Where the hell do I put the discussions of transcendence, secularism and death? I’d like to keep the last two in the conclusion: it seems to me that both Marxism and theology are secular and anti-secular programs; too many people go about saying they are not interested in death, but life (Badiou and Negri, for instance), so I really would like to finish on death, via Bloch and Adorno. But transcendence? Maybe with the first chapter on theism and atheism.

two dozen foil-covered dishes splay out

grease and fat made proudly by my

discerning relatives, one set of wrinkled

silver tops devouring another.

.

my eyes glaze like

uncovered gravy

going solid in the beige

Pyrex behind the second

dish of deviled eggs.

.

my aunts and grandmother

talk about homosexuals.

.

did you hear about Brian and his ‘friend’

…..……you know they won’t be having children

……….(laugh laugh laugh)

but you can’t judge ‘em

………….no, you have to love’em, they’re still

…………family

I don’t think God made ‘em that way

I think they choose to be like that

.

we humans have trouble with

presence without pretext,

pesky “I think, therefore I am

uncomfortable” leaving us unable

to sit silent with each other, radiating

happiness by simple fact of I am not alone

and we are not alone together.

.

I would rather kneel

eyes closed, bare neck

against your black velvet

throat, nerves to skin to fur

to skin to nerves singing it is good

that you are here it is good that we

touch your presence against my presence

is good it is good we are together here it is

good it is good it is good back and forth in primal

love rite language deeper felt than words

left unregistered by your

beautiful brain.

We Have Decided Not to Die: Spiritual Rituals of Reversible Destiny

We Have Decided Not to Die is an award-winning, very unusual and deeply intriguing eight-minute short film by the Australian filmmaker Daniel Askill.  A Triptych.  Three Rituals. Three Figures. Three modern-day journeys of transcendence.  From the post-modern quirk school of filmmaking, this piece transforms the power of ritual actions into an emotional allegory that creates a world beyond evolution, creationism and intelligent design.  From a mental state where logic drops away, the film embarks upon a visually lyrical odyssey along a poetically surreal road to reversible destiny, where death is no longer inevitable.

We Have Decided Not to Die: Spiritual Rituals of Reversible Destiny

Please Share This:

You must dig deep
to reach high.

Within the dirt
ancient minerals bind
through friction and time
to create a precious stone
with the potential to heal
and transcend the Earth
from whence it came.

They gave it a name:
Lapis Lazuli.
Stone of Lāzhward.
A Persian blue.

The color of Heaven.
The composition of Harmony.

A gem
placed in my palm,
its symbol
held in my heart,
as the unveiled treasure
of friendship and truth.

A common argument against personal development is that you are comfortable where you are. I’ve certainly thought this many times before, and have had many people say things to me like:

• “Why would you want to struggle with your low-fat, raw-vegan lifestyle when you were healthy before you started?”
• “You’re going through so many emotional ups and downs while you’re trying to ‘figure yourself out.’ You seemed more consistently happy before this all started.”
• “I see the benefits of personal development, but I’m already happy with the way things are going for me. Plus, I wouldn’t want something ugly to come out that would ruin the way things are.”
• “If things start going badly for me, then I could always get into personal development. But for now, things are good.”

These are all logically reasonable points. It kind of goes a long with the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. And of course, everyone is at a different place and can only do something effectively only when they are personally ready to do so.

But what if you knew that there is simplicity on the far side of complex in everything?

Meaning, every path of growth is like the wave below.

At a certain point in your growth (simple), you reach a plateau, where things become difficult, and you may even digress (complex). But you know that once you go through that, your growth will be infinite and effortless (simple).

So what’s your choice? Stay stuck around that blue circle, never even knowing what is beyond? Or lean over the ledge a little and try to get a glimpse of what it might be like on the far side of complex?

How do you take this leap? What’s holding you back?

Fear. You must overcome your Fears.

Everything to the right of the blue circle is unknown; and the unknown is scary. But once you take that step, your world changes. You change. You come out on the other side a new person. Really, a new person. You will no longer be controlled by your Ego, but be guided by your Higher Self.

You do have a choice about whether or not to move past that blue circle. Do you make excuses about how you aren’t really interested in that effortless, infinite potential on the other side? Or that you don’t know how to get there?

It’s your choice. I hope to see you on the other side.

Love & Light,

Matt

Another Eva Cassidy video.  For my sisters because I don’t want any of us to be afraid.

Happy Joyous greetings to all of you who are desirous for peace, and the same greeting to those who have no clue that peace is abounding.

During these difficult end times, now seen as an economic depression, may we grow strong in our faith that this will come to an end, with life as we know it changing in a moment, as it will, with heavenly rewards waiting for us all to be reclaimed. May we pull together to help each other throughout the challenges that are facing us all. 

    Peace, according to the end of the Mayan Calendar will put an end to time as we have been experiencing it. A new world is right around the corner, scheduled with Glory to begin on December 22, 2012! Sometimes I think that three years is a long time to go, until I think of how fast a child grows up, which all of a sudden makes it seems that peace is literally on our doorsteps, ready to usher us into the kingdom that we will soon call our new home. In light and in love. 

    Blessed are all beings, including the peace makers, who, with faith, are paving the way for a new way of living that will benefit us all. 

    Hallelujah, praise God and the Goddess who are the parental creators of our lives, 

    With love, talia

Here’s a link to pictures of our year; just click on these words: Seasons Greetings

if i’m not always open to the idea of becoming more than i currently am, am i truly living? or is that what we deem “coasting along” and sadly settle into in our routine moments of daily gray, when life becomes simply a second-hand twitch and we wonder when we lost the childlike belief in adventures that would pulse like heat from our worn-down running shoes?

i want to get that back. i want to remember what it feels like to learn to fly again; to tie towels and curtains around my neck and enter the weightless realm of “imagine ifs.” to tear across an open field without a cloud in my mind, absolutely certain that nobody could catch me if they tried. to be unafraid of falling.

what do we lose, as we give in and grow up? what selves do we shed year by year, melting and freezing with the seasons, becoming a little less sure of our handholds in the sky and a little more weighted by snow collecting on our shoulders? i have fears now i didn’t know then, lost in the labyrinth of hypotheticals and pondering loss in my quiet moments. perhaps this is why i tend to shy away from those moments of solitude as of late…i’m afraid of what i might discover lurking in Her pockets, waiting to prick my tender fingertips with truths i’m unprepared to own.

my dad will be 60 tomorrow and i’ll be half that age in 2 years, and “older” now has taken on an entirely different connotation and visual representation. i’m afraid of not needing my parents; this is about as honest as i get, for walls of sober moonlight are impenetrable by day. to live is to grow is to learn is to become is to let go is to find yourself and recognize your life as your own, stripped and stark in the darkness of self-discovery, when light can shine the brightest and the Path just might take an unexpected turn, for better or for worse.

i am afraid i’m speaking in circles, but then again, perhaps this is my destiny…i chose this years ago, when “growing up” meant something other people did and wrote about for me to experience through picture books and fairytales…

(breathe, and now…i remember afternoons spent outside in the backyard, swingset-strewn and summer-strung, eyes closed as i twirled and twirled, fasterandfasterandfaster, knowing my brother was somewhere on the same lawn in the same motion, a blur i couldn’t think to focus upon…not while i gave myself up entirely to the dizzydrunk pull of the clouds and the assurance that we’d all fall into the sky some day…

and when i hit the ground, i knew i’d found a little magic for a topspun moment, and made time stand still until i couldn’t hold out any longer. but it never mattered, then — at that time, falling was always such a sweet release.)

what do you think of when you think of beauty?

art?

architecture?

music?

nature?

literature?

film?

something clicks within us when we behold beauty.  the things that capture our eye and heart transcend to our souls.

C.S. Lewis says it like this:

“The book or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing…..They are not the thing itself; they are only a scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”

what is pointing you towards true beauty today?

The trees do not care what we are celebrating, be it Christmas, or Kwanzaa, or Yule. We care. We argue. We party. Of course the trees notice, in their slow, silent, cellular way the shift of the sunlight on their bodies. They notice the freezing of water, and respond to the thaw when it comes. The rhythm of each year is written, visibly recorded, in the rings of trees and the layers of soil. The do notice individually if we cut them down for firewood, or to clear space for our living. But ultimately they are uninvolved in what drives us to plan and work, to spend and travel, worry and anticipate.

This is perhaps one of the most universal insights of all human religion, that there is always something larger than ourselves in which we move and live.  Some people assert they have a special, and thus better, relationship with that larger reality. Some claim their nation is guided by God or that their good fortune is somehow earned or deserved.  Likewise some become convinced that the opposite is true, that the whole world has been turned against them, by Dharma or by God.  Likewise,  some people are certain that the Creator of the Universe expects them to piously honor the birth of Jesus on December 25.

Unitarian Universalists naturally hold humility about these things. We think it is good to celebrate the birth of Jesus, and just as good to enjoy a secular Christmas.  And, if you decide to celebrate on some other day, or to celebrate another holiday, or to not celebrate at all, that is good too.  If you give gifts to your friends and family on one particular morning, or on another, the trees do not mind.  All the trees ask (in their silent, cellular way) and all that we ask, in our verbal and thoughtful way, is that you act justly, love mercy and walk humbly within the web of all living things.

