Who is Kali? Sadhguru

Tout à propos (de la Déesse qui lève la coupe pleine du sang humain) this gentleman's explanation of what a goddess is, and what Kali, so defined, is, is the lucidest and succinctest I've ever heard--though I'm pretty sure that a gentleman is what he isn't.  His wit is cruel, and self-serving, but astonishingly acute. And he nails the Dark Goddess.

7 Secrets of the Goddess: Chapter 7.2 - Vitthai's Secret

There is much truth in this acrid little video--and in at least one instance, unless I have misunderstood it, a certain hair-raising untruth:  "The nature of man cannot be domesticated by rules that enforce fairness and justice. Such rules will only suppress and eventually provoke the beast within humanity [Sic!] to strike back, defy and subvert the very same laws."  ¡Hail Kali! (And, I think is also meant, Shiva!) Does this lady, with her ineffably correct (sometimes just slightly incorrect) Baboo accent, actually understand and mean what she just said? Do you think she could, maybe, show us some pictures of this beast?  Perhaps give us some examples of how being treated fairly and justly "only suppress" it, and "eventually provoke it to strike [back, she says, though clearly the beast will be the first to initiate aggression], [to] defy [justice and fairness?], and [to] subvert [the rules, or laws, which enforce fairness and justice]. Is "domestication" [even if it never happens] really the purpose of rules that enforce fairness and justice?--Why not fairness and justice as ends in themselves?  Is having a beastly [bestial?] nature--assuming that we do have one--incompatible with justice and fairness?  In fact, how exactly, if you are not a two-year-old child having a tantrum--or a Goddess drinking a nice, warm cup of human blood--do you "defy" justice and fairness?

I have spoken of roseate Ruby Darjeeling Tea, now (another strum of the Lyre) I sing:

Raw, Wild Rose Honey from Virginia (Appalachia), which only yesterday I received a nine-pound shipment of from the Formaggio Kitchens (of New Jersey, I think) purveyors, which I had purchased online but a week or so ago; which, if anything could, has made my morning cuppa, beyond ambrosial, into something like Super OOTW Sublime.  The inside of my head fairly reeks of roses.  All kinda roses.   

When I was a little kid, my forebears being mostly college-educated white people, the first gods and goddesses that I read about, in Victorian primers,

were the Gods of Olympus.  I didn't have to believe in them, and I understood that I didn't have to believe in them--but I liked them, and I liked believing in them; especially Apollo, Athena, Hermes, Zeus, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon; my favorites being Apollo and Hermes (although a certain frisson that went through my pubescent body when I thought about Sky-Father Zeus gave me to understand that a particular intimacy was the nature of boys' relationships with Zeus).  And there was a real sense, when then I went to Protestant (Methodist) Sunday school, that Jesus, for all his strange love of sinners, and suffering little children to come unto Him, lacked both the character and the class--and the wits--of the Olympians.  Frankly, he bored me.  But I was too young still, at ten years old and less, to realize quite what it portended for my Christian Faith that I found Apollo and Athena (the original Wonder Woman) fun and jocund, and if it came to that, believable--while Jesus, knock as he might at the door of my heart, and offering me "Salvation" for sins that I hadn't committed and didn't want to commit, seemed weird and distant.

Russia Just Had Something We've Certainly Never Had In America: An Honest, Free Presidential Election

Of course, the Russkis had a head start on us.  They never had an inherently rigged Electoral College.  Much less a totally corrupt, for-sale-to-the-highest-bidder bipartisan system which made it impossible for any honest person, ever, to be a politician.

Jimmy Dore is right, of course, that the Times are ripe for Revolution--

But so have they been for a very long time in this country, with its deliberate subversion of democracy by the powers of large land-owners, vested financial interests, and the autocratic centralist authority of the Federal Government since the days of its founding.  How, to begin with, did we lose unicameral legislatures (proposed by Benjamin Franklin)?  Whence comes this otiose, inherently corrupt parody, of the ancient Roman Senate and the English House of Lords, which is the "upper house" of American state and federal bicameral legislatures?  Why, for that matter, have we a president, and not simply a speaker for our parliamentary houses of commons? And, to speak of the unspeakable, what evil genius saddled us with the Electoral College?  It occurs to me that, once the Battle of Yorktown had established our independence, a secret benevolent society (of which there are many examples in the 1780's) might have finished the business of our revolution with the assassination of, say, John Adams, George Washington, and a dozen or so other notable absolutist Protectors of the Rights of Property (but not, of course, James Madison, whose Bill of Rights we would always need)--in whose absence, a much freer confederation of the states, not unlike the  Delian League in the Age of Pericles, might have been joined together, which might, from the first, have permitted the states to position themselves as slave-holding states Vs. non-slave-holding states.  And how many heavy heaps of misery of 19th century American History might that not have prevented?

