2011_3_05 A Few Laughs and Four Films
Let me start with some humor provided by David Fitzsimmons, our local political cartoonist, who also writes a satirical column in the Arizona Star on Saturdays about the weekly folly in in the state’s politics. He poked fun at our state Senators up in Phoenix, most of whom have “spent three years in the eighth grade. “He goes on the say, “Most of them think a Rhodes scholar is an asphalt expert and PBS is something that happens to wives “to make them edgy once a month.” He also weighed in on the subject, hot in the press this week, about the desire of some citizens of Pima County—that is to say Tucson-- wanting to secede from Arizona. It is an idea that has a great appeal to Sue and I, however foolish it sounds. He has three suggestions for possible names for this 51st state. The people who advanced the idea thought “Baja Arizona” was a good name. Fitzsimmons goes them one better: “Bajajaja.” If you don’t like that he has two other suggestions: “Arizonistan,” or “Mexafornia.” He also thinks everything north of Tucson should be called “southern Utah.”
I have seen four films in the past few days that are worth a few remarks. Two are low budget American films, one is a French erotic drama, and one is an early action film with Michael Caine.
PRINCESS KA’IULANI I picked up for Sue, as she is an aficionado of all things Hawaiian, and she was in tears by the end if this film. The father, a Scottish man, takes the Princess, a mere teenager, away to England when some greedy American businessmen trying to hi-jack the islands for their own profit and dominance, threaten the royal family. Being wrenched away from her homeland was very hard on her and to make things worse she is abused at the school she is sent to by the wealthy aristocrat who becomes her protector. Fortunately her host has two teenage kids, a boy and a girl, and they like her and soften the blow of being away from home. Eventually she and the lad fall in love; a period of bliss follows, but it is not to last. She was too committed to helping her homeland and he had to take care of the estate once his father was gone. And when she did return to the islands she did play a part in her people getting the right to vote. But, alas, she died shortly thereafter. The American influence could not be stemmed. In 1950 it became our 50th state. However, a minority has preserved the Hawaiian culture and it has made a bit of comeback in the past decade or so. In 2007 Sue and I went to Molokai to attend a Hula event that lasted three days. And the Hula celebrated was the traditional Hula, not what you find in the bars in Honolulu.
The young woman who played the Hawaiian Princess was O’orianka Klicher, the same young woman who at 14 played Pocahontas in Terrence Malik’s film, “The New World.” She did a good job in both films. Interestingly, in both films she plays a doomed Princess who falls in love with a foreigner, both Englishmen, and then spends time in England, to end up dying in their early twenties.
The DVD contains two discourses on Hawaiian history and both are informative and authoritative. They fill in some details and add nuance to the Princess’s character.
CONVICTION is a small movie but effective, about a timely topic: DNA testing that free men from prisons who were mistakenly jailed, tried and sentenced. The movie tells the incredible story of two mischievous kids who had lousy parents, so they bonded together to hold off a mean-spirited world. San Rockwell plays the brother, who is hot-headed, impulsive, and a magnet for trouble, while Hillary Swank plays his sister, Betty Ann Waters, who also has a temper and enough will and determination to move mountains, even if it takes 18 years. That’s how long the brother is in jail for a brutal murder he didn’t commit.
He goes to prison in 1980. The sister eventually becomes a lawyer, and once she finds out about the DNA tests she goes after a blood sample from the crime of the assailant, and then enlists Barry Scheck, the well-known DNA lawyer, to help her prove they got the wrong man. The brother had made the mistake of insulting the female Sheriff’s deputy who had arrived to take him in for questioning and she takes umbrage at his attitude, and actually decides to frame him out of spite, and she pulls it off by threatening Water’s wife and an ex-girl friend who lie to the jury saying he told them he killed the woman, who was stabbed something like 47 times. The sister, Betty Anne, finally gets the women to retract their stories. All her patience through several setbacks and her diligence on finding out the truth pay off in the end. Unfortunately the ex-Sheriff’s deputy could not be brought to justice because the stature of limitation had run out. Nonetheless the DNA test proved Waters wasn’t the killer, so he was freed. He was one of 254 men who have gotten off because of the DNA tests. Justice delayed is better than none at all. The actual killer has never been found.
LEAVING is a hot-blooded French movie that stars the bilingual Kristen Scott Thomas who has never been so sexy. It is not a new story; one thinks of Nora in “The Doll House,” and Emma Bovary. It is the dilemma of the trophy wife who finally pushes back, usually with tragic results. Suzanne (Thomas) has been married to a doctor for twenty years and he hardly pays attention to her. Anymore. They have two teenage children, a boy and a girl. Superficially, they appeared to be an ideal family. But then the husband hires Ivan (Sergi Lopez) a Spanish laborer, a hunk but also an ex-con, to do some cleanup work around the house. One thing leads to another and when Ivan makes a play for Suzanne she has already decided to go for it, as she’s tired of being the bored and ignored housewife. That initiates a passionate affair driven by lust and a dream of a different life, one more emotionally satisfying. But when the husband finds out he initiates a war between himself and Suzanne; he blocks every avenue that the couple have to make some money. They are quickly reduced to penury, their backs up against the wall. In desperation Suzanne and Ivan invade the family home and walk off with paintings and other valuables which she figures, she was only taking back what was really her’s after twenty years of service. The cops saw it differently and Ivan was arrested when he tried to sell what they took. The husband made a deal with Suzanne: come back home and Ivan will be freed. She has no choice so she takes the deal. But he can’t stand her husband any more, and one night she gets out of bed and takes her revenge. The film ends with Suzanne and Ivan at their secret meeting place in the countryside. They embrace and…at this point I told Sue it should end here; we needed go further, as we know how it has to end, badly. And it did end right there.
It’s easy to think they might have made it as a couple if the husband had let her go and been fair with her about what she was owed. It is also easy to be swayed by their passion, which was borne on Eros rather than love. But few experience that kind of ecstasy in their lifetime. But as Rex Reed commented in his review; he salutes the sincerity Kristen Scott Thomas brought to the role of Suzanne but ultimately she’s “a woman who is basically naïve, careless and self-destructive.” The trade-off of such reckless passion is a state I would characterize as NO EXIT.
PLAY DIRTY is the last film, an early Michael Caine vehicle, about a suicide mission to blow up a petrol depot in the desert that Rommel needed for his tanks in the battle for North Africa. It’s a “Dirty Dozen” type plot; an officer behind the lines dreams up this next-to-impossible-mission that he recruits several criminals for it to be led by a naïve engineer, which is Caine. The reason I ordered it from NETFLIX is I am reading Caine’s autobiography and it was one movie of his I thought I hadn’t seen—there were several-- but as it turned out I had seen it, probably when it came out. But no matter, I didn’t mind seeing it again, although it was predictable from beginning to end.
The movie was shot in Spain in geography first exploited by Sergio Leone. Caine tells a funny story about another film being shot close by, “Shalako,”with his old buddy Sean Connery. Some Indians on horseback came riding over a sand dune and the run smack into, not cowboys, but German tanks and other armored vehicles. The horses bucked their riders and high-tailed outa there. Laughter abounded but it took an hour to clean up the mess.
As for “Play Dirty” I did enjoy seeing several middle aged British actors that I used to see quite often in the sixties and seventies, like Harry Andrews and Nigel Green.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
All the Worlds a Stage
2011_2_25 All the World’s a Stage
There were two versions of the Globe Theater on the south bank of the river Thames. The first burned down due to an accidental fire in 1613 and the second was completed the next year, with some improvements, but on the same spot. The second Globe lasted 31 years when the theater-going fell into disfavor under the Puritan rule. It was then pulled down to make room for tenements. The modern replica of the Globe Theater was built very close to the original site.