So, though the trees are beyond such sentiment, I hope that you have holidays which awaken you to the wholeness and goodness of life.

Below you will find my notes from a lecture I attended at Hillsong College. I took them on my iPhone Notes app – a first for me, as I went in unprepared to be so engrossed that I’d want to take notes! (See previous post).

They appear here as I took them, unedited, typos, spellos, my own abbreviations (btw why is abbreviation such a long word?) So, for those of you who are interested, let’s see if you can make sense of my fingers and thumbs…

Dr Neil Ormerod - Lecturing on Augustine's De Trinitate

Hillsong College: Lecture
Augustine & De Trinitate – Dr Neil Ormerod (RC)
Rec Bernard Lonergan – Augustine
Grace – understood common sense wise or theoretically.
Lonergan suggests another realm – interiority: the object being our own operations. What does our questioning say about us? Understanding why & how we get to common sense or theoretical conclusions.

In De Trinitate book 8 Augustine begins to argue from the practical “you know what this is like… You can work this out”

What is A doing in De Trin?
bk 1-4: scriptural argument vs Arius & Arians ie whatever attributes are given to the Father is given to the son. Effectively Homoousios but using scriptural language: whatever is true of the F is true of the Son & the Spirit. A’s hermeneutic rule: what is the context of the scripture. Sometimes Jesus is talking about his humanity & others his divinity. He anticipates Chalcedon in developing a 2 nature Christology.
Also… The Father sends the Spirit (texts); Jesus sends the Spirit… so the Sp proceeds from the F & the Son.
With Arius the church had to use & understand his language to address the issues he was raising. These bks 1-4 have a limited impact, acknowledged by A himself, he indicates a shift at the end of bk 4, and bks 5-7 are not based on script arguments. He introduces 10 categories from Aristotle. This provides a theoretical framework for a philosophical argument. The Q now is ‘in the one God how can we make distinctions’ – substance, person, essence, accidence, location …  and esp Relation – this provides a distiction which does not impact upon the unity of the godhead. He takes issue with the Cappodocean fathers for not making proper distinction between categories.
The category of person is esp important. Persons are defined by their relationships, processions. Other things are attributes. These attributes pertain to the divine substance not individually to the person. BUT The term person is not an attribute of being. For there are 3 persons not one.

Aug did not really comment on ‘one substance’: homoousios’ substance refers to ‘under-standing’ ie the Father & the Son are of the same understanding. Tertullian confuses things stoically & empirically however as he uses ’substance’ to mean ’stuff’. Descartes similarly muddles things by defining substance as about what ’stands under’.

In proceeding from the Father the spirit is different from the son. We say the father is the f of the son; and the son is the son of the father; The spirit is the spirit of the father but the father is not the father if the spirit. One is symmetrical the other is not. Aquinas in his Summa Theologica takes this further. But the Arian argument does not follow that because the father is not begotten as the son is begotten we cannot say that this is a non reln argument with respect to the father.
One script text in bk5-7 majored on, rel to common sense – theory: Jesus is the power of God & wisdom of God. These are attributes & in the realm of theory this does not make sense. He argues this is an appropriate way of speaking (an ‘appropriation’) so we need to recognise the general way scripture talks in certain places.
End of bk 7: reln between God & the creature; how is it that we might enter into the Trinitarian relationships. Robert Doran takes this up more recently.
{break 20 mins}
Bk 8 talking about a more inward realm (interiority). Like 5 finger exercises. Eg have you experienced this? Have you thought about that? Now he is coming from a faith seeking understanding. Eg. Given this doctrine, what are the ways we understand God as Trinity? Takes issue with tradtional ways because of their materialistic analogies, eg. Water, ice, steam; tree – root, branches, trunk.
Turns to human beings – made in His image. Lover, beloved, loving. Mind, knowledge, love. Understanding – conceive – concept. Understanding – speak – word (but internally not orally). AHA! moment because YOU understand. Like a judgment: we weigh up the options, we judge the possibilities. The interior word of God is the YES of judgement. Eg. Paul says in Jesus there is no yes and no, there is only Yes. So its scriptural basis is fd in Jn1 and in Paul. The Father’s ‘generation’ of the son is like a perfect concept. One speaking, the other spoken. Identity between the known and the knowing – the psychological response to the Arians. Speaker – Word.
Bk 10 – hard
Bk 11 – ex of analogies
Bk 12 – back to theology, scripture, the Cross. Transcendence – where we know & love God. Final section here is very prayerful & worshipful. Can we have an analogy that is based on my knowledge of God & my love of God: a realm of grace. Admits that you cannot do it, and comes back to his lover, beloved, loving analogy.

Pilgrimage Statistics

Consecutive Days Riding: 62                                Consecutive Days Blogging: 63

Today’s Mileage: 10                                           Total Trip Mileage: 545

The red line traces our progress.

A Spiritual Buffet?

Before I climbed on the bike this morning I reviewed an article on the front page of yesterday’s USA Today. The lead story was entitled: Mixing Their Religion: Many choose their faith from a spiritual buffet. The article was based on a recent survey of Americans about their religious beliefs. Over the past several years I have seen similar survey results pointing to a growing diversity in our nation’s religious and spiritual beliefs.  In particular several of them point to the fact that while many people may go to church, their beliefs often do not fit with that church’s dogma and teachings. These findings have fueled many a discussion on talk radio, chat rooms or newspaper letters to the editor.  It is clear there is a growing “blending” of diverse spiritual threads within people’s personal belief systems.  The question that fuels for many of these discussions is “what does this mean?”

Some individuals’ and groups’ answer to this question would lead us to believe that this blending is problematic and perhaps a sign of decay within our existing institutions.  Other individuals and groups see this blending as a positive sign, as an embracing of diversity and a sign of growth. Personally, I think it maybe both, a warning sign and a promising change! 

A Spiritual Entree?

Within psychology we have long recognized that our developing belief system follows a set process.  From the moment we are born, we are an information processing system.  We input data, we analyze data, we make assumptions and simple decisions based on this data, and we act on our assumptions and receive feedback from our environment (i.e. success or failure, reinforcement or punishment). This whole process operates with the goal of making sense of our world so we can act to get what we want and need. 

Initially this belief system (explanations and expectations) are given to us by parents, teachers, and ministers.   It represents a readymade road map with canned explanations of life’s demands.  But as any parent knows, fairly early in some cases, the challenges and questions concerning these beliefs will eventually follow!  Beliefs are constantly tested, we make predictions and then we wait to see if we are right.  Positive outcomes strengthen our beliefs; negative outcomes may lead us to search for better explanations, perhaps even new beliefs.  As we grow and mature, our beliefs are more and more of our own choosing.  We retool what we were taught with new information, new teachings and new experiences. 

My point is that exploring, sampling, testing and choosing are all part of our human nature.  Our religious and spiritual beliefs are no different than our political or economic beliefs. Many psychologists would argue that the sign of “maturity” is not in the content of your belief system (that it be different from your youth) but that you believe in the content for a different reason. Maturity is judged by how “well tested” your current beliefs are and whether they have they been challenged (internally, externally or both) and “forged” by life experiences.  You do not have to believe they are true, you know they are true for you!

Some of all or just one?

But how can this smorgasbord approach to spirituality be both positive and negative?  I believe  the distinction resides with the answers to two questions. First, does this blended belief system really fit for you, does it provide you with sound advice?  For some people this blended system simple represents a “quick and easy” or momentary convenient fit, perhaps just a “fad.”  Secondly, does this belief system promote a true state of transcendence and growth in the individual’s actions, thoughts and feelings?  For others this smorgasbord of a meal may simply provide temporary relief and a return to the “status quo.” 

For some a visit to the buffet provides nourishing advice and leads to growth. For others, sticking with a single satisfying entrée leads to a fulfilling meal and growth.

I’ve been in San Antonio for over three months now, and when people ask me how I like it, I answer truthfully: “I love it!” The people here have been good to my housemates and me. The culture is intoxicating. San Antonio has an amazing downtown, its (built-up, commercial, and tourist-clogged, yet beautiful) Riverwalk winding its way past ruinous missions (the Alamo is only the most famous of five), artists’ villages, and the oldest cathedral in the United States. But in looking back at a few of the exciting events I’ve neglected to blog about over the course of the last five weeks, I realize I’m a little nostalgic for home.

On the weekend of October 23-5, the Jesuits were generous enough to send me on a spiritual retreat held at St. Louis University. It was a fine, clear autumn day in Missouri; the gracefully landscaped campus of SLU was lovely, and the leaves in St. Louis were just beginning to turn. Autumn is my favorite season, so great was my delight when two weekends later Father Marty invited my friends Meghan, Stephanie, and a few other parishioners to a state park two hours west of San Antonio called Lost Maples. It is supposedly the best place in Texas to see authentic fall foliage. While it wasn’t quite as staggeringly gorgeous as what I’d see back home in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, it was very beautiful, and the hike we took was pleasant.

Yet perhaps it sufficed more to kindle than to satisfy a desire for natural beauty which I had been neglecting while living for several months in an urban environment.

