has committed himself to progressivism. McCain has not. We already have disembodied feminine voices suggesting that McCain is some kind of heroic independent, when, in fact, there is no progressive constituency that shares his values. And many of the core groups of the neo-con coalition are now rejecting the neo-con hypocrisy and embracing certain ranges of progressive issues. Whether Obama's brilliance as a campaigner can translate into executive power remains to be seen. But where he goes from here, in the campaign, is the real test. Simplistic judgments about his character are premature.

- Jeremy

the end of the credit empire

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:01:20 GMT

            So now we have the debate about whether we will enter a period of 'stagflation' - an ugly neologism, but characteristic of the neo-post-neo mentality of those who try to dispose of history, that is, of those whose 'professionalism' disallows larger trends and general principles, things which can be apprehended more or less directly. At issue is the question of whether we are about to enter a period of zero or negative 'growth' combined with an aggressive inflation, an inflation projected as anywhere from difficult to catastrophic. Krugman in the Times points out that we do not have the wage / price spiral of the mid-seventies, since we have neither the inordinate wages nor the dominant unions. But, of course, this is not 1974. Not only do we not have the wage / price seesaw, we do not have the raw production base which formed its fulcrum. It has become a cliché to talk about how we have exported production in the last few decades. But if the economy no longer pivots on the production base, what is its axis or hub? We can say that 70 percent of the economy is now consumer based, but what does that mean? Does it validate what my father was saying 30 years ago, that we are now beginning to make a living selling hamburgers to each other? The whole seems to be supported by the credit structure. Certainly, the greatest and most consistent profit centers, in the last decade or two, have been in the financial sector. But credit cannot exist in a vacuum. Or, if it can, it is short term, like Enron.
            What we are living on is the residual or inertial potency of the dollar itself. But since the dollar itself is an instrument of credit, the support is circular. Certainly, one of the deepest principles, if not the oldest saw, about money, is that money as credit is 'produced' against commercial production. The simplest one-to-one correlation for the generation of money as credit is the loan against tangible production for 'the marketplace', whether in the construction of a home or of a plant that manufactures consumer items, or the production of consumer or capital goods themselves. If we want to look at where Marx's concept of 'surplus value' actually resides, it is not in the area of labor, but in the commercial arena between credit and production. The United States, in terms of its history, is the living exemplar of this fact. The United States created an empire almost entirely out of the 'surplus value' of credit in an environment of tremendous raw production. The United State became the production powerhouse of the world, and in the process not only dominated the financial markets of the world, but also penetrated the social, cultural and political fabric of almost all other nations, a power it exercised with imperial dominion.
            I do not wish to discount the military imperialism of the United States. Just the reverse, I am painfully aware of our history. Our journalistic immediacy that keeps us ignorant of the past makes it hard to understand our present day relationships with nations as diverse as Nicaragua and China. And we pursue the same policies to this day in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Columbia and dozens if not scores of other nations, quite apart from the obvious and disastrous intervention in Iraq. In fact, our international militarism may be worse today than at any time in the past precisely because of the waning powers inherent in our financial situation. As much as we play the game of denial, our dominion is fading. But, given our aggressive a-historicity - a blindness we can no longer ascribe to our 'newness' as a nation - we are falling collectively into viciously reactive policies, policies made far more dangerous to the hapless victims because of the sinister depths of modern weapons technology.
            But none of this would have been possible without the original production and credit base, the development of the United States as the premier manufacturing nation of the world. The fact that we adopted and adapted British mercantilist theories of colonialism during that period of development was almost peripheral to the force of our dominance, although the Nicaraguans will long remember the name of United Fruit, even if the company has changed its name.

