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.