Friday, January 20, 2012

continued from where my computer left off...

(sometimes my computer asks me, "Do you want to navigate away from this page--cancel or continue?" and then won't let you do anything---I have to remove the battery to get it to shut down--does anyone have any "treatments" for this "disease"?  Or is it my machine going viral, the way of all viruses? Thank Someone for Autosave!

Re: 50 cent words--I recall gas being 25cents a gallon in Mt. Carroll Il when I was there in the late 60's--and the "coinage" of the term goes back further than that.  So given this "inflation of gas"  (heh) wouldn't a 50 cent word by a $5 word by now?

I have noticed, though, that professional writers still sprinkle their prose with a few terms few know about, so I have to reach for my dictionary--now easier than ever on my fone;Spanish too...

But beyond two or three, most prose is very plain even in literary magazines for the (NPR) college or geek-washed public--research papers however usualy have impenetrable neologistics and erudite language to conceal the meanings--of usually quite ordinary concepts dressed up in new outfits--not fooling Calvin and Hobbes however!  But if you want to get ahead in a foreign country still gotta learn the "idiomas"..but we wouldn't want the unwashed masses to catch on to the actually rather shallow nature of most research. (Harper's has a section in the back where they "unpack" some pretty inane factoids and truthiness of absurd "extreme research"--I always look at this first, and Flo actually enjoys it also.)("No one enjoys a good laugh more than I do...")

In other words, expensive words can be expansive words too--it's sometimes nice to know that there is actually a word for some of the things that roll around unattached in my head!  But also it gives a little spice and a little challenge to the reader--and causes us to realize that, no, we don't know everything, not even our own language.  The dictum in Jefferson Grade School still holds: "We never guess--we look it up." 

But my question still remaineth: how can I look up the spelling of a word if I don't know how to spell it in the first place?  At least in reading we usually already have the spelling in front of us!

what's in a 50-cent word?

75 cents? No, that's Life. (that's a lotta money! well, that's Life ad infinitum)

At the halfway point of my sleep-wake cycle I got to thinking about my previous aside about preserving "50-cent words" from destruction.  And I realized that we are fully out of the Romantic era and the flowery Victorian fine arts and into the era of "plain-speaking"--popularized finally by Harry True Man?

Now that the lingua inglaterra has gone global, and news anchors no longer have any accents--according to us Midwesterners (not-from-Chicaga- that is)--something which I sort of predicted some years ago--I s'pose I should be happy that I now can be understood globally.

Well, maybe not.

Especially since I am not really going anywhere

Thursday, January 19, 2012

"THE GAMBLER"

I just finished Dostoevski's book of the same name.  I had anticipated a read/ride that would be of minimal interest to me, since I rarely if ever gamble, and don't really understand this disease except by the medical model.  I mean, personally.

Well I am not a murderer either, at least not by the common wordly terms by which it is ok to hate your brother.  But I should have remembered my experience with "Crime and Punishment" when I read it for college.  I have never yet read any author who could make an "innocent bystander" feel like the protagonist--and most of all, to feel the constant and lowering oppression that is common to  addicts and idolaters everywhere, transculturally.

For the first time in my life, through this book, I feel I know what it must be like to be a compulsive gambler. Of course, as with the prison story, it helped that the author had had his own gambling problem, so personally experienced what it is to be a loser; as all gamblers are, who cannot quit on their own. As I learned in AA, liberation from our cheap idols comes only by a power higher than ourselves--and I don't mean  our wives, guys!

("Wive's Guys" eh? Unpack that!  I have been thinking about volunteerism and have realized that getting married is often our biggest and hopefully best volunteer mission.  What is love if not voluntary? And the same of course goes for the wife--but if we marry not to be a servant but a mere sucking machine  for personal gain--if servanthood is not mutual--then it is no wonder that half our marriages fail, because we so despise servants and service--even when we are being served! This makes about as much sense as gambling itself--and "The Gambler" is also a picture of love and relationships missed and/or ruined. As we see in the climactic scene with the protagonist and his love interest.)

At any rate, this is another example of Dost being "differently abled" than the philosopher/economist Tolstoy.
I think it interesting that I have never forgotten the name Raskolnikov; because I became him for a while. I would wake up at Shimer happy, and almost immediately the thought came to mind, "Yes, you are happy for the moment--but what about that old woman you murdered?"

