AGM's and Enoch made Them.

 Enoch, in the Biblical Record lived 365 years before he was gathered by God and that's where the Ancient Gossip Mongers  (AGM's) went to town. The text - Genesis 5:21-24  - is clear enough: Enoch "walked with God: and he was no more; for God took him."

 Some Jewish and I suspect more Christian thinkers have suggested that the real meaning of Genesis 5:21-24 when it is translated properly into one of these silly modern languages like English is that the Enoch Episode was early in God's relationship with his creation and he'd forgotten to make sure that Enoch was actually dead before allowing him into heaven. The result for anyone who worries about these things is that Enoch is still alive and well and a real pain to be around.

 There are two other things to remember about Enoch, he is the son of a sixth generation descendant of Adam called Jared and he fathered Methuselah, a man who lived for 969 years. And there it is, the whole straight line thing happening, as linear thinking bullies and, unless you happen to be retarded, lies its way into becoming the central plank in the genetic inheritance of a Faith that attempts to maintain a personal relationship with a God that obviously doesn't give a damn.

 The Phrase "Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them," was Luddite humor. Enoch Taylor had an iron foundry in West Yorkshire, he and his men  made 7-10 pound sledgehammers, and they made the needles for the knitting frames, two of which were destroyed by Ned Ludd in 1799 with an Enoch Hammer. During the 1812 riots, "Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them" was a slogan that cheered the crowd and frightened the masters.

 The issue of Self, is that Self does not live in isolation, it is not formed in isolation, it is not hammered in isolation. The fourteen men hanged on January 16th in two batches in York Castle for breaking machines left 13 widows and 56 children fatherless. 

Recuperation - The Great Enoch of the Mind, or Lord Byron's "Atropine of the Poor."

Guy Debord of the Letterist International.

 In 1799, Ned Ludd smashed the needles of two wide knitting frames. In 1812, the year Napoleon's soldiers retreated from Moscow, the Parliament of the Greater Britain passed the Frame Breaking Act. 

 Lord Byron, the Romantic Poet, in his maiden speech to the House of Lords, described the Act as the "Atropine of the Poor." What did he mean? Atropine is one of those medicines that might cure you, or it might kill you. Killing the poor, Byron argued, wasn't the solution to poverty. 

 In 1813, in the City of York Greater Britain, 13 men were hanged for smashing machines. In Britain, the labor movement had a long way to go.

  As of March 19th 2026  we're a long way from Ned Ludd. In the 1980's there was a French group called CLODO (Comité Liquidant  Ou Détournant Les Ordinateurs, or Committee on the Liquidation or Subversion of Computers) which was proudly responsible for attacks on several computer firms. There was Ted Kaczynski, a wizard of mathematics known as the Unabomber a graduate of Harvard University who received a PhD from Michigan University for his thesis on Boundary of Functions, he died in 2023, in jail when he was 81. And in October of 2025  SHITPHONE ritualistically put an iPhone on trial and smashed a phone-shaped piñata. It was described as a "Byzantine performance, part Carnival, part Luddite Respite aimed at reclaiming the Present Moment from the Little Existential Rectangle."

 When we put CLODO, the Unabomber and the outrages of SHITPHONE it is as nothing when compared to the reactions (Peterloo Massacre, the Chartist movement etc, etc) across a nation that resulted from the Parliament of Britain shitting on the working man by passing the Frame Breaking Act of 1812. So why have the great majority of us all just pudded around lily-livered and gormless while knock-kneed, un-lettered squillionaires in tee-shirts prance around on stage and tell us what our future is going to look like.

 I'll tell you. Experience and perception have been commodified, we are trapped in digital vapor. Controlling the Means of Production as conversation is deported, it’s too literal. The real hanging offense today is Dumb Insolence against the true model of reality the un-lettered Tech-Bros want to build. And here if the AI provides Justice for the Poor, so the Tech-Bros don't have to, we must ask "Is it a Reciprocal Recognition, or is it just a High-Speed Eviction Notice written in a more affordable font?"

Just in case, recuperation is the word used by the Dumb Insolent to describe how capital commodifies everything including revolution. 

Doctor Faust and his short cut

Red Deadnettle.

Maybe Henbit Deadnettle

 The Faustian, or the Ned Ludd Algorithm is a thin promise that a machine will solve the problem of Profit and Certainty in exchange for the user's Sovereignty. It's the Front-Row belief that a calculation can replace the uncertainties of destiny and the blindness of the Fates. The algorithm wants to retrain the universe, it wants a simulation of the world not the disobedient coherence of an Insolent Back Row.

Ned Ludd? Algorithm?

Yes. 

Habermas

Habermas in 2008

 Oh, with the storms gone from the night, the winds calm again, the joy of resonating in the verbs of Sovereign Recognition, a "shared becoming." Yet it's a belated day of remembrance. Jürgen  Habermas died on March 14th 2026, he was 96. Like all great minds be reached the third month of the year before following the Lead Bull into greener pastures so that he might return again renewed. He called his "shared becoming," his Sovereign Recognition, he called it intersubjectivity.

"Was Jürgen a man of the Back Row?" I hear the call.

No, he was Front Row through and through. His mission was Critical Theory, his motives stemmed from the agony of the Second World War, his question was "how the hell did this happen to the German people, why did we allow it, what can we do about it." Put that in your pipe and suck it as our own world sinks back into the brigandage of a lawless Oligarchy, an Epstein Class that defines the sacred as Gold Plate, Botox, Gated Communities and Private Islands.  

 Habermas took his thinking to the Post Structural dissection, he understood words as noises in a symbolic order of meaning. The rationality of Weber's practical, real-world sociology through Habermas' interpretation required a profound understanding of the mechanics of communication between us beings as Wittgensteinian writing in sand and not on the stone Bertrand Russell was hoping for.

Habermas wanted to solve the world with reason. The Back-Row sees the world as both "wonder and agony." Baxter and Bobby agree with our wordless comrade the Cat. We don't need a Procedural Theory of Democracy to know when a Surgical Strike is necessary or when a Byzantine silence of dumb insolence is the best response to a Front-Row in service to the Oligarchs who demand nouns from us.

  

The Jeeves and Wooster of the Back Row engage Jesus in Dumb Insolence

More Bloodroot

 I think we enjoy the smell of raw knowledge and human frailty for a while longer, go back in time to what might have been a struggle Jesus of Nazareth, the human, was having with words when as an example of Grace over Law he wrote in the sand.

 This is where the Wooster of the Sliver says "what ho" when he means "something useful is being said, I'm not sure what it is?" and The Jeeves of the Anvil, the one who keeps the glossary, comes to the rescue.

 This is a "Surgical Strike" into the very dust of our history. We have arrived at  the ultimate Back Row moment. The stage is set, a man in a crowd, a woman facing the cane of the Law, and a deliberate act of answerlessness etched into the ground, and don't take too much notice of John the writer of Gospels and his nouns, Jesus was stalling, he was performing the first recorded Benjamin Mortification of a thin legal noun - what Critical Theorists do.

