two fish

 
 
depression
may be defined as
an experience of ‘loss of significance’
that there is no there there
- rather different than
     say
meaninglessness

in that meaninglessness impends with significance
depression seems a difficult state or zone precisely for
its psychological sense (or landscape)
of no landscape.
there is no there there means
there is nothing to work with - the psyche
works with and through images - not necessarily
visual, but made of substances
here there are none.

                   

a word for depression might be anomie
taking a process approach
in looking at depression -
as depression is
at times extreme suffering,
most extreme pain -
it’s worth working towards an answer - from within
the landscape of depression (a non-landscape)

    – even in a black hole, there remains
the imprint of the falling, and it’s this falling
that may have set the gravity well
in motion

                   

following this logic, one of the psychological
approaches to depression works with the question
of triggers. To try to think or find the beginning of the feeling
of being depressed, and look to what was happening
or happened just around the time before that
– it may have
been incidental thoughts, may have been
a day of suck-off work a day
of freedom

the important thing is not to judge but just
to jot – so, a diary or journal is useful,
because it’s not nearly so useful to interpret later
(a slippery business) as to look back and see
the thing happening in writing,
and to write the transits out.
In the above,
what may or may not be found
is that there are
absolutely real and important concerns
that are triggers;
if these are known precisely these can be addressed.
these concerns do not cause depression, but, as mentioned
are triggers – this is one notion.

                   

if the cause of depression
remains mysterious, still one can usually find
triggers, if observing carefully, in a workable manner
without aggression.

Another mode of psychological thought concerning depression
is related to emotional process
there is an aspect of frustration and anger which is healthy
in that, separated from blame, anger for instance is often
     smart –
the sense of knowing in your bones that something
(situation or theme) is wrong , that
     you won’t put up with it,
     whatever that may be –

                   

not ascribing blame means, psychologically, it’s not
that it is wrong, so much as
staying with the self which feels

     – however, say, politically speaking,
     the thing may be wrong.
– But often we can’t change the thing,
reasonably or quickly,
looking at how to work with anger is important here.

the point is that anger (even frustration alone) left to brew
and stew, may turn later
to resignation.
one cannot
get out of the situation
change
the thing
or
change oneself
in relation to it
and so
there is defeat

                   

this sense of defeat i’m talking about happens beneath the awake mind
even beneath the subliminal
it is unstoppable
it may happen in both extremely minor, or major ways;
- working in this mode: to consciously
recall and list truthfully those things
that are really pissing you off
this would not be any ‘approved’ list of
what should rightly be pissing you off,
but an idiosyncratic list.

      it may be
Egg McMuffins and the size of one’s living room
     the color of a carpet:
the list must be honest, or it’s a useless exercise
in other words, depression must be taken seriously
as all really true and complete things are
which is a way of ‘attending upon . . .’

                   

     (all psychological means have to do with
proper attendance, to attend upon psyche,
a key to the nature of how healing happens)

   a ‘not’ or a ‘non’ -
beyond the issue of friend or enemy;
i mean, one can rail against depression
or try and befriend it, but neither works.
actually, coping doesn’t work well either

one issue about depression,
a mild or minor episode of depression may seem manageable
but this is a false impression of depression, based on
a seeming transience or brevity, a
‘lighter’ level of psychological suffering.
     When depression becomes chronic (incl. episodically chronic)
when this cosmos of depression becomes
   a powerful sense, a real element of life
it cannot be ‘managed;’ some seek
amelioration via drugs or vacations or changes of
scene – at times to a certain effect,
though these treatments
often prove to be disturbingly temporary – and as such
may be interpreted as failures, thus reinforcing the depression,
because one of the truisms of depression, as every depressed person
absolutely realizes, is that
nothing works

                   

another mode of working with depression is cognitive
     – based on an RET approach (rational-emotive therapy)
represented in the book, “Feeling Good,” by Burns. it
is a skillful approach, presenting an
‘applied contemplative-philosophical lens’ to daily life,
     and
deals with what we are saying to ourselves, moment-to-moment -
As we honestly look at these moments:
     i was surprised
very
     surprised
–
in this way of working,
by teasing out momentary
thought,
we may find
depression is
a cascade effect, with
beginnings
that don’t feel
at all like
depression
–
it’s not
so much
about anger or frustration
as seemingly ‘rational’
messages
to ourselves,
which might include
a thought
somewhere
already down
the cascade
like:

‘I can’t do anything.’ or
‘I’m a failure.’
This is the sort of
globalized,
black-and-white thinking
that marks depression.

                   

the point isn’t to change that thinking – which doesn’t work –
so much as to track it: back, on the one hand, and, to redirect, on the
other. for instance, when a thought occurs like, “I can’t do anything,”
you think of something you can do – cook an omelet perhaps.
and it helps to actually cook one.
so
then,
maybe
you
can’t
do
anything,
but
you
can
cook
an
omelet,
and
you’ve
proved
it
– this may seem
a bit innane, but it’s not,
it’s
quite serious

                   

RET or cognitive psychology (done right)
is quite effective in that it’s a
powerfully direct awareness practice.
the point is that depression is
a cascade-effect of certain kinds of thoughts, and each minutae of
thought

triggers an emotion, and that emotion encourages a further thought(s)
which triggers a further emotional environment(s), and so it goes
through the cascade – until the landscape is more solid
than a planet.
Burns’ book articulates depression
diagnostically, presents a means to self-examine, and outlines
a series of processes by which a person can basically work with
and often cure their depression. a self-help book in the
real sense.

there is another aspect to depression, which is archetypal,
something that western psychology and certainly medicine
do not touch on or really agree with. This involves the necessity
of depression.

In other words, depression may not be at all
like a bad cold you get rid of or wait to get out of.
When the universe pulls apart falls apart,
when you have no energy, when all of life is drained
from life. When even despair is an energy which seems
impossibly lively

                   

we can ask, but cannot know, wish to leave but be completely
stuck, or sunk in a quicksand, a morass. Something is
binding us, and we cannot rise, we cannot return to
easy ideals, cannot move on, go to the next step,
    so
we lose all that is cavalier. In the pain of no significance.
this itself, unbearable, is a destroyer of everything that is
cheap and american, so to say, every bullshit romantic
movie, every cheery, false newscaster on TV; every smile
hurts as does every grief

depression also eliminates death-metal gothic-fantasy overlays -
this is because depression cannot be willfully sublimated
into images and story – if it can, it’s not really depression but
something else.

So, galling limitation, as the I Ching says. such galling limitation
may be complex, composed of outer, inner and relational
(inter- and intra-psychic) realities;

the point is,
we can always work with
our mind
with depression –

                   

     an aggressive attitude doesn’t seem to work:
the ‘let’s get rid of this’ attitude – the fighting against, the
battle to ‘remove’ depression.
actually, depression is unworkable
this is why it’s called depression, what the word means
and not something else,
so we don’t work on depression per se,
but on how we think or feel, and what’s happening in our life
situation – depression feels totally solid, but the moment, like
the conscious mind, persona, isn’t at all solid, there’s space;

     the situational factor is likewise important
as are the social-cultural factors
and we can track, and in gathering certain valuable nuggets of
thought, information, process, a certain psychological horizon
may appear (no guarantees, but generally speaking)
often, related to depression is a deep and profound despair, grief,
pain. These we can know. find and know and attend.
But depression itself cannot really be found and known in the
same way.

