Happily abandoning Jean-Jacques and his never-ending spiral of "obscurities" ("no-meaning" I think were a better word for it, though his intent is somehow pretty clear--and fairly disgusting), I have read, and re-read, Dan Savage's pretty, witty little book The Kid, last night and this morning; liking it so much that I've found and am checking out his other two recent books Skipping towards Gomorrah and The Commitment--along with a slight plethora of books on Humanism. I have a very capacious 'Jensport' backpack. Funnily, in the same section where I found Savage's Skipping Etc., I found the Insufferable Bork's Slouching towards Gomorrah, whereof I am pretty sure Savage's book is at least partially a parody, but which nothing could ever force me to read enough of to be positive. And so, once I've found a good inspirational work on atheism, home again, home again, to await this evening's automatic deposit of my welfare pittance and dinner (or supper, as we farmboys say).

Done, and done. 'Twas what I thought; maybe better--I won't know till I've done my just-to-make-sure re-read. Meantime ([!] How did I learn to speed-read like this?) I've been reading ever more delectable smut: Panthers in the Skins of Men by Charles Nelson (who also, according to what I've found on the internet, wrote The Boy who Picked up Bullets--out of print apparently, but much more kindly thought of by editors and readers alike than PITSOM), which almost nobody, according to the customer reviews, likes very much; but with which I am enthralled by, finding in it that which everyone said was in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and which, to my perception (Yuck! Stupid butt-ugly, violent, raw, egotistical smack-head ethos and coprophage insensibility), Was Not There. But it's here, throbbing keenly with an exquisite wit.

And when I came into the (Main State) library today, there waiting for me were six (count 'em) smut-works that I'd put on reserve for me only a couple of days ago--I'll list 'em and, if possible, review 'em in tomorrow's blog. I'm having fun, maybe learning something.

But finally, a couple of remarks on Jean-Jacques: The comparison with Ted Bundy is somehow more one-on-one exact (Physically Abused Child Syndrome?) than I had realized. So (1) There is no notion of responsibility in Rousseau's universe; not for oneself, nor for one's belongings or "property," and least of all for others. (2) For all his burning, barely suppressible immodesty (one hesitate's even to call it egotism), Rousseau is singularly lacking in that elusive something that we recognize in others as character.

Unconscious obscenity

Maybe I should've stuck to smut. I started reading Du Contrat Social (mornings on the bus going to work, and afternoons coming home), swept away by the opening sentence, "Man is born free--and everywhere he is chains," thinking what a pussy I had been not to appreciate this wonderful fellow Liberationist Jean-Jacques. Then--phooey: "Chacun de nous met en commun sa personne et toute sa puissance sous la suprême direction de la volonté générale; et nous recevons en corps chaque membre comme partie indivisible du tout." The hell we do--Not! And it gets worse. Rousseau's Belief, apparently sincere, that without the constraints of society there would be no morality, is infantile (for sure, it links him with de Sade). While his ramblings on sovereignty sound like something Ted Bundy might have said as a practising Young Republican. Which brings me to the first part of the second of four books--And I think I just don't have the stomach to go on.

Wanting smut, I checked out a backpackful of Gordon Merrick novels (munchious bon-bons--amazing that a public library would treasure up such delicious filth), and Full Circle by Michael Thomas Ford, which turned out to be so bitterly, beautifully true (and only just barely pornographic enough) that I've been weeping about it all day--in the way that men do, sniffling and tearing up every time I think about it. The Club Baths, as it happens were also my first experience of the infamous pre-condom, pre-AIDS steambaths: March 1966. Ejaculated five times (I was twenty-three), although I've forgotten almost entirely how and with whom. Those were the days.

Reading, with guilty complacence and narcissistic fascination, François Ricard's la Génération Lyrique. What he said. That's me, and my friends, and my generation, to the life. That is how we all were. And are. Just so, we were aware of ourselves, and of one another, in exactly the way that Ricard describes us; and we were, as he says, at the same time individually and collectively, extatically and exultantly, conscious of our privilege, our beauty, our charm (half arrogance, half angelic grace), and of our intellectual and cultural supremacy--and determined, with an astonishingly aristocratic steeliness of resolve, not to lose a jot or tittle of the perquisites or the joys and pleasures of our superior rank. I'm sorry, we sound like monsters--but we were beautiful, kind, and gracious. And for us, as for no other generation, sex had no connotation of disease or death.