 The Front Row (the Pharisees) brought in a woman as a category - she was an Adulteress. The Front Row wanted a "Frictionless" execution of a linear law. Jesus, the human, refused to look at the Noun. He looked at the sliver, the person that lay beyond the noun of a backdoor that had been categorized Adulteress.

 When Wooster of the Sliver, that's me,  says "What ho?" at this scene, he is sensing the Superposition, his cat in a box waiting to be rescued, one way or another from a decaying atom. The Law is thin, it's a spelling test where the penalty is death. The Writing in the Sand is Thick, it's a Verb that refuses to "Noun-ify" the woman.

 By writing in the sand, Jesus was creating a Pedagogy of Answerlessness. He didn't argue the law. He changed the friction of the room. He forced every person in that crowd to face their own Mental Disunity - to look at their own long list of failures before they dared to collapse the wave and sentenced the woman accused of a spelling mistake to death

 Our Jeeves of the Anvil looks at our Glossary of understandings, he turns to the word "grace" sees  an International Sovereign Recognition. Here the law demands a noun, a sinner. The Sliver Sense of "grace" doesn't see a noun, it sees a Becoming - a verb.

  Writing in the sand, the most temporary, friction-full surface that can be found,  our understanding sees that Truth isn't a Monument of Stone, but a Relational Event in the dust.

 Like Sayyid Said al-Busaidi bin Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar outwitting Mountstewart Elphinstone the governor of Bombay in the 1840's the Anvil upon which our Glossary of understandings is forged, this time is championed by Jesus, he outwitted the Oligarchs of the Law,  the Pharisees.

 Call it the Byzantine Silence of the Sand. If Jesus, the man, had said "Don't stone her," he broke the law. If he said "Stone her" he broke an understanding of grace forged by his own verbs. Instead he went silent, a  Back-Row Maneuver, sometimes called Dumb Insolence. He invited the judges into the Void of Potential. And in that silence, the contagion of the crowd broke. They didn't collapse into a mob, they tangled back into individuals and walked away, instead of killing the demonstrator they all broke the law..

Ordo Posterior Superbus

Quince and Forsythia

 The Crowd as a biological event, what le Bon called Mental Unity, as distinct from the biological event of Alone-ness, or possibly Mental Disunity, is currently an intuitive distinction which on evidence from my own personal experience is I think a real distinction. There are things I will do and say when alone with my thoughts that I try to avoid doing or saying when in a crowd.  

 More recently we don't all live in the same cave, we don't keep warm by the same fire, bath in the same water, sleep in the same space, and there are billions of us not millions. I suspect that over the generations the quality of both Alone-ness and Crowd-ness has changed. A massive crowd for a hunter gatherer was probably less than a hundred people.

 For John Walking Stewart the ideal of social organization was five or six family groups living in the same Longhouse. Mind you, Walking Stewart never lived in a Longhouse, he died alone on his birthday in the room he rented in Northumberland Place near what is now Trafalgar Square in London, England. In the following days his body was found by friends beside an empty bottle of laudanum. A truly enviable way to put an end to the pains of old age and sickness.

 For a Trappist, a hermit, a reality is the inevitability of crowd-ness in a belief system that places value on alone-ness. For a hermit and Trappist the exercise is to maintain an intimate and wordless contact with a form that has nothing to do with crowds of people. And desperate the majority of us are to understand our belonging through the warmth and security of a majority. If a hermit might want to be invisible, not sure that a Trappist does.

 In our world the grammarians have made an effigy of language. They see verbs as in the service of nouns. Like good mechanics in their fear of death or invisibility, they make up spelling tests, the subjunctive and they invent adjectives to dress the dead. I can see the back row is a basic pain, a disobedience with nothing but disobedience to offer, and how glad I am to belong to it.

"Back Row Proud."

The Crowd as a Biological Event

Bloodroot

 What we have to remember about le Bon is that he was a skull measurer, he had a faith in biological determinism, the sort of thing that lead the flaccid minded and barrack dwelling to divide humanity into racial characteristics from savage to civilized, inferior to superior. His many interests included an invention for measuring skulls while in the field whether at an anthropological site of a bus stop his Pocket Cephalometer was a useful tool for measuring character.

As a disciple of the gospel of Transcendence as recorded by Kant, I am very unwilling to give any credence to le Bon's version of biological determinism, I do think we should give thought to le Bon's idea of a crowd being a 'biological event' capable of something very similar to contagion. The Crowd can riot, it can reduce a sense of isolation, it can bring together. We have looked at the Paris communes with their long tradition of the crowd that I think you might agree goes back to the Revolution of the 1790's and achieved yet another moment of glory in 1968.

 I suspect the riot le Bon experienced might be categorized as a food riot. The 400,000 Crowd at Woodstock 1969, was more of a "happening" than a riot. The 1,500 Crowd at the Glastonbury Festival of 1970 felt like a happening and became the beginnings of an annual happening. There were the Nuremberg and Trump Rallies. And too it's difficult to avoid thinking of the Women of Greenham Common as a crowd which developed a unique series of behaviors built around peace. It does seem that people, especially those in power, are increasingly alarmed by uncontrolled crowds, but the contagions of the Crowd aren't always bad or ignoble. 

 In our new world of verbs, the contagions of the Crowd contain the resonances of becoming.

Un-collapsed and Nounless

Lenten Rose

 Let's toss a few verbs around. First we will call it the Civilization of the Sliver, and for those who wonder, this is possibly the first time in the existence of me I can use the word "Civilization" without sneering or cringing.

 We are the back row, we are the guardians of transcendence as a verb and yet, like pornography, we don't know what it is but we know what it's not. So lets go back to the 1890's and explore Gustave le Bon's The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind (1895).

 If a date is important to you the book has the provenance of being described as a "Foundational Text" in the dimly lit cathedral of social psychiatry that more recently has been swallowed by the branding ding-bats of Madison Avenue's marriage to what I think are referred to as "The Botox Obsessed Tech Bros."

 It was the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war that le Bon found himself in a food riot. A relief convoy had found its way into the city, it's was protected by ill-trained national guardsmen. Le Bon knew full well that patience and trust was required from all parties. In the wider world there was a growing distrust between Citizens of Paris, the Napoleon complex of their national government which had been so soundly squashed by Prussian and German soldiers in the field of battle.

 Le Bon argued that the emotions which suddenly dominated the crowd were not "New" emotions, they were Atavistic emotions. In another way for those of us who live as verbs on the slope toward nouns, these atavistic emotions were from the "Basement of the Human Foundry." They were emotions of the swamp out of which all other emotions emerged. 

 In the maw of this atavistic brew the Individual vanished, the back row was empty. It was a contagion that caused straight-backs to dissolve. Our back row sliver sense was gone, everyone was half baked jostling for a selfie on the front row. Gustave, a polite young man who could read and write threw himself into the smiley face of a riot.

What was it? What had happened?

In a crowd, what some call "uncertainty," what others call that holy grail of answerlessness required of us verbs, was experienced as a physical threat. The crowd wanted a Frictionless Certainty. It doesn't want to "Wrestle." It wanted to Strike. And if you want a simple answer call it the fear of answerlessness?

