you say you want a revolution...

~~~~~~~~~

Read and watched Revolutionary Road. Been steeping and discussing it all week.

The book opens with a pre-game pep-talk from a director (a story's powerful magician fantasy master) to the players in his small-town play. The heroine is the lead in the project. Opening night, she gives her considerable best (being a first-rate girl) to bring it to life. But the leading man has called in sick, leaving the very-unsuited director to take his place. Doomed from the start! She sinks beneath the banal waves that take her down real slow and painful as the other players fail her.

And on we go to see this happen in the story.

Reading this masterful novel is to understand the peculiar power and strength of "novel" as genre. Novel as the inner voice, the daemon / muse whispering the tale, becoming as intimate a thing as our own taproot-marriage of conscious and unconscious. We fall into Novel, anticipate its whisper, going beyond print, beyond word -- even beyond image, taking it in as pure distilled essence into every corner of our being.

And this novel is the pure perfected craft of Novel.

What a challenge to morph it to screen. Did they succeed? How could they? But what a brave thing to attempt.

Not that it doesn't succeed as Film.

And -- here in the film, the "real life" director is the "real life" actress's husband, and her husband in the film was also her love interest in the American collective-consciousness participation-mystique epic iconic stew "The Titanic." What magic is this?

I'd say -- to be safe -- our archetypes Kate & Leo need to make a happy film, one full of bouncing babies and art crafted to bliss and harmony... Make it sing a future to being and never give glance to any possibility of apocalypse, war, theocracy, etc.

smiling,

+++ work with caution +++

ps. the house a woman's life. the rooms the many women. I was just going to Netflix. The Bride Wore Black (Jeanne Moreau) now at the top of our queue.

pps. thinking about it, Kate has resolved it all for April Wheeler and the rest of us. The Academy gave her the Best Actress award. Welcome, Aquarius. Age of harmony, equality, when love steers the stars.



smiling more...

Summa Felicitas,

Deborah

who, thanking you for your time, now vanishes

(my review of Holy Smoke here)

MYTHS, FAIRY TALES AND DREAMS

wonderful essay (and website).


and the key to carl jung:


The soul descends into generation, after the manner of Kore
She is scattered by generation, after the manner of Dionysus;
Like Prometheus and the Titans, she is bound to body.
She frees herself by exercising the strength of Heracles;
Gathers herself together through the help of Apollo
And the saviour Athene, by truly purifying philosophy;
And she elevates herself to the causes of her being with Demeter.

~Damascius, the last head of the Platonic Academy in Athens, 6th century AD. from The Seven Myths of the Soul by Tim Addey, The Prometheus Trust

mix well with the understanding that ...

The unconscious is not a demonical monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.~C.G.Jung The Practical Use Of Dream Analysis, Collected Works Vol. 16

The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life. Whatever values in the visible world are destroyed by modern relativism, the psyche will produce their equivalents.~C.G.Jung, Modern Man in Search Of a Soul
CGJUNG

The inspired speech of myth

begotten of the Daimon
reveals that the world

is the theater
of the periodic revolution of soul.

---------

(comments: click on date below.)

collectives

(and, as Strauss reads all that last post, he thinks, "Thank God I'm not a Straussian.")
+++

Collectives.

Logic, academics. As science knows, the unconscious is at work, "thinking" us. Important and a milestone for science to be saying this, which has been my point in these posts. A sign that the Enlightenment is -- like consciousness itself -- getting past its positivistic stage.

The work of the age.

... the individual as the only carrier of life and existence is of paramount importance. He cannot be substituted by a group or by a mass. Yet we are rapidly approaching a state in which nobody will accept individual responsibility any more. We prefer to leave it as an odious business to groups and organizations, blissfully unconscious of the fact that the group or mass psyche is that of an animal and wholly inhuman. What we need is the development of the inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on the one hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the other hand in man's unconscious psyche. CGJUNG Collected Works, Vol. 12

Now, religion must square itself with history. With the daimon.

Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.
~Cicero



The unconscious is not a demonical monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.
~C.G.Jung The Practical Use Of Dream Analysis, Collected Works Vol. 16

It has yet to be understood that the Mysterium Magnum is not only an actuality, but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche.
~CG Jung Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,

+++

Cain slew Abel, Seth knew not why
For if the children of Israel were to multiply
Why must any of the children die? ~Randy Newman

Another side of the present dangerous collectives is scetched by Jeff Sharlet in this months Harper's:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488
Jesus killed Mohammed:
The crusade for a Christian military

excerpt:
The Air Force Academy chapel is the most popular man-made tourist attraction in Colorado, seventeen silver daggers rising above campus, veined with stained glass that suffuses the space inside with a violet and orange glow. But when one of the academy’s public-relations officers takes me on a tour, it’s empty. Very few cadets worship there anymore. Instead, they meet in classrooms and dorm rooms, at mountain retreats, and at the numerous megachurches that surround the academy.
