Ashes

Woke up this morning feeling like I had to search this poem out:

Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick...
They all know that I'm alive,
that I chew my food...and they don't know
why harsh winds whistle in my poems,
the narrow uneasiness of a coffin,
winds untangled from the sphinx...

On the day I was born,
God was sick,
gravely.--Cesar Vallejo

As I get older I'm trying to accept this state of feeling.

Thank you to Robert Bly for introducing me to this poem.

Bunny Rabbits and Easter

The other day my 12 yr. old son asked: "Dad, why do we have the Easter bunny?" Of course, I didn't have the foggiest idea. But, lo and behold, while finishing up reading The Maiden King this morning, the answer appeared:

"The goddess of the spring equinox was Eastre, the hare was her ritual animal and the egg her fertility symbol. The image suggests the lasciviousness of the goddess, the sheer lusciousness of life, sexuality, and birth. And with the goddess, the moon, the luminous white of the moon that carries the imprint of the hare, shines."

"Moon goddess imagery carries the cyclic pattern; it is simply a law of life. The forest knows how to sacrifice parts of itself that have to give way to new growth. The grief in the dying gives place to the miracle of resurrection. The hare willingly sacrifices itself for the sake of spirit: unconscious matter sacrifices itself for conscious awareness.

"Farmers who know hares well think of them as sacrificial animals. When fields and hedges are burned off, they see hares who refuse to run before the fire reaches them, suddenly leap, their fur on fire, to run to their death aflame. The more we meditate on the hare, the more we love this animal that, like the moon, dies to be reborn." [Page 217, The Maiden King]

Perhaps it was moment of synchronicity.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"When our children start becoming murderers, we typically don't wonder what's wrong with the system that's turning them INTO murderers, we wonder what's wrong with THEM. Imagine an assembly line that out of every hundred vehicles turns out one that is horribly defective. Then imagine--instead of examining the assembly line--taking the defective vehicle out and shooting it. Then, when the next one comes along--instead of examining the assembly line--taking THAT one and shooting it. And when the next one comes along--instead of examining the assembly line--taking THAT one out and shooting it."--Daniel Quinn

I pulled this quote from this essay.

A True Coaching Inspiration

Revisiting this powerful article for some inspiration before baseball practices start next week. Mike Powell, in my mind, is a good example of a male mother for his players, and what masculinity is to some degree. He's showed the boys his wounds and in return they've showed him their wounds. I think it was the mythologist Micheal Meade who once said, "I'll show you my wound if you show me yours." I have learned through experience it is a challenge to lay your wounds out there for younger men hear, but they won't trust you otherwise.

Quote from article: "Powell's goal, as he told his friends, was 'for each boy to say that for the first time in my academic career I had someone who really loved me.'"

Animal Souls

The other day our 12 yr. old mentioned that his friend informed him that animals didn't have souls, but humans do. Well, I said, I guess that all depends on who you ask.

“Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves.” ― Derrick Jensen

Giving up Money

I don't know if it was a good idea to read this article before going off to earn some money delivering mail.

Finding God?

The other day our 12 yr. old son mentioned that one of his friends asked him if he believed in God. While he was explaining his answer to me I remembered a moment a few years back when a friend of mine asked me over the internet if I was agnostic. I said I didn't think so. I wasn't familiar with agnoticism to give him a definite answer at that time. So what did I do? I visited the Ishmael Community. And I went to the question and answer section of the website and typed in agnostic. Here is what I read:

I'm simply saying that I'm unable to put myself in any camp with regard to the existence of God. I can't join the atheists (who assert that there are zero gods), I can't join the monotheists (who assert that there is one god), and I can't join the polytheists (who assert that there are many gods). Nor am I an agnostic; I'm not saying I DON'T KNOW whether God exists, I'm saying this knowledge is UNOBTAINABLE. It's not that I don't HAVE it, it's that it's NOT THERE to be had.

Or you could put it this way: God's existence is an object not of knowledge but of belief. It's possible to BELIEVE that there is no God, one God, or many gods, but it's not possible to KNOW any of these things. I should add that, while it's POSSIBLE to believe one of these things, it's not NECESSARY to believe one of them. One is to FREE to choose one of these beliefs to embrace, but one is not COMPELLED to choose one. --Daniel Quinn from Question #538

I put the quote above in my own words and answered my friends question. Why? Because it makes sense to me.

Fears and Doubts

My mind has been consumed with fears and doubts since three AM. They all revolve the question if I have what it takes to coach my son's Little League baseball team. This has happened every year since I first started coaching his team 3 years ago. It seems like as long as I remain a baseball coach I will have to go through this process before the season starts, and occasionally throughout the season. I'm beginning to accept this as part of my coaching experience.

TEOTWAWKI

I try on a daily basis to check out Timothy Scott Bennett's Facebook page. For those of you who don't recognize the name, he is the author of All of the Above. I consider him to be an author with a changed mind*, and that's one of the reasons I follow his work. And to be honest I haven't read All of the Above yet, but I plan on it. The other day I had one of the librarians at our local library check to see if she could get it for me through inter-library loan. She located two copies: one in Missouri and one in Washington. She put the order in and said, "we'll see what happens." It's a long way from Missouri to northwestern Wisconsin, so I will probably just end up buying the book.

The point of this post, though, is to mention what he said on his facebook page yesterday. It resonated with me. It's what I've felt and what I've heard others express in one way or another. It's something that my great-grandfather(He was a Jehovah Witness) spent alot of time thinking and talking about, so I've heard. It's what Derrick Jensen means when he says that this culture has a death urge. Here is what I read on Mr. Bennett's page:

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem with "warning" that "civilization is at stake" is that, at a deep emotional, psychological, and spiritual level, and likely unbeknownst to the vast majority of people in which this is at work, the Civilized™ humans on this planet seem, to my mind, to actually be craving TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it.) I'd much rather we become conscious of, and speak about that possibility, and why that might be the True™.--Timothy Scott Bennett

My great-grandfather died when I was around a year old. But given the chance I would have asked him why he thought the world was going to end. I was never convinced by the "he was just a nutcase" argument. Why? Because I think at some level we're all craving it. It's just that some have better ways of expressing it than others.


*His work has been influenced by Daniel Quinn.

Daniel Quinn Quote Saturday

"We look at the world around us and find that turtles are not flawed, crows are not flawed, daffodils are not flawed, mosquitoes are not flawed, salmon are not flawed--in fact, not a single species in the world is flawed--except us. It makes no sense, but it does pass the medieval tests for knowledge. It's reasonable--and it's certainly supported by authority. It's reasonable because it provides us with an excuse we badly need. We're destroying the world--eating it alive--but it's not our fault. It's the fault of human nature. We're just badly made, so what can you expect?"--Daniel Quinn in The New Renaissance

It's Already Happened Once

This excerpt has given me something to think about before bed:

"Our culture of expansion and achievement has projected its own mythology onto the universe, giving it a spectacular beginning and a linear progression to some kind of end. If, instead, the universe has always existed, then anything that could possibly be done has already been done an infinite number of times. If it's possible for you to win a Nobel Prize, then if you go far enough back, there's a world exactly like this one where you already did it. So there's no point doing anything just to accomplish it, only to enjoy it."--Ran Prieur

Good and Evil

Ran across this quote while reading "The Maiden King" this morning:

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to seperate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart." Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Changing the System

I revisited this article this morning. I like this quote:

"You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not the highest. But there's nothing physical or expensive or even slow about paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a new way of seeing. Of course individuals and societies do resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist any other kind of change."