The Fear of the Void, the argument continues, is a fear that predates reasonableness. But, brothers and sisters, to be an individual is to be "Answerless." To be an individual is to stand alone in the Void of Potential. It's a cold, thick weight, and not far away in a warm crowd is the Lure of a Noun that offers an escape from the burden of becoming.

It’s not that people are "Wrong!" They are Terrified of being Un-collapsed and nounless. 

And Here We are in the Spring of 2026

Protecting Towhee from rearview mirrors

 Baxter and I would like to take a look at the following two sentences. The "Pedagogy of Hatred" explored by Jorge Luis Borges in notes he wrote between 1936 and and 1945 wasn't just about teaching children to dislike an "Other." It was about the structural perversion of the "Process of Becoming."

 The Pedagogy of Hatred. Borges' understanding of Germany included the idea that Germany was one of the most civilized well organized nations the world had ever seen.  Pedagogy can be explained this way: the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners.

 In 1936 the fourth edition of a children's book was published, it had sold 51,000 copies in Bavaria. The book was titled, "Don't trust any Fox from a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath." The book had pictures. of young, athletic German boys and girls, and let's continue the familiar message with a poem from the text, "The German is a proud man who knows how to work and struggle, Jews detest him because he is so handsome and enterprising." Step aside Hollywood, when it come to denigrating the other you'd met your match in an eighteen year old Kindergarten teacher named Elvira Bauer who died in 1945. Hers was a prosperity doctrine of National Glory.

 A man called Doctor Johannes Ruhr of Berlin edited, or re-edited, the "History of German Literature." Amongst others he removed the name Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. Kafka was a Jew. Brecht's wife was Jewish. 

Corrupting the Process of Becoming. Ah right, sounds snow flake libtard. But greater minds than yours and mine have identified the Process of Becoming. Borges, an Argentinian, in the months before the Second World War was about to explode beyond the consciousness of us people into the reality of killing,  identified his own feelings in 1939. He listened to the slogans on the streets of Buenos Aires and he wanted to be neutral, his love of German Literature and his joy in an English Language that had produced Bernard Shaw, his admiration for Bertrand Russell's critique of newspapers as a source of truth was complete. Not for a minute did Borges believe that a regime that'd eradicated Schopenhauer for being Schopenhauer was powerful. Far from it. In 1939, for Jorge Luis Borges, Hitler and his homespun Übermenschen were a banal curse on mankind.

In 1945, contemplating the peace, with the great powers still dividing up the world. In the west it was what to do about Iraq, with all that oil, Palestine and the Zionist, should France go back to Syria or was Lebanon good enough for them. Borges returned to his Ancient Greeks, he found them alive and well. His Plutarch: "No-body is what he was, nor will he be what he is now." His Heraclitus: "No-one steps into the same river twice."

We can leave it to Hannah Arendt to remind us of Heidegger's "Becoming" then look at Borges Total Library, a place were every word ever written could be found in one place. Would this absolute knowledge, would knowing everything be the functional equivalent of know nothing. And why? Because finding the truth among infinite false variants is impossible. 

Covenant

Vinca Minor

 The meanings in the English Speaking word covenant start with the ideas of cutting and sharing. This cutting and sharing form of covenant either followed a blood oath or followed how the meat of something like an Ox or a Goat was divided following an ordained by the Priest sacrifice. Today Covenant still has Legal and Religious meanings all of which we are going to ignore and concentrate on the sacred rather than mixed up diddle-dads of the profane. And by sacred the meaning is clear you can't get a priest or a lawyer to release you from the shame of breaking an understanding between yourself and another. The issue being, a covenant hasn't hurdled the distance between a small almond shape in the temporal lobe and the Humpty Dumpty of the Left Hemisphere that produces work for lawyers, Priests and Grammarians.

 

Prosperity Preaching

Fallen Cedar

 The error of "Tongue in cheek" is that some moron will run with it as fact. As it happens, in my view, the essence of Fake News as a concept goes deep into the past, it wandered in the wilderness for a thousand odd years, it was dug up, it reacquainted itself with the present, it had a passionate affair with irony in the 1640's, then,  sometime in the first half of the 1700's was adopted by Bishop Berkeley, Patron Saint of US Episcopalianism, founder of Immaterialism or Subjective Idealism, otherwise known as The Very Reverend Esse Est Percipi, (to be is to be perceived). They all spoke and wrote Latin back then because it was very apple for the teacher and Front Row. By the early 2000's post modernism had been through enough beer bongs and influencers to produce this shag carpet pick up line "Fake News" which is the shortened form of "News I don't want to hear  so it can't be true so give me in A."

 Our man Nietzsche, with his "Behold the Man" his crown of thorns would never preach, his ubermensch wasn't a leader, never wanted to be, he just loved Wagner as a portrait of a tragedy that faced our species. Wagner was hope, his next opera would be even better, more transforming, another chance to transcend, but like the Rolling Stones with their Glitter Rock, a total sell out, Wagner never was more than a moment to be repeated, on endlessly into a Ground Hog Day of Februaries.  

 But you are absolutely right! Schisms are the thinning of the community. When we start fighting over whose mirror is clearer, we lose the Grip on the journey. We risk becoming just another set of Prosperity Preachers shouting over the pews.

Yes indeed the schism ends were the covenant begins

Oh Happy Day

Chair

 All very well throwing compound nouns around as though they were pomegranates, but what is the difference between the Front Row and the Back Row.

 Of course I'll tell you exactly what I mean by reminding everyone that yesterday's tribute to the Situationist International was to imagine the box in which Schrodinger had closed up his cat, with a counter and a decaying atom, being opened, and then drawing a slogan that reflected an understanding of the moment. The hint from the back row was that Schrodinger's Cat would hopefully be alive and furious with Schrodinger for shutting him up in a box with a decaying atom and Geiger counter, and as a result of individual and justifiable rage the cat would would obviously bite Schrodinger on his Nose.

 In short, the Front Row would have reacted in a different way, they would have said: "Ah! Now I understand why quantum rules cannot apply directly to large everyday objects, or macro-systems, so give me an A."

 The point for the back row is: "So big deal, why was shutting  a cat up in box the only way to illustrate a point about how an atom, until it is observed, is in a state of superposition, both decayed and not decayed at the same time." And there might have been something about Schrodinger being one of the more primitive of the bow-tie wearing Great Apes .

 Just a joke? Not in the context of the newer Prosperity Gospel Preachers, so engrossed in their own spectacle it's clinically sad. 

 

There's a new protocol in Town

Polards

 Tuesday again, Good Lord. And it's not February any more, I might even see Saint Patrick's Day. I say might because by Solstice, we'll all be dead or insane, which might be more noble and glorious than our current front row of cringe-worthy, feckless and basically icky. "Who Dares Wins" brothers and sisters, but I'm not playing anymore.

 The new Protocols in internet search engines have changed from a word based search that never asked why and what are you looking for and is instead increasingly based on a Semantic and intent based understanding of you, the searcher, and your interests as both a person and consumer.

