The View from Here Dec 2011

My old pastor friend Dr. Les Pugh use to do an annual sermon in which he pondered about his current beliefs and values… I think he called it something like “The View From Here”… (one of the phrases he tended to weave in each year- from Flannery O’Connor I think- was “the silent working of good”).

I think this is an excellent exercise but I’m feeling lazy this week and I have too many books to read so I’m just posting a few earlier thoughts on this topic… at this point in the journey the more things change the more they remain the same for me.

Regardless of your ideology, may peace rule in your heart, mind, home and work… and, may the force be strong with you.

Fomrism

A number of years ago I decided to try my hand at creating a new religion from scratch. Symbols, deities, virtues, liturgy... I'd settled on the perennial philosophy as the bedrock of my personal belief system and this struck me as a useful endeavor.

I decided to structure it as a polytheistic system of belief as opposed to monotheistic. 7 gods. I saw this less as a belief in multiple Gods but more of a belief in God being beyond our finite comprehension (hence, the ultimate ground of our being manifesting in multiple facets- like a prism). Or, as the Tao says, "The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao".

It didn't take long for me to lose interest in this, Fomrism, as a religion per se, and rather begin to see it as an exercise in developing a system for living. I also progressively saw this system as an attempt to encapsulate all of reality in a conceptual structure- hence, an intellectual endeavor.

In writing my last blog, "Why we exist", I realized that my explorations into Fomrism still guide my sense of why we exist (and how we should live) strongly. Apart from the "religious" aspects of the system (and the intellectual pursuit of placing all the universe in one basket), here is what Fomrism has taught me concerning how to live.

It is worth saying that I don't consider any of this original... it seems rather to me like an alchemical amalgam of all I've encountered life to date.

You can call these concepts values or characteristics or goals or virtues... Ultimately it has become for me a how to live life to-do list of sorts with archetypes.

• Wonder, awe, mystery, silence The unknown
• Union, synthesis, peacemaking King and Queen in union
• Nurture, loving-gentleness, kindness, mercy-charity The mother
• Passion, kaizen, energy The love between
• Justice, truth, wisdom The father
• Strength, doing right, courage The warrior prince son
• Beauty, creativity, compassion The healer princess daughter

Why we exist...

Why do we exist?

For some reason this particular question has been somewhat of an obsession for me in many periods of my life. I'm not sure why this particular question has meant so much to me over such an extended period of time. I'm inclined to think that there are many other questions that would have been more practical and/or useful... for example, what is the best way to earn money? How does one master the craft of songwriting? How do you write programming code for IPhone apps?

But why? Why has my mind, over so many years, has that question taken hold of me with such a relentless grip? I've considered the genetic possibilities... "Micro" and "Macro"... "Micro", I inherited this interest from my mom and pop (even grandparents, aunts/uncles). This doesn't seem right to me based on my recollections (although my great great grandfather on my dad's side was a moyel). I've settle on "Macro" as the driving influence. Jung speaks of the collective unconscious and I've wondered if my Jewish blood (and the collective unconscious of my peeps) has been a factor here. I don't have a better explanation at this point.

Many things have made sense to me in answer to this question over many years...

• It's an unsolvable mystery... who can know why we are here?
• Existentialism per Irvin Yalom (with credit to Victor Frankl's logotherapy)- Life has no inherent meaning... all we can do is attempt to piece together a meaning that holds together for each of us through life's travails.
• Absurdity per Steve Martin- Steve majored in philosophy in college and tells the story of sitting in the laundromat trying to determing the meaning of it all and coming to the firm conclusion that there is no meaning, the best we can do is laugh and laugh at the absurdity of it all.
• Christianity- Man exists to know, love and serve God through Jesus Christ.
• Judaism- Man exists for Tikkun Olam (to heal the world).
• Buddhism- Stop asking such silly questions and just be a compassionate being.
• Confucianism- We exist to be good, to honor our ancestors, to refine the self.
• Hinduism- We exist to become perfect.
• My own personal musings have included a few key options...
• We exist for joy.
• We exist to evolve.
• We exist because we exist (a variant of that saying, "We're here because we're here")

Who really knows why we exist? There are a multitude of opionions. Despite this there are some good common themes. Some time soon I'll blog on Aldous Huxley's, The Perrenial Philosophy... It focuses on themes shared in common by various faith paths.