Fincino Quote

A quote I wrote down before I returned James Hillman's Loose Ends:

"This [the soul] is the greatest of all miracles in nature. All other things beneath God are always one single being, but the soul is all things together...Therefore it may be rightly called the center of nature, the middle term of all things, the series of the world, the face of all, the band and juncture of the universe."--Marisilio Fincino

Things Are Alright

About an hour after I posted yesterday (Read yesterdays post), our 12 year old and I were talking about fear while we were raking up sawdust. And out of the blue he mentions this quote from Frank Herbert's "Dune" (He listened to the book on tape a few weeks back):

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

I was proud, impressed, and stunned. There are times when we are concerned that he is spending too much time in his room listening to books. Well, yesterday cooled that concern a bit

Kids, Coaching and School

The other day our 12 year old commented that if they made school more interesting kids would pay more attention in class. I thought it was an astute observation. I know that looking back on my schooling experience I was bored out of my skull most of the time (That's one of the primary reasons why we homeschool). But when it came to my response to him, I waffled. My hatred of the schooling system has cooled a bit, I think. And, I think, part of the reason why is because of my experience coaching Little League baseball. I know that as a coach you try like hell to make practices as interesting and fun as possible, and there are just some kids that refuse to quit screwing around and disrupting practice. There is always the child who quips, when are we going to do something fun.

Saturday's Daniel Quinn Quote

From The New Renaissance:

"During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day"

Headed Down the Path

Yesterday, finally finished putting up firewood for next next winter. While we were finishing up my neighbor stopped in to see if I wanted some chickens to run around the yard and eat ticks. This morning mailed my tree order forms for spring planting. Now we're headed out to the pasture to clear some brush. I'm also noticing the word farm and farming coming up more often in our conversations and I'm about ready for another pair bib overalls.

Blind Spots

"Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you. If a thing falls outside the range of people's curiosity, then they simply cannot make enquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot--a spot of blindness that you can't even know is there until someone draws your attention to it." My Ishmael

One Reason Why

One of the main reasons I broke down and bought The Maiden King was to have this poem by Rumi, and Robert Bly's commentary on it.

We should ask God
to help us toward manners. Inner gifts
do no find their way
to creatures without just respect.

If a man or woman flails about, he not only
smashes his house,
he burns the world down.

Your depression is connected to your insolence
and refusal to praise. Whoever feels himself walking
on the path, and refuses to praise--that man or woman
steals from others every day--is a shoplifter!

The sun became full of light when it got hold of itself.
Angels only began shining when they achieved discipline.
The sun goes out whenever the cloud of not-praising comes near.

The moment the foolish angel felt insolent, he heard the door close.--Rumi

Voids

Derrick Jensen and Daniel Quinn on voids:

"Quite suddenly, after six thousand years of totalitarian agriculture and civilization building, the people of our culture--East and West, twins of a single birth--were beginning to wonder if their lives made sense, were beginning to perceive a void in themselves that economic success and civil esteem could not fill, were beginning to imagine that something was profoundly, even innately, WRONG with them." (Daniel Quinn, Pg.267-268, The Story of B)

"The same is true on the larger scale, as no comforts or elegancies, no feeling of power over another, no accumulation of property can make up for a failure to participate in the great liturgy. It's an attempt to use increasing amounts of emptiness to plug a great void (or, as R.D Laing wrote, 'How do you plug a void plugging a void?'). It's an attempt to cure loneliness through power. But loneliness can only be cured through relationship, and relationship is precisely what expoitation and abuse destroy." (Derrick Jensen, pg.567, Endgame)

Not In Control

Lately I've been reading up on mythology and fairy tales. I found this quote significant: "The movement to demonize the father gods, and to create a sentimentalized version of the Goddess makes women and men more infantile." [Robert Bly, Pg.88, The Maiden King]

Out of all this reading and thinking about this I can say one thing for sure: We're not in control!

Good Satire

Here is a really good satire talking about the relationship the Alaskan oil companies have with the citizens of that state. The author of the article also wrote The Raven's Gift. I have a signed copy on my bookshelf. It's one of the best novels I've ever read. Here is what Daniel Quinn had to say about it: "An epic adventure, a work of mythical dimensions, never to be forgotten."

Don's work is definately worth checking out.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"As developed in Ishmael, the 'story' we're enacting in our culture is this: The world was made for Man to conquer and rule, and Man was made to conquer and rule it; and under Man's rule, the world might have become a paradise except for the fact that he's fundamentally and irremediably flawed. This story--itself mythology--is the foundation for all our cultural mythology, and I said in Ishmael that it isn't possible for people simply to give up living in such a story. They must have another story to be in." [Daniel Quinn, Pg.183, Beyond Civilization]

Bringing It To Light

Reading through The Maiden King again this morning and found these words of wisdom about depression:

"...the only way out of a covert depression is an overt derpression."[Pg.67,The Maiden King]

He also mentions in this section that most men in the west suffer from a covert depression.

Just Appeared

This quote found its way into my hands again yesterday. I thought I would have to go searching for it ever since I read Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections a few months back. But to my surprise, while I was reading through Thomas Moore's Soul Mates at a second-hand store in Rice Lake, and I ran across it. Actually, I opened up the book and there it was.

"Other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection."--Carl Jung

Action and Desire

Pulled the Te of Piglet off the shelf this morning in a last ditch effort to look for a quote to post, and I'm glad I did. Dug this one up from The Tao Te Ching:

Those habitually without desires
Perceive as "subtlety."
Those habitually with desires
Perceive it as "action."
These two have the same source,
But different names.
Together they're called "darkness"--
Darkness of increasing darkness,
All mystery's gateway.--[Lao Tsu, Pg. 54, The Te of Piglet]

Inside and Outside

Saw and heard the first robins this morning. Always a welcome and pleasant sound this time of year.

This quote caught my attention while reading Loose Ends earlier today:

"'The soul functions in the body, but has a greater part of its function outside the body...(and)imagines many things of the utmost profundity outside the body, just as God does'." [Jung talking about the alchemist Sendivogius's perspective on soul, Pg. 153, Loose Ends]

Feeling a Bit Off

The Santee Sioux poet/philosopher John Trudell sums up nicely how I've been feeling the past couple of days: "I'm just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing its understanding of being human." Also, these two lines by D.H Lawrence comes to mind: "I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections./ And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly,/ that I am ill.

Mythological Understanding

Slowly working my way through The Maiden King. I wrote this passage down yesterday:

"With the help of Freud, Western culture has moved from a literal to a psycholgical understanding of the world in only a hundred years. But now we are receiving a request to move on still further, from the psychological to the mythological stage. This is more difficult. We are at the moment, almost incapapable of a mytholgical understanding of the world. That understanding is not behind us, but ahead of us. It does not involve adversarial thinking, but the sort of double vision that develops in the Underworld." [Robert Bly, Pg. 40, The Maiden King]

Where the Problem Lies

The problem isn't with the people but with the story.

"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act as the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."--Ishmael

Teach a Hundred

Another noble effort to spread the teachings of the gorilla

"What you do is to teach a hundred what I've taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred. That's how it's always done."--Ishmael

Growth for Adults

I wrote these lines down this morning. It's becoming clear that when we stop hearing about a growing economy it will be a sign that our society is starting to mature.