It may turn out that real changes are necessary
but these needs may be quite small, nearly infinitesimal
it may be that a subtle pattern of thought can be reframed

                   

                   or

                   /

                   and
other changes may be necessary
– something inimical to
depression –
a plan – a later stage of work
may be formed and implemented
over months or even years of time.
Sometimes
the honest formulation
of a reasonable plan
is an antidote
(though usually not the antidote, alone)

The I Ching says,
“Galling Limitation should not be persevered in.”

                   

ONE VERSION OF INFINITY

You run so fast, round and round and round, that finally the fastest way to
run is to stay still. You run so fast that you begin to see your own back,
and you begin to become still. At that point, the whole thing begins to
become infinite. When you hold still, you supercede any kind of speed at
all. You become the ultimate and utmost winner of that particular race.
From that point of view, being back to square one is one version
of infinity….In this case, back to square one is the infiniteness of
immense immeasurable space and expansion that you experience. Therefore, it
is absolutely absurd to try to search further – and the only way not to
search further is to be, to stay, to stand or sit still.

From “Cosmic Disaster,” in GLIMPSES OF REALIZATION: THE THREE BODIES OF
ENLIGHTENMENT page 14. Edited by Judith Lief. Published by Vajradhatu
Publications.

Afraid I’m more of the “seraching further” type (d monk)

           Moog Modular

Thank you Robert Moog!

Moog died today, age 71. In rememberance, the beginning of a piece on Moog (rhymes with ‘vogue’) published April, 2000 in salon.com.

Robert Moog
His invention had an extraordinary impact on how musicians create, and radically changed the way music is made.

By Frank Houston

In the 1920s a Russian inventor named Leon Theremin unveiled the first purely electronic instrument. You played the theremin by waving your hands in the vicinity of two metal rods, controlling pitch and volume, that were attached to a nondescript wooden cabinet. Between the strange arm motions and the instrument’s invisible machinations, the theremin’s overall effect in performance was theatrical and mysterious.

But like the 200-ton telharmonium, the world’s first mechanical music synthesizer (invented by Thaddeus Cahill around 1900), the theremin was difficult to play. In 1955, four years after the theremin’s eerily weepy sound was employed in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” RCA introduced the first modern synthesizer. The machine made sounds by manipulating electrical waves to denote timbre, pitch and volume. Like early computers, it filled a room and was tended by men in lab coats.

Moog Sonic 6

A few years later Robert Moog, a graduate student in physics at Cornell University, published a magazine article explaining how to build a theremin, offering do-it-yourself kits for $49.95. Orders poured in, and Moog sold 1,000 that year. “We had $13,000 in the bank,” he recalled recently, “a humongous cache of wealth for a graduate student back then!” The windfall enabled a career that helped bring electronic music out of the realm of novelty acts and university labs. A decade after the first RCA machine, Moog introduced the first widely adopted electronic instrument – the synthesizer that bears his name.

When Moog (rhymes with “vogue") unveiled the Moog music synthesizer in 1965, his engineering skills combined with a bit of business luck to radically change the way music was made. Synthesizers went from being computers to instruments that could be found in any music store. The flowering of rock music may have come via Leo Fender, Les Paul and the Gibson Guitar Co., but the innovative music of the early 21st century owes far more to Moog and his imitators and successors.

Mini Moog

After getting some exposure to the liberal arts at Columbia University’s Engineering School, Moog began graduate education in the engineering physics department of Cornell University. He took eight years to get his Ph.D., largely because of his part-time hobby: building theremins and other electronic instruments. The degree came in 1965, a year after Moog launched his synthesizer business. Moog built his synthesizer in 1964 after a composer told him about the need for user-friendly electronic instruments utilizing new solid-state technology. The Moog was modular: You used patch cords to select your waveform (the sound’s timbre) and frequency (pitch), and plugged in the interface – a keyboard, instead of the binary code on paper that had defined the first RCAs. Moog’s engineering wizardry did the rest.

Significantly, Moog’s was the first synthesizer to use attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes, set with four different knobs, which control the qualities of a sound’s onset, intensity and fade. Like many of his designs, Moog’s envelope generators became a basic component of later synthesizers. . . RCA synthesizers, intended for an elite market of labs financed by universities and record companies, had cost $100,000 and up. In 1967 the new Moog sold for $11,000. It wasn’t the only synthesizer around; many experts also commend Donald Buchla’s modular synthesizer, built around the same time. But the Moog became prized for its utility and elegance, making Moog the name that brought synthesized music to the masses.

The Moog’s biggest break came in 1969, when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos had a huge, Grammy-winning hit with “Switched-on Bach,” . . . The Beatles introduced a new Moog in the majestic “Because,” on “Abbey Road,” . . . In 1971, Carlos brought the Moog to cinema, scoring Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” with electronic Beethoven [she also scored The Shining, and played Moog synths for TRON] . . .

The synthesizer also boasted the voltage-controlled lowpass filter that came to be known as the Moog filter, capable of making a variety of full horn, string and vocal timbres. The filter was patented in 1968, much to the envy of the competition, who “ate their hearts out,” Moog says. They “all came up with voltage-controlled lowpass filters, but most of them sounded like shit, if I do say so myself.” . . .

         
Wendy Carlos & her circa 1971 Moog studio



Robert Moog
 
 

James Hillman in “A Terrible Love of War” (PDF review here) writes of America (pp. 127-28):

Mars is battle rage, an insane red fury in a field of action. Firing the weapon brings Mars immediately into the scene, saving a man from cowering and trembling, from feeling himself a victim, and shakes him from his self-occupied inertia at a loss to himself and to his unit.

Since the god is in the gun, the passionate love for these weapons may express less a love of violence than a magical protection against it. Handgun – a fetish or amulet to hold at bay the fear of injury or death, the passivity of inertia, and, in ordinary civilian life, to have in one’s hands a charm against the paranoid anxieties that haunt the American psyche. The continent is filled with roaming revenants, giant spirits of destroyed forests, buffalo spirits, slaughtered tribes, drowned valleys behind dams, ghosts of the lynched hanging from trees, miasma hovering over rapacious levelings and extractions, unjust executions named “due process,” knifings, abattoirs. The land not only remembers, it is humming with agonies, a pulsing layer of the collective unconscious deposited there by American deeds recorded as American history.

“Iron all of itself works on a man.” The automatic in my hand brings Mars to my side. God in his heaven may not smile on me or deliver me from the valley of death; he might long ago have forgotten my name and I may not be among the chosen, but so long as my gun is within my reach the ghosts can’t get me.

Caputo in Vietnam remembers one of his men who suddenly pops an old woman they were holding. The man later explains, “Phil, you know the gun just went off by itself.” Automatic. The autonomy of the god. Because a god is in the gun it is demonic, so that control of the gun in your hand is not altogether in your hands. The question remains whether control of weapons by humans can ever be achieved without a more radical appreciation of the inhuman factor.

Views of this movie around the net:

Havana Journal
Che Guevara and The Motorcycle Diaries
“‘In a way, 1968 began in 1967 with the murder of Che,’ says the author and political journalist, Christopher Hitchens, who describes himself as ‘a recovering Marxist, not ashamed, not unbowed, but thoughtful’. Like many who came of age politically in the late Sixties, Hitchens was in thrall to the personality cult that attended Che. ‘His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do - fought and died for his beliefs.’”