These two weekends called to mind, each of them, a famous poem by Gerard  Manley Hopkins that expresses the close link between an experience of the seasons and an awareness of the rhythms, and ultimate orientation, of our own lives:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

- Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

It is hard to grow up in a place like New England without a conditioned sensitivity to the changing of the seasons, and without an emotional responsiveness to their myriad signs: the mourning and rejoicing inspired by denuded trees and crisping snow, by melting snow and returning robins, alike. These are things that I miss; much ado is made of the Hill Country ringing San Antonio to the north (and on a visit to a vineyard in New Braunfels on my birthday, my housemates and I got to experience the arid beauty of that place), but Texas is not big on natural landscapes, the kind that grace glossy-paged calendars and impress themselves most deeply on my memory.

For our third and last big trek of the month, my seven housemates and I drove ten hours east to a JVC retreat in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, where we stayed in a few moldy lakefront cabins in the middle of a pine forest. During the day it rained a little; at night the skies would clear, and after a bonfire we would march out to the dock and lie on our backs and gaze at the stars. In the morning we would rise for breakfast and some of us, despite the frigid chill coming in off the water, would tarry by the edge of the lake, where mists were rising from the murky surface like ghosts.

Hopkins was surely right: we do not experience a beauty like this without sadness, even when this sadness is difficult to source or define. When the sadness is not linked to the projection of a loss, as it is for Hopkins’s Margaret, there is still a lonely and introspective spirituality awakened in us by early morning lakes and rained upon forests….a spirituality which the human person needs.

My trajectory lately has not only been a geographic one, from rural to urban; it has also been an internal journey between philosophies. My years in academia were a time of existential questioning and naked openness to a world of daunting ideas. The JVC experience, on the other hand, is about community; it is about solidarity with all the suffering of humanity, yet out of this solidarity, out of this fellowship, we seek to draw a life-affirming hope and a joy. Put another way: I always used to watch films by Tarkovsky and Bergman and Sokurov, gloomy masters of Romantic despair. Recently I have put those artists away in an effort to help “real” people (those who don’t have the luxury of an education that disposes them to call movies “films”) with “real” problems (such as how to pay for the light bill when one’s husband is out on disability and three of the four children are pregnant, themselves — problems that make the so-called “questions of modern man” seem distant if not completely irrelevant). And maybe simply “being good” rather than hypothesizing about morality is the key to living a functional and fulfilling life. Tarkovsky’s grappling with the mysteries of Incarnation allowed him to depict the Crucifixion in a million shattering ways, but far, far rarer in his works are glimpses of that Resurrection towards which I am trying, more than anything, to orient my life.

But I have to be honest with myself: JVC’s focus on community and solidarity and social justice — and even the claim to a certainty about the meaning of our existence which the joy of the Resurrection so often seems to demand — is not the spirituality I knew in my youth, and so it is somehow alien to the God who knew me in my youth. The God of my youth is one who resides in the falling leaves, in the rising mists.

Yes, let’s be honest: it is not always easy to believe that love, in the end, will conquer all — that humanity is beautiful and can be redeemed — that the Resurrection is a reality. These are statements that I do believe in and profess, and I wouldn’t want to stop at moral agnosticism and doubt simply because they hit us harder in the gut than dreams of Paradise. But I am nowadays facing an equally seductive temptation to make my exultant convictions the root of my faith, whereas I wonder whether all they can be are its flowers. The victory of the Kingdom is as yet unseen; what is the difference between taking a leap of faith and setting oneself up for a fall? Better and more pertinently put: I don’t want to blind myself to opportunities for growth or to problems with my current philosophical world view by assuming that life is already, and always will be, simply…peaches.

In “Spe Salvi,” Pope Benedict speaks of faith as

a habitus, that is, a stable disposition of the spirit, through which eternal life takes root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see. The concept of “substance” is therefore modified in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say “in embryo”—and thus according to the “substance”—there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this “thing” which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does not “appear”), but because of the fact that, as an initial and dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it has even now come into existence.

So here are my questions: precisely what is the “stable disposition” which I know, unquestioningly, to be real? And what is the “initial and dynamic reality” that I carry within me and which promises some certainty about something? That we have reason to rejoice is an interpretation, a second-order conclusion, and if we’ve gotten the basic meaning of human experience wrong, then all of that confidence flies out the window: all that is indubitable is that I experience, yet this may not be as obvious and useless a statement as it appears, for it’s not as though it doesn’t invite us, somewhere down the road, to an earnest, true, and beautiful life. There is still somehow no better an explanation for the intensity of our existence than that we possess what we may as well identify as a soul. Go much further than this, and our ethical conjectures, however true they may turn out to be, will become wildly contingent and fragile; and yet I agree with Levinas, in his work on Husserlian phenomenology, that spiritual wisdom is already to be gleaned from the basic understanding that “a subject is not a substance in need of a bridge, namely, knowledge, in order to reach an object, but…the secret of its subjectivity is its being present in front of objects. The modes of appearing of things are not, therefore, characters which are superimposed on existing things by the process of consciousness; they make up the very existence of things.” Doubts, then, about the specific nature of Truth and Meaning may be human, wise, and necessary; but skepticism towards the existence of Truth and Meaning themselves is utterly groundless and basically absurd.

This can teach us a lot. But what does it have to do with the woods of Mississippi?

At our Orientation to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, the priest leading the retreat challenged us to identify our basic “images” of God, and gave us a few choices: is God, for me, an old wise man, or a trusted friend? Does he appear to me principally as Redeemer, or as Judge, or as Creator? As I mentioned, for me God is increasingly synonymous with Resurrection (and that is a topic for another post); but my first and enduring “vision” of God will always be that expressed in the opening passage of the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth, the earth was shapeless and void, and darkness lay upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving above the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2) Insofar as I can visualize God, represent him as metaphor, I picture him as a long blanket of clouds rolling inexorably over water — perhaps because my earliest childhood memory is of a majestic storm thundering over a vast gray ocean on a long-ago trip to the beach.

The experience of the sublime and of the beautiful — whether it is in nature or in a great film or novel or painting or poem — is that which reminds me more forcefully than anything that I have a soul and that there is some kind of magnificent divinity out there. I approach this realization in the shivering cold of Massachusetts climes (as pleasant as the sunny temperatures of Texas may be in my less existential moods). At the same time, reading back over this post, I’m a bit dissatisfied, because it seems like I’m equating an authentic religious experience with doubt and pessimism, with melancholy or, worse, depression. This is not the case. Rilke wrote of beauty that it is “the beginning of a terror we still can bear, and why we love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy us.” As attractive as this line has always been to me, it doesn’t correspond perfectly to my own experience. I do not stop at Margaret’s mourning, and I would go further than Rilke does in his verse: beauty of the kind I am describing does begin in terror and passes next through deep melancholy, but it ends, eventually, with love, because it not only disdains to destroy us, but actually expands us, opens us up. Watching falling leaves or standing long enough beside a lake, with the world “worlding” all around me (to use Heidegger’s wonderful verb), I wind up with a sense that the Truth is coming from afar to meet me, and that I belong, somehow, to this Truth.

It’s exciting.

All great religious traditions tell of figures who encounter God in solitary meditation on this world which, while ephemeral and not our true home, occasionally discloses a sense of what eternal beauty and infinite belonging might feel like. The Buddha attained enlightenment meditating beneath a Bodhi tree. St. Ignatius of Loyola received an overwhelming vision of the interconnectedness of things while praying for hours by the river Cardener at Manresa. In modern times, a young atheist named Avery Dulles, who would later become a Jesuit cardinal, came to a profound conviction that God exists the instant he saw a tree on the Charles River beginning to blossom beneath a steady gray drizzle of rain. While I can’t claim to have had such a dramatic experience on that lake in Mississippi, I am comforted that no less than Jesus himself was always retreating to a mountainside (Luke 6:12), to a lake (Matthew 14:13), to the desert (Matthew 4:1), and to a remote olive grove (John 18:1) to pray. I wonder whether he, too — the hypostatic one — felt as I do: that it is in places like these that one feels most acutely the convergence of our experience as material beings perplexed by doubt and unknowing, and our experience as spiritual beings deeply, inwardly aware of their own transcendence over the world and over death.

I recently had a conversation with an friend about surrender.

We were discussing the nature of good and evil. I believe that you don’t need to be a Christian, or religious, to be good. Nor does a particular religious identity diminish the capacity for evil.

The great biblical scholar Willi Marxsen, probably the last bible scholar also famous for theological ethics, argued that the real point of the Christ event, the faith of Jesus, is that He is the sign for taking action.

There are a couple easy objections. Such a view is a bit reductionistic. It’s as if someone told us, “do something.”

We could just as easily respond with “do what?”

“Just stand there.” “Look busy.” Or just dead silence.

I argued that we know God when we are active, taking risks, and creating. When Luther said “sin boldly,” he was stating that knowing the love of God allows us to make mistakes sometimes. Knowing God means also knowing your power. And it is going to be imperfect. If it were perfect, it would be God-like.

My friend’s response: and what about surrender? Sometimes it is precisely when we realize we do not have power that we are able to grow and become transformed by God. I can’t control everything. One cannot both surrender and have power.

Yet even surrendering is a creative act. And often we need to surrender over and over again. Surely, we do not need to be in control, because the Divine Affection is. But the debate between initiative and surrender conceals Christ’s deeper challenge.

Jesus doesn’t ask for action or surrender for their own sake, but because our lives are at stake: are we zombies or human beings? sometimes the choices we make deaden us; and other times it is through surrendering we become award of God’s glory. Christ wants us to recognize our shared humanity and its reflection of the grand transcendence around us.

