Surviving in Mr Trump-a-dump's America

Make no mistake, Mr Trump is a horror to me. I am a liberal, almost a socialist in some areas, like health care for all!!

Bur Mr Trump is also an American "event" . He fits in our history as unfortunate as that is to say. He pulled together the "tea party" so called patriots, the very religious, the gun lovers and the white supremacists in a coalition. We has a black president, we were about to have a female president. All who opposed these events found a common cause, and are now bed-fellows with Mr Trump.

The USA is on a path to become a diverse and tolerant society. But we are, as someone once said, a civilization without a culture. When our culture is born, I am certain that it will be diverse, tolerant and welcoming. I was optimistic it would be in my lifetime, now I am not so sure. But got to stay hopeful. I am uncertain as to who will lead the anti-Trump movement in the 2020 election. No one is emerging now, because it is a long time until 2020, enough time to get wounded beyond recovery by the "tweetings." I am hoping for a wiccan transgender Latina, but let us see what the meta-verse spews forth for us. :)

Stieg Larson's Millennium series

I just loved these books, and I was rooting for Lisbeth Salander all the way. At work I was asked to take a personality evaluation test, and it revealed that I am  person who values the human contact and relationship above the rules. Now that is definitely not to say that I am not a law abiding citizen. rather I see that each act, each thought arises from it's own unique set of circumstances.  I will grant that we must use some generalities in  order not to be bogged down in over thinking every thing, but in cases that give us pause, that upset us, or that we perceive that damage has been done to us or to those in our oikoumene, we must, yes absolutely must examine as best we can all the circumstances that lead up to that event.

With the character of Lisbeth Salander we see this quite clearly, as the author draws it out in microscopic, forensic detail. Who is she? How did she get to be who she is?  The media rushes to judgement in the most salacious, titillating way...of course she is an insane lesbian satanist, and thus a threat to all that is good and holy and true.  But that is how we are told to perceive ourselves..we are the good, the holy, the true...all others are to be excluded and condemned.

But is this really the case? It is the easy way out, and for Lisbeth and her circumstances. it is the cowards way.  Her friends...those people who have come to know and appreciate her...rally to give us all that we need to know to realize that the whole is so much more that the sum of the isolated and Fox-news/Rush Limbaugh-interpreted parts.

ἔκβασις

day one of my fall adventure log..it will be a short adventure but one that i want to enjoy. in the past i always hurried to the place that i wanted to go but now i want to savor the journey. the destination is only a part of the whole. going forth, abiding, return, like those who went into the great deserts of the Thebiad or much later (and more appealing to me), those who went into the Northern Thebiad~the primeval forests of the land now called Russia. why did they go? to seek divinity..to know themselves..or to just get away from the familiar .

i am ready, almost. got a map, instructions, and a few clothes. but it is amazing how many sundries i think i need...nail clippers, powder, razor, comb, deodorant...the list grows even as i struggle to fill it. only two books (as i wont count the kindle app as books) Cry to Heaven by Anne rice i want to finish..it has taken me to the wonderful worlds of pre-Gluck opera and the unfamiliar yet exciting world of the castrati, the pop stars of the 1730s & 40s. funny how i forget about civilization in the 1700s because as an American, my focus is on the log cabins of my pioneers and not the great opera seria of G.F. Handel that they left behind them. a special thank you to the dear one who told me about this book...

also going along is Rabbit, run by John Updike. my mind used to get lost in the past and want to dwell there always. now i care about the present, how did we get here? why do we act the way we do? Updike is the great chronicler of the average man in America in the second half of the 20th century...he has an amazing cryptic style that makes you re-read every paragraph to tease out the meat. and yes i know it is vacation but i cant be without my books. picture a 16 year old gawky boy struggling through 30th street station in Philadelphia with a big case and duffel weighted like rocks...

anyway, it is almost time to go. will check and doublecheck my list..have i got everything. geez i am such a worrier. but i do have a confidence now that i didnt have before, so i am ready to go forth and enjoy the journey as well as the destination.

our number

john dee, alchemyst

to the first queen elizabeth

said we all have an angel--

a divine guardian,

and each angel has a number.

ah! if we could only

know those numbers!

then we could contact

any person, any where...

well now we know them.

all those numbers--

but the angels are forgotten.

The last of the old playground

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving (1997), I stood on the hill behind Pastor B--'s house, near the TV tower. Form this vantage point, I could see most all of Elizabethtown, from Groff Avenue to the new Foxbury development, and far out past route 283. When I was a boy at the Childrens' Home, this view was obscured by the forest, but no longer. I felt as if I were in a calm, untroubled place, far away from the day to day worries of life. how I wished I could stay here forever, observing, but not participating....with no more close, entangling concerns.

