The God Atar and Eternal Fire

Snow and Ice

 Hominids, that's us and other Great Apes like us, have been playing with fire for almost two million years. It was back in the time of ice and Megafauna. Steppe Mammoth, Smilodon - Tigers with the saber teeth - and Giant Sloth. Meanwhile in Africa, where we began, there were Giant Rhino, Short Neck Giraffe, massive herbivores, some very rough looking baboons and some pretty big carnivores.

 In what is now Eastern England, there is respectable evidence of Neanderthals, using flint and pyrite to make fire four hundred thousand years ago. Can you imagine the wonder of those first acts of making fire. A magic sense of we can do this.

 For early Zarathustrians a burning fire remained a visible presence of a pre-Zarathustrian god of Fire called Atar, who under the care of the Zoroastrian pretense of Monotheism had become Ashar, a divine and eternal principle representing a human contribution to truth, cosmic order, righteousness and natural law. How to understand this today is to give a non-linear perspective to Fire by inquiring after the Who of fire, as well as  the What of fire.v

Ashar, morphed by priests from the more free-wheeling God, Atar, was once a who, a raw incomprehensible energy, a Limbic Emission with stories, passions and a childhood to remember. The Fire Keeper, or Fire Lighter, was a what with a set of administrative duties, rights and responsibilities that'd emerged over time through the long process of de-personalizing the Gods in the service of one God not many.

Establishment Zarathustrians, even after the technology of fire making had been well developed, maintained an Eternal Flame in their temple. It was, and might still be called the Fire of Victory, a reminder of the fire making story, a gratitude and respect for the who of Atar as he had been in the old days. He was wild, uncontrollable, often mean and spiteful. All very well giving him the status of a Divine Principle and calling him an Ashar amongst a list of other Ashars, and ignore the well known fact that Angry Gods, even those who may have been demoted, often came out of retirement especially when challenged by some upstart Hominid who'd come to the conclusion that God was a what that passeth all understanding.

All those things are true, and yet for Zarathustra there was no escaping the Fire of Victory as a necessary recognition of the human consciousness determined to rid itself of the title punching ball and take its place as an ally of Ahura Mazda. Determined to participate in the process of making the world wonderful through "Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds."

 To be the builder of an Eternal Flame. a king had to go back to the days of the Fire Keepers and Fire Collectors, he had to source his flame from sixteen different places so everyone could see how authentic and genuinely deserving he was. He couldn't just conjure one up from Angie's List.

From Atè and Poine to a rule of Law not of Men

Could be Poine on a day off chatting to a Fury

 In the Ancient World of the North Eastern Mediterranean there was more to Atè than the inevitability of an endless Blood-Feud. But something like a conflict between Menelaus and Paris over who deserved Helen, that whole thing was complex, baked-in and as a result a Blood-Feud of some sort was bound to happen.

 Menelaus and Paris both were much smitten by the most beautiful girl mortal in the world and being competitive boys with reputations for honor and valor to maintain, each felt entitled to Helen. They both felt there'd been far too much influence from the politicking of the gods, particularly the Goddess of Love herself, Aphrodite, who may have decided that Helen preferred a life with Paris in Troy than with Menelaus  who lived in part of the world where the expression spartan existence comes from.

 Aphrodite always had opinions. By some reckonings everyone knew that since losing most of her youth Aphrodite just didn't like men, they were far to fickle and needed to be regularly punished, she wasn't that fond of pretty young things and a war between Menelaus and Paris would be easily ten years of solid entertainment for her.

 Along with Atè, the Greeks had "Poine" or "Poena," as in Subpoena. She was a personified spirit of retribution and vengeance, like her boss she had wings and was often pictured seated looking interested. Poine was an attendant to Nemesis, so it should come as no surprise that Poine had a lot of friends amongst the totally out of control inhabitants of the Underworld called The Furies.

 When someone wise like Apollo wanted to make sure a miscreant who'd fallen for one of Atè's blindings, which we talked about yesterday, was properly punished, Poine was sent to observe and on occasion one or other of the parties to a Blood-Feud  might raise the possibility of paying a ransom as recompense for damage done. This Ransom was called Poine. The common sense theory behind Poine was that a person could release themselves from their past misdeed, and do away with the possibility of an endless and destructive, error ridden Blood-Feud by instead paying Blood-Money to the wronged party.

 This wasn't as simple as it sounds. Back in those days the Furies didn't give in that easy, they were a very excitable limbic emission enriched bunch with hardly any administrative oversight who spent a lot of time with Poine before she went all administrative on them by suggesting they were far too primordial in their reluctance to adopt this half baked strategy of Money instead of a Feud.

 The other point that needs to be made here is that back in those distant days, a family or a clan if they'd been wronged, believed that the land itself had been infected with a pollutant that would spread like a plague, destroy everything unless that wrong was cleansed in a visceral and limbic manner. There wasn't an alternative to Blood-Feuding. You couldn't just wake up one day and say the Blood-Feud is a thing of the past.

 Not for one moment would the ancestors swallow that sort of namby pamby excuse for cowardice. They didn't invent the wheel by confronting the Saber Tooth Tiger with cowardice! No! They responded with a hard-arsed united front that challenged the Saber Tooth Tiger's understanding of easy meat. It was just plain ludicrous to think that a couple of cows as recompense for someone's brother mysteriously disappearing cleansed anything. The only solution was to launch ships and make it right. If hundreds of people had to die then so be it, this was for the greater good of the cosmos.

 There's a good case for arguing that if the very Ancient Greeks couldn't see the value of Blood-Money over a Blood-Feud they were savages, uncivilized and barbarous. But that argument would be wrong. The ancient world of people had a well developed and personal relationship with their universe and with themselves that required participation from their Gods. You couldn't just say we mortals could easily sort this out ourselves if we could please stop believing that stealing someone's cow or killing their brother pollutes the land with a catastrophic earth shattering infectious sicknesses. 

 But in those days, in exactly the same way we can today, what you could do was get the Gods on the side of a new concept of Law and Order. In that Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World the first thing to do was to find a way to sidestep the wrath of the Furies, you had to rein them in, persuade them to develop impulse control. In this whole area of discussing practicalities with the Gods, reputable Oracles, Shamans, Priestesses and Priests were very useful and authoritative. They were the social freeloaders, the cocktail party class, who sometimes called for the sacrifice of virgins, but they could get someone like Apollo to have a word with a Representatives of the God of Retribution and Vengeance and ask her to add to someone like Poine's workload by persuading Poine to do more than observe, take notes at Blood-Feuds and gossip with Furies. In short, Poine had to become a more active participant. 

 This did not happen overnight, it took generations, but in time and with the cooperation between Gods and a few well placed Mortals, the Gods were persuaded that yes indeed, a negotiation chaired by Poine was a very effective way to wash away the stain of sin on the earth. In every way it was cleansing just as good as an old fashioned deep down Limbic Emission of a generational Blood-Feud. 

Sadly for all of us, as The Department of Administrative Satisfaction, Confessions and Healing began to dominate the interstitial space between the "I" and the "Me" Poine lost her connection to the Gods, her role was taken away from her, given to the Public Temple where she became a fine or prison sentence, hemlock or exile and while the immediate problem might have been fixed, the cosmos had not been restored, we people drifted further and further away from the Universe.