It’s actually an old metaphysical problem. Are we the living dead? Are we puppets on a string? We we simply robots? Or are we alive? Can we take the risk of commitment? Can we take the risk to change? To whom to we surrender?

We act in our walking. And some times we will stand still and surrender to the enchanted glory that envelops us.

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Under the darkness of a rather cold night, I wonder just how much of the world I see when my eyes are open, and what are the things that I usually focus on? Do I have a natural proclivity to just look at the same objects and sites that come into my awareness, do I follow conditioned patterns, do my eyes have visual rail tracks that it normally runs on, or blinders to things on the periphery? It’s impossible to observe everything with two eyes, or perhaps that just happens when the eyes are closed? How blind am I really, and is that the reason I like to walk around with a camera, challenging myself to see things differently, framing the world to the size of a viewfinder, allowing myself to look in new directions, searching for the visual that usually gets passed by. Perhaps that’s why I keep shooting images, obsessively observing, letting attention flow free, allowing light into the unconsciousness blindness that often inhabits my sight. In many ways, the camera has become my guide dog to the everyday visual world I inhabit, leading me down roads that I would naturally not take, like water cascading down a hilly incline, always taking the path of least resistance.

When I see the blind, I wonder just how much of the world they are missing, yet perhaps the other senses compensate and allow sounds, smells and temperatures to form internal visuals that no camera will ever be able to capture. We need camera’s of the mind, image processors for the brain, ways of seeing the unseen … or is that simply what we call art?

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My country is the world and my religion is to do good. – Thomas Paine

Joseph Nye, author and former Dean of  the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, writes, “Globalism, at its core, seeks to describe and explain…a world which is characterized by networks of connections that span multi-continental distances.” Author Mark Ritchie takes it one step further by characterizing globalism as actions driven by “mutual respect” and utilizing “communications that further understanding.”

The spirit of Globalism runs throughout the framework of Get Down. Most importantly, by giving members the tools to speak through music, the constructs of language are transcended. No longer hindered by language barriers, members can “speak” to each other through their audio tracks. The ability to play “remix tennis” within the site also means that entire conversations can be had by two people from two different countries who otherwise would never be able to communicate. Similarly, because the site is online, it takes advantage of the internet’s abilities to transcend geography and time; two people in two different time zones can come together to create pieces. This would allow a cross-fertilization of cultures as people from different places on the globe exchange audio from their respective cultures. Lastly, it fuses actual musicians with those who are musically untrained- giving both of them the tools to talk to each other through their audio tracks, each still embracing their unique voice, but unfettered by differences in musical backgrounds.

The piece below is a mashup of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean and traditional Turkish music. It’s  a perfect fusion of seemingly disparate cultures; honoring both, it incorporates them into a new take on old sounds.

Tracing Out Laruelle’s Kantian Reduction of Spinoza

I’ve been having a (very loose) discussion of the relationship between Laruelle and Spinoza over at An und für sich, where Anthony P. Smith is helping me understand where Spinoza and Laruelle diverge. In the last day I’ve been reading up on this nexus, combing through Laruelle’s Response to Deleuze where most of the resistance to Spinoza is spelled out, as well as attempting to get a grasp of Laruelle’s rather vocabulary-entrenched argumentative conception of “decision” within all of philosophy, much of which I draw from Brassier’s treatment. Not an easy task. So this post operates only as a touching point of intuitive difficulties I have with Laruelle’s treatment of Spinoza, and not a rigorously explication of them. I sense that part of the problem is the global approach that Laruelle attempts to bring out of what is really much more an analysis of Kant and Kant-related philosophies. That is to say, the “Dyad” of Laruelle, which is supposed to find its source in an orginary ”decision” between Idealism and Materialism fits quite well in the Scheme/Content form of Kantian and perhaps most post-Kantian philosophy, but this “science” of philosophy may not really be as well suited to pre-Kantian, or at least Spinozist positioning.

I think part of the problem may be genetic, which is to say, Laruelle isolates the first act of his non-philosophy to be an explicit Plotinean/Kantian duplicity. He frames the orientation of his problematic in terms of Plotinian One and Kantian transcendence:

… Non-philosophy does not effectively or successfully begin until Une biographie de lhomme ordinaire [A Biography of the Ordinary Man (1985)], because it is there that the problem of how to bind the four sides together is thematized and basically formulated –albeit not without difficulties– through the notion of unilaterality. The conditions for this solution are that the One acquire a radical autonomy with regard to philosophy, that it stop being a philosophical object, and that the latter is revealed to be a transcendental appearance. It is as though an over-neoplatonization of the One was accompanied by a corresponding over-kantianization of philosophy as appearance…

“A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy”

Though in this very interesting essay Laruelle traces out the various stages of non-philosophy as its stemmed from this original “dyad” (we want to say), one has to wonder at the full-wealth of a proposed science of philosophy that necessarily drags with it an inherently Kantian partner. As a Spinozist there is a very real, non-representational sense in which Spinoza precludes or forecloses the path that Kant and Kantianism took, and took hold of the Plotinean One in more or less Plotnean terms (a degree-of-being resolution), so much so that a science derived from Kant as a constitutive part simply misses the analytical mark. One cannot read Kant back into Spinoza (unless of course a Spinozist, such as Deleuze, has been busy putting Kant into Spinoza as an expansive permutation of his thought). This leaves us with the sense that Laruelle’s science of philosophies is perhaps best conceived as aimed towards post-Kantian appropriations of Spinoza, which one intuits perhaps really is the historical case.

In a certain way, admittedly from the beginning, Kant helped form the very conception of the originary ”decision” which is said to characerize ALL philosophy, giving one to wonder if once we carefully pair away Laruelle’s Kantianism (assumed in the characterization of decision) a space opens up, historically, for a communication between Spinoza and Laruelle (one which Laruelle himself may not have been able to grasp due to the global nature of the claims of his science).

Part of my problem in reading Laruelle on Spinoza is attempting to locate the all important “decisional” dyad. Brassier in his dissertation on non-philosophy does a very good job of characterizing it in particular Kantian terms, terms otherwise recognized as scheme vs. content (Davidson). Philosophy is said to make a core, axiomatic choice which divides the Real into some “transcendent” a priori “faktum” (scheme) and some “immanent” empirical “datum”:

“Alien Theory” [click for larger image]

We can certainly see the strong Kantian nature of the decision in this telling by Brassier, but with the equations of immanence = empirical datum and transcendence = a priori faktum *at the simplest level), there really is no correspondence that I can see between the nature of this “distinction” (or Dyad) and the various distinctions we read in Spinoza. We feel like we are swimming in really the Kantian half of the originary Plotinus/Kant dyad.

Brassier opens up the distinction into its simplest form, that of the knower and the known, the perceiver and the perceived, but I still cannot find the traction point in Spinozist philosophy, largely because these elemental dyads are refused in a great number of ways which generally foreclose an essential materialist/idealist reading.

“Thus for any philosophical distinction between two terms (or Dyad), as such, in the…”

Curiously Laruelle has found a kind of incipient “ego” in Spinoza’s philosophy (in his Response to Deleuze, cited further down), which he links to concepts of Oneness, and perhaps his reading of Spinoza is leveraged in accepting this, but many actually find the opposite of this as Spinoza’s explanation of perceptions, thoughts, knowing are radically against any isolated ego or self, continually de-centering any supposed knower/known dyad. It could be that Laruelle’s need for an “ego” to be found in Spinoza is based upon the desire to graft Kantian distinctions/decisions back onto him, but thus far I cannot quite grasp where he locates this and rather suspect a deficiency in his reading (driven by both a desire for global description and his contest with Deleuze). For thoughts on Spinoza’s subversion of the “subject”: Subjectless Subjectivity, A Geography of Subject: Beyond Objectology, where Williams’s “Reconfiguring Body and Mind: Thinking Beyond the Subject with/through Spinoza” is discussed.

Where Lies the Decisional Dyad In Spinoza?

Anthony Paul Smith has been helping me uncover just where the decisional dyad occurs in Spinoza, and in the comments linked above you can find the context of the causal discussion. There he locates the decision not within a faktum/datum, but within a One/All division, and then further in the natura naturans/natura naturata specification:

The problem in Spinoza is the convertibility of the One with the All, for Laruelle. This leads to all sorts of amphibologies and melanges, rather than any kind of identity. The split is then between the natura naturans and the natura natuarta, in Spinoza. I do think this leads to a kind of slippage in Spinozist thought, but one that can be recast non-philosophically and still Spinozistic.

Connecting all the dots between the naturans/naturata distinction in Spinoza, and the Kantianish transcendent faktum/immanent datum seems very difficult to do. In fact, I can’t do it. IF there is a transcendent part of the dyad, it is the naturans which certainly doesn’t fall into any easy empirical/immanent category. In fact if this is an orginary decision in Spinoza it certainly doesn’t seem to operate in the transcendent/immanent manner Laruelle’s Kant-derived essentialization of philosophy finds important. Instead, in the cognitive plane, acts of perception are naturans actions (affirmations) which concretize themselves into naturata states of relative being, degrees-of-power, in which “knowing” refuses the distinction between knower and known. They are not parsed in order to be reglued, and certainly not via the naturans/naturata distinction. To put it another way, the naturata do not make up a datum that is the conditioned. Nothing is “given”, so to speak.