'Globalization' is part of this reactive process. It used to be that the credit power of the United States, as an instrument of financial 'warfare', could force open markets, largely without the overt assistance of the federal government. We had the power to control the markets without necessarily resorting to the military. Even latterly, when the people of Chile, one of the most stable democracies in South America, elected a Marxist, Salvador Allende Gossens, as president in 1970, Nixon was able to use the World Bank to cut off credit to Chile. The result was that a nation that had had a small but manageable inflation was suddenly confronted with 400 percent per annum inflation. As a consequence, Chileans were relatively passive when an insurrection killed Allende and replaced democracy with a military junta. While we are now cognizant of the consequences in terms of the 'dirty war' of Augusto Pinochet, direct American military involvement in the putsch was minimal enough so that Nixon basically succeeded in hiding it from the American people for the remainder of his term.
But 'globalization' is a two-way door. While its initial effect serves the commercial interests of the United States, it also involves the globalization of credit. And globalized credit not only moves without barriers, in the electronic and digital era it moves instantaneously. Because businessmen rather than statesmen have determined our recent economic policy, no foresight or insight went into the process. But, of course, as I say, we cannot acknowledge the diminishing power of the dollar.

            The American empire was an empire of credit, an empire of the dollar. Therefore the dollar went out into the world in a range of forms, apart from the raw dollar transactions of commerce. One of the forms was a function of raw commerce: the cash reserve. Because the dollar was so powerful, international trade was denominated in terms of the dollar. International banks retained dollars as their cash reserves, a pool of dollars for settling international transactions, as well as the cash ground for liquidity. The United States is still the premier economy of the world, but its preeminence is diminished by the growth of other economies. Our power is shown by the wide distribution of our present difficulties among other countries. But the slide of the dollar against other currencies also shows our diminished position. And while a range of international transactions are still denominated in dollars, both the Euro and the Chinese currency are muscling into the international currency markets as competitors for international cash reserves. Several years ago, I heard estimates that the dollar value of these cash reserves could be as high as thirty trillion - a that point nearly three times the GDP - although I am in no position to assess whether that figure was fanciful.
            And the falling dollar itself is driving the dollar home from other arenas. As an investment power, the dollar is losing ground to its domestic competitor in other countries, so investment dollars are being driven home.
            In other words, where we are experiencing the 'inflation', at this point, is in the falling dollar. We are experiencing direct inflation in terms of commodity prices, most noticeably in the prices of gasoline and bread. But, in part these are also a function of the falling value of the dollar and its homeward migration. Some suggest that the sudden rise in commodity prices involves a bubble. But this is the same bubble that has been wandering around the economy for the last twenty years. I would suggest that this wandering bubble is also a consequence of 'empty' dollars returning home, looking for an investment place to hide.

What we are seeing is the success of the 'conservatives', beginning with Reagan's 'supply side' economics - perhaps more accurately the 'un-supply side' economics, since its profitability aimed precisely at the elision of 'supply' from the equation. Move the dollar and forget the product. Send production and product to India or China and make your profit from the dollar transaction. The problem here, of course, is that you wind up sending everything, including both the real value and the profit to India and China, and hence driving the dollar home. In the internet age, the service sector follows the product and the production. Apparently we hoped to outsource everything except the profit. But the dollar comes back. But it comes back to 'buy American', as the old slogan says, only now in the hands of Chinese, Indian and Saudi Arabian investors. But it also comes back as dead ballast. The decline of the dollar is inevitable. And here is where the 'inflation' is taking place for the moment. But where it goes from here is not necessarily obvious or predictable.

            Inadvertently, apparently, the Romans combined military and commercial imperialism. Their extraordinary feats of engineering created the infrastructure for radical commercial development. As I suggested a few posts ago, the Roman Empire fell, not so much because of the failure of its military as because it had reached the limits of its economic development in terms of the technologies for production and distribution.
            In some respects, the United States is more like the Spanish empire. While the Spanish empire developed through conquest, the conquest was largely based on the disparity between military technologies, war clubs versus guns. The primary Spanish concern centered on gold. The Spanish enslaved the native populations, an extremely low profit business model. But as long as the gold flowed to Spain, she was a dominant power in Europe. Her demise came when she invested her gold in a contemporary European military force, the Armada. The chance destruction of the Armada on the coastal rocks of the British Isles largely destroyed Spanish power.
            Our empire has been built, not on gold, but on something far more ephemeral and elusive than gold, namely 'pure' credit. Gold seems solid and substantial. But it produces nothing of itself. And once it's gone, it's gone. Credit has great productive value, when it's backed by productive value - an apparent conundrum, but an economic fact. The production machine has largely shut down. How large a military, how many Iraqs constitute the equivalent of one Armada?