But I can't recall the name of a single Tolstoy character, except Anna Karenina; but only because it is the famous name of a famous book and I am slogging through it at the moment.  But I don't feel a thing for Anna or the disreputable men with whom she carries on--and Tolstoy was pretty bad at male-female relationships anyway, and despised his own wife--so sympathy for the devil I no-do-feel!!!

"Good writing is good writing," said Norman Mailer--so writing--esp. to aggrandize the author--may be satisfactory to many--but I can't agree that this is an adequate excuse for writing whatever theories come to mind, even if based on personal experiences. I have yet to read a line in which Dost brags on himself--but he can put one's mind and even soul in a fictional character like no one I have ever read. Flannery O'Connor went back to Dost in her later years, and I too find myself returning to that which so fascinated me in college; and now I have some insights as to why. Maybe I am ready to go "underground"--? (Brrrrrr...)

Saturday, January 14, 2012

from Anthony Esolen's "What is Man?" Touchstone current issue

"The young girl Sonia, in love with the hero Raskolnikov, urged him to confess the murder he has committed. She--who has known sin and suffering and degradation in her own life--says that he must go out into the public square, in broad daylight, and throw himself to the ground, crying out that he, he alone, has sinned against all mankind and the whole earth, and that he alone is responsible for all the wickedness that has ever been done...(he) does exactly that. 'Plastered.' says a bystander."

Alexander Pope: 'The proper study of mankind is Man--the glory, jest and riddle of the world.'

"Every language I know has a word that names Man, the universal, including every one in being; therefore also naming each: a universal, singular, and personal term. A little consideration shows that there is no substitute in English for Man. None of the alternatives do the necessary work.

 "The common good cannot be the mere good of the collective, just as the common good cannot be described quantitatively, as all forms of utilitarianism attempt to do. That is because common good is a good of personal beings. Maritain: "Even if the common good of human society were uniquely and exclusively a sum of temporal advantages and achievements, like the common good--not really common but totalitarian-- of an apiary or an anthill, it would surely be nonsensical to sacrifice the life of a human person for it."

"From this point of view, 'The human person, as a spiritual totality referred to the transcendent whole, surpasses and is superior to all human societies...A single human soul is worth more than the entire universe of temporal goods.'"

"Who is it that, gleaning among the dry husks left by the reapers? It is Man. Who is that, looking enraptured upon the beaty of the night sky?  It is Man.  Who is that, whispering into the ear of the  drowsy child, filled with milk from the breast? It is Man, and so is the child. Who is that sucking its thumb in the warmth of the womb? Man; and it is Man, stretched upon the bed, breathing his last heavy breaths in this world."

""Turn back O Man,' says the old hymn.  Man can do so, and I, Man, can do so, because of the One who called Himself the Son of Man.  He, too, is Man. Not simply an adult male, a human being, a person, a man, but Man himself, sinless, one with the Father.  We can...now look to Jesus, and say with the unwitting Pilate, 'Ecce Homo," Behold the Man, or, mysteriously, "Behold, Man."

Friday, January 13, 2012

"Whatcha doin', Marshall McLuhan?" --Goldie Hawn, on "Laugh-In"

Well I'll tell you...."He's going to sing, he's going to sing..." (MP and the Holy G)

"In Christ, Medium becomes Message.  Christ came to demonstrate God's love for man and to call all men to Him through Himself as Mediator, as Medium."--MM

"He also saw the potential to bring about the...'obliteration of the person'....once writing that,' man has become essentially discarnate in the electric age. Much of his own sense of unreality may stem from this. Certainly it robs people of any sense of goals or direction.' " (c.f. Europe, minus Muslims--were that possible)

And in a letter to Clare Booth Luce, he wrote,'Discarnate man is not compatible with an incarnate Church.'"

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Para Boles

Re: The Sower Mtt 13

"The knowledge of the secrets of heaven have been given to you , but not to them. Whoever has will be given more;whoever does not have, even what (little) he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak in parables."

See Isaiah 6:9-10

Recent events have taught me that there are many around here who go to church and yet in their hearts totally reject Christ.  My grandfather was one of these. Probably both of them, actually--to the perputual detriment of their children and grandchildren. My grandmothers were the opposite.  It is a male proclivity to reject Christ because He directly offends their precious--delusional--sense of autonomy.  I do not find that men are any less emotional than women. It's just that men tend to choose to be cold and calculating on the outside and horrifically competetive sometimes to the exclusion of everything else--but inside they are often seething with anger, resentment, and esp. the desire to control--freakishly--this too being utter self-deception. The best word for this kind of creature is "hellion;" which most men take to be a badge of honor and courage!!!