Commonweal
EASY RIDERS

Slate
Don’t Applaud this Movie
“In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”

Salon
Lefties demanding their Che or the highway may be disappointed . . .

New York Metro
Che Sera Sera – “The Motorcycle Diaries may be a sophisticated snow job, but it’s also true that the brutalities it serves up are not fictions and, in many ways, still exist in Latin America.”

Interviews

The Guardian
Interview with the director Walter Salles

Film Journal
Interview with the director Walter Salles

THE CUBA DIET
What will you be eating when the revolution comes?
Posted on Monday, June 6, 2005. Originally from Harper’s Magazine, April 2005, by Bill McKibben.

Cubans have as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They’re still short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal—they’ve gotten that meal back. In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth.

Today
It was reported that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay tortured prisoners with the music of Christina Aguilera.

A study showed that the world military budget was about $1,035,000,000,000 in 2004; the United States accounted for nearly half of that.

Scientists in Los Angeles created a fusion reaction at around room temperature using a pyroelectric crystal.

Scientists studying the Devils Hole pupfish, of which only 180 remain, accidentally killed eighty of them.

Police in Nigeria arrested a cow for murder.

Fishes of Iraq: Aspius Vorax

It’s been a long time since posting here. 2fish hasn’t been on vacation, just a temporary haitus in blog activities. We’ve received a few kind comments on the blog, not very much active communication. 2fish isn’t all that personal, chatty, political, rebarbative, musical, pop-cultural, technological, or relevant in any direct, applied sense, your response is perfectly understandable. People have various reasons for blogging – CNN just did a report, BBC News made a statement, and there’s more on the issue: Freedom and democracy. 2fish exists merely because it can.

No, American soldiers in Iraq don’t spend all of their time bird watching. They also fish. That’s SPC Mauro above. He’s holding what is essentially a great big minnow.

New Forums, Freer Communities?
A problem faced by bloggers in non-democratic societies like Iran and China is that these governments not only block web content they find threatening, but authors of politically critical content can and do go to jail. The Global Voices movement is committed to helping citizens in such countries achieve greater freedom of speech on the net – or at very least, helping them get around government filtering and evade arrest for speaking their minds in cyberspace. Chinese bloggers like Isaac Mao hope members of the Global Voices movement will help him and his compatriots develop more sophisticated blogging tools in order to make speech “safer.” One possible idea is to combine blog-publishing with online social networking, so that more controversial blog posts are published only to groups of trusted peers. “Today’s blogging is not a very mature format,” says Mao.

Despite the challenges, China now has over half a million bloggers, blogging in Chinese on Chinese servers and ISP’s, using local-language blog tools including one that Mao developed. In order to stay out of trouble, Chinese blog hosts censor their users and users censor themselves. Even if censorship were loosened or if it became easier to circumvent it, Mao does not believe that freer speech in Chinese cyberspace will spark a democratic revolution. But at a time when the Chinese government has been cracking down on more reformist viewpoints in newspapers and books, the blogosphere does offer a new alternative forum for idea-sharing, personal expression and community building.

Then there are the challenges of the digital divide in places like Africa. Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh doesn’t expect Africa to be transformed by blogging any time soon. Bridging the digital divide is perhaps the least of Africa’s many problems. Nonetheless, she thinks blogging is important – if not transformative – for the small number of Africans who do blog. “For young people, we have not been heard, we don’t have a space in Africa within politics or in other arenas to express ourselves.

2fish is looking for heroes and stories relating the heroic. If you have a compelling story to relate, please send it to twofish[at]iyume[dot]com, we hope to disseminate.

It’s a bit tragic that, if glimmers become dreams and dreams become social realities, if the realities are consuming enough, the manifestation appears as organic, simply part of the existing landscape, thus relatively unnoticed. The glimmer of a dream - instantly being able to freely access those most-condensed fonts of human wisdom: books, works of intense labors, devotion – just beyond reach. No more! A panoply of sacred texts translated, straight no chaser.

Just now the golden-sandled dawn has called.

(Sappho, Fragment 18)

Sacred Texts Online

Sacred Texts: Timeline

World Mysteries dot com

Bibliography of Sacreds Texts - with online links

Comparative Religion dot com

Some 2000 free eBooks - relating to Asian cultures and and cultural studies generally

here at the U Virginia eText Center

Beyond Reading: Papyrology Links

Sappho and

Other Women’s Voices: Translations of Writings Before 1700

What greater good can be done for the future without learning, growing into knowledge. Even without a friend, impoverished, with only food, an Internet Cafe and a few bucks – open your mind.

A napkin dripping.

(Sappho, Fragment 110)

Several friends of mine are associated with the Zen teacher Cheri Huber. I’ve heard some of her lectures, and will be doing a 5-day retreat at The Zen Center, in March. Speaking of which, The Peacemaker Institute will also be hosting a workshop with Cheri Huber, titled “There is Nothing Wrong with You,” February 18-19, in Boulder, Colorado. Although I am not, strictly speaking a Zen practioner or associated with these groups, I support their work wholeheartedly and want to call your attention to their excellence.

One of the exciting and interesting projects Cheri Huber is doing, The Peace Project: Assisi is worth checking out. They are asking for one-dollar donations, and you can read more about it here and here and here.

The Peacemaker Institute is part of the Peacemaker Community. One of the upcoming activities of this community will be Bearing Witness at Auschwitz Birkenau, November 7-11, 2005. “Originally conceived of by Zen Master Bernie Glassman, this is the tenth annual Auschwitz-Birkenau retreat. . . . The retreat will be guided by Bernie Glassman, Andrzej Krajewski, Eve Marko and an experienced group of international leaders representing diverse cultures and religious traditions.”

 

 

I am reminded of Shelley [PBS], who in my view was a keen influence on the early
Stevens of Harmonium.

In his Prometheus, PBS puts into the mouth of Demogorgon (itself a . . . ‘mighty darkness . . . ungazed upon and shapeless’ (II.4., 2-5) the statement that ” . . . the deep truth is imageless.” (II.4., 19).

And Stevens himself famously observed that ‘ . . . the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.’

(reprinted from a Wed, 15 Dec 2004 wallace_stevens listserv post)

 

Demogorgon - Prince of Demons
From Monster Manual I, Gary Gygax:
“Demogorgon appears as an 18-foot tall reptilian-humanoid.
He has two heads that bear the visages of baboons.
His blue-green skin is plated with snake-like scales, his body
and legs are those of a giant lizard, his twin necks resemble snakes,
and his thick tail is forked.
In place of arms, he has two huge tentacles.”
While MMI indicates that this demon has baboon heads,
I decided to model them more after baboon skulls
to enhance the general evil look of the thing.
Keep in mind that a human to scale to this drawing
would only come roughly to the middle of its thighs.

Amanda Kidd, writing Sex On Wheels, the post just below, seems to be following many of the ideas presented by Georges Bataille (theological scholar, novitiate; librarian; anti-Facist; surrealist officially excommunicated from its inner circles), concerning eroticism.

In the Foreword to his final work The Tears of Eros (1961) he writes:

In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!

In the final chapter of this work, Bataille wrote about Chinese torture and presented photographs of an ecstatic man who is cut to pieces. André Malraux, then [French] Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, condemned the book [link].

