BLOGIQ

The Worthy

Being out here can change the way you look at things.  When I first arrived here in the Oregon wilderness, fresh from my failed career, I was just the same as I always had been, if a bit more ripe.  You know the sort of fellow... an extra bright guy with a cheerful smile, and then, a temper like an armload of sweaty dynamite.  Not the sort to be trifled with.  But here in this place I found what I needed: a challenge!  95 acres of wilderness, and–– absolutely nothing!  I had to build it all!  I am a lousy carpenter, and know of nothing but music, so... the perfect challenge!

I had never owned a dog.  Grendel the Swift, my first dog, was a Corgi, an oversize tube of ridiculous furry meat with the legs missing, the paws seemingly attached with too few parts... a living piece of comedy to keep me company as I built the necessary shelter so that my wife could join me.  Grendel is as all Cardigan Corgis, designed with a permanent smile attached.  As a result of the characteristic skull shape endemic to the breed he was always smiling.  I needed that, and as I worked through the wet winter months alone, I was not alone, I had Grendel, whose unusual body shape seemed in some way justified so as to contain an enormous bladder, a feature upon which I came to depend, as he could go 15 hours at a stretch curled up in the trailer without needing to urinate if the weather was bad.  That dog was my best friend.  I have never had much love for people, but animals I love, and Grendel was tops. 
    

My wife showed up and we were a family.  Like any family there was a characteristic sound to our lives.  After we added my wife's unbalanced and equally noisy Kelpie pup to the mix along with our parrot, the din of our happiness could be heard for miles.  Someone noticed.  I heard the hissing sound and thought nothing of it.  I am a city boy.  A gun shot I get, but a hiss?  Who cares.  My dog noticed. 

One afternoon the din of our lives was interrupted.  The barking became intense and then as my wife watched, the cougar emerged from the brush, the sound, the hiss, then no more barking.  The cougar left Grendel with his neck snapped, the two holes in the back of his head like two red eyes.  He died on the couch, his eyes wide and his body paralyzed.  I went nuts.

I wept and was inconsolable.  For the first time in my life I felt hate, real hate––for an animal.  I built the trap out of heavy timber, solid and right.  The vertical channels would receive a full sheet of three fourths inch ply and it would crash down as a guillotine from seven feet, hitting the deck with a crack like a rifle.  Nothing would escape.  I trained the lights from my truck and tethered a cord. I amassed the weapons in the bathroom so I could spray it with 100 rounds and kill it... while seated.  I baited it. 
    

There is not an animal stupid enough on the face of the earth to enter such a trap. You could feel the hate.  I used hormones, and meat, sound and scent.  He never returned.  No animal on this earth would be so stupid as to have entered that trap.  There was too much hate in the air.  Air like sour lead.

I got a pit bull with a stout neck.  A few years passed.  Lily, my pit bull is not cute or smiling.  She chases bears like an evil lathering gargoyle and also... cougars.  One day I heard her barking like a mad thing, crazy for about half an hour.  I went to see what she had treed.  Her mouth was foaming and her hackles were up in a combination of fear and blood lust.  A pit bull is a terrible thing once aroused, it is like hollow point ammunition, perhaps just a bit too much.  I looked up into the tree and there it was.  A cougar, and a large one too!  I thought of all the people I knew, and all the lies they have told me, lies told with a smile and a warm look, and I remembered, and looked... looked up into the tree and saw them: those eyes.  Yellow and pure, true and right as instinct, yellow and absolute.  A predator, just like all the people I knew, but different, better––more honest. 

So magnificent to see them!––those eyes which had pierced the darkness so long before my wife or my dog had arrived here–– those eyes, so yellow and unrepentant, never shifting, only looking ahead, right to be what they are, true and worthy, and I knew, no matter how easy the shot, I could not kill it.  I never took aim, the pistol never raised.  How could I?  Just look!  How royal and magnificent to see such honesty, such cold and pure honesty which never pretends!   This animal had the integrity of 1000 men.  I could not kill it.  Just look at those eyes!––– Not a lie in sight.

 

Rich Norman

Cornelia Funke: Author of Reckless, etc.

For the last few days I have been sporadically listening to the audio version of Reckless by Cornelia Funke.

Those who are au courant in best-selling books will probably know who she is. I am catching up on books published since I lost interest in mass culture and was pleasantly surprised by this book.

Reckless is fed by the works of the Brothers Grimm. Cornelia Funke reuses the traditional stories and adds world-making details of her own. For others who have studied heritage stories and so-called myths, her use of the old stories may be interesting.

Apparently Cornelia is an illustrator and writer, which may be why some of her written details are so easy to visualize.

The story is full of adventures and ordeals. I look forward to reading or listening to the sequel.

If you enjoy adventure stories, this book may be of interest.

 

 

 

Related links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Funke

http://www.get-reckless.com/index.html

http://ericksontribune.com/2010/09/master-storyteller-cornelia-funkes-real-world-of-fantasy/

Please feel free to post relevant information.