At first people might have been able to say: "I am not taking this money because I am greedy! I am taking it because the Goddess Poine has declared that if I take it the cycle of the Blood-Feud is closed. I have to take this money, otherwise........!"

Then as the court system developed and Athena persuaded The Furies to get with the times and think of themselves as the "Kindly Ones" instead of blood thirsty vigilantes of the Underworld whose job was making life hell for murders and oath breakers, Poine became a footnote to the wise utterances of chaps like Plato et al, and we in the west were all headed for the Code of Justinian, Church Cannon Law, English Common Law, the Code of Napoleon. We wanted a Rule of Law not of Men

 

Understandings of forgiveness

Hera, on a wall in Pompeii.

Goddess of Marriage, women, family and childbirth,

 Zeus's father was the king bee of the Titans, he was a not too bright man called Cronus. One of Cronus' great fears was a prophecy that assured him he was going to be killed by one of his sons. Many will argue that this happened a lot in the bad old days when our Limbic Emissions had a less effective Department of Administrative Satisfaction. The point is, every time Cronus' wife Rhea, who was Cronus' sister, bore him a son he swallowed the boy.

 This left a problem of succession, which Rhea decided to solve by persuading her husband to swallow a stone instead of swallowing her most recent son, Zeus. And lo, when Zeus came of age he forced Cronus to regurgitate the sons he had swallowed, took advantage of his brothers, none of whom had any love for Cronus, and he made war on the Titans, took control of Olympus, became King of the Gods and in the family tradition he married one of his own many sisters, this one was called Hera, who's pictured above.

 In due course Hera had a more serious than usual disagreement with Zeus, this one was about which of her children got what. There was no trying to be reasonable, so in her role as Queen of Olympus she decided that as punishment for Zeus' constant infidelities, in the traditional manner through deception, she'd see to it that her favorite, not his favorite, would get the keys to the Oldsmobile.

 Say what you like about the close relationship the Greek Gods had with their Limbic Emissions and their poorly developed Department of Administration, but if Hera hadn't acted as she did we might never have met the personification of delusion, recklessness, folly and ruin the Ancient Greeks called Atè. She may have been one of Zeus daughters or possibly the daughter of the Goddess of Strife and Discord, but she had keen insights into the Human Condition. 

 Hera had asked Atè to help her make sure her disputed son Hephaestus received the due respect he deserved and it didn't all go to her undisputed son Aries, who nobody, not even Zeus liked. Relatively speaking, both Hephaestus and Aries were perfectly decent Gods, but the title disputed attached to more gossipy mentions of the name Hephaestus pissed Zeus off because no one in Olympus believed, even for God's, that parthenogenesis, which is another name for Virgin birth, was a real thing. If it wasn't Zeus then someone else had sired Hephaestus, and there was every reason to believe Hera was as well attached to her own Department of Limbic Emissions as any other  traditional Queen of the Gods.

 Well it wouldn't be Ancient Greece if Atè had managed to successfully deceive Zeus. Hera claimed innocence, apart from which she was a Queen and the Goddess for women, marriage, childbirth and family, and of course she was perfect. Zeus was furious, he had to do something, he grabbed Atè by her hair and threw her down to earth where she kept herself occupied by blinding the minds of both gods and men, causing them to do dreadful and foolish things.

 The Greeks believed in a kind of blindness and delusion they identified as Atè. It just came over you, it wasn't really your fault, but once the wrong was done, it still created a Blood-Debt. If someone stole your wife and took her to live a life of luxury in Troy as opposed to the rather tedious and isolated lifestyle offered to the most beautiful female mortal in the world by a Greek Property Owner who spent most of his time out with the lads beating up on neighboring City States, you were duty bound to get her back or die trying. This eye for an eye logic was well sourced in Limbic Emissions and is still very much a subject of dispute in those interstitial spaces between "I" and "Me."

 Nonetheless, Atè, somewhere in her devious soul, had given Hannah Arendt the beginning of her understanding of forgiveness. An opportunity for a New Beginning as opposed to some soppy excuse for not putting any effort into getting your own revenge right here on earth. 

Did Jesus have non-linear thoughts, the "I/Me" and the Beatitudes.

A Land of Ice and Snow

 To summarize, we People have a "Me" and an "I." "The I" is mostly somatic and when exchanging opinions "The I" issues from the limbic system, it's the grumpy old guy devoted to surrealist utterances, who lives in the basement. The "Me" is both sides of a gossiping couple called the  Prefrontal Cortex. "The I," being somatic and bodily, isn't big on language, the "I" produces "Affects" which for a doctor are the physical symptoms of an internal emotional condition that requires diagnosis.

Our couple, the "Me" has a bit of a cogitate, during which conclusions about the legitimacy of the "I's" position are  reached. Many of "Our" conclusions  are based on the perceived Affect "The I" position will have on other members of "Our" species.

Why on earth? An understanding of society is socially constructed. This makes it a symbolic understanding of something that may or may not be real. Like the curate's egg our symbolic understandings of the real have good parts and bad parts.

The other thing we have to try to accept is that we share these constructed symbols and together they comprise the cognitive architecture that enables society. We like to think we control this operating system but we don't. What we are is a little piece of what evolved to be an interdependent system which in evolutionary terms has been very successful but which in more recent iterations of Western society seems to encourage those of us with a more sociopathic attitude toward The Beatitudes.

Baxter and I with much assistance from Can Bobby and no help whatsoever from Ivan have come to an "I/Me" conclusion that "I" should henceforth be referred to as "The Department of Limbic Emissions" and the "Me" should be charged with the administrative task of running "The Department of Administrative Satisfaction, Confessions and Healing."

Our inspiration for this decision comes from Zhang Daoling and his "Way of the Five Pecks of Rice." Successive leaders of the movement became depressingly theocratic and authoritarian.They took to increasing the number of rules, decreasing the number of people allowed into paradise and to calling themselves "The Celestial Masters."

The Point is, with ICE in the trees and Snow on the ground I wish to argue for an understanding of the beatitudes that suggest they may have come from the non-linear mind of a Hunter-Gatherer and later his message was realigned to suit an Augustinian Iron Cage of Stalinesque Linear Thinking.

The question is, was Jesus cynically hunting and gathering converts to the linear cause and its demand for absolute obedience. Or was he in any way non-linear. Was his  "Blessed are the Meek," a rejection by the less responsive and surly of the absolute control demanded of them by the Trinity. Was "Blessed are the Poor in Spirit," a rejection of spiritual accumulation. Was "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst," a validation of the "I" in the basement roaring what the F's the matter with everyone then sticking a finger down his throat while the quarreling storage and hierarchy couple who lived upstairs admired an invitation to the White House Easter Egg Hunt and attempted to interpret their sense of abject and pointless emptiness. 

Plato, Saint Augustine, Calvin, the Neoplatonists and Interstitial Space.

A Ribosome Producing a Useful Protein

It's a fair habit, when looking into the face of a Westerner, to ask: "What did Plato and Saint Augustine do to you?" The point being Saint Augustine of Hippo, although he was alive six or seven hundred years after Plato died, had spent many useful hours reading Latin translations of Greek Texts, which in discussing Plato, was a more mystical and spiritually inspired exploration than the one Plato might have appreciated from readers of his own philosophies.

