Placelore

What Piece of Work

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.

- Hamlet (2.2.295-302), Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

The Dark Tower

1.

On August 6th 1945 at 8.15 in the morning a nuclear-solar energy that does not belong on this earth was released some 549 meters above Hiroshima "Such was the ferocity of the blast, eerie shadows of incinerated humans were left imprinted on steps, pavements and walls.” For days, weeks, months, even years after survivors searched for those missing.

 On first reading about this occurrence some fifty years ago I felt a haunting, periodically this feeling returns.

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II

(London, June 26th 2017, 8 AM) Although knowing it would be in the vicinity of my journey, nonetheless when I stepped out of Latimer Road station something inside me beckoned to turn around and there it was directly behind, less than 100 meters away, shocking in it's stark, brutal devastation; faintly in the atmosphere you could still hear it screaming … instantly brought in witness to the offering of some primitive form of solace I said aloud to all and to no one - my God  - such brief recognition of our utter helplessness. Momentarily we were, we are, all in that tower, and it stands there now terrifyingly sacred.

Around the area there are photos of those missing, messages, flowers, prayers upon stained paper, and there also written large in black letters the word Why? To that heartfelt question there will be answers of degree from investigations, commissions, politicians but there will be no words from the silence, from the sorrow of Being. 

The aftermath of this, and such an event as this that I have witnessed more directly previously, will follow a course … but for now there is a certain shock and awe felt in that street, in that neighbourhood, not the words shock and awe as uttered vindictively by a blundering former American president, but something closer to the root of the Dark Tower. 

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III

 There are a few books, which I return to read every few years, one of them is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The title of the book is derived from the Abattoir "Schlachthof-fünf” in Dresden where Vonnegut and other Allied prisoners were incarcerated in February 1945. Throughout the book there is a recurring line: "So It goes." The words appear each time a death occurs and what they imply lies at the centre of any understanding of Vonnegut's work: fatalism, stoicism and the acceptance that nothing worthwhile will come from denying or shrinking away from difficult situations or when the worst has happened. Questioned repeatedly over the decades about whether he thought Dresden should have been bombed, Vonnegut's most meaningful response was that the city had been bombed; the question for him was how one behaved now. "If one of his aims was to provide a voice for those innocent, his method of making himself heard was both courageous and effective; he told us the hardest of truths, but in the gentlest, funniest and most amiable way he knew how." 

 

 

Turning Point

Before and After

Thirty-six years have passed since I crossed over a cold sea, ship-bound for Liverpool. Again I was leaving, searching for a returning. A dilapidated bus bearing the company name “Magic” carried me through what was then England’s industrial midlands, travelling south towards London.

Some few miles to the west of London (Londinium) a city established by the Romans lies the old parish of Harmondsworth which derived its name from Heremod’s enclosure. Millions of people from around the world traverse this landscape, for here, where now exists a large international airport, stood the old village of Heathrow.

In January1981 I was due to board an aircraft at Heathrow bound for Sydney. As the time neared departure, I felt a magnetic current drawing me towards a posture of waiting, an “inner voice” counselled me not to go aboard the plane. This call was clear, accompanied by a vision of what the future held should my life be moulded solely by the world of outside appearances. I could see that it would not matter how many or how good personal relationships might be, how great or important the job I might have, how much money I might earn, how many material possessions I might acquire, on its own all of this would amount to nothing. There and then I realised that to go solely forward and inevitably one way down into that “outside future” was to commit myself to a terrible existence.

The aircraft left without me.

What now, I said to myself? Three days later I met a man who received me into his care and began to direct me back and up. It is said when the pupil is ready the teacher appears. To be offered the guidance of a teacher and to be open enough to receive what he or she has to offer is a grace. To accept then the conditions necessary to begin preparation, to be worked upon, so as to be moved towards submission. Submission to a higher influence often evokes in us a deep fear of the unknown. What is going to become of me if such a step is taken?

After having passed through a repetitive painful process that had allowed something in me to give up I was brought to this turning point. To have given up for a time even the desire for change and what I had searched for over the years had unknowingly placed me for a few vital moments in a mysterious stillness wherein I distinctively felt my life being weighed. As has happened to others, I experienced a compelling need to come deeper into my inner self and there repose until through a blessed reorientation I found myself in silent witness opening towards the compassionate heart at the centre of my being.

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"The moment one commits oneself, then providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have otherwise occurred. A whole stream of events; all manner of unforeseen incidents and chance meetings and material assistance come forth which no one could have dreamt would appear."

Johan Wolfgang VonGoethe

 

Learn method to get rid of it

Ponder 10,000 volumes,

wander 10,000 miles.

Stick like glue to the four treasures.

Drown the brush daily,

grind the inkstone to dust.

Take a week to paint a creek,

Spend a month on a rock.

Go through complexity

to simplicity.

Learn method 

to get rid of it. 

 

— Mai-mai Sze

Enkindled unto the crown

I had an intuitive feeling I was in the country that would either save or destroy the world, nothing I have experienced since that day nearly fifty years ago has altered this view. I was then nineteen years old, feeling the aloneness, standing in a parking lot in Los Angeles.

