Hmmmmmmmm

Cleanliness and Depression

This is how it works for me.

The Grains

Today I gained a deep insight into my lovely Megsie's world, with an astonishing and delightful make-believe called "The Grains".

This conversation at our house today:

Meg: Did you put all the bowls I washed back in with the dirty dishes?

Bens: Yes. They weren't clean.

Megs: Yes they were. Why did you do that?

Bens: They had stuff on them. I can't put them away like that. I tried--I just can't bring myself to do it.

Megs: Oh! They're really actually clean. That stuff you are talking about is just the grains. You wouldn't be able to get them off either.

Bens: I think I could. Would you like me to show you?

Megs: No. Could you not do that anymore? It makes more work.

Bens:. Sweetie, I was just making space in the drying rack so I could wash them and all the other dishes. Sorry I don't mean to make more work. I really just can't bring myself to put them away. If you are going to wash them like that, could you just put them away yourself--I'm fine if you do that--I just can't actually put them away with 'the grains' on them.

Megs: Okay, lovely (puts stack of bowls away in cupboard where they go).

Filed under "New Words in English"

Overheard this week in spoken conversation: "I was just rofling".

Random thoughts on Osama bin Laden

I have found myself over the past several days growing increasingly attracted to the image of Osama bin Laden. He seems to have a very beautiful and gentle face and eyes. This might merely be a case of exposure leading to liking.

The recent killing of Osama by forces loyal to the Empire and the massive news exposure which followed seems to me to have provided those of us in the west with an amazing and beautiful opportunity to put a face on the ultimate failure of the myth of redemptive violence. It also provides us with a beautiful opportunity to consider the final repercussions of the make-believe we call "justice".

A word about make-believe may perhaps be in order. I mean something incredibly simple by this phrase. I believe that all our feelings and all our actions spring from our beliefs, and that all these beliefs were constructed by each of us at various points in our lives in order to do the best we can to take best possible care of ourselves. Some we constructed when we were very young. Some we constructed later. But we constructed each and every belief we hold, each one of us, for our own selves and for our own reasons. What this means, among other things, is that we can at any time, for our own reasons, choose to reaffirm or to discard any of the constructed beliefs--these make-believes, as well as to construct new ones.

Sometimes lots of people come to hold more or less similar make believes, all together, in a sense. Justice is one such make believe which seems to me to be rather widespread. To me, the make-believe of justice is a belief people construct in order to justify wanting what they want. To me, it's actually preferable to simply allow myself to want what I want, without feeling a need to justify it by constructing make-believe called justice. The reason I prefer to choose not to need a make believe of justice in order to want what I want is that it seems to me that this make believe called justice is very much a driver of the great majority of the violence and war in the world. Both sides are using violence to go for what they want, and they are both, fascinatingly, appealing to this same make believe called justice--a make believe which strongly justifies their use of violence in pursuing what they want.

This brings us back to Osama. His beautiful gentle face is, in one sense, the face of one side of a war. Both Osama's side and Empire's side strongly appeal to the make believe of justice in pursuing what they want. I wonder how many of you, lovely readers, have a real sense of Osama's legitimate wants--the ones underlying his violent rhetoric? Have you ever read his two fatwa? Here's his 1996 fatwa. Its language so strongly appeals to the make-believe of justice.

I wonder how many of you, dear readers, have considered the wants of Osama bin Laden--the wants which motivated his attacks on September 11 and prior to that against U.S. embassies, U.S. warships, etc.? Have you been able to dispassionately consider what was driving him?

Wikipedia has an interesting article on motivations for the September 11 attacks--drawn from Osama's fatawa and interviews with him. He was concerned about, among other things: U.S. sanctions against Iraq, U.S. forces deployed in Islam's most holy nation (Saudi Arabia), and U.S. support of Israel against the Palestinians.

What's really fascinating is that all these actions by Empire (the U.S. et al.), and the violence which accompanied them, were motivated identically to Osama et al.'s motivation--appeals to justice. Sanctions against Iraq were statedly in pursuit of justice for Kuwait. U.S./Empire support of Israel grew (arguably) out of pursuit of justice for Jews after World War II.

That is to say--all the violence on both sides was, and continues to be, in response to previous violence, with strong appeals to justice. Obama has himself strongly appealed to justice over the last several days since Empire killed Osama. The problem with the make believe of justice is that what looks like justice to one side never looks like justice to the other. Osama's friends and associates don't see his death as justice, and are calling for and will doubtless carry out more violence in pursuit of justice regarding Osama's death. Similarly, America/Empire didn't see it as justice when Osama and associates carried out violent death on 9-11, or in embassy bombings etc. The ongoing violence is never going to end with a justice which everyone feels is just. The only way it is ever going to end is when someone decides to forgive. But that is a subject for a different post.