Re-reading, reading thoroughly and in sequence, the fables of Jean de La Fontaine in the Classiques Larousse edition, with all the footnotes, Documentation The'matique, Jugements, and Sujets de Devoirs et d'Exposés; just for pleasure, and for the special joy of acquainting myself with one of those authors so seldom met with outside of French literature whose every thought is exactly my own, or would be if I had the same exquisitely sensitive and cultivated humanist philosophy, and the same perfect felicity of language and expression. And wouldn't you just know, there in the Jugements, is a long, nasty animadversion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (from Emile) upon some of the fables that I like best, giving exactly the contrary of why I believe that children understand them best and profit from them most: "Les enfants se moquent du corbeau, mais ils s'affectionnent tous au renard...Vous croyez leur donner la cigale pour exemple; et point du tout, c'est la fourmi qu'ils choisissent...dans la fable du loup maigre et du chien gras...la pauvre enfant qu'on avait désolée (!) avec cette fable tout en lui prêchant toujours la docilité(!!)...s'ennuyait d'être à la chaine, elle se sentait le cou pelé; elle pleurait de n'être pas loup." So very serious is maître Jean-Jacques--'Tis but a step from him through the nasty muck of the "divine marquis" to Robespierre, and on through the dual, amusingly rivalrous, frauds of Freud and Jung to the summum bonum of fascism in Hitler. That way madness did indeed lie--and indeed nothing could lie further from the sublime commonsense of La Fontaine. Funny how it is, that I so thoroughly and absolutely detest the (immodest, hypocritical) person that Jean-Jacques Rousseau basically was, that I cannot read patiently his most unexceptionable writings (e.g., du Contrat Social), and certainly could not abide a paragraph or a page of, say La Nouvelle Heloise or Emile; while, at the same time, I adore Bernardin de St.-Pierre, Rousseau's admirer and close friend, and I love without reservation the quintessentially romantic and Rousseauvian Paul et Virginie. I think Napoleon (of all people) had much the same dichotomous dislike of the one and admiration of the other. Which troubles me: When you start agreeing with Napoleon (in matters of taste at least), you know you're in loony-land.  Or maybe there's more to Napoléon than we had heretofore allowed ourselves to think about....

Heads up, Dr. C.