One of the most popular services, called The Mill, takes place on Friday nights at New Life, in a giant, permanent tent that not long after academy dinnertime fills with fake fog and power chords and more than a thousand men and women ranging in age from their teens to their early twenties. I attended one Friday night in the company of Bruce Hrabak, the cadet who’d told me there was no separation of church and state in the Constitution.
Broad-shouldered and broad-smiled, with color in his cheeks and excitable dusk-blue eyes, Hrabak says he’s at the academy both of his own free will and according to the strict Christian doctrine of “predestination,” that is, destiny chosen by God. It is this paradoxical mix, he explains, that allows him to serve both as an officer and as a missionary for the “Great Commission,” the evangelical belief that Christians must spread the Gospel to all nations. The academy, he explains, is a step on his spiritual journey.
The sermon at The Mill was painful—the pastor’s wife had recently delivered a stillborn baby, and he spoke in raw, awful terms about suffering and theodicy, the age-old question of why a loving God permits bad things to happen to good people. It is one of the central dilemmas of the Christian faith, and its persistence, its resistance to easy answers, is what has made Christianity the forge of so much of the world’s great art and philosophy.
By the end of this hour-long service, though, everything turned out for the best; even the dead baby had been shoehorned into God’s inscrutable plan. That cheered Hrabak up. Over dinner afterward, he told me he believed that all suffering, that which he endures and that which he inflicts, has a purpose. He felt this truth was of special solace for soldiers. I asked what he meant. “Well, you’re pulling a trigger, you know?” He thought about that a lot. Not the shot fired or the bomb dropped, but the bodies, the souls at the other end of his actions. In his classes, he watched videos of air strikes. At night, he pictured the dead. He was not as afraid of dying as he was of killing unjustly. He was afraid of sin. His double identity—as a spiritual warrior and as an officer of the deadliest force in the history of the world—was his redemption.
What would he do if he ever received an order that contradicted his faith? Hrabak looked shocked. He giggled, then composed himself and took a big bite of pizza, speaking confidently through his food. “Impossible, dude. I mean, I guess it could happen. But I highly doubt it.”
What if he was ordered to bomb a building in which terrorists were hiding, even though there were civilians in the way? He shook his head. “Who are you to question why God builds up nations just to destroy them, so that those who are in grace can see that they’re in grace?” A smile lit up half his face, an expression that might be taken for sarcastic if Hrabak wasn’t a man committed to being in earnest at all times.
What he’d just said—a paraphrase from Romans—might be something like a Word of Knowledge, a gift of wisdom from God. It blew his mind so much he had to repeat it, his voice picking up a speed and enthusiasm that bordered on joy. “He”—the Lord—“builds up an entire nation”—Iraq or Vietnam, Afghanistan or Pakistan, who are you to question why?—“just to destroy them! To show somebody else”—America, a young man guided to college by God, distrustful of his own choices—“that they’re in grace.”
Grace, of course, means you’re favored by God, no questions asked, a blessing that you can neither earn nor deserve. To fundamentalists, it’s worth more than freedom, and they’re willing to sacrifice their freedom—and yours—for that glorious feeling. That’s a paradox, a box trap the fundamentalists have built for themselves. The first casualties of the military’s fundamentalist front are not the Iraqis and Afghans on the wrong side of an American F-16. They’re the spiritual warriors themselves, men and women persuaded that the only God worth believing in is one who demands that they break—in spirit and in fact—the oath to the Constitution they swear to uphold on their lives. “You’re laying down your life for others,” Hrabak
says. “Well, there has to be some true truth to put yourself in harm’s way for.” True truth; truth that requires an amplifier. For the God soldiers, democracy is not enough.

playing for change: war / no more trouble

darlin, won't you stand?

ultima strauss!

O, do read TheraP's Blog :

Who is Leo Strauss? And why should we care? (National Disgrace Exposed!)

May 18, 2009, 12:20PM

TPM

-----------------------

notes

From Deborah

Subject: Re: ultima strauss

I know the Weekly Standard (colorfully called Rupert Murdoch's Neo-Con rag) isn't something that goes down well when swallowed whole —but this morsel does give some taste of the discomfort those as Eros-centered as — say, all of us, certainly Jung—have with what passes as philosophy, with those endless whole nine yards of hard-line analytical academia.

All this is missed by the Strassian-embracing Neo-Cons, even as they suck down the sublime waters, bending stiffly from the waist, kowtowing toward the same ultimate source as Rosen... Guess Rosen must have glanced up at the right moment—seen the human reflection?

"The Beautiful is difficult."

Minding your own vision, reading sources as directly as you can: Isn't that the message in the bottle that keeps bobbing up, washing onto our shore? Easy for hard heads keeping everything sorted, all the ducks in rows, deeming negative capability the height of slop, to look down long noses at the flare of the more passionate nostril. :) So what? May their mouths relax enough to receive some kiss, some great O of surprise, some ahhh of humble-awed knee-trembling mystery. Some great Frenching tongue... The elements, everstirred by Eros, only standing still when one wraps tightly in his wings: Life—life so much bigger, big enough to contain death and for death to contain it back again.