"Growth is indeed an appropriate megaphor for children, but in an adult growth also means aggrandizement, overweight, over-population, overkill, cancer, escalation, proliferation. So that growth has become the foolish metapsycholgoy of fat men in a declining culture." [James Hillman, Pg. 85, Loose Ends]

Letting The World Fall Apart

The other day, while reading Jim Harrison's After Dark, I jotted down these lines:

"The study of native cultures tends to lead you far afield from all you have learned, including much that you have perceived and assumed was reality. At first this can be disconcerting, but there are many benefits to letting the world fall apart."--Jim Harrison

Sometimes I wonder if you don't carefully, conciously, and slowly try to take apart what you think is reality there is something out there that will arrange it for you, and sometimes not in a nice way.

Tired

I don't have anything to say or a quote in mind to share. I'm going to shut this thing down and start reading through The Maiden King, by Robert Bly and Marion Woodman.

Our Secret Plan

I posted the quote below with this article over at Facebook. I think they go well together.

"Our secret plan is this: We're going to go on consuming the world until there's no more to consume. This does not preclude consuming it "wisely" or consuming it as slowly as possibly. It doesn't preclude supporting every conceivable conservation initiative. It doesn't preclude supporting every conceivable means of recycling. We're going to recycle, we're going to conserve-- but we're also going to go on consuming until there's no more to consume."--Daniel Quinn, from his essay titled: On Investments

Many Gods

I woke up this morning with a plan to post a simple quote with an article talking about the acidification of the oceans, and than I ran across this excerpt in James Hillman's "Loose Ends." The excerpt shook me up a little, and is important to me, because I learned in reading his autobiography a few months back that Carl Jung's house was being haunted for a brief period until he finished the book this excerpt was from. In other words, the invisible beings were not going to leave him and his family alone until he finished the book, atleast that is the conclusion he came to upon reflection of the experience.

"For me, to whom knowledge has been given of the multiplicity and diversity of the gods, it is well. But woe unto you, who replace these incompatible many by a single god. For in so doing ye beget the torment which is bred from not understanding, and ye mutilate the creature whose nature and aim is distinctiveness. How can ye be true to your nature when ye try to change the many into one? What ye do unto the gods is done likewise onto you. Ye all become equal and thus is nature maimed...The multiplicity of the gods correspondeth to the multiplicity of man."[Carl Jung, Seven Sermons of the Dead]

The Book of the Damned

I pulled out Daniel Quinn's The Book of the Damned this morning to look for a quote, and found this one:

"Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth."--Daniel Quinn

Know Thyself?

"Know Thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away."--Goethe

Driving to Work

Years back I remember Derrick Jensen saying that we value production over life itself. In fact, he said, we sacrifice life at the altar of production. Yesterday was one of those days where this was made clear to me. I had to drive to work on unplowed roads that had over a foot of snow on them, and only a one lane track broken through from other vehicles that were capable of busting through that much snow.

Of course, I didn't make it. I got the bottom of the first big hill and decided to turn back for obvious reasons, one being what would happen if I met a snow plow coming over the top of that hill with only one lane to travel in. So, I got out of the car and shoveled myself out a spot to turn around. Hoping the whole time while I'm frantically shoveling that some crazy bastard doesn't come speeding over the hill and smash into my car or me.

Well, I got the spot shoveled out and the car turned around and made it home safely. But the point is I, or other drivers, could have been seriously injured or killed in that situation, and I was angry about it. But who do I get angry at? The United States Postal Service? Myself for bad decisions in the past? My boss? This insane culture (Afterall, this part of the state could have shut down until atleast the roads were plowed)? Past generations?

I don't know the answer to this, but I do know it felt like I was forced into a situation that I had no control over.

The Excitement of Thought

Posting another quote that James Hillman used in "The Force of Character."

"A thought is a tremendous mode of excitement."--Alfred North Whitehead

I just got my notice that James Hillman's book titled: Loose Ends is in at our local library. Looking forward to picking it up.

Did I ever tell you how thankful I am for libraries?

Revisiting George Draffan Interview

Lately I've felt the need to go back and read some of the early Derrick Jensen interviews, and this morning I finally did it. The first one I had in mind was with George Draffan. This excerpt jumped out at me: "As civilization arose, power began to become centralized, as it is in the second face. The powerful created a discourse — later divided into disciplines such as religion, philosophy, science, and economics — that rationalized and institutionalized injustice. After ten thousand years, we all to some extent believe that these differentials in power are inevitable."--George Draffan

Character

"Character is fate."--Heraclitus

Going Against the Dragon

"Mythology is more helpful than enlightenment or to put it chronologically, years of mythology need to come, accustoming the soul to darkness, before the soul is ready for enlightenment."

I pulled this quote from this interview. I find myself returning to it once every couple of months.

Truths

‎"Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to saying it not at all. It is indeed sufficient for people to hear the laws of thermodynamics once, and to understand that they're written down somewhere, should they ever be needed again, but there are other truths, of a different human order, that must be enunciated again and again and again -- in the same words and in different words: again and again and again."---Daniel Quinn

Brain Imagery

More from The Sibling Society:

"The average child in the United States sees six thousand hours of television by their fifth year.... Television floods the infant-child brain with images at the very time his or her brain is supposed to learn to make images from within.... Failing to develop imagery mean having no imagination." [Pg.186]

Responsibility

"Are people feeling guilty nowadays? Well, if I were asked to lay my finger on one of the most striking differences between the social climate of Europe and the West as it is today and as it was, say fifty years ago, I think I should have to specify the presence in it almost everywhere of a vague, uneasy feeling of guilt. There is and atmosphere of guilt....Responsibility is food for the will, guilt is food for the feelings only....confused feelings of guilt tend to beget paralysis rather than energy.

"Those who are old enough to remember the years between the wars will recall the skillfull use Hitler made of just that paralysis in the 30's, when even young people, who were in their cradles at the time it was signed, were somehow made to feel guilty about the unjust provisions of the Treaty of Versailles."

He then goes on to say:

"Feelings of guilt tend to turn rather easily into feelings of hatred and contempt. We may feel a bit guilty ourselves, but we are very sure that a whole lot of other people are much more guilty, and probably ought to be destroyed."--Owen Barfield

Relationship?

Yesterday, while on the mail route, I was thinking about this statement by Robert Bly: "Among boys, one could say that if the son is released from the oedipal struggle with his father, he will find somewhere in his life areally big male energy that wants to kill him." (Of course, this is what Jack in the Beanstalk is all about.) A few minutes later The Greek Myth of The Iron Cage entered my thoughts.

"As the generations pass they grow worse. A time will come when they have grown so wicked that they will worship power, might will be right to them and reverence for the good will cease to be. At last, when no man is angry any more at wrong doing or feels shame in the presence of the miserable, Zues will destroy them too. And yet even then something might be done, if only the common people would rise and put down rulers that oppress them."--The Greek Myth of the Iron Cage


I'm wondering what the relationship is between the two is, if there is any. I'm thinking that if the oedipal struggle and male to male intiation is lacking in a culture it faces the threat of being destroyed by Zues.

