Don't know why I can't do Pictures anymore

The question is do I care. I think the answer is no. If could do a Doolittle and talk to the sums, they'd talk back, say things like He has to be one of those retarded boomers and go on to say incomprehensible things like Have you checked the compatibility of your browser and the platform you're downloading to. The answer to that question is I don't know how to. Always tempting to open a window and start throwing things out of it. The sooner I achieve nothingness the more at home I'll be

Creative Is.

The Bean with the beautiful name

Yes always sounds about right, unless the question is "Have you found your ending yet?" My favorite answer to that question is "It's not a craft, I don't do product, it doesn't need an ending." Creative Is  my friends. Think of it as a journey into the future,  a communion of wish, beyond consumption, fundamentally useless and yet it's work, and like pornography you know an end when you see one

The Welsh Bards

 
Milkweeds

Maybe Taliesin needs an explanation? We're talking the years of our lord 500 to 600 after the birth that gave us a renaming of the Winter Solstice. At that time the Roman Legions had runaway and The Welsh, The Compatriots or The Cymry, comprised the remnants of the Old Britons who had occupied the islands of Britannia in the years prior to the Roman Arrival in 55 BC, a tumult which would have had included Boadicea, or, if you still have a grudge against Rome, Boudica. The Welsh included Romanized Britons, some of whom could have read Latin, there were Christians as well as a reemergence of Celtic Gods, including a rather glamorous Irish Sun Goddess who had a knack for avoiding the attentions of powerful men. Along the East of the Islands, Saxons, Angles, Picts, Jutes and other savages were arriving in increasing numbers. The Welsh themselves were a long way from maintaining a Welsh Peace in Britannia. No. Instead they were setting the tone for the post-roman British Isles, they were a bunch of relatively civilized quarreling Kings and Princes. And yes, they had slaves, they had Saints, wise-men and a bardic tradition which went back two thousand years, and might have witnessed the long drawn out building of a structure called Stonehenge, off the A 303 in Wiltshire. Bards of the old tradition composed the poems, their role was to memorize and when called upon to recite the poems that came before them. They were the performers who carried history, praised kings, composed eulogies, gave powerful men and women something to live up to by giving them an existence in words after their death. Then around the year 900 or so parchment became more available, by 1300 paper had arrived in parts of Britain. And lo, the oral tradition was fading, any Tom, Dick or Harry could read a poem. Taliesin was one of the the first Old School Bards to be written about by monks. He was a rock star who did stuff like hang out with King Arthur and accompany a Giant called Brân the Blessed, which translates as Blessed Crow. Blessed Crow was a genuine Welsh king in the Pendragon tradition.  And like many super heroes Taliesin was found by accident, raised by the son of a powerful Lord. He wasn't found in the bulrushes although some propagandists have suggested he was found in coracle, he was in fact found under an Elm Tree, so there! In another story, as a child, Taliesin ran away from fairyland where his job as a child slave was to stir the Cauldron of Inspiration. 

Truth in Being and Taliesin

 

Milkweed Bloom

"Truth in Being." You can turn upside down trying to work out why.  One of the great minds of the 20th Century, when the French investigators looked into why he was a member of the Nazi Party, classified him as a Fellow Traveler. A verdict that made him a dip-shit in a large number of minds. He didn't deny it and he made no excuses for it, and in 1949, so long as he reached no position of authority he was allowed to start teaching again at his old university in Freiburg. His idea of "Truth in Being" was his version of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Of course, there'll be debate about whether I know what I mean, but we're not locusts, and, as yet, we're not mechanical devices either. There's more to us than being an abacus, which doesn't mean that being un-blessed by the ability to add up makes us any more or less human. It's strange, even here where I currently live, a good chance the odd eyebrows were raised when they read Hannah Arendt's short book on the Trail of Eichmann. Eichmann's defense was to claim he was doing what he was told. Hannah Arendt's defense against the critics of her book was to make a joke about how easy it was to tell when a critic hadn't read  her book. Evil, she claimed, was fundamentally banal. The Devil was boring as hell. For one of Arendt's sources of inspiration this idea of "Truth in Being" was the concealed waiting to be unconcealed. Made sense from him, our finite world was an unfolding of meaning. It certainly happened. A revelation occurred. And Maybe for Heidegger the finitude of existence was a good reason for a great mind to let it be, the resounding silence of who am I to care what people think, sat well enough in him. But you have to think about Taliesin, 550 anno domini into 600, the Greatest Bard of Wales whose poems of praise fed him well, bread, butter and mead came his way until he said something nice about a rival Prince. Taliesin made amends for his fickleness by praising his patron's brave son who'd died in battle. A death that broke the old man's heart, without Taliesin's poem of praise to his son and his kingdom, he'd lost his heritage. I have the feeling we've got a whole bunch of "Truth in Being" people, they've stopped trying basically, they'll wait and see, and I suspect there are a good few very fine masked Taliesin's swishing around in front of mirrors whose poems probably won't last. 

Walter Benjamin Art and Media

 

Gap

In the 1920's or 1930's Walter Benjamin's point about mechanically reproducible art was that it couldn't produce what he called Aura. Three things. In mechanically reproducible work there had to be a perceptual shift in the mind of the subject. What cannot be reproduced is the work of art's original presence in time and space. In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Benjamin made note of what he called an optical unconscious, a subject's ability to desire physical objects, which is connected to an ability in us people to identify information by habit instead of minute inspection. Perceptual twist, an aura of authenticity, and the mental heuristic that permits assumption, all three might be popped into an envelope called Media Studies and then ruthlessly abused.