In the prologue to “Henry VIII” Shakespeare calls the Globe “a wooden O.” Actually it was a timber-framed polygon with as many as 16 sides, which made it look like a oval in form from a distance. The Elizabethan Theater, unlike the modern theater, which is tied to scenes and technical machinery, was portable, self-contained, adjustable, and only needed an audience. The public stage was a spin-off of the common scaffold stage of street theaters of the medieval era. The area in front of the stage was called “the Yard.” Part of the audience saw the play from that perspective and they had to stand for the length of the play. Otherwise the audience sat in box seats arrayed in three levels in a circle around the three-sided stage.
Usually the stage was head high to allow for a working space underneath the floor; then the posts were covered with a drape so the theatergoer could not see beneath the stage. Since it was below the stage level it was referred to as “Hell,” and there was a trap door in the floor of the stage so “devils” could emerge from below. (In 18 plays Shakespeare used the Hell’s trap door only twice.) In likewise fashion the ceiling above the stage and the three-tired up-stage background was called “Heaven.” It was painted with blue sky, clouds, and yellow stars and sometimes in other theaters with a zodiac on the ceiling too. (They think it was painted by a itinerate Flemish painter.) If any one were to be interested in more detail of the components of the Globe Theater I would highly recommend THE GLOBE RESTORED by C. Walter Hodge who not only wrote the book, he illustrated it with some very fine pen and ink drawings.
The phrase “behind the scenes” will take on a new meaning when you study the composition of the old Globe Theater. The word “scene” comes from the Greek word “skene” which means tent or booth, again a reference to the smaller portable stage of the Middle Ages. The “proscenium” was the area in front of the scene. The back-stage area was called the “Tiring House.” The word ’Tiring’ actually was a reduction of the word ‘attire,’ and referred to the dressing rooms, storage and wardrobe.
Players entered the area from an outside door in the back. The up-stage façade was a vertical plane arranged with several levels. The first two were stacked on each other with six doors and windows. At floor level, right in the middle of the façade, was the “inner stage,” the main entrance and exit for the players, which was cover by a curtain. (In some Elizabethan theaters the inner stage was a double door made out of wood.) There were two additional wooden doors on each side of the main entrance or inner stage. Directly above it was the “upper stage,” a gallery or balcony above the inner stage, used as required by musicians, sometimes by spectators, and often as part of the play. It was flanked by two “window stages,” one on each side. In short, there was symmetry to these first two levels. Two more vertical levels extended above the inner and upper stages. The first was called the “top stage.” It was used mostly by musicians. (Symbolically, it could represent the perception of the Music of the Spheres, since there is a thread of Hermetic Philosophy clearly throughout the structuring of the Globe.) Above the top story was the super-celestial stage known as the “The Hut’ or “The Heavenly Throne.” This was a space equipped with machinery to lower divinities, if that was called for, through another trap door to the floor of the stage. According to Hodge the upper stages of Renaissance theaters had a tendency to “impart symbolic importance to vertical display.” There was, if you will, a climbing toward the uppermost level through 7 levels—from yard to hell to main floor to inner stage to upper stage to top story to heavenly throne. The number seven is a number sacred to Christianity and Hermetic Philosophy. Perhaps it was part of a kind of occult or hidden shorthand behind the invention of the structure of the Globe Theater. Another consideration in this regard is the stage faced east, just like the altar in Christian churches in Europe—toward Jerusalem. In other words, the construction and layout of the Globe Theater is what Paracelsus termed a VITA COSMOGRAPHICA, a diagram of the cosmos as a two-way street, God comes down from his Heavenly Throne and humanity endeavors to elevate itself to the Heavenly Throne. I would call that a HIEROGLYPH, a sacred reading of a hidden truth. Here is how Frances Yates put it in THEATER OF THE WORLD, her splendid book about the Globe Theater and its intellectual and Hermetic influences that informed the ideas behind its construction.
“The painting of the ‘heavens’ in Burbage’s theater, with its images of the signs of the zodiac and of the planets, would have been a matter of great importance. For, apart from their practical use as cover and for acoustics, the ‘heavens’ emphasized and repeated the cosmic plan of the theater, based on the triangulations within the circle of the zodiac. They showed forth clearly that this was a ‘Theater of the World,’ in which Man, the Microcosm, was to play his parts within the Macrocosm.”
Which brings me to my drawings and what I call THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER, for I have intuitively evolved a concept and method similar to the emblematic method so popular during the Renaissance. After a search of 5 years I came up with my own version of VITA COMOMGRAPHICA. To quote John Blofeld, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, the challenge is “to create mental symbols related to spiritual goals,” images the Tantric practitioners calls a “yantra,” a visualization that can summarize in two-dimensional form a cosmic diagram, which is what the Globe Theater does in three dimensions. One of the better-known yantras is the Tibetan WHEEL OF LIFE; a series of concentric circles jammed packed with Buddhist’s symbols and beliefs. Such images are objects for contemplation, a starting point, again to quote Blofeld, “to transfer the force of desire to the symbol so that the desire is concentrated directly on the goal. If the adept is accomplished in the art of visualization, there will be not be much element of make-believe, for he will have learnt to produce mental creations which are more real to him than the ordinary objects of his environment.” I have chosen to call my images hieroglyphs, would-be sacred symbols with hidden meanings, and the entire series of drawings THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER.
After I quit teaching I spent 5 years searching for a way to describe a transformational experience I had had in the late sixties. Around 1973-1974 I settled into an approach I was happy with. In 1975 I wrote my first book, PRIMUS ROTA, which I self-published and privately distributed to 5 western sates. Remembering the Renaissance theater had a tendency “to impart symbolic importance to vertical display,” my pen and ink drawings favored a vertical format divided into three horizontal levels.
In the drawings I used a vertical format that divided into three registers or levels. I thought of the levels as a tripartite division of reality, roughly considering the lower level the material world; the middle level was that of the psyche; and the topmost level was the spiritual realm. Water and the desert came to represent the lowest level; the middle level could be represented in a variety of ways; and a bird in flight or a mandala in a midnight sky represented the topmost level most of the time. The theater idea is evoke by the use of a platform, if you will, a proscenium, with most of the narrative imagery and action taking placed on staging platform. It was like a world apart yet fixed within a cosmos in which it played a vital role. The divisions between the levels were not hard and fast; more like subtle and blend at the borders. To use an image from Carl Jung, they constituted a UNUS MUNDI, one World.
About two years after I started using the tripartite hieroglyphic approach, I came across a picture of the Serekh Motif, an ancient Egyptian emblem that was common on royal residences in the Early Dynastic Period. It was an image on a stela with a tripartite hieroglyphic arrangement that surprised me when I fist saw it. It was obvious I was not the first to think of the idea, to say the least. The Egyptians beat me by 5,000 years! Here is what it looks like. On the bottom level was a panel that described a hall of a typical Egyptian temple columns that gave you a sense of spatial depth. It was meant to suggest the world of space and time. It would equate with my lower material level. The middle register had, again something typically Egyptian, contained the image of an animal, a snake, said to be a cobra. I equated the cobra with my level of the psyche, and inevitably with KUNDALINI, with SERPENT POWER, with a special form of healing energy, with self-knowledge and individuation. The top most register had another and larger animal, a falcon, representing the God Horus, originally a solar deity, an animal representation of the living kings of Egypt. He was one of oldest gods of the nation, as his presence on the Serekh Motif indicates.
When I first read the books of Frances Yates, BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION, THE ART OF MEMORY, and THE THEATER OF THE WORLD I was thrilled to find such a kindred spirit and her discourse on the symbol-rich background to The Globe Theater taught just how a ‘hieroglyph’ worked and how I might create some myself. Like with the Globe Theater I put my actors on the stage between the darkness of hell and the glories of the Heavenly Throne.
As Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage.” And when Ben Jonson saw the charred remains of the first Globe Theater after the fire, he exclaimed, “See the World in ruins!”
