Truth in Being and Taliesin

 

Milkweed Bloom

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

Walter Benjamin Art and Media

 

Gap

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

Another Shot at Endings

Drain Field

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

Just another Life

Milkweed

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