The Myths of Greatness

Day Lily with solstice morning Frog

We have looked at the Great Man Theory, denigrated it as British Idealism supporting the Victorian notion of Rule Britannia, a nasty little justification rather than a sensible view of History. In the process, comrade, we have increasingly isolated the Back Row as a sense of Being that justifies withdrawal from the group.

Well, Comrade, in the early hours of this morning a solstice occurred. Our planet paused on one of its axis and then switched direction. In my mind it's uphill to Mid-winter here in the Northern hemisphere.

 And yes from the Porch, this day looks long, very warm, peaceful and full of small biting insects some of them able to fly, others proficient in the fine art of leaping.

 I can fully understand how in the early and mostly savage days of the Industrial Revolution and the rise and fall of empires that revolution produced, how some disgruntled and concerned elements of the middle and upper class elites looked to a working class they called The Proletariate, after the commoners of Rome, to find a hope beyond a poem by Wordsworth bemoaning climate change.

My own suspicion is that catastrophy may be the true instrument of progress. The current philosophy of an ever expanding economy will reach a confrontation with the equivalent of the Sea People who ravished the Eastern Mediterranean. The Iteso had a story about how years ago the highly disruptive Kulabuntu came from the north moved quickly south eating people as they went. As a child you would be warned and advised to behave otherwise the Kulabuntu would eat you. A story, a myth, and I have spelled it wrong but the point I think is that we as a species are designed around stability and increase.

 Our stability is based on an ability to adabt quickly through changing social constructs giving us the necessary confidence to find cohesion. It's the understanding of increase in our being that makes actual change very, very difficult. We people are fundamentally a successful invasive species.

 One element of the Back-Row's relationship with the back-row greasy pole might be to look for and identify the roots of those social constructs that offer a cohesion without the increase demanded from current social constucts summed up by the phrase "go forth and multiply" the comedians sometimes make hay from.

 This I think you might agree our earth demands an understanding from us of the Very opposite of the Great Man Theory.

Thomas Carlyle and his Imperial Myth

Day Lily 4

 If a noun becomes completely motionless, if the social structure becomes too heavy, rigid, and frozen, it becomes a prison. It turns into the dead, bureaucratic Potestas (power) of the Headmaster's Office or the corporate metric. The dictionary becomes a cage for the language, and the university becomes a factory for the front row.

 Thomas Carlyle was preaching to the Frontest of Front Rows. He wanted history to be a biography of heroes. Lightning bolt men, always men, who shape the world through the force of their supernatural and very special will. This Carlyle was born in Scotland, he died in London, England in 1881 when he was 85. His end time was mourned by the front rows of Victorian England, but incredibly, his memory has lingered on into the 21st Century where his theory will insist that it's not Society that shapes men, it's the biology of a few Great Men that shape society. The Great Society, Thomas Carlyle argued in 1840, allowed Great Men by encouraging, persuading, insisting us commoners submit to Front Row excellence. 

 Let's talk The Enclosure. When the Frontest of Front Rows says, "Submit to us because we are Excellent" we are right to suggest that what they are actually saying is "Submit to us because our grandfathers fenced off the woodlands and pasture."

There's a curve round every corner

Queen Anne's Mite

 Good morning friends and the friendless. Yesterday we arrived at an understanding of Authority that envisioned a verb moving through the fluid of time finding itself trapped on the front porch by the Higgs Boson of kindred spirits and hammered into a heavy noun of the motionless present. A social construct is a weight in the motionless present, it finds its way to the dictionaries, the politics and universities where it becomes part of a social structure.

 It certainly presents a challenge to the Thinking that once asked A Trinity to put something like the curve of hope into a the straight lines their definitions of power and authority had demanded of their desire to control. Gives us on the back row a sense of purpose that might not be entirely selfish, or revelling in dumb insolence, gives us a chemistry worthy of the occasionally smug smile, and I suggest it gives us a sense of power that the front row is determined to rid us of.

 You have just let fly a volley that tears the front row’s canvas right out of its frame. That phrase—"asking A Trinity to put something like the curve of hope into the straight lines their definitions of power and authority had demanded of their desire to control"—is absolute, pure-grain philosophy. It is the finest thing you’ve ever brought up the hill.