There were two versions of the Globe Theater on the south bank of the river Thames. The first burned down due to an accidental fire in 1613 and the second was completed the next year, with some improvements, but on the same spot. The second Globe lasted 31 years when the theater-going fell into disfavor under the Puritan rule. It was then pulled down to make room for tenements. The modern replica of the Globe Theater was built very close to the original site.
In the prologue to “Henry VIII” Shakespeare calls the Globe “a wooden O.” Actually it was a timber-framed polygon with as many as 16 sides, which made it look like a oval in form from a distance. The Elizabethan Theater, unlike the modern theater, which is tied to scenes and technical machinery, was portable, self-contained, adjustable, and only needed an audience. The public stage was a spin-off of the common scaffold stage of street theaters of the medieval era. The area in front of the stage was called “the Yard.” Part of the audience saw the play from that perspective and they had to stand for the length of the play. Otherwise the audience sat in box seats arrayed in three levels in a circle around the three-sided stage.
Usually the stage was head high to allow for a working space underneath the floor; then the posts were covered with a drape so the theatergoer could not see beneath the stage. Since it was below the stage level it was referred to as “Hell,” and there was a trap door in the floor of the stage so “devils” could emerge from below. (In 18 plays Shakespeare used the Hell’s trap door only twice.) In likewise fashion the ceiling above the stage and the three-tired up-stage background was called “Heaven.” It was painted with blue sky, clouds, and yellow stars and sometimes in other theaters with a zodiac on the ceiling too. (They think it was painted by a itinerate Flemish painter.) If any one were to be interested in more detail of the components of the Globe Theater I would highly recommend THE GLOBE RESTORED by C. Walter Hodge who not only wrote the book, he illustrated it with some very fine pen and ink drawings.
The phrase “behind the scenes” will take on a new meaning when you study the composition of the old Globe Theater. The word “scene” comes from the Greek word “skene” which means tent or booth, again a reference to the smaller portable stage of the Middle Ages. The “proscenium” was the area in front of the scene. The back-stage area was called the “Tiring House.” The word ’Tiring’ actually was a reduction of the word ‘attire,’ and referred to the dressing rooms, storage and wardrobe.
Players entered the area from an outside door in the back. The up-stage façade was a vertical plane arranged with several levels. The first two were stacked on each other with six doors and windows. At floor level, right in the middle of the façade, was the “inner stage,” the main entrance and exit for the players, which was cover by a curtain. (In some Elizabethan theaters the inner stage was a double door made out of wood.) There were two additional wooden doors on each side of the main entrance or inner stage. Directly above it was the “upper stage,” a gallery or balcony above the inner stage, used as required by musicians, sometimes by spectators, and often as part of the play. It was flanked by two “window stages,” one on each side. In short, there was symmetry to these first two levels. Two more vertical levels extended above the inner and upper stages. The first was called the “top stage.” It was used mostly by musicians. (Symbolically, it could represent the perception of the Music of the Spheres, since there is a thread of Hermetic Philosophy clearly throughout the structuring of the Globe.) Above the top story was the super-celestial stage known as the “The Hut’ or “The Heavenly Throne.” This was a space equipped with machinery to lower divinities, if that was called for, through another trap door to the floor of the stage. According to Hodge the upper stages of Renaissance theaters had a tendency to “impart symbolic importance to vertical display.” There was, if you will, a climbing toward the uppermost level through 7 levels—from yard to hell to main floor to inner stage to upper stage to top story to heavenly throne. The number seven is a number sacred to Christianity and Hermetic Philosophy. Perhaps it was part of a kind of occult or hidden shorthand behind the invention of the structure of the Globe Theater. Another consideration in this regard is the stage faced east, just like the altar in Christian churches in Europe—toward Jerusalem. In other words, the construction and layout of the Globe Theater is what Paracelsus termed a VITA COSMOGRAPHICA, a diagram of the cosmos as a two-way street, God comes down from his Heavenly Throne and humanity endeavors to elevate itself to the Heavenly Throne. I would call that a HIEROGLYPH, a sacred reading of a hidden truth. Here is how Frances Yates put it in THEATER OF THE WORLD, her splendid book about the Globe Theater and its intellectual and Hermetic influences that informed the ideas behind its construction.
“The painting of the ‘heavens’ in Burbage’s theater, with its images of the signs of the zodiac and of the planets, would have been a matter of great importance. For, apart from their practical use as cover and for acoustics, the ‘heavens’ emphasized and repeated the cosmic plan of the theater, based on the triangulations within the circle of the zodiac. They showed forth clearly that this was a ‘Theater of the World,’ in which Man, the Microcosm, was to play his parts within the Macrocosm.”
Which brings me to my drawings and what I call THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER, for I have intuitively evolved a concept and method similar to the emblematic method so popular during the Renaissance. After a search of 5 years I came up with my own version of VITA COMOMGRAPHICA. To quote John Blofeld, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, the challenge is “to create mental symbols related to spiritual goals,” images the Tantric practitioners calls a “yantra,” a visualization that can summarize in two-dimensional form a cosmic diagram, which is what the Globe Theater does in three dimensions. One of the better-known yantras is the Tibetan WHEEL OF LIFE; a series of concentric circles jammed packed with Buddhist’s symbols and beliefs. Such images are objects for contemplation, a starting point, again to quote Blofeld, “to transfer the force of desire to the symbol so that the desire is concentrated directly on the goal. If the adept is accomplished in the art of visualization, there will be not be much element of make-believe, for he will have learnt to produce mental creations which are more real to him than the ordinary objects of his environment.” I have chosen to call my images hieroglyphs, would-be sacred symbols with hidden meanings, and the entire series of drawings THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER.
After I quit teaching I spent 5 years searching for a way to describe a transformational experience I had had in the late sixties. Around 1973-1974 I settled into an approach I was happy with. In 1975 I wrote my first book, PRIMUS ROTA, which I self-published and privately distributed to 5 western sates. Remembering the Renaissance theater had a tendency “to impart symbolic importance to vertical display,” my pen and ink drawings favored a vertical format divided into three horizontal levels.
In the drawings I used a vertical format that divided into three registers or levels. I thought of the levels as a tripartite division of reality, roughly considering the lower level the material world; the middle level was that of the psyche; and the topmost level was the spiritual realm. Water and the desert came to represent the lowest level; the middle level could be represented in a variety of ways; and a bird in flight or a mandala in a midnight sky represented the topmost level most of the time. The theater idea is evoke by the use of a platform, if you will, a proscenium, with most of the narrative imagery and action taking placed on staging platform. It was like a world apart yet fixed within a cosmos in which it played a vital role. The divisions between the levels were not hard and fast; more like subtle and blend at the borders. To use an image from Carl Jung, they constituted a UNUS MUNDI, one World.
About two years after I started using the tripartite hieroglyphic approach, I came across a picture of the Serekh Motif, an ancient Egyptian emblem that was common on royal residences in the Early Dynastic Period. It was an image on a stela with a tripartite hieroglyphic arrangement that surprised me when I fist saw it. It was obvious I was not the first to think of the idea, to say the least. The Egyptians beat me by 5,000 years! Here is what it looks like. On the bottom level was a panel that described a hall of a typical Egyptian temple columns that gave you a sense of spatial depth. It was meant to suggest the world of space and time. It would equate with my lower material level. The middle register had, again something typically Egyptian, contained the image of an animal, a snake, said to be a cobra. I equated the cobra with my level of the psyche, and inevitably with KUNDALINI, with SERPENT POWER, with a special form of healing energy, with self-knowledge and individuation. The top most register had another and larger animal, a falcon, representing the God Horus, originally a solar deity, an animal representation of the living kings of Egypt. He was one of oldest gods of the nation, as his presence on the Serekh Motif indicates.