It is a cliche, not less true for being continually reasserted, that one of the most moving and edifying events in our life is the confounding discovery that someone whom we have believed to be our foe is in fact our friend. But the yet more uncommon discovery of abiding enmity in one whom we had believed to be our friend can be even more stirring and illuminating, and can show us with far greater clarity the substance of our own philosophy, and can reveal our own natures to ourselves in a truer light than love could ever admit of. Such is the discovery that I have made in reading Kaiten Nukariya's essay on "enlightenment," written apparently (judging from the idiosyncratic, characteristically Japanese mistakes in syntax, spelling and usage) originally in English. Throughout the first two chapters (1. Enlightenment is beyond Description and Analysis 2. Enlightenment implies an Insight into the Nature of Self) all is well, or not too bad. But the third chapter (The Irrationality of the Belief of [sic] Immortality) begins with a roundly, unpleasantly biased (in the direction of racist bigotry) generalization that happens to be not quite true of either of its subjects: "Occidental minds believe in a mysterious entity under the name of soul, just as Indian thinkers believe in the so-called subtle body entirely distinct from the gross body of flesh and blood." Well, perhaps Indian thinkers do believe in some such rarified abstraction--I am not knowledgeable enough of Indian thought really to tell--but the assertion of what "Occidental minds believe" is calumnious, and worse, ignorant. And it's all downhill from there. The fourth chapter (The Examination of the Notion of Self) descends into meretricious twaddle, informed by an underlying, malignant Confucianism of which the author is so far from examining as, seemingly, not even (in a vulgar, culture-bound way) to be aware of it. Thus: "The belief in immortality, based on...an insatiable longing for longevity (grotesque infelicity!)...is another form of egoism, one of the relics of our brute forefathers. I challenge my readers to find in the whole world any crime not based on egoism....Has there been anyone who committed theft that he might further the interests of his [fellow] villagers? Has there been any paramour who disgraced himself (?) that he might help his neighbours? Has there been any traitor who performed the ignoble conduct (sic) to promote the welfare of his own country or society at large?" It is at this point that I begin, as they say to "resemble that remark." Yes, in fact, if you define "traitor" as one who conscientiously deplores and defies the government which circumstance and the accident of nature have visited upon him, there have been quite a significant few--Henry David Thoreau for one, and myself for another--who have "performed the ignoble act" (refused to pay our taxes, flouted military conscription), exactly, "to promote the welfare of" our "own country" and "society at large."
But hey, just a goddamned minute--in my pique at finding myself and my favorite philosopher misunderstood, I neglected to deal with the self-serving absurdity of Kaiten Nukariya's (best known, after all, as the author of Bushido, the Religion of the Samurai)'s challenge. I will not say that egoism is a good or a beautiful thing; in fact, as George Meredith dissects it and lays it bare in his wonderful novel The Egoist, it is one of the nastier and more contemptible ways of hiding from oneself one's own inconsequence. But it is plumb silly--or perhaps something worse; something perhaps self-excusatory in a Japanese militarist--to derive the worst evils in the world from it. In very fact that worst, cruelest, stupidest crimes that I can think of--the atrocities committed by the German and Japanese soldiers in World War II, the endless bloody ritual massacres/sacrifices of the Aztecs; the savage life of pillage, torture and murder of Merovingian Franks, and of American paramilitary forces in Latin America and the Middle East--have been, and are, committed with something like total abdication of the "responsible will."
But to continue (from memory), K.N. goes on to assert that, "We are all the reincarnation of our parents, as our parents are the reincarnations of their parents, and so on ad infinitum." He says, moreover that, "It is absurd to say that we go to college simply in order to educate ourselves and not to become educated members of our society." Too stupid, too brutally collectivist, too ignorant of the infinite variability of human genetics--in a word, too dumb-ass Confucian--even to waste my time refuting. I thank God as I read it that I am no compatriot of Kaiten Nukariya's, so that I am spared having to endure his-in-particular's intolerably familiar presumptions of consanguinity and cultural cousinhood. I have always thought that the "brotherhood and love" constantly thrust upon you by followers of Jesus Christ was the nastiest over-familiarity ever likely to be imposed on you by total strangers; but I see now that I've been wrong: Compared to the Confucianist notion of inheritable class/status, Christianity is positively respectful.


I think, always, of G. Gordon Liddy's conversation with Timothy Leary, during which he held his wrist in a candle flame until it was quite roasted and the pain must have been exquisite, and showed the blister to Leary, saying, "You see, what you (liberal humanists) don't understand is that we (fascist authoritarians) are serious."


Nor am I forgetting, ever, the equally, nay even more serious Lady Xoc, whose subjection of her mere, unserious, individual self to an excruciating higher cause of state is graven on Lintel 24 in Structure 23 at Yaxchilan, Chiapas, Mexico (an event which took place around 709 a.d.):

"Shield Jaguar stands holding a flaming torch...Kneeling in front of him we see his wonderful queen, Lady Xok. And she takes a rope that's studded with thorns [now believed to be obsidian shards]..and she's running it..through her tongue...Spots of blood are collecting on the paper...in the basket in front of her.
"Pain and loss of blood were a necessary prelude to conjuring up...royal ancestors [To conjure a Vision Serpent..the bloody paper will be burnt as (an) offering to the Gods to prove her royal lineage."]

And serious, or not serious (Who can tell with the Smirking Chimp?), there is George W. Bush's, for real, defense of branding fraternity pledges with coat-hangers ("in the small of the back, just above the buttocks") during hazing/initiations--supposedly the only sample of his under-graduate prose to have survived--with his interestingly knowledgeable and petulant-sounding dismissal of the pain as being "after all, no worse than being burnt with a cigaret." It does sound as if it were something he'd personally investigated. So I'd say, yes, probably he was serious.