Mr. Gasset

Yesterday, I was paging through James Hillman's book The Force of Character, and in it he quoted Jose Ortega y Gasset and mentioned that he was a great philosopher. I thought to myself I really need to get to learn more about Gasset's work. So this morning I get up, flip open my notebook to some notes and quotes from the past and what is the first thing I come across:

Written on 10/31/11: "Most people cannot 'say' what the person before them is like, but being unable to 'say' does not imply that one is unable to see."--Jose Ortega y Gasset

I'll be learning more about Mr. Gasset.

Einstein Insight

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."-- Albert Einstein

Caring for Stories

"The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memory. This is how people care for themselves."--Barry Lopez

It Wanted To Be Posted

I pulled one of my notebooks off the shelf this morning, opened it up to a page, and the first words I layed my eyes on were written on Sunday March 12th, 2009: "Almost nothing exerts a more powerful hold on people's minds than unexamined and unchallenged received wisdom--and human exceptionalism is certainly part of that legacy."[Daniel Quinn, pg.102, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways]

Children and Mythological Thinking

"What children very deeply want to know of history is how things got to be this way--but no one in your culture would think of teaching them that. Instead they're overwhelmed with ten million names, dates, and facts they 'should' know, but that vanish from their heads the moment they're no longer needed to pass a test. It's like handing a thousand-page medical text to a four-year old who wants to know where babies come from."--[Daniel Quinn, pg.148, My Ishmael]

If I Had The Chance

If I had the chance to sit down with the poet Robert Bly tomorrow I'd ask him this: Mr Bly, back in 1996 you wrote this in The Sibling Society, "We are drawing nearer to what Freud call the 'the pure culture of the death instinct.[Pg.42].'" Given that you're in your mid-eighties now, and it has been over 15 years since you wrote that, do you feel that we're still headed toward "the pure culture of the death intstinct?"

In Partial agreement

John Lennon once said this:

"I think our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for manical ends. I think they're all insane. But I am liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what is insane about it."

I partially agree, John. But back around the time you said this there was a U.S Senator from Wisconsin that wasn't totally off his rocker. This is what he had to say to the 91st Congress of the United States on January 19th, 1970:

"There is a great need, and growing support, for the introduction of new values in our society--where bigger is not necessarily better--where slower can be faster--and where less can be more. This attitude must be at the heart of the nationwide effort--and agenda for the 1970's--whereby this country puts gross national quality above gross national product."--Gaylord Nelson

Fear of Going Down

I had something else in mind to post this morning, but this poem by Antonio Machado fits the mood so well that the other is going to have to wait.

Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea--
Rudder, anchor, oars,
And the fear of going down.--Antonio Machado

And It Spoke

I woke up this morning ready to search for an Antonio Machado poem talking about the human shadow, and stumbled across this one instead:

Every man has two
battles which he fights:
he fights with god in his dreams,
and he fights the sea when awake.--Antonio Machado

My interest in Melville and Moby Dick is growing.

Death Instinct

Robert Bly wrote this 4 years after I graduated from high school:

"We are drawing nearer to what Freud called "the pure culture of the death instinct."[Pg.42, The Sibling Society]

Faces

The other day I found this poem in James Hillman's The Force of Character.

From mirror after mirror
No vanity's displayed
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.--William Butler Yeats

More on Ishmael

Took the time and watched this video this morning. Now I have a better understanding why I recently wrote a letter into our local newspaper thanking a local high school student for mentioning that Ishmael was her favorite book in 2011. It took me three weeks to finally make up my mind and do it. And the letter really only amounted to a short paragraph thanking her (I'll post the letter within the next couple of days). But after putting aside all of my fears it was clear that: First of all, I wanted her to know that somebody in the community was paying attention to this. Because, like Mr. Bennett said in this video, once your mind is changed you look everywhere for signs of this different vision, and sometimes it's nice to know that others are looking too. Secondly, I wanted to publicly acknowledge that it was good to see that Ishmael was alive and well twenty years after its publication. Lastly, I know that after I read Ishmael, and the rest of Quinn's work, I longed to meet up with other readers (Where I live it's 15 miles to the closest city, so it was tough at times) and sit face to face and talk about his work. And as a side note, and as fate would have it, I met up with a like minded woman (She's an old hippie, just ask her.) that lived just down the road from me, and she mentioned that she had a daughter returning from California that I might be interested in. And again, as fate would have it, we're happily married expecting our 3rd child this September. I'm glad the book fell into my hands when it did.

Show Yourself

Seeking more elder wisdom this morning, and found it in "The Force of Character."

"We look at each other to see into each other. Of course we misjudge and follow the wrong perceptions, but these errors do not negate the idea that it is a citizen's duty to make his face public. Only God may hide his face." [James Hillman, Pg. 151]

Destruction of Fatherhood

Yesterday I mentioned that I was rereading parts of Robert Bly's "The Sibling Society." I ran across a statistic that I have occasionally grieved over since I first read it years ago:

The partriarchal system's destruction of fatherhood continues in the United States: here is its free hours that are 'enclosed.' In 1935, the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday and Sunday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935, are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband." [Pg. 36, The Sibling Society]

Primacy of The System

Been up since three a.m. rereading the first two chapters of Robert Bly's "Sibling Society." This quote by Fredrick Winslow Taylor sums up some aspects of the first two chapters nicely: "In the past the man has been first; in the future the System must be first." The System, of course, has given us power beyond our ancestor's wildest dreams.

Regret and Racoons

On the mail route the other day, I saw a dead racoon lying on the centerline. I drove by it twice and didn't take the time to move it, and I'm regretting it now. That's the second dead coon I've seen in the past 3 days. The other was lying in the middle of a frozen lake with tire tracks across it's back. Someone apparently thought it would be fun to run it down and kill it. I didn't move that one either (I was to busy wiping its guts off from my dog because he rolled in it), and of course I regret that too. Ever since reading this passage by Dennis Martinez I've tried to move roadkill off the road when time permits.

"The words conservation and ecology, as we use them in the Western sense, don't exactly fit what Indian people did or do with the land. It was their livelihood, which depended on reciprocity. Thus, the trees were not seen as trees, they were also seen as relatives. The trees are relatives and other species are relatives and they watched you all the time. It was a forest that looked at you to see how you were handling the remains of plants and animals.

"An animals shadow soul is alive for a long time after an animal is killed, and it watches how you treat the remains

." [Dennis Martinez, pg. 93 Original Instructions]

To The Point

A few days back I posted a quote out of If The Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways and mentioned that I was working on a letter to our local newspaper about Ishmael. I was going to try and work two Quinn quotes into the letter, but I just might stick with this:

I would like to thank [Student] for letting us know that her favorite book of 2011 was Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. 20 years after its publication it's good to see the book is alive and well.

No Respect

The other day we went ice fishing. It was my dad, son, and I. And, for the first time, we took our chocolate lab out there. Before we left there was a concern that he would find something to roll in, perhaps a dead minnow or some fish guts. But I figured the chances were fairly slim that he would actually find something, so we took him anyway. Well, he found something to roll in right in the middle of the lake.

What was it? A dead racoon with tire tracks across it's back. During one of its evening hunts the racoon must have been out there eating dead minnows or fish that fisherman had thrown up on the ice. Unfortunately someone thought it might be fun to run it down and kill it. The first word that came to mind when I saw it was: cruel. And this quote that I came across in David Abram's Becoming Animal also came to mind:

"We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has been only a short time in this country and know very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught long ago by animals themselves. The white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their ways, and passed on this knowledge from one generation to another.[A Carrier Indian From British Columbia, pg.259, Becoming Animal]

I've been working on a letter to the editor of our local newspaper. It's going to be thanking a local high school student for mentioning Ishmael in the paper. I'm going to try and work this quote into it.

