[b]Bianco Luno:
The source of icy resentment at a woman’s stoop (for it is a stoop) to maternalism: she pretends to think she can actually make things better.
Contrast the corresponding paternalism:
He really thinks he knows better.[/b]
Bianco roots his ethics here in human biology. Or largely does. But lots of women don’t pretend and, occasionally, you will come upon a man who really does not think he knows better.
So: which is closer to the way things really are?
On the one horn of the dilemma, self-deception; on the other, despair.
Squarely impaled.
But you, good-natured (we will concede), think we can drive right down the middle?
You not being me of course.
The curious thing about violence against women is that violence against men, so commonplace as to seem appropriate, counts for very little.
Each sex cultivates its own brand.
But we are never really only one brand or the other, are we? Still, testosterine and violence are the stuff of legends. Let’s declare war on it.
[b]Bianco Luno
The person you would meet were you to meet me in person would not be that person but a person more like yourself.
That person, the two of you could say, is more real than either of us exactly because he does not have to live among us…
So we can dismiss him and his antics from the technological distance afforded us in the concept of ‘we’.[/b]
The troll here then is always at a distance from the troll there.
[b]Bianco Luno
The most stable form government takes is oligarchy, rule by a circumscribed set.
Monarchy, tyranny, benevolent dictatorship at one end, true democracy at the other (each appearing as violent reactions to conditions) have short shelf-lives.
Their tremendous romance, however, lends them a greater reality than we have room to accommodate most of the time.
The oligarchy, to which little romance attaches, will, of course, ape one or the other as the age accords each in turn a place of honor.
For Plato, the person of the philosopher-autocrat, the construction of his literate class, was the ideal, the politically correct way of masking power.
In these times, democracies imagine themselves into existence with the same ease.[/b]
This is something we really don’t want to hear: A cynical troll’s take on Enlightenment. Too much [in places] like Herr Marx’s. Only, of course, including him.
An intense light emanates from the eyes when swollen with bottomless conviction. Everything visible is very clear and sharp, and there are no shadows, so what may lie in them we cannot see, try as we might.
~
But every conviction sleeps in one shadow or another.
A black hole seen from the other end perhaps. But equally mysterious.
[b]Bianco Luno:
Report from the fighting in Bosnia or some reverie based on such a report.
Not far from the ancient heart of Western “civilization and culture”, a woman was found impaled on a ten foot iron spike.
The spike entered through her vagina and exited through her mouth.
Further up on the spike, her small child…[/b]
The troll aims for the jugular here but there are far too many of them. It matters or it does not matter: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on…”
In the sculpture of war, flesh is the medium, conviction the tool.
It is, like it or not, the most important, the most affecting human art…
The handiwork is telling.
By contrast, this bombing of installations and infrastructure (and only incidentally of civilian shelters) from a technological distance is kitsch.
Imagine Barack Obama debating this with George W. Bush. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. So many buttons, so little time.
[b]Bianco Luno
Not even the images of post-World War I German Expressionism depicted in The Trench of Otto Dix measure up:
“…filled up with hideously mutilated bodies and human fragments. From open skulls brains gush like thick red groats; torn-up limbs, intestines, shreds of uniform,… Half-decayed remains of the fallen, which were probably buried in the walls of the trench out of necessity, and were exposed by the exploding shells, mix with the fresh, blood covered corpses. One soldier has been hurled out of the trench and lies above it, impaled on stakes.”
(Walter Schmits)
~
But these were men—and the word ‘victim’ applies, in the darkness of their pride, only with difficulty to them.
The report of the impaled mother and child may be apocryphal; I doubt photographs exist or whether the media (which, for my taste, is still far too squeamish in its presentation of the objects of popular outrage) would dare display them if they did.
Yet, even untrue, the image occurred to someone.
Art, like insult, need only purport to be true to deliver a reality of its own.
The mother and child on a spit easily supercedes the crucified son as our religious symbol.
~
You, I’m sure, refuse responsibility.