- Jeremy

against the prejudice against the history of philosophy

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 10:36:24 GMT

[with an ongoing polemic against the simplistic rationalism of the Enlightenment]

I finally picked up a copy of a book I acquired a year or more ago, a book of papers on Fichte, and began to read the introduction. And there, at last, I found articulated what I have essentially known since I was an undergraduate, although without the formal qualifications. 'In the United States,' the author avers, the primary bar to Fichte - apart from the intrinsic nature of the work, the lack of translations and the difficulty of his German - is 'the widespread bias against the history of philosophy.' By now, I had understood that the bias against the history of philosophy was a function of the English speaking world. But I had not understood that it was basically limited to the United States - a fact, however, that does not surprise me. Pursuing Fichte, for example, I had discovered a vibrant, if insurgent, present day movement toward 'transcendentalism' of one sort or another, not only in Europe, but here as well. And European philosophy has never abandoned the residual force of Idealism and other modes of 'speculative' philosophy. My fleeting contacts with Nietzsche over the years only recently touched back into the secondary texts, so I cannot be sure how much scholarly acknowledgement there is of Nietzsche's debt to Idealism, as much as he seems to reject it. But the Nietzschean insistence on value proceeds directly from the heart of Idealist thought. And the vector of his positive search persists with a force equal to the residuum of his analytical nihilism, at least within the frame of continental philosophy.

The United States, it seems, is the last bastion of the simpleminded rationalism that started the Enlightenment. Perhaps, initially, the isolation of linear thinking had its merits, since it was the first clear focus on the process of the rational. As such, it began the actual investigation of the nature of thought and experience, and an analysis of experience that opened the modern sense of self and individualism, and hence grounded the modern concepts of freedom and democracy. We try to project these things back beyond the Middle Ages. But rationalism is a modern phenomenon, as are our ideas of self and political freedom. But linear rationalism is a degenerate form of the analytical experience from which these notions derive. As I say, its artificial simplification into the syllogistic sequences of Aristotle and later logicians perverts the actual analytical experience at its core. True 'reason' cannot be reduced to linear rationalism, a fact of which we should have become aware by now.
Obviously, I am repeating things I have said before in this blog. But the urgency is absolute. The study of the history of philosophy makes it clear that the history of philosophy is the living core of the culture. Whether we call it 'theology' or 'philosophy' or find some other name for it is irrelevant. How we define our experience predicates our experience. If we define our experience as strictly linear, our experience will be strictly linear. When Bertrand Russell and George Moore rejected anything non-linear as 'metaphysics' and metaphysics as balderdash, the linear consequences were simple enough. We can draw a direct line from them to fast food restaurants, cheap construction and extravagant but empty profitability in the credit markets. We are not linear beings. To reduce us to linear beings is to reduce us to linear beings. In such a 'light', even television becomes universally sophisticated. Fast food and brand name sodas become legitimate 'cultural' exports. I am only surprised that Andy Warhol used soup boxes and pinups instead of soda crates and burger wrappers.