Augustine was a Baptized Neoplatonist, he'd participated in the self congratulatory ritual special making katharsis of washing away his doubts and ascending spiritually to sit by the side of the One God of the Neoplatonists. Augustine's famous prayer "Lord make me chaste but not yet" has followed him like a dog's tail down through the centuries, made him one of the chaps. But try to trust me, any thought of martyrdom was always the furthest thing from Augustine's mind. The boy was of the middle classes of Roman Citizens, ambitious for wealth and status, and asking a Roman to explain Plato was a little like asking a Victorian to explain the people of the Upper Zambezi to you.

Both Plato and Augustine of Hippo were firmly of the opinion that language did not do much more than describe what was already there. Plato saw language as a reflection of eternal ideal forms and pretty reliable so long as there was precision in the use of words, no incomprehensible mumbling, or poor enunciation, or purposeful deception.

Fur Augustine language certainly reflected eternal ideal forms, it signified real things, but it wasn't a reliable vehicle for transcending the earthly plain, exploring the inner world of the truth behind the signs which required an understanding of God the Creator, who God was, what he meant, what he wanted, and why he was so incredibly important to a person's career, for that God needed to say stuff. 

In a sense Saint Augustine, being ambitious for wealth and status in the world of Rhetoric, had an understanding of language which saw language as offering a more creative access to Plato's eternal forms. Plato's world argued for Apollo as the prime source of Divine Truth, he gave Apollo a voice through the Priestess of Apollo who served in the Temple at Delphi, a place of spectacle, games, theater  and pilgrimage. All the same you can't get away from the tongue in cheek of a dialogue that saw Socrates as a tourist, reading an axiom on the temple at Delphi's walls that read "Know Thyself." Apparently a friend had been queuing up and had paid for a chance to ask the Oracle the question "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" The Oracle had answered "No!"

Of course Socrates knew very well that he didn't know everything and he certainly wasn't the wisest of men and he also believed that Apollo through the Oracle couldn't lie. This left Socrates with the difficult problem of wondering what Apollo, if he couldn't lie, had meant by announcing that no one was wiser than Socrates.

Socrates in his own journey through life, started asking questions of people who'd always made a point of claiming to be wise. It turned out, Plato noted, they weren't the stable geniuses they thought they were. Soon enough Plato understood what Apollo had meant. Socrates the wisest of men because Socrates by knowing he knew nothing, he clearly knew himself. Henceforth for Socrates, his Divine Mission was to ask difficult philosophical questions of one and all, but mostly of Jackasses who claimed to have all the answers.

 The concept of Divine Truth is safe and well with Saint Augustine, less so with Plato. Saint Augustine, like all Neoplatonists, could be extraordinarily creative with his interpretations. He insisted that the Virgin Birth was central to the Christian message and that Mary remained a virgin through the conception of, the bearing of and the birth of Jesus. With out Mary's sacrifice everything else fell apart.

Plato, on the other hand, a man who was concerned with knowing how to understand knowledge, most likely would have considered the story of Jesus' birth a mythical account designed to elevate the individuals involved.

It's kind of like this for me, everyone wants a God or Gods. What Calvin did while God was back up the mountains confidently enjoying a ham sandwich and a bit of respite from his many errors was to give everyone a real powerful interest in experimenting with secularizing idols that offered more immediate comfort than the hellish and endless drudge of making fewer and fewer and less and less worthy people ridiculously wealthy.

But the point I am trying to make is not some obvious economic point about the cliff we've fallen off, the solution to which will be an End Times that offers an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, it's how, as a species, do we understand the space-in-between. To use a term usually understood by the medical profession, how do we understand the interstitial spaces. And I'm not talking God and Man so much as I'm talking the space between "I" and "Me," the recursive to and fro, a backwards and forwards between the two parts of thinking.    

My current thinking in the area is finding some comfort in the idea of this interstitial space suffering from an unfortunate confluence with some sort of infectious protein that has become available to out bodies as a result of an industrialization of diet

The Apocalypse, Descending Escalators, Calvin, Hegel and Wet Dreams

Mary Magdalene's remains were discovered

in Southern France in 1279

 Baxter adores the idea of my disorderly lusting, it's a solution for him, he can absolve himself from all sin by blaming me. He didn't like it, he was just doing as he was told, and it'll be I who enters Hades with an open mind.

It's odd and rather sweet that a substantial abdominal aortic aneurysm, a well photographed and much fondled giant of his kind, takes comfort from my attempts to emulate a chaotically entropic universe by maintaining a clock-like disciplined practice of concupiscence in an attempt to encourage Anti-Calvinist habits in others. The reality is of course, I should have gone all the way back to the errors our species made when the first Cock Robin picked up a stick and doodled an IOU into a clay tablet which accidentally got kiln fired when my creditors treasure house burned down and is now hidden away in a Dutch Museum.

We people in the Western Tradition do rather require the convictions of an End of Times to maintain a semblance of hope, and lo, please, pretty please show me the Western Mind that doesn't whisper the sweet nothings of : "Yes, it's just a feeling, but I definitely do think I go somewhere very nice when I die."

We have a damnation that convicts us at birth, it comes down the escalator spouting hatred unless we agree to behave thusly. Death is a blessed release. Here the Question Why is easily answered : "So we can escape the misery we have made for ourselves." As they say, the Apocalypse is the ultimate wet dream, it's the moment we reach the end of the line and stop "progressing."

It wasn't just Augustine or Calvin!! History is replete with goody-goody convictions drilled into us Westerners by the very best universities that saw a flow of inevitability, a predestination, which totally robbed us of our agency and handed the responsibility over to the Big One. Even bloody Hegel, and to a certain extent Kant saw the predestination of our species, none of it our choice. Hegel envisioned his phenomenology of spirit as a preordained process. The Owl of Minerva, Hegel quipped, spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. He meant we only understand reality and history when it's finished and too late to do anything about.

I hope you too find this as deeply offensive as Hannah Arendt did. She saw these holy trinity structures of thinking as a wide open route map for the malevolent minds that claim to understand the direction of history and this special, unique understanding justifying their use if violence today for a Synthesis tomorrow.

Anyway, and this is very, very interesting for anyone still interested in the moods of The Trinity. In 2016 Pope Francis elevated Saint Mary Magdalene's feast day to the same status as that of boy saints. For a gal who had struggled with Seven Demons, each demon representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins, until she met Jesus who wanted her to be an Apostle to the Apostles, follow him around and financially care for her so she could assist him with his ministry, even if it does sound as though Jesus adopted her as a corporate welfare officer, really does sound something like a Pope breaking a glass ceiling for someone who might have enjoyed life.

Socio-Biologists, Hobgoblins and their Spawn

Tree with White Stripes

 Over the last twenty to fifty years, we, or rather I, have been talking about the changes our answer to the Question Why have wrought on the way we people think. And over the years I've had this devotion to an understanding of life as a product of randomness that's more roundly described as a "slope in a random place" than any one of the many other definitions from the great cathedrals of learning.

One of the results of this navel gazing has been a private relationship loosely defined as "me and I" which we've shared with a primary other we can call the written word, which is a place that listens, pauses, tries to make sense of and then attempts to record what's being said.