Speaking of avoidable disasters which were made infinitely worse by refusing to avoid them, what was the American Civil War but a kind of Revolution in which the Wrong Side won?  But of course, states have a right to dissolve their attachments to one another and to secede from one another, and no state, ever, has a right to invade another. If only Lincoln had been assassinated four years earlier: Some 750,000 young men's lives might have been spared; the American West would have been settled earlier, as independent republics; and the tsunami of poor, wretched refuse from eastern and southern Europe (not to mention Ireland) which inundated the United States in the latter half of the 19th century would have been kept from our pristine shores.

Inspiring Rant: Your Democracy Has Been Stolen; It's Time For Revolution

One October Evening in 1965 in Seattle, Walking Home from my first Job as an Export Documentations Clerk,

Up along First Avenue, a couple of blocks down from the Pike Street Market, I halted in front of a beguiling, clean and warmly illuminated little bookstore, and walked in, penetrating perhaps a third  of the way into the establishment, where I saw displayed in a matching four-volume set the Four Yogas of Swami Vivekananda (of whom I had never heard and knew nothing), which I therewith purchased, and which (at least the fourth volume, Raja Yoga, the Aphorisms of Patanjali, with commentaries by Swami Vivekananda) became my meat and drink for the next year or so of my life.  So wise it seemed, and so profound, I virtually memorized it, learning of what the mind is made, how focused, how trained and how mastered.  I did not think till years later to discover who Swami Vivekananda had been, what his credentials as a disciple of Ramakrishna were, nor anything of his tragically short life or his enormously successful and influential career as a teacher and a scholar.  And in a sense, certainly I was right to consider anything and everything but the Raja Yoga as superfluous and inconsequential.

Nonetheless (and howsomever) what I eventually did come to know on a more personal level about Vivekananda--like his devotion to the Goddess Kali, which he apparently learned (albeit with some resistance) from Ramakrishna himself, and his counseling of a devotee of Shiva to "be pure and worthy" of his Lord, and his slavishly respectful attitude towards theism in general, frankly, make me want to vomit.  Kee-rist.  Esti de Tabernacle, as they say in Quebec, meaning approxinately fuck-oh-dear.

CHANTICLEER: L'Amour de Moy - traditional French, arr. Alice Parker/Robe...

         There are many versions of this lovely-lovely song on YouTube, some evidently scribbled down in tablature on the back of old envelopes to conform to the character of wheezily folksy "Traditional French" (whatever the hell that would be).  This sounds as if it could have been written by, say, Guillaume de Machaut, with its clear, heart-wrenching, internal rhymes and subtle melismas--and it's carefully and beautifully sung, so that all you notice when you hear it is its exquisite poetry, which is far too perfect--too simple, too limpid, too polished--to have sprung from some wild-ass rustic "tradition."  I have listened to it three times already, and I'm ready to hear it again.  This really is the food of love.

People Focus Hatred On Trump - Ignore Causes

So far as I can tell, Jimmy Dore is the only completely rational expositor of the plain and simple, albeit complicated and many-faceted, truth.  Saves me a lot  of work.

Ah les crocodiles!

Gotta say:  I like this guy's  exquisitely clear pronunciation of what is, after "l'Amour de Moi," my favourite song in French.  Only it seems to me there's a stanza missing...

Actually there are a couple of stanzas missing.  After Il fredonnait une marche militaire, etc., and (another repetition of) the refrain, should come:

                  Il s'agitait sa grand' queu à l'arrière
                  Comm' s'il était d'avance triomphant.
                  Les animaux devant sa mine altière
                  Dans les forêts s'en fuyaient tout tremblants.


Then the last stanza, before (the final repetition of) the refrain, should be:

                  Et tout rempli d'une crainte salutaire
                  S'en retourna vers ses petits enfants.
                  Notre éléphant d'une trompe plus fière
                  Voulut alors accompagner ce chant.