~E. Marie

Who Fired Prometheus? Pt. 3. The Historical Nexus: Our Fearful Phylogenetic Ethic and its Origins

 

In the third part of this series of articles detailing the sources and archetypal reflections of conscience/super-ego, I am left with a daunting disconnect between the elevated conscious perception of our moral facility, and its unconscious aspect.  Indeed, I was so very surprised to discover the source and dynamic implications of my own conscience, that I wrote the following in my book, The Tangible Self:

 

"Although castration is big in psychology, it seems absurd to the ordinary healthy person.  I never thought about it.  A non-topic.  Perhaps once a decade there would be talk of gelding a bull and the word would come up.  No one ever spends even a single moment concerned with the idea.  It seems nothing short of asinine to make so much of it as they do in psychology.  Castration?  Nonsense!  Imagine my surprise to be presented with the contents of my unconscious and to observe thousands and thousands of scenes, so many scenes from every period of my life, and what do I see?––acres and acres of unbelievable super-energetic fantasies about or involving only one thing: Castration!" [Norman, The Tangible Self,  pp. 77-78.]

 

We have seen in parts one and two of this series, the mythological imprint of this punitive aspect of human archetype and ontology:

 

http://blog.theultranet.com/2013/06/who-fired-prometheus-part-1-our-barbaric-mystery.html

 

http://blog.theultranet.com/2013/06/who-fired-prometheus-pt-2-analysis-the-archetypal-mutilationour-masochistic-inheritance.html

 

One can read of the purpose of these images, and how they serve to form the super-ego, which is inheritor of our Oedipal complex:

 

". . .we can tell what lies hidden behind the ego's dread of the super-ego, its fear of conscience. The higher being which later becomes the ego-ideal once threatened the ego with castration, and this dread of castration is probably the kernel round which the subsequent fear of conscience has gathered; it is this dread that persists as the fear of conscience." [Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id” in A General Selection From The Works of Sigmund Freud, p. 233.]

 

And we can see the masochistic/passive /feminine implications revealed in the analysis of Prometheus Bound offered in part two of this series:

 

“. . .the castration complex always operates in the sense implied in its subject-matter: it inhibits and limits masculinity and encourages femininity." [Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (vol. 19), p. 256.]

 

So the question presents itself, from whence comes this ugly dread, this internalized punitive barbarism with which we are all threatened, and how did it come to find purchase within each of us?  The answer is to be found in the record of human history, and the trail of laws and myths which follow in its train.  This image is now a part of our inherited phylogenetic and instinctual template:  Its aspect now a ripe possibility waiting to be brought to ontological fruition, a masochism as ripe fruit, swollen and turgid, an ugly fruit in need of but a tender breeze to fall to earth and disperse its poison.  In his most worthy book, The Greeks and the Irrational, E. R. Dodds, a superb Greek scholar and philologist par excellence, draws the strings of history and psychology together for us.  This ugly imprint has been nurtured over thousands and thousands of years.  Its exact source is clear to discern with Dodds's careful examination of the historical record. 

 

"The head of the household is its king . . . and his position is described by Aristotle as analogous to that of a king.  Over his children his authority is in early times unlimited: he is free to expose them in infancy, and in manhood to expel an erring or rebellious son from the community . . . as Zeus himself cast out Hephaestos from Olympus for siding with his mother." [Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 45-46.]

 

However, as early as the 6th century BC, the situation had begun to change, and as social conditions began to improve, and the father's authority became less and less absolute in the face of these new social conditions leading to increased personal freedom, the strict authoritarian structure of family life began to loosen.  Now, what was a shame based dynamic, one based on external threat from the father, becomes a guilt based dynamism, one based on an internalized threat, an internalized moral structure in the true modern sense of the word emerges: super-ego.  This is demonstrated by the need for laws introduced by Solon, and later, by Plato, to safeguard the now threatened patriarchal family structure. [Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 46.]

 

Super-ego uses severe repressions to create by internal means, what were behaviors, inhibitions and restrictions previously brought about by external patriarchal threat.  Dodds fleshes the idea out as follows:

 

"The peculiar horror with which Greeks viewed offenses against a father, and the peculiar religious sanctions to which the offender was thought to be exposed, are in themselves suggestive of strong repressions.  So are the many stories in which a father's curse produces terrible consequences––stories like those of Phoenix, of Hippolytus, of Pelops and his sons, of Oedipus and his sons––all of them, it would seem, products of a relatively late period where the position of the father was no longer entirely secure.  Suggestive in a different way, is the barbarous tale of Kronos and Ouranos . . . the mythological projection of unconscious desires is surely transparent––as Plato perhaps felt when he declared that this story was fit to be communicated only to a very few . . . and should at all costs be kept from the young." [Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 46-47.] 

 

Here is a synopsis of that myth. Please note the Oedipal and castration themes.