Especially in his Erotism: Death And Sensuality, Batialle viewed “eroticism an aspect of man’s inner life, of his religious life.”

Amanda is observant of a paradox contained in our dual nature regarding the erotic: need and fear – at the center of this paradox is a point of extreme anxiety, which Camille Paglia discusses in Sexual Personae as the juncture between culture and biology. Bataille extends this juncture into unfolding landscapes: hundreds of pages defining and illustrating the lost spirituality of eroticism, blasting through bourgeois limits of propriety much as (to continue Amada Kidd’s metaphor) a sport bike wails through the legal speed limit on a country road in less than four seconds.

The thrill of speed on a good bike is about a lot more than risk, it’s about the blossoming of erotic landscapes, and FLOW; the erotic liberation inherent in “suspend[ing] a taboo without suppressing it. . . . the taboo and its transgression;” that is, entering into a zone of strong juncture – rapture. “Unless the taboo is observed with fear it lacks the counterpoise of desire which gives it its deepest significance.” “The anguish at the heart of the taboo” yields poetic significance, human significance.

Man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels that he is tearing himself, not tearing something outside that resists him. He goes beyond the objective awareness bounded by the walls of the chrysalis . . . (the quotation continues, below)

One of the most provocative writers of the 20th century, well-translated into English, Erotism languishes forgotten. Here are a few excerpts from early on in the work:

FOREWORD

The human spirit is prey to the most astounding impulses. Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him. The saint turns from the voluptuary in alarm; she does not know that his unacknowledgeable passions and her own are really one.

The cohesion of the human spirit whose potentialities range from the ascetic to the voluptuous may nevertheless be sought. . . .

The inner experience of eroticism; the degree of objectivity connected with the discussion of it; the historical perspective in which this must be seen (p. 31-2):

My purpose is to see in eroticism an aspect of man’s inner life, of his religious life, if you like.

I said that I regarded eroticism as the disequilibrium in which the being consciously calls his own existence in question. In one sense, the being loses himself deliberately, but then the subject is identified with the object losing his identity. If necessary I can say in eroticism: I am losing myself. Not a privileged situation, no doubt. But the deliberate loss of self in eroticism is manifest; no one can question it. I intend to discuss the theme of eroticism quite deliberately from the subjective point of view, even if I bring in objective considerations at the start. But if I do refer to erotic manifestations in an objective way, I must stress that it is because inner experience is never possible untainted by objective views, but is always bound to some or other indisputably objective consideration.

Eroticism is primarily a religious matter and the present work is nearer to “theology than to scientific or religious history.

I repeat: if I sometimes speak as a man of science I only seem to do so. . . . My theme is the subjective experience of religion, as a theologian’s is of theology.

True, the theologian talks about Christian theology while religion in the sense I mean it is not just a religion, like Christianity. It is religion in general and no one religion in particular. . . . The Christian religion I lay aside. If it were not for the fact that Christianity is a religion after all, I should even feel an aversion for Christianity. That this is so is demonstrated by the subject of the present work. That subject is eroticism. I am making my position clear from the outset. It goes without saying that the development of eroticism is in no respect foreign to the domain of religion, but in fact Christianity sets its face against eroticism and thereby condemns most religions. In one sense, the Christian religion is possibly the least religious of them all.

(p. 36-7) Erotic or religious images draw forth behaviour associated with prohibitions in some people, the reverse in others. The first type is traditional. The second is common at least in the guise of a so-called back-to-nature attitude, the prohibition being seen as unnatural. But a transgression is not the same as a back-to-nature movement; it suspends a taboo without suppressing it. Here lies the mainspring of eroticism and of religion too. I should be anticipating if I were to spend too long now on the profound complicity of law and the violation of law. But if it is true that mistrust (the ceaseless stirrings of doubt) is necessary to anyone trying to describe the experience I am talking about, this mistrust must also meet the demands I will at this stage formulate. Let us say first that our feelings tend to give a personal twist to our opinions. This difficulty is a general one . . . . connected with the taboo on which they are based and this duplicity I mentioned, the reconciling of what seems impossible to reconcile, respect for the law and violation of the law, the taboo and its transgression.

(p. 38-9) Eroticism as seen by the objective intelligence is something monstrous, just like religion. Eroticism and religion are closed books to us if we do not locate them firmly in the realm of inner experience. We put them on the same level as things flown from the outside if we yield albeit unwittingly to the taboo. Unless the taboo is observed with fear it lacks the counterpoise of desire which gives it its deepest significance. The worst of it is that science whose procedures demand an objective approach to taboos owes its existence to them but the same time disclaims them because taboos are not rational. Inside experience alone can supply the overall view, from which they are finally justifiable. If we undertake scientific study indeed, we regard objects as exterior to ourselves; we are subjects: in science the scientist himself becomes an object exterior to the subject, able to think objectively (he could not do this if he had not denied himself as subject to begin with). This is all very well as long as eroticisrn is condemned, if we reject it in advance, if we rid ourselves of it in this way, but if (as it often does) science condemns religion (ethical religion) which is patently fundamental to science, we are no longer justified in opposing eroticism. If we do not oppose it we must no longer consider it objectively as something outside ourselves. We must envisage it the stirrings of life within ourselves.

The inner experience of eroticism demands from the subject a sensitiveness to the anguish at the heart of the taboo no less great than the desire which leads him to infringe it. This is religious sensibility, and it always links desire closely with terror, intense pleasure and anguish.

Anybody who does not feel or who feels only furtively the anguish, nausea and horror commonly felt by young girls in the last century is not susceptible to these emotions, but equally there are people whom such emotions limit. These emotions are in no sense neurotic; but they are in the life of a man what a chrysalis is compared with the final perfect creature. Man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels that he is tearing himself, not tearing something outside that resists him. He goes beyond the objective awareness bounded by the walls of the chrysalis and this process, too, is linked with the turning topsy-turvy of his original mode of being.

Spoken after one of his advisers briefed him fish that do not control any of the world’s oil,

“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”
- G.W. Bush, Saginaw, Michigan Speech, Sept. 29, 2000

On Bush’s Radical Dismantling of the Environment (October 3, 2004)

( bushisms excerpts ebook download)

Reading Naomi Klein’s exposé of the attempted selling off of Iraq, wonder what Marx would make of it. That, and G W’s popularity.

Reading Marx, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” Marx’s statement seems overtly theatrical, and a form of ideological double-speak. Postmodern Marxist camps declaim, “they (we, Bush voters, everyone?) are oppressed (without knowing it).” That’s ideology for you. Hell, don’t you feel oppressed? I do. So, I’m oppressed and I know it. The economic game as it’s played is anti-human in some respects (never mind the environmental costs). Options? BBC panels of experts never seem to come up with a sensible alternative to Liberal Democracy, as we have it. Socialism is a dirty word on both sides of the pond. It seems professionals are afraid to rationally discuss more equitable economies between rich and poor, as a concept of sensible economic theory. In a recent debate, a presenter bemoaned “a failure of imagination” regarding alternative sustainable future economics. Maybe Brazil has a better idea, someone on the panel quipped.