            I have hammered David Hume so much in so many of my writings that I am not sure whether I have pounded him in the blog. But even if I have, it's worth doing again. Hume is the core moment in the modern fixation of the linear. Hence it is imperative to destroy him. And, contrary to Russell, he is eminently destructible. Russell said that 'hell is filled with philosophers who tried to disprove Hume.' But we are all living now in the hell that Russell created and certified by counteraction. How Hume 'proved' the linear was an exquisite shell game. If we assume the linear nature of consciousness and experience, the linear nature of experience and consciousness is eminently provable by default. But the 'by default' is important here. The problem that Hume confronted is the problem of perception. With the recognition of solipsism - the recognition that all of our experience is an appearance in consciousness - how do 'objects' become possible? Hume is credited as a skeptic. But he is only a half-skeptic. He stops at a point which leaves linear logic untouched while theoretically dispossessing all our standard grounds for establishing a metaphysical base to experience. If all is appearance or 'representations' in consciousness, then we have no basis for asserting either mind or substance 'outside' the representations.
            Now this is all well and good. But then we are thrown back not only on the question of how we experience 'objects', but how we differentiate values in experience. Locke had shown that all our experience 'of the world' is based on sense data. But even he assumed that sense data was 'associated' according to our experience of the external world. But George Berkeley pointed out that our only 'experience' of the external world is the sense datum. Therefore sensation supplies no prior associative principle. Hume is supposedly a skeptic because he insists that we only have the 'representations' in consciousness. But he insists that these representations, when they are 'objects', are necessarily 'matters of fact' What certifies them is sensation or sense data. But how does he go 'outside' the representations to certify that they are 'matters of fact', and not simply illusions, hallucinations or dreams. In other words, he, too, is positing an 'external' foothold that is obviated by solipsism - by the fact that we only have representations, of which 'sense data' are a subsequent analytical category.
            By the same token, Hume simply assumes 'number' as axiomatic. And, while he does not draw the inference, his 'number' apparently includes both language and the analytical possibilities of consciousness. That is, 'number' is his synecdoche for the analytical range of consciousness. But since analysis is not something involving the tangible content of 'sense data' - his touchstone for all validity - how number and language, as well as all the analytical functions and properties come into being or find their ground becomes thoroughly problematic. Hume tacitly recognizes the problem by largely denying the analytical function. A concept is a specific experience with a 'general term' attached. But he never considers the question of a 'source' for 'term' itself.
            Thus, by 'proving' his axiomatic assumptions as if they were conclusions, Hume arrives at his famous results - characterized, sardonically, as 'no matter, never mind'. Nothing can be posited as 'external' to the representations and their immediate alterations. And while, under the circumstances he adduces, this is true enough, it is equally true that he has given us no certification for his assumptions outside the assumptions themselves. All 'perceptual objects', whether illusions, hallucinations and dreams, or putatively 'actual' objects contain 'sense data' in one form or another. So what is the difference? Where does the difference of our experience of their validity come in? And as soon as we deny a prior organism in the function of experience not only as analysis but as an awareness of experience itself, we have obviated the last possibility of experience. But, as I say, the conclusions were inherent in the assumptions. They solve neither the problem of solipsism nor the question of validity. Hume only admits validity where he assigns validity by prior assumption. If he had been a true skeptic, he would have had to admit, finally, that all he had done was establish the final limit of solipsism, the abnegation, not only of experiencer and experienced object, but also of experience itself.
            In fact, Hume ultimately took us no further than Descartes. He was a rationalist, and not an empiricist. Experience is grounded in validity and not sense data. But, by making sense data the artificial touchstone for experience, Hume essentially removed reason from the frame of doubt and discussion. He proves his thesis, not empirically, that is, by experience, but by reason. His is a rational argument against experience. And therefore, while formally and technically he leaves no real ground or basis for reason, pragmatically, he leaves nothing but reason - and simple, linear reason at that.

            But, of course, we are the American heirs of this peculiar bias, this peculiar prejudice against the history of philosophy - perhaps precisely because it would force us to consider the possibility that awareness and experience are as holistic, global and ambiguous as the nature of matter as we understand it since Einstein. In other words, the nature of both reason and experience would not necessarily be something we could assume that the most arrant freshman would understand.

            All of which is to say that Hume was not a skeptic. He was a rationalist - a simple, linear rationalist - bent on proving his simple linear rationalism at any cost, which is what he did by default.
            But these are precisely the issues that the German Idealists finally confronted. They finally annihilated the Humean artifice of rational skepticism. But they themselves were caught in the toils of the rationalistic language of logic.

            I finally downloaded the first part of Spinoza's Tractatus, something looming in the background that I had never read before. Spinoza, arguably, is the ultimate godfather of linear rationalism in the west. And the Tractatus was his first significant work. While the opening argument targets the 'irrational' in religion, it is also clearly an early expression of the pure rationalistic consciousness.

(1) Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. (2) The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for mastery, though it is usually boastful, over-confident and vain.