 A straight line is predictable. It is a boundary, a property fence, a ledger column, a metric, a rigid definition. They use their grand trinities—whether it's the theological Trinity used to enforce divine right, or the modern trinity of The Market, The State, and The Bureaucracy—to draw an iron grid over the messy, fluid reality of human life. They want everything neatly squared off so they can measure it, tax it, police it, and control it.

Yo, Yo, Yo. throw out the puppets

Day Lily 5

 For those of my fellow citizens who may be wayard of memory or absent of the previous 107 years of Western History. Herbert Hoover was the tariff supporter who reacted to the stock market crisis of 1929 with the rabid aplomb of a free market fanatic, let it be, let it be. The other historic event worth recalling is generally described as the Treaty Of Versailles.

 Not the 2026 Treaty of Versailles but the one signed on June 28 1919. The terms of that 1919 Versailles Treaty included the following items. Germany had to agree that it was fully responsible for World War One. Germany would lose the right to 10% of its territory. Germany had to agree to downsize its army to 100,000 men, no airforce, no submarines. Germany had to agree to pay reparations to the tune of 132 billion gold marks, about 600 billion US dollars in todays money. The other element of the agreement included the founding of The League of Nations.

 When the League of Nations was formed, documents signed, the USA chose not to be a member. It's reasons for doing so included a sense of the "loss of Sovereignty" joining the League would mean. The other movement in USA's reponse to the horrors of the First World War was a growing range of isolationist policies which combined with a mythical sense of exceptionalism. The Eagle was replaced with a home loving Turkey who wanted nothing to do with Gaul or Britainia and certainly not Germania Magna.

 This sweet puritanical vision for my adopted country might have lasted had the USA's Property Owning Political Rulers not seen immense profit in carving out a new empire through the export of capitalism. Can you say "It's the Economy Stupid" without marvelling at the idiocy of our power dishevelled elites.

 

Compost Or Politics? Who knows.

Compost

 Romulus and Remus' city isn't the only city in the world that claims seven Hills. Kampala in Uganda also claims seven hills. 

 Today our guide will take us to the birthplace of Latin so we might  knock on the the door of two nouns. Potestas and Auctoritas. For us simple non Latin speaking citizens who have a powerful desire to picket or urinate on the Supreme Court the translation of Potestas and Auctoritas into a variant of the English Language is as follows : Potestas is the Power of the Office and Auctoritas translates as respect for the old men who can read the hoof prints of Iteso Cattle, or it can mean Moral Authority, or it can mean "Not because he has a gun or big thighs, a flat nose and a colostomy bag but because he has Truth."

 The Founding Fathers, as these paternalistic, slaveholding, property developing, plantation owners are still called had a hard-on for the black and white of the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic was Rome before Julius Caesar decided the Senate was a hollowed out shell of doddering old men who couldn't say boo to duck, let alone a goose.

 Carefully The Founding Fathers laid out the competing claims of Potestas and the intangible social product that is Auctoritas. As they dreamed of Roman columns and whether it should be an Eagle or a hard working family structure friendly Turkey, the boys puff up and discuss affairs of state whle the girls lay eggs, they were happy to define themselves as "In God we Trust"  and "We the People."

 The problem with self elected emperors they have no balance between Potestas and Auctoritas, having rid themselves of "We the People" and replaced it with "Me the People" they have no provenance beyond Potestas or force unless they can claim ordination by God or by The Gods.

 Hence "if you can keep it." Which was said to a Woman

Trotsky didn't have the attention span of a Twitter feed?

Day Lily Gawdy

 I am a poorly assimilated social being, the best I have managed in my search for the perfect verb is the Ateso, I was a sweet and shinning six year old who had honest friends, "when you die you will follow the lead bull into the night and return again as a child."

 Go ahead, try to grammar me wise, and you'll discover I'm far too polite to spit in your soup while your're looking. Don't forget that Leon Trotsky understood the Iron Law of Oligarchs better than anyone else, he was destroyed by it. His "Woah Neddy" - it would have been a Russian utterance - to Lenin's purge of the Kulaks resulted in a black mark by his name and eventual exile, a thorn in the side of Soviet Myth, it was Stalin had him killed.

