Garnishment

Please just take some time to think about how these definitions work in the compass of this same word.

Garnishment:
–noun
1. Law. a. a warning, served on a third party to hold, subject to the court's direction, money or property belonging to a debtor who is being sued by a creditor.
b. a summons to a third party to appear in litigation pending between a creditor and debtor.
2. adornment or decoration.

Also, please consider that your debtor status is not immoral...it is your requirement to be an "upstanding" citizen. It is what makes you legally an actual, accountable being.

Give Us This Day...

Lawrence, I would admit, at least in many of the essays I've read, has a totalitarian mind; he seems to believe that humanity needs authority. This is not an odd idea of course. And in truth, the democracy of the USA is authoritarian. Perhaps only Athenian democracy--while not inclusive of the whole, no votes for women for example--really was truly a type of "lottery" government of the people (demos). Any citizen (adult male who had completed military service) could be called to serve on a council and even be "elected" (ie, name pulled out of a hat) to serve as a judge. But I think it's probably true that we all take a thankfully mindless comfort in abdicating responsibility in much of our living. This is not unproblematic as you must be aware.

Though Lawrence is suspect in many ways, he is always incisive. From his essay on Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" he says of Dostoevsky that "we have to admit...[his] profound insight into the nature of mankind. Man can but be true to his own nature. No inspiration whatsoever will ever get him permanently beyond his limits." (p 234, Selected Literary Criticism) The Grand Inquisitor, Lawrence tells us, names the three "limits" of mankind.

1. He demands bread, and not merely foodstuff, but as a miracle, given from the hand of God.
2. He demands mystery, the sense of the miraculous in life.
3. He demands somebody to bow down to, and somebody before whom all men shall bow down.

Miracle, mystery, authority--these "prevent men from being 'free'."

Now, these are easy enough to consider as true. These demands play themselves out over and again. But it seems to me that the first demand, bread from the hand of God, must be the basic fault...the error that enslaves us, and that the rest springs--confusedly from there.

The essay goes on, in Lawrence fashion, making one point in several different ways as a way to cover all the angles should you disagree...but this one point is really simply an extension of the above demands but driving home towards the totalitarian need for an authority to give you bread. Your bread, the bread you grew, that he gives back to you as miraculous...and you thank him for it. The abstracted bread. And you forget that you can provide your own damn bread.

Here is the progression in Lawrence's essay (239-40).

...seed-time and harvest have been the two great sacred periods of miracle, rebirth, rejoicing....For it is the earthly bread as a miracle, a yearly miracle.

The earthly bread is leavened with heavenly bread. The heavenly bread is life, is contact, and is consciousness. In sowing the seed man has his contact with earth, with sun and rain: and he must not break this contact. In the awareness of the springing of the corn he has his ever-renewed consciousness of miracle, wonder and mystery: the wonder of creation, procreation, and re-creation, following the mystery of death and the cold grave....man must not, must not lose this supreme state of consciousness out of himself, or he has lost the best part of him....All this is life, life, it is the heavenly bread which we eat in the course of getting the earthly bread. Work is, or should be, our heavenly bread of activity, contact and consciousness. All work that is not this is anathema. True, the work is hard; there is the sweat of the brow. But what of it? In decent proportion, this is life. The sweat of the brow is the heavenly butter.
...
Miracle and mystery run together, they merge. Then there is the third thing, authority..."that which men bow down to"...They will bow down first, the Inquisitor saw, to the one who has the power to control the bread.

The bread, the earthly bread, while it is being reaped and grown, it is life. But once it is harvested and stored, it becomes a commodity, it becomes riches. And then it becomes a danger. For men think, if they only possessed the hoard, they need not work; which means, really, they need not live...

So that ultimately men bow down to the man, or group of men, who can and dare take over the hoard, the store of bread, the riches, to distribute among the people again. The lords, the givers of bread. How profound Dostoevsky is when he says that the people will forget that it is their own bread which is being given back to them. While they keep their own bread, it is not much better than a stone to them--inert possessions. But given back to them from the great Giver, it is divine once more, it has the quality of miracle to make it taste well in the mouth and in the belly.

Men bow down to the lord of bread, first and foremost.

Lawrence goes on to make statements about democracy failing the test of "heavenly bread." No great Giver and so no heavenly savor. You can see this leading into an understanding of a "need" for Jesus and then a need for an earthly Giver as a stand-in for Jesus until he returns. The Utopian "heaven on earth".

Again, the mistake comes with the first demand listed above. To not realize the gift is Nature and needs no other agency than work (and Thoreau would tell us even that work can be minimal). Life is Sweat; Heaven is Bread. But BOTH are in your hands.

Give yourself your daily bread. Or maybe better, go find some nuts and berries.

[As an aside, it seems interesting to consider the rise of Paleo diets in light of the "error" of the abstraction of bread...storage and control...commodification. The seeds of error in our minds, our conception of where the bread comes from--not the Giver who stores and doles out bread--not the grocery store...the wal-marts, etc.--also seems to lead us down the path of poor health. The disease of "extra-governance" in human systems and "heavenly" systems springs from our learning to grow and store food.]

Hero Crime

I spent a few minutes (or more) with this little bit from Gertrude Stein and I think it's apropos to our robber baron culture. We lionize the Greed of Wall Street cuz goddam if I had the opportunity I'd keep those billions too...and you'd shittin' hate me for it but holy jesus want to be in my place.

Anyway, not too far from my writing desk, geographically speaking, is a museum dedicated to John Dillinger. We all seem to want to stick it to the man, but, guess what...the "man" ain't in charge no more and you and me, we're the ones getting stuck.

Do you see what I mean when I say anybody in America can be a public one, and anybody in America being able to be a public one it has something to do with the hero crime and so many people are always doing this thing doing the hero crime it gets into anybody who can have his picture where it is to be seen by everybody. Of course there are so many who feel themselves to be a crime hero that practically nobody wonders that there are any, their names are like the names of Pullman cars, they make them up as easily and it is no good. (From "American Crimes and How They Matter")

Yes, that was in Crase's AMERIFIL.TXT. You really should go steal a copy from someone, because likely you can apply any one of its entries to any news/blog item you come across dealing with politics and money.

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.