While, shortly thereafter, Spinoza characterizes all these influences under 'fear', it is clear from this opening passage that he sees them as a range of forces, of stressors, fears and passions. In other words, he assumes that it is only the negative emotional forces in human psychology that obscure the basic rationality, which is consciousness itself. In other words, he assumes, tacitly and pervasively, that 'rationality' is the ground condition of 'mind'. And this is the assumption of rationalism and 'the Enlightenment' throughout. If we could only free the mind from artificial or arbitrary emotional concerns, rationality would be its natural medium.
But, of course, this was the basic premise of rationalism, namely that thought and linear reason are synonymous, a premise that has remained essentially unchallenged up to this day - at least amongst the heirs of rationalism and 'the Enlightenment'. If we cannot 'certify' logic, if we cannot establish its own validity, this does not obviate its validity, and, by tacit extension, does not discount logic as the ground of thought, even if logic itself has been driven into the structural corners of language. Hence the heirs of the analytical philosophers still tend to consider language as the necessary equivalent of thought, without considering the evolutionary question of how language emerged, or only considering it as a technical and not a basic philosophical question. 'What was thought before language?' is a meaningless question to them, even though we still have a great deal of thought which is essentially prior to language - and particularly creative thought.

As I have said repeatedly, linear rationalism found its equivalent and partial justification in Newtonian physics. Newtonian mechanics is the physical equivalent of linear rationalism. And again, as I have said, we have failed to recognize (as much as 'new agers' have played with the concepts of relativity) that Einsteinian physics is as much a direct statement about the actual global conditions of thought as about the nature of the material world. Global thought reopens all the questions that linear rationalism had purportedly 'answered' as null and irrelevant - just as Einsteinian physics answered linear Newtonian physics with a global formulation encompassing paradox. Such being the case, we should perhaps begin searching for the global description of consciousness and mind that will express this peculiar equivalency. And we shall find that the groundwork, for western philosophy, was already established by the German Idealists.

The problem, of course, when we recognize that our present field of consciousness is apparently established entirely within the frame of consciousness, is to realize that a 'direct' response to 'the world' is necessarily involved, but the structure of our perceptions, as well as our thoughts, are also grounded in wholeness. Both 'number', or thought, and 'objects' as perceptions are necessarily holistic responses within the frame of 'ordinary' awareness. The problem apparently established by Locke is actually not the question of how 'sensations' are 'assembled' into 'objects' in perception, but how the immediate or direct value response which has its roots in evolution, produces our present sense of 'object', which, even as a perception, carries an abstractive potency. In other words, the real issue is the reflective activity in awareness that produces our present interpretive responses which we consider as 'immediate' perceptions.

Perception cannot be divorced from the body and from the wholeness of the body. The proponents of 'scientific philosophy' who hold that evolution somehow validates linear thinking have it backward. Evolution validates the global nature of thought. The only way for thought to arise is from the immediate, as if 'thought' itself as immediate were the a priori condition for evolution. When we understand self-awareness, we understand that it cannot be the other way around. Evolution cannot precede the possibility of perception, because perception is necessarily functionally immediate. That is, it is literally 'without mediation' in terms of the received nature of the perception. 'Sensation' cannot justify it. Therefore it must justify sensation.
Self-awareness proves it because self-awareness proves the essential independence of consciousness. Self-awareness is the validating moment of the independence of consciousness. At the same time, consciousness is also necessarily an a priori condition for evolution, in the sense that consciousness or awareness was necessarily a potential within 'matter', whatever 'matter' may be. Evolution is the mutual 'emergence' of matter and consciousness as coequal. But self-awareness is both the assertion and the proof of the final independence of consciousness. At the same time, it is an assertion of independence against what? When we arrive at the Theory of Relativity, what dissolves is 'matter' and not consciousness. This is not to go into the false idealism of saying that we 'create' the material world in its actuality. But what the material world is becomes moot. Consciousness attains independence. But 'matter' becomes an ambiguous concept. The inertial nature of the world certifies the independence of the world. But what the world is in essence or in substance becomes ambivalent.

- Jeremy

Morgana 18x24 on rice paper with felt pen

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:47:32 GMT

i've been working for quite a while on a portrait in oils of Morgana. Hopefully I will complete it in the next 1 or 2 sittings. Time is running out....Anyway, I've started doing some warm-ups with drawing and or watercolor before I launch into the oil study. Here's one of the drawings.

Robert Lowell

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:03:22 GMT

I find that my used copy of Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967-68 has one uncut page, between the second and third from the last, the first page of the 'Afterthought'. The inked tops of the pages and the clean cut of the other pages shows that it was the only uncut page in the book. The dustcover is clean and whole and the inside front flap tells me, straight off, that '[f]or this new edition, the author has added three poems and made revisions.' The book was given to a son or daughter ('Pat') in March of 1972. I may have owned it for as much as a decade.
The 'Afterthought' begins: 'NOTEBOOK 1967-68: as my title intends, the poems in this book are written as one poem, jagged in pattern, but not a conglomeration or sequence of related material.'