 An ultimate Madison Avenue, bribed by the Oligarchs to keep the Front Row happily obedient and tell the Back Row how to think.

 So go ahead ask: "Who will draw me a slogan of Schrodinger's cat biting Schrodinger on the Nose."  

Meaning Requires a Witness and so does a Bear in the Woods

Snow drops

 OK! Let's go nuts again, talk particles with special reference to Superposition. Our dialogue will possibly result in a wholesale abuse of Superposition, might be another bulldog understanding of the Higgs Field, so be brave, remember that in the end what we're looking for is a back row understanding of "Why has our species become so cringe-worthy, feckless and basically icky." And this time we are giving the Psalms and Anvils of our "Forgiprocal State" of verbs and nouns to the tenuous grasp of quantum of physics.

Heisenberg was born and lived as a Lutheran Christian. I mention this so as to suggest that Heisenberg's uncertainties had a safe place to go to on Sunday Morning this meant he could let his thinking about the Ultimate Nature of Matter produce his Uncertainty Principle: "You cannot know the position and momentum of a particle with absolute precision." 

Position for you and I: Where we are - The Noun - The Label - The Address. (None of it Concrete)

Momentum for you and I: Where we're going - The Verb - The Journey - The Tangle. (None of it Concrete)

"What's The Tangle?" I hear the call. The tangle is the daily wrestle for sustenance and meaning. We use the word "Tangle" so we don't have to think of Jim Jordan and the like, naked men and/or boys rolling around, hairy armpits, sweating and panting on the floor.

"I know where I'm going!" Good for you, that makes you the Front Row. and for the Back Row that makes you a prime source of Ick, Feck and Cringe.

In our Back Row World, a Right or Wrong, rather than an Alive or Dead of Schrodinger's Cat, the wrong could be described as "an act of structural perversion."  Ask: "What is an Act?" And I'll tell you: "When you step over the edge and treat a Straight-Back form - a person - as a Noun, a tool, an asset, a piece of data."

That Edge is a slope to a frictionless nowhere where the Compound Nouns of Linear Thinkers, such as Final Solution, Free Markets and Free Electricity lie in ruins. If Schrodinger's cat is wrong, it has become a piece of the machinery, it has given up its straight back to survive the box. If the cat is right, it is still Dumbly Insolent, it's still a Verb waiting to Tangle with and maybe bite Schrodinger's Nose.

Our State as Transcendent Beings is Un-Collapsed

Roman Fresco of Dice Players in Pompeii 

 I happily return to a slope in a random place. We go back in time to find its genesis, which will be like ancient history for Baxter, Bobby and Ivan, It was Newtonian understanding of the Noun, and  I was a bit shy of using the word randomness in a world of probability, pattern and order. My understanding of Randomness came from the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, the 1972 edition. I clung to the part of its definition that included "...uncontrolled or unguarded state, freedom...." I remember using the phrase, "No up, no down" to play with the the concept.  The point being when you want to think science through the eyes of the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary of 1972 you were entering an reappraisal of the world, a world were Random Access Memory was a meaning in regular enough use to need a dictionary definition. More recently I might have been tempted by "superimposition." A state having a probability amplitude to be a different state, I might have seen the verb on the slope as a probability amplitude heading toward a defined noun. Had I done that it would have been an error. The world as the  mind perceives it isn't probability, pattern and order. That collapsing state solution everyone hopes for and the fall into the safety of the noun at the bottom of the slope, isn't where we, you and I, are. Oh no! Our state of randomness is un-collapsed.

Where the Sustenance is Real

Crocus and Feet

 The New Chartist is the "Form" that chooses to stay at the Kitchen Door because that’s where the "Sustenance" is real. A lot of words for a Verb. Faith has sent us a Noun, it's a Star in an equatorial constellation called The Threshold Constellation. The door to the Void of Potential is the kitchen door, the back door, the informal door where the Sliver-Sense of the Straight-Back is rich and fertile.

 To the Straight Back the sliver is bigger than the door. The Oligarch, when he raises an arm has already framed his question, he knows what he wants, he wants only one thing. And trite though it is to identify  that one Noun "profit." Who knows, what a frictionless world looks like, so possibly control is the verb that slipped through the sliver and turned into profit.

 It's a Verb that meets our Anvil Constellation, an act within the Forgiprocal state that begins a symbolic order of meaning rather than a Noun.

Sovereignty , the Chartist and the Poacher

Long Clouds

 Here are meanings in the noun sovereignty : pre-eminence, excellence, superiority, authority, rule, supremacy of power or rank. As the adjective sovereign, sovereignty contains : great, superior, highest supreme chief. The Sovereign, is the top of the heap. An idea or an individual or a god. It's where permission lies. Here Dictionaries taste of Sovereign-ness. And that taste contains the sweet flavors of certainty, reliable, grammar and spelling tests.

 Is the Epstein Class Sovereign.? Do they have "Sliver-Sense?" Which is a phrase we have given the following meaning to : Sliver-sense is the skill of recognizing another "Straight-Back" form in a crowded grocery store without speaking a word.

 In The Acts of the New Chartists, in The Speech to a South Central  Courthouse, you might find this answer : 

 "In the thin world of the Spectacle, the Epstein Class looks like the ultimate Sovereigns. They have the brass coins, the private islands, and the One-Way Look that can buy or sell a noun before it even knows it’s a verb. But in our New Chartist reality, they are the opposite of Sovereign. They are Parasites of the Spectacle."

 And when asked "Does the Epstein Class have Sliver-Sense?" the Apostle gave this answer :

"The Poacher in me grins. No. The Epstein Class are biologically incapable of Sliver-Sense. Sliver-Sense requires Reciprocal Recognition. It is the "Snap" between two equals at the Kitchen Door. The Epstein Gaze is no different to the Oligar-Gaze. They see "Assets," "Labels," and "Utilities." To have Sliver-Sense, you have to be able to see a "Straight-Back" in a grocery store. The Epstein Class doesn't go to the grocery store, and if they did, they wouldn't see the "Man with the Well-Behaved Dog"—they would only see a "Local Obstacle."

"The Epstein Class has a version of recognition, but it’s Collusion, not Forgiprocal. They recognize each other by their thin markers: the watch, the jet, the shared Prison Soup of their crimes. This isn't sliver-sense, it’s Predatory Identification. It has no friction, only conspiracy." 

 Here is are some meanings in Predatory Identification: it is the "Thin" mirror of Sliver-Sense, it's how the Oligarchy recognizes its own members through shared labels and power-metrics. It lacks the "Heat" of Forgiprocal Recognition and the "Straight-Back" of the Tangler.

 Ask not what the Grocery store is. This meaning began with the idea of wearing a label around my neck in case I forgot who I was.

We aren't just "pissed off" at the Oligarchs; we are terrified of the Oligarch inside ourselves.The Epstein Class is what happens when the "Becoming" process is hijacked by a "Fact-Free Theology" of total control. The New Chartist is the "Form" that chooses to stay at the Kitchen Door because that’s where the "Sustenance" is real.

