I have been asked by an associate with a less than mild temperament that I somehow need to wake up: "Wake up mate." Generally this has to do with a confused conversation dealing with ethnic values in politics. I am of the absolute belief that only radical tolerance will be sufficient to help us to prevail as a species. I am intolerant of intolerance. I believe in cultural diversity but a shared capacity to communicate and to heal one another. Healing.
In the wrong reading all this sounds like politically correct fluff. In the right context it is a highly developed a way to approach human relationship.
Every spirtual development that yearns to evolve always carries with it a shadow of repression. It is a matter of how the hatred is repressed, stifled and killed: which means that it must be killed in a lived manner. This is called psychological work: living the death of instinct is just one aspect. Survival is another.
In a deeply compelling book, given to me by my friend Oppermann, called "The Second Book," the author Bazdulj begins with a series of poetic wakings. These are the wakings of Friedrich Nietzsche on toward the end of the end of his life. These may be the most poetic treatment of the topic of waking since Adonai breathed life into the red clay Adam at the beginning. If we suspend disbelief for a moment, and consider it possible that Nietzsche was the actual genius who imagined the Uebermensch, conceived it within the heat of his own creative force, then we could say that Nietzsche's waking in this book heralded a close to the waking that had taken place since the time of Adam.
Even more complex is Muharem Bazdulj's next chapter devoted to a possibly fictional letter to an editor of a journal of a highly earnest (perhaps a bit too earnest) fellow on the nature of a friend's poetry, a "Muhamed Deznetic" which carries an Islamic religious undertone, both to the interpreter and to the poems cited. With Bazdulj one can not be too careful with correcting one's literalisms, but perhaps I digress from the subject of waking too much into the issue of tolerance and ethnic sensitivity.
However this associate that urges me vehemently to "Wake up mate." And this brings us to the very mediocre and very impoverished subject of Franklin Deleno. The Article he pointed to was:
http://freakylynx.livejournal.com/511564.html
I laugh and think about how I mistrust the information found in web logs in general. The source article belongs here:
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-10-05-1.html
I don't find Deleno very likeable according to one fellow's judgement of his corporate involvements that led to him getting fabulously wealthy and played a part in the implosion of the stock market in October 2008. I won't name corporate names because it becomes rapidly too nauseating to do so. I do not really want to do much more research on the subject, since the area of high finance is largely beneath me. If it isn't "beneath" me, as many will be quick to point out, then I am simply an idiot and it is beyond me, and my "values." High finance and paper markets, "Jenseits von Gut und Boese." I can send them to hell and they will quickly send me to hell. Perhaps it is simply beyond the ken of my own nausea, and others, including my interlocutor will say "wake and survive, or stay asleep and drown or die."
Most of the time this kind of waking, into this form of nausea is intolerable. Sometimes waking with a feeling of Nausea is unfortunately what I am subjected to. But in this brutal "bardo" (meaning "passage through the realm of death and beyond") of revulsion we come to yet another name of surpassing mediocrity: Orson Scott Card.
"Ad Hominem" arguments are considered logical fallacies. But I will make these two brief points:
- very brief research with the debatable resource of Wikipedia indicates he places an extraordinary