I’m happy and lucky, to have a personal economy with which to live without daily economic anxiety. This pleasant experience began three years ago. It’s a pretty refreshing situation – though work is hard at times and I’m oppressed by it. I’d rather be by the beach, near a big research library, writing a book: Right now. Santa Monica would be okay, though I’d prefer Vancouver. Yeah, Vancouver would be great. Vancouver is my mantra. But I’m so oppressed I’ve had a sort of failure of inspiration or imagination. It’s just all I can do to keep this all up, keep it going. How could I possibly leave my work? And if I did, I certainly couldn’t afford to live in Vancouver for a year or two or three and write a book. Perhaps there are grants. My school doesn’t provide any. Well it’s always been hard to write a book, it’s not any easier now. Whether riding a liter bike via ferry to Amamioshima to snorkel and camp out and spend time alone with the elements eating raw fish will help heal the heat of oppression, I can’t say – it’s only a few hundred kilometers away and a few hundred bucks. But having the right bike seems important. A 1000cc twin. A sportbike, but “soft” enough for occasional light touring. Something used, not in demand, something that’s had its day. A bit of history, touch of gray, old man with a story, carburetion and poor mileage rather than fuel injection. Something lithe. Something you get into, not on top of. Something that reaches into your soul, kickstarts your heart, causes the world to disappear.

Everything depends on that new world and how you relate to it. Also, why you sought it in the first place. What is true citizenship, when your soul calls out for self-erasure, and the senses seek immolation in transformation in order to emerge connected again with unknowns.

In that religion comes from religio, meaning, a linking back to the origin, this defines a religious person, even one who denies God/Gods. In this sense Marx performed a manner of religio (Harry Watson and Joseph Schumpeter argued that Marxism is a religion).

Vehicles of transformation, transmutation. We are: for each other. Love is. Sickness is an initiatory requirement in many shamanic cultures. Violence, masochism and death play important roles in psychological transformation. “Like a sickness and its cure together . . . Like rain and sun, like cold and heat” (Shakespeare in Love ). Linking back. How can you renew the soul without death? Even in love, the height of love, the happiness of golden light, bliss of presence in which one becomes with another; unites without thought. What has died, was, might seem unimportant – and often is. It doesn’t hurt to let that old self go after you’ve crossed the threshold, it’s insignificant that old self. It was. Nevertheless, something has died. Death (psychologically) needn’t be composed merely of suffering and pain, that’s the point. But we do become conscious of what we lose when it’s painful to us, and when we desire what presently can’t be attained. As a result the concept that death, that absence, is essentially pain is easily acquired. Though pain may not always be painful – it may become something else; anger, drive, moods, art, an entryway into new worlds – “from pain to ecstasy, including the wounding in which one is ‘delivered’ from the flat ennui of numbing conformity to cultural expectations.” Pain isn’t singular; is mysterious.

Pain wounds, kills, yet also impells a journey through darker lands. Hades enriches with darkness, intoxication, waters of forgetting & remembrance, risk. Pain is no opium, that is, suffering is no opium. Unless the pain becomes subliminal, with the painful state presenting itself as reality, as the table of social interaction. Rules of propriety. Parochialism, codified parochiality. Virtue and pain may become as intimately related as lovers, unconscious Gods. Then, isn’t it a clue, to seek the erasure of all ideologies? In that ideology, in virtu, is a form of parochialism, and parochialism treats pain in a certain way, a limited and one-sided way. If the deepest nature of pain and pleasure both are sought, a sense of poetry arises: “Pleasure is the pleasure of the powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation. The morality of the poet’s radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation” (Wallace Stevens). Nature is profoundly paradoxical. This poetic sense alone, it seems to me, is capable of defeating parochialism, at its root. Nonetheless we live in serious times and have no truck with vapid imaginings. It is precisely for this reason I desire to become one with a particular machine and risk death.

I submit Justice and Beauty are such [formulations of universal] principles from which an ecological psychology could be derived. James Hillman

Half of a lecture Justice and Beauty: Foundations of an Ecological Psychology is excerpted below:

First, psychology is anthropocentric. Its definition of consciousness, for instance declares (per definition) it impossible for anything but humans to be conscious. The self is still imagined like a pineal gland, a self-enclosed atomistic unit, neither inherently or necessarily communal. The planet is an alien place, essentially nihilistic, into which the individual human is thrown, alienated and anomic. Second, human-centered psychology fosters a disordered, senseless, and enslaved planet. By ripping the human soul from its womb in the anima mundi, the world soul, this mother of all phenomena becomes a corpse, reduced to measurement, experimental dissection and cannibalization of its body parts. Rivers and rocks, flowers and fish, defined as soulless in themselves can find value only by human assessment. For many centuries of our history and in most other cultures, an idea of the world soul endows all phenomena with meaning and intelligible intentions—and their own individual inwardness. Depth of soul lies not just in us; it resides in the planet’s own nature.

Clearly, we need to start again. [We need principles that start not in the human mind but are given to the mind with the world.] We need to imagine an ecological psychology that takes its starting point [not in human concerns only but] in the planet’s concerns and its beings concerns, which we humans serve with our mental capacities. [That is, we do not dig in our philosophy, science, or theology for principles, nor turn only to our human experience; rather] we can attempt to formulate the principles already at work within the cosmos, grounding the value of all participants.

I submit Justice and Beauty are such [formulations of universal] principles from which an ecological psychology could be derived.

Justice and Beauty offer universals of archetypal strength because they are recurrent in time and ubiquitous in place, trans-cultural, immensely fecund. They muster emotive and symbolic expression and are instantly recognizable in daily affairs—and not only of humans. [Justice and Beauty are universals on which cultured communities and human dignity rely and aim to further.] Without them, existence becomes nasty and brutish. With them, the psyche finds itself in a cosmos of value, and psychology becomes the study of the ways any phenomenon measures its place in the world.

An idea of Justice has hardly been important to psychology, which has proceeded as if Justice can be ignored. Yet, Justice is the ruling principle of society, and of the natural world, formulated as natural law. The Greeks considered Justice (Themis) foundational, a great earth Goddess like Gaia, whom Zeus had to obey. She lies at the roots of the polis, the city, making civic cohesion possible, giving each its rightful place and cautioning each not to overstep its bounds.

Justice makes possible an inherently co-related society of beings [where mutual dependency is] based not on mutual usefulness and economic exchange, but on the bare fact of participatory existence. If all beings belong, then all are needed and useful, and justice prevails for each and every. Justice lies so deep, feels so innate, it works like an instinct. Transgressions spring quick to the eye; injustice stinks and wounds long fester. A sense of justice comes with the newest soul: the smallest child cries: “That’s not fair.”

Like this innate response to injustice, so there is an innate aesthetic response. All beings present themselves first of all aesthetically to each other as visible forms, textures, aromas, patterns, rhythms. The world is intelligible by means of these displays, allowing all beings to recognize one another. [The old Roman word for the display of phenomena was ostentatio, a Latin rendering of the Greek phantasia; phenomena show themselves as fantasy images giving impetus to imagination and asking for an imaginative response. The arts are thus the first mode of being in the world and responding to its display. Beauty and ugliness derive neither from personal taste, societal norms, or objective rules of form, but are given with the phenomenal cosmos in its presentation of itself. In fact, the original meaning of kosmos means fitting, decorous, the display of adornment, and is closer to our current world “cosmetics” than to the emptied out cosmos of vast gaseous space in which drift weightless cosmonauts above and beyond gravitas. And, because kosmos also means right order, beauty promotes justice.