 

From, http://www.deathreference.com/Ke-Ma/Kronos.html:

 

"According to the Greek poet Hesiod, in his Theogony (c. 750 B.C.E. ), Ouranos ("Sky") mated nightly with Gaia ("Earth"). When their children were born, Ouranos hid them in Gaia's inward places. Painfully swollen with offspring, she wrought a huge sickle and asked her children, six brothers and six sisters (the Titans), to punish Ouranos. Only her youngest son, Kronos, agreed. Giving him the sickle, she told him where to hide. When Ouranos next lay on Gaia, Kronos grasped him with his left hand, the sickle in his right, and cut off his genitals. From the drops of blood that shed on her, Gaia conceived among others the Giants, and from the severed genitals, which fell into the sea, a white foam arose from which was born the love goddess Aphrodite.

Now followed the rule of Kronos. He married his sister Rhea, who bore him three daughters and three sons: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus (the Olympian gods). But Gaia and Ouranos had foretold that Kronos would be over-thrown by a son, so he swallowed his children as each emerged from the womb. About to bear her sixth child, Zeus, Rhea asked her parents how to save him. They sent her to Crete, where she hid him in a cave on Mount Aegaeon. She presented Kronos instead with a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he thrust in his belly. Zeus grew apace and in time forced Kronos to yield up his children. Once reborn, the gods waged war on the Titans, whom they overthrew, and Zeus replaced Kronos as ruler." 

(Please note also, that some versions of the myth repeat the reversed wishful castration theme, and Zeus also castrates his father in turn).

Now from the Dodds:

 

"And when Plato wants to illustrate what happens when rational controls are not functioning, his typical example is the Oedipus dream. . . it seems not unreasonable to argue from identical symptoms to some similarity in the cause, and conclude that the family situation in ancient Greece, like the family situation today, gave rise to infantile conflicts whose echoes lingered in the unconscious mind of the adult." [Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 47.]

 

And lastly Dodds assembles the entire picture for us in these words:

 

"The psychologists have taught us, how potent a source of guilt feelings is the pressure of unacknowledged desires. . . the human father had from the earliest times his heavenly counterpart: Zeus pater. . . Zeus appears as a Supernatural Head of the Household. . . it was natural to project onto the heavenly Father those curious mixed feelings about the human one the child dare not acknowledge. . . that would explain very nicely why the Archaic Age Zeus appears by turns to be the inscrutable source of good and evil gifts alike. . . as the awful judge. . .who punishes inexorably the capitol sin of self-assertion, the sin of hubris.  (This last aspect corresponds to that phase in the development of family relations when the authority of the father is felt to need the support of a moral sanction; when "You will do it because I say so" gives place to "You will do it because it is right.") [Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 48.]

 

Here in this historical transition from an external shame based ethical structure, to an internalized guilt based structure, in this internalization of the patriarchal threat (introjection), we see the creation of our modern ethic, our conscience, our masochistic capitulation: our super-ego.  This historical basis for our phylogenetic inheritance can be brought to light and assessed as to its healthy or pathogenic contribution by way of economic analysis, and clinical example.

 

I will provide that analysis in the next installment of this series.  Once we clearly see the way the phylogenetic impression is brought to bear and made to resonate by current situational developments in upbringing, and, a precise account of the economic effects of this ugly historical precipitate are made manifest in specific example, the dismal, current picture of modern personality and ethical structure will be complete.  Then, it will be my happy task to reveal the healthy alternative, the wondrous answer!  For "the thing" can be removed, do be sure of that!  Particular formative impressions can be brought up from under repression so as to disband, weaken and eliminate super-ego… permanently!  Then, other healthy structures can be energized and used in a new and novel way, to free our energies and allow even the worst of Life's abuses to be reclaimed, and those energies used to healthy result, unbound from fixation.  Ethics are a function of Empathy.  Ethical structure, real ethics, are not a function of threat!  We will soon see how much intelligence and happiness has been ruined, how much of ourselves and our potential has been maligned and wasted for this barbaric abuse, which we have so foolishly inculcated into our very being, and in the height of sheer idiocy, proclaimed in our ignorance, not to be sadism and waste, but, to be none other than the very height of human achievement, as if capitulation before a tyrant were the essence of truth, as if obedience before this ugly lie were in fact: virtue. 

 

Rich Norman

 

References:

 

Dodds, E. R. (1973). The greeks and the irrational.

       Los Angeles: University of California Press.

 

Freud, S. (1926). The standard edition of the complete

       psychological works of Sigmund Freud volume

       nineteen: The ego and the id, and other works.

      London: Hogarth Press.

 

Norman, R. (2011). The tangible self.

    O'Brien, OR.: Standing Dead Publications.

 

Rickman, J. (Ed.) (1957).

    A General Selection from the

    Works of Sigmund Freud.

    New York,  NY: Doubleday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Star Weekly At War: Compelling Visuals To Seduce The Gullible

Above image: Cover image for The Star Weekly At War by Ian V. Macdonald

http://www.thistlexpress.com/star_weekly_at_war.htm

This book has the most compelling collection of Norman Rockwellesque war propaganda illustrations and photos I have ever seen.