I grant, or concede, that neither of the putatively missing stanzas is essential to the swift narrative sense of the poem, and that the latter (of the two) is positively defective.  [Actually, both stanzas are fautifs--You just can't rhyme "triomphant" (singular) with "tremblants" (plural); nor, come to think of it, "enfants" (plural) with "chant" (singular).]  Nonetheless, the French child in me is much affected by the beasts trembling in the forest at the intimidating display of crocodile tail; while, as an elephant, I should miss sorely the invitation in the last stanza to blow my trumpet/trunk in triumph.  Perhaps we could, however, forget the iron rules of French poetry for the sake of just this one Comptine.  Or, if we could never do that, we might always add to it, after we sing it, a little leçon in good French prose explaining what faults we've just committed and promising never to commit them again.                

                      

We've spoken (sung high the praises) of Ruby Darjeeling Tea, which tastes and smells, among other things, like an armful of Red Roses--

What are we to say of Margaret's Hope's Spring White Darjeeling, which tastes/smells like a bouquet of Lily of the Valley?  Muguet, as I remember from the song of Guillaume de Machaut (I think it was), as in:

                     L'amour de moi
                     S'y est enclose,
                     Dedans un joli Jardinet
                     Où croît la Rose,
                     Et le Muguet.

Which, when you hear it, will break your heart with loveliness.

So "Bloody Gina" Haspel, whom Trump proposes to head the CIA, was "just following orders" in running those CIA torture camps in Thailand....

It's still quite clear that she tortured people because she liked torturing them. To hear her taunting a victim of torture affords a deep, horrifying insight into the very nature of Evil itself.  And, of course, that's really the only reason--bullshit aside--that anybody ever tortures anybody: The love of hurting others.  Orders handed down by superiors mean nothing.  As was concluded, I believe, at the Nuremburg trials.

But now, the point is, we are to have an all-powerful (possessed of a secret budget) rogue, paramilitary security agency, headed by an unrepentant, bloody-handed war criminal.  Things don't get much worse than this, until the Sultan himself starts wandering among us, murdering his "one innocent man a day." 

Still more interesting things I'm discovering about music (using my new, end-of-life, technical approach of "Just play the damn Notes in the Order they're written"):

Chopin's still too hard, and Liszt continues ridiculously out of reach (and who'd want to, anyway?); but Mozart and Beethoven sonatas have gotten astoundingly easy.  And, Beethoven, far more beautiful--I should say, far, far more beautiful--than I had ever imagined.  Maybe I mean even, astoundingly, philosophically, from-another-world more beautiful.  And I've always liked Beethoven. So maybe it's time to talk about pedophilia.  

Beethoven, of course, was a pedophile, as people who had charge and governance of their nephews in his day sometimes were, or could be when they felt like it--and there was nothing that the nephews (while they were still in their minority), or that the mothers of the nephews (or the sisters-in-law of the pedophiles) could do about it. Usually it didn't hurt the nephews too much.  You could even say, over all, that it was probably good for them.  And when they came into their majority (turned 18 and were no longer dependent children), they could confront their uncles, and say, "Well, that was then. Maybe nobody would believe what you did to me all those years--but now I'm going to get married, to a woman, and live my own life.  So give me my inheritance from my dead father, and leave me forever the hell from now on alone."  And that's what Karl van Beethoven did and said to his uncle Ludwig (so far as we know) when he turned 18, and went off to found Pullman Cars on passenger railways, and become a happy, rich and successful man in his own right.

Is any of what I have just written true? I urge you to consult your official (say, Thayer's) biography of Beethoven and to seek proofs to the contrary.  

Defining Trump

There seems to be some question, in some peoples' minds, about what Donald Trump is--how we should qualify him, so to speak.  In truth, there is no question.  What Donald Trump is, and has always been known to be--since he first appeared before us as a Reality Television "star"--is vulgar. Stupid, yes--thin-skinned, ignorant, illiterate, narcissistic, ineducable and irrational, even--but you miss the point if you don't grasp his one really irreducible quality which is vulgarity.  If you're still not getting it, go over--really listen to--the incredible, long, ex tempore oration he made, on the occasion of their Jamboree, to the Boy Scouts of America:  The word for what he said, and his manner of saying it, ladies and gentlemen, is vulgar. Apparently, nothing but vulgarity will serve the unspeakable purposes of the Deep State of America.