My current position draws from all I've read, seen, heard and thought over these years...

We exist for joy- joy does not necessarily mean being happy.
We exist to serve- compassion as a way of being with the human family (and ourself).
We exist to evolve- we are accountable for how we play the hands of cards life deals us.
We exist to enjoy- to relish creation and life.
We exist to create- offspring, art, peace.
We exist to wonder- at all the mystery that surrounds us in the universe.
We exist to synthesize- to bring harmony where there is discord.
We exist to nurture- people, the earth, ideas, our soul.
We exist to burn- to be passionate about things and people that matter to us.
We exist to ensure justice- to fight for what is right and just and equitable.
We exist to be fathers, kings, sons, warriors and princes.
We exist to be mothers, queens, daughters, healers and princesses.
We exist to know the rapture of immersion in beauty... to make it... to be taken by it.

This is enough of an answer for me for now.

And one for good measure…

The Mystic Dean Moriarty: from the Gospel According to Kerouac

Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong.

"Now this is the first time we've been alone and in a position to talk for years," said Dean. And he talked all night. As in a dream, we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother's door at eight A.M. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed.

He was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms. You remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!"

He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. "And not only that but we both understand that I couldn't have time to explain why I know and you know God exists." At one point I moaned about life's troubles-how poor my family was, how much I wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter.

"Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up. My head rings!" he cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes- that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails. "Since Denver, Sal, a lot of things- Oh, the things-I've thought and thought. I used to be in reform school all the time, I was a young punk, asserting myself-stealing cars a psychological expression of my position, hincty to show. All my jail-problems are pretty straight now. As far as I know I shall never be in jail again. The rest is not my fault."

We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road. "Think of it," said Dean. "One day he'll put a stone through a man's windshield and the man will crash and die-all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way 1 am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us-that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel" (I hated to drive and drove carefully)-"the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side."

There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. He used the word "pure" a great deal. I had never dreamed Dean would become a mystic. These were the first days of his mysticism, which would lead to the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days.

~Jack Kerouac "On the Road"