My grandfathers; one more than the other; were always controllers.  They believed that they deserved to be, because of their hard work and innate brilliance. It was also culturally encouraged at the time.  The rest of my family is purblind to their very considerable and possibly perpetual influence. They were also Germans--and it has actually been shown that Germans at least in Germany have the least sense of humor of any Europeans--and maybe that could be applied worldwide.  Certainly our sense of humor and proportion was at lowest ebb in the 20th Century!!! (Thank God for "Britcoms!")

But besides all these cultural deprivations, degradations, and depredations, I feel very much at a disadvantage in what Christ commands, which is primarily prayer.  I am not "prayerless"; but I pray less than I would like; and if I'm not satisfied, is He? 

It is no coincidence, I think, that the Y chromosome is foreshortened=(


Neither we nor especially the kingdom of darkness really understand God--but for grace, we would know nothing at all. But, to paraphrase another, "With Great Grace comes great responsibility," to use what freedom we have to reflect back the "Sunshine of Your Love."  We do no better than the moon, ourselves, but the full moon last night reminded me that great darkness can be penetrated by even a little light, and all the more so as the darkness adds unto itself, day by day, with it's millenia-worth of accumuated unforgiven and uncomforted sins and sorrows.  But even the moon has to "stand in the light" or it is dark and cold and hidden and barren as we can imagine.  So with us.

I often think about my own mini-parable of the bacterial colonies that do not necessarily yield to other stronger colonies or even the antibodies of more organized organisms; but left to themselves on a Petri dish will accumulate enough toxins to wipe themselves out--another and maybe the prime reason that these tiny mindless things do not dominate the earth in spite of their unmatched reproductive rate.

Man has manged his waste products somewhat better-- up until now--Rome, London, and NYC still seem to exist and still seem to grow.  But that too is Grace. And Long-Suffering. "How long must I put up with you?"  Well, He has, for another 2 millenia almost--but are we not poisoning ourselves ever more massively? But I believe it is not the material decay and failure to plan that will be our undoing, at least individually, and eventually corporately. I agree with Christ that our primary evil and defeat and spiritual decay of "every good gift from above" comes  from within. "You war and cannot have--you have not because you ask not" --again with the prayerlessness, already. Which is the core of the Sower Story and Mtt 13. (See James--the entire book is best.)

(As for existence being self-justifying or works being equally so, a brief review the NT is sufficient to answer these defense mechanisms as well. Freud had a couple of categories to fit these as well...)

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Before I forget...

but I hope I don't.

There is no photograph, reel of film, 3D or not, nor any "footage" whatsoever that can even come close to representing the feel of a walk around a lake that is filled right up to the brim. It feels like a walkway more than a body of water (as I referenced in my previous blog if anyone recalls.)  If it were a few inches higher, it would be a mess. A few inches lower and it would look like nothing remarkable at all.

 Lake Kakusha and its caretakers are so much a blessing to me--but does anyone notice this at all besides me? And this is the way the lake has looked for at least 2 months straight. It is all the more wonderful this noon because there is still a thin sheet of ice on it; at 51 degrees F!!

But water and ice can be not so nice.  My condolences to the Philbin family whose son was lost, apparently falling through the ice on the Fox (WI) river.

Monday, January 9, 2012

NU!!!

This is a Yiddish all-purpose phrase which can mean many things, but largely is a rhetorical question mark, as in, "I am the greatest--nu?"  It meretriciously solicits your opionion while making it not count. But that's literally, and people don't use commonly such words to put anyone down; it's almost automatic, like "How are you?", and here's hoping they won't take you literally.

So if I choose to ooze this word in the future, u'll know what I mean--nu?

The point besides being that people often say what they don't mean--for the sake of effect, shock value sometimes, to impress others with our wise-dumb, to ooze big words (5 demerits to me for "meretriciously") and--mostly-- to communicate minimally while putting up our personal shield o' privacy/cone of silence continually.  This often takes the form of the attack mode--the best defense is a good bit of offense.  I wonder if Bill Maher would be as condescending to Mr. Tebow in person privately as he is in his Public R's (recall: R-rated here means "Rant" whereas PG means Providential Guidance needed and G = "Groovy!")