Vulgarity is inarguable, leaves nothing to be said--and that, no doubt, is what you want when your foreign policy is genocidal (intimidating through the slaughter of women and children), as it is now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Yemen, and your domestic policy is simply that of a fascist prison-state, designed to incarcerate as many people, and confiscate as much of their material wealth as possible: You say "Grab 'em by the pussy," or some similar, mind-boggling obscenity--and, for you, there is a useful pause. Wriggle-room. It takes the average citizen several instants of frozen horror (during which you are still alive) to realize that a bullet between your eyes, or a knife through your aorta, is the only really meet and fitting response to your violent, though possibly inadvertent, indecency.  Or so says the Charlotte Corday within me.

The Big Question--One that I am almost afraid to ask--is, I see, fairly popular on Google:

What if Henry VIII had not dissolved the Monasteries?  And what if, therefore, the Reformation had never come to England?  Would the Inquisition have stayed away? Could Science and Copernicanism (and Keplerism) have flourished? Might the Puritans and Pilgrims have gone their several fecund ways, without destroying the fabric of Society?  Most of the answerers seem to opine that English Catholicism, and monasticism, was so steadfastly English a phenomenon that (had it not been destroyed in the only way that it could have been destroyed, from the top down) it would have preserved its humanist equilibrium and ridden out the doctrinal tempests that  overwhelmed religion in the Empire of Charles V.  I agree.  It's not, mind you, that I think so highly of the Catholic religion, as such; but, in fact, English Roman Catholicism, and concomitant monasticism, was, from its beginnings, as much a peculiarly, through-and-through English humanistic cultural/political institution as it was ever a body of dogma.  English Roman Catholicism, and monasticism, was, if ever a religion were, the expression of a way of life adapted to the needs and exigencies of a whole people's lives in the sheltering circumstance of a "Scepter'd Isle, a green and pleasant Land."  Buddhist/atheist that I am, I find its humanity, its music (those odd, jerky rhythms, those strangely moving "false relations"), its "Perpendicular" Gothic architecture, too beautiful and in their way too true to discredit. When we think of Chaucer, of Thomas More, of Erasmus, do we doubt that Shakespeare, Milton, Hobbes and Locke are on the horizon?

Long Talk (almost two hours) with Phil Tonight,

Him saying, of prime importance, that there is, somewhere out there, a recording of Dame Nellie singing Cherubino, the very music which she was supposed to've lacked the Spiritual Refinement to sing.  Damn, I'm going to look for it.

Then we diverged into a long, excited dialog about the peculiarities of English music and architecture, from "Sumer is a-cumin in," through Perpendicular Gothic to "If love's a sweet Passion," noting the resonance with Frescobaldi, and the dissonance with Palestrina, attributing much to the rhythms of the English language itself.

Then we spoke of silly, senseless, psychotic, Abrahamic religions Vs. our own rational Dharmic religion; with wondering dispraise and disdain of Shaivism and secret/sexual tantrism, asking ourselves ¿why Kundalini Yoga is not accepted as the one, true, universal yoga? and ¿why ever Vivekananda (whom we, both, love and read the Yogas of) would have become a devotee of the goddess Kali?  Is it that we do not understand?  Or that we do not want to understand?

Truly I am fortunate to have such a friend as Phil.

Tea and Music

Since my bit of good fortune (an insurance settlement) came down upon me this past year, I have, frankly, wasted too much of it on absurd frivolities which it would be tiresome to enumerate.  But some parts of that ridiculous gaspillage, contrarily, I do not in the least regret; specifically my expenditures on Indian tea, printed music, and a fine little electric piano (Casio), with headphones, so that I can play the music I like best at any hour of the day or night without annoying the neighbours.   

The tea, in especial, has been my heart's ease.  One variety particularly, Darjeeling Ruby, is so fragrant, so delicious, so gently stimulating, so mildly soothing (morning headache begone!), that I really don't mind paying $100 for a half pound of it.  

Regarding my piano, of which my maid says, "You play and play--and no sound comes out!" After several years of not having a piano, and now basically, reviewing the music I've been playing for the past six and a half decades, I notice some interesting changes in my performance (or practice) habit: I no longer, as was ever my wont in my salad days, go from suite to suite, and partita to partita, cherry-picking the pieces that are easiest to play.  Nowadays, I settle down to playing one suite, or partita, or sonata, at a time, and I play it through, from Ouverture to final jig, with all the repeats, and all the right tempos.  It makes Handel and Purcell and Bach ever so much more satisfying and interesting.  Most especially the Bach suites and partitas, which have all their own peculiar characters (personalities even), which the cherry-picking mode tastelessly confounds; and most especially of all the Handel suites--the 'Harmonious Blacksmith' being but a glittering specimen in a wholly jewel-like suite in E Major.