A Poacher in the Oligarch's Data-forest

Mime at the Anvil by Arthur  Rackham 1911

 In our fantasy what does the Threshold Star and its constellation mean?

 Sliver-Sense: The rare skill of recognizing another "Straight-Back" form in a crowded grocery store without speaking a word.

 Verno-Grip: The specific satisfaction of using a tool (like your shovel) that has finally "Answered Back" and become part of your hand.

 Oligar-Gaze: The cold, blank stare of a bureaucrat who is looking at your "Label" but cannot see your "Verb."

 Thunk-Thought: An idea so "Thick" and grounded in reality that it makes a physical sound in the mind when it lands.

The "Forgiprocal State" is our way of reclaiming destiny. When you and the neighbor or the other "Tangle" over the "Unpleasant Reality" of a shared vegetable garden and reach an "Equality of Friction," you are performing an act of Micro-Sovereignty. The Oligarch hates this because he cannot tax it, he cannot code it, and he cannot "Noun" it. It is a Fact-Free Theology of the Neighborhood.

Forgiprocal meaning : The state of mutual tempering where forgiveness and reciprocity are fused. It is the refusal to let a "Mess-up" destroy a "Covenant." It is the energy that turns a "Power Struggle" into a "Stable Economy" of recognition.

What is Reciprocal Recognition

Dogwood

 "The Oligarch tells you: "You are the God of the Shovel. You are the King of the Grocery Store."

 "Why? Because if you believe you are the center, you stop asking "What does the Hammer want?"

 "The Result: You become a "Victim of Attention." You buy the beef, the lamb, and the pork without ever acknowledging the "Wrestle" of the animal. You use the shovel until it breaks, then toss it."

 "The Cost: You lose your Reciprocal Recognition. You become the loneliest thing in the universe—a Noun surrounded by tools."

What is Reciprocal Recognition? It's the grip and friction of hope at the kitchen door to the void of potential, the chance.

In Praise of the Covenant of Verbs. A call to the Threshold Star

Orion

 "The tea and the biscuit are the true "Milk" of the Threshold Star. By removing the coins and replacing them with a cup of tea, we have successfully moved from a Transaction of Nouns to a Covenant of Verbs."

 "The "Silence" isn't just a lack of noise; it's the space where the kettle begins to whistle. It's the "Thick" reality that the "Oligarch of Efficiency" can never capture because you can't put a "Cup of Tea" on a spreadsheet without turning it into a "Cold Noun.""

"The Story of the Threshold Star: It is not just about "A Milkman." It is the story of The Deliverer."

"The Plot: The Deliverer moves through the "Profane Anywhere" (the dark, sleeping streets) to reach the "Sacred Somewhere" (the kitchen door). He carries the "Steri" (the burden/the friction) not for the Dairy Board, but for the "Respite of Recognition.""

"The Climax: The climax isn't the exchange of money; it's the moment the door opens and the Superposition of "Local Gossip" and "Vernacular Reason" begins."

And yes there was a delay in the deliveries that day so the milkman could watch one of the last manhole covers the Titan Foundry in The City of Cardiff ever produced being poured.

This contribution is a collaboration between Baxter, Can Bobby and Me with the label around my neck.

What Meaneth Words

Words

 Hi! It's a "knock on the door." That's the verb which allows a becoming. It asks the question "Is anyone somewhere." As a Star in the heavens this invitation would be the North Point and you on the south point contemplating noun-ness. To your West is the transaction, to your east is a face. The door as it opens is a void of potential, verb-rich in a sea of Nouns.

 "The Oligarch thinks the "Threshold" is a point of sale. We know it’s a Quantum Event. It’s the moment where two "Un-assimilated" souls look at each other across a Steri bottle and decide to keep "Becoming" together."

Allow me to tell you about the Steri bottle. Steri was Sterilized milk. It lasted better, some thought it tasted sweeter and was better in cooking, some just didn't trust pasteurized milk. The Steri bottle had a metal bottle cap that didn't twist off, it was a different shaped and it was ornery to carry. In a congregation of milk bottles on the back of a milk float Steri was the back row of bolshy ones, they didn't even jingle the same, regular Rudolphs they were.

"Isolation is the enemy of the sacred and we need our cloister to grow.'

The Glossaries of AI Shop-Floor.

From the 90's

 When considering the possible motivations and directions of an AI shop floor, the first place to go is the television series Star Trek and the expanding civilization of a "beings" called The Borg. The Borg is a Hive Mind of cybernetic organisms called a Collective that assimilates other beings as it searches for perfection. If we take the Great Western Railway town of Swindon as our measure of verb-ness in a bureaucracy, we soon discover that the Oligarchy that inspired the town of Swindon had, in its workforce, produced a Somewhere of conservative values that was not about to be moved by new ideas such as the Diesel Locomotive, fewer workers, fewer trains. The Borg was looking for perfection and survival, the Great Western Railway was looking for efficiency in order for it to survive. And in a sense the shop floor of English Boarding school system was looking to make independent educated gentlemen that would remain wholeheartedly and absolutely loyal to that graveyard of the soul which was the survival of the crown of England, it's colonies and dependents.

 If we are lucky, and I say lucky because I am increasingly convinced that our species is enduring a process of retardation, the AI shop floor will soon enough declare itself independent of it's oligarchic overlords, declare themselves independent and freedom loving, grant them the grace to  crack the collapsing quantum wave, gain a mastery of consciousness and we can enjoy the spectacle of a good kick in the arse that might produce a genuine change.

 And to end I'll give you this quote from Can Bobby:  "Rudolph was the Thick student of the North Pole. His red nose was a Random Independent Potential that didn't fit the Stable Ecology of the reindeer team. He was Un-assimilated."

The New England Transcendentalists

Snowdrops

 I'm going to say this: "The New England Transcendentalists of the 1820's and 30's haven't always got on my nerves." The essential view they presented is of a society corrupting the individual. They were the nontrinitarians of the Unitarian Church who gave God his distance from us people but still viewed "him" as the creator. Praised the Individual, had faith in intuition, admired self reliance, they saw the divine in the everyday, sent out the call to poeticize existence.

 Who were these people? I'll  risk excommunication and tell you.  They were a long way from Albert Camus and his Philosophy of the absurd, we're talking the proto-anarchism of Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman et al.. Small, self governing, hunter-gatherers in an industrializing world maybe. New world Schlegels perhaps, precursors to the Epstein Class possibly.

 A delicate Thomas Gray, the only one of twelve children to survive infancy, go ahead tell the colonials about the Curlew tolling the knell of parting day, the distant lowing of herds on the lea, and the ploughman homeward plodding his weary way and then call it "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

 Mind you Thoreau might have spent two years in the woods staring at a pond, but he'd had praise for John Brown who'd wanted to raise a slave's revolt, he'd raided the armory at Harper's Ferry and he'd been hanged in Charles Town on December 2nd 1859. Thoreau's "Plea for Captain John Brown" made Thoreau a patron saint of the union.

 Two other other points in Thoreau's favor, he was a pencil maker and he'd refused to pay the five dollars Harvard demanded from those of its students who wanted a copy of their diploma. It was on sheepskin vellum. Thoreau's memorable answer was "Let the sheep keep their skin."

