Castalia

My dream-fantasy, that I have never "shared" with anyone, and which actually takes up a good deal of my conscious fantasy-life, is that whenever, in a Far Western State, I see a needy (hungry, homeless or unhappy) child (usually a boy, but I suppose it could be a girl), I just go up to him (or to his parent/s) and say, "Here's 5,000 dollars, and my card.  Spend the money as you will, but I advise you not to buy food or clothes or personal items for yourself just yet.  You will notice that the address on the card is that of a five star hotel in the city center.   I urge you to go to it.  You will find that a room has been reserved for you, and that a member of my staff will be there to greet you and get you settled in--and, just for this evening, to take you to dinner and/or do some preliminary shopping.  Tomorrow, others of my staff will make sure that you get time to swim in the hotel swimming pool,  to get in some intensive shopping, as well as to meet other kids in your program-group, and to explain our educational/lifestyle program, and administer compatibility/eligibility tests to you to see just where you might fit into it." 

My Guilty Pleasure is Reading Salon Magazine,

which, in my self-defense be it said, I only started reading when Glenn Greenwald was its featured, major political columnist:  When Greenwald went on to the Guardian, I admit, I should have gone with him, and not lingered to laugh and jeer and shudder deliciously at what an hysterical twat-rag Salon has become without his serious, male, proportionate insight and example.   

On the other hand, how inexhaustibly hilarious it is that the females Greenwald left behind are utterly incapable of distinguishing the (serious, brutal, injurious) style of ¡rape! of Mr. Ghomeshi from the (funny, clever, non-injurious) style of ¡rape! of Mr. Cosby.  The one hurts and the other does not hurt--What could be simpler?   I'm so glad I'm gay, and that I don't have to pretend: to take ¡rape! seriously, as if it were the moral equivalent of mayhem or murder; or that I give a shit whether women have orgasms or not; or that I don't recognize a self-serving, face-saving lie when I hear one.  'Cause I'm really good at detecting lies--even if it takes me a while to conceive of their intended purpose and to whom they are necessary.  I have not the iridium steel in my bones, or the near absolute zero in my heart, that many worthy straight men have, who live with women, and love them--or at least have sex with them--and answer lie with lie, and, with a practiced pretense of affection,  conceal their complete indifference to them. 

I hadn't thought about Mike Ruppert for some time--a galant, funny man--

And what I find on Googling him is that he supposedly shot himself in the head on the 13th of April, this year.  Oh, and there's a note in his own hand to "prove" his suicide--so fucking obviously dictated under torture, or threat of torture--and two or three pages of op-eds, blog entries and solemn ruminations, obviously bought and paid for (What kind of rock do the CIA's apologists live under?), reasserting that  no, it couldn't possibly have been murder, and that Ruppert had run out of time, and money, and was very, very depressed (as who wouldn't be having proved that the CIA is a criminal, corrupt, rogue agency?).

But, they say, if you want really incredible "suicide," think about Garry Webb, Pulizer Prize winning journalist, who on December 10, 2004, shot himself twice in the head, being overcome with remorse and regret, apparently, for having said about the CIA pretty much the same thing that Mike Ruppert said.

Grandpa Fleming and the Palouse, my Infancy and early Childhood

It is of some importance to note that all the grandparents of all the children I played with, and went to grade school and to Sunday school with--in the benign immensity of the Palouse of the 40's and 50's--all of them knew one another, and were, for the most part, friends.  Telephones were eavesdropping and information sharing devices: party-line wall-phones, usually in the kitchen, with magneto cranks to signal the operator (one long crank) or the other people on the line (by a sort of Morse code of long and short cranks).  Needless to say, with a dozen or more members per party-line, the wall-phone rang all day long--and th'industrious Palouse farmwife (with or without a girl to help her, preparing three solid meals a day, for a dozen-odd family members, hired men, and whoever else happened to be there at meal time; plus canning, preserving, cleaning, cream-separation, butter-making and such endless jobs as egg-candling) had to keep an alert ear out for her own identity code (say, two longs and two shorts) and that of whomever else (say, Amanda Gordon, three shorts) she might be gleaning dirt on.  

Actual physical communication, over the gravelled roads between ranches, and paved roads near town, was by pickup truck for men and kids, and by car (nearly always a Buick, but sometimes a Cadillac) for farmwives and grandparents.