When I first read the books of Frances Yates, BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION, THE ART OF MEMORY, and THE THEATER OF THE WORLD I was thrilled to find such a kindred spirit and her discourse on the symbol-rich background to The Globe Theater taught just how a ‘hieroglyph’ worked and how I might create some myself. Like with the Globe Theater I put my actors on the stage between the darkness of hell and the glories of the Heavenly Throne.
As Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage.” And when Ben Jonson saw the charred remains of the first Globe Theater after the fire, he exclaimed, “See the World in ruins!”
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Cairo moves to Madison.
2011_2_24 Cairo moves to Madison.
Dear Stan,
First of all, I can’t tell you how sickened I am by what is happening in the State senate of my home state, Wisconsin. To see what Scott Walker and other Republican governors are trying to do—crush unions, decimate the middle class, make it so their rich friends and backers in the private sector never have to pay taxes, blame the budget crisis in the states on the workers in the public sector, and refuse to do the right thing, that is, tax the wealthy which would go a long way in solving the problem of the deficits—really burns my ass, as my dad used to say. Speaking of my father, he was president of the CIO Union at Hamilton Beach, the factory he worked at in Racine for 35 years. He was president for 12 years and after his tenure in office he resembled Bill Clinton, the elder statesman whose experience was still of value to members of the union. I’m sure he is turning in his grave over what is happening in Madison: a frontal attack on not only collective bargaining, but also a questioning if unions should even exists. They want to flush down the toilet a tradition that has been around for 75 years. The only consolation is the response to this outrageous attack, as tens of thousands of local and sympathetic people have been demonstrating for the past 2 weeks and have no plans to let up until the governor, Scott Walker, agrees to remove that section in his so-called Budget Repair Bill about outlawing collective bargaining. To see the public workers react with such alacrity and passion, and in such huge numbers, warms my heart. As Paul Ryan put it, “Cairo has moved to Wisconsin.”
I posted a piece on my blog earlier today about the situation and how I viewed it; but it did not included the phone conversation that a blogger from Buffalo managed to record when he posed as Dave Koch, a billionaire businessman—an oil man-- who is one of Walker’s backers. It proves what I thought and wrote about in my article: he admits that the budget crisis was just a vehicle to achieve his main goal, which is a long time right wing ambition, stamp out the unions once and for all. The blogger who trick him into the revealing conversation was Ian Murphy. He did some research on Koch and was able to sound like him and talk like him. Walker was so full of himself he was, as Murphy put on THE LAST WORD last night, he was “oblivious” and never questioned the authenticity of the other voice on the line. He was unguarded and spilled the beans willy-nilly. He admitted the hubbub that he created around the State’s budget woes was merely a smoke screen for his real target, the public sector unions. He said “This is our moment” and I want to do “something big.” To eviscerate the unions at this time, before the 2012 election campaign gets rolling, would just about cinch a Republican victory in the fall, and of course he would be a hero of the party, maybe even its presidential candidate. One looks at Walker and it’s clear this man’s middle name is AMBITIOUS. If he were to win this first round in this class warfare, and the other Tea Party governors follow suit, he’d automatically go to the front of the class. However, the game is far from over. Indeed, a poll conducted by USA TODAY and CNN had 61% backing the union views and collective bargaining, and about 31% backing Walker’s stand. In any event, thanks to Ian Murphy the cat is out of the bag and he ain’t going back in it.
Dear Stan,
First of all, I can’t tell you how sickened I am by what is happening in the State senate of my home state, Wisconsin. To see what Scott Walker and other Republican governors are trying to do—crush unions, decimate the middle class, make it so their rich friends and backers in the private sector never have to pay taxes, blame the budget crisis in the states on the workers in the public sector, and refuse to do the right thing, that is, tax the wealthy which would go a long way in solving the problem of the deficits—really burns my ass, as my dad used to say. Speaking of my father, he was president of the CIO Union at Hamilton Beach, the factory he worked at in Racine for 35 years. He was president for 12 years and after his tenure in office he resembled Bill Clinton, the elder statesman whose experience was still of value to members of the union. I’m sure he is turning in his grave over what is happening in Madison: a frontal attack on not only collective bargaining, but also a questioning if unions should even exists. They want to flush down the toilet a tradition that has been around for 75 years. The only consolation is the response to this outrageous attack, as tens of thousands of local and sympathetic people have been demonstrating for the past 2 weeks and have no plans to let up until the governor, Scott Walker, agrees to remove that section in his so-called Budget Repair Bill about outlawing collective bargaining. To see the public workers react with such alacrity and passion, and in such huge numbers, warms my heart. As Paul Ryan put it, “Cairo has moved to Wisconsin.”
I posted a piece on my blog earlier today about the situation and how I viewed it; but it did not included the phone conversation that a blogger from Buffalo managed to record when he posed as Dave Koch, a billionaire businessman—an oil man-- who is one of Walker’s backers. It proves what I thought and wrote about in my article: he admits that the budget crisis was just a vehicle to achieve his main goal, which is a long time right wing ambition, stamp out the unions once and for all. The blogger who trick him into the revealing conversation was Ian Murphy. He did some research on Koch and was able to sound like him and talk like him. Walker was so full of himself he was, as Murphy put on THE LAST WORD last night, he was “oblivious” and never questioned the authenticity of the other voice on the line. He was unguarded and spilled the beans willy-nilly. He admitted the hubbub that he created around the State’s budget woes was merely a smoke screen for his real target, the public sector unions. He said “This is our moment” and I want to do “something big.” To eviscerate the unions at this time, before the 2012 election campaign gets rolling, would just about cinch a Republican victory in the fall, and of course he would be a hero of the party, maybe even its presidential candidate. One looks at Walker and it’s clear this man’s middle name is AMBITIOUS. If he were to win this first round in this class warfare, and the other Tea Party governors follow suit, he’d automatically go to the front of the class. However, the game is far from over. Indeed, a poll conducted by USA TODAY and CNN had 61% backing the union views and collective bargaining, and about 31% backing Walker’s stand. In any event, thanks to Ian Murphy the cat is out of the bag and he ain’t going back in it.
The Battle Joined
2011_2_22 The Battle Joined
Events in Madison, Wisconsin, last week and continuing this week has made it clear that the Republican party is the captive of its ultra-conservative wing who are hell-bent on this mission: “to take the country back.” That has been the mantra of the Tea Party folks since their inception. Sarah Palin uses the phrase often as well. They want to take it back to the time when WASPs were on the top of the social heap, when business had a freer hand, when regulations were minimal for business, when minorities knew their place, and when government was small and ineffective. The Far Right would also love to roll back the union movement to the dark ages, especially the public-sector unions, who, it should be known, contributed $200 million to Obama camping in 2008. If they could eliminate the opportunity to put that much into the 2012 election that would be a big plus for Republican chances to sweep in 2012, with a THANK-YOU nod toward the Supreme Court for their ruling that Corporations were comparable to persons and therefore could spend as much as they like on their candidates.
Now the newly elected Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, 43, steps forward with his “Budget Repair Bill,” a foolproof plan to take the public-sector unions down under the guise of spreading the pain among all middle class taxpayers in regard their pension and benefit plans. I call it foolproof because he knows he has the numbers to win easily in the State Senate. So he launched his plan and when he did 14 Democratic senators walked out in order to stall the vote, which they would have lost. At the same time 5000 union people and sympathizers began to demonstrate in and around the Capitol building. By last Saturday 70,000 were joining the protest movement and Walker said he couldn’t care less: he was doing the right thing and therefore he wasn’t going to negotiate with anybody; it was a done deal and the senators should return to their jobs, as should all the teachers. In his view Unions need to be knocked off their high horse; they needed to be brought down to earth to be as poor as the majority of taxpayers and members of private-sector unions. They must be punished for being such good negotiators. He cleverly exploited the resentment among other taxpayers whose benefit expenses have increased over time. Walker is only leveling the field (in a downward fashion) while the rich get richer (in an upward fashion) as their taxes keep getting cut (all for the sake of the economy, of course.)