Anthony Paul Smith also mentions the reversibility of the One and the All in Spinoza, and there is good evidence that Laruelle does hold this as central to his analysis. He makes this point clear in his Response to Deleuze where he objects to Deleuze’s drawing comparisons between Laruelle’s One and Spinoza’s One:

(1) To the first objection: The One in question, the radical immanence through which it is defined, is not above all the One-All, whether ‘close’ or not to Spinoza, but instead a One-without-All, and even a Onewithout- Being, which we call the One-in-the-last-instance in order to oppose it to the convertibility which it refuses of the One and of Being, similar to the Spinozist reversibility of the One and the All. Certain contemporary philosophers abhor the One—and with good reason. We do as well: however, on the condition of specifying that it is then a question of the One correlative to the Multiple under any title or relation, and convertible through an inversion—whether close or not—with Being. Because the One prevails over Being or the Multiple, or the Multiple over the One, or because they alternately prevail over one another, these are clearly possible solutions which must be explored, but this is precisely not our problem. A real critique of immanence according to Deleuze is now possible; and among other possibilities, it can be constructed on behalf of a form of immanence still more radical, excluding all transcendence outside of it: not only theological objects and entities, but also the ultimate form of transcendence, auto-position or survey, the fold or doublet, etc. The One-in-the-last-instance is the true suspension of this One-All and, in a general way, of all reciprocity, in other words, of all relation without possible exception, essentially ‘without relation’ to Being.

Because Laruelle is responding to a “Spinozist reversibility of the One and the All” we are not sure if he is taking Spinoza on directly or not. And this is a problem we’ve already mentioned, as Laruelle has Deleuze specifically in mind here. The situation is further problemized because characterizing Spinoza’s philosophy as a One and All explication actually stems from the German Idealist reinvigoration of him in the 18th century, leading to the Pantheism Controversy. It was Lessing’s recasting of Spinoza Substance into questions of the One and All (Hen kai pan) that eventually lead to Schellings’s Idealist insertion of “negation”  into the Spinoza program, all in the name of rectifying it with, yes, Kantianism, ultimately culminating in Hegel’s ontological negation. The entire matrix of the One and All re-characterization of Spinoza, in attempts to avoid a percieved threat of radical Nihilism and Atheism, not to mention the dissolution of the “subject” and anthropocentrism, has to be considered as historically driven (ideologically so), well within the aims of domesticating Spinoza. So, in a certain sense, Laruelle’s acceptance of a One and All Spinoza (under the auspices of a Kantian diagnosis of “decision”) is quite in line with the philosophical attempts to domesticate him in synthesis with Kant (via the subject). Indeed, the question of the “I” (in Schelling with Kant and Fichte), which Laruelle discovers as implicit in Spinoza, haunts this fundamental mis-reading of his position. Kant should not be brought to Spinoza.

Substance As Ego?

I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, I suppose I should include it, here is the passage where Laruelle imagines that the very unity of Substance becomes an originary projection of a “ego”.:

In reality, Spinoza has always been invoked for two contradictory reasons: for the immanence characteristic of causality, no doubt, but also for the transcendence all too characteristic of the unity of substance in relation to the so-called ‘human subject’ as the supposed or site of immanence. The formula of the ‘human subject’ is kept here, but it is obviously ambiguous (which subject? which man?). This double enlistment is significant: Spinoza, this is justifiably immanence in effect, but immanence as it is lived or received as transcendent by the human subject, external to it and too great for it—let us retain this formula—and thus Deleuze recognizes and lays claim to it, rejecting man as the third and final moment of the triad, as a piece adjacent to machines, as a persona adjacent to concepts. Here there is no essence or absolutely autonomous form of man: the latter is a system of effects and is composed beginning from its content, affections and perceptions. The argument given is this: immanence is not to something else which is always transcendent; it is thus not to the cogito or to the ego; it is to self but not ‘to itself’ (emphasized p. 208, understood consequently: the ego is a preliminary form, transcendent to the immanence of the One- All). What does this argument mean? It begs the question: if immanence is that of the Spinozist substance, then in fact it is the ego which is now a transcendent form; but this is to be given what is necessary to demonstrate. The recent interpretations of the Cogito (Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion) are more subtle and show that radical immanence, without representation, is the essence of the Cogito.

“Response to Deleuze”

One can certainly see the lasting residue of the Idealist reappropriations of Spinoza in this reading, that any unity must be a cogito unity. While I am not familiar with the proofs of Henry and Marion, on any number of fronts one can argue that in fact Spinoza’s philosophy subverts not only the human cogito (and “ego”) to such a radical degree, but also does so at the level of Substance itself. The human subject is torn asunder from within, in a necessary Conjoined Semiosis (as I argue in these three posts: Aggregates, Groups and Trans-semiotics; Conjoined Semiosis: A “Nerve Language” of Bodies ; The Necessary Intersections of the Human Body: Spinoza ), but as well, that Substance is unity in no way correspondent to human cognition. In fact only a strong Idealist commitment (and one might say implicit Kantian commitment) would drive the preoccupation with a One and All reading of Spinoza. Spinoza himself really does not make this sort of distinction in his philosophy (far from it being the essential dyad), chosing other determinations upon which to organize his thinking. As such, perhaps Laruelle’s critique falls more heavily upon “Spinozists” and much less so than on Spinoza himself. This leaves us right back where we started, attempting to locate the initial decision of Spinoza’s philosophy.

The non-Euclidean: A Change of Axioms

Because this is not a thorough investigation but only a report on my followings of an intuition, it is perhaps better to change tact and find a certain strange correspondence between Spinoza and Laruelle, a correspondence of analogy. The attempt to locate the Kantianish ”decision” in Spinoza seems to ground itself upon the reef of German Idealism’s appropriation of (and inoculation of itself against) Spinoza. It could be that an approach of the problem rhetorically would yield unexpected results.

Key to understanding Laruelle’s non-philosophy, perhaps more key than any other factor, is appreciating the “non” in non-philosophy. It is not a negation in the least, but rather a kind of expansion, or alteration. Laruelle tells us that it must be seen in the light of the “non” in non-Euclidean geometry. Brassier in Alien Theory puts it this way:

[click for larger image]

And Laruelle expands on the nearly literal connection between Non-Euclidean geometry and his change of axioms. It achieves a science status by breaking the internal logic of the (Kantian) decision (comparable to the changing of the 5th axiom of Euclid).   

Non-philosophy is obviously not a theory of knowledge or a system in general. It is a real-transcendental science of the world. The only way of discovering it is by relativizing the exclusive primacy of the logic that hides it and prevents one noticing it in philosophy, even of the non-analytical kind. We could say, in our customary style, that it is a transcendental logic that is real-and-nothing-but rather than logical; one that is without-logic or non formal, so to speak. Contrary to the logicist reduction of philosophy, which leaves the hidden prerogatives of philosophical sufficiency intact, specifically in the form of positivity and hence of a kind of dogmatism, this non-philosophical reduction of philosophy is at once real-transcendental and capable of a wide variety of realizations, not only in terms of logic but in terms of the sciences in general. There is an instance that is more radical than logic, and this is the real. Not that it is possible to replace logic by just any science while maintaining the same privileges for the latter. It is the universal posture of science that must take the place which in philosophy is held by the restricted universality of logic. Non-philosophy shatters the strictures of logic and analytical reduction, just as it dissolves the residues of a compulsory, exclusive and primary logic in the transcendental logic of philosophers, granting the transcendental the sole support of the radical real, and hence the possibility of entering into combination with each of the sciences. Non-philosophy is unified theory: a radical extension of philosophy beyond transcendental logic, but one that deprives it of its traditional pretensions. As a result, it is philosophy and its logical organon that lose their prerogatives by being turned into a simply real-transcendental organon. Thus, it is necessary to take the expression ‘non-philosophy quite literally, so to speak. It is not just a metaphorical reference to ‘non-Euclidean…

“A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy”

Now Brassier’s footnote references over 30 pages of text, so perhaps Laruelle works out a rigorous comparison between his non-philosophy and philosophy itself (all of them making the same sort of “decision”), different than that expressed in Laruelle passage cited which explicates the non-Euclidean analogy. This I cannot say. At first blush though we can read a very rough equivalence. Euclidean geometry possesses one group of axioms, and non-Euclidean geometry constitutes a change in these axioms. Pointedly, the fundamental decision of philosophy is avoided in favor of a radical Immanence. Okay, we can see that. But more is at stake in the literalized analogy, the movement from a “geometry” to a “science” and Laruelle’s expansion brings most of this out. In no-way does the non-Euclidean refusal of the parallel-postulate (related to Euclid’s fifth) give non-Euclidean geometry a position of taking the products of Euclidean geometry as its empirical objects, so the comparison holds within itself a slight of hand. This meta-like positioning of non-philosophy via non-Euclidean reference actually reads a kind of perverse disassociation.