Another Shot at Endings

Drain Field

The case of Donahue and Stevenson, whether a Mrs. May Donahue was entitled to financial compensation when she found a snail in a bottle of ginger-beer, first went to court in Paisley, Scotland, in 1928 and it found a conclusion in the United Kingdom's House of Lords in 1932. Mrs. May Donahue was a shop assistant, she separated from her husband in 1932, she subsequently divorced and died in a mental hospital in 1958 when I was six years old. It's totally a ripping yarn. For some reason, and I accepted this years ago, a conclusion-driven-saga is not within my own capacity. Tragically I'm beginning to take joy in what I'll call conclusion-less-ness. It's a right royal f-you and a get over it to the answer merchants. I just don't care what six times six is. And if occasionally I forget the name of this or that political figure or the name of the cat sleeping on my belly, too bad. 

Just another Life

Milkweed

The Ouspensky Phenomenon supposes that if we teach ourselves to think about reality in a different way we can open our consciousness to the idea that oneness is interconnected with many-ness. His Fourth Way combined the way of the physical body, the way of the emotions and the way of the mind. These are the three proud heritages of the Fakir, the Monk and the Yogi. Ouspensky placed his Fourth Way into the the midst of ordinary everyday life. He didn't seek a separation from the world in order to follow the Fourth Way instead he gave the Fourth Way a dimension, a mathematical quality within the context of his understanding of the four dimensions within consciousness. Here it's frightfully useful to accept that the esoteric as a mindset is communicated Symbolically. What does that mean. For some it means proper training within a culture that includes heavy doses of peer pressure that allows us to gain a familiarity with the language of Symbols. Others, such as Saint Teresa of Avila and Doctor of the Catholic Church, prefer the nine phases of prayer that permit direct and wordless communication with God on judgement day. Others like the black and white of manuals. It's a cozy snuggle between the Active Life and the Contemplative Life Hannah Arendt sought an understanding of. The decent thing about Ouspensky, as he approached his end time, he was able to realize the path he'd chosen was a long, arduous, complex, mostly torturous and possibly a wasted one. Money helped, here our man was comfortably situated but the equation of his that had required four dimensions of consciousness couldn't maintain an integrity and like an intriguing quantum observation it collapsed.  

The Ouspensky Phenomenon

 

Path of Righteousness

The Ouspensky Phenomenon could be defined as a socially affordable Snake Oil. It might be inaccurate to call it an example of myth and politics unless it was an economy and I was a politician. Then I could confidently declare the fundamentals of Snake Oil alive and well in the Ouspensky Phenomenon. The issue of course that challenges language is a definition of the Ouspensky Phenomenon. What is it? Of the facets available to think about, two jump up and down quite loudly. The first is the Far East, somewhere beyond the Muslim frontier, some new flavor of Cool Aid had started entering fashion in the West when the Magi introduced themselves to Mary. The second facet is this. Ouspensky's second book found it's way to the United States where it was discovered by an American Archaeologist who'd found in it a theme for one of his buildings, he translated Ouspensky's second book into English and published it. The book sold well, years later when Ouspensky discovered a reputation waiting for him he was able to recoup a suggestion of his royalties. Of the two, start with the Magi.

"The Philosopher must bow down to the Microscope" John Walking Stewart

Foots etc..

The "Five Pecks of Wheat" was more likely five Pecks of Rice. It was the entry fee for an early Daoist community. It was enough to satisfy the Celestial Masters, the professionals who ran the departments of heaven like well ordered drill sergeants. Not everyone was guaranteed a reward, only about 18000 people would have the correct balance of life force to survive the apocalypse. Being good was a competitive sport. Back then, like today, there was of course no shortage of advice on how to polish the QI. In excess of two thousand years after the first Five Pecks Grand Master, a philosopher and esoteric known in English as PD Ouspensky's exploration of the fourth dimension and an extended visit to Nepal produced a sought after 1912 book called Tertiary Organum. It was a made in a lifetime Lamarkian evolutionary journey. The gist of his account was some people achieve enlightenment through an extraordinary physics and are heaven bound, others don't and aren't. Grand Master Zhang Daoling ran a small empire. Ouspensky developed a bit of cult, he died in Surrey, England, in 1947.

Disappointing endings

Tools of a Trade

It might be a bit of a stretch but there are similarities between my Friend Baxter and Hannah Arendt's exemplar of a virtuous public servant, Cato the Elder.  A somewhat random and possibly a confusing offering that may require an explanation of Scipio's role in the Second Punic War. Worth remembering this was the Roman Republic, not that bowl, indeed bowel of gruel and vice Rome became after it had allowed Julius Caesar following his victories in Gaul and Britannia to effectively engage in a date rape at home. Two hundred or so years prior to that depressing event, Scipio was a new wave sort of chap, exactly the sort of Roman who gave Cato the creeps.  Hannibal Barca, son of Hamilcar Barca of Carthage, Rome's opponent in the Second Punic War may have been more like Cato. You don't take your Elephants across the Alps, along with your breakfast table, storytellers, a parrot, and your mistresses, unless you're fundamentally a conservative sort of chap, which may well have been why Cato who was pretty much terrified of Carthage had convinced himself that Rome's chosen champion, Publius Cornelius Scipio, was far too weak minded and cretinous to stand a chance against The Carthaginians. In the end it might have done the Roman Republic a massive favor if Hannibal had wiped the floor with Scipio, cutout the hero worship of Emperors, this tragic, weak-kneed search for populist saviors. The Punic Wars maybe a niche subject, and granted a very few of us have been subjected to the warped punishment of having to study History of the Roman Republic while in detention, but amongst those of us who've had that rare privilege, a very few of us had risked further punishment by vocally supporting Hannibal in the detention room, and while most of us could have happily garroted Cato the Elder a very few of us, the more imaginative ones perhaps, were devastated when we heard that Scipio had defeated Hannibal.