My main point here was that somehow, for me, Osama's face, so plastered all over the news recently, has come to powerfully represent this whole make believe of justice, and its futility, and the futility and self-perpetuating nature of the myth of redemptive violence, which percolates somehow through both of these major cultures (Western and Arabic) and both of these major religions (Christianity and Islam).

Surprised by Weeping over me.

I recently had a kind of strange experience which reminded me of another similar experience a while ago.

A (new to me--now my friend but formerly just Megs' friend) friend came over recently and spent the day--she's from out of state. In the course of our conversation, the subject of prayer came up, and I matter of factly told her I don't pray any more (all hail, by the way, Lucius Shepard's brilliant Handbook of American Prayer, which I massively recommend). She responded to this initially with gentle disbelief--the assumption that I must be joking. However I gently persisted, and when she realized I was serious she seemed a bit shocked, and said she wanted to hear more. So I shared with her a bit about my deconversion experience. She was genuinely and warmly listening, which is a really lovely experience, but then in the middle of my story she suddenly had tears streaming down her cheeks. I found this really surprising and interesting, and suddenly wanted to hear some of her story rather than telling her any more of mine. Alas, she was somewhat reticent to answer my questions, and despite gentle persistence I ended up getting only the very vaguest (I love that--"vaguest") of answers from her about why she was weeping. Maybe next time she visits I'll learn more. I hope so! =).

It felt astonishingly strange to me to have someone weep over my experience when my own feelings about that experience of are ones of delight, gratitude, and wonder. This strangeness feels very delicious--I want more of it. This is also a bit fascinating as my previous feelings about that same experience were also ones of pain and sorrow--ah the delight of switching over to happy-making make believes!

I see from the experience that I've changed a lot over the past couple of years--because it reminded me of a similar experience I had a little over 2 years ago. My mother had recently died, and my story about it at that time was one that had me feeling a lot of painful emotions--I suppose you might describe my experience at the time as being a bit raw. During that time, another friend/acquaintance (someone I used to know but hand't been in touch with for years--really more a friend of my parents) had a vaguely similar reaction. My amazing sister had expressed (on facebook) that she was no longer a Christian. This former friend responded by saying that my mother must be weeping in heaven (shitty version of heaven, right?) to know that both of her children were no longer Christians. At that time, my response was one of almost overwhelming anger. In fact, my written response to her on facebook was pretty much the unkindest thing I've ever said to anyone, from my point of view. I say from my point of view because of course unkindness is a totally different experience for the giver and the receiver of said unkindess, based on their own make believes. But from my point of view, what I said to this friend was me bringing my perhaps not-inconsiderable mental and emotional resources to bear, along with my knowledge of this person's make believe, to say the very meanest most unkind and outrageous thing I could possibly think of to say--I wanted to hurt her, because I was blaming her for the way in which I had hurt myself in response to her words. I'm pretty sure it worked really well too, as I heard reports that she spent the entire day weeping.

Under my previous make-believe, I would end this story by judging what I did as "bad" and saying I was sorry to have done it. But now it's simply really fascinating to me.

Have you ever been surprised by someone weeping over you? Tell me a story!

Pirsig's Church of Reason

Tomorrow I am starting back to Uni, and I see that among other things I need to reread Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (also because the last time I read it, 20 years ago, I had never ridden a motorcycle).

Here's his introduction of the idea of the Church of Reason (clearly it's a little long, but well worth reading, in my opinion):

That night, for the next day's lecture, he wrote out his defense of what he was doing. This was the Church of Reason lecture, which, in contrast to his usual sketchy lecture notes, was very long and very carefully elaborated.

It began with reference to a newspaper article about a country church building with an electric beer sign hanging right over the front entrance. The building had been sold and was being used as a bar. One can guess that some classroom laughter started at this point. The college was well known for drunken partying and the image vaguely fit. The article said a number of people had complained to the church officials about it. It had been a Catholic church, and the priest who had been delegated to respond to the criticism had sounded quite irritated about the whole thing. To him it had revealed an incredible ignorance of what a church really was. Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety was an example of the very materialism the church opposed. The building in question was not holy ground. It had been desanctified. That was the end of it. The beer sign resided over a bar, not a church, and those who couldn't tell the difference were simply revealing something about themselves.

Phædrus said the same confusion existed about the University and that was why loss of accreditation was hard to understand. The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. He explained that when a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties, no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn't lose its accreditation.

All that would happen, Phædrus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer ``holy ground.'' The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestation.

It must have been a strange concept to all of the students, and I can imagine him waiting for a long time for it to sink in, and perhaps then waiting for the question, What do you think the real University is?

His notes, in response to this question, state the following: The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

In addition to this state of mind, ``reason,'' there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.

But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all.

It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.

Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations.

They see the second university, but fail to see the first.