"The subject of Ishmael is the unrecognized and unacknowledged mythology of our culture, which Ishmael formulates as a story that spells out the relationships among Man, the world, and the gods. In this context the gods are mythological, which is not to say that they're unreal but rather that their reality is irrelevant. The world was made for man to conquer and rule, and Man was made to conquer and rule it--according to our mythology. It goes without saying that this is a divinely appointed mission. The Europeans who drove the indians off their land and put that land to the plow sincerely believed they were doing God's work."[Daniel Quinn, Pg. 49, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways]

Struggle Within

Lately, while watching the fire in the morning, I've been pulling books off the shelf that have influenced me. I'll read some of it and usually grab a pencil and write out some passages longhand that move me. It's good writing practice. Here is one of the passages I copied:

"Why has the interior judge become so brutal and terroristic? We can say that advertising from a child's earliest years has so influenced the greedy, desirous part of the child's soul that the resisting force, the judge, has to enlarge itself in order to combat the inflamed wanting. The interior judge, moreover, can no longer rely on outward authority in it's battle against impulse. Having to resist without help from the parent or teachers, it has to do it all alone, and so it naturally moves toward primitive, humorless savagery, well expressed in grunge rock, action movies and piercing of body parts."[Robert Bly, Pg.xii, The Sibling Society]

Longing to be Childish

One of my favorite parts from Robert Bly's "The Sibling Society":

There is little in the sibling society to prevent a slide into primitivism, and into those regressions that fascism is so fond of. Eric Hoffer remarked: 'Drastic change [has produced] this social primitivism ... [the] mass movement absorbs and assimilates the individual ... [who] is thereby reduced to an infantile state, for this is what a new birth really means: to become like a child. And children are primitive beings -- they are credulous, follow a leader, and readily become members of a pack....Finally, primitivism also follows when people seek a new identity by plunging into ceaseless action and hustling. It takes leisure to mature. People in a hurry can neither grow nor decay; they are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.' "[pg.ix, The Sibling Society]

I looked up puerility after reading this quote again. It simply means to act childish and silly.

No Secret Knowledge?

This morning, I found a quote in Ishmael that is related to the quote I posted by Kurt Vonnegut a few weeks back. Here is the quote by Vonnegut:

“Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads. And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.”

Here is the one I found in Ishmael:

"I didn't want a guru or a kung fu master or spiritual director. I didn't want to become a sorcerer or learn the zen of archery or meditate or align my chakras or uncover past incarnations. Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they're all designed to benefit the pupil - not the world. I was after something else entirely, but it wasn't in the Yellow Pages or anywhere else I could discover.

In Hermann Hesse's "The Journey to the East," we never find out what Leo's awesome wisdom consists of. This is because Hesse couldn't tell us what he himself didn't know. He was like me - he just yearned for there to be someone in the world like Leo, someone with a secret knowledge and a wisdom beyond his own. In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library. But I didn't know that then." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 5, Ishmael]

More on God

More childhood question answered. Lewis Mumford on God:

"For mark this: if one puts God at the beginning, as the creator of all things, he becomes a monstrous being, as the God of the Old Testament in fact seemed to the sensitive Manichees, who took note of his irrational angers and his bloody commands long before Voltaire. That God is a god of matter, bestiality, darkness, and pain: not a god of love and light. If, on the other hand, one attempts to unbind deity from responsibility for having produced a world half lost to the powers of darkness and death, by promising some redemption, at least for man, in an eternal future which will balance up accounts and make love prevail: if one does this one seems to turn a brutal god into a demented one, a creature capable of condemning human beings to an eterneity of torture for sins committed in the briefest of lifetimes: a savagely disproportionate system of punishment repulsive to reason and justice. If the God who permitted the slaughter of the innocent in the Lisbon earthquake shocked Voltaire, what would he have said to the God who permitted his creatures to invent the insane horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz?

Neither faith nor reason could bring such complete defilements and miscarriages of life within the compass of human acceptance, if a divine purpose actually presided over all the occasions of human life. Plainly, if there is a loving God he must be impotent: but if he is omniponent, truly responsible for all that happens within his domain, capable of heeding even the sparrow's fall, he can hardly be a loving God. Such contradictions drive honest minds to atheism: the empty whirl and jostle of atoms becomes more kind to human reason than such a deity." [Lewis Mumford, Pg. 71, The Conduct of Life]

Competent Gods

"In fact, the real gods of the world--if there are any--are competent gods. They created a world that functions perfectly, without divine oversight or intervention. If we don't curb our population growth, the built-in processes of the world will take care of it." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 61, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways]

Answer

Part of an answer to some of the childhood questions I've asked (related to yesterday's post).

"If God is willing to prevent evil but unable to do so, then he's impotent. If he's able to prevent evil but willing to, then he's corrupt. And so, since evil certainly exists, God is either impotent or corrupt and therefore cannot be God."[Daniel Quinn, Pg.163, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways]

Some Childhood God Questions

Growing up through the eighties and early nineties (I was born in 1974) I was always concerned about our impact on the environment. I mean it was twenty some odd years after Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring", so the message was out there for all those that wanted to see. Of course, being a typical kid, I wanted to see anything and everything I could lay my eyes on. And it was obvious that we were destroying the planet. So some of the questions that I asked on occasion were: Why are we destroying such a beautiful place? And why, if God created it all, is he allowing it to happen? And, also, why if he created us did he program us to do this? You'd think an all-seeing and all-knowing God would know better.

Twenty Years Since

This coming Ocotber it will be 20 year since I move from southern Wisconsin to northwestern Wisconsin. Why? Well, the plan was to live with my grandparents and save up some money for tech school. My grandpa was a logger and owned logging machinery. So, I lived with them and logged for about 6 years, never went to tech school, and was fortunate enough to save up some money. But looking back I think that was only part of the reason I moved up north, because before I moved up I also made it clear to myself that I wanted to become a man in the process.

This morning, while watching the fire in the masonry stove burn down, it occured to me that since I was reading Robert Bly's "Iron John" close to 20 years after my explicit desire to become a man that I obviously still have work to do. But, I wonder, if there is ever a final threshold that has to be crossed in this quest to become a man? We'll see, I guess. Onward.

Something Beyond the Busy Life

A few days ago, I got out of bed and wanted to do nothing but sit in the woods. Just sit and listen to the sounds around me, watch for movements, smell and breathe the cold winter air, and feel the cold northwestern Wisconsin wind blow across my uncovered face. But, I didn't. I was busy and had things I needed to do.

Now this feeling has occasionally arisen in me for the past 25 years. It didn't matter if I was at home or at school or heading off to the logging job. Most of the time I've ignored it, but there are times when I don't and I seem never to regret it.

I was paging through Robert Bly's "Iron John" and found this brief passage while looking for another quote I had in mind to include in a post:

"The Wild One in you is that one which is willing to leave the busy life, and able to be called away.

The strong leaves of the box-elder tree,
Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe,
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,
And live forever, like the dust." [Robert Bly, Pg.223, Iron John]

I've sat with plants in the past, and hope to do more of it in the future. And the few times I have sat with them living forever did cross my mind. I just might be starting to understand why that is. Thank you Mr. Bly.