This "Primate Ooze" defines and takes over the office of Pharisee and Sadducee--which I characterize as our modern version of Left and Right "wings"--but not the kind that can fly!  Both preclude Spirit-led utterance because of pre-set agendas, platforms, and inflexible legalistisms--here I include the rigid doctrines of libertarian ism, so called, which is more libertine than liberating.

If u want to see someone really liberated--look at the EAA video about the invention of Steve Saint and see if it doesn't make you want to fly!! (Sorry piggies) Can be accessed on Steve or Grace Schuler's facebook page.

But: "He whom the Son sets free, is free indeed"--a thought and statement of fact to which I intend to repair frequently. If our freedom depends on our wildly changing circumstances--that is a very poor freedom indeed and probably is not freedom at all but self delusion.  True freedom has to be in all places under all circumstances and reducing the intimidation factors by which the world works--not freedom but fear--to as near zero as possible by receiving and using properly "The Peace that Passes Understanding"--given never acquired.

I continually find-- in science, medicine, and elsewhere--that organisms do best if they stick to their design--and do not fantsize too much about being a dolphin or a wolf!  Remember that pigs are just as clever as dolphins...so they say...


If yu want to see someone really liberated, go to the video on the EAA website about the invention of Steve Saint; see if it doesn't make you wnat to "fly like an eagle!" (sorry piggies)  available on Steve or Grace Schuler's facebook pages.

NU??????????????????????????????

Friday, January 6, 2012

Re:calibrating...

I am in Genesis 29 at the moment and it gives me pause at several junctures.

First, the incredible detail--conversations, 3 flocks in front of the well before being joined by Rachel and her father's flock.  Is this really all just made up? 

Second, I consider the fact that all of Jesus' progenitors were incrediblly carnal, reactionary people who blindly stumbled into matters far too great for them, but continued to stubbornly make the same dysfunctional and sinful errors over and over.  Then God breaks in, not so much to prevent people from sin--tho He does that too, say, for Abimilech/s--but to "repair the breach."

 Would any of us really want to fight with any of these people? The cost would clearly be massive--as it was for all of them--but they only occasionally discerned these costs, and rarely thought things through.  We have lots of history on our side--but we don't learn any better than they did; possibly worse due to an acceleration of distractions that they did not have--and people in 3rd world countries still do not have--hence more room for the actual God, as opposed to our secularized overweening committments and "self-esteem"; which is really just steam/hot air balloons.  The vacuum where humility belongs in the present world seems to grow ever-larger, far beyond the mere increase in population. Replaced by dirty hubris, obviously.

Thirdly, these preceders ceded very little to God along the way--Abraham's acts of faith were the exception, even in his own life up until Moriah; and in Jake's life up until his wrestling  match.  These folks were not conspiracy theorists--they just conspired!  Where we would be embarrassed to do what they did, they boldly went before us, and cheated and manipulated their way through life; very much like many of O'Connor's characters.  Maybe we are not supposed to emulate or imitate most of their acts (of un-faith) but to "compare and contrast" their perfidies with the perfection and justice and light of God.  Which is only slowly revealed and/or put into practice by a perfect timing that totally eludes us, esp. in the present. In my case, it is usually only in retrospect that I see His wonders that fail of all other potential explanations.

Lastly, I find it fascinating that Leah was unloved yet bore the first four of these tribal progenitors.  In naming the first three, she concentrated on her bitterness, unloved-ness, and her vain hope that Jacob would really love (prefer her?)her because Rachel the Beatiful Person was barren for a long time. But, by the fourth and probably most important child, she seems to have given up on her husband and in essence made God her beloved--God who showed himself compassionate to her in spite of her and her father's deception. She decided- rightly I think--to just be grateful--and grateful particularly to God, so this time she said, "This time I will praise The Lord." Hence Judah, unlike his elder brothers, was brought up in an atmosphere of an attitude of praise, gratitude, and a heart of a mother tired of depending on the vagaries of her family.  And so God gives us this opportunity--every hour perhaps--to be bitter and cynical--vs joyful and a far better parent. Thus Levi represented the Law--but through Judah even Jerusalem was "saved by grace." (many times and eventulally permanently) And it was Judah alone who kept Joseph from being killed by all--ALL--the rest of the others--including Levi of course. The law kills but grace saves through faith--and seeing one's mother or wife resting in God's glory and not their own--is an influence far beyond mere example.