In our recent campaign of rape and pillage through the meanings of concupiscence, original sin, Saint Augustine of Hippo and other monotheist interpretations of purpose I and my other parts find myself no more or less depressed than when in the 1980's Margaret Thatcher started referring to written words in Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Biology" a book that was written by Spencer in response to Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species." Spencer argued that Social Evolution mimicked Biological Evolution, and he introduced the expression "Survival of the Fittest" both in Biology and Society.  Thatcher and her conservatives were dominated by Spencer's conviction that "there was no alternative" everyone had to accept that government, regulation, handouts to the weak and sick, free milk for growing children interfered with the only true guiding light of humanity which as Spencer claimed in 1864 was survival of the fittest. Spencer was 83 when he died in 1903. Thatcher was 87 when a hundred and ten years later in 2013 she died a baroness of heart problems, cancer of the bladder and dementia in a Posh London Hotel.

I will remind us all of minds like the one represented by Homer and the Welsh Bards. They had a prodigious capacity to use memory. As a matter of course the Pharisees, including the Saul that became Paul the Apostle were obliged to memorize the first five books of the bible. These were not cruel and unusual obligations. Taliesin worked hard to become one with the community of Bards, their job was to remember stuff before getting their chance to contribute their own interpretations. The very fact of poetry had to do with the authority of the apprenticeship which was apparent in the curtain call that was the audible rhyme of spoken words. It's true you and I might have spent hours in detention being forced to memorize one of Blake's existence challenging poems because the English teacher was a frustrated sadist. All the same some lonely souls reveled in the possibility of having something to call their own. And Homer, if he was a bard, had never a need to write anything down, and even if he'd wanted to he probably couldn't write and if he could write he probably couldn't have afforded the papyrus.  No, those beauties carried the life of their poems in their minds, you chased them to the shade of a tree and said tell me a story.

 Then all of a sudden where has the body gone and the linear path of the elected few, those chosen by grace and enforced by the Holy Spirit becomes a cosmic law of the Father and his adoring son. A survival of the fittest if ever there was one masquerading as the hobgoblins of the Christian Church . And this is a reason to spend a lot of time with Hannah Arendt's idea of "Natality."

Concupiscence, disorderly lusting, Saint Anthony of Egypt, Calvin and Weber.

The Torment of Saint Anthony.

Michelangelo 1487-88

 OK, for those of us who share Hannah Arendt's view of Saint Augustine's understanding of "Original Sin" and "Love" today may have to be a day devoted to a sit down with Baxter and Ivan for a discussion on what "concupiscence" means and why Mathew claimed that Jesus thought lustful gazing was the equivalent of committing adultery in the heart, a verse in the New Testament that put the white meat on the bones of many a monastic order.

But first we have to meet the challenges of the question : "Why do professional groups demand an adherence to their own jargon and why do Theologians insist on using so many long, impossible to retain words that hardly anyone understands without constant reference to an unabridged dictionary." The answer to that question is from Proverbs 25:26 "A righteous man falling down before the wicked is as a troubled fountain, and a corrupt spring." In short "Muddying the Waters."

It wasn't the commandment to "go forth and multiply" that put the sin into Original Sin. It was "disorderly desire" or concupiscence, otherwise known as out of control lusting, and the thing was the Unmoved Mover had given specific instructions to observe the rules for living in Eden. Certainly Eve was very much at fault, but Adam should have known better than to give in to a disorderly desire. And worse, we're talking the Holy Trinity here, it was almost as though one leg of the milking stool had failed to love God with all his heart, soul and mind. Hugely disappointing for all involved. And we could go on to talk about success stories like the the ten year struggle the desert hermit Saint Anthony of Egypt had with perversions, sexual longings, female demons, but some of those accounts might threaten our own immortal souls.

Instead we should broach the subject of how John Calvin, who died when he was 54 in 1564, managed concupiscence. And here you can get the feeling that Calvin was dutiful son of a respectable middle class family who was inches away from being a 16th Century beatnik, waiting to be called to useful service.  His inward looking moments are really all about him and how he shouldn't allow his own access to the afterlife interfere too much with his intellectual life. His early years were spent in France in a flux of ideas that included a Catholic establishment bothered by waves from the Protestant reformation which washed new exciting ideas ashore, some more heretical than others. Calvin's father had initially wanted him to be a priest, but was persuaded that if he became a lawyer he'd earn more money, and here too, in the world of lawyers there were exciting moves being made one of which was referred to as "humanism" which put the onus on the classics as a source of legal precedents. Inevitably young Calvin chose a wrong side, he'd supported the opinions of a man who was burned at the stake, and he had to go into hiding.

Calvinism was a contribution to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century. It was all over the place, disputes, heresies, power struggles but as the world entered the 17th Century the Protestant movements had settled into the academically rather dull business of raising money and ministering to the flock. And here, I'm afraid to say we have to talk about the "Five Points of Calvinism" so that we might get a sense of what Max Weber called the Iron Cage into which the Calvinist Protestant Ethic herded much of Western Society, including most of North America.

Point One for Calvin was : Total Depravity and Utterly Perverse. We are all completely hopeless when it comes to sin, we were born concupiscent, disorderly lusting, disorderly desiring, our absolute sinfulness didn't go away and never would. The next three points are convoluted attempts to explain  the extent to which we could do anything about our depravity. The answer was was not much. You couldn't just ask Calvin, or the Holy Spirit or the Father for forgiveness. It was all somewhat predestined, you didn't have a lot to do with your fate, effort grades were recommended but fundamentally it was down to how the other two legs of the the milking stool were feeling about how you were representing yourself in your contribution to The Trinity. Frankly if you weren't the right sort then bye-bye-birdie. Part Five was about the Perseverance of Saints and how they couldn't really help but be Saints and sit up there with the Father himself, so your chances of achieving such an election were beyond remote.

And Yes! The Five Points of Calvin did very little to bring home a sense of well-being unless you were actively working on your appearance as a devoted member of the congregation. You couldn't spend your incomings on dance clubs, fancy shoes, or anything that suggested you were being disorderly in your desires, and god forbid you pine a little for your neighbor's ox. No, you put all those endless hours into maintaining the appearance of a dour, unhappy, hard working citizen who saved his resources in a sensible, possibly interest earning place for a rainy day in the vague hope that one day you'd know happiness 

Max Weber had a mental breakdown in the 1880's, he organized hospitals in the First World War, he supported democratization of Germany, he died in Munich  of Influenza in 1920 when he was 56 years old. His sociology argued for a rational interpretation of human behavior and his analysis of the effects Calvin's thinking, particularly Calvin's Five Points, had on the rapid progress of Capitalism via the Industrial Revolution. He wrote a book called "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."

The central argument in this book was that the general anxiety produced  by the Protestant reformations with their assertions that "There is not hope in us" had robbed people of any reasonable chance of forgiveness. As result the Calvinist motivation to be good had turned secular and an upright citizen, to become a mover and shaker in the world, henceforward had to judge his or her own worth and future security by their worldly success.

Monotheism, The Trinity and Linear thinking

Home of the twelve non-linear Olympian Gods

 You couldn't really have a god boffing a mortal and producing a demi-god called Jesus. That had all been done before, it was a little past tense, it was an entertainment and had never lasted as a real, genuine belief system that sucked people in dominated their attention and secured devoted followers.

When you're talking the One God, you couldn't suddenly decided to have two eternal gods, and if you wanted a central authority rather than some sort of democratic process obviously there had to be some sort of begetting so that authority would remain in the same general area in the way that things obviously passed to the eldest son.

After the fiasco, the basic embarrassment, of those early Canaanite roots any thing like two gods seemed a little risky even if you did call it the Holy Spirit who'd obviously be a boy. And yes it was all very convoluted but so much better than bringing back a Mithra and an Anahita or a familiar and comforting army of evil fighting Spentas and calling them "beings worthy of worship" or "emanations of the One God." But wait a minute, thinking of them as "emanations" could provide the three legs of a milking stool.....