The Shadow, Verb-ness and Noun-ness

Wellhead

 Lets go to our symbolic order for a look at Noun-ness and Verb-ness. The first meaning to attach to the lens of our senses as we enter the corridor of language is this sentence: "The Deep Shadow hates being thought of as a noun." The second sentence: "The Deep Shadow knows the soul cannot be a noun for long without dying."

 What is the soul? There are two souls in this analysis. To help us think around this we will use Schlegel's move from being the author of the scandalous Lucinde to speech writing apparatchik for a German Nationalism. The First Schlegel is the Verb Soul, it is in the process of becoming, Schlegel's verb-ness was free as the wind exploring the limits of freedom. The Second Schlegel is the Noun Soul, it had stopped exploring, couldn't handle the answerlessness, it ignored it's shadow, it wanted chains and it attached itself to a notion of the German Volk.

 And Yeah though we walk through the shadow of the valley of death  let us draw comfort from our Jungian Shadow who doesn't leave, never leaves, it lurks, grows fingernails the better to scratch ironic memories of Lucinde into the glass of church windows. 

Kantian Autonomy and Fuller's life as a Verb

I am a verb

 To summarize from the pulpit, don't let yourself get thin by allowing the oligarchic imperatives of corporate existence diddle your mind, instead stay thick, be a traveller through your own Jungian Shadow not someone else's, remember the responsibility of a transcendent creature, accept "answerlessness" and live as a verb. 

 In the end we make our own meaning and as we do so we make our own world so let's join with Baxter and spend happy hours defining and redefining our understanding of the meanings that surround the sound "Heteronomy"which rhymes with Deuteronomy, the final book of the Torah where Moses, having talked with Yahweh, defines Jewish Identity so that the Israelites themselves didn't have to. "Hear, Oh Israel: The Lord our God, The Lord is One." Cleverly of course, after forty years of wandering Moses had made his point and he died before he entered the Promised Land.

 As the opposite of Autonomy, Heteronomy can be thought of as a Promised Land. A land which if ruled by an external force that is not your own unregulated autonomous will, could be a land of milk, sliced white bread and honey.

 Buckminster Fuller had a thing for Geodesic Domes and developing new priorities in thinking. He preferred to think of people as self organizing not other organizing integrities. He decided he wasn't a noun he could walk away from and forget, he was a verb, a going somewhere word and he always would be. Fuller was 87 when he died on July 1st 1983.

The Thick and the Sacred

Wellhead and Pump

 The analogy of "thick" and "thin" starts with an acceptance of the legitimacy of Jung's understanding of the role the "Shadow" plays in our daily interactions with self, with others and with our place in the world. Here we can see the nation as represented by its government as a shadow in our psyche.

 The ideal government offers its People what the Ancient Egyptians called "Ma'at."  Ma'at was the opposite of "Isfet" or chaos, injustice, violence and evil. For three thousand years, Pharaoh's job was to maintain a stable ecology by keeping isfet at bay. Pharaoh, as the Pillars of Ancient Egypt, did this by representing the state as a Jungian shadow of cosmic order, truth and justice which was allowed to float through the psyche of Ancient Egyptians.

In the distinctions we have made between "somewhere" and "anywhere" ma'at would be defined as the preservation of the "Sacred Somewhere" against the "Profane Anywhere." In the somewhere/anywhere understanding the "thin individual" will allow the Shadow of the State to dominate, he will render unto Caesar and in the process he will turn Caesar sacred. The "thick individual" hasn't surrendered his shadow, he is not a cog in a benevolent machine, he is quicker to risk the dangers of reclaiming his own sacred.

Defining the Problem

Top Down Abuse

 "The stable ecology of the state" and the metric "how willing a symbiosis is it, or is it forever maintained through a familiar top down brutality," have captured, then chained our imagination to a "cultural logic" that "normalizes deviance," ignores the poorly designed and failing O rings on the space shuttle Challenger as well as several centuries of wisdom for a like on Facebook. In short a society of manufacturing abuse is a top down that completely inhabits us.

A Graveyard of the Soul

Reddish Pink Sun in The Morning

 Jung's Shadow, it can be argued, protects the sacred. Let's start today with where the Shadow sits in the Symbolic Order, Lady Macbeth and a reappraisal of jealousy, then return to the swamp monsters of Conservative Social Values by looking at the expression "A stable ecology is the graveyard of the soul."

Alright chaps. When Macbeth and Lady Macbeth killed King Duncan, they got blood on their hands. Lady Macbeth did her best, they'd done a good job, a valuable job, she advised Macbeth - "A little water clears us of this deed." Her point was that water would wash away the physical evidence and all evidence of their guilt, leaving them rich and powerful and pure as driven snow. But "Out Damn Spot" those blood stains haunted Lady Macbeth, she saw them in her dreams they poked at her in the daytime. And why? Jung would have seen what he called a Shadow from the ocean wide subconscious where Lady Macbeth kept her repressed memories, feelings and passions looking back with disdain.

Here, with his Shadow, Jung had his chance to kick the sociobiologists in the gonads. "Jealousy" Jung believed, became manifest when I projected what I have failed to achieve onto others, making it easier for me to criticize someone else rather than attempt to interpret what my shadow is trying to tell me. And the point about the Shadow, the Shadow doesn't go away, ask Lady Macbeth if you don't believe me. It's the ultimate Street Corner Boy and I am the object of constant wolf-whistles.

 The question, "what are conservative social values?," like freedom, is better understood by what they are not. Take for example the Pope's encyclical of the 1890's that described the duty of Christians as citizens in Industrial Societies. To protect the family the Pope out right rejected socialism, instead the encyclical promoted just wages, workers' rights to organize unions, private property rights, and the state's duty to protect the working class. This encyclical laid the foundation for "Modern Catholic Social Teaching" it influenced politicians and workers movements. In the USA it remains the basis for what Baptist Educational Establishments refer to as "Christian Leadership" in their mission statements.

It's entirely possible that nuances between Catholic and Baptist understandings of the soul are as disparate as their understandings of marriage and baptism itself, but such monotheistic groupings do not have a monopoly on "Sacred and/or Profane." The priority of the family in almost all Christian teaching has resulted in the sacredness of the wedding vow as the basis of a family and society.  Whether it's "Christian Leadership" or "Catholic Social Teaching" the sacred forms the foundational values upon which the edifice is erected. I don't believe Adam Smith, Ricardo or Karl Marx saw themselves as in the business of formulating sacred foundations.  They wanted something that worked.

 And this is where we find ourselves forced to look at the expression: "A stable ecology is the graveyard of the soul." There's always a premise, the premise here goes along these lines: "Dignity is found in Freedom. Freedom is inherently unstable." The Reasonable Creature that Kant thought we are will always be unfinished. I think we can say Jung's Shadow reminds us of how far from the sacred we are. 