What’s really galling is when the Union agrees to accept an increase in costs he won’t sit down and talk to union leaders about the worse aspect of his so-called Repair Bill: he has outlawed collective bargaining for benefits, vacations and work conditions. So there are the bare knuckles, the full outrage of this bill, what can not stand in the eyes of union members of whatever stripe because it is business trying to, finally, having a good chance to eliminate a major countervailing power, something business has dreamed about since the inception of the union movement. Walker is trying to get across the idea that unions aren’t necessary, they are the bane of business and progress, and they should be outlawed. This attack is the reason this is such a BIG DEAL and why the demonstrators have to not give up, for the very existence of the idea of unions seems to be at risk. Collective Bargaining means having a seat at the table; it is the cornerstone of Unionism; it is what it’s all about. No individual can fight for justice and rights like an organized group can. Walker is now talking out of both sides of his mouth. He keeps say the senators should come back and let’s talk about what’s not negotiable. Dear Sir, that makes no sense whatsoever. So the standoff continues.
Going on at the same time in the House was more evidence of right wing attack dogs.
The Republicans, now lean and mean, purged of all moderates and newly aggressive after their triumph at the polls last November, have begun a blitzkrieg on the federal front while Walker and others of his ilk begin on the State level. And it has already proved viral, having spread to Ohio, Indiana and Iowa. The ultra-conservatives leading the charge have read their taking control of the House as a mandate to go after spending—programs they don’t like, for ideological reasons—with a meat ax. They slashed $61 billion from the budget. Cuts included domestic program and foreign aid (always a favorite to get rid of), school programs, nutrition programs, environmental protection, and heating and housing subsides for the poor. They defunded Planned Parenthood, sections of the Health Care Bill, and the Public Media,
NPR and PBS. (These most likely won’t make it through the senate.)
The Far Right would love to bury the union movement, which they have hated for many decades; they feel the moment is right to attack with 16-inch guns. No doubt Governor Walker is making a big play, desiring to get out front early, establishing himself as fresh and capable candidate for president next year. It’s quite a gamble and the endgame is yet in sight. If he does indeed start the ball rolling on a systematic dismantling of union power, it certainly would be a leg up for the Republican who could manage that.
Happily I can report that there are mass demonstrations in those other states trying to do what Walker has started. The battle is joined and far from over.
Events in Madison, Wisconsin, last week and continuing this week has made it clear that the Republican party is the captive of its ultra-conservative wing who are hell-bent on this mission: “to take the country back.” That has been the mantra of the Tea Party folks since their inception. Sarah Palin uses the phrase often as well. They want to take it back to the time when WASPs were on the top of the social heap, when business had a freer hand, when regulations were minimal for business, when minorities knew their place, and when government was small and ineffective. The Far Right would also love to roll back the union movement to the dark ages, especially the public-sector unions, who, it should be known, contributed $200 million to Obama camping in 2008. If they could eliminate the opportunity to put that much into the 2012 election that would be a big plus for Republican chances to sweep in 2012, with a THANK-YOU nod toward the Supreme Court for their ruling that Corporations were comparable to persons and therefore could spend as much as they like on their candidates.
Now the newly elected Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, 43, steps forward with his “Budget Repair Bill,” a foolproof plan to take the public-sector unions down under the guise of spreading the pain among all middle class taxpayers in regard their pension and benefit plans. I call it foolproof because he knows he has the numbers to win easily in the State Senate. So he launched his plan and when he did 14 Democratic senators walked out in order to stall the vote, which they would have lost. At the same time 5000 union people and sympathizers began to demonstrate in and around the Capitol building. By last Saturday 70,000 were joining the protest movement and Walker said he couldn’t care less: he was doing the right thing and therefore he wasn’t going to negotiate with anybody; it was a done deal and the senators should return to their jobs, as should all the teachers. In his view Unions need to be knocked off their high horse; they needed to be brought down to earth to be as poor as the majority of taxpayers and members of private-sector unions. They must be punished for being such good negotiators. He cleverly exploited the resentment among other taxpayers whose benefit expenses have increased over time. Walker is only leveling the field (in a downward fashion) while the rich get richer (in an upward fashion) as their taxes keep getting cut (all for the sake of the economy, of course.)
What’s really galling is when the Union agrees to accept an increase in costs he won’t sit down and talk to union leaders about the worse aspect of his so-called Repair Bill: he has outlawed collective bargaining for benefits, vacations and work conditions. So there are the bare knuckles, the full outrage of this bill, what can not stand in the eyes of union members of whatever stripe because it is business trying to, finally, having a good chance to eliminate a major countervailing power, something business has dreamed about since the inception of the union movement. Walker is trying to get across the idea that unions aren’t necessary, they are the bane of business and progress, and they should be outlawed. This attack is the reason this is such a BIG DEAL and why the demonstrators have to not give up, for the very existence of the idea of unions seems to be at risk. Collective Bargaining means having a seat at the table; it is the cornerstone of Unionism; it is what it’s all about. No individual can fight for justice and rights like an organized group can. Walker is now talking out of both sides of his mouth. He keeps say the senators should come back and let’s talk about what’s not negotiable. Dear Sir, that makes no sense whatsoever. So the standoff continues.
Going on at the same time in the House was more evidence of right wing attack dogs.
The Republicans, now lean and mean, purged of all moderates and newly aggressive after their triumph at the polls last November, have begun a blitzkrieg on the federal front while Walker and others of his ilk begin on the State level. And it has already proved viral, having spread to Ohio, Indiana and Iowa. The ultra-conservatives leading the charge have read their taking control of the House as a mandate to go after spending—programs they don’t like, for ideological reasons—with a meat ax. They slashed $61 billion from the budget. Cuts included domestic program and foreign aid (always a favorite to get rid of), school programs, nutrition programs, environmental protection, and heating and housing subsides for the poor. They defunded Planned Parenthood, sections of the Health Care Bill, and the Public Media,
NPR and PBS. (These most likely won’t make it through the senate.)
The Far Right would love to bury the union movement, which they have hated for many decades; they feel the moment is right to attack with 16-inch guns. No doubt Governor Walker is making a big play, desiring to get out front early, establishing himself as fresh and capable candidate for president next year. It’s quite a gamble and the endgame is yet in sight. If he does indeed start the ball rolling on a systematic dismantling of union power, it certainly would be a leg up for the Republican who could manage that.
Happily I can report that there are mass demonstrations in those other states trying to do what Walker has started. The battle is joined and far from over.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Potboiler Fantasy
2011_2_09 Potboiler Fantasy
Finished another drawing last night, an atypical work. How do I describe it? Well, it is three fantastic figures in huge pot, another figure outside the pot, with a fiery mandala on the outside of the pot, which indicates whatever is in the pot is ‘cooking.’ In the back of my mind were two things: memories of my catholic youth and stories about certain martyrs who were killed by boiling them in oil; and images from Alchemy, the ‘Bath of the Philosophers,’ especially that image I have seen in several books of Christ in a ‘bath’ with an alchemist stoking the fire with a bellows. Two of the figures look like creatures in that bar scene in “Star Wars,” and the third figure is off to the side and of a somewhat different character, less grotesque but still fantastical. One of the Aliens has the head of a crock, a long neck like a giraffe and two tits on its neck, and a crown on her head. The other has a snake-like neck and a head that combines a snake with a bulbous effect. Very strange indeed! Its right arm is visible on the right side of the format, with its right hand shaped like a gun. Why? I don’t know. Maybe he is Jared Loughner’s true self. The third figure is a variation of an image I have used twice before. He has a long stiff beard, a bird’s beak, a checkerboard jacket, a black circle oh his right deltoid, and head compose of concentric circles with stars visible inside two rings. At the center of the circles is a white and empty smaller circle. He’s a mystic traveller of some sort; he stares off to the right, perhaps gazing at depths the two aliens have no notion of. There are stars inside two of the concentric circles, some are white, and some are black. The stars are repeated on the outside of the pot, inside the mandala. There is one other creature alongside the pot, a cow-like critter that seemed to be braying for all he’s worth.