I submit these principles are basic to cultures everywhere because they are given with the cosmos itself, and, since primordially given they are ecological guarantors. Psychology’s task is to rebuild its learning and its therapies on these ecological archetypals, so that the great wide world and its beings can never be outside its purview. [Because] justice and beauty [are not merely humanistic, religious, scientific or regional, they] allow many modes of implementation; yet transcend all implementation with an ideal claim of transcendental value, inspiring artistry, dignity and respect, and prompting lasting rectification of ugliness and wrong. For precisely ugliness and wrong are the major cause of a suffering planet, that blue ball wrapped in a whirlwind, so fragily afloat in a sea of stars.

link

Found the Allen Ginsberg Library today, online. It’s brilliant. Filled with audio, video, photos, ephemera, manuscripts, and more.

I know very little about water. This post is a collection of links I found, in no particular order: just scratching the surface.

‘A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar,
Entered his body with the water,
And entered his eyes
With the reflection in the limpid mirror. . .
As the taste of water flooded him
So did love.’

(Ovid, Narcissus, trans. Ted Hughes, 1997)

Gaston Bachelard has penned Psychoanalysis of Fire. Harder to acquire is his Psychoanalysis of Water it’s music actually, perhaps the title in error? Try instead, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, obtainable.

Mythology: The Water Deities

March 22: UNHCR marks World Water Day

Plants give up their secret of splitting water (26 Feb 2004)

WASHINGTON — Researchers said Thursday they had taken another step toward understanding how plants split water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, which may provide a cheap way to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel.

Water hotspots (a clickable map).

Porous paving and The Earth Sucks (Crumb Trail)

Is this Atlantis?

U.N. Warns of Dead Zones in World’s Oceans

Shared Oceans, Shared Future (US State Dept)

Water on Mars

FAVIGNANA, Italy - Over thousands of springtimes, as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, the fishermen of Favignana have battled giant bluefin tuna lured into vast chambers of intricate netting. This year, the nets were empty. Marine biologists say not only bluefin tuna but also other fish stocks are plummeting across the world, upsetting delicate natural food chains. Some fear irreversible damage has already been done. Even worse, international law experts add, little is being done to stop it. Despite all the evidence, high-tech fleets probe the last deepwater refuges, hardly troubled by authorities.

From the Negev Foundation:

The dramatic rise in human population in this century, coupled with over consumption and inadequate resource management, threatens the quality of life worldwide:

World population will double by 2025; nine-tenths of these people will be born in developing countries.

More than half the world’s population is concentrated on 5% of the land; nearly 90% live on less than one-fifth of the land.
About one billion people, one sixth of the world’s population, live in arid or semi-arid lands, of whom just two-thirds practice farming.

90% of world food aid is directed to populations in unproductive arid zones.

Since 1970, food production per capita has declined by at least 20% in Africa and parts of Asia due to desertification and mismanagement of fresh water.

About 800 million people are chronically undernourished because of poverty, insufficient production, inequitable food access and political turmoil.

Each year, an area the size of the state of Kansas, is impoverished due to encroaching deserts.

80 of the 100 countries experiencing increased desertification are developing countries

 

early morning coffee drinkers

dawn clouds pose against

 

neon

erotic environments

 

dissipate                                          

             

                                           biting into toast

how the known                                     the pool of the other

encompasses

 

twofish

 

When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima at 8:15a.m. on Aug.6, 1945, I was 26 years old.

So begins the speech given by Toshie Une. I was visiting Fukuoka two days ago, watching some of the Peace Memorial Ceremony taking place, on TV. In the ceremonies, the giving of water figured heavily.

Toshie Une, 85, of Minami Ward, Hiroshima, watched Yasuhiro Tani, 25, of the same ward, slowly pour water into a bucket in front of a monument for atomic bomb victims.

Une has visited all the atomic-bomb memorial monuments in and around Hiroshima to make offerings of a glass of water for the past 49 years. She has taken part in the water-offering ceremony since it became part of the memorial ceremony 30 years ago. She entrusted Tani, who sympathized with her experience, with this important role of offering water to atomic bomb victims this year.

The Mayor of Hiroshima lashes out at US, reads the Japan Today headline. As well, the Prime Minister received a tepid welcome: “In front of about 45,000 people at the ceremony to mark the 59th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Koizumi reiterated his pledge to observe the war-renouncing Constitution. But in sharp contrast to the reception given to Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and other speakers, the premier received only thin applause after his speech and was even booed by some in the crowd.” As well, Nagasaki marked its anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city today (August 9). “Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito called on American citizens to stand against their government’s pursuit of enhanced nuclear capabilities, and the Japanese government not to take any action that would disturb the peace and security in Northeast Asia.“

Toshie Une’s story is here. A few paragraphs,

Arriving at the shelter, we found so many people there, crowded inside or in front of the shelter, with burns and wounds all over their bodies. “They all look like monsters. Maybe our children were afraid of them and went back to the nursery. We may have passed each other. Let’s go back,” the mothers said. The people were naked, and had swollen reddish faces. From behind it was impossible to tell if they were men or women.

I asked several of the burned people, “What happened? Who are you? How did you get like this? Where are you from?” But their tongues were cut or twisted and they couldn’t utter a word. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. When I tried to hurry back to the nursery as I couldn’t find any of the children there, the people started making gestures, as if they were squatting, scooping up soil and drinking it.

“Uhmmm. . . Waaatt. . . ” They said, in very weak, unclear voices. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. “Waaatt. . . giiiiv. . . ” “What? I can’t hear you. What do you want?” I listened to their appeals and finally I saw what they had been asking for with their gestures. “Water? Water?” I asked them. They nodded. Their expressions changed and they tried to follow me in a gesture of adoration. “Don’t follow me. Wait here! I’ll bring water. Just sit down here!” I persuaded them to stay there and immediately left to get water.

One man, badly injured and bleeding, said to me, “Just now some strange terrible bomb was dropped on the center of Hiroshima. It contains horrible poisonous gas. All the water in Hiroshima is mixed with the gas. If you give them that water, they’ll die straight away. Don’t give them any!” He was shouting at me, repeating his words, “Don’t give them any! Don’t take it!” I was horrified to hear what he said, so I stopped trying to take water to them. They must have kept waiting over there for me to bring them water. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give them that water. I felt terribly sorry, in agony about this. I could imagine the people over there probably would have died waiting for water I was meant to have brought.

One day, around 1955, I was climbing Mt. Dai-chausuyama at Koi with my friend, and we came across the statue of the “Taki no Kannon” or “Mercy of Goddess at Waterfall” at the site of the Kyojunji Temple on the hillside. There we found some very pure mountain water. Then the events on that day ten years before came back to me clearly. An encounter with the purest water in Hiroshima led me to make this wish: I’d like to let the victims drink this pure water. I’ll bring the water to atomic-bomb memorial monuments and apologize to them. Please forgive me. I’ll do it as long as I’m alive and my health allows.

Forty years have passed since then, and I’m now over eighty. On fine days, as I’m pulling my cart with its water bottles, I am still offering water to over 120 monuments in and around Hiroshima. I wish to console the souls of the victims by offering water from a small clear cup with the words Comfort Water for the A-bomb Victims written on it.

I have never seen such an atrocious way of dying. I never want to see such a hell again nor to be forced to see it. Nuclear weapons annihilate all living things, all created arts and culture, not to mention human beings. My earnest desire is that they will never be used.