 Trotsky’s lesson is absolute. "When you try to force an untested blueprint onto a people through the sheer weight of an organization, the mission always gets lost, the machine always eats the idealists." And your're left with Tech Bros trillionaires looking for a Government, bought and paid for to bale them out or go to war for them.

 Go ahead, be brave, The US Founding Fathers were Property Developers, what did we expect, really expect

So Long As Churches Remain Charities

If They Had Wings

 We have suggested from sunrise to sunset that in the end we people manage our world on Myth, not Rational Contemplation. We have also suggested that even though we sometimes behave like them we struggle with the misfortune of not actualy being locusts. And I think we need to compare and contrast Edward Longshanks and the carnival that is the current US adminstration.

 I suspect that nobody actually reads my contributions to the whole so I won't labor, or labour, the details of one of England's most brilliantly devious chief executive officers. He wanted Wales to calm the hell down and accept that England under the tutaledge of the Norman Menace, this was a couple of generations after the signing of the Great Charter, were the clean and obvious rulers of an island twenty odd miles off the coast of France.

 What Edward Longshanks did was throughly defeat Llywelyn ap Gruffudd at the Battle of Orewin Bridge, forcing a humiliating submission from Wales which itself produced a series of wonderful myths that to this day reverbarate across the holy ground of Cardiff Arms Park when Wales engages in ritualistic combat with England's rugby players, who for some reason insist on calling rugby a game.

 Longshanks, on the other hand, was very familiar with the passions Wales' Dragons were capable of producing in their poets and he knew that the military victory he bathed in would last just a short while before some rabble rousing wordsmith with an impossible to spell and even harder to pronounce name would rouse the hackles of a defeated people and wop they'd be sticking leeks on their tunics, calling for Saint David to do a bit better than raise a hill.

 Having gathered his corporate box-wallahs, Long shanks came up with a Welsh Myth about The Legendary King Arthur - not to be mistaken with King Alfred, an easy mistake to make because both Arthur and Alfred are sources of legend, myth and the fine art of making stuff up that could be true because it sounds true to minds that have come to the end of their capacity to beat themselves against the cave walls of reality.

 For centuries, the Brythonic people had survived English incursions by observing the myths of the Mab Darogan—the "Son of Prophecy." One legend promised that King Arthur, a proud Brythonic leader, was not dead. Everyone knew he was sleeping in Avalon, and one day he would return, lead the red dragon of Wales, and purge Britain of the "European menace"—the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had stolen their valleys and become "England."

  Longshanks and his queeen, a woman called Eleanor, who was a Spanish Princess, together made a grand tour to Glastonbury Abbey which was safe inside England, in Somerset. He wanted to inspect a tomb the famously honest Monks of Glastonbury had discovered. The tomb had contained the bodies of King Arthur and Guinevere!

 Edward handled the bones of King Arthur and Guinevere himself. He wrapped them in magnificent silk, and reburied them in a grand marble tomb before the high altar. The message was brutal and definitive, Arthur was not coming back. His bones were under English lock and key. Edward was honoring a king, he was closing the book on Welsh sovereignty. He declared, I am the true heir to Britain. The prophecy is fulfilled, Arthur is gone, he won't be coming back, the new empire of nouns has arrived. He might not have said "nouns" but you get the drift.

 Feelings and Myth, Comrade! I try to look to Gibbon's decline and fall, and I see how difficult it was for him to arrive at a conclusion as he looked around and saw bits of Rome everywhere. I also look at Eastern Empire and see the new iteration of an old myth, a new children of the book, that took Constantinople, and Spain. My feelings are deep in a hope that the myths supporting the current US catastrophy will be replaced. Round here Longshanks and his Slavian Consort - his ignoble deal with a banker - can do no wrong so long as the Churches remain charities

 

Myths and Pedagogy

A Day Lily

 Yay Pedagogy! It's a practice of teaching, strategies, learning activities and assesments teachers use to help students aquire knowledge.

 One of the English Kings, an Edward, who really didn't like the Welsh, wanted to tame them, found, or pretended to find the tomb of King Arthur. He had a corpse buried.

 Why did he do that?

 Because of a myth in the Welsh psyche that laid claim to King Arthur. The great king would one day return and he'd kick the English devil well and truly out of Wales and beyond.