The grandparents who owned, and, with their progeny and hired hands. inhabited the Palouse during my infancy and early childhood, were those who had worked through the initial, failed staking of claims and establishing of homesteads from the 1880's to the 1910's, and had bought up the farms of the improvident and incompetent first-comers, welding two or three or four farms together into one "ranch."  As a child, lithping in numberth, I was well aware that my mother's father's "ranch" consisted of at least four different properties:  The virgin land that he had broken out himself at the age of nineteen with the backing of a character loan from a bank, and where he had built, with his own hands, the house that my mother was born in, and that I was conceived in; the property adjacent to it, the "old Whiteman place," with the artesian springs, groves of ancient trees, and the vast, untidy old farmhouse where my mother's older brothers and their children lived; wheat-land, property adjacent to the old Whiteman place, purchased, I think, from elders of the Gordon family; and lastly, bought from the Gordons, Pampa, an idyllic oasis named for a town that had disappeared by the time I was born, with green pastures along a creek that flowed out from the pond fed by year-round springs, a pretty, big old farmhouse surrounded by fruit trees and poplars, two immense gardens, tended severally by my grandmother and my grandfather, of flowers (nearly an acre of irises) and vegetables.  There with some ceremony, bidding his sons and son-in-law (my father) take over the wheat growing and harvesting of the composite larger acreage, my grandfather retired at the age of fifty-eight, and, with the help of a dour, devoted collie dog, raised a small herd of Guernsey cows whose preternaturally rich, golden (high carotene content) milk virtually inundated his family and neighbours.  I, born at the flood of those Channel Islanders' lacteal production, vividly recall  from my earliest years,  an abundance of butter, home-made ice cream, great pitchers and tall glasses of milk, and breakfast cereal with clotted cream--thumb-sized chunks of pure, delicious butterfat.

The most remarkable thing about my grandfather, although it was not noticed by his friends or family because of his sometimes abrasive gruffness, was that he never in his life, however mightily provoked, raised his hand in anger to an animal or a child--nor would he permit his sons or sons-in-law to do so.  I think, upon reflection, that he doted on me, and I know that I loved and admired him:  He was, after all, the former Kid Fleming, who came West, from Iowa, at age thirteen, supporting himself by working as a clerk in his uncle's grocery store in Yakima.  Then, at age fifteen, he joined a group of wild horse capturers and tamers ("breakers") working mostly out of the Horse Heaven Hills near Pasco, whence with skill, courage, and a non-violent system of horse-breaking uniquely his own [hitching four wild horses to a buckboard and giving them their head], he acquired his grubstake and his glorious sobriquet.  He was a wonderful man to listen to the Lone Ranger with--who teared up just as I did at the Lone Ranger's splendid chase-music, and at the noble sentiments and manly valor evinced by our hero.  I think he may have been gay.

"An impossible man to work for, or with," my father proclaimed his father-in-law to be; yet the fact that he was rich and the president of the local draft board enabled my maternal grandfather to procure for my father, who'd have made a poor soldier anyway (despite his good looks), an exemption from military service on the grounds that he was a "Worker in an Essential Industry." And, truth to tell, the work was not all that hard, leaving my father plenty of time to practice his two favorite hobbies, drinking and flying a succession of small, private airplanes--and to his credit he never drank when flying; and as soon as I was of an age (four years old, I think), he began to take me flying with him, calling me his co-pilot, first in the Piper Cub, then in the petite, pretty cherry-red little Funk.  We flew all over the Pacific Northwest, Idaho and Montana, my father and I--and, though it was a near thing on a couple of occasions, I never once wet my pants.  Vividly--what a wonderful first memory!--I remember, of a brilliant sunny day, flying among towering cumulus clouds, then "disappearing" into their mysterious, misty interiors.

But in fact, my very first vivid memories are of feasts, feasts such as farmers reward themselves with--Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, as well as harvest meals, and a local event held in June, called the Farmers' Day Picnic to which all the farmwives who considered Lacrosse to be their official, local town, contributed lavishly, according to their virtually unlimited means of patriotic and victorious prosperity, every viand, delicacy, vegetable and sweet imaginable--with certain notable, white, middle class American omissions: There was, to be sure, no beer or wine proffered at a Farmers' Day Picnic, or snails, or baby rabbits, or sea urchins, or song birds "baked up in a pie," or ducks--and though there were pheasants from the teeming hedgerows and ditches, these were cooked up tough, savorless and dry, due to the unbending abhorrence of local farmwives of anything even remotely like the "rotting" of game fowl.