Two additional eyewitness accounts are here, in French and English.

An atomic bomb resource site for teachers and students K-12 is here. US bombadier Thomas Wilson Ferebee, the poor fellow who dropped the bomb, passed away March 17, 2000. A movie was made, The Beginning or the End (1947).

Lately I’ve been reading versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is a book which Ezra Pound described as “the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s).” He was referring to the Golding translation, 1567, the first in English; Shakespeare’s Ovid. Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC-17 AD; bio, and links here) wrote Metamorphoses in exile, at the age of 52. Of the many translations available, the poet Ted Hughes, (whose free-verse translation, which won the 1997 Whitbread Award for a book of poetry), mentions: “However impossible these intensities might seem to be on one level, on another, apparently more significant level Ovid renders them with psychological truth and force. In his earlier books, preoccupied with erotic love, he had been a sophisticated entertainer. Perhaps here too in the Metamorphoses he set out simply to entertain. But something else joined in, something emerging from the very nature of his materials yet belonging to the unique moment in history – the moment of the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire” (Ted Hughes in The New York Review of Books, July 17, 1997).

It should be possible to gather quite a large number of translations for comparison. Below are six diverse versions of the Invocation, which appears at the beginning of The Metamorphoses:

MY SOUL WOULD SING of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may the
song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world’s beginning to our day.
(Allen Mandelbaum, Trans. 1995)

Now I shall tell of things that change, new being
Out of old: since you, O Gods, created
Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice
To tell the shifting story of the world
From its beginning to the present hour.
(Horace Gregory, trans., 1958)

OF bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
‘Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc’d from Nature’s birth, to Caesar’s times.
(translated into English verse under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, etc., 1717)

I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.
(A. S. Kline, trans. 2000)

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.
(Arthur Golding, trans. 1567. Invocation here)

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed
to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods
inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves
and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song
in smooth and measured strains, from olden days
when earth began to this completed time!
(based on Brookes Moore, 1922)

Here are a few more links. Quotes from Ovid’s works, primary sources: ancient texts, Illustrating Ovid (links to rare historical illustrations), additional art influenced by, U. Vermont Ovid Project, voluminous links.

The groundbreaking Guggenheim Museum motorcycle exhibit displayed a 1901 Indian Single, (16 cubic inch, 1.8 hp), which is about the oldest motorcycle (really a motorized bicycle) made in America (the motorized bicycle dates back to the 1890s). So it’s been about a century of motorcycles and motorcycling, and now Honda has announced the first motorcycle purpose-built for women riders. It is pretty shocking, in a, duh, belated sort of way. Some of the research has been pretty technical. Here’s one of the research items mentioned:

“We couldn’t understand why Italian women said they had no problem with the riding position on conventional bikes, and why they claimed their feet could easily reach the ground, says Dave Hancock, who despite his sex is Honda’s top “female test rider because of his 5ft 6in and 9st frame.

It only makes sense that there are no female test riders. After what might have been decades of study, Honda finally learned that:

“At first we thought they must be taller, but then we discovered that most Italian women wear high heels all the time — even when riding motorcycles.

These Honda boys are truly up on their game. They’ll need to design some radical foot shifters and brakes for their Italian model, if they go with the research. The same article also reports:

It won’t have stabiliser wheels on the back, it won’t have a shopping basket, and it won’t even have sat-nav showing how to get to the hairdresser.

Haha. Cute. At least Honda didn’t write that. What it will have:

Crucially, it will be easier to ride, with a lower centre of gravity to reduce the risk of “toppling , easier to operate controls and adjustable footrests, seat and handlebars. It will also boast a sculpted seat for added comfort.

Also be 500-800cc, and introduced in the Euro market, begging the question of whether America, for all it’s freedoms, might not yet be quite ready for such social radicalism. The ME-XA is scheduled for release in 2005. It’s interesting that “me” is a pronunciation of the kanji “woman.” XA of course, is merely cool sounding. Another online motorcycle rag comments that:

No one has ever marketed a “ladies’ motorcycle” before, mainly because it would turn-off many male purchasers.

Bizarre. Who makes this stuff up? Where is the reference for that eye-popping stat – buried on page 252 of Men are from Mars, Women from Venus? Anyone who hasn’t taken too much acid can appreciate a woman on a bike, so perhaps what’s implied is that if a “feminine” motorcycle is produced, latent homophobe bikers everywhere will be selling their “girly-boy” machines (to quote Gov. Arnold) as soon as they can shudder out of their leathers. Is this the real reason why a women’s motorcycle is a century late? Honda, at least, has decided guys are finally able to cope with the concept. This may not seem like a Kuhnian paradigm shift to you, but in the motorcycle world hey it’s bigger than the radiator. Hats off to Honda for thinking outside the box.

However. I’d like to add that women have been riding bikes for a very long time. The real issue here is what does “a women’s motorcycle” really mean. Reading motorcycle forums, there are plenty of guys bitching about riding position: seat height, bar width and distance, foot peg position, overall stance, weight, etc. There are solutions to many of these issues, which involve aftermarket parts, and when there aren’t solutions, there are plenty of motorcyle models to choose from. My point is, what makes a woman’s motorcycle paradigmatically different from a man’s? Motorcycle fit, center of gravity, model selection has and continues to be problematic for men, is my point. You know, guys come in a lot of shapes and sizes. It really may come down to a question of degree and overall concept, that is, marketing and image concept, rather than a bike made for women (the term “women’s bike” should be resisted) looking like apples to the current oranges – except in the case of the Italian high heel issue perhaps.

Reistance. What I object to is that, in ‘branding’ move, the existing term “motorcycle” now becomes “men’s motorcycle.” It’s hard to imagine Elena, illustrated above, who writes exquisitely about her Kawi ZX-11 rides, trading her bike in for a ‘ladies’ bike. It’s farcical.

While I applaud Honda’s effort, some misinformation and hype is being dished, particularly when beefy scooter-like-bikes, for example the Suzuki Burgman 400cc and 650cc are becoming popular worldwide. These are unisexual machines. Which begs the question, what is a motorcycle? But why get postmodern.

It isn’t easy, these days, to find a deep psychological extrapolation of current events. William Van Dusen Wishard, author of Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning, and head of WorldTrends Research, a Washington-based consultancy specializing in the analysis and synthesizing of global trends, begins his thought-provoking 9/11 commemoration speech to the C.G. Jung Institute of New York, Sleepwalking Through the Apocalypse, with this perspective:

“In 1957 Peter Drucker wrote, ‘No one born after the turn of the 20th century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols.’ If Drucker’s right, and I personally think he is, despite all the political, social and technical advances of the past century, the underlying story of the 20th century was about a world where the historic social arrangements, spiritual underpinnings and psychological moorings that had anchored nations for centuries, have been in a transition of epochal proportions. The tectonic plates of life as we’ve known it are shifting.”

This lecture presents six major points of global shift, and discusses humanity’s future. It’s well worth reading in its complete form here; the excerpts below represent a jumping-off point rather than conclusion. Here are the six major thematic shifts Wishard presents:

First, science is in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as nature, human, and life. Increasingly, scientists are subordinating humans to technology. The faster computers go, the faster our whole tempo of life goes just to keep up. In essence, we may be abdicating our own psychological center of being and handing it over to the computer. Within the next three decades we’ll have reached the point where the question will be, “What are humans for in a world of completely independent, self-replicating technological capability?”