This is what I find buried in the provocative metaphor. Primary among the interest in non-Euclidean geometry is the curious features of elliptic geometry. What we have in the globalization of space in such a geometry (which denies the parallel postulate of Euclid), is the kind of hermetic space that Laruelle finds problematic in Kantian philosophy (and by extension, philosophy in general), that is to say, the a priori conditioning creates the empirical conditioned, folding the “decision” back into the whole coherence, obscuring in a way its transcendence. The sphere of non-Euclidean geometry, invoked, a world where parallel lines SEEM like they would go on forever, in the seclusions of philosophical axioms, are shown to be recursively closed, intersecting at antipodes. In a way, Laruelle’s non-philosophy actually claims to expose the non-Euclidean (elliptic) nature of Kantian inspired analysis of “decision”. From the point of view of earth, when we draw two parallel lines on the ground, they appear actually Euclidean, transcendent, whereas in almost a Lacanian Symbolic fashion, our space is curved. They will intersect.

So when Laruelle invokes the non-Euclidean nature of his non-philosophy, I believe he is rather exposing both the illusion of an infinite Euclidean space (within a philosophy), and it’s actually curved, hermetic isolation of the Real (when seen from without). Kant’s logical necessity of Euclidean space further orients this reference to fifth postulate differences in geometry, and the kind of critical and axiomatic break that Laruelle is attempting to make.

The invocation of Euclid’s geometry, apart from Kant’s love for it, also has something of a reverbative affect back through the history of philosophy to the Ur-philosopher of Euclidean clarity, Spinoza himself. How can one rigorously (or literally) compare your radical approach to non-Euclidean geometry and not call to mind Spinoza’s famous more geometrico, and his desire to treat human emotions as if they were lines and points? In fact, at the face value of rhetorical forms, Laruelle’s non-Euclidean non-philosophy stands in strict opposition (I know, Laruelle refuses “non” as opposition, but I am speaking of the rhetorical form here) to Spinoza’s Euclidean Philosophy. As I’ve tried to point out in the above, it is hard though, given Laruelle’s Kantian framework of dyad, to locate exactly where the decisional diagnosis will fall. Instead they stand apart, perhaps as pictures. Or, as different sorts of Space, just as the original analogy might most strongly suspect.

Now this is the interesting thing. Non-Euclidean geometry largely developed over the contest of Euclid’s 5th axiom, what came to be described as the parallel postulate. And elliptic geometry (among others) arises with the change of this postulate, that parallel lines will not meet ad infintum. The appeal to the Non-Euclidean is an appeal to the challenge of the parallel postulate. Perhaps this is only a contingent jewel of historic happenstance, or perhaps Spinoza’s Euclideanism somehow floats behind Laruelle’s invocation, but Spinoza’s philosophy possesses its own much debated “parallel postulate”. In fact his gnomic parallel postulate can be said to be fulcrum upon which he balances the entire materialism vs. idealism quaesta.

With some homology to Euclid’s unmeeting parallel lines Spinoza asserts that “E2P7: The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” In fact upon this parallelism of infinitely extending parallel lines of causes seems to create the entire woof and weft of Spinoza’s seeming Euclidean space. It is the fiber of an abstract rejection any form of Idealism, a placing of the material on equal footing with the ideal (positioned within, one supposes, an infinity of other order and connection expressions of other unknown Attributes). Spinoza accomplishes a flattening of space required for his analysis, but in doing so in just this way refuses any scheme/content, conditioning/conditioned binary. What can we make of this?

Let us take up our provisional reading of the implicit Euclidean and non-Euclidean reversals in Laruelle’s rejection of the Kantian decision. The internal (spherical) realm of Kantianish decision creates an appearance of phenomena which are quite Euclidean in appearance (flat). The decision producing a philosophical coherence of the world in terms of material and idea, in a sense, bends the Real creating the very Kantian restricted access to Real, through an illusion of Euclidean infinity. The decision performs the very structure of Kantian philosophy itself (no matter which axiomatic dyad one makes). It appears straight because it is curved. Okay, let’s accept this doubling.

But because we are hard pressed to locate the original dyad in Spinoza – Is it between Substance and Attribute, as Laruelle suggests late in his Response to Deleuze, is it between Attribute and mode, between Substance and mode as in naturans/naturata, or Between Attributes themselves for instance in the parallel postulate itself? – we might want to take up the very case of Euclidean Space itself, the Space of the Ethics. This assessment of space is further complicated by Spinoza’s famous dismissal of geometry itself in Letter 12, wherein figures and shapes (as well as numbers and maths) are given to being mere imaginary products. Clearly, Euclidean geometry is taken up as a form of argument not because it presents a fundamental truth about Substance. Nature does not speak mathematics. All the same, Spinoza flattening of the ground through his own parallel postulate does well to be compared to Kant’s flattening through the bending of Space. Could it be that Spinoza’s Euclidean geometry presentation is actually the inverse of Kant’s, exoterically flat, esoterically elliptic? That is, despite the parallelism of thing and idea, is it not that parallel lines do in fact intersect, and that these intersections are regularly performed in the foreclosure of any knower known dyad as well as the remarked absence of any “subject”?

Spinoza tells us rather radically that any idea we have of something in the world is actually an idea we have of the state our body is in, so that when I phenomenologically look at my dog and perceive it, this is nothing more than imaginary relationship I have to the world (and myself), and that my idea of my dog is actually the idea (I prefer the concept “information”) of my body being a certain state. The reference is entirely cybernetic and recursively defined, and this is due to his parallel postulate. Friends of a neurological, brain-science view of the body and consciousness like this internal reference. All our thoughts about the world are our bodies coming into certain states of combination. What Spinoza tells us is that certain states of combination are more powerful, more active, more free, that others. Another way of stating this that our informational distribution and organization can become more or less self-determining.  We can see here a non-Euclidean bending of space buried within the flatness of the parallel postulate itself. Each human being makes a kind of self-referential sphere. But this is really not so either, for even though our ideas are merely ideas of our body being in certain states, we can have better ideas than others, and because we and the external things of the world are both expressions of the One Substance, occasions of us actually coming to know things external to us are necessarily participatory occasions, occasions which not only defy any restrictive notion of “subject” and “object”, but also cross out any ultimate boundary between one’s own body and that of another thing.

As I have argued in my treatment of the Prophetic Imagination, Spinoza’s Scheme of the Prophetic Imagination ; Omens of the Future: Intellection and Imagination, Spinoza ensures the possibility of a sharing of essences even at the level of the imagination. In addition to this, Spinoza’s definitions of body and individual as communications of parts and the causes of unitary effects all promote a variable negotiation of boundary which undermines any self/other essentialization, and in fact runs this mutuality right down to a panpsychic core which is neither materialist nor idealist. What one might propose with non-Euclidean, elliptic Geometry floating in the air, is that the knower and the known (in the Idealist sense) form the antipodes of a spherical mutuality of real communication of parts, such that the identity between each is blurred if not collapsed. And this antipodal notion actually expresses itself in an ignorance which takes the podes to be opposed because the spherical space is forgotten in an ignorance. This is to say that there are a spherical space of causes which have colluded to bring about the relations almost all of which is invisible. But not only this, the spherical space is filled with its own infinity of antipodes, and the space itself can be, and is perpetually redrawn in other spheres, all of which end upon the Immanence of Substance itself. This is to say, the Sciences are in the business of identifying antipodes (objects and knowings) and reconstructing the spheres of their collaboration, ultimately in the face of a necessary distortion (not of flatness or parallelism, but of infinities). And the monism of Substance, along with parallel postulate flattenings of our own thoughts, serve as tools for correcting the dislocations of our self-oriented and imaginary Euclideanism.

It seems to me that because the Ethics has to be read as a material thing with which our bodies are meant to interact and combine with, something upon which to grind our body lenses, so to speak, and not merely a mental, Ideational world to drift into, and because the philosopher is to conceive of his/her thoughts of the world (even the most transcendental thoughts) as thoughts of his/her body being in a certain state, forming a kind of combinative, material power, precisely the non-Euclidean dislocation of philosophical truth of Laruelle occurs buried within the implicit fractal and non-linear relations bound within the Euclidean exoteric form of Spinoza’s Euclidean presentation. In all, Spinoza’s coherence of argument is meant to provoke the intuition of connection, and thus to alert the mind to its own distortions of space, in particular how it reads its causal relationship to the world. Spinoza’s is a non-philosophy in the sense that it is meant as a philosophy meant to be left behind, once used.

This is something I wrote roughly two years ago after a particular ‘transcendent experience’ – I am copying it here as it belongs with every grouping of my work…

In the beginning, there WAS. There was no I, there was just existence. I was not me, I was something that yes, was conscious, but there was only NOW the need for consciousness. “I” was not singular or plural, “I” was everything and everything was one. It was as if we had been sleeping for a very long time in the bath of the void – this was the moment of birth. But not until this moment, not until this instantaneous birth of consciousness did the void even exist. The void was birthed at the same time as we – and it looked on us with the same awe that we stared into it.

Mind you I did not have eyes to see, nor did I have arms and legs to flail about in this eternity of possibility. “I” was not yet me – I was still the collective, the totality of one. And as I became conscious of existence, soul became conscious of its own limitless nature. I saw before me the void, but it was not a void – it was the pinnacle of everything imaginable. It was limitless and contained all possibility; those with eyes would say it was “dark” but I saw only what my present existence defines as “light.” Promise.