'[A]s my title intends, the poems in this book are written as one poem[.]'

            I am not a scholar of Lowell, but a poet and student of poetry. So perhaps the scholars can adduce evidence in Lowell's published or unpublished writing that contradicts this statement. Lowell was obviously contradictory and ornery, among other things. Although, at this point, I have not picked them up in several years, I have worked with the Notebook and History for more than thirty years, having discovered them shortly after they were published.
            No doubt Lowell intended History as the final version of Notebook. The headnote, 'Note', in History, says, in its entirety, 'About 80 of the poems in History are new, the rest are taken from my last published poem, Notebook begun six years ago. All the poems have been changed, some heavily. I have plotted. My old title, Notebook, was more accurate than I wished, i.e. the composition was jumbled. I hope this jumble or jungle is cleared - that I have cut the waste marble from the figure.'
            The thrust of the 'Note' obviously suggests that History is intended to replace the Notebook. But, once again, we have the ambiguous use of 'poem' for the whole. Notebook was his 'last published poem'. Presumably, then, History - and each of the other, shorter texts spun out of Notebook - is also 'a poem', a complete cogent work.
            Four years after the publication of History, Lowell died of a heart attack at the age of 60. If he had lived longer - perhaps for another decade - one wonders if he would have viewed the two 'poems' as distinct and separable performances, each valid in its own right. We have to assume that at the point at which he wrote the 'Note' for History, he was still under the influence of the revisionary force implicit in the title. Notebook was clearly a history, but the history was intentionally intimate and personal. But the 'Afterthought' tells us that Lowell was already self-conscious and balking about the 'confessional' title that had been applied to his poetry. 'This is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan's too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarrassment and triumph.' Which is true enough. But it is an extraordinary intellectual and aesthetic autobiography, not as confessional or recitation, but as exploration.
            Personally, I find the Notebook more cogent, both overtly and in that organic sense of unity which is the basic bread of poetry. The 'history' in History is arbitrary and forced, even though it intends, by indirection, the same panorama of intellectual and emotional acquisition and discovery. At the same time, there is an intense thematic unity of History that succeeds, much as 18th century English poetry succeeds, by a kind of reversion to formality itself. Moreover, the Lowell of History does stand in the mirror. Where we know Lowell 'from within' in the Notebook, we begin to get an Augustan distance in History, a formal armslength that begins to objectify both the surrealism and modernist intensity that Lowell had finally fully engrafted into the American tradition.
            In this, of course, History repeats its own history. Lowell was the long poem looking for the key. And the key, of course, was Berryman's Dream Songs. Berryman, not Pound, showed Lowell how to write the long poem. Berryman is the jongleur. We think we are looking through a keyhole at an actuality, when, now and again, the door swings open, and we see the apparatus for projection and screening, a strange and entrancing apparatus, as old as Homer and the Greek anthology, in some sense. But, like the Wizard of Oz, the exposure of the mastermind is an essential piece of the plot, part of the modernist reality. Berryman hovers on the brink of artifice, and turns artifice itself into an active principle of cogency that defies even the English technicians of the 17th and 18th century. God knows how it works. We mere mortals must witness the performance with peculiar awe, since he not only works without net, but also apparently without a wire. The price, of course, is a sudden disappearance as wrenching as his suicide, the mephisto transposition.
            Lowell brings it down to earth and back to the legible conditions of poetry.

Perhaps we will cavil at the duplication of poems. But Lowell reworked his poems and republished them, sometimes repeatedly, in bound form. Each of his books gropes toward the wholeness of the long poem, even before the Notebook. His reworking of the same mass of material is the essence of his style. His total commitment to poetry means that the whole of his life is substance. Elephant's memory passes beyond the screened pavilions of early 20th century New England summers to the residual village memory of the puritan, and beyond the stacks of Widener and Boston Public to the inevitable bibliophilia of the poet, the browsing mania for the fugitive text.