Second, for the first time in history, the Caucasian race is no longer reproducing itself. No European country is reproducing its population; nor are Caucasians in North America reproducing themselves. The implications of this are so far-reaching that it’s difficult even to speculate what they might be.

Third, future ages may view man’s seeing the Earth from the Moon as the defining event of all subsequent history. Joseph Campbell clearly considered it the most significant psychological event of the past several thousand years. Seeing Earth from the Moon vastly accelerated the collapse of all the boundaries that provide identity — boundaries of nation, race, religion, class and gender. Thus everyone, to some degree or other, faces a crisis of identity. This also profoundly affects the underpinnings of all religions, as every religion includes some cosmological concept of how the universe was first created. But space exploration has given us new and different information and perspective.

Fourth, for the first time in history, what constitutes a family is being redefined. This has acute implications for government, education, social cohesion and what we broadly term “civil society".

Fifth, the ability to create change, as well as the attitude that change is desirable, is now a global possession. Throughout history, in all civilizations, continuity rather than abrupt change has been the normal state of affairs. No society on the planet knows how to live with constant, radical change. Thus for the first time in history, every nation is, concurrently with all other nations, in a state of profound crisis as we try to adjust to an ever-accelerating pace of change. Thus there is no global center of stability and order such as Britain provided in the nineteenth century, and America supplied the second half of the twentieth century.

Sixth, our whole symbolic language has been devalued. For example, “Heaven” used to carry a sacred meaning. It was the dwelling place of the gods; a place people hoped to go when they died, our link with eternity. Now we speak simply of “space,” an endless void. Similarly, we used to speak of “Mother Earth,” which gives the earth a creative, nurturing implication. Now we speak only of “matter,” an abstract, lifeless substance. In this way, our symbolic language has been diminished. The function of symbolic language is to infuse into our conscious life some of the transcendent meaning that emanates from the unconscious realm, from the depths of our inner being. That connection has been weakened, so there’s far less transcendent vitality brought into our conscious life.

Barry O’Connell writes, “Recently I was able to obtain a number of these rugs and they are identical to what was available during the Russian war. . . This rug must date to before The Islamic Republic of Iran began sending the refugees home after the war. The assault rifle to the right is a Paratroopers version of a AK-47. The helicopter is the Hip helicopter which was what the Soviet Airborne used most often.”

The anonymous Beluch rug weavers have given us canvases imaging the Afghan War.

From Raw Vision:

At the end of 1979, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan until the spring of 1989. They left behind a determined opposition in the Mujaheddin militias, and a puppet leader who in spring 1992 was forced into refuge at the United Nations office in the capital, Kabul. . . . Like folk-art everywhere, the Beluch rugs woven during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan reveal the makers’ concerns for time and place.

They symbolically depict significant events through the use of easily-recognised motifs derived from a common culture. They swarm with wild animals in fanciful landscapes, and often include portraits of significant local figures, and also patches of text. In this, the Beluch differ from other Asian weaving traditions which strictly follow Islamic law and eschew pictorial work in favour of geometric or arabesque designs. During their now almost-forgotten recent war, the weavers created a body of work which showed the full panoply of modern warfare – guns, grenades, tanks, helicopters, jet planes, rockets and bombs. Most Afghan War rugs are unique, but their imagery reveals common themes.

From Oriental Rug Review:

One of our suppliers called and said he had a World Trade Center rug and it was very peaceful - no airplanes, no fires, no death. We like this rug very much. The weaver pictures the buildings, surrounded by trees, as if they were built in the middle of Central Park rather than in lower Manhattan. We see a nearby mosque. There are several emergency vehicles with red lights flashing, a very normal thing to see in NYC. So here it is - one of the most peaceful war rugs we have seen.

 

Returning to the light topic of relationships between the Earth, poetry, psyche, and death (see this post) the following paragraphs are excerpted from the British critic Sir Frank Kermode, whose essay Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut appearing in the book Pieces of My Mind (pp. 153-57), is a gem. For the sake of space, you’ll have to put up with something of a jump start:

‘Poetically man dwells upon this earth’, said Holderlin. In the poverty of the Time Between, one establishes this dwelling by finding the poetry of the commonplace, in the joy of Danes in Denmark, the cackle of toucans in the place of toucans, in Elizabeth’s Park and Ryan’s Lunch. Stevens did it over and over again, observing the greater brilliancies of earth from his own doorstep. He dwelt in Connecticut as Santayana dwelt in the head of the world, as if it were origin as well as threshold. He wanted to establish Hőlderlin’s proposition, and every reader of Stevens will think of many more instances of his desire to do so. . . . The foyer, the dwelling place, might be Hartford or New Haven, Farmington or Haddam. The Captain and Bawda ‘married well because the marriage-place / Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell’ (Collected Poems, p.401). It was earth, and the poetry of the earth was what Holderlin sought and Heidegger demanded. Stevens was always writing it and naming the spot to which it adhered. This is what poets are for in a time of need. They provide a cure of that ground; they give it health by disclosing it, in its true poverty, in the nothing that is. The hero of this world, redeemer of being, namer of the holy, is the poet. Stevens has many modest images of him, yet he is the centre. In that same central place Heidegger sets Hőlderlin and adorns him with words that have special senses: truth, angel, care, dwell.

Heidegger gave the word dwell a special charge of meaning. Drawing on an old sense of the German word, he can say that ‘Mortals dwell in that they can save the earth’, that is, ‘set it free in its own presencing’, free, as Stevens would say, of its man-locked set. There is much more to dwelling, but I will mention only that to dwell is to initiate one’s own nature, one’s being capable of death as death, ‘into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death’. Furthermore, ‘as soon as man gives thought to his dwelling it is a misery no longer’; so out of its insecurity and poverty (‘man dwells in huts and wraps himself in the bashful garment,’ says Hőlderlin; ‘a single shawl / Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor. . .’, says Stevens [CP, p. 524]) he can build, can make poetry. For Heidegger is here meditating on Hőlderlin’s enigma, that we dwell poetically on this earth, even in a time of destitution, and that our doing so is somehow gratuitous, independent of our merits, a kind of grace.

But perhaps, after all, Stevens did know something about Being and Time. Perhaps it was knowing about it that sent him looking, in his seventies, for news of what that Swiss philosopher might have to say about his supreme poet. Heidegger wrestled with ideas we all wrestle with: the potentiality of no more being able to be there, he remarks, is the inmost, one might say the own-most, potentiality. We have many ways of estranging death; for example, we say, ‘Everybody dies’, or ‘one dies’. So we conceal our own ‘being-toward-death’; yet death is the ‘end’ of Being, of Dasein – and the means by which it becomes a whole. To estrange it, to make it a mere fact of experience, is to make it inauthentic. Being understands its own death authentically not by avoiding that dread out of which courage must come but by accepting it as essential to Being’s everydayness, which otherwise conceals the fact that the end is imminent at every moment. There must be a ‘running forward in thought’ to the potentiality of death.

Only where there is language is there world, says Heidegger; and only where there is language is there this running in thought, this authentication of death. It is the homecoming that calls for the great elegy; it is ‘learning at home to become at home’, as Heidegger says of the