As I realized the promise of the void laid before me, the pure newly born soul began to sing of its love for this opportunity. Love was not an emotion, there was only I, and as I was still newly born from that which I came, there was no need for emotion, no need for anything defined or experienced by the self. The self was all, and all were one. The experience of being pure light, without knowledge of anything else for there was nothing else in this NOW, this instant of birth – was the birth of I AM.

The I AM, upon realizing the nature of existence, gave birth to the universe. As I looked into the void, suddenly sparks of light in the distance appeared, first one at a time, then increasing in frequency. Their colors encompassed every hue known to man. They began to grow and change, these sparks of light, and one flew past me. As it passed, it’s light morphed and space was born. In one fraction of a second it was an indescribable glimmer and the next it was a glowing ball with depth and size. More flew by, their insides churning, and far in the distance behind me a great explosion occurred, and sound was born. Then began a symphony of explosions, the birthing of solar systems and great stars that was more supreme than any earthly musical creation. As I listened to this sound, fully aware that the greatest of things were being formed from within without, I again felt the presence of the void without consciousness as I had at my own birth. I closed my eyes, once again experienced this void, and a great trembling was felt within. Where I had not previously been cold I now was warm, then hot; I was aware of pulsations from every spark of light, star, and universe that was forming. Each part of my soul now far-flung into the void sang to me, and I was reaffirmed that I was still not “me” – I was all and all were listening, churning, waiting, though by now I had become fully aware of myself and this external process of my own internal birth. I saw then within the void perfection. The stars and universes still swirling around me quieted and in that instant I saw the organization of perfection, my own perfect blueprint, the blueprint for the universe.

There was great chaos in this instant. My consciousness transcended this chaos, and as I looked upon the perfect universe, as I experienced its being, all the sights and sounds and sensations of every nature were amplified. They moved through me for they were me. I was no longer staring at the picture of perfection, I WAS becoming this perfection, and felt the massive energies of all things moving into perfect alignment. This experience transcends words. The universe was born, into perfect order – and I…well, there was no longer any I.

I don’t know where I am.
At times I plunge
to the bottom of the sea,
at times, rise up
like the Sun.
At times, the universe is pregnant by me,
at times I give birth to it.

- Rumi

Liberals think that the title of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron.  They’re wrong.  Goldberg himself writes:

“For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right.  And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.  All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.  Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition.  And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents.  The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” [page 175].

“Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, Hitler’s “revolt against reason.”  All fed into a movement that believes action is more important than ideas.  Deconstructionism, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all these ideas had the same purpose–to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancient regime still fought and persevered.  These were ideologies of the “movement.”  The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project” [Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, page 176].

It turns out that most of the moral and philosophical assumptions of liberalism have been shared by not only the Marxists, but the Nazis as well.  NAZI stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party,” and was merely a rival brand of the clearly leftist political ideology of socialism.  And given the fact that Marxism was in fact every bit as totalitarian and murderous as Nazism, in hindsight it seems rather bizarre that “Marxist” was ever an abracadabra word that the American left was willing to bear to begin with.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the foundational ideas that liberals uphold as being the opposite of fascism in fact actually fed the monster of fascist Nazism, and how the modern American left continue to fall prey to fascist premises and outcomes to this very day.

It is particularly interesting that the supposedly highly individualistic and influential school of thought known as “existentialism” became so ensnared by fascism and Nazism.  On the surface, existentialism would seem to be the very polar opposite of fascism and Nazism.  After all, a philosophy of radical freedom centered in the individual would surely be incompatible with a totalitarian social system that denies political liberty in the name of the community.  One would assume that existentialism would be a philosophy of rebellion against all such external authority.  And yet the Nazis quoted Frederich Nietzsche at great length in support of their ideology (see also here).  Martin Heidegger, one of the foremost existentialist thinkers in history, turned out to have been a proud member of the Nazi Party.  And even famed existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre – who fought to resist fascism in his Nazi-occupied France during WWII – ultimately merely chose another totalitarian ideology in its place (Sartre identified himself as a Marxist and a Maoist).

Georg Lukács observed (in The Destruction of Reason, 1954, page 5) that tracing a path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Weber.  Rather than merely being amoral monsters, the Nazis emerged out of a distinguished liberal secular humanist intellectual tradition.

Max Weinreich documented in Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, an exhaustive study of the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime.  Far from opposing the Nazi regime, we find that German academia actively provided the intellectual justification for Nazi fascism as well as the conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Weinreich does not claim that German scholars intended the Holocaust, but he argues that the Holocaust would not have been possible without them.

He asks, “Did they administer the poison?  By no means; they only wrote the prescription.”

How could such a thing happen?

Very easily, it turns out.

The existentialists (along with the secular humanists and the liberals), deny the transcendent, deny objective truth, and deny the objective morality that derive from transcendence and objective truth.  Rather than any preordained system – whether moral or theological – existentialist anchored meaning not to any ideals or abstractions, but in the individual’s personal existence.  Life has no ultimate meaning; meaning is personal; and human beings must therefore create their own meaning for themselves.

One should already begin to see the problem: since existentialism, by its very nature, refuses to give objective answers to moral or ideological questions, a particular existentialist might choose to follow either a democrat or totalitarian ideology – and it frankly doesn’t matter which.  All that matters is that the choice be a genuine choice.

Existentialists didn’t merely acknowledge this abandonment of transcendent morality, they positively reveled in it.  In his book St. Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated the life of a criminal.  Genet was a robber, a drug dealer, and a sexual deviant.  By all conventional moral standards, Genet was an evil man.  But for Sartre, even ostensibly evil actions could be moral if they were performed in “good faith.”  And since Sartre’s Genet consciously chose to do what he did, and took responsibility for his choices and his actions, he was a saint in existentialist terms.

And the problem becomes even worse: by rejecting the concepts of transcendence, objective meaning, truth, and moral law, and by investing ultimate authority in the human will (i.e. Nietzsche’s “will to power”, Hitler’s “triumph of the will”), existentialism played directly into the hands of fascism — which preached the SAME doctrines.  If fascism can be defined as “violent and practical resistance against the process of transcendence,” as Ernst Nolte defined it, then it’s affinities with existentialism are crystal clear.  The two movements became part of the same stream of thought.

Modern Nietzsche followers argue that Nietzsche was not a racial anti-Semite.  For the sake of argument maybe he wasn’t; but he was without any question an intellectual anti-Semite, who attacked the Jews for their ideas and their ethics — particularly as they contributed to Western civilization and to Christianity (which he also actively despised).  And in addition to Nietzsche’s intellectual anti-Semitism was his utter contempt for any form of abstractions — particularly as they related to the transcendental categories of morality and reason.  Nietzsche maintained that abstraction of life resulted from abstraction of thought.  And he blamed Christianity – which he rightly blamed as a creation of the Jews – for the denial of life manifested in Christian morality.

And, unlike most pseudo-intellectuals of today, Nietzsche was consistent: in his attack against Christianity, he attacked Judeo-Christian morality.  He attacked the Christian value of other-centered love, and argued that notions of compassion and mercy favored the weak and the unfit, thereby breeding more weakness.  Don’t you dare think for a single nanosecond that Hitler didn’t take the arguments of this beloved-by-liberals philosopher and run down the field with them toward the death camps.

The Nazis aligned themselves not only against the Jews but against the the Judeo-Christian God and the Judeo-Christian morality the Jews represented.  A transcendent lawgiving God, who reveals His moral law on real tablets of stone for mankind to follow, was anathema to the fascists.  They argued that such transcendence alienates human beings from nature and from themselves (i.e., from their own genuine choices).  The fascist intellectuals sought to forge a new spirituality of immanence, focused upon nature, on human emotions, and on the community.  The fascists sought to restore the ancient pre-Christian consciousness, the ancient mythic sensibility in the form of the land and the blood, in which individuals experience unity with nature, with each other, and with their own deepest impulses.

Gene Edward Veith in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian worldview writes:

The fascist rebellion against transcendence restored the ancient pagan consciousness.  With it came barbarism, a barbarism armed with modern technology and intellectual sophistication.  The liquidation of the transcendent moral law and “Jewish” conscience allowed the resurgence of the most primitive and destructive emotions, the unleashing of original sin (page 14).

Nietzsche argued that God is dead, and Hitler tried to finish Him off by eradicating the Jews.  What is less known is that he also planned to solve the “church problem” after the war.  Hitler himself  said:

“The war is going to be over.  The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem.  It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure” [From Hitler's Tabletalk (December 1941), quoted in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak, 1990, page 105].

Hitler boasted that “I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion.  It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”  And Himmler said, “Men who can’t divest themselves of manners of previous centuries, and scoff and sling mud at things which are ‘holy’ and matters of belief to others, once and for all do not belong in the SS.”

With the creed “God is dead” and the resulting “death of God,” Nietzsche predicted that energizing conflict and revolution would reemerge in a great wave of nihilism.  Human beings would continue to evolve, he said, nodding to Darwinism.  And man would ultimately give way to Superman.  And Nietzsche said that this Superman would not accept the anachronistic abstract, transcendental meanings imposed by disembodied Judeo-Christian rationalism or by a life-denying religion.  Rather, this Superman would CREATE meaning for himself and for the world as a whole.