I remember reading this for the first time and remarking about the analytic craftsmanship displayed. He avoided splitting the University into fields or 150 departments and dealing with the results of that analysis. He also avoided the traditional split into students, faculty and administration.

When you split it either of those ways you get a lot of dull stuff that doesn't really tell you much you can't get out of the official school bulletin. But Phædrus split it between "the church" and
"the location", and once this cleavage is made the same rather dull and imponderable institution seen in the bulletin suddenly is seen with a degree of clarity that wasn't previously available. On the basis of this cleavage he provided explanations for a number of puzzling but normal aspects of University life.

After these explanations he returned to the analogy of the religious church.

The citizens who build such a church and pay for it probably have in mind that they're doing this for the community. A good sermon can put the parishioners in a right frame of mind for the coming week. Sunday school will help the children grow up right. The minister who delivers the sermon and directs the Sunday school understands these goals and normally goes along with them, but he also knows that his primary goals are not to serve the community. His primary goal is always to serve God. Normally there's no conflict but occasionally one creeps in when trustees oppose the minister's sermons and threaten reduction of funds. That happens.

A true minister, in such situations, must act as though he'd never heard the threats. His primary goal isn't to serve the members of the community, but always God.

The primary goal of the Church of Reason, Phædrus said, is always Socrates'
old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it's revealed by the process of rationality. Everything else is subordinate to that. Normally this goal is in no conflict with the location goal of improving the citizenry, but on occasion some conflict arises, as in the case of Socrates himself. It arises when trustees and legislators who've contributed large amounts of time and money to the location take points of view in opposition to the professors' lectures or public statements. They can then lean on the administration by threatening to cut off funds if the professors don't say what they want to hear. That happens too.

True churchmen in such situations must act as though they had never heard these threats. Their primary goal never is to serve the community ahead of everything else. Their primary goal is to serve, through reason, the goal of truth.

That was what he meant by the Church of Reason. There was no question but that it was a concept that was deeply felt by him. He was regarded as something of a troublemaker but was never censured for it in any proportion to the amount of trouble he made. What saved him from the wrath of everyone around him was partly an unwillingness to give any support to the enemies of the college, but also partly a begrudging understanding that all of his troublemaking was ultimately motivated by a mandate they were never free from themselves: the mandate to speak the rational truth.

The lecture notes explain almost al of why he acted the way he did, but leave one thing unexplained...his fanatic intensity. One can believe in the truth and in the process of reason to discover it and in resistance to state legislatures, but why burn one's self out, day after day, over it?

The psychological explanations that have been made to me seem inadequate.
Stage fright can't sustain that kind of effort month after month. Neither does another explanation sound right, that he was trying to redeem himself for his earlier failure. There is no evidence anywhere that he ever thought of his expulsion from the university as a failure, just an enigma. The explanation I've come to arises from the discrepancy between his lack of faith in scientific reason in the laboratory and his fanatic faith expressed in the Church of Reason lecture. I was thinking about the discrepancy one day and it suddenly came to me that it wasn't a discrepancy at all. His lack of faith in reason was why he was so fanatically dedicated to it.
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

The militancy of the Jesuits he somewhat resembled is a case in point. Historically their zeal stems not from the strength of the Catholic Church but from its weakness in the face of the Reformation. It was Phædrus' lack of faith in reason that made him such a fanatic teacher. That makes more sense. And it makes a lot of sense out of the things that followed.

That's probably why he felt such a deep kinship with so many failing students in the back rows of his classrooms. The contemptuous looks on their faces reflected the same feelings he had toward the whole rational, intellectual process. The only difference was that they were contemptuous because they didn't understand it. He was contemptuous because he did.

Because they didn't understand it they had no solution but to fail and for the rest of their lives remember the experience with bitterness. He on the other hand felt fanatically obliged to do something about it. That was why his Church of Reason lecture was so carefully prepared. He was telling them you have to have faith in reason because there isn't anything else. But it was a faith he didn't have himself.

It must always be remembered that this was the nineteen-fifties, not the nineteen-seventies. There were rumblings from the beatniks and early hippies at this time about ``the system'' and the square intellectualism that supported it, but hardly anyone guessed how deeply the whole edifice would be brought into doubt. So here was Phædrus, fanatically defending an institution, the Church of Reason, that no one, no one certainly in Bozeman, Montana, had any cause to doubt. A pre-Reformation Loyola. A militant reassuring everyone the sun would rise tomorrow, when no one was worried. They just wondered about him.

But now, with the most tumultuous decade of the century between him and ourselves, a decade in which reason has been assailed and assaulted beyond the wildest beliefs of the fifties, I think that in this Chautauqua based on his discoveries we can understand a little better what he was talking about -- a solution for it al -- if only that were true -- so much of it's lost there's no way of knowing.