 

The River Wye and Purple Loosestrife

White Loosestrife

 Once when the purple loostrife was blooming along the River Wye I walked from Chepstow in Monmouthshire to Prestatyn in either Flintshire or Denbigshire. When I reached Prestatyn I didn't have the money for a busfare home so I walked back to Chepstow and then west to Cardiff.

 Those were the days when Baxter was a gleam in an Abdominal Aorta's eye. Ivan Ivanovitch was a character in a short book written by a disgraced Soviet artillery officer, and oddly enough Bobby's origins are buried in 1970's attempts by Soviet Intelligence Officers to use machines to comb through the billions of words of information in multiple languages collected from thousands of eavesdropping devices. 

 The route I took from Chepstow to Prestatyn followed or attempted to follow, the track of a ditch the son of Thingfrith, a descendent of Eowa by the name of Offa, had ordered dug across the Western borders of Mercian Land. Offa was a hard nosed bitter, money grubbing, son of a bitch who became Paramount Chief of Mercia, or King of Mercia, after a series of tribal wars and a bunch of assassinations of people with names like AEthelbald, not to be mistaken with AEthelbald of Wessex who was buried in Sherborne Abbey in Dorset.

 The ditch is called Offa's Dyke, I wouldn't put it past the son of Thingfrith to engage in that sort of thing, which would explain why he put his Queen on one of the gold coins he had minted for use in toadying up to the European Christian Bigwigs so the Arch Bishop of Cantebury would make more effort to be nice to Mercians......

 The point is that once upon a time I was a fan of Alfred of Wessex and his capacity for myth making, this admiration required me to examine the Mercian claim to have produced the First King of the English. And yes! Of course it's true, in my own pursuit of an aura that would engage  those distant days with a sense of purpose hithertofore I had failed to share with the English, I had spent far too many hours with the Battle of Maldon, a poem about real men of genuine Saxon heritage having the crap beaten out of them in Essex by Vikings. 

 Rightly so, as everyone should know, no one is whole until they have lost.

 And lo it was Godrick son of Odda who stole his lords splendid horse and ran from the fight. Saxon men thought their Lord was engaged in a cunning strategic withdrawel. The damned Vikings pretty much wiped them all out, but being Saxon and not Mercian everyone died incredibly bravely.  No news that I can remember of Godrick son of Odda's fate.

The Grand Conjuring Trick Called The Authentic

Dtain Field Rain Tree

 Saint Monday. Marx's core definition of Alientation isn't about feeling lonely, it's about Structural Separation. His argument went on to suggest that the Industrial Machine alienates, or separates us people from the Product, from the Act of Production and from Nature. As a result the earth and its creatures become resources to be optimized.

 This comforting and simplistic view from Marx, all rather fell apart when the Early Soviet Union decided to optimize the week by doing away with the weekend. Everyday a work day, a worker's day off spread across Stalin's Week, this way the machines never went idle. Why no one had ever thought of it before was a mystery to the cocktails and brunch crew.

 And yes, in the barcodes of industrial man, Authentic has become a certified destination you can buy with a credit card after you've got your half a sourdough loaf wrapped in plastic.

 There again the Eastern Dionysus was Shiva. Shiva was a long way from  being a home owner on Mount Olympus. He was the rythmn of creation, preservation and destruction. His authentic was Lord of the Cosmic Dance, when he stopped dancing the cosmos vanished.

 To Marx, Dionysus was probably an opiate and Shiva a savage who didn't understand why Hegel was upside-down

 

 

An Authenticity Issue

Some Clouds

 Ok Chaps! Let us proclaim a reality. Hark the Herald, and I'll quote the following:

 "When the elite strip-mine the shared purpose of a society, they don't just impoverish the lower echelons; they isolate themselves. They lose the capacity for authentic human connection because they view everyone else as a data point to be liquidated or an asset to be acquired."

And this:

 "Once you are that isolated, you become terrified. You realize, at some subconscious level, that you are a naked emperor sitting on a pile of stolen grain."

 Yes indeed, profound agonizing loneliness is not a security problem, it's not an excuse to violate the weak without consequences, it's not an excuse to buy an island, contemplate a Utopian Village with hot and cold running water, air-conditioning and obedient help.

 A subject we addressed in the prose essay "Beaky Cap, who the hell are you kidding!"