Happened Again

Yesterday, I wrote: "There are times when I'm reading a book and I will notice a different author has said something similar. I will then head over to the bookshelf, pull down the book, and look for the quote. This morning it happened."

Well, this morning it happened again. I started out with Lewis Mumford and ended with Robert Bly's book about Henry David Thoureau.

"The new attitude toward time and space infected the workshop and the counting house, the army and the city. The tempo became faster: the magnitudes became greater: conceptually, modern culture launched itself into space and gave itself over to movement. What Max Weber called the "romanticism of numbers" grew naturally out of this interest. In time-keeping, in trading, in fighting, men counted numbers: and finally, as the habit grew, only numbers counted." [Lewis Mumford, Pg. 278, Interpretations and Forecasts]

"To many Americans in the generation of the 1840's it felt as if the United States had fallen into mesmeric attention to external forces and a shameless obedience to them. The swift development of the Northeast, with its numerous factories, its urban workshops for immigrants, its network of free-acting capitalists, its centralized industry, showed that external forces can and do overwhelm forces of soul and conscience, changing everyone's life for the worse. To many in New England it felt as if some sort of Village King had been killed; the ancient, grounded religious way was passing; a new dispensation had arrived, The sovereign of the new administration was not a king or a human being, but what Blake called "a ratio of numbers," and this ominous, bodiless king lived in the next county, the next state, the next planet. Living under the power of a bodiless king is a bad way to live." [Robert Bly, Pg. 3, The Winged Life]

Headed to the Bookshelf

There are times when I'm reading a book and I will notice a different author has said something similar. I will then head over to the bookshelf, pull down the book, and look for the quote. This morning it happened.

As I said before, I've been reading different parts of Walking on Water for inspiration. While at it I ran across this excerpt:

I ask a student to give an opinion. She says, "We need wild salmon."

"Why?"

She's fast: "Diversity is strength."

"Why is that important?"

"Wild communities with the most diversity are the most stable. If there is some disaster, they're more able to recover."

"Why do you care about that?"

She thought, then came back with, "The strength that diversity gives is not only to the physical world, but also to the mental and emotional world. Everything has a lesson for our human communities, not in any woo-woo way of talking fish but in the way we have always learned how to live in a particular place. Observing and cooperating with everything around us has been the basis of our species evolution and our personal development. More diverse habitat means more lessons, which means more chance of our own survival within that paritclar habitat." [Derrick Jensen, Pg.106, Walking on Water]

I open up Doug Brown's "Roadmap to Sustainability: Interpreting Daniel Quinn"

This is not what Q [Daniel Quinn] means by the Community of Life. The Community of Life and community-through-diversity are not subjective states of being that make people or living things FEEL good. The diversity in the Connunity of Life is an objective criterion essential to maintaining the community. Community is structural and material component of the life process, as is the biodiversity that correlates with it. Humans have difficulty understanding this. And there is a reason for why they don't get it: once humankind stepped out of the Communtiy of Life, or more precisely believed that it did, then in its divorced state as Taker civilizations, it alienated itself from the objective dimension of communtiy and began to liken community to a feeling of "sameness"-to a subjective feeling of belonging together as humans in which diversity became suspect. Community for the Taker way became a means to retrieve what was lost and abandoned in the civilizational process of divorcing itself from the true Communtiy of Life." [Doug Brown, Pg. 17, Roadmap to Sustainability]

So, diversity is what we're after. And it's something that we rarely ever talk about. We're in trouble.

Eight Years Later

I mentioned yesterday that I was reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" for writing inspiration. This morning I turned to the title page and found that it read: "To Curt, It's time to work miracles, it's time to walk on water. Derrick Jensen, 2/19/04 Occupied Tunes"

What surprised me is that next month it will be 8 years since he signed and sent me that book. It sure doesn't feel like it's been eight years. And it's sort of funny because I can remember how much I anticipated for this book to show up in my mailbox. It was worth every penny I paid for it, that's probably why I find myself opening it up 8 years later.

Stuck With Me

Found myself reading some books about writing for inspiration this morning. These lines stuck with me throughout the day: "As is true for most people I know, I've always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that? [Derrick Jensen, Pg.3, Walking on Water]

They speak to my experience of schooling.

Off to Work

Off to carry mail for the postal service today. This morning, while watching the fire in the masonry stove, I got the chance to read more of Micheal Perry's "Handbook for Freelance Wriging. I'm glad he put this line in there: "First, you must read for yourself. I'm not an academically prepared writer; I have a bachelor's degree in nursing, for Pete's sake. I consider myself a dilettante. I keep waiting to get caught; for someone to say, hey wait a minute, this guy's FAKING it! Not only am I not well-versed in the academics of literature, I can barely hum the chorus.When I'm in literary company, I feel the impostor. I have the greatest respect for those with an understanding of the mechanics and theory of writing, regardless of the genre. I can't diagram a sentence. I can't define the terms split infinitive or comma splice. But I can string together generally acceptable prose. Why? I have to believe it's a result of reading." [Pg.13]

I use to think to become a writer you had to know the mechanics of writing before you could become one.

My Usage of Quotes

Periodically I wonder why I like to use quotes. Alot of my thoughts are quotes. Of course, there are many reasons why I think I do. One of the answers to my question is found in this quote (Surprise!) by Kurt Vonnegut. Ever since reading "Palm Suday" on those cold winter mornings back in the old farmhouse next to the woodstove it has stuck with me.

“Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads. And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.”

Stopped in My Tracks

I had half a post written out until I came across this quote looking for another quote that I wanted to use in this post. "We've lost our ability to believe that God is unequivocally on our side against the rest of creation." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 284, The Story of B]

This post was going to be about what I think about most of the political letters written in to the editor of our local newspaper. But after reding that quote I don't have anything to say about those letters. I can't really name it, but there is something in that quote that cuts to the heart of the matter for me this morning.

Mow the Roof?

Yesterday a reader wrote and asked for a cordwood update (For those of you who don't know my family and I built a cordwood house a few years back). Over the years I have considered writing up an essay, or perhaps even a book, about our cordwood building experience. Right now, given how busy I am with the life's demands, I'm going to stick to with the occasional small post on this blog. I have a small window of time to write in the morning, and that's usually a couple of hours before the sun comes up. Perhaps some day I will have more time to sit down and put together some thing more significant.

The question we are most often asked about our cordwood house is: Do you put goats up there to mow your roof? First, all parties involved chuckle, then one of us goes on to answer no. I can only imagine what sort of catastrophe would materialize with such an endeavor. My biggest fear would be a goat falling off the edge of our house and hanging itself. Or every time the goat stepped out to the edge to take a bite of grass we'd lose some of our roof.

I think mowing it would defeat the purpose. The longer grass helps keep the dirt moist. And plus I really don't like to mow grass

Are You a Believer?

A few months back a coworker asked me if I was a believer. She, of course, was referring to God. I told her that, no, I really do not believe in anything. She was sort of taken aback by my statement. I think she assumed I was an atheist. I really didn't have the time, or the ability to explain myself clearly and coherently without pulling out a copy of "If They Give you Lined Paper Write Sideways." Plus, her husband is trying to survive late stage brain cancer, so I wouldn't even try. But I will post the excerpt out of Lined Paper here for anyone that is ever faced with the belief in God question. And typing it out might help me some day come up with an answer that I can put in my own words.

Elaine. Of course...I have a question of my own. It's probably been asked many times.