I'm not sure I have the patience for a discussion of the tangle of string that's the foundation of the Christian Faith. It's always referred to as incredibly complex, requiring years of study and reflection that ideally was paid for by others. Which is probably correct, you don't get a mind around something like perichoresis or Hypostatic Union in a ten minute gossip after church on Christmas Eve.

It is fascinating the effort generations of increasingly decrepit old farts have put into justifying the theme of their mission on earth which is basically to discuss the merits and demerits of Jesus' use of blessed in his Sermon on the Mount. As a top-down command it quickly gets stale but as an area of discussion I see years and years of good company, 

First of all: Perichoresis, from the Greek for "rotation" or "making room for" is understood this way: "Describing the mutual indwelling and interpenetration of the three Persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), emphasizing their distinctness yet perfect unity and shared essence, as well as the union of Christ's divine and human natures."

It does sound a little like a poor excuse for being found in a nun's bedroom. What it means is that The Trinity just is and always has been the starting point for everything in the universe and because God had decided to reveal it to us by penetrating a mortal, it just showed how important we were to him, and how much he actually loved us even if occasionally we did get on his nerves and he on ours.

Second of all :  "Hypostatic" from the Greek for "pertaining to substance" in the context of The Trinity means relating to the underlying substance personified by the trinity. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost are personifications. In those days substance and being didn't have the distinction it has today. Substance and essence were pretty much the same thing, in Greek it was referred to as Ousia.  Hypostasis in this context are individual realities. Hence:  One Ousia, three Hypostases. 

When it came to the question "Is Ousia a physical substance?" There was doubt whether substance, the raw sediment, was essence. "Did what it was made of become its essence, or did it's essence become what it was made of?" Hypostasis in those days was not physical but it was Objective Reality. Ghosts, spirits, Gods, the panapoly was a fluid world of dreams and wonder. It was entirely possible for a genuine son of Zeus to stray with a mortal and produce an offspring with the mortality of a human and the powers of a God, but this wasn't actually the point, the fact that it could and might happen was the point. Do you see the beginnings of a ghost in the Ousia? The straightening of the line, the hunt for an end.

If you don't recognize the arrogance of the gigantic statement Trinatarians decided to make when in the interest of their one god, they chose to demand an adherence to a belief that declared God was a permanent unmoved mover, everlasting eternal structure, then lets add a dimension that asks "Why can't god and man go round and round in circles for ever and ever?"

My answer is power hungry megalomaniacal ass-wipes who demanded we engaged in a linear thought pattern by declaring a hypostatic union between a God and a man which put a Triadic Structure into our understanding of the universe which included us people as a central feature. In Hegelian Dialectic terms the thesis was God,  the antitheses was man and the syntheses was Person or Christ.

We people were a leg on the milking stool, we were a fixture with a time-line, it was all our fault, God was a long suffering "who" and all this time we had been responsible. In reality nothing had actually changed, but under the new top-down guidelines our sins had been forgiven our new straight line of existence required us to readjust our legal systems, we were required to stop observing the logic of the feud, we were required to forgive our neighbors not demand the restoration of damages. The King, the ultimate leader wasn't God, the King was a part of each one of us up there in heaven with the Father and the Holy Ghost.

And of course we have to have a look at the Holy Ghost, ask questions, make sure we're on the same page and be polite about his purpose. His job was to give life to the Triadic Structure of the Trinity. He allowed The Trinity to be free of the tripe ridden land, it was a real thing up there, a real place, a real country up there that each one of us, whether we were lord or lady, journeyman or serf properly belonged to. 

Solving the world or sustaining it

Saint Augustine of Hippo. Vittore Carpaccio 1502

 Triadic Structures are very present in Jacques Lacan's thinking. He uses a slight modification of Hegelian Idealism. Lacan pulled desire and recognition out of the master/servant dialectic, he proposed the desire was the slave, and recognition, or the desire to be recognized  was the master. His Real, his Symbolic and his Imagery achieve a balance of circles, each circle dependent on the other two, if ever the connection between them was lost or upset, then "emotional well-being" and "psychological distress" found work.

I think it was yesterday we looked at Triadic Structures in Zarathustrian monotheism and began to suspect that the Lord of Wisdom in and of him or her self was all very well as long as his or her person was present. If they weren't then doubts went unanswered. Some time ago I remember harping on a little about Sumerian and Ancient Iranian Goddesses of war having femme fatale quality that launched ships unless you were a fan of Pindar, or like Gilgamesh in love with a hairy barbarian sent to teach you the lessons of modesty and your Goddess of War was notorious for and indeed appeared to take joy from breaking the hearts of good looking, powerful young men. You could say "no" to a Goddess, it was part of the give and take, but you couldn't really say "no" to the One God, whose decision making processes passeth all understanding.

In other words we have discussed the possibility of the inspiration of this or that reasonable and new thought pattern having a limited capacity to outlast the mind from which it emerged unless the pattern of thinking was modified to include older and more widespread patterns of thinking, and the new idea was considered a step forward.

With Zarathustra's teaching, after he was gone, there was a firming up of dualisms between good and evil, a choosing of sides encouraged by linear thinking. The role of Public Relations for Zarathustrian thinking was taken on by Shaman communities from North Western Iran who were famous and highly sought after by the Political Classes, for their wisdom, their knowledge of the world, their wealth and their capacity to do magic. In the established Zarathustrian Communities these Magi liaised with kings, princes and they took responsibility for the funeral practices of the faithful, including the sanctity of the Tower of Silence. They were close to and trusted by the community. 

It's also the case, even back then in those days of the final two millennium BC, the further west you went the more magically powerful, spiritually aware and mentally together the East seemed to be. They were wise and they seemed to have answers. Three of them turning up with gifts in a Bethlehem barnyard for the birth of child, pretty much silenced doubts about the child having been born of a virgin. 

In Third Century of the common era, when Saint Augustine of Hippo was a callow youth, a man called Mani, he was from a Persian, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic family, took to preaching his own version of the word. He saw himself as a prophet like Jesus, he'd been predicted by the bible and his message was very much a Christian message presented as a battle between darkness and light, if you were bad you were consigned to the flames of hell and that was it for you, if you were good you had a shot at become a star in the sky and finding eternal calm and happiness. Mani died in prison, his corpse was stolen by his supporters who then started the rumor that like Jesus, he too had risen from the dead. Manichaeism spread rapidly across all of Eurasia. It's message briefly outpaced the Christian message and might have succeeded had Constantine not modified his attitude to the Christians.

Saint Augustine was a disciple of Mani until he became disillusioned and converted to Christianity, but even while he was laying out a formal set of understandings for the Christian communities to unite around, he wrestled with how to address good and evil, his point was always the question "why would the fountain of all creation allow evil?" At least Mani came right out and just said it, evil was always going to win, take no notice of the bastards, they are not long for this world, none of us are, be good, find a place in the stars, the best for you is yet to come.

Our own friend Can Bobby will take notice of a distinction between the relationship Triadic Structures have with linear thought and the relationship they have with non-linear thought. Put in an easy to remember way: Linear Thinkers through their Triadic Structures try to make history so they can solve the world: Non-linear Thinkers through their Triadic Structures try to circle history back to the beginning so they can sustain the world.