~
Throw them a morsel: by revealing a vulnerability, while you may disgust a few, alienate some, most will be gratified, knowing now in which pocket to place you.
Accessibility is the key to betrayal.
And for yourself, it provides a chance to destroy a new persona.
~
Each day, every hour, from Bosnia-Herzegovina, East Timor, Somalia, El Salvador… incidents more pertinent to my theme than I can make up or envision.
Why pick this one?[/b]
Of all the things people do not want to hear why indeed pick this one? Because it is both the farthest removed from philosophy and at its very heart and soul.
Even the ironists are at a loss here. It all seems so fucking futile. Some have a pocket now for everyone. And a virtually endless supply of personas.
Just ask the Barry Obamas paid to sustain the current crop of crimes against humanity.
[b]Bianco Luno:
Not a pacifist, I can’t say there isn’t anything you might do that would provoke me to kill you.
But war, like love, is not something I would want the state to make on my behalf[/b]
The state can make it on my behalf in the event of another Fuhrer. But not in the event the military industrial complex needs another infusion of cash.
It’s a rare dream that compares in impact to my waking visions.
And, for some, it has little to do with a vivid imagination. You can’t just imagine these things.
[b]Bianco Luno:
Despite a valiant attempt at fairness in her treatment of female moral development, Carol Gilligan can’t seem to help performing a revaluation in favor of the predisposition toward continuity, prioritizing the relationship, the network or web of connection over separation, autonomy, and the isolating tendency of marking out obstacle strewn paths of individuation traditionally dear to one sex.
Though I can appreciate her view as corrective, I interpret differently one critical image she educes.
She quotes Jake, an eleven year old boy, who considers that one should have the right to destroy oneself with “a hand grenade” but not with “an atom bomb” (as then, presumably, the rights of others would be involved).
The image of violence is blindingly bright to Gilligan.
Amy, the eleven year old girl, (not in so many words but to the same effect) stresses the importance of communication and the responsibility we have for one another, and that the right thing to do is what preserves the relationship, not simply sustaining the negative obligation to refrain from trampling the rights of others…
My partisan reflex is to wonder which of these two small voices I find more immediately offensive:
Her responsible coziness or his brutal rambunctiousness?
In the boy’s defense, Amy is utterly humorless.
Might not the boy’s explosive humor be more indicative of a deep vulnerability to the idea of autonomy and a greater, more vivid, concern for its uglier consequences than her premature sincerity is of an understanding of the human connections at stake?
“…but not in the instance of any given bratty boy.”
And in the instance of this solemn girl?[/b]
Bianco takes seriously the role of biology in the gender wars. And it is easy enough to become a reactionary here: sexist twaddle!!
These things are too complicated for me to understand. But it is only when I insist they are too complicated for anyone else to understand that some take umbrage.
You, perhaps?
[b]Bianco Luno:
How quaint the contrasts I preserve between women and men, people and animals.
Won’t these come to an end, coalesce, resulting in simply one category of sentient flesh?—and eventually, just matter, substance as we expand our rights-conferring consciousness to engulf everything?
You, at some distant point in the future, when you come to judge me antique in my discriminations, will you understand that I am playing my music on period instruments, the best I can strain to acquire?[/b]
Quaint in relationship to what though? Certainly not to the truth.
Here for example is another period piece:
From The Magus:
We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only layed on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
Animals never come up though.
Truth, not as a correct representation of the world, but as an act of terror. A terrorist theory of truth.
And these are always delivered by trolls. Just ask the folks who receive them.
[b]Bianco Luno:
The most hateful thing about me is how transparent I am.[/b]
You can see right through him, can’t you? Only you are probably convinced he could never see through you.
Pose after pose.
Why ever settle for sincerity as long as we can keep this up?
And this would be true even in a world we weren’t forced to play games in.
[b]Bianco Luno:
Who wouldn’t sympathize with the Nazis?