I may have picked up the Complete Poems, when it came out, and riffled through it. But I had read the reviews, both long and short. How is it possible to 'conflate texts' when it comes to Lowell? One hopes that, someday, the texts will once again be separated out and published in their original integrity.

- Jeremy

empire and commerce

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 07:33:31 GMT

If there is one point at which Marxism should have altered our understanding of history, it is in the recognition that empires are essentially commercial enterprises and that the life of the empire depends on the powers of commercial, rather than military, expansion. The Roman Empire fell because it had reached the limits of its technology for production and distribution, particularly for distribution. That is, beyond a certain point, with the technology available, commercial development - commercial expansion - could no longer provide the supererogatory profits necessary for empire. Expanding trade produces a profit over and above straight profit from commercial transaction. This is parallel to the expansionist force inherently built into stockholder capitalism. Stockholder capitalism is appropriate for venture capital formation, or second order venture capital formation. When primary investors have 'proved out' an invention or process development, stock offering is the next logical step. Obviously, a risk is still involved, and therefore the possibilities of profit above strict and appropriate interest should also be available. But once an invention or process development has also 'proved out' in the marketplace and established a fairly consistent market share, the expansionist force inherent in stockholder ownership is commercially counterproductive, a negativity that eventually feeds on the corporation itself.
Marxism involved a number of radical errors. While Marx himself understood that money is credit and that the market is governed by demand, he still assumed that the value inherent in the product resided in the 'work value' necessary for its production and not essentially on the demand in the marketplace. As a consequence, he could assume that the value of products was an absolute, apart from the demands of the marketplace. As an equal result, he could assume that the whole structure of credit was largely extraneous, and particularly with respect to interest on credit. But the ancient religious strictures against interest evolved in societies in which almost all capital formation was traditionally a function of individuals or governments. Governments financed infrastructure and monumental architecture. Individuals directly involved in 'industry' or commerce developed their own capital base. Lending was therefore presumably an individual consideration. While I am not inclined, at this point, to argue the abstract question of the modern commercial and industrial state, it is obviously not possible without collective modes of capital formation. And, since collective modes are necessarily impersonal, the incentive is necessarily interest, if not the risk rewards of higher profits.

I write all this because we need to understand the decline of empire in terms of market dissolution. While there may have been 'external forces' that caused the great migrations of the 4th and 5th centuries in Europe, it seems likely that they first began with the collapse of the Empire itself. The growth of empire had enriched the encircling 'barbarians', allowing for the development of craft and commerce within them as well as with the Empire. The breakdown of the Empire was a breakdown in commercial trade. And since the security of the Empire and its clients was predicated on the revenues from commerce, the political decline was a function as much of the commercial breakdown as of raw political corruption or decadence. Increased commercial development had allowed for population growth in the encircling tribal orders. With the decline of commerce, their internal political stability was threatened. The weakening security in the Empire made the inner provinces vulnerable. And, of course, from the borders, the inner provinces were visibly wealthier and a natural prey.
And I say all this because the worldwide situation appears to be on the verges of the same kind of limitation. In this case, of course, the limitation of expansion is not so much technological as geographical. While regions remain inaccessible, the world itself has been industrialized and commercialized. Much growth is possible, but the physical market limits have been reached. This was also something Marx suggested, although, again, it became a relatively marginal function of his other errors. The reliance on 'expansionist' forces in economics is no longer endlessly appropriate, if it ever was. And the obvious limitations on resources, particularly fossil fuels, are also establishing new limitations on the actualities of commercial exchange, limitations that will probably prove more imposing than the geographical or the technological. And, of course, global warming and desertification are going to shrink the habitable regions.