Go ahead, say what you like about the name Mani as the founder of a religion before we risk accusations of blasphemy by wondering why Jesus was called Jesus because next time we are going to ask a question that does rather tie reason up, pop it in a burlap sack and toss it over a cliff. We're going to ask "Why do Christians need the Trinity?"

 

Triadic Structures in an early monotheistic religion

Jan 13th 2026

 Even Zarathustra had a struggle with a Triadic Structure. His one God, the Lord of Wisdom, if not the creator of knowledge was at least a fountain of knowledge, and he made a theoretical sense, but when you ask  people to believe something there has to be more to it than "This is your idea, do as it says!" People wanted Angels, they wanted lots of Gods, they never really wanted a marked difference between good and bad, they needed to have sides to chose from, and given a choice they preferred to have the option of bribery than some goody-two-shoe figure that didn't smite trouble makers or win battles.

The attempts to wed men and gods into a sacred union became increasingly complicated when the preoccupations of one god so dominated the cultural scene that all other gods were strongly discouraged then outright banned.

I think it safe to say Zarathustra was more of a Nerd than he was a Saint or a Politician, and like all Nerds he was bound to be disappointed in his fellow human beings, he expected an intellect from them that shaped their world in the way that his intellect shaped the world for him. If only people would think before they acted or even if they just sat down and had a think about it before flying off the handle and setting fire to the neighboring village because a goat was missing.

One of the very first things Zarathustra found himself doing was to engage his thinking to a more linear process. Non-linear thinking was altogether far too forgiving, a mind had to look into a future and start taking responsibility for it to grasp the value of a Wise Lord. In a Monotheist understanding both a single Uncreated Creator and a beginning, Middle and End became a central feature of the answer to the question why. Things didn't go round and round, except for the Uncreated Creator, everything else had a beginning and an end. Yes indeed if you weren't ready for it, death was to be feared. And yes, it could be argued that demands for compromise from the non-linear thought merchants resulted in the end becoming a chance for the the responsible individual and the irresponsible universe to rid itself of bad people, freshen itself up and return again renewed.

Zarathustra's early attempt at dogma came up with a simple instruction that had a triadic structure. Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. Useful action started with thinking, then moved on the discussion and only then as a last resort, were neighboring villages justly burned.

Zarathustra himself was persuaded that the Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom needed a little moral support from the traditional spiritual world. If you wanted to be taken seriously you couldn't just dismiss thousands of years of war gods, animal gods, river gods, love gods the whole panapoly of male and female guardian spirits who had always had to be sacrificed to and appeased. No, Zarathustra allowed what the faithful chose to call the six Amesha Spentas. These were not gods or spirits, not at all, they were emanations from Ahura Mazda himself and as emanations they were attributes of the Uncreated Creator.

400 or 500 hundred years later Zarathustra's influence over the one god narrative had begun to wane a little. Pedants were wondering why an uncreated creator, unless he or she or it was a malignant narcissist would have anything to do with creating badness. The story tellers saw their chance, and prime among them were a collection of Shamans from North Western Persia whose influence on power brokers in the political and warrior class was considerable. To maintain Zarathustrian legitimacy they persuaded Zarathustrian leadership to resurrect to traditional gods, Mithra and Anahita. Mithra was a boy god of law and order, solar alignment, bulls, bull slaughtering and warriors. Anahita was a girl god, she represented the river of fertility that dropped down from the heavens, her name translated into : "The damp, strong and immaculate one." Like the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, while Anahita wasn't a full blown Goddess of War, she did have a lot to do driving chariots and crushing demons.

The Triad introduced by this Shamanistic clan, otherwise known to the western mind as the Magi, to this later stage of Zarathustrianism was a relationship between the wise Ahura Mazda, Mithra tough boy with a good boyish heart and Anahita who like all chariot riding goddesses who were interested in love was basically a femme fatale.

Was Pindar a Kiss-Ass

A Short Hercules

 Ivan Ivanovitch, of the left Iliac is on form today, he feels ignored. But at least we all agree that the word orogeny, from the Greek word for mountain and the Greek word for creation, should mean a hell of a lot more than "mountains formed by the movement of tectonic plates."

 But such is the lowly status of geology as a field of study, it's not "top-tier" as they say, words like orogenic mountain range, drumlin, morraines of all kinds, cwms, do little for the poet. Erogeny and offspring, on the other hand, from the Greek for sexual desire and the Greek for born of, is up there with adult stuff that pretty much dominates at least ninety percent of entertainment and a good fifty percent of most thinking.

So let's forget France's contributions to psychoanalytic theory for a bit, talk about Pindar and ask why the subjects of his poetry, his style and manner, dominated a cultural elite for in excess of two hundred years, and then in the middle of the 1800's when the Olympic games was resurrected Pindar again influenced the tone and flavor of the Olympic Games Poem.

Most of Pindar's themes were Eros related. He was big into god's abducting maidens, the results of the Union being a demi-god usually of mixed virtue who could lift weights or do things to javelins. It was a violence softened by pleasure, and for the victim, the financial security of a dubious marriage or a stipend.

The Olympic Games did rather bring out the homo-eroticism of a slave owning society that regarded most Greek women as chattels to be traded. Pindar was no exception. He was prone to being in love and expressing his passion for beautiful, athletic, male boys, what these days we might call pederasty resulting in pedophilia, was in Pindar's day a legitimate source of inspiration.

Back then, a poetry reading included music and dance, and I guess there was an element of interpretation from the performers. They had lyres and the kithara. They had wind instruments, the double-reed auloi  and Pan pipes or the  syrinx. They had the tympanon, it was like a drum. They had the kymbala or cymbals. It was a big performance, very popular as entertainment, tickets highly sought.

Like Taliesin, Wales' own Shining Brow of bards, Pindar knew how to butter his bread. He invested well in flattery, he composed a line or two about what a wonderful human being one of Alexander the Great's uncles or cousins or something was, then when Thebes, in Greece, was leveled for having a problem with Macedonian expansion Alexander killed thousands, enslaved many more thousands but he spared Pindar's house and sanctuary in Thebes.

In another poem Pindar impressed a patron with a description of Hercules, who was considered the supreme example of heroic physique, by claiming Hercules was in fact a very short man indeed but it didn't stop him from being Hercules.

And why did Pindar do that, because his wealthy patron was, shall we say, diminutive. 

Lacan, The Real, Reality, The Other and James Joyce

Sigmund Freud's Couch.

Huffstutter 2004

 I know Baxter wants to get away from Jacques Lacan. Myself I'd like to shore up an understanding of what Lacan means by Real.

In the course of a person's lifetime, meanings gather moss as they gain shades and layers. A mind  can easily hold fast to a spot on the symbolic order, think it rather cute and pour stuff into it, imagine our world without retard, puerile and cretin, which you just can't do with sums. The thing is, in Lacan's way of looking at it, there's a distinction to be made between Reality and The Real. Far from there being two distinct words to mark the difference in a manageable way, real is all bundled into real.

In short, for Lacan, "Reality" is the world we have built using symbols and images. "The Real" is everything else. Sounds far too easy and a little pointless until you adjust the meanings a little by suggesting: "The story of reality can be changed, The Real can't." Then you might be persuaded to ask: "Does The Real care about me?" The answer to that is: "No sirree! But Reality does its best to try."