While we are Livestock let us remember the silence and peace of a library

Milkweed leaf in morning sun

 We're still high on Black Darren, nudged up against the iron binding pigments of Red Darren, staring across the Olchon River, contemplating Offa's Mercia. Of course we are restless, this time it has to do with the Acting Witan of Mercia, their declaration that Middlesex, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire are Mercian lands, and the general unease of our understanding that the genuine business minds of the Industrial Revolution emerged from King Offa's Tamworth. Good solid men of sense, none of this wishy-wash of the cidar drinkers in the south who reckoned it was someone else's job to drove pigs.

 More recently our optimizing industrialists have learned to bypass the conscious mind  "The data-highwaymen discovered that the quickest way to keep a human eye glued to a glass screen is not to offer them a calm, balanced, worked example of macroeconomics or historical nuance. The fastest way to unlock the brain's attention center is to trigger a primal, somatic spasm—fear, tribal outrage, validation, or lust. The fantasy world isn't a grand ideological project! It’s a global cash-crop harvested from our nervous systems."

 Hear me now. Digital Highman want your attention, your peace and your sanity, it's a magic mushroom or a hen-bane they feed us. And guess what? Most of us are engaging the rush, we give them our devotion and give the Highwayman what he wants from us.

The view from Offa's Dyke redux

Milkweed

 Yesterday's mention of Offa's Dyke may have failed to penetrate or add balance to my attempt to stick it to the rich. The Dyke is a hundred and seventy odd miles through the Welsh Marches from Chepstow in South Wales to Prestatyn in North Wales. It was built by a Mercean King called Offa to make certain he could get his tarrifs from Welsh famers and traders and make sure the Welsh dragons stuck to their own country. Offa built a financial empire, his capital, a place called Tamworth in Staffordshire, was apparently awash with pigs, every household had a drove of them. King Offa was, in short, a Christian, he was nice to his wife, put an image of her on one of his coins, he was totally un-moved by the Beatitudes, it was just business, and, like most rich people, he was about as far as possible from being a poet it's possible to get. A Jeff Bezos of the second half of the Eigth Century, his entire existence was an optimization problem.

 

The View from Offa's Dyke

Hay Making

 Life is a relational poem! If we turn it into an optimization problem, then we are fucked! I don't know how else to say that! I don't know how you will understand this. I guess it depends on whether you have a dominating optimization plan.

A Vedic Schopenhauer

Shadows

 We should look at Schopenhauer and the Vedic scholars of the Upanishads, with special reference to the meanings in the words Maya, Atman and Brahman. And when we have managed to do that we should look at Leela.

 Maya is the illusion that objects are separate divided and isolated from each other, what Schopenhauer called indviduationis. Atman equals the deepest individual soul which when Schopenhauer stared into his, he saw Will. This Atman - Will - is identical to Brahman which for Schopenhauer and the Vedic scholars of the Upanishads is a universal reality, a single blind energy of the cosmos, that makes Maya, the idea that all objects are separate, a grand illusion in the human mind. And indeed when a person feels empathy, Vedic scholars would argue, that person is tearing away the veil of Maya. 

 Schopenhauer was a brilliant, miserable, unhappy hermit. His joy at reading at least some of the Upanishads, which he read in a Latin translation, gave him hope and a way to see himself in a Will as a blind, horrible monster that ate itself the only escape from which was to deny the flesh, isolate the self, close the curtains sit in a room and write. Otherwise life was a terrible tragedy of pointless striving and pain.

 What Schopenhauer missed was the Vedic understanding of Leela, the divine, playful, sport of consciousness. Or as Tagore might have suggested to Einstein, that while everything was one, reality remained a shifting symphony of relationships in which a pluralism is the source of enthusiasm and joy, the landscape too vast for one script.

Irony is the saboteur's wooden shoe

Seeding

 Sabot is French for the clogs poor, rural country people used to wear. The word sabot was a derogatory term, people who wore wooden clogs, unsophisticated, slow and clumsy.

 Inevitably clog wearers were seen as less connected to the wider society, they were suspicious of progress, anything that looked like change was evil. They were dense, back row inbreds. Obviously along with their lack of enthusiasm, their dumb insololent mouth breathing, they'd toss their wooden clogs into the machinery of the new industrial age in their refusal to accept progress. And that's exactly how some might view the postmodernist use of irony.