Daniel. Go ahead.

Elaine. We've been talking about living in the hands of the gods.

Daniel. Yes?

Elaine. But you never make it quiet clear whether you BELIEVE in these gods, or any god.

Daniel. When Ishmael talk about the gods...Let me start that a different way. The subject of Ishmael is the unrecognized and unacknowledged mythology of our culture, which Ishmael formulates as a story that spells out the relationships among Man, the world, and the gods. In this context the gods are mythological, which is not to say that they're unreal but rather that their reality is irrelevant. The world was made for Man to conquer and rule, and Man was made to conquer and rule it--according to our mythology. It goes without saying that this is a divinely appointed mission. The Europeans who drove the Indians off their lands and put that land to the plow sincerely believed they were doing God's work.

Elaine. Yes, I understand that. But I don't see how it answers my question.

Danie. Which is, do I believe in God.

Elaine. Yes, I guess so.

Daniel. Being a Martian anthropologist, I have to pull back from your question, have to take off the blinders you're asking me to wear. Believing in things that may not exist--or disbelieving in things that MAY exist--is a peculiarity of your culture, not a universal human activity. Because it's universal among you, you assume it's universal among humans in general.

Elaine. That's true. It never occurred to me that it might not be universal among humans.

Daniel. You variously believe in God, though God may not exist, or you disbelieve in God, though God may exist. You variously believe in angels, though angels may not exist, or you disbelieve in angels, though angels may exist. You variously believe in extraterrestrial spacecraft that have the world under surveillance, though these spacecraft may not exist, or disbelieve in them, though they may exist. You variously believe in ghosts, though ghosts may not exist, or you dibelieve in ghosts, though ghosts may exist.

Elaine. Yes, that's all true.

Daniel. Tell me, do you believe in supermodels?

Elaine[laughing]. Supermodels? I don't BELIEVE in them. That isn't the word I would use.

Daniel. For you, the existence of supermodels doesn't require you to exercise the faculty of belief.

Elaine. That's true. Though I've never thought of belief as a faculty.

Daniel. Oh it definitely is. It's the faculty you must call upon in the face of the absurd. As William of Occam put it, Credo quia absurdum: "I believe because it is absurd." A thing whose reality doesn't seem to you absurd doesn't require belief.

Elaine. Yes, I suppose that's true. But the existence of God doesn't strike me as absurd.

Daniel. It's absurd in the sense that no one can produce even the slightest evidence of God's existence. They can produce PROOFS, but these are only valid if you accept the premises on which they're based. If you don't accept those premises, then they're just empty exercises in logic.

Elaine. I suppose I'm dimly aware that such things exist.

Daniel. Another faculty exists that is a kind of cousin of the faculty of belief. This is the faculty that comes into play with regard to supermodels. You PEOPLE THE WORLD with supermodels. Fifty years ago there were no supermodels, but in the last few decades you have peopled your world with them. A hundred years ago there were no movie stars, but since then you've peopled your world with hundreds of them. Europe in the Middle Ages was peopled with saints.

Elaine. Yes, I see what you mean.

Daniel. The Gebusi of New Guinea consort with spirits on a daily basis. Their world is peopled with spirits, and if you were to ask them if they believe in spirits, they would react just the way you did when I asked if you believe in supermodels... But to return to your original question, I have to say the faculty of belief has completely atrophied in me. It strikes me as foolish to believe in things that may not exist -- or to deny the existence of things that may exist. Nonetheless, I've peopled my own personal universe with gods who have a care for all living things. I don't pray to these gods or build shrines to them or expect favors from them or perform rituals for them. Nor do I expect other people to 'believe' in these gods or to people their own universes with them.

Elaine. I understand. This resolves a question that was very much on my mind--and is probably on the minds of many of your readers.

Daniel. What question is that?

Elaine. I imagine a great many of your readers consider you a nonbeliever.

Daniel. I assume you mean a nonbeliever in the Judeo-Christian God.

Elaine. In any kind of god.

Daniel. I'm afraid I don't know whether that's true or not. But I'm not sure why this is relevant. Or what question I've resolved for you.

Elaine. You've explained how it was possible for you to write a book like "Tales of Adam," in which the gods figure so prominently.

Daniel. Yes...?

Elaine. Some readers must wonder if you were writing from the heart or if it was just a sort of...poetic re-creation of the animist worldview.

Daniel. Someone might imagine that I'd merely adopted an animist persona--a false or alien persona--for literary purposes, as James Hogg did in writing his "Confessions of a Justified Sinner."

Elaine. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that.

Daniel. It's a classic that enjoys a sort of cult status. To write it, Hogg had to adopt a persona diametrically opposed to his own, that of an extreme predestinarian, one who believes that one's salvation or damnation was ordained unalterably by God from the beginning of time. Believing himself to be of the elect, regardless of any sin he might commit, the narrator considered himself "justified" even as he murdered his brother, his mother, and others, and allowed others to be hanged for his crimes. The book, Written in the early 1820s, decades ahead of its time, was received with scorn and fell into obscurity until being redicovered by authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and Andre Gide...In any case, you can be sure that the Tales were definitely written "from my heart," to use your phrase.

Elaine. I didn't doubt it.

Daniel. So...Where are we? I take it we've disposed of the question of my personal beliefs.

Elaine. Yes. ( pages 48-53, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways)

Nature and Understanding

Putting together some ideas from others here. The other day I posted a quote by Ran Prieur in which he paraphrased the Tao Te Ching. Ran wrote: "This reminds me of a verse from the Tao Te Ching, which I would paraphrase as: 'When you lose touch with the Tao, there is nature; when you lose touch with nature, there is human morality; when you lose touch with human morality, there is law.'"

I was paging through Daniel Quinn's "If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways" and found this quote: "The received wisdom [Of our culture] is that such a thing as Nature EXISTS, that it is a veridical entity out there--as real and substantial as the US Congress or the Roman Catholic Church--enjoying a separate existence from our own. This is the entity people are thinking of when they say that they 'love Nature' or would like to be 'closer to Nature.'"(Pg.79) He then goes on to say later on in the dialogue, "The distinction between 'us' and 'it' [Nature] is a cultural construct, and a very old one."(Pg.80)

As a culture, we've lost touch with alot more then just the Tao. The gulf between mind and matter is vast...

Becoming Holy

Today, while doing the mail route I listened to "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." One of the things that I found amazing was the speed of his conversion to Islam. Here is a quote that I think expresses to some degree why his conversion was so fast: "The old tradition says that if a man loves God he can become holy in twenty years; but if he hates God he can do the same work in two years." [Robert Bly, Pg. 48, The Little Book on the Shadow]

Caught My Attention

This quote from Ran Prieur's blog caught my attention:

"This reminds me of a verse from the Tao Te Ching, which I would paraphrase as: 'When you lose touch with the Tao, there is nature; when you lose touch with nature, there is human morality; when you lose touch with human morality, there is law.'"

Some day soon I'm going to pick up an interpretation of the Tao Te Ching.

What is The Law of Limited Competition?