Indeed, lo and behold, all of reality has been built on the idea of making you and I happy, and if not happy, then at least constructively motivated.

Being an ambitions male with a lifestyle to maintain, Our Man Jacques Lacan quickly concluded that Freud was absolutely right, when it comes to hardcore mental imbalance, morbid unhappiness, intermittent explosive disorder or whatever you wanted to call it, there were certainly reputations to be made but there was no actual cure for the fundamental Human Condition.

But he had noticed that in the wider society we people spent an inordinate amount of time in a pursuit which because he grew up proper he might have phrased this way: "Colluding to adapt to social norms." This collusion, he ventured to observe, had its casualties, but without the moral support of other gossiping idolaters we would all become casualties of The Real and under those circumstances where would reliable help come from.

There might be no cure for those whom the Symbolic World, Reality, had failed to embrace with the sort of love and appreciation that fills the void and makes it possible to dramatically reduce contact with The Real. But in terms of symbol making, an "I" that sat alone on a bench staring at the Liffey River and listening to the ducks, might find solace in dreaming of his dressing room, hunting around for the material out of which to make symbols that better suited him.

For Lacan that would require a person to accept "The Real" as real and "Reality" as an order of symbols, some of which made no sense whatsoever. For James Joyce it was developing a writing style that was "famously experimental and complex" that would challenge the professors of the English Literature, or it was "pretentious, overly difficult, deliberately obscure and fragmented" that rescued him from losing his mind to the isolation of preferring the company of park benches to the company of people.

Love affairs with Triadic Structures

Latch

 Today, as we wait for the Spring Marsh Frogs to sing, our little group intends to poke a finger or two at the Triadic Structure. Or, if you prefer to be a folksy political type desperate for the authenticity of the roots you never had, a three legged stool.

The off putting thing about Hegel's Triadic Structure was that one of the asymmetries was prepared to die rather than be wrong. The asymmetry that would have preferred to die than submit was referred to as the master and the more magnanimous asymmetry was referred to as the slave or in more enlightened times referred to as the servant.

The third leg of this triadic structure, which eventually became called the Synthesis, was like a melding of the two asymmetries into some sort of compromise which in time would become yet another asymmetry. Not an easy compromise to make and it would have been impossible had it not been for a flaw within the asymmetry that had a death wish, he wanted his wonderfulness to be recognized, and  over the generations the master and servant were able, for mutual advantage, to recognize each other as self-conscious beings, and this produced a mutual recognition out of which, often through conflict, a synthesis, a new direction, emerged.

For Hegel, his Triadic Structure had nailed it, everyone else could go home, and in the same way that Kant's version of the Enlightenment had predicted the End of History, Hegel was confident his own Phenomenology of Spirit was actually how the End of History would happen.

Hegel probably had a point he wanted to drum home when he assigned master/servant to the two asymmetries in his triad. He wanted to have one asymmetry dominant, raw in tooth and claw, otherwise nothing would get done, no one would obey anyone else, the harvests wouldn't be harvested and so on. A closer appreciation of Hegel's meanings include the idea of union between asymmetries that included recognition and the desire to be recognized.

When Lacan attended lectures on Hegel's phenomenology in Paris, he grasped this area of desire and recognition and saw a much subtler complexity. He concluded that master and servant misidentified the forces at play. The desire for a Pork Chop on a stick might be a need for sustenance, but a desire for a chunky soled Kleman Pador Tyrolean walking shoe was a desire for recognition. It was an adornment, part of the wardrobe. And if indeed the servant had a master, his master was the wardrobe that presented his self image to the world. And here Lacan introduced his own Triadic Structure.

In Lacan's Triad, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are three interlocked rings, and all is well as long as the symbolic remains a master worth following. Then, should the imagery no longer supply the symbolic with a path through the real, bam, you got neurosis and pharmaceutical makers have 20 percent of their manufacturing capacity. There's also a chance that your whole Tyrolean wardrobe thing might be showing signs of disintegrating, your neurosis becomes a compunction which turns psychotic the next thing you got a problem with too many skeletons in the basement.

Lacan, being French, referred to these symptoms as sinthomes and while struggling through James Joyce who he judged to be a very difficult writer he concluded that Joyce wasn't writing for other people, he had no desire to impress them with a new take on the literary equivalent of Tyrolean Brocade, he was writing for his own sanity, no one else. He was scouring the floor of his dressing room, gathering bits and pieces, including his shames and his soiled underpants and through his writing he was using them to symbolically complete himself by desperately trying to keep his three rings in some sort of working order.

Jacques Lacan's Drive and Hegel's influence on tension between asymmetries.

70 F. Jan 9th, 2026 Maple Pollen? 

 To get a closer look at "noise," the real from which symbols rescue us, I'll imagine I'm a wardrobe in Jacques Lacan's vestibule, waiting to be gazed at, judged and impressed. Like everyone else I'm struggling with a "lack" of some sort, an unfilled hole that needs content.

Currently I'm very disappointed in the Scottish Breeks that arrived in the mail, which really don't suit my Tyrolean Tracht Loden and makes my boiled wool Alpine hunting hat look unconvincing. There's a color clash I think, which could respond better to the bloom of heather on a windswept moor than to a vacuumed carpet and a ticking clock.

Jacques has reminded me more than once that moments of uncomfortable noisiness are bound to be alarming. The quality of unknown in the real always is, but I was to rest assured that while my wardrobe remained wholly preoccupied with maintaining the "why" and "wherefore" of my existence, in no way was it the irreducible fact of my existence. What remained of that was littering the floor of my dressing room.

Of course I sometimes wonder whether the aesthetics in the world of my Symbolic Order leave Jacques a little mystified. Like most of his generation Lacan did his uncomfortable time with Hegel's dialectics. Came away with his two objects representing an asymmetry, the one defining the other, the resulting tension producing a direction rather than an impasse. He called this direction "Drive."

His "what about you" was the assertion that the big, bold, object, the image around which my person has been shellacked in place was waiting in his vestibule, what I wanted to be was the other little object, it was waiting upstairs where I lived on the dressing room floor. 

Objet Petit A

Mobius Strip

 We've talked a lot about Jacques Lacan. We have to realize he died in 1981 when he was 80. Stuff has happened in Neuroscience and those sort of areas since the simpler and infinitely more comprehensible times. One of the topics Lacan put high priority on was the moments when a person started developing a self image.

For Lacan this idea of self image was an attempt to make yourself into  a mirror image a bigger and more confident other. You built it as a protection against the terror of reality. All very well being frightfully clever but an honest appraisal of a self in the world, for Lacan, was an absolute recipe for anti-social, psychotic behaviors.

There were two sorts of images, or others for Lacan. He thought of these others as objects. The one object was a mirror image of what you as a person decided you needed and wanted to be in order to fit into the world as best you could.  You could look at yourself in this mirror and judge your progress. The other other, the other object, which he called objet petit a, was what you'd left behind of yourself in the process of turning yourself into something that mirrored this wonderful image of yourself. Good looking, tall, successful, fun to be around....

Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that to manage the day to day you'd turned yourself into a very fine, highly polished Wardrobe. Everyone loved it, envied it, though it was great. Your other object, the objet petit a, would be the sawdust, waste wood, unfinished cans of varnish and cigarette butts you'd left laying around, or hidden away somewhere.