Gallery of photos from the book:

http://www.thistlexpress.com/gallery_the_star_weekly_at_war.htm

To the best of my knowledge, images are very quickly received into the brain compared with pages of print.

For those who were born after WWII, I suspect many have never seen the onslaught of lying propaganda that led the gullible into fighting and dying while the greedbots and banksters profited.

The only time the reality of men, women and children being mutilated and killed was alluded to in propaganda illustrations was when the ad was for Victory Bonds.

Book Introduction & Epilogue:

http://www.thistlexpress.com/epilogue_the_star_weekly_at_war.htm

Excerpt:

"...The selected pictures and articles thus should not be seen as a reliable historical record, but rather as an example of how government and the media can make palatable, if not gratifying, what was essentially a catastrophe for all concerned...."

Ian V. Macdonald, the author of The Star Weekly At War served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He subsequently was a Canadian diplomat. Ian has written extensively about the harsh and deadly realities of situations that the humans who call themselves the government often prefer to keep hidden.

Above photo is from the biographical information page about Ian V. Macdonald at:

http://nostalgiasattic.ca/aboutus.htm

Excerpt from the above link:

"...(Ian) organized the first two Canadian Trade Missions to Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe and arranged the visit of two Zimbabwean mining and trade delegations to Canada. His diplomatic and commercial experience in Arab countries earned him a request from the government of Libya to bring a 96 member Canadian Delegation to the high profile Peace Conference of 1987 in commemoration of the US bombing. He narrowly escaped assassination in an anti-Libyan plot to discredit the conference. (Chris Halens, the son of a German diplomat and reporter for Southam News became the ultimate target). Ian was the Chief Canadian Delegate to two International Conferences in Moscow on sanctions and led three business missions to Baghdad following the Gulf War. Currently he is writing a series of books based on his experience with foreign subversion of the political process in Canada and about the techniques employed by the media to conceal the problem from the public. He also is a trombonist in Great Jazz, a Swing Era Big Band..."

More biographical information about Ian is at:

http://www.thistlexpress.com/about_Ian_Macdonald.htm

Please feel free to post relevant information.

~E. Marie

The Break of Night

 

Please enjoy this parable from my book The Black Mirror.

 

     Leslie was alive, a blossom held aloft in life’s season. The strange wounded tumult of joy and awkward exaltation which is youth buoyed and savaged her, and she opened her tender unknowing before it, and like a sail welcomed all dangerous winds and seasons to find their breath then within her, and claim their heights as her own. All the world is weather, and gladly fills such a sail.

 

     Likewise all those who sail want nothing more than rope to rig their mast and hold such a sail, so they may invite the wind to test it. Jack was a sailor to be sure, and beheld Leslie with the hunger, hope and daring of youth’s highest wisdom. Only one who has yet to find the cross winds of his true seasons is wise enough not to doubt such a truth, and in the sure wisdom of youth they were wed.

 

     The wisdom of youth beholds the future never knowing it is not the present, and so believes itself true. All sorrow and happiness, dull, awesome and terrible, were to fill those precious years with life’s full froth, for bitter makes sweet, and life is such a brew as this. In storm and season the mast was sure and the sail was swollen with those winds which blow twice. And so Leslie knew her body, and its season filled her heart with crimson sweetness, and so her body knew her husband filled her and she him, and did forget herself, and choose to know this season’s full breath, will and measure, in place of her own.  She was full to be pleased and to please him, and was that not happiness? She served him before all things, and so placed her burden down and was virtuous. “After all, who need carry water for two, when to serve one is wet enough? Am I not full to know he is happy, and is this not sacrifice and virtue?” So she whispered the words of her secret soul to herself no more, and found it easier not to hear them.  Is it not easier to be silent when the season fills our heart? How can a blossom not deny itself for the wind? What but passion could speak loudly enough to quiet the dead?

 

     Again the wind blew and the sail was swollen before time with its second breath, which her body graciously returned. Her child bore her heart aloft, and she blossomed to his season, and plummeted to his depths, and they were as life loves life, in double draughts of bitter and sweet, and so time’s thirst was slaked and its season spent.

 

     So full with time’s hungry winds, her days were consumed, and she was alive and floated upon the stream of its passing, born high above her lost words, the season’s happiness was within her and cast no shadow. How could she see her hollow shadowless happiness from such height? “Is it not best to sacrifice our words to the season of our children, and find our place happy amongst their streaming clouds and windswept days? Is this not sacrifice, most beautiful?” So did kindness call her disappointment virtue, and name her unwilling emptiness beauty. After all we are kindest to ourselves when we murder ourselves, and most forgiving when our lazy steps find virtue shuffling over our thousand graves. Who but virtue could quiet the dead? Under whose feet does our happiness sleep? Under whose leaden feet is our happiness pressed mute?