Then, suddenly, from far below, my son Brendan called to me, saying, "Come down here, Daddy. Let's follow these tracks!" I looked down upon the old playground behind the S-- Homes. There I saw huge piles of earth, like mountains striving to reach up to me on the heights. And there were many tracks, made by the backhoes and bulldozers, going in all directions. I did not want to go down, but for Brendan's sake I did. We followed many tracks, and looked for treasures which might be hidden in the mud. So many children had played and had fun in this place.... There was no pleasant view down here, just a rocky, muddy waste land. Soon we found that the tracks went nowhere, and the mountains, which seemed so solid from a distance, would not hold our weight. How I longed for my former place on the hill.

Finally, I accepted that we had to leave this place. I called to Brendan, but he was far away. Knowing that I would better be able to find him if I were on the hill, I began my ascent alone. At last, after a steep climb, I had returned to my place, and my all-inclusive view was restored. I saw Brendan in the distance. When I called to him, he came running, a happy child running free over that space as others had in their time. He wanted to climb up as soon as possible to be with me and share what he had seen. Together then, we talked and looked out over where we had been exploring, then far out over the roof tops of Elizabethtown.

Our Playground, c.1950-1997, R.I.P.

The Power of Words

Words create the "land beyond nature," i.e. the meta-physical realm. In the ancient world a war was fought for the sole title to the land beyond nature. The importance of this war to its participants was this:

(AXIOM): In the land beyond nature all thought forms expressible in words are at base level of equal value due to their existence alone.

However, in order to uphold a social order in the natural world, the land beyond nature must seem to be monolithic,. i.e. holding to a certain set of acceptable principles upon which the social order is constructed. All who oppose these principles must be condemned as infidels or heretics because they, by their mere existence, attack the very foundation of society. Few indeed have broken through to this fundamental axiom....

Today, however, we have Gaga...

Wordstream II

Over in my place the place where i have been put there has now been time for thought and time to process the stream of life that flows through and around and beyond past me into the shadowed future but here now my thoughts conspire to examine all the more than i can see and jump they do from star to star around the cosmos galaxy universe membrane dimensional field as they attempt to process all potential phenomena in that which does exist or exists not yet or existed once but now so long forgotten and lost that i begin to seek the energy more and more to reach the full potential of what must be so up and up we soar again to follow the ancient metaphor of the religious ones the seekers who have in the past defied the bonds of their kin and place to see beyond the all and tear through the membrane the walls of night the very bonds of physical reality that pretend to tie us here to place and time but then upreaching at last i come to the marvel world of light and life the phos and zoe of those gnostic minds who saw before to all of this yet could not say in a distinctive way that could not be mocked by those in power but now o yes i have arrives to claim the strength to feel the light of wonder love and true untruth that lies beyond for all who seek it there in that place which is no place where all began so long ago to form through its energy then released to brightly expand and show the all which we can only see in shadow form just now.

Bildungsroman

There have been three excellent coming of age TV series that were cancelled after one season: My So Called Life, Freaks & Geeks, and My Life As Liz. No--wait! Liz has been renewed for a second season. Now we will be able to find out what come after, like reading Remarque's The Road Back (or Marchwitza's Storm over the Ruhr) after All Quiet on the Western Front. But not like that show Jen Love Hewett was in after Party of Five.

In Freaks & Geeks, Lindsay Weir comes of age. The process begins when illusions are shattered, and ends with the quintessential Baby Boomer choice: establishment and conformity or fringe and freedom. This is displayed in our national discourse with great drama in the presidential election process. But let's not go there. Lindsay's version of the choice is between going to college to be a part of the top 1% or heading off in a van to follow the Grateful Dead tour. We all want to get in the van, but somehow conformity envelopes us.

Jia Baoyu, in the Hongloumeng, manages to choose both. He fulfils his obligation to his family by fathering a son and by passing the national examinations in such a way they he gains the attention of the Son of Heaven himself. But right after that, he vanishes in the 18th century Chinese equivalent of following the Grateful Dead: by becoming a wandering monk.

Can we choose both? Perhaps to do this is to fall between two stools, and we end up with neither. Or there other choices that we cannot see? Other mental and cultural spaces to be discovered and explored? As we get more and more wrap'd up in our electronic hibernaculum, will it even be possible to reach the fringe and find freedom?