Oh sure, the Jung's of this world could go on about the archetypes around which a desperate and self conscious self could model itself, and Jung did mention shadows, which is what he called his cigarette butts and sawdust, being an ominous presence in the psyche. Lacan, in his model, put much more than a mere shadow into his objet petit a, his other other.

First of all, Lacan didn't want people messing with what he'd called his other other. He wanted it written and understood just as it was. Objet petit a, as far as he was concerned, was as good as an algebraic formulation.

Secondly the objet petit a, would always be a remainder, it was definitely a left over bit of reality that both the conscious and the unconscious could sense. But for Lacan, the moment we people started using symbols to make a language that tried to enable us to communicate with the object petit a, this other other, like a vampire, would remain outside the mirror, it couldn't be trapped by language, it was for ever a lurking misfortune, an unwanted appendage. And yet, no doubt about it, there was something in the periphery that refused to be ignored, it was lurking around, making the odd wistful sound that verged on whimpering, it had some sort of point to make that lay outside the Symbolic Order, so probably best to prescribe Quaaludes.

Finally, the objet petit a, this other other, means we can never be whole, our mirror, when we looked into it to check progress would never reflect what we'd become

Noise Cancelling and Sums ain't got It All

 I wanted to use the word Randomness or "Entropy as Noise" to get our minds around the possibility of other ways of thinking about ourselves as we are in the world. To get where I want to go, I'll have to offer an explanation of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. And I want to use information technology's lossy compression to inform our understanding of the way meaning works, specifically as presented by the post structuralist understanding of symbolic order in words and sentences. I'll try to start with the dainty ideas in this flighty expression lossy compression.

Lossy Compression in information science is when an electronic file is compressed to make it smaller, allows it to require less bandwidth when transmitted and less space to store. In the process of compression information is lost. Hence Lossy.

There's a big lossy factor to the way our brains handle information. And why? Here we have "Entropy as Noise" and/or Randomness. If too much information was to attempt to fill our brain networks at the same time ir would become garbled. The information would lose cohesion it would become a bunch of random words. As a result, instead of a book of stamps I might leave the post office with a six by ten envelope handcuffed to the back seat of a Sheriff's cruiser. Entropy is a measure of order within a system, low entropy is tidy and neat, high entropy is messy.

We evolved from the primal ooze this way. We know a lot, we don't have to use all of it all the time. It's there in your mind, making it useful, or at least germane to the matter at hand, doesn't require you to go back to the genesis of your ultimate purpose in life. 

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem applies to all mathematics. What it said in 1931 to the shock and alarm of Empiricists like Bertrand Russell and what it still says is that there are things in math that cannot be proved by math. In other words, if Godel is right, there is no mathematical theory of everything.

Be brave, while math can slide between concepts in the same way language slides between meaning on a symbolic order, sums haven't got it all, hard to believe but there's still room in the world for whatever it is that might be going on between our aggravating little ears.

We do take short cuts and will continue to allow a library of vaguely defined words to carry meanings that slide between nuances of slippery understandings for us. Our means of transmission may well be lossy for purposes of efficiency, getting the basic message there quickly, at the same time they remain very imprecise when compared to numbers.

Joan of Arc Patron Saint of Soldiers

Sybil Thorndike, 1929 as Joan

 in Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan

 The lovely forms of Francis Hutcheson's six senses, inspired as they were by the grace of an honest and distant God, have the slope-like qualities of the German Idealists. An arc of history curving toward justice. A star in the East bringing good news. Destiny or divine guidance. 

I say slope-like to take benefit from the Agincourt Effect Incline. In their attack on the English, overconfident French Knights, who greatly outnumbered the uncivilized English were moving up a gentle hill in heavy mud. It's what the military call a killing ground, the Pride of France fell prey to the English Archers.

It took a good 15 years of defeat after defeat, and France in the person of a French King would have been lost at the Siege of Orléans, had it not been for a very young peasant girl dressed as an armored maiden with sword on a mission from god. She was a very competent and fanatical leader of men who was able to drum some sense into the Dauphin Charles who was standing in for his dad who was safe in Paris having one of his manic episodes - Dauphin is French for the French King's Eldest Son, and also for the Dolphins that appear on his coat of arms.  Amongst her other talents Joan was able to influence wind direction which was rather critical.

When things settled down, when she was about 19 years old, despite the influence she'd had on the course of the 100 Years War in France's favor, Joan was basically accused of being a heretic by French Authorities for wearing men's clothes. Had she been able to stick to it and admit that wearing boys clothes was wrong she'd have done time and then, as long as she wore women's clothes, probably found a future in the church as a leader of Crusades, but there was something about Joan that pissed off the boys. While in jail she was taunted, raped by a nobleman and what with one thing and another she started wearing boys clothes again. French Authorities handed her over to the English, and for this brave, patriotic, loyal, fierce French soldier, who refused to fight on Sunday, the Arc of history curved toward a Justices that convicted her to be burned at the stake. 

 You might think well, well, well and ask for a reminder of Bernard Shaw's portrayal of her as a deeply intense challenge to the institutions of the church and of the state. For the State she was a female of no apparent lineage, a loose canon who could rouse the soldiers which was just downright dangerous. For the Church she appeared to have a direct communication with God, which put her at odds with a church that saw its role as maintaining a unity of doctrine by keeping for itself the hard work of interpreting the word of god. 

Anyway, Joan was burned to death in 1431, her conviction was overturned in 1456 and not until May 16th 1920 was she canonized as a Saint.

Recursive

Interpretive Dance Class 1949

 I wanted to talk about the word "recursive." It's a word that's come up a lot, and because it sounds a little like a Times Table, I have glossed over it once too often. The trouble is when "they" talk about neural networks of the various gradations of complexity, from simple to complex, in the evolution of neural networks, the most complex allow for "recursion."  This means that to wax lyrical and with tremendous elan on the role communication has played on the Genesis of Species I have to know what recursion means when applied to cognitive function, so I don't stick my foot down my throat.

To avoid an error of comprehension in the definitions here, my own thoughts return to the Post Structural European thinkers who began to understand the words in language as Jacques Lacan's irascible Symbolic Form notable for its fluidity that was better understood as an order of meaning rather than anything that had the nerve to claim a certainty of meaning. What did we use to say in those happier days?

We found faith in Lacan. For him language is a vast network of words, sounds, structures that shape our reality, forms the unconscious, gives structure to the world around us, it's where meaning arises, and of course in this tidal pool of interactions between something and emptiness words happen and become lodged in the memory.

Neural Networks are pathways in the brain for processing information. There's a backwards and forwards, up and down. The word recursive in a Recursive Neural Network, whether the network is artificial as in the big computer or in part of a body that belongs to you or I, puts an equal weight on the backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards of bits of information that's traveling around the network and as a result the network builds hierarchical tree like structures like sentences, not vague half backed whiffs that go around and round just thoroughly enjoying a symbol-less expression of itself for which, aggravatingly and possibly neurotically, there is no explanation. 

In our minds, recursion is something that makes sense or begins to make enough sense to pass as sense. In the new world of automation, failure of "recursion" as it currently stands means insufficient data to achieve a solution. And the thing about our Recurring Neural Networks, as opposed to those other ones, as long as we are alive our constant symbolizing of the real never actually comes to a comfortable end. Instead of ending to it all as quickly as possible and switching ourselves off, we come up with things like interpretive dance and  when that's not available we call forth words like curiosity, creativity, special, passionate and onwards.