 

    So time came as a virtuous thief, to steal the cost of Leslie’s virtue.  Leslie found her body tire, and an empty place came, where another season once bloomed. Her children left and she cried out to her husband, “I am empty and gray. My children no longer need me, and my sacrifice is unreturned.” He said unto her, “You may love me, and I you, and so we might fill each other with time’s last drops of life.” So they found the shadows of evening fine company in play amongst this Autumn, and Leslie sacrificed to her silence and bore her husband’s weather within her as her own, and was happy in her Autumn shadow.

     Leslie’s husband, at last, could no longer cheat time, but left of her, and knew no more days, and sacrifice claimed the wheat of Leslie’s life, and so Autumn melted into icy winter, with the empty field of frost and stubble her sacrifice had born. Leslie cried out, “My husband, my love!” but he was gone. “My children, my reason!” but they were gone. Only the night remained to hold her, only the night remained to hear her, a windless vacant sphere, a silent vacuum which has forgotten the promise of sacrifice, where the pulse of passion has been long silent, where no echo of dawn remains.

 

     Leslie thought of her life with its hundred seasons—red lust, loves glowing shadow, purple anguish bruised and tormented, shy yellow days and golden baskets of wheat, and how these filled all the light of her days with color. Now only palest night remained within her, empty and unhued, for what is blackest is also what is most absent, empty and pale, in its darkness.

 

     The night held Leslie without touching her, and its silent voice cradled her to listen, for the night loves us by receiving, its absence is its whisper, and so Leslie heard, and knew that a new season had held her in the tenderness of perfect silence. She understood the black pale beauty of night, the shades of its ink which whisper the sacred prayer of our days into an empty ear, a waiting hollow like night itself. Our night soul is a hidden cave filled with still air and the echo of our days.  Once the echo fades we are blessed to know what remains. This is the night’s silent wisdom. So does the night bestow us to ourselves, as a silver whisper, cradled in ink.

     So Leslie unfolded her winter heart, and laid it open before the night, to hear the night whisper into the quiet of her soul. Only the palest diamond leaves light unspoiled. So may our winter heart know the night: as a crystal chalice filled with what the hot sun has spilled into the night, made tender and perfect once poured through the white ice moon, and washed pure. Leslie thought this to herself and knew the night and its rejoicing, listening silence, and found her courage could be heard in the still night air. She decided to cheat the virtuous ghost named Time, and steal the moment of her night happiness back, and so give it Time’s breath with these lines of verse:

 

"The Break of Night"

The break of night, day's under season
Slowly yields its gold to ink.
The folded page, now free from crimson
Finds in blackness freedom's light.
Ever often passions straining, faded as a laurel worn
Now but ink reclaims the heart, in darkness stilled, and still reborn.
What air is drunk in silent folds, the tender ear in rapture slakes
Of heaven's thirst and then in season, feels the perfect still of night.
No longer pulled, no longer heated
Spring of fire be gone, and so
I hear no pulse, but know this evening
Only now, my promise hold.

 

This work is the sole property of the author, Rich Norman © 201o, and is used by this forum with both permission and gratitude.

If True, Respect & Thanks to Edward Snowden, Surveillance Whistleblower

Many of us have been aware of mass internet surveillance since the early days of the World Wide Web.

Now Edward Snowden has exposed how everything we do via internet and say via telephone is being collected for possible use.

In his interview video, he seems to be an intelligent, honorable man.

"Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelation:  The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows":

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance

Excerpts:

...In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

Despite his determination to be publicly unveiled, he repeatedly insisted that he wants to avoid the media spotlight. "I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing."

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. "I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me."...

...He has had "a very comfortable life" that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."...

Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. "I am not afraid," he said calmly, "because this is the choice I've made."

He predicts the government will launch an investigation and "say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how massive and invasive the system has become".

The only time he became emotional during the many hours of interviews was when he pondered the impact his choices would have on his family, many of whom work for the US government. "The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more. That's what keeps me up at night," he said, his eyes welling up with tears...

...The primary lesson from this experience was that "you can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act."

Over the next three years, he learned just how all-consuming the NSA's surveillance activities were, claiming "they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them".

He described how he once viewed the internet as "the most important invention in all of human history". As an adolescent, he spent days at a time "speaking to people with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own".

But he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance. "I don't see myself as a hero," he said, "because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."

Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA's surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. "What they're doing" poses "an existential threat to democracy", he said...

End excerpts.

Of course, the system of government in the United States was designed to be a constitutional republic and that term is frequently confused with democracy.

Additional information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden 

Please feel free to add relevant information.