That this is statistically rare should not be cause for either despair or resentment; nor for doubting God's goodness.  "You already have as much God as you want." The additionally pertinent fact that God builds faith and muscularizes and actualizes faith by suffering upon suffering upon suffering far more than by blessing--is also sensbile, reasonable given the status of "McWorld"; and stated directly by God and His Christ and all the prophets; and by consistent word and ensamples; so He is entirely accurate both about us and Himself; and the absolute necessity of salvation by all-powerful, all -accomplishing grace.

"So what is sincerity worth? You can be sincerely wrong, can't you?  More on that later, probably...

Monday, January 2, 2012

Does "Naughty" Come to "Naught?"

(help me our here, Dennis--are these two words as related as they seem? Help thou us, O Etymology Man!!!

(In the case of the Detroit Lions, it certainly seems there is some relation!) Alas poor Bills ye knew them well...

The great mass of ratio ad absurdum makes life a mess of noi/sty des-aspirations?

"Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed."

"But who are you?" Ike trembled violently.

I am slogging through Tolstoy's agrarianism, which reminds me of the Southern author-cluster contemporaneous or slightly prior to O'Connor... I believe Alan Tate may have been their chief contributor...a contemporary example might be Wendell Berry, who also harkens back to the virtues of farming and farmland and small town life.  Percy has such a character in the mother in his book, "The Moviegoer." I seem to recall her as a follower of Marcus Aurelius or some other noble pagan.  I have heard something similar about Tom Wolfe's magnum opus, involving the cult of Zeus--?--

All of them seem to give the nod to religion as being important but only as a social construct or kind of moral adhesive that has no basis in fact but is useful to restrain the unlearned masses.

 Tolstoy doesn't seem to think the ex-serfs are even educable, or that education is even worth the candle--except that he has already gotten his, thank you very much. O'Connor may have been very much at home in the country--she hated Atlanta--but she was no starry eyed idealist or romantic. This is why Mr. Tate has decreased and she has increased, even in the South itself.  Urbanists loved her portrayals of "Good Country People" but as it turns our they have in the main been tone deaf or dyslexic towards the plain grace in fromt of their faces.  It is unthinkable to both the urbanist and to the noble agrarian that such people should be given a second look; and the only reason they fall into the trap of judgementalism, and miss the point of the grotesqueries, is that their imaginations pretty much halt within the confines of their own romantic ambitions--once again I refer to Christian Landers' satires about, "the wrong sort of white people." which of course is a dig against the "right sort of white people" of which he is admitedly a member.

And to O'Connor's assertions that one must "draw large and startling figures" to an audience such as hers--and in the main, they still don't get it--one must draw attention to not so much her style as her substance.  The brief reviews I have read of O'Connor's work are so off the beam--as we see in her letters--that one really needn't bother.  If one totally disregards The Holy Ghost, as most of us do most of the time--damned inconvenient, He Is--there is simply no way to come to an understanding of what she was doing--she knew all that and kept writing--ahead of and outside the bell curve--"anyways."

O'Connor never seemed to me the least bit sanguine about either urban life nor about the serfs and Serf-dome of the deep South. Yet she participated-albeit reluctantly and not wholeheartedly-- in both--as a writer and an intellect--but never championed much of anything disembodied or anti-carnate. She read widely and deeply but was never arrested or taken in my mere philosophy...she lagged behind--purposely I think--postmodernism--but was in the end proven far ahead of that curve as well--in a way that Berry and Tate will never be.  Both Tate and Berry are very much a captive of their times--which is why they could get articles and poems in The New Yorker, which never published so much as one Percy or O'Connor story. The died- in- the- wool urban romantic or powerful pragmatists who buy the golden junk that fills the margins of TNY, really doesn't intend to kill his/her goose.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

If He may say so...

Two sequential reminders from the King of kings:

"I praise You Father, LORD of Heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, this was Your good pleasure."

"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."

"For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light."

If it were not so, could any child bear it?  It is only for the small, the humble/d, the poor in spirit, and those who are broken and know it, and whose needs have been revealed, and whose excuses have run out. I might dare to call this the "Percy Principle," after Walker Percy's repeated theme of "no exit" until "the jig is up," and one is left with naked hope, and with providential freedom/yokedom; and indelible promises.  While we as the anti-children do tend to promote ourselves to our level of incompetence--the Peter Principle which so obviously applies to St. Peter as well--God is at working not only stripping the ball from our grasp, but taking away our nice uniforms and even our underwear, (gasp!) so that we are forced to "Pray Naked" as in the song by Michael Roe and the 77's.  ( More about him and his friends later)

Not the worst place from which to begin, eh?