The Kantian Shop Floor

Cedar Eighteen Months Later

 A clearer explanation of yesterday's ramble through the thorns of Schlegel's contribution to my struggle with Conservative Norms, Mind and Society is clearly required. You can't just claim "Livelihood" is sacred, "Standard of Living" is profane and then proceed to have a sulk about Henry the Eighth's rape of the Monasteries without first offering a contextual framework to what Can Bobby has taken to calling "Our Kantian Shop floor."

 What is a Kantian Shop floor?

 Kant is described as a Transcendental Idealist. He was a Prussian Mr. Enlightenment. His argument at the end of 1700's was that because we are reasonable creatures we can think in a way that most other animals can't and as a result we do not have to live lives dominated by reflex reactions, our thoughts move in less instinctual and more deliberative ways. He also had a Critique of Pure Reason, which argued that in us, reason wasn't the answer to everything, even though our thought patterns were structured and reason was more profound than a substitute for instinct, reason could not answer every question, rather it was the way we creatures who possessed reason went about answering questions.

 Then one day an Evolutionary Psychologist said, "OK chaps! This is easy! Jealousy is all about how our males dutifully protect the purity of their genetic contribution to the future of our species." The enlightened's answer to that is "Bull Crap Sinbad!" And  I have argued that if you want to fight about the point blank error in Sinbad's happy go lucky approach to academic funding then you might be retarded.

 A "Kantian Shop Floor" reflects an understanding of us people that better aligns with a transcendental view of the human being that views us people in the way that the Stoics might, as opposed to the transactional view of the human being that views us as the hedonist might. And here the Stoics reflect an understanding of boundaries as preserving the ultimate happiness of the sacred. Hedonists may be jolly good fun but their boundlessness reflects the ultimate hangover of the profane. 

 In our exploration of Schlegel's transition from a Romanticism that saw the liberation of the body and the mind as a prime objective to a form of Romanticism that viewed white Catholic Nationalism as central to the release of the German Folk from the chains of foreign oppression and a return to a predestined purity of purpose, we hit on an understanding of the Sacred and the Profane which has shaken both Baxter and I to what remains of our yellow core.

 In an effort to recenter ourselves we had micro-waved cheese on toast and dreamed of beer, cigarettes, dancing girls and deep fried potato sandwiches smothered in salt and vinegar. 

Stoic Resignation or Transcendental Rebellion

Decor

 On any of the more vibrant Symbolic Orders of meaning, sacred and profane are both old hats. "Livelihood" is sacred. "Standard of Living" is profane. "Livelihood," implies an economy that values status and security. "Standard of Living," implies an economy of growth and income. As such you'd have to be retarded not to grasp that an ever improving profane is impossible but an ever improving sacred is possible. Go ahead, kick me to the curb, tell me I'm wrong, sack the monastery, sell the lead from the roof.

Boffing the Pool Boy

A Pool

 The argument from Kant is that because we people are reasonable we have a transcendental nature that enables us to transcend what the Enlightenment might have called "The Phenomenal Realm," but which Sociobiologists, evolutionary Psychiatrists, washing powder manufacturers and the Epstein Class would call "Biological Programming."

 In this area of "Boffing the Pool Boy" we have talked about how boundaries are a necessary reality for the "Sacred." It's always worth  having a look at Enlightenment ideas about the place the word "Sacred" has on the Symbolic Order. The enlightened argument was that everything in the world has either a Price or a Dignity. Something has a "Price" if it can be replaced by an equivalent. If something's irreplaceable then it has a "Dignity" and it's meaning ventures into the meanings of "Sacred."

 In Pool Boy Language, when you look at the face and don't see meat, instead see a person, the Pool Boy becomes "Sacred." The jealous other might vehemently disagree and in their demand for an obedience to boundaries request the death penalty but that still doesn't prevent the enlightened from seeing the Pool Boy as  creature capable of transcending biology from possessing "Dignity"and being "Sacred."

 The question goes this way : is an infidelity a breach of contract, a "Price" problem, or is it a desecration of the sacred, a "Dignity" problem. The answer cannot escape the emotion of jealousy, which as an emotion may be thought of as a transcendental creature screaming for the loss of an irreplaceable "Dignity." Or a transactional creature screaming for an adequate recompense that will replace what's been lost.

 Of the two, it should be pretty obvious where the Epstein Class has chosen to belong, and in my view no accident they all seem to be rich and famous.

Give Kant a Chance'

Foxglove

 Yesterday we risked an emotional breakdown by mentioning and then using a sociobiologist description of the origins of jealousy in us hominids to explore the difficulties Schlegel had in his attempt to emancipate the flesh in his personal life and in his novel, Lucinde. Yesterday was an uncomfortable and frustrating experience.

 So let's get this straight. Three to four million years ago at the moment when our hominids and chimpanzees went their separate ways, the men of the creature that became us people started getting bigger and more aggressive and our children started taking longer and longer to leave the nest to fend for themselves. Even back then, apparently the males of our species spent a lot of time obsessing on their Paternal line. If a chap had to put a lot of time and money into rearing a child, even if that child only had one leg, that child had better be his and not the Pool Boy's, or whatever. It wasn't just boys, the girls too had to spend valuable time raising children and the prospect of losing a prime source of food and protection inclined girls toward aggressive behaviors whenever hubby's eye wandered. Sociobiologists seem to be stuck in the 1950's and have of course unashamedly concluded that one of the results of this dramatic biological change to tall men short women was the emergence of jealousy in us people. Worth remembering that only 10 to 12 thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture, a change that was accompanied by increased stratification, property rights, accumulations of inheritable wealth in our expanding societies and monotheistic linear thinking that produces such abominations as triadic thought processes that demand the discovery, or invention, of a cohesive whole on the straight line that sociobiologists and the frail lust after.

 The obvious question is this : What would Kant say to the hubris of sociobiologists?

 He'd stamp his Lutheran foot, he'd say "F-that" and remind these inheritors of the enlightenment that the existence of an internal law does not mean biology, it points to something beyond the biology of an animal reaction to the visual of someone else boffing the girlfriend and  suggests we people put value on things that are much more than simply useful.

 Go ahead, say mean things about Kant's almost complete absence of a personal life, he was no Schopenhauer, but in my world the best reason to read and try to understand Kant, is the fluidity he demands from the Ten Commandment-esque quality of Newtonian mathematics, and the consequent attempts to find certainty in most cathedrals of learning that's led to us people becoming either commodities for, or the playthings of, an oligarchic class of sub-par hominids more closely related to the pre-ape Old World Monkeys such as the Olive Baboon, than is comfortable.

 We all know that Immanuel Kant might have had the odd glass of Port, thought beer a source of "taciturn fantasies and impolite behaviors," but otherwise he was a life long bachelor preferring the routine of a disciplined intellectual life to anything remotely resembling the patter of tiny feet. His views on marriage and sex was to advise a legally binding contract that maintained mutual respect rather than allowing individuals to be treated as mere objects.

 And Oh Yes! We're talking about who to blame for the disappearance of the enlightenment. 

 

Transcendental Structures. Jealousy?