Surprise, surprise! The house defeated a Republican bill to extend the Patriot Act when 24 Republicans joined Democrats to vote it down 277-148 (in a process that required 2/3 vote.) Eight Tea Party types joined the no vote.
There is a crisis reaching critical mass in our judicial system as Republicans continue to block Obama’s choices for the circuit court with delaying tactics, once more playing politics rather than doing the right thing. But the White House has been slow to nominate too and the confirmation process in the senate is dysfunctional as well. In short, they are not keeping up with the need for enough judges, not replacing those who are retiring. When Obama took office there were 54 vacancies. Now there are 101 with 46 of them considered in an emergency status.
The federal stimulus package provided $58.5 billion for food stamps. The program helped 43.6 million people in November 2010. Half of them were children. Before the recession the program was serving 26 million people. The money spent also helps the economy.
President Karzai wants all reconstruction and development units that support NATO troops should be phased out, as the Afghanis do not want them changing their country by outside whim and attitude of knowing what’s best for a people they don’t really understand.
I haven’t watched any TV news yet today but yesterday Omar Suleiman made some remarks that came across as threats to folks in the square downtown--that the government would not tolerate them staying there very much longer and may have to call out the police. The crowd yesterday was the biggest yet. It would be suicidal for the police and the leaders of the old guard to fire on that many of their citizens. Could they be that stupid? They have had their way for so long they can’t stand the idea of the rabble pushing them around.
(Saturday: The revolution succeeds)
On the 18th day of the uprising that became a revolution, Feb. 11, Mubarak finally realized his day was over and he resigned the presidency and the Military assumed the temporary custodial care of the government until the election next September.
Yesterday and events of last night will take an honored place in my memory, as vividly as the assassinations and other events of the sixties and seventies. First it was Tunisia that chased out its autocrat, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in office for 30 years, who fled to Saudi Arabia. Tunisia is a relatively small Arab state with 12 million citizens, while Egypt has a population of 85 million and is regarded as the, so to speak, the flagship Arab state, the historical and cultural center of the Arab Universe. Nonetheless, Egypt’s “little brother,” Tunisia showed it what was possible and “big brother” picked up the baton and began its revolt. And as I write this thousands are demonstrating in Algiers, with riot troops out and helicopters in the air above the crowd. All freedom-loving people are hoping that Egypt ‘s success will spread the contagion through North Africa into the states of the Levant. If the revolution remains largely secular and pluralistic, Israel will probably be safe, or at least as safe as it is now.
For 30 years the 18 million citizens of Cairo were under the thumb of the hated “emergency law” which sanctioned a secret police who could throw people in jail indefinitely without a trial. This revolution was definitely a youth revolt, as all the pictures of the Arab Street indicate, as the children of those who had suffered the most under Mubarak road their parents anger and frustration to a triumph of the will of the younger generation. It was thrilling to watch it all unfold, in one of television’s greatest moments.
On Friday night the rumor was that Mubarak was going to step down, give up the presidency, and the crowd in the square were pent up with excitement. They felt that way because a military spokesman said that would happen. But instead he simply delegated powers to his chief crony, Omar Suleiman, and would hold on to his title as president as new committees work on reforms prior to the elections in September. He referred to himself as the father of his country and struck a tone of Father-Knows-Best and he wanted the children to behave and quit this nonsense in the streets. He revealed he just doesn’t get it, remaining paternalistic and patronizing to the bitter end. The anger, frustration and disappointment in the massive crowd were palpable, but somehow it was contained; it never translated itself into an anarchist fury of destructiveness. They maintained their stance of non-violence, which I thought was close to miraculous. Plans were made to walk over to the presidential palace in the morning.
Now, what happened between the end of that Friday night speech and Saturday morning about 9:30 Tucson time, when Suleiman made his brief announcement on State TV that the president had stepped down and was on his way to his vacation home at Sharm El-Sheik by the Red Sea. Apparently, the military stepped in and forced him to give it all up once and for all, twisting his arm to get out of town. Whatever they actually said, he complied, seeing no other options at that point. Hearing the news the crowd erupted in cheers and shouts that went on and on through the night, as unbridled joy and celebration burst out of tens of thousands of delirious Egyptians.
Many question remain and a rocky road is no doubt ahead for the movement that brought about the change, but the first big step has been accomplished. Three cheers for the youth of Egypt!!
Finished another drawing last night, an atypical work. How do I describe it? Well, it is three fantastic figures in huge pot, another figure outside the pot, with a fiery mandala on the outside of the pot, which indicates whatever is in the pot is ‘cooking.’ In the back of my mind were two things: memories of my catholic youth and stories about certain martyrs who were killed by boiling them in oil; and images from Alchemy, the ‘Bath of the Philosophers,’ especially that image I have seen in several books of Christ in a ‘bath’ with an alchemist stoking the fire with a bellows. Two of the figures look like creatures in that bar scene in “Star Wars,” and the third figure is off to the side and of a somewhat different character, less grotesque but still fantastical. One of the Aliens has the head of a crock, a long neck like a giraffe and two tits on its neck, and a crown on her head. The other has a snake-like neck and a head that combines a snake with a bulbous effect. Very strange indeed! Its right arm is visible on the right side of the format, with its right hand shaped like a gun. Why? I don’t know. Maybe he is Jared Loughner’s true self. The third figure is a variation of an image I have used twice before. He has a long stiff beard, a bird’s beak, a checkerboard jacket, a black circle oh his right deltoid, and head compose of concentric circles with stars visible inside two rings. At the center of the circles is a white and empty smaller circle. He’s a mystic traveller of some sort; he stares off to the right, perhaps gazing at depths the two aliens have no notion of. There are stars inside two of the concentric circles, some are white, and some are black. The stars are repeated on the outside of the pot, inside the mandala. There is one other creature alongside the pot, a cow-like critter that seemed to be braying for all he’s worth.
Surprise, surprise! The house defeated a Republican bill to extend the Patriot Act when 24 Republicans joined Democrats to vote it down 277-148 (in a process that required 2/3 vote.) Eight Tea Party types joined the no vote.
There is a crisis reaching critical mass in our judicial system as Republicans continue to block Obama’s choices for the circuit court with delaying tactics, once more playing politics rather than doing the right thing. But the White House has been slow to nominate too and the confirmation process in the senate is dysfunctional as well. In short, they are not keeping up with the need for enough judges, not replacing those who are retiring. When Obama took office there were 54 vacancies. Now there are 101 with 46 of them considered in an emergency status.
The federal stimulus package provided $58.5 billion for food stamps. The program helped 43.6 million people in November 2010. Half of them were children. Before the recession the program was serving 26 million people. The money spent also helps the economy.
President Karzai wants all reconstruction and development units that support NATO troops should be phased out, as the Afghanis do not want them changing their country by outside whim and attitude of knowing what’s best for a people they don’t really understand.
I haven’t watched any TV news yet today but yesterday Omar Suleiman made some remarks that came across as threats to folks in the square downtown--that the government would not tolerate them staying there very much longer and may have to call out the police. The crowd yesterday was the biggest yet. It would be suicidal for the police and the leaders of the old guard to fire on that many of their citizens. Could they be that stupid? They have had their way for so long they can’t stand the idea of the rabble pushing them around.
(Saturday: The revolution succeeds)
On the 18th day of the uprising that became a revolution, Feb. 11, Mubarak finally realized his day was over and he resigned the presidency and the Military assumed the temporary custodial care of the government until the election next September.