As a dark-skinned, non-Aryan, with a distaste for authority, no less, I’m sure, had I been available to them, I too would have been fuel for their ovens and contributed to the peculiarly greasy soot that settled over the Polish countryside.
But I am available to you and my time may yet come.[/b]
Alas, nearly 20 years later and his time still has not come. Yet, as with you and I, he does draw closer and closer to that other fiend in history.
Please don’t unfurl your kindness toward me; if it does you a favor, it does nothing for me.
For some, to be or not to be selfless is just another way to note to be or not to be selfish.
The truly cynical troll.
[b]Bianco Luno:
“We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. [Because] to abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice.” Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror.[/b]
But don’t you first have to believe this, asked the troll?
Well, given how few people there are who want to believe that.
The end of history—when ‘you’ and ‘I’ conflate to ‘we’, according to Marx—seems barely conceivable to me.
In Marx, as a descriptive thinker, I see no threat.
As when dead, it cannot matter to me then, at that time, as it so much unnerves me, still existing, now.
When the hardness of my separateness dissolves, so will my fear.
But as a normative theory it is a very hard sell; it may, I suspect, in fact, be the right thing to advance, but only according to a conception of rationality no individual (and who else could be the target of the promotion?) can think.
Like my plan for depopulating the planet, it will have to be seen as a joke, however intended.
He may well be describing only a particular historical age however. The one Ayn Rand susbscribed to from an entirely different direction. Besides, we all help to depopulate the planet eventually.
Ha ha.
[b]Bianco Luno:
Every time the boy brought home something he thought precious, found in a ditch, he was met with derision, and the lattice of feelings, on which he’d trained to grow enough hope as to seem inhuman, crumbled.
What he selects now from the gutter is decomposed or barbed or smelly, and ready—the boy is now always, like a scout, ready.[/b]
I’m always ready for whatever you bring here.
It must be, you feel, the boy might have reacted differently, or can now.
And I’m the one always ready to retort, “really, in the end, what’s the difference?”
[b]Bianco Luno:
Stupidity n., term of art: the subconscious suppression of an unprepossessing truth for comfort. Suppression for survival should tend to be more conscious—for survival, i.e., to avoid suicide, insanity or worse—and perhaps excusable through being tragic.[/b]
When you become intent on bringing this all up to the surface you will have chosen to live in the world of distractions. Like me. Nothing is tragic here. How could it be?
Panhandler: “Not all that bad, Christmas, for business. Folks get sappy and reach in their pockets. Worst time is summer. Everybody thinks you’re having too much fun and they walk on.”
For everything there is a season: turn, turn, turn.
[b]Bianco Luno:
Incompatibility of consciousness and sincerity.[/b]
Unless, of course, you become conscious of the right things. If you’d like, I’ll make a list of them.
Two women in conversation in a café.
I can only see the face of one and barely hear anything.
Her expression alternates between amazement and nodding acknowledgment or approval.
Do I ever have conversations where I can make use of such faces?
Or am I just unaware of my substitutes for them?
The faces that most intrigue me always seem to alternate between outrage and fear.
And that is because my own often betrays the fear I feel in confronting those that most enrage me.
I want them gone. I can’t make them go away. Not without the sort of consequences that will make me go away.
If only there was a viable substitute for having to live with this.
[b]Bianco Luno
Why can’t kindness to others also be a kindness to oneself?[/b]
Or cruelity to others as well.
There is no going back.
If there ever was a golden time it is irretrievable.
Without sounding too hopeful, we must come to embrace the darkness more and more.
Yes, we lie ourselves to the grave but it appears to work.
Not if we believe a lie about going back is the truth. That works too.
Are my mannered questions lightly disguised, now antique, aphorisms?
Is an awareness of the impossibility of things a feigned ignorance?
Are we shirking the responsibility of sincerity?
Don’t I really know enough to be sincere?
Do we know enough about ignorance to feign sincerity [or sincerity to feign ignorance] in confronting those who claim to understand those things we insist are impossible to know?
Must we always tie words like this together in a slip knot?