Was that a poem? Anyway—here's a better one as well as the article:

what time is it?
it is by every star a different time,
and each most falsely true;
or so subhuman superminds declare

—nor all their times encompass me and you:
when are we never, but forever now
(hosts of eternity; not guests of seem)
believe me, dear, clocks have enough to do
without confusing timelessness and times.

Time cannot children, poets, lovers tell—
measure imagine, mystery, a kiss
—not though mankind would rather know than feel;

mistrusting utterly that timelessness

whose absence would make your whole life and my
(and infinite our) merely to undie -e.e.cummings

Modern Ancients Stanley Rosen's achievement. by Thomas Hibbs 11/25/2002, Volume 008, Issue 11

summa felicitas,

deborah

note: Freud wrote to his future wife that

"it is neither pleasant nor edifying to watch the masses amusing themselves; we at least don't have much taste for it. . . . I remember something that occurred to me while watching a performance of Carmen: the mob gives vent to its appetites and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions; we save ourselves for something, not knowing for what. And this constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement. . . . Why don't we get drunk? . . . Why don't we fall in love with a different person every month? . . . Thus we strive more toward avoiding pain than seeking pleasure. And the extreme case are people like ourselves who chain themselves together for life and death, who deprive themselves and pine for years so as to remain faithful, and who probably wouldn't survive a catastrophe that robbed them of their beloved. . . . Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from the direst poverty and that the possibility exists of being able to free ourselves increasingly from social ills. The poor people, the masses, could not survive without their thick skins and their easygoing ways. Why should they take their relationships seriously when all the misfortune nature and society have in store threatens those they love? Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? The poor are too helpless, too exposed, to behave like us. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sicknesses, and evils of social institutions."

Gertrude Himmelfarb aside, what we see is that open sexuality in the 19th C -- and Jung was born in 1875 -- was associated with the lower classes. (They were like beasts of the field in the mind of the century's most open confessor, the writer of My Secret Life. Reading him astounds because of the contradictory and unconscious attitudes he so freely conveys .) But -- my point is that Jung, like most all his generation, carried the same baggage he was working out openly in his theories: Sexual repression was part of a 'respectable' class identity.

Jung wrote this about Freud, and I think it applies well to our current crop of conservatives:

The historical conditions which preceded Freud were such that they made a phenomenon like himself necessary, and it is precisely the fundamental tenet of his teaching-namely, the re­pression of sexuality-that is most clearly conditioned in this his­torical sense. Like his greater contemporary Nietzsche, Freud stands at the end of the Victorian era, which was never given such an appropriate name on the Continent despite the fact that it was just as characteristic of the Germanic and Protestant countries as of the Anglo-Saxon. The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artifi­cially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by con­stant moralizings. These ideals were the last offshoots of the col­lective religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and shortly before had been severely shaken by the French Enlightenment and the en­suing revolution. Hand in hand with this, ancient truths in the political field had become hollow and threatened to collapse. It was still too soon for the final overthrow, and consequently all through the nineteenth century frantic efforts were made to prevent the Christian Middle Ages from disappearing altogether. Political revolutions were stamped out, experiments in moral freedom were thwarted by middle-class public opinion, and the critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century reached its end in a renewed, systematic attempt to capture the world in a unified network of thought on the medieval model. But in the course of the nineteenth century enlightenment slowly broke through, particularly in the form of scientific materialism and rationalism.

This is the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines. He has a passion for explaining everything rationally, exactly as in the eighteenth century; one of his favourite maxims is Voltaire's "Ecrasez l'infame." With a certain satisfaction he invariably points out the flaw in the crystal; all complex psychic phenom­ena like art, philosophy, and religion fall under his suspicion and appear as "nothing but" repressions of the sexual instinct. para 45, Sigmund Freud in his Historical Setting CGJUNG CW 15

Deborah

---------------

From: EMC
Subject: Re: ultima strauss

Them Straussian neo-cons — it makes perfect sense: the ancients, just like the neo-cons, had no concept of universal human rights. They're a very good match.

And, by the way, neither Plato nor Aristotle were supporters of democracy. Though it is completely debatable whether he thought it could be realized, Plato argued for a utopian oligarchy, and Aristotle's student, the author of the Ath. Pol., does not seem to have a decided taste for democracy (see his take on Theramenes, for example).

Likewise, as David Stockton argues, it's difficult to discern any strong bias towards any particular political system in many of the ancient sources, including Thucydides and Herodotus.

In fact, the more I study the radical democracy of the classical period, the more it seems that the ancients really did very little theorizing about democracy, but that democracy came into being as a new device in the aristocrats' political arsenal. Really—aristocratic dynamism. The democracy of the Greeks—literally in Aristotle: the right of the people to gather in the same place. The Greeks had no concept of rights theory; democracy for them was a way of settling civil disputes.

All of this is just evidence that the neo-cons want to stamp out the obvious debt of American democracy to the Enlightenment. And why should they want to do that?

love to all, e