~E. Marie

 

 

Who Fired Prometheus? Pt. 2. Analysis: The Archetypal Mutilation––our Masochistic Inheritance

This is the second, of what promises to be a four or five part series of articles, outlining in general terms, the historical development and ontological genesis of the castration complex, super-ego and conscience, and, a hopeful new discovery.  This redesigned construction of personality, will yield greater intelligence, enhanced ethical and creative functioning, as well as increased affective stability, by way of replacing certain existing unconscious structures which are endemic to modern personality.  Before I offer up the happy alternative, we must first look most carefully at the current state of affairs. What forms our conscience, our super-ego?  Please examine the Rubens, Prometheus Bound, posted below, for a window into the unconscious, the "under-soul" of our human height and sickness.  To fully understand this article I will direct the reader to the first in this series, which can be accessed at:

 

http://blog.theultranet.com/2013/06/who-fired-prometheus-part-1-our-barbaric-mystery.html

 

These topics are unpleasant and seldom discussed, but their imprint is omnipresent.  Psychoanalysis is the tool best suited to uncover, plainly discuss and understand these issues, as psychoanalysis has always rightly enjoyed a bad reputation, the hallmark of honesty which never curries favor with its audience, and shuns all attempts to modify a pungent truth with our pretty lie: good taste.  So, dear reader, brace yourself for an unvarnished truth most dyspeptic, our height and human cooperative conglomeration perched upon a savage mutilation, a penalty utterly barbaric.  After this piece of analysis, I will then detail the history of the phylogenetic impressions forming our masochistic cooperative, and offer up a specific ontological example of the economic psychodynamics involved, and at last, we will then return to the shining surface and reveal the answer!  So be brave and read, for the antidote most cheerful awaits one who can look plainly upon what follows. 

 

Analysis of Rubens: Prometheus Bound.

 

First, I will direct the reader to the following link for a discussion of the relationship between unconscious content, repression, and the creative process. 

 

http://blog.theultranet.com/2013/05/a-novel-idea-from-symptom-to-sublimation.html

 

Please note that artistic creation is a function of the wish for reunification with unconscious content.  Indeed, Rubens is a supreme example of the proposition, a profound artist whose relation to unconscious content is all but a direct one.  As one approaches undistorted unconscious content more and more closely, said content strengthens its energetic cathexis by way of symbolic multiplication and redundant thematic "over-determination," as it is known in Freudian psychology.  Here, on the surface, we see a quadruple redundancy representing a particular complex: the castration complex.  This punitive complex provides the threat around which conscience, super-ego, is formed.  Before I detail exactly what I mean by that statement, and justify it in terms of direct observation of unconscious content and psychoanalytic theory, I will outline this redundant surface symbolic architecture. 

 

1.  Prometheus is bound in chains.  (Binding is a well known and common symbolic representation of castration).

2.  Prometheus has no genitals. 

3.  As is typical in dreams and hysterical symptomatology, Prometheus shows a distorted displacement of the active element, as a wound representing the female genital, and hence castration, is displaced onto his side.

4.  Lastly, and of no small interest, the bisexual nature of unconscious content and human disposition is represented, and the act of castration extended and further embedded into the image, as we see a clear example of female castration being carried out upon the analogous organ, the clitoris, which is being removed by the representation of the father, Zeus's eagle.

 

Now we need but ask and answer a single question, to reveal the wishes and fears which are contained within the image.  I have found a simple formula which has provided great aid in interpreting neurotic symptoms, and as you know, a dream, an artwork, and a neurotic symptom are all constructed via the same mechanism: the return of the repressed, and hence, can be understood using precisely the same methods of analysis.  Neurosis hides its energetic unconscious sources with a sort of disguise, a distortion of its core energetic unconscious components is used to conceal those pathogenic elements which are active in its formation.  Many types of distortion are used, mostly, symbolic compromises between conscious censorship and unconscious wishful ideations, but I have a particular distortion in mind: the reversal of cause and effect in manifest presentation.  The result appears as an unhappy effect, a catastrophe or accident most unintended, but that is the distortion.  The effect in a neurotic symptom is the wish!  This reasoning applies perfectly to the Prometheus myth: 

 