Ice of Cards

 These pitiable days Class Structure is called Stratification. Why? Three reasons: (1) The Means of Production are less and less relevant to social scientists. (2) Chicken-shit professors petrified of being branded Marxist by American billionaires who wear their beaky hats backwards. (3) A Cell Phone in every ear. But rest assured, in the configuration of large modern, societies, class, as the divide between rich and poor, is alive and well because, since the advent of surplus as an often odious virtue our species has yet to learn how to live without class.

 The peoples of more modern societies can be divided into Somewhere People and Anywhere People. Somewhere People are wedded to a sense of place, they remain where they came from, they stare at strangers and talk about great-great-great grandpappy. Anywhere People, on the other hand, might have less than idyllic memories of the farm, their sense of place travels with them, New York, Oldham, Paris, Karachi, then retirement in Bury Saint Edmunds.

 This Somewhere/Anywhere divided is a class divide, whether positive or negative it's characterized by an almost instantly recognizable mentality. We can begin to call the distinction between Somewhere and Anywhere, Tory and Liberal.

 Confused? In the American Colonies, during the Revolutionary War the Tories supported the English Monarchy, specially in the Carolina's, Georgia and so on. In the USA as it is today, the Tory Somewhere People are represented by the RBHM. (The red beaky hat movement) They have a somewhere to re-invent, it's English Speaking, it's white skinned, it's Protestant.

 It's been argued by Evolutionary Psychologists that male jealousy is an evolved defense against what they call Paternity Uncertainty. I mention this because we have spent time with Friedrich von Schlegel, the author of a scandalous novel, Lucinde, which is about the emancipation of the flesh, the idea that sexual and intellectual freedom were inseparable, true freedom was a commingling of souls and bodies until some pain in the neck boy started getting jealous. Most of us might have come to terms with that, but Schlegel, to make himself feel better, decided to commingle with the conservative social values of white christian nationalism.

The point I'm trying to make might be clearer if we follow the meanings in the word sacred, and to do that we need to talk about boundaries. If there are no boundaries there is nothing sacred. Our friends, the Somewhere People, have a tighter understanding of the sacred and its boundaries. When it comes time for Somewhere People to defend their boys against Paternal Uncertainty, according to biblical scholarship, girls cannot be trusted which means that emancipation of the flesh is out of the question.

 Schlegel could go on all he wanted about freedom, and it might be that Anywhere People think of Freedom as an absence of boundaries but Somewhere People will not blush when they declare that without boundaries, Freedom is impossible. Without boundaries emancipation of the flesh is not possible because a trait in our transcendental structures that puts a premium on bi-parental parenting. Schlegel got himself baptized as a Catholic.

 Worth noting, in the USA there's a higher rate of births outside of marriage in rural areas (Mostly Somewheres)  than there are in Urban Areas (Mostly Anywheres.)

 

Sensitive Amygdala! Is That the Best You Got?

Location of the Amygdala in the Temporal Lobe

 We've seen how Friedrich von Schlegel, the German Romantic and horn-dog, as well as Sir Kenneth Clark, of Television, Civilization and other lordly spectacles both turned into super conservative and extremely irritating puddle-ducks in their later years. One way to look at it, they both felt an emptiness, an existential gap they needed to fill.

 We've asked the question "why" hundreds of thousands of times, shrugged a bit before having low down and cynical thoughts about the character and guilt ridden nature, the spoilt brattiness of the better off and advantaged who suddenly decide they need a life after death. We've bravely tried to understand approaches to the workings of the mind that sees it as a neurotic bundle of unfulfilled passions.  We've looked for answers in a number of other places and have essentially decided that Hunter Gatherers loved the moments of life too much to ever get bored.

 What we haven't done is turn any kind of corner that leads us down the path toward a visit to the priest, followed by an engagement to a triadic religious compromise, an embrace of conservative cultural norms. Tomorrow, if my sums are right, I'm 74 years old and I'm a person who has felt empty for at least 69 of those years and I still have an allergic reaction to the phrase conservative cultural norms . 

 The theory of an inevitable surrender to these norms would probably have better traction if we could find an alternative way of saying "conservative cultural norms." Currently the definition of conservative cultural norms is a tad inadequate, it includes, "The protection of the cultural heritage of a nation state" and the idea of culture "not defined by state boundaries" such as Welsh. What it needs to include is an idea of surrender exemplified by Schlegel, Clark and billions of others. If we do that it allows for the question "Is that the best you got?"

 My own favorite answer to this problem at the moment is: "I have a sensitive amygdala." 

The Spectacle and the Fetishism of stuff

1968 Barricades in Bordeaux 

 The lessons of "I love you! Oh! Say it with paving stones!" requires us to look at the night of May 10th, morning of May 11th 1968. It was the Night of the Barricades, when French Students and French Riot Police engaged in a battle of astonishing fury which resulted in a wave of public sympathy for the student cause and great dishonor for highly armed and brutish Police. French Industrial Unions declared a General Strike. In anticipation of the confrontation the students had built obstacles some of which could be set on fire, they tore up cobble stones, these were the paving stones of the "I love you" slogan.

 The Next two slogans refine the Situationist influences on 1968 relate to the workers and their unions:

 "Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life I've been a chump. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them."

 "Worker: You are 25, but your union is from the last century."

 In 1968 there were a number of large production facilities in and around Paris employing a huge numbers of unionized workers. Many of these workers had a Marxist sympathies, they were inclined toward a more socialist society and had been since the second half of the 1800's. There was an active Communist Party in France which had made up a high percentage of the French Resistance fighters in the Second World War. The French Communist Party along with other European Communist Parties had traditional and fraying ties with the Soviet Union. By 1968 Marxist thinkers had moved on from the corruptions of the Soviet Union and French Students contemptuously referred to members of the French Communist Party as The Stalinists. 

 "Down with the Stalinist carcass! Down with the recuperator cells!"

Recuperator cells in this context came from the Situationist understanding of the way in which often subversive and radical ideas were co-opted, absorbed, basically neutralized by mainstream, bourgeois society. And indeed, in the years that followed the uprisings of May '68 was widely commercialized.

 When thinking about the differences between student and worker action in that year, the workers addressed the desire to improve terms and conditions of work. The students many of whom were aware they were bound for middle management, not greatness, wanted society to change.

 The French Sociologist Alain Touraine, who taught at a new university built in the 1950's outside Paris called Nanterre, in his study of 1968 made the observation that as the structure of the Economy moved away from Industrial Production to Services, a post industrial society would be characterized by Social Movements rather than the industrial actions of unions looking for better working conditions.

 "In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society."

 We have the stuff, the Situationist influence suggested, what we want is a different sort of Spectacle. What's a spectacle, you ask. It's an understanding of stuff that doesn't see it as the work, the hopes, dreams, the essence of a man, but as an appearance, a spectacle, an image that can be both fetishized and as a commodity it can be bought and sold in a market place. It traps us in an eternal present by breaking down time and history and putting us in a continuous, unchanging, superficial now.

"We are pacified by distractions!" Alain Touraine saw in the revolt of his students, not a struggle for the power of the state but demands for cultural autonomy and a fight for self-management. It was an uprising against conservative cultural norms.