Rudderless

Imagine that we are always and only contextual.

It's easy enough to talk about ourselves as beings who often have good and bad things happen to us as organic creatures. An illness that may kill us is bad; apparent health is good. Certain bacteria promote healthy operations within the system that is our body; others promote disease, death, decay. This seems "bad".

However, these are simply natural processes and only the mind that speaks and considers itself a discrete, unique entity that values life (continued living) AS a discrete, unique entity (mind) will be wont to assign a valuation to a measure of health or well-being. Sick is bad; not-sick is good.

Life happens (but is not necessary); death happens and is necessary. I find this statement endlessly fascinating.

However, once we start thinking along these lines we must try to reduce this unique being that has a self-obsessed mind to something more common and natural. After all we are only another form of mammal.

So, like all other organic life, our discrete, unique self as a body/mind must expire. This is not a unique occurrence and in fact is so commonplace that it must be one of the oddities (weaknesses?) of the human that the contemplation of it unhinges so many of us.

Still, if we think of ourselves as "like" all other beings we can also consider ourselves as "like" all other planetary "metabolisms". If the planet is our primary organic being (this is Gaia, yes?) then perhaps we are only a species of metabolic action. If so, the planet, if it has a "mind", might label us "good" or "bad"?

The point, moreover, is that humans measure all things by human standards--and these, sadly, tellingly, are short-sighted (just like the duration of our lives, so our common interest) and have only self-preservation as a consideration.

The real error as regards how the human fits in with the planetary comes in the form of the mind itself--or the self-regarding mechanism that creates the discrete idea of unique human being. Mind sees "me" as highly valuable and my selfish desire for my continuing existence is necessary to me. However, as regards planetary systems, wherein species come and go (and lovely is the rose) a billion times over, this is a gross error in understanding "one's place".

As philosophy is simply a backwards attempt to assign meaning to the meaningless so do we attempt to create meaning in our ecological and environmental organic "uniqueness" among our planetary brethren.

And as long as we exist (in our minds) "outside" of the natural planetary parameters of "duration" we will continue to simply create master-narratives that allow us to continue the mass delusion of our unique species.

Until we are no more.

Where Do We Find Ourselves?

Emerson asks, in 1844, in his essay "Experience", "Where do we find ourselves?"

In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

Here! I at least am here! But "here" says nothing, really, does it Bob?

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

It was dark a long time ago, Bob. We are lost even while our machine-age magicians profess we are on the road to truth. Sophocles, in 422 B.C.E. (and this is the "chorus" of Antigone compressed a bit by Amelie Rorty), is most assuredly expressing an already ancient wisdom:

In the meshes of his woven nets, cunning of mind, ingenious man...
He snares the lighthearted birds and the tribes of savage beasts,
and the creatures of the deep seas...
He puts the halter round the horse's neck
And rings the nostrils of the angry bull.
He has devised himself a shelter
against the rigors of frost and the pelting rains.
Speech and science he has taught himself,
and artfully formed laws for harmonious civic life...
Only against death he fights in vain.

Brilliantly portrayed here as a double-trap, what, in the face of the most particular of particularities, keeps us in these "woven nets" by which we expect one day to escape the truth of death while dreaming within the limits of human mind?

Emissaries of Despair

Here's the thing.

A gun is regressive. And belief that guns are essential and offer you recourse to real protection is erroneous.

I will not convince you of this.

A gun is a tool of death and as such stands against hope which I believe is what "progress" (as defined as "betterment") represents.

A common defense: guns don't kill people, people kill people. This is specious of course and has no real meaning as it is simply a reduction that admits of ALL killing tools.

We forgo the particular in this kind of reasoning.

I can easily argue that all guns are tools of death (I believe that is a true fact but I'd entertain dissent); as a consequence I conclude that all guns are detrimental as they have no other attribute. I will not argue that guns are evil as that requires agency. Guns are a tool that creates opportunities to manifest what is detrimental to human being.

I cannot easily or readily argue against all use of violent force or coercion. I do believe there is, if not a "right", at the very least a natural propensity to defend one's life. Fight or flight--either can be a form of defense.

Now, it's about here that folks go off the rails. We begin to create scenarios and situations where tools of death make us safe against others who mean us harm. We then pit tool against tool in order to create a kind of balance of death expectancy.

To me this is only a kind of gamble. Two guns of the like-make and operating efficiency may be equal in their death capacity; but we must still contend with human facing human. There is never a "same" in this equation.

So, we are back to you and I meeting as beings in the world and bringing our perceptions, knowledge and understanding to bear.