In his ‘Selected Essays and Critical Writings’ A. R. Orage wrote, “no mere record of experience, however novel,” can obtain entry into true realism. “Entry is by divination, not by description. Compare, for instance, the descriptions of battles in Homer and in the Mahabharata with the descriptions of actuality. The latter are accurate, but the former are true. There never was such a battle as Vyasa described in the Mahabharata. Let us hope there never will be. But, as we read it, we feel that Nature has dreamed it, and only not actualised it because she had other plans. By this means, actuality itself becomes transfigured; experience is given a solace; and no mere reporting can accomplish that. What is the satisfaction in knowing that such and such a thing occurred? But there is satisfaction in knowing that it occurred as a consequence of choice among many alternatives! Freedom is given back to us. At each moment we stand at a new crossroads. The road Nature takes will be, in course of time, the actual; the roads she passes will remain the potential. The more of them there are, the richer life has become for us.”

I do not know what the result will be of a Trump presidency but in my view the appointments of Stephen Bannon, Mike Flynn, Mike Pompeo, Reince Priebus, Nikki Haley, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos to his cabinet,  Myron Ebell to his transition team does not bode well for the USA or the world.

One of Americas finest investigative journalist I. F. Stone wrote - "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” Experience eventually helped me to see a truth in this, but also to remember Martin Luther realised, “Truth can only manifest through a lie.”

At the end there is a short sequence from the BBC series The Nazis a warning from History, this is very much based on the work of Prof. Sir Ian Kershaw. Kershaw although one of the more nuanced historians of the Nazi era does not really fathom the depths of the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler. The ever deepening question rather than an answer for the existence of such a being does not lie in ordinary history but in mythology.

Mythology, etymologically from Muthos, indicative of the truth cannot be approached with the ordinary mind. There exists an index of similarities between Donald Trump’s political campaign and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, however Trump is no Hitler, the United States is not the Weimar Republic. However the combination of strong narcissistic and authoritarian bigoted tendencies within a person in high office of state can unwittingly enable more sinister interests. Whereas Jiddu Krishnamurti stated, “Evil exits but you know nothing about it’, nonetheless it is worth recalling Shakespeare’s words placed upon the characters of Banquo and Macbeth, …

Banquo.

That, trusted home,
Might yet enkindle you unto the crown,
Besides the Thane of Cawdor. But 'tis strange:
And oftentimes to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths;
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence. —

Macbeth.

Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme...
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill; cannot be good: — if ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor:
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smother'd in surmise; and nothing is
But what is not.

 

New York times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/opinion/no-trump-we-cant-just-get-along.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

http://joshuafoust.com/this-is-not-normal/

CNN

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/14/politics/white-nationalists-on-bannon/index.html

Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2015-steve-bannon/

New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/article/138814/media-failing-explain-trumps-recklessness

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/17/sessions-flynn-and-pompeo-who-are-the-potential-trump-cabinet-picks-

The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-president-latest-cabinet-sessions-flynn-pompeo-racist-mike-a7426046.html

The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/trump-bannon-election/508688/

Letters from America - BBC 4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b083h0tp

Aljazeera (Interview with Noam Chomsky)

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/upfront/2016/11/upfront-special-noam-chomsky-trump-era-161125114959227.html

International business News

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/what-are-similarities-between-donald-trump-adolf-hitler-1582136

Wall Street Journal

http://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-rode-waves-of-populism-until-it-crashed-the-party-1477492356

BBC Series - The Nazis a Warning from History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n__oBkRYT7A&t=32s

 

 

George, McMurphy and Democracy

As Mr McMurphy says in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

“So this is how you work this democratic bullshit - hell’s bells!"

You Gotta be asleep to believe it

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guQw3nSkXMY

 

The Cuckoo

"A cuckoo’s nest may be just a playful name for a mad house ... but the common association of cuckoos and insanity comes from the baffling and brutal behaviour of cuckoo’s themselves. In nature cuckoo’s lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, depositing one egg per nest. It is a process by which an outcast becomes a tyrant … "

The hope, sorrow, indeed beauty of Ken Kesey’s book - at the end out of a whole population, only one will finally break through the glass to a larger world.

Doorway

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

Let us train our minds to desire what the situation demands.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

The pressure of adversity does not affect the mind of the brave man, it is more powerful than external circumstance.

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.

 

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.

— Seneca

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Go out Into the Darkness

God Knows

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

Minnie Louise Haskins

 

Tolerance

You have your beliefs, and another has his; you hold to your particular form of religion and another to his; you are a Christian, another is a Mahomedan, and yet another a Hindu. You have these religious dissensions and distinctions, but yet you talk of brotherly love, tolerance and unity - not that there must be uniformity of thought and ideas. The tolerance of which you speak is merely a clever invention of the mind; this tolerance merely indicates the desire to cling to your own idiosyncrasies, your own limited ideas and prejudices, and allow another to pursue his own. In this tolerance there is no intelligent diversity, but only a kind of superior indifference. There is utter falsity in this tolerance. You say, "You continue in your own way, and I shall continue in mine; but let us be tolerant, brotherly." *When there is true brotherliness, friendliness, when there is love in your heart, then you will not talk of tolerance. Only when you feel superior in your certainty, in your position, in your knowledge, only then do you talk of tolerance. You are tolerant only when there is distinction. With the cessation of distinction, there will be no talk of tolerance. Then you will not talk of brotherhood, for then in your hearts you are brothers.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Repetition

Something Understood

Repeat After Me

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0713rtc

 The Myth of Sisyphus

by Albert Camus

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Aegina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward the lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Oedipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.