All knew of Zeus.  He was the most severe, powerful and intolerant of all the gods, so very stern and potent in his discipline!  His wishes are known: Fire is of the gods, not of man!  His temper and punishments are known and feared by all!  Why did Prometheus disobey such a sure and stern patriarch, so powerful and so sure, so very certain to find him out?  Only one reason can be deduced: Prometheus wished to be punished!  Prometheus is a masochist.  Now we can interpret the image as a masochistic/hysterical symptom: Hysterical symptomatology is formed by two "counter-valent" wishes simultaneously affecting a single symbol.  "Counter-valent" is my own term which denotes a single symbol affectively encoded with two opposite wishes from two different psychical systems.  In this case, the horror of the image is one wish, the disobedient guilty wish for punishment, which originates in the super-ego, and the other wish, the opposite wish finding its source in the unconscious id, is the wish to submit to the father and be loved by him, as symbolized by the eagle plunging into the wound, the primary submissive masochistic wish par excellence!  The symptom then, is a product of the tension between the two counter-valent wishes, one a wish to be punished by the father sourced in one psychical agency, the super-ego, the other to be loved by him, sourced from the unconscious id.  Indeed, psychoanalysis has rightly understood (in the male subject), precisely these two aspects, the fear of castration and the wish for love of the father, to be part of every human mind in the form of the negative Oedipal complex.  All people, men and women, have two Oedipal complexes, the negative and the positive, which in their simultaneous affective strength and balance result in the fundamental structure which determines the healthy or unhealthy outcome for each of us.  Here we see the two aspects which form the male negative Oedipal complex: the fear of castration, a requisite mutilation and horror (and I contend also, a guilty masochistic wish for punishment), which must precede the completion of the second wish, the wish to "submit" to the father and be loved by him.  It is this core compound masochistic-homosexual wish, the horror, the tension and horror between these two wishes, the guilty horrifying wish to be punished by castration, and the wish to sexually submit to the father and be loved by him, the structure of the negative Oedipal complex itself, which carries the core threat around which conscience is formed.  Conscience is a masochism.  Just as with all masochists, Prometheus acts so as to encourage his father to punish him.  The resulting image is so very potent and powerful in its punitive force, that virtually all our drives have in some part been subject to repression into the unconscious as a result of this patriarchal threat!  Our conscience is but an ugly punitive relic of the threat of castration, conscience, a pathogenic guilty structure, formed as an ugly relic from an abusive father.  I will spell this idea out in detail with reference to specific texts and clinical examples in the next installment of this series.

 

You will also please note how the outcome of the new version of the Prometheus tale I had written in the first part of this series, so very different in its form, has at its core the exact same result!  Although in my version, Zeus does not punish, and it is Man who rejects Prometheus, my attempt to redefine the meaning failed utterly!  Archetypal material asserts its form by way of unconscious sources!  The coals being tossed from hand to hand are a clear symbolic reference to masturbation, which phylogenetically, is invariably punished by castration carried out by the father.  Prometheus submits to Zeus in substitution for the brotherhood of man!  The exact same outcome!

 

This notion is not so far-fetched as it may seem, and next time, I will demonstrate the fact by way of reference to specific psychoanalytic texts, ancient law, clinical example, and history.  Perhaps there is another way to create moral structure and ethical sentiment?  Once the historical development of super-ego has been articulated, I will provide a specific ontological example, so we may see exactly how conscience is formed in the case of the individual, and after a study of its economic, ethical, and psychopathological implications, we may well find that a healthy alternative is presently at hand.

 

Rich Norman

Dog Poop Powers Park Lights to Dog Poo (Methane) Power Goes Global

Feces is the correct word for poop, of course, and poo or poop can be more fun to say, especially while cleaning up after beloved companion animals.

Methane conversion is not new.

This application of converting dog feces to light in public places is innovative and apparently has become popular since 2010.

From "Dog Poop Powers Park Lights" by Wired UK 09.15.10:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/dog-poop-powers-park-lights/

Excerpt:

"...Mazzotta’s Project Park Spark, which was funded through MIT and created in partnership with the City of Cambridge, comprises a special “methane digester” that converts freshly scooped poop into methane.

Dog owners collect their dog waste in a special biodegradable bag and throw it into the digester –- an air-tight cylindrical container, where the dog feces are broken down by anaerobic bacteria. A byproduct from that process is methane, which can then be released through a valve and burnt as fuel. In this case it is being used to power an old-fashioned gas-burning lamppost in a park..."

The Park Spark Project web site is at:

http://parksparkproject.com/home.html

Several agencies and companies have apparently gotten involved in methane digesters for dog poop.

"Dog Poo Power Goes Global" by Dr. Reese Halter:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-reese-halter/dog-poo-power-goes-global_b_1648239.html?utm_hp_ref=green

Excerpt:

"...The concept is straightforward and, more importantly, needed to address rising atmospheric methane globally. Over a two-decade period, methane is 72 times stronger at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

Traditionally, rice paddies, cattle and peat bogs were the main source of methane. Today, landfills, cattle, hog and chicken manures are also large methane contributors, as well recently as mega amounts from thawing sub-Arctic soils and bubbling from deep-sea Arctic methane deposits.

Across America there are over 78 million dogs. In the UK there are about 10.5 million dogs. Canada has approximately 3.5 million whilst Australia has a little less at 3.4 million dogs. That's a lot of dog poo -- in Australia alone it's at least a half a million metric tons a year..."

Please feel free to post relevant information.

~E. Marie

My Noontime Happiness

I am in a most unusual position.  I have aged well beyond any expectation I have ever nurtured, as a jazz musician of the highest order for some twenty years, complete with the attendant "sacrifices," it seemed impossible that I should ever have achieved the disgracefully old age of 50, for such an admission is a disgrace to one steeped in this most noble and ignoble tradition.  Ha!  I have escaped!  So let us rejoice and celebrate my impossible victory.  I have cheated the fact, left the smoke filled room, become an intellectual, and discovered paradise!  Look what I have found!  I have a "present" for you:  Here, come with me––

 

 

Oh my friend how I have missed you!  Your summer so distant from my noontime happiness, drenched in Sun and heat, splashed bright and wet with light and purring red Sun. I will wrap the world for you, fold it into my happiness and the warmth of this forgotten noon, stolen back from Time so I may give it to you... Here, come with me.  Let me show you my crumbled world, now snatched away from Time, again liquid and living, hot and sultry with scent and sweetness, twice stolen and double thick with my noontime happiness.