Yesterday and events of last night will take an honored place in my memory, as vividly as the assassinations and other events of the sixties and seventies. First it was Tunisia that chased out its autocrat, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in office for 30 years, who fled to Saudi Arabia. Tunisia is a relatively small Arab state with 12 million citizens, while Egypt has a population of 85 million and is regarded as the, so to speak, the flagship Arab state, the historical and cultural center of the Arab Universe. Nonetheless, Egypt’s “little brother,” Tunisia showed it what was possible and “big brother” picked up the baton and began its revolt. And as I write this thousands are demonstrating in Algiers, with riot troops out and helicopters in the air above the crowd. All freedom-loving people are hoping that Egypt ‘s success will spread the contagion through North Africa into the states of the Levant. If the revolution remains largely secular and pluralistic, Israel will probably be safe, or at least as safe as it is now.
For 30 years the 18 million citizens of Cairo were under the thumb of the hated “emergency law” which sanctioned a secret police who could throw people in jail indefinitely without a trial. This revolution was definitely a youth revolt, as all the pictures of the Arab Street indicate, as the children of those who had suffered the most under Mubarak road their parents anger and frustration to a triumph of the will of the younger generation. It was thrilling to watch it all unfold, in one of television’s greatest moments.
On Friday night the rumor was that Mubarak was going to step down, give up the presidency, and the crowd in the square were pent up with excitement. They felt that way because a military spokesman said that would happen. But instead he simply delegated powers to his chief crony, Omar Suleiman, and would hold on to his title as president as new committees work on reforms prior to the elections in September. He referred to himself as the father of his country and struck a tone of Father-Knows-Best and he wanted the children to behave and quit this nonsense in the streets. He revealed he just doesn’t get it, remaining paternalistic and patronizing to the bitter end. The anger, frustration and disappointment in the massive crowd were palpable, but somehow it was contained; it never translated itself into an anarchist fury of destructiveness. They maintained their stance of non-violence, which I thought was close to miraculous. Plans were made to walk over to the presidential palace in the morning.
Now, what happened between the end of that Friday night speech and Saturday morning about 9:30 Tucson time, when Suleiman made his brief announcement on State TV that the president had stepped down and was on his way to his vacation home at Sharm El-Sheik by the Red Sea. Apparently, the military stepped in and forced him to give it all up once and for all, twisting his arm to get out of town. Whatever they actually said, he complied, seeing no other options at that point. Hearing the news the crowd erupted in cheers and shouts that went on and on through the night, as unbridled joy and celebration burst out of tens of thousands of delirious Egyptians.
Many question remain and a rocky road is no doubt ahead for the movement that brought about the change, but the first big step has been accomplished. Three cheers for the youth of Egypt!!
Friday, February 4, 2011
Riders of the Chariot
2011_2_03 RIDERS OF THE CHARIOT
Patrick White’s novel RIDERS OF THE CHARIOT is a narrative about the creative tasks of four connected characters whose lives magically interact in Sydney, Australia, in the post-war years of the forties and fifties. They are more examples of the breed that White thought of as the burnt ones, touch-by--God-individuals engaged in what Carl Jung would term “Opus Redemption.” The four compose the RIDERS OF THE CHARIOT with the Chariot in this case being a reference to Merkabah Mysticism and Jewish Gnosticism, with one of the four, Mordecai Himmelfarb, being a zaddik, the Hasidic ideal of the just and honest man. The ‘work of the chariot’ involves sacrifice, abuse, misunderstandings, humility, visions, highs and lows—even a crucifixion. It all boils down to being a loner, a crank, an outsider, and a social pariah. As for the halo, few can see it, including some who wear it.
The Four Riders are part of a spiritual vision, which I’d characterize as a common thread of mystical intuition about UNIO MYSTICA, our underlying reality. All four Riders suffer terribly and lead lives of utmost isolation; they are people that God has separated from the common run of humanity, the vast population of “normal people,” each for their own service and purpose. All four live out the roles of scapegoat, pariah, or illuminated outsiders who carry the moral and metaphysical burdens of their fellow creatures. They act out their lives in their respective roles in the context of modern life, within their various spiritual legacies.
Mordecai Himmelfarb is one of the four Riders in White’s novel and he is of particular interest to me because he is the fictional representation closet to my own experience, and that’s one reason the book has special meaning for me. Himmelfarb was a professor and author in Europe prior to World War II. After the war he moved to Australia (Sydney) and took a job in a factory that made bicycles, a menial job at odds with his past and true capacities. Few people could understand his post-war choices. But it does not seem so strange to me. So what was involved with his decision to move to Australia and take such a job? After his earlier social and academic success something happened which emptied that life of the virtue it once had. Rhea, his beloved wife, was seized by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp and he never saw her again. He felt a profound guilt over her disappearance and death, and the only thing that made sense to him was commitment to a life of humility and obscurity. To deny what he had been became a spiritual goal for Himmelfarb. Such a life was more important than “a place in the pews.” Worldly achievements were the playthings of egocentric humanity. He had another goal: to transcend his ego.
My life since I left university teaching has followed a similar path. My post-war choices (the Vietnam War, of course) have been seen by many of my older, academic friends as pretty strange and puzzling, for like Himmelfarb I found a job as a custodian in a neighborhood Presbyterian Church. When I resigned my position at UNLV in 1971, I was fully aware I was committing professional suicide. But I didn’t care. I had moved beyond that concern. I was that fed up with Higher Education in America. My moral imperative and personal vision were at odds with theirs. I had been a political activist on campus for 5 years and it earned me a reputation as a troublemaker, which would cost me tenure. But no matter, I wanted to and needed to make a gesture of defiance when I left to show my former colleagues that there were things more important than job security. So I quit before they could can me. For me it was all part of THE GREAT REFUSAL, the inclination to reject war, materialism, egotism, careerism, social status, environmental abuse, and mainstream values. I walked away from a position I was good at, as Himmelfarb did in Europe to pursue an alterative path. As one academic friend of mine put it, “You climbed a mountain and when you reached the top, you took a leap in the dark, ignoring what you had won. You abandon a post others would kill for. You treated it as garbage in, garbage out.” As I read that today I think of what Ed Abbey once said: “I live at Fort Fuck-it-all.”
Like Himmelfarb, humility became a main concern for me on my new job. Being a janitor was a parallel position to what the ex-professor from Europe had done, and believe me, the transition from Assistant Professor and Big Man on Campus to being a janitor, the lowest of the low, a real scum-job, wasn’t easy; it took a long while, as I had to wrestle with my ego time and time again. Working for Presbyterians made it even more difficult, as they were uppity and aristocratic, believing they had more clout than their numbers would indicate. I went from the limelight to complete invisibility. It was a true test of principle—as radical a turn-around as one could imagine. However, I did have one thing going for me from the get-go: my working class roots. I had worked in five factories in Racine, Wisconsin, my hometown, before I was twenty-one. My father and mother had been life-long factory workers, and so were many of my relatives. In some ways it was like being back in a familiar saddle.
Nonetheless I would characterize those years at the church as my time in purgatory. Other time I saw my service as on the chain gang, or my time as a desert ascetic. But in measuring its impact on me, it was one giant leap foreword in regard my pursuit of self-knowledge, the ultimate attainment. That was the over-all goal, along with putting that knowledge to creative use in my drawing and writings.