            Historians commonly focus on expansionist forces, since, almost by definition, growth is more unified than decay, and is therefore more accessible. But Rome, of course, is the epitome empire and the paradigm collapse. Therefore the scrutiny on the fall has been intense. But Marx - perhaps paradoxically, given Gibbon's intellectual background - is the father of economic historiography. Even in terms of a comprehensive commercial thesis of empire, such as Marx's, its validation now depends largely on micro-history rather than on the surviving literary records concerning the growth of political, military and social power. And the anthropological and archaeological study of the decline at the micro-historical level, as well as the review and reinterpretation of the documentation in terms of the orientation, is relatively recent. We still have some historians who suggest that Rome thrived on booty, rather than commerce, as if the one-time profit of conquest were sufficient to sustain an empire such as Rome.
            Obviously, like most, I am using Rome as a metaphor. But whether the study, even with Marx's thesis, is relevant to our present situation remains moot. That is, whether the decline of imperial Rome can offer explicit cautionary instruction for our own situation is still less than clear. Our interdependence is not simply commercial, but also technological in an altogether new sense. And the evanescent nature of the infrastructure development, in the last few decades, as well as the ephemeral nature of the profit centers in the marketplace, suggests not only that the centrifugal forces are already at work, but that they involve possibilities for decay and disintegration not available to Rome. Scams and shoddy construction are undoubtedly as old as human urban history, if not older. But the possibilities of government sanctioned scams in recondite, virtual realms of credit are relatively new. And shoddy Roman construction departed from a base of durability that has seen their structures survive for two millennia.
            The larger question, of course, is whether a form of 'balanced' economy is possible. Embracing state socialism, of course, has proven a disaster. The state is about politics. Politics is about power. The aggrandizing or expansionist force is inherent in the process that brings politicians and bureaucrats to power. Therefore, the state, essentially in every case, is by nature an imperialistic force, unless restrained by the citizens. Even in putative 'democracies', where a substantial proportion of the population is supposedly 'educated', the education apparently does not include curricula concerned to address the actual nature of the state. Governments, as 'players', are always going to represent a peculiarly self-interested viewpoint.
            And, of course, without a worldwide effort to control population, population control will become subject to the forces of nature and not human consciousness. But this is the issue throughout. Are we ready to take the conscious steps necessary to prepare for the inevitable changes? Or are we going to continue to view the world according to cellular limitations in which our individual credit rating today and the security of our retirement tomorrow are the paramount concerns?

- Jeremy

Jeremy's sermon on Meister Eckhart

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 24 May 2008 08:33:32 GMT

            To call Eckhart a pantheist or neoplatonist is, of course, a travesty. God is without attributes. God cannot be predicated. Therefore God is other. The only sign of God is our created nature. And the center of our created nature is value itself. We have the power to recognize value. But that also means that we are a value. The value is specific to who we are, since, by nature, value is always specific. But, in our present mode of experience, value opens moment-by-moment. The value that I am is a sequence of values - a sequence of values that points to a value. If we follow the sequence, wherever it leads, we will experience the presence of God, but the presence of God, finally, is a sign, a moment of experience. But God remains beyond predication.
            This is to explain Eckhart from my perspective. But that is the nature of Eckhart. He challenges us to see God in our own nature, but a God without attributes and beyond predication. But Eckhart masters his view from the Christ question, the issue raised by the church from the first. The otherness of God is not necessarily a popular starting point for a theistic understanding. To presume that Jesus is also the necessary link, the inevitable or absolute for God, is equally inevitable for the devoted follower. That the only moment of union is the moment of denial, in the ritualistic language of the psalm, is neither here nor there. Meditate on the cross with unfeigned devotion, and God will 'appear'.
            Therefore the church itself is pantheistic. God is everywhere present, mediated by the blood of Christ. The church is also neoplatonic by filiation, but not necessarily by genetics. Plotinus rejects Christianity because it abrogates 'philosophy'.
            So Eckhart has this problem. God is everywhere present. But God is absolutely without attributes or any predication in the world. But Eckhart is the father of Einstein. The dilemma, the paradox, is an illusion. Both assertions are simultaneously true. Listen carefully to his sermons, his tracts, his commentary.
            God is in the tree. God is in the tree for the tree. But the tree is not God. God is not the tree. God is in the tree for us. The tree in us can be a sign for God. But we are not God. Our seeing and knowing are not God. But when the tree is just a tree - so that God is in the tree for the tree in my experience, and therefore my experience ceases to be me - then God is both in the tree and my 'self', since my 'self' is not other than the moment of the tree. We could call it 'value'. We could call it 'objectivity'. But these words, unfortunately, have a force of their own. God is God, without attributes or predication.
            What is our experience, then? Because the issue, then, is as much my experience as God. But Eckhart simply makes the presentation. If we follow the whole, the presentation opens our consciousness.

- Jeremy