What is the Law of Limited Competition? Dr. Alan Thornhill answered it over at the Ishmael Community:

"You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. Lions and hyenas will kill competitors opportunistically (as will other creatures, like baboons), but the law as stated holds true: they do not HUNT their competitors the way they hunt their prey. That is, they'll kill a competitor if they come across one (especially in conflict over food when food is scarce), but in the absence of a competitor, they won't go looking for one to kill. Such behavior would be evolutionarily unstable. (See THE SELFISH GENE by R. Dawkins.) As a strategy, it just doesn't pay off to use your time and energy hunting competitors that you DON'T eat (and that will fight back to the death) instead of using your time and energy to hunt prey that you DO eat. It's not a matter of ethics, it's a matter of calories.*"

After Dachau and Eliminating Competition

More on the theme of elimination competition. This is an excerpt from "After Dachau." In that book the Nazis had successfully purged the human race of the mongrel races and the only race left was the Aryan race. Here is one of characters describing the inevitability of the Aryan's success:

"The story of human evolution doesn't follow the same pattern as the evolution of other creatures. When reptiles emerged from the amphibians, they didn't destroy the amphibians. When mammals emerged from the reptiles, they didn't destory the reptiles. But the same is not true for humans. Among humans, each emerging species apparently destroyed the species from which it emerged. This explains why none of those earlier species survived to the present time. In fact, most biologists feel this accounts for the tremendous speed with which humans evolved from lower forms. So we Aryans were only doing what humans have done from the beginning. [Daniel Quinn, Pg.125, After Dachau]

Control of Nature

While reading Lewis Mumford's perspective on Karl Marx I came across this quote: "At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy."--Karl Marx [Pg.204, Interpretations and Forecasts]

Working Defintion of Capitalism

Occasionally I make my way over to the bookshelf and pull down Doug Brown's book "Roadmap to Sustainability: Interpreting Daniel Quinn." Today was one of those days. I'm trying to understand why we value products over people.

"Our working definition of capitalism is 'individuals competing to get ahead.' In other words the essence of the market and profit-driven system is competition, along with the relentless pursuit to eliminate it."[Doug Brown, Pg. 41, Roadmap to Sustainability]

I'll see where this leads me.

Understanding the Acorn Theory

More quotes out of James Hillman's "The Soul's Code." This will be the last day of the parenting and adulthood thread. Also, there are more quotes then usual in this post partly because it is in memory of Mr. Hillman who passed away at the end of October in 2011.

He's speaking to adults here:

"I want us to envision that what children go through has to do with finding a place in the world for their specific calling. They are trying to live two lives at once, the one they were born with and the one of the place and among the people they were born into." [James Hillman, Pg. 13, The Soul's Code]

"So this book is about children, offering a way to regard them differently, to enter their imaginations, and to discover in their pathologies what their daimon might be indicating and what their destiny might want." [James Hillman, Pg. 14, The Soul
s Code]

"A child defends its daimon's dignity. That's why even a frail child at a 'tender' age refuses to submit to what it feels is unfair and untrue and reacts so savagely to abusive misperecptions. The idea of childhood abuse needs to be expanded beyond the sexual kind--which is so vicious not principally because it is sexual, but because it abuses the dignity at the core of personality, that acorn of myth."[Hillman, Pg.27 The Soul's Code.]

He explains what the acorn theory or "acorn of myth" is here:

"The acorn theory proposes, and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause--to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons."[James Hillman, Pg. 12, The Soul's Code]

I like the idea the it has chosen us and has our interests at heart. If you ever want to read a good autobiography that supports this idea pick up "Providence", by Daniel Quinn. I think he did an amazing job at showing how his daimon guided him throughout his life.

Parental Fallacy

James Hillman talking about the parental fallacy.

"A 'happy' child was never and nowhere the aim of parenting. An industrious, useful child; a malleable child; a healthy child; an obedient, mannerly child; a stay-out-of-trouble child; a God-fearing child; an entertaining child--all these varieties, yes. But the parental fallacy has trapped the parents also in providing happiness, along with shoes, schoolbooks, and van-packed vacations. Can the unhappy produce happiness? Since happiness at its ancient source means EUDAIMONIA or a well-pleased
daimon, only a daimon who is receiving its due can transmit a happy benefit to a child's soul." [James Hillman, Pg. 83, The Souls Code]

Children and School

More on parenting, with some schooling weaved in.

These quotes, and the section that it was pulled from, changed the way I parent and how I percieve my schooling experience. Plainly put it was dull. Of course that was thirty years ago, but from what I see things haven't changed much.

"Children don't need schooling. They need access to what they want to learn--and that means they need access to the world outside the home." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 166, My Ishmael]

"But, of course, having your children underfoot in the workplace would seriously reduce efficiency and productivity. Even though sending them to educational detention centers is terrible for children, it's unquestionably wonderful for buisness. The system I've outlined here will never be implemented among the people of your culture as long as you value buisness over people." [Daniel Quinn, pg. 165, My Ishmael]

I especially like the part about valuing "buisness over people." I've liked it ever since I read it over a decade ago. It's clear, to me at least, that our current political and economic systems(Which schooling gets us ready for) value products over human and nonhuman life.

Payback

I'm still following the parenting and adulthood thread. I've always considered this wise criticism.

"Parents of my generation taught our children the codes of responsibility, restraint, and renunciation, but also we taught them how to evade the codes. Stepping through the codes was a secret game among parents in the 1970s, a little payback for being a parent. That would be all right--at least humanly normal--if the code were strong. But widely vayring codes from dozens attractive cultures flood our receptors. If we want to evade a certain element in our code, the renunciation of selfishness and theivery, for example--in which the forbidden is allowed. Some of us spend our whole lives looking, successfully, for holes in the codes. When our parents teach us how to do that at the dinner table, we find those lessons very appealing. We could say that flatness lies in saying yes to everything." [Robert Bly, Pg. 232, The Sibling Society]

Adulthood and Parenting

I'm going to stick with the adulthood theme, but this quote is going to have more to do with parenting. Ever since I've read this quote it has stuck with me. Partly, I think, because it comes from one of Robert Bly's books and mostly because I'm an active parent in the United States.

"J.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeat's father, wrote to his son after living two years in the United States, 'You know discipline is essential in every family. In Europe the children discipline themselves so that the parents can have a good time; in America the parents discipline themselves so the children can have a good time.'" [Robert Bly, Pg.38, A little Book on The Human Shadow.]

Limitations

I was looking through my notebook and found this quote that I'd written down back in the middle of November(right before deer season as a matter of fact):

"Adulthood is connected, in some mysterious way that no one understands, with the number of limitations that there are in your life."--Robert Bly

Perspective

Given my lifestyle, one post a day for an entire year seems like it is going to be tough. But then I thought about this line by Robert Bly talking about Hanry David Thoreau:

"He walked two to four hours each day and noted with the most astonishing perseverance and tenacity the exact days on which wildflowers--dozens of varieties--opened in the forest. [Pg. 77, The Winged Life, Robert Bly] He then goes on to say, "Thoreau trained himself over many years to see. His training involved a number of disciplines. The first was constant labor. His journals are so immense that they must have required, during his short life, two or three hours of writing each day, over and above the walks he wrote about. Second, he aimed to become just, and in this struggle followed the ancient doctrine, contrary to scientific doctrine, that certain aspects of nature reveal themselves only to the observer who is morally developed. The alchemists founded their penetration of nature on their moral character. [Pg. 81, The Winged Life, Robert Bly]

One post a day doesn't seem so bad.

New Year's Resolution

I've made my New Year's resolution: atleast one post a day on this blog. That means by this time next year my annual count should read 365. It's a lofty goal, but I'm thinking I can get at least get one quote a day posted.