Netflix' "Icarus"--Why I won't watch it

In the first place, I'm not even a little bit concerned about, or at all interested in, "doping in amateur sports." For that matter, I'm really not interested in amateur sports--and I might venture that anybody who is interested in amateur sports who is not actually an amateur who plays the sport he's interested in is an obsessive idiot--unless he's a fan, as I am, of peewee baseball. That said, in the very first place, the subject of doping in amateur sports is a non-subject, which those who are most hysterically fixated on make up their definition of as they "explain" it (and therewith, simultaneously, invent it).  The very word "doping," is absurdly ambiguous.  Do you mean "doping with performance-enhancing drugs"? Aspirin?  Amphetamines?  Cannabinoids?  Mescalin? Antibiotics? Ritalin? Well, speaking of my all-time favorite amateur sport, peewee baseball, should six-year-olds be allowed to drink coffee (before a game)?  How about hot chocolate?  It might very well depend on whether the game were to be played in the Netherlands or not. In any case, if you please, Richard Nixon and Nancy Reagan are dead, and with them, thankfully, also long since dead, and not resuscitable, is their characteristically imbecilic and boundlessly ignorant twattle about "drugs."

In the second place, I am not at all concerned with (though I quite understand--and despise) the desperate search that the morons (or, should I say? the malevolent assholes) who constitute the Deep State of America, and who like to think they dictate Foreign Policy, are launched on to find a Casus Belli for their transparently, utterly contrived New Cold War with Russia. Anything, apparently, will do.  And the New York Times (which has given us so many bloody but otherwise fictive wars since the end of the last, real one) will second it.  

I am kind of amused, and a little bemused, when I hear Red State white trash--say, Texans--talk about Patriotism and the Fidelity we all owe to the United States of America...

As if Texans (Texans!) had any right to speak of such things; much less as if they knew squat about them.  Let us begin with the iniquity of the Mexican War (We could begin with the genocide and usurpation of the Cherokees, but we won't), by the unjust means of which Texas was wrested from the sovereign country of Mexico and made into the first notable country, that I know of before the modern state of Israel, which had no right to exist.  Remember the Alamo, indeed!  I think you may have forgot what tax it was, and what it was assessed to cover the costs of, that Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail for not paying.

One Good Thing About the Genocidal Débâcle we called the "War" in Vietnam...

Was that it ended, for all practical purposes, the abomination of peacetime military conscription. The standing army we've had since 1975, of over-armed bulldykes, faggots, niggers and crackers (which is what black people call poor white trash), while a constant threat ["war abroad"] to the peace and stability of world at large, is of no consequence domestically [for the necessary "terror at home" of our tyrannous state--as devised so cleverly by Robespierre--we are amply supplied with militarized police forces, a hideous, bottomless prison system, and a plethora of murderous, predatory "security agencies"]. Still, we call them our "troops," and even Jane Fonda now says she loves and supports them.  Maybe because she's old, and she's tired of being called "Hanoi Hannah."

Well, I don't love or support our fucking "troops" (neither for what they are, nor for what they continue to do in Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan), and never did, even when they were raised by compulsory conscription (and were butchering the hapless civilians of Korea and Vietnam); but I'm half a decade younger than Jane Fonda, and I was never so prominent as she was in the anti-war movement.  Though I like to think I did my bit:  I went on a couple of notable Peace Marches and successfully evaded the Draft.  I even met Ms. Fonda in person one day in the spring of 1970, when she visited the underground newspaper in Seattle, of which I was the more or less official Gay Liberation Editor.  She spoke encouragingly to us in a general way, briefly, got some pictures taken of herself with our Editorial "Staph," and departed.  I thought two mutually contradictory things then about Jane Fonda in the brief while that I stood in her actual presence:  (1) She was the most beautiful person (except for Peter Coyote, whom I had met in San Francisco in 1967) that I had ever met in my life; and (2) she looked just like her handsome, masculine father (and her brother too, come to think of it).  Nonetheless, I thought I detected real sincerity in her, and was moved by it.

But still, Jane Fonda is simply wrong to love the mercenary "troops" of America, and very much mistaken if she now thinks it's okay to "support" them.  Mercenaries is mercenaries, my dears--killers for hire--and they're the scourge of mankind.