The Whore of Mensa

THE CLIENT One thing about being a private investigator, you've got to learn to go with your hunches. That's why when a quivering pat of butter named Word Babcock walked into my office and laid his cards on the table, I should have trusted the cold chill that shot up my spine. "Kaiser?" he said. "Kaiser Lupowitz?" "That's what it says on my license," I owned up. "You've got to help me. I'm being blackmailed. Please!" He was shaking like the lead singer in a rumba band. I pushed a glass across the desk top and a bottle of rye I keep handy for nonmedicinal purposes. "Suppose you relax and tell me all about it." "You ... you won't tell my wife?" "Level with me, Word. I can't make any promises." He tried pouring a drink, but you could hear the clicking sound across the street, and most of the stuff wound up in his shoes. "I'm a working guy," he said. "Mechanical maintenance. I build and service joy buzzers. You know - those little fun gimmicks that give people a shock when they shake hands?" "So?" "A lot of your executives like 'em. Particularly down on Wall Street." "Get to the point." "I'm on the road a lot. You know how it is - lonely. Oh, not what you're thinking. See, Kaiser, I'm basically an intellectual. Sure, a guy can meet all the bimbos he wants. But the really brainy women - they're not so easy to find on short notice." "Keep talking." "Well, I heard of this young girl. Eighteen years old. A Yassar student. For a price, she'll come over and discuss any subject - Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Exchange of ideas. You see what I'm driving at?" "Not exactly." "I mean my wife is great, don't get me wrong. But she won't discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn't know that when I married her. See, I need a woman who's mentally stimulating, Kaiser. And I'm willing to pay for it. I don't want an involvement - I want a quick intellectual experience, then I want the girl to leave. Christ, Kaiser, I'm a happily married man." "How long has this been going on?" "Six months. Whenever I have that craving, I call Flossie. She's a madam, with a Master's in Comparative Lit. She sends me over an intellectual, see?" So he was one of those guys whose weakness was really bright women. I felt sorry for the poor sap. I figured there must be a lot of jokers in his position, who were starved for a little intellectual communication with the opposite sex and would pay through the nose for it. "Now she's threatening to tell my wife," he said. "Who is?" "Flossie. They bugged the motel room. They got tapes of me discussing The Waste Land and Styles of Radical Will, and, well, really getting into some issues. They want ten grand or they go to Carla. Kaiser, you've got to help me! Carla would die if she knew she didn't turn me on up here." The old call-girl racket. I had heard rumors that the boys at headquarters were on to something involving a group of educated women, but so far they were stymied. "Get Flossie on the phone for me." "What?" "I'll take your case, Word. But I get fifty dollars a day, plus expenses. You'll have to repair a lot of joy buzzers." "It won't be ten G's worth, I'm sure of that," he said with a grin, and picked up the phone and dialed a number. I took it from him and winked. I was beginning to like him. THE SETUP Seconds later, a silky voice answered, and I told her what was on my mind. "I understand you can help me set up an hour of good chat," I said. "Sure, honey. What do you have in mind?" "I'd like to discuss Melville." "Moby Dick or shorter novels?" "What's the difference?" "The price. That's all. Symbolism's extra." "What'll it run me?" "Fifty, maybe a hundred for Moby Dick. You want a comparative discussion - Melville and Hawthorne? That could be arranged for a hundred." "The dough's fine," I told her and gave her the number of a room at the Plaza. "You want a blonde or a brunette?" "Surprise me," I said, and hung up. "I shaved and grabbed some black coffee while I checked over the Monarch College Outline series. Hardly an hour had passed before there was a knock on my door. I opened it, and standing there was a young redhead who was packed into her slacks like two big scoops of vanilla ice cream. "Hi, I'm Sherry." They really knew how to appeal to your fantasies. Long, straight hair, leather bag, silver earrings, no make-up. "I'm surprised you weren't stopped, walking into the hotel dressed like that," I said. "The house dick can usually spot an intellectual." "A five-spot cools him." "Shall we begin?" I said, motioning her to the couch. She lit a cigarette and got right to it. "I think we could start by approaching Billy Budd as Melville's justification of the ways of God to man,n'est-ce pas?" "Interestingly, though, not in a Miltonian sense." I was bluffing. I wanted to see if she'd go for it. "No. Paradise Lost lacked the substructure of pessimism." She did. "Right, right. God, you're right," I murmured. "I think Melville reaffirmed the virtues of innocence in a naive yet sophisticated sense - don't you agree?" I let her go on. She was barely nineteen years old, but already she had developed the hardened facility of the pseudo-intellectual. She rattled off her ideas glibly, but it was all mechanical. Whenever I offered an insight, she faked a response: "Oh yes, Kaiser. Yes, baby, that's deep. A platonic comprehension of Christianity - why didn't I see it before?" We talked for about an hour and then she said she had to go. She stood up and I laid a C-note on her. "Thanks, honey." "There's plenty more where that came from." "What are you trying to say?" I had piqued her curiosity. She sat down again. "Suppose I wanted to have a party?" I said. "Like, what kind of a party?" "Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?" "Oh, wow." "If you'd rather forget it..." "You'd have to speak with Flossie," she said. "It's cost you." Now was the time to tighten the screws. I flashed my private- investigator's badge and informed her it was a bust. "What!" "I'm fuzz, sugar, and discussing Melville for money is an 802. You can do time." "You louse!" "Better come clean, baby. Unless you want to tell your story down at Alfred Kazin's office, and I don't think he'd be too happy to hear it." She began to cry. "Don't turn me in, Kaiser," she said. "I needed the money to complete my Master's. I've been turned down for a grant. Twice. Oh, Christ." It all poured out - the whole story. Central Park West upbringing, Socialist summer camps, Brandeis. She was every dame you saw waiting in line at the Elgin or the Thalia, or penciling the words 'Yes, very true' into the margin of some book on Kant. Only somewhere along the line she had made a wrong turn. "I needed cash. A girl friend said she knew a married guy whose wife wasn't very profound. He was into Blake. She couldn't hack it. I said sure, for a price I'd talk Blake with him. I was nervous at first. I faked a lot of it. He didn't care. My friend said there were others. Oh, I've been busted before. I got caught reading Commentary in a parked car, and I was once stopped and frisked at Tanglewood. Once more and I'm a three time loser." "Then take me to Flossie." She bit her lip and said, "The Hunter College Book Store is a front." "Yes?" "Like those bookie joints that have barbershops outside for show. You'll see." I made a quick call to headquarters and then said to her, "Okay, sugar. You're off the hook. But don't leave town." "She tilted her face up toward mine gratefully. "I can get you photographs of Dwight Macdonald reading," she said. "Some other time." FLOSSIE'S I walked into the Hunter College Book Store. The salesman, a young man with sensitive eyes, came up to me. "Can I help you?" he said. "I'm looking for a special edition of Advertisements for Myself. I understand the author had several thousand gold-leaf copies printed up for friends." "I'll have to check," he said. "We have a WATS line to Mailer's house." I fixed him with a look. "Sherry sent me," I said. "Oh, in that case, go on back." he said. He pressed a button. A wall of books opened, and I walked like a lamb into that bustling pleasure palace known as Flossie's. Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian decor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, "Wallace Stevens, eh?" But it wasn't just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could "relate without getting close." For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master's, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine's over Freud's conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing - the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York. "Like what you see?" a voice said behind me. I turned and suddenly found myself standing face to face with the business end of a .38. I'm a guy with a strong stomach, but this time it did a back flip. It was Flossie, all right. The voice was the same, but Flossie was a man. His face was hidden by a mask. "You'll never believe this," he said, "but I don't even have a college degree. I was thrown out for low grades." "Is that why you wear that mask?" "I devised a complicated scheme to take over The New York Review of Books, but it meant I had to pass for Lionel Trilling. I went to Mexico for an operation. There's a doctor in Juarez who gives people Trilling's features - for a price. Something went wrong. I came out looking like Auden, with Mary McCarthy's voice. That's when I started working the other side of the law." "Quickly, before he could tighten his finger on the trigger, I went into action. Heaving forward, I snapped my elbow across his jaw and grabbed the gun as he fell back. He hit the ground like a ton of bricks. He was still whimpering when the police showed up. "Nice work, Kaiser," Sergeant Holmes said. "When we're through with this guy, the F.B.I. wants to have a talk with him. A little matter involving some gamblers and an annotated copy of Dante's Inferno. Take him away, boys." Later that night, I looked up an old account of mine named Gloria. She was blond. She had graduated cum laude. The difference was she majored in physical education. It felt good.