It is also of some importance to note that, as well as not eating or drinking a number of things that European peasantry can scarcely do without, we wheat-ranchers of the Palouse, unlike our Continental counterparts--with the exception of our grandparents--even in the 1940's, bathed at least once a day.  Our grandparents, however, continued not bathing oftener than once a week. And frankly they had an odor, not that unpleasant, but pungent in my young nostrils, of what the Japanese call "old-people stink."

Christmas 2015

What makes it Christmas, in what is otherwise so un-Christmassy Honolulu, is getting brief Christmas Eve phonecalls from John Marshall, Marcus and Phil, the last of whom sent me via e-mail the picture of an "indescribably delicious" bottle of Moselle which graces our blog today.

What colour are they now, thy quiet waters?
The evening star has brought the evening light,
And filled the river with the green hillside;
The hill-tops waver in the rippling water,
Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape
In thy clear crystal.

Phil, so he says, is about to set out on a gastronomic tour of northern France, whereof he promises to send me menus, wine-lists and descriptions.  Whereas Johnny Marshal, so he says, is about to become one of the official judges in an Eastern Washington Medical Marijuana's growers' contest--required, as such, to sample about half of some 120 entries.  Further news, says John, may be read in High Times magazine.  "Remember to pace yourself," said I to the already exultant John Marshall.  And I said pretty much the same to Phil.

Reflecting, I see that I have spent most of my life ln Bardol/Meditative states and in practicing Sadhanas--conscientiously and assiduously, but usually unaware of the their formal, Yogic significance

I began life, as I have said elsewhere, aware, not of myself as such, but of my parents' need to conceive me, as is natural in the Sidpa Bardo, or Bardo of (re)Birth.  As a conscious being, drawn to the erotic energy of these two, slightly hysterical but very pretty and quite nice young people that my parents were, I first flooded the room with blue/white light (visible perhaps only to the Inner Sight), then hovered above my them like a a star (and not unlike Tinkerbell), and at the height of their orgasm descended into my mother's womb, I was conscious of bringing them peace and  joy, and of allaying their fears (and indeed, in the late afternoon of December 7th, 1941, "a date that will live in infamy," they were sore afraid)--and I was strangely, matter-of-factly aware at the same time both of their fears and of their material circumstances, and knew that I would be born, nurtured and cared for in my first years in the midst of great ease and abundance.  Two and a half decades later, in a dark room in an abandoned house,  one summer evening in Portland, Oregon, in the arms of an ecdysiast whose professional name, funnily enough, was Barbara Buxom, I observed and experienced a similar descent into my partner's womb of a blue/white, star-like, male entity, who--had his fetus not been aborted a few weeks after--would have been my son.

I do distinctly recall, as well, from my first experience (knowledge?  seeing?) of the Sida Bardo that I felt no hatred or aversion for my father, as is said to be customary for reincarnating male entities, but rather an amused, playful sort of pity for both him and my mother--such as one feels for children  whose fears one knows to be exaggerated.  Of course, many parts of the world on the eve of my conception were absolute hell--and in fact, throughout my earliest childhood, I recall a recurring vision, not exactly a nightmare, but more like a disquieting peripheral awareness, of people--just people, men, women and children--being thrown into a burning pit, which (though I knew it not) corresponded with the contemporary reality of Eastern Europe and the South Pacific under the Axis Powers in the 1940's.  But for us favored children growing up on wheat ranches in the endlessly fertile, utterly peaceful rolling hills of the Palouse, the 1940's brought a life of abundance probably unequalled in the history of the world.  We were rich without knowing we were rich, and we took our prosperity for granted, thinking that we had earned it--or that our grandfathers had.    

Long, long talk with Phil last night--

We got deeply into the belief systems of the many headed, noting that they have no actual standard of truth as such; and that they believe, rather, whatever they think they ought to believe (say, Creationism).  That is, they believe (or profess to believe) what they have somehow (probably by the example of those whom they deem credible persons) come to think to be the opinions of persons of such worth and credibility as themselves.  Something like that.  And as to disbelief, quite simply, they   disbelieve whatever it causes them too much pain to believe.  And that is how, though they know what controlled demolition is, and have seen many other instances of it on television, they can look at the images of the controlled demolition of the three skyscrapers on 9/11/2001 and disbelieve that what they are seeing is controlled demolition: prima facie evidence of the government's willingness to slaughter its own citizens.

Phil then brought up Edward Louis Bernays, of whom I had never heard--but whom, as I now Google him and read the Wikipedia entry on, I, with horror and aversion, recognize to be (along with his uncle Sigmund) the very Father of Lies and the Cold War and the CIA, him being particularly, personally responsible for what I have always thought the two greatest Abominations of U.S. foreign policy, our entry into World War I, and our overthrow of the government of Guatemala in 1954.  Jesus fucking Christ.