Patrick White’s novel RIDERS OF THE CHARIOT is a narrative about the creative tasks of four connected characters whose lives magically interact in Sydney, Australia, in the post-war years of the forties and fifties. They are more examples of the breed that White thought of as the burnt ones, touch-by--God-individuals engaged in what Carl Jung would term “Opus Redemption.” The four compose the RIDERS OF THE CHARIOT with the Chariot in this case being a reference to Merkabah Mysticism and Jewish Gnosticism, with one of the four, Mordecai Himmelfarb, being a zaddik, the Hasidic ideal of the just and honest man. The ‘work of the chariot’ involves sacrifice, abuse, misunderstandings, humility, visions, highs and lows—even a crucifixion. It all boils down to being a loner, a crank, an outsider, and a social pariah. As for the halo, few can see it, including some who wear it.
The Four Riders are part of a spiritual vision, which I’d characterize as a common thread of mystical intuition about UNIO MYSTICA, our underlying reality. All four Riders suffer terribly and lead lives of utmost isolation; they are people that God has separated from the common run of humanity, the vast population of “normal people,” each for their own service and purpose. All four live out the roles of scapegoat, pariah, or illuminated outsiders who carry the moral and metaphysical burdens of their fellow creatures. They act out their lives in their respective roles in the context of modern life, within their various spiritual legacies.
Mordecai Himmelfarb is one of the four Riders in White’s novel and he is of particular interest to me because he is the fictional representation closet to my own experience, and that’s one reason the book has special meaning for me. Himmelfarb was a professor and author in Europe prior to World War II. After the war he moved to Australia (Sydney) and took a job in a factory that made bicycles, a menial job at odds with his past and true capacities. Few people could understand his post-war choices. But it does not seem so strange to me. So what was involved with his decision to move to Australia and take such a job? After his earlier social and academic success something happened which emptied that life of the virtue it once had. Rhea, his beloved wife, was seized by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp and he never saw her again. He felt a profound guilt over her disappearance and death, and the only thing that made sense to him was commitment to a life of humility and obscurity. To deny what he had been became a spiritual goal for Himmelfarb. Such a life was more important than “a place in the pews.” Worldly achievements were the playthings of egocentric humanity. He had another goal: to transcend his ego.
My life since I left university teaching has followed a similar path. My post-war choices (the Vietnam War, of course) have been seen by many of my older, academic friends as pretty strange and puzzling, for like Himmelfarb I found a job as a custodian in a neighborhood Presbyterian Church. When I resigned my position at UNLV in 1971, I was fully aware I was committing professional suicide. But I didn’t care. I had moved beyond that concern. I was that fed up with Higher Education in America. My moral imperative and personal vision were at odds with theirs. I had been a political activist on campus for 5 years and it earned me a reputation as a troublemaker, which would cost me tenure. But no matter, I wanted to and needed to make a gesture of defiance when I left to show my former colleagues that there were things more important than job security. So I quit before they could can me. For me it was all part of THE GREAT REFUSAL, the inclination to reject war, materialism, egotism, careerism, social status, environmental abuse, and mainstream values. I walked away from a position I was good at, as Himmelfarb did in Europe to pursue an alterative path. As one academic friend of mine put it, “You climbed a mountain and when you reached the top, you took a leap in the dark, ignoring what you had won. You abandon a post others would kill for. You treated it as garbage in, garbage out.” As I read that today I think of what Ed Abbey once said: “I live at Fort Fuck-it-all.”
Like Himmelfarb, humility became a main concern for me on my new job. Being a janitor was a parallel position to what the ex-professor from Europe had done, and believe me, the transition from Assistant Professor and Big Man on Campus to being a janitor, the lowest of the low, a real scum-job, wasn’t easy; it took a long while, as I had to wrestle with my ego time and time again. Working for Presbyterians made it even more difficult, as they were uppity and aristocratic, believing they had more clout than their numbers would indicate. I went from the limelight to complete invisibility. It was a true test of principle—as radical a turn-around as one could imagine. However, I did have one thing going for me from the get-go: my working class roots. I had worked in five factories in Racine, Wisconsin, my hometown, before I was twenty-one. My father and mother had been life-long factory workers, and so were many of my relatives. In some ways it was like being back in a familiar saddle.
Nonetheless I would characterize those years at the church as my time in purgatory. Other time I saw my service as on the chain gang, or my time as a desert ascetic. But in measuring its impact on me, it was one giant leap foreword in regard my pursuit of self-knowledge, the ultimate attainment. That was the over-all goal, along with putting that knowledge to creative use in my drawing and writings.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Can a Whip be a Souvenir
2011-1_02 Can a Whip be a Souvenir?
The Black Sphere, my signature symbol, is wet ink on paper, but first it was a dry image in the mind, a mind in distress.
Joseph Campbell put it this way: “ The Mythogenetic zone today is the individual in contact with his own interior life, communicating through his art with those ‘out there.’”
In PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN James Joyce said along the same line: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
In regard ‘Serpent Power’:
• Moses: “ Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: And it shall come to pass that everyone…when he looketh upon it, shall live.”
• Here is a report of a dream by a first generation Jungian, C. A. Meier: “It was an exhibition with my two sons. Suddenly one of them, who had stayed a little ways back, called out, ‘A snake!’ He had vomited up a worm about 18 inches long (like a snake) and pulled it out of his mouth, and was holding it
in the middle with his right fist, he ran to show me the snake. It had the head of a miniature dog. I said to him I too had once had a worm like that, and it was a good thing when it came out.”
While I was in distress I had a vivid and power dream about a serpent emerging from my body. While I was teaching at UNLV another professor took me into a huge gym to explain his germ theory to me. When we got into a bathroom with urinals he paused and said, “I want you to watch what happens when I spray the red spots on the surface of urinal.” With that he took out an aerosol spray can and dosed the porcelain with a fine triangular mist. The area began to bubble up and create a thick froth; out of the foamy substance a cluster of small silver worms emerged. I stood there amazed. “That’s nothing watch this. I am going to spray those self-same red dots on your left deltoid muscle.” The area, in a similar fashion, turned into froth and then a huge serpent began to emerge from my shoulder. I was so horrified I turned away so I didn’t have to watch this thing happening to me. “You can look now,” my associate said. When I turned I saw he had rolled the snake up like it was a whip with three large loops. He walked toward me saying, “Here, it’s your ‘souvenir.’ ”
Like the dreamer said, it was a good thing that it came out.
The Black Sphere, my signature symbol, is wet ink on paper, but first it was a dry image in the mind, a mind in distress.
Joseph Campbell put it this way: “ The Mythogenetic zone today is the individual in contact with his own interior life, communicating through his art with those ‘out there.’”
In PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN James Joyce said along the same line: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
In regard ‘Serpent Power’:
• Moses: “ Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: And it shall come to pass that everyone…when he looketh upon it, shall live.”
• Here is a report of a dream by a first generation Jungian, C. A. Meier: “It was an exhibition with my two sons. Suddenly one of them, who had stayed a little ways back, called out, ‘A snake!’ He had vomited up a worm about 18 inches long (like a snake) and pulled it out of his mouth, and was holding it
in the middle with his right fist, he ran to show me the snake. It had the head of a miniature dog. I said to him I too had once had a worm like that, and it was a good thing when it came out.”
While I was in distress I had a vivid and power dream about a serpent emerging from my body. While I was teaching at UNLV another professor took me into a huge gym to explain his germ theory to me. When we got into a bathroom with urinals he paused and said, “I want you to watch what happens when I spray the red spots on the surface of urinal.” With that he took out an aerosol spray can and dosed the porcelain with a fine triangular mist. The area began to bubble up and create a thick froth; out of the foamy substance a cluster of small silver worms emerged. I stood there amazed. “That’s nothing watch this. I am going to spray those self-same red dots on your left deltoid muscle.” The area, in a similar fashion, turned into froth and then a huge serpent began to emerge from my shoulder. I was so horrified I turned away so I didn’t have to watch this thing happening to me. “You can look now,” my associate said. When I turned I saw he had rolled the snake up like it was a whip with three large loops. He walked toward me saying, “Here, it’s your ‘souvenir.’ ”
Like the dreamer said, it was a good thing that it came out.
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