The Superman, according to Nietzsche, would be an artist who could shape the human race – no longer bound by putrefying and stultifying and stupefying transcendence – to his will.  “Man is for him an un-form, a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor,” he wrote.  Such a statement did not merely anticipate the Darwinist-based Nazi eugenics movement.  It demonstrated how the exaltation of the human will could and would lead not to general liberty, as one might have expected, but to the control of the many by the elite — with those of the weaker in will being subjugated to the will of the Supermen.

Nietzsche’s new ethic became the rationale for all the Nazi atrocities that would follow.  As Nietzsche himself put it, “The weak and the failures shall perish: the first principle of OUR love of man.  And they shall even be given every possible assistance.  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity” (in “The Anti-Christ” in Portable Nietzsche, p. 570).  We see here also the exemplification of yet another legacy left behind by Nietzsche that was picked up by the Nazi and afterward by secular humanist atheists today: the Nietzschean attitude of flippant, sarcastic contempt for all the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity.

One of the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity was the fundamental sanctity of human life.  But the Nazis had their own concept – Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).  And nearly fifty million of the most innocent and helpless human beings have perished as a result of an existentialist philosophy that survived the fall of the Nazis in liberal thought, which celebrates pro-existentialist “pro-choice” above human life.

Nietzsche’s philosophy underlies the thought of all the later existentialists, and the darker implications of his thought proved impossible to ignore.

And Martin Heidegger, in his own personal choice to commit himself to National Socialism, did not ignore them.

There is more that needs to be understood.

Martin Heidegger invoked Nietzsche in his 1933 Rectoral Address, in his speech entitled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in which he articulated his commitment to the integration of academia with National Socialism.  He began by asking, if Nietzsche is correct in saying that God is dead, what are the implications for knowledge?

As Heidegger explained, if God is dead, there is no longer a transcendent authority or reference point for objective truth.  Whereas classical thought, exemplified by the Greeks, could confidently search for objective truth, today, after the death of God, truth becomes intrinsically “hidden and uncertain.”  Today the process of questioning is “no longer a preliminary step that is surmounted on the way to the answer and thus to knowing; rather, questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing.”

Heidegger’s conclusion became accepted to the point of becoming a commonplace of contemporary liberal thought: that knowledge is a matter of process, not content.  With the death of God, there is no longer any set of absolutes or abstract ideals by which existence must be ordered.  Such “essentialism” is an illusion; and knowledge in the sense of objective, absolute truth must be challenged.  The scholar is not one who knows or searches for some absolute truth, but the one who questions everything that pretends to be true.

Again, one would think that such a skeptical methodology would be highly incompatible with fascism, with its practice of subjecting people to an absolute human authority.  And yet this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of fascism.  In fact, Heidegger’s Rectoral Address was warmly endorsed by the National Socialists for a very good reason: the fascists saw themselves as iconoclasts, interrogating the old order and boldly challenging all transcendent absolutes.

We find that in this same address in which Heidegger asserts that “questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing,” Heidegger went on to advocate expelling academic freedom from the university:

“To give oneself the law is the highest freedom.  The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the university.”

Heidegger argued that the traditional canons of academic freedom were not genuine but only negative, encouraging “lack of concern” and “arbitrariness.”  Scholars must become unified with each other and devote themselves to service.  In doing so, he stated, “the concept of the freedom of German students is now brought back to it’s truth.”

Now, the claim that freedom would somehow emerge when academic freedom is eliminated might be sophistry of the worst kind, but it is not mere rhetorical doublespeak.  Why?  Because Heidegger was speaking existentially, calling not for blind obedience, but for a genuine commitment of the will.  Freedom was preserved because “to give oneself the law” was a voluntary, freely chosen commitment.  Academic freedom as the disinterested pursuit of truth shows “arbitrariness,” parking of the old essentialist view that truth is objective and transcendent.  The essentialist scholar is detached and disengaged, showing “lack of concern,” missing the sense in which truth is ultimately personal, a matter of the will, demanding personal responsibility and choice.  In the new order, the scholar will be fully engaged in service to the community.  Academic freedom is alienating, a function of the old commitment to moral and intellectual absolutes.

And what this meant in practice could be seen in the Bavarian Minister of Culture’s directive to professors in Munich, that they were no longer to determine whether something “is true, but whether it is in keeping with the direction of the National Socialist revolution” (Hans Schemm, quoted in Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, tr. Ernest A. Menze, 1978, p. 99).

I point all of the above out to now say that it is happening all over again, by intellectuals who unknowingly share most of the same tenets that made the horror possible the last time.

We live in a time and in a country in which the all-too modern left has virtually purged the university of conservatives and conservative thought.  This is simply a fact that is routinely confirmed.  And as a mater of routine, conservative speakers need not apply at universities.  If they are actually invited to speak, they are frequently shouted down by a relative few liberal activists.  And leftwing censorship is commonplace.  Free speech is largely gone, in a process that simply quashes unwanted views.  We have a process today in which a professor who is himself employing fascist tactics calls a student “a fascist bastard.”  And why did he do so?  Because the student gave a speech in a speech class choosing a side on a topic that the professor did not like.

We live in a society in which too many of our judges have despised a system of objective laws from an objective Constitution and have imposed their own will upon both.  Judicial activist judges have largely driven transcendent religion and the transcendent God who gives objective moral laws out of the public sphere.

Today, we live in a society that will not post the Ten Commandments – the epitome of transcendent divinely-ordained moral law – in public schools.  And why not?  Because judges ruled that:

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” which, the Court said, is “not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

One can only marvel that such justices so cynically debauched the thought of the founding fathers whose ideas they professed to be upholding.

Justices of the Supreme Court agreed with this fallacious ruling even as the figure of Moses holding the Ten Commandments rules atop the very building in which they betrayed our nation’s founding principles.

And thus the left has stripped the United States of America bare of transcendent moral law, just as their intellectual forebears did prior to WWII in Nazi Germany.   And thus the intellectual left has largely stripped the United States of America from free debate within academia largely by pursuing the same line of reasoning that Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger employed to do the same in Nazi Germany.  We saw this very feature evidenced by leftist scientists who threw aside their scientific ethics in order to purge climatologists who came to a different conclusion.

The climate that led to fascism and to Nazism in Germany did not occur overnight, even though the final plunge may have appeared to be such to an uninformed observer.  It occurred over a period of a half a dozen decades or so, with the transcendent and objective moral foundations having been systematically torn away.  And after that degree of cancer had been reached, it only took the right leader or the right event to plunge the world into madness.

I never liked the cassette tape.  I thought it sounded inferior to vinyl, I hated the artwork and tiny liner notes, I hated how the print on the cassette would smear and smudge, I hated how repeated listens would create flat spots in the sound, and I hated the re-winding and fast- forwarding.  However, I loved the ability to make a mix of songs known and unknown for friends.  I can remember spending hours putting together the collection of songs to approximate 45 min. per side and the need to improvise when there was 1 minute and 25 sec. at the end of side one.  (Pigs on the Wing by Pink Floyd was the perfect ending song and ended up on many tapes.)  Receiving a mix tape from someone implied a kind of intimacy, care and concern and is something I cherished.  Seeing the individual’s handwriting or cut and paste artwork each time I listened to the tape reminded me that they had spent time carefully selecting and creating the listening experience just for me.  CD’s eventually replaced cassettes but retained the possibility to create a mix of songs with intent for the listener and thought for the push and pull of songs.

With the rise of the ipod has come the rise of the playlist.  I have begun to adjust to how the ipod shifts my attention to the single.  However, putting together a playlist maintains neither the permanence or the intimacy of the mix tape.  With upwards of 10,000 songs on an ipod I find too often that songs get lost or that I do not listen as carefully as I used to.

Posted in this entry is a 30 minute podcast.  It is a “mix-tape”.  I have chosen a handful of songs to listen to carefully.  My selection process was arbitrary; I liked they way these songs fit together.  I will post other mix tapes in the future and will try to build them around themes and sounds.  They will be short so that you too will be able to listen to them in a single sitting.

Listen:

Download: Education of the Bored

The Dead Weather

Treat Me Like Your Mother

Jack White can do no wrong.  This is his most recent band and it is another barn burner.  It sounds like the ’70’s hard rock that I first heard from KISW in Seattle and KGON in Portland.

The Frogs

I’ve Got Drugs

Took this off an old mix-tape that a friend gave to me to digitize.  They’re weird.

Romantica

The National Side

I don’t remember how I stumbled upon these guys, but this is a beautiful song from an unbelievably strong album.  It is cohesive, mysterious, and works its way deep into your consciousness.

The Hold Steady

Massive Nights

Rock-n-Roll still lives.  A couple of guys, some beer, some sweat, and some attitude combine to create something transcendent.

Paul Westerberg

Bored of Edukation

Speaking of rock and roll transcendence, Paul Westerberg and the Replacements were a group of guys that combined beer and attitude in the ’80’s.  Today Westerberg remains one of America’s best songwriters.  He records his songs in a basement in Minneapolis and releases them from time to time on the internet.

The Hold Steady

Stuck Between Stations (Acoustic Version)

She was a real cool kisser and she wasn’t that strict of a Christian/She was a damn good dancer but she wasn’t that great of a Girlfriend

That is one of my favorite lines from a rock song.  I remember her.

Eric Bachmann

Man ‘O War

I have seen this man perform twice.  He was terrible.  Twice.  However, he played several songs that would not leave my head for several days after the show.  This is one of them.  It might make you cry.