Hey Jack Kerouac

"Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother and the tears she cried, she cried for none other than her little boy lost in our little world that hated and that dared to drag him down. Her little boy courageous who chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood. Hip flask slinging madman, steaming cafe flirts, they all spoke through you."

10,000 Maniacs


The Mystic Dean Moriarty: from the Gospel According to Kerouac

Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong.

"Now this is the first time we've been alone and in a position to talk for years," said Dean. And he talked all night. As in a dream, we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother's door at eight A.M. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed.

He was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms. You remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!"

He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. "And not only that but we both understand that I couldn't have time to explain why I know and you know God exists." At one point I moaned about life's troubles-how poor my family was, how much I wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter.

"Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up. My head rings!" he cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes- that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails. "Since Denver, Sal, a lot of things- Oh, the things-I've thought and thought. I used to be in reform school all the time, I was a young punk, asserting myself-stealing cars a psychological expression of my position, hincty to show. All my jail-problems are pretty straight now. As far as I know I shall never be in jail again. The rest is not my fault."

We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road. "Think of it," said Dean. "One day he'll put a stone through a man's windshield and the man will crash and die-all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way 1 am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us-that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel" (I hated to drive and drove carefully)-"the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side."

There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. He used the word "pure" a great deal. I had never dreamed Dean would become a mystic. These were the first days of his mysticism, which would lead to the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days.

~Jack Kerouac "On the Road"

The Only Animal

The only animal that commits suicide

went for a walk in the park,

basked on a hard bench

in the first star,

traveled to the edge of space

in an armchair

while company quietly

talked and abruptly

returned,

the room empty.

The only animal that cries

that takes off its clothes

and reports to the mirror, the one

and only animal

that brushes its own teeth—

http://www.juliasroom.com/fwrighttheonly.htm

Balance

It is hard to complete anything when you are so easily enchanted by everything.