But I think the logical extension to matching weapon for weapon is that we have to believe that humans are always in a state of expectancy that amounts to "kill or be killed".

If you ultimately believe that humanity reduces down to that then you cannot readily argue against any action and cannot create any kind of ethic or morality that works against the ultimate belief--otherwise your beliefs are always, at their core, in conflict.

Kill or be killed gives us our degraded state. If this is this is your belief then there absolutely is no exalted state; there is no divine spark inherent in a maker's creation. Unless that spark shines out in order to kill--to be the last man standing.

I don't think most of us want to believe this and yet this is what we enact it daily when we use guns and buy guns and carry guns; We carry our potential destruction. We hold death-expectancy in our hands.

I take a similar view of the organized religions of which I have more than a passing knowledge. It is always kill or be killed, assimilate or die, masked as our God loves you, believe and be saved from eternal damnation ("the unknown" or "undiscovered country").

This kind of thinking comes out of a desire for Power over others...Power is AGAINST everything. Power is Fear of Everything.

There is no hope in Power and there is no hope in its emissaries or their tools.

And Justice for All

Besides being a pretty good Al Pacino movie, the post title, as you know, comes from the "Pledge of Allegiance". Isn't it funny how you grow up with these things and have no real idea of their inculcating symbolic intention...a flag and allegiance to it. Odd, right, pledging loyalty to an abstraction.

That's not the point though: with the "democratic" challenges to ruling authority in Egypt and Tunisia some have trumpeted the call to liberty (and justice) for all. However, many are asking about the inequality of women in these societies and if that will be addressed in any meaningful way. Will there be justice?

No. To elaborate, equality is a chimera and justice is a legalism of the power structure of systems of government. Power decides what is just and just how equal things need to be in order to be called just. Melville addressed this, as shown in the previous post, with the idea of "fast-fish and loose-fish"; even if a fish is fast this tenet of "natural law" (I have caught it, and I am in possession of it) will be vitiated by the hierarchical law of "civilized" legal systems if Power wants the fish. And this vitiation, this unequal or unfair action will be called "just". And it will indeed be just in civil terms.

We have also heard calls condemning patriarchal systems...I really can't disagree here as I find the psychology of the human male to be the cause of all our ills. Yep, I'm laying at the feet of the biological male animal striving for alpha positions and all the lesser males trying to put one over on the alpha. These "stupid" biology tricks are useful in certain species and social orders do benefit from this kind of organization--but it seems to me that the wrong genes have been in the ascendancy for far too long. The female animal goes about her living in the cycle of care not in the cycle of domination.

Our human reality is dominated by masculine aggression on every level. We pray to the trinity of War, Technology and Money. All of these are masculine ideas. All of these come out of a desire to conquer our very biology--conquer each other--conquer our planet--even conquer our gods. These are our masculine abstractions.

Without a massive alteration in this particular "way" of being there is no hope.

Our only future is in the physical reality of the feminine, body, mind and soul.

The Gun Inside of Us

**Update below

It's too easy to argue with so much intensity about this object and not really think much about it. Or rather be open to thinking about it without a knee-jerk "political" response or "defensive" response. I think I mean defensive there in both ways.

For some reason I've begun to think that really, everyone, EVERYONE, feels that a gun is an error of the human imagination. Many things are "mistakes" of imagination. This was the teaching of the myth of Pandora's box, and really, I think the core of the story of Adam & Eve in the garden--expulsion for knowledge "too soon". Human minds touch the ineffable--it's there within our neural networks--the ALL and the Abyss ("Nothing" is not quite the right word here as we don't really know how to think about it)--and in this way we can imagine everything. In this way we are susceptible to self-destruction in the manner of Icarus. In our very foundational mythologies we are given the whole truth. We have no capacity for wisdom on the whole. Wisdom is slow and comes with age probably only truly comes with death.

We imagine and we create without wisdom. Wisdom is knowing the ALL and the Abyss lives in everything we do and touch. Without the understanding that is wisdom, that is knowing finality, of death as the just and proper conclusion to this living, we bring out of ourselves only the Abyss. We carry it into our lives through fear of death.

A gun is abysmal.

**Update

I want to clarify a bit. The abysmal [correction! is NOT] "bad"--it IS. A gun, hell probably everything we do that attempts to define us against our surroundings, is a response to the void. And pulling the trigger confirms the fear of it and inability to confront it in ourselves with the wisdom of the ALL (which I might argue is simply acceptance of what is "given" in nature).