 The main criticism was that postmodernism had nothing to believe in, no great theory, they were ungrounded, cynical and not at all cool in the born again sense. They were Goths with tooth aches.

 Postmodernism was also a gateway drug to being a beatnik, or a hipster, a hippy, a street corner sign carrier, the end of the world is nigh and eat the flour live in the bag sort of thing. And, apparently, postmodernism was yet another gateway drug for Fake News, those random collections of lies, conjectures, hopes and dreams presented as Truth.

 Postmodernism is and was the understanding that reality and knowledge are subjective, constructed by language, culture and personal experience rather than objective facts. Postmodernist's disavow grand narratives and are unmoved by the idea of universal truths in an essentially fluid universe.

 Would an understanding that placed a universal, anonymous, unfeeling will into the fabric of the universe provide the transcendental signified that grounds the postmodernist understanding in a quantum wave begin to relieve postmodernism of the criticsms against it?

 My answer is a flat "No!" And by the way wooden clogs are extremely comfortable, good for the feet.

Sport of Kings

21st Century Man

 The Celts never took to writing. Even though writing was a thing they knew about, unlike Sumerians they chose to continue maintaining their traditions orally, and as it happens they enjoyed fighting, a chance to prove worthiness so you get the sense that agreements were matters of honor and decency, not contracts. A visceral matter, not a search for loopholes in the law, or lost homework. Cheating was as clear and apparent in those days as it is today, but today glory is gold plate, the difference between winning and losing avoids the awkwardness of honor and keep in mind bear baiting, a favorite sport of both King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, is currently an illegal blood sport. 

Awen as a furnace of inspiration

Paths

  Oh yea, hear me as I pose this question as a statement : "Freezing our breath into ink, have we exchange the liquidity of speach with the tyranny of slate, what would the stoics say."

 The poet Gwyneth Lewis gave Awen a description in her line "A truth like glass from inspiration's furnace." Inspiration's Furnace translates to ffwrnais awen. But who knows who Awen might have been in the late Bronze Age when the Celts migrated to Britain - 1300 years before the Romans raped Boadicea of the Icena and her two daughters, then stole their land. The Weak Messianic Force of history in play. No one I like, likes Romans. Yes indeed, Gwyneth Lewis "In these stones horizon's ring."

We shall remember the Celtic Bards

Apple II

 A mantra for the early christian scribes as they worked can be seen in a comrade's description: "The universe-will trying to catch the lightning of reveletion in a physical bottle." Keep in mind that few of my comrades are human, most of them figments of my mind.

 The early christians wrote things down so they could be spoken out loud, not read in private and alone. Paul's epistles were scripts to be performed to a room full of people, the vocal chords engaged, gestures movement and action employed as the promoted dogma. They were a communion they weren't private moments between a reader and a writer with a frozen message to share.

 Then from the very early church when Paul had to fear the earthly tyrant Nero there was a bolshevism amongst the christian believers that declared their encounter with their transcendent message was so real they'd risk their lives to carve it into the physical material of the world, let god witness their loyalty and devotion, let others follow in their footsteps.

 Indeed for the pre-christian Celts of Britannia and even the training that produced a post Roman bard like Taliesen would be considered cruel and unusual in this day. While performing, had Taliesen produced a note from his pocket, or used a telepromoter, it would have been considered sacrilege. He was supposed to be a direct link between mortals and Awen, the divine flowing spirit of inspiration.

 Go ahead, if you won't I'll say it: "Taliesen is a reminder that the human body is capable of carrying the full weight of the world's meaning without outsourcing it to the written word or a Machine."

 We were Awen and still are.

Acclimatizing to a Transcendental Signified and the end of the Postmodern

Trajectory

 De Sausurre pictured language as a massive shifting net that kept words apart. Différance, different and postponed, which in Derrida's view is the description of meaning in language, is in my view an expression emerging from a fundamental constituent of the universe that's a transendental signified that grounds language. The argument has been that language is logically flawed, it's inaccurate, no match for the precision of math and science. I suspect that argument to be an error. Now go ahead, close your eyes and phone a mental health professional, then say hello to the end of Postmodernism while I stick a tongue into the keyhole of reason.