 

Here is the pathway, draped in cool shadow and scent, currents of tangled lavender breeze at once sweet and vanishing into clear forgetfulness; the sheltering greedy canopy of folded green, arching its back over the shade, shafted fingers of yellow light and pools of rose, splashes of amber and peach, drifting currents of heat and thick warmth, ripe Sun and welcome bashful tongues of cool shade, sudden laughing puddles of mirrored heat and silver light splashing under our careless footfall.

 

Oh the greedy shelter of this noontime canopy!  Its folded green heat and burnt brown fingertips hungrily suckling upon the noontime Sun, licking up its heat and pain into itself, greedily sheltering us from the burnt heat of noon.  Safe, cool and protected here under its sheltering greed and folded green heat.

 

Now the Sun pierces our brooding kindly host, tickling her fingers of yellow feathered light and golden shadow, her branches of red and orange daylight, stolen through under the green wing above us––So kindly and lidded, this arching shelter of leaf and life, green and growing, ripe and hot, unfolding itself before the furnace of Day...  As if it could drink her whole heart into itself.  And so the Sun teases these trees, this hungry arching palm of folded heat and shifting branches, piercing and shadowing, the gauze of Day dripping her golden red feathered fingers of light and teasing heat upon my cheek––Here in my noontime happiness.

 

Now the Sun has had her fill.  As we climb higher and higher, the sheltering lid of green growing thinner and more feeble, until at last her wing is bare.  Her hungry green tent torn away.  Now slapped blind in a white sheet of Sun, I have been kissed, blessed, blinded and sanctified, washed clean and boiled through to know her, to know the wet kiss of her white molten heat, the blinding spattered sheets of Sun now drenching, pouring their relentless vibration, pure and white, boiling up through me, cleansing me with pure fingers of white platinum light.

 

Oh how I have missed you, my friend!  Who but you is strong enough, to know even this much happiness?

 

Now standing before my noontime Sun atop my mountain, the world spreads itself before my horizon–– Bright and unrefusing is my noon!  Here are my distant mountains, cold and alluring, granite, gracious and forbidding are their cragged peaks, gently ringed in the supple milk white shawl of seasonless snow,  delicate and eternal.  Here is the endless pale sweep of my painted azure heaven, arching and encompassing, endless and containing, bright, clean and cold, boiling with the wet white heat of my platinum noon.  Here is my valley unfurled before you.  You know its careful, hunched, hidden places, and slender threads of platinum and rose, jade and azure, green and guarded, shaded, greedy and sheltering, sunken, lush and sweet...swollen with hidden treasures and tangled scents, tongues of cool shade, fragrant memories––and silver sweet forgetting.

 

Oh my friend how I have missed you!  Your summer so distant from my noontime happiness, drenched in Sun and heat, splashed bright and wet with light and purring red Sun. I will wrap the world for you, fold it into my happiness and the warmth of this forgotten noon, stolen back from Time so I may give it to you... Here, come with me.  Let me show you my crumbled world, now snatched away from Time, again liquid and living, hot and sultry with scent and sweetness, twice stolen and double thick with my noontime happiness.

 

 

This work is the sole property of the author, © 2012 Rich Norman, and is used by this forum with both permission and gratitude.

Every Minute: How Many Humans Are Born On Earth?

If you haven't already researched this, would you like to guess how many humans are born every minute on earth?

(Cue the game show music ;-)

Per http://www.peterrussell.com/Odds/pop.php:

Total births per second: 4.17

Therefore: 250.199 human births per minute

Peter Russell apparently uses U.S. Census site figures for his sources:

http://www.census.gov/population/international/

Can these figures be accurate?

Unverifiable, in my experience. Approximately ten years ago I called the Census office and asked where international population numbers came from. According to the staff person I spoke with, several countries estimate their populations.

What is the direct impact of world population growth on U. S. taxpayers?

Apparently some of the highest increases in human births occur in countries subsidized by U. S. taxpayers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_birth_rate

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_figures_for_countries.PNG

A site that provides some information on foreign aid distribution is:

http://foreignassistance.gov/countryIntro.aspx

Foreignassistance.gov has the following disclaimer:

"The data reflected in this map does not fully represent the total amount of foreign assistance available in a given fiscal year. At the time of request and appropriation, some funds are not requested at the country level. These funds are initially allocated to regional or functional offices for subsequent allocation to overseas offices or worldwide programs, and are not included in the heat map. In addition to funds from specific country offices, countries may receive funds from Regional or Functional offices, which are currently captured on regional and functional office pages."

Please feel free to post relevant information.

~E. Marie