Still Bingeing on the endless Television Series 'Supernatural,' watching one damned episode after another on my computer, into the wee hours of the morning, day after day...

While the world,  seemingly ever more firmly in the grasp of psychotic/sadistic ghouls, imbeciles and madmen (I speak primarily of the United States of America, and its bloated, fascist military/security agency dictatorship and NATO allies) tips ever more vertiginously into the toilet, with the destabilization of the Russian economy, destruction of European and American assets, and ongoing murders of civilians, especially children--such as the recent massacres of school children in Pakistan blamed on the Taliban which are so obviously the work of the CIA. How life doth imitate art.

I have learned, in a recent letter from my bank denying me, now or ever, a credit card, that I (of all people) have a credit rating, and that it couldn't, possibly, be lower.  Ha ha.  I mean, the idea of me having a decent credit rating!  It's like the idea of me driving a car.  Or me getting married to a woman.  Or me (even when I was young and lissome) competing in intercollegiate wrestling.  Or joining the marines.  Or (even before Vatican II) becoming a priest.  

So, the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA "Abuses" has been out for a week or two now--

You can read on the Huffington Report what those CIA "abuses" are supposed to have been--bad indeed, you might think, if you've never seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib, or the appalling video "Collateral Murder," and if you've somehow managed not to hear about our own Military Intelligence 's torturing of children, or the slitting of babies' throats in front of their parents--or if you know nothing of those bodies dumped every morning before dawn in the streets of Mosul and Fallujah bearing "signs of torture" (i.e., with their faces flayed and their fingernails torn off); or maybe, really, after all, not such bad things.  Hardly bad enough to get the CIA abolished. Funny. Could somebody still be covering things up? Could it be that we are still not being told the Whole Truth?

Who said that torture has anything whatsoever the fuck to do with eliciting information?  Or with interrogation, for that matter?  Of course the head of the CIA did say it--but why in the name of Christ was he allowed to say it?

I didn't talk to Bill Weaver, our "Guru," for a decade or so after I first knew him, about his direct experience, towards the end of World War II, of the Nazi death camps: sniping out S.S. guards (as I had heard he did) before the Red Cross got there, at Dachau and Belsen--but finally, one evening in the late 70's, during one of what had become our regular "family parties," I put it to him: "So, what would you say, is the Truth of the Nazi death camps?"

And, after a slight pause, half reluctantly, half didactically, Bill said, "Never believe that those stories about the hot-lead enemas are not true."

Then he said, "there was one thing about the Nazis, though--a space I could not make--how they could pick a baby up by its heels and dash its head against the wall."

au Cinéma

Watching the TV series 'Supernatural' (first season) on Hulu, I'm impressed by the youthful beauty of the supposedly fraternal protagonists, and their evident intention of acting (goddamit), which is seldom quite realized, due to their youth and to the generally execrable quality of the scripts and the all around, palpable awkwardness of their (no homo!) relationship as entirely and emphatically butch brothers--intermittently while watching the same show in its tenth season on Netflix: wherein the beauty of the protagonists, especially Sam's, has noticeably dimmed (and Dean threatens to become just a tiny bit potelé), but the acting, as such, is 1000% better, and the writing is positively brilliant, with every now and then a fairly direct allusion to the still utterly girl-less relationship of the brothers, and a much more relaxed attitude about it--befitting the middle of the second decade of the third millennium.

And among all that, I'm watching the great quantity of the great Clara Bow's astonishingly idiosyncratic and marvellously effective silent movie acting--a real treat.

Dialectical Materialism--Rubbishy Nonsense, Preposterous Piffle

Lest I be thought a mere captious Logical Positivist/Empiricist Evil Bee of Discord who     buzzes about troublesomely and maliciously making up my own poisonous and solipsistic definitions of things, I will quote a couple of (what anyone, I'm sure, must agree are) objective, non-biased definitions of Dialectical Materialism; the first is from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and the second is from the Concise Encyclopedia (both, I gather, being Encyclopaedia Britannica companies):

(Item 1):  "Dialectical Materialism: the Marxist theory that maintains the material basis of a reality constantly changing in a dialectical process and the priority of matter over mind..."

[Dialectical Process:  Reasoning in which a question-answer approach (dialectic) is used to examine the correctness, legitimacy, or validity of an assumption, idea, opinion, etc.  Plato]

(Item 2):  "Dialectical materialism: Philosophical approach [to?] expressed through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later by Georgy Plekhanov, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Joseph Stalin [Stalin wrote?], the official philosophy of Communism.  Its central tenet, borrowed from Hegelianism, is that all historical growth, change, and development results from the "struggle of opposites."  (In philosophical terms, a thesis is opposed to an antithesis, which results in a synthesis.)  Specifically, it is the class struggle (capitalist and landowning classes [Thesis!] Vs. the proletariat and peasantry [Antithesis!] that creates the Dynamic of History [Synthesis!].  The laws of historical dialectics [!] are seen to be so powerful [!] that individual leaders are of little historical consequence [!].  Originally conceived [!] as operating in the realm of sociology, economics and politics, the principle [!] was extended in the 20th century to the scientific realm [!] as well, with major [notorious and deleterious] effects on Soviet "science."  Marx and Engels stated their philosophical views mainly in the course of polemics and brief historical [!] studies; there is no systematic exposition of dialectical materialism."

Where to begin?  Last things first:  The fact (If the Concise Encyclopedia tells us it's so, let's just assume that indeed it is so.) that "there is no systematic exposition of dialectical materialism" is a very good indication that there is, in fact, no such thing as dialectical materialism, and that its non-existence must be the inevitable conclusion of any principled, scrupulous, honest attempt to make a 'systematic exposition of dialectical materialism.'   As, for example, have been the conclusion of all principled, scrupulous and honest attempts to demonstrate the nature of the Ether--In which Lenin also, significantly, persisted in believing, long after the Michelson-Morley experiments (of 1881 and 1887) had established its non-existence.

Now, back to the very beginning:  Georg Hegel's "reading" of, "knowledge" of, and "intuitive understanding" of History--from which the rest of his "philosophy" is famously derived--I feel compelled to say immediately that there was nothing that the [silly, pompous little] man had more ridiculously wrong notions about,  or a less intuitively correct understanding of.  He was, moreover, so absurdly and overweeningly persuaded of the perfect correctness, nay sibylline profundity,  of his historicity that I find just about any opinion he held on any historical subject insufferable: Perhaps because it's a subject in which I have myself done considerable reading, and it's dear to me--my first impulse on reading or hearing of one of Hegel's historiffecations is, not to laugh, as probably it deserves, but to vomit, and then to slap the stupid, pompous face of the vainglorious little mind that imagined such fetid twattle.  In fact, after just a paragraph or two of Hegel's illucid prose, I find my palms tingling with undelivered slaps--Surely this cannot be good for my hypertension or my temper.

And/but, in at least the second place (or instance) ¿¡What the bloody fuck does "the material basis of a reality constantly changing in a dialectical process" even mean!?  Or even more basically ¿Whatever--in a world that has long accepted Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy as true and valid--meaning or sense is there in "the material basis of...reality"?  much less "constantly changing in a dialectical process"?  ¿¡How (the bloody fuck) is it at all even conceivable that a process of any sort whatsoever (much less of a constantly changing reality) might be "dialectical"!?  And these are not, O Vladimir Ilyich, three different ways of asking the same bloody fucking question.

And lastly, is the question of "priority" of any fucking importance whatsoever? To anybody but snobs, that is, and those who serve them.  But if matter (what is talked about) has "priority" over mind (the organ of reason), doesn't that make it virtually impossible to talk about things?

Sad Chickens

Talking on the phone yester-morning with my old friend, gay chess buddy, mildly Tourette's-syndrome-afflicted Douglas H., who now lives in northeastern California, but who lived for some time, in years past, in Hawaii. While we were talking, the feral chickens who live in the park-space under my east-facing window, next to the animal shelter here in Honolulu (in a situation not unlike that of the feral but pettable cats that live in the gardens of the Villa Borghese next to the zoo in Rome) were making the kind of distressed noises that chickens (roosters anyway) make on drizzly days: a discouraged, never quite finished or exactly repeated, but continually re-commenced version of their usual sunny-day "cockadoodle-doo."  I asked Douglas if he could "hear my cock" over the phone. He said he could.  

"You'll notice," I said, "that they don't seem to be saying 'Cockadoodle-doo' at all."

"That's because," said Douglas, "they were brought there by Filipinos and the Portuguese and Malaysians as fighting cocks.  They don't say 'Cockadoodle-doo,' they just kind of cry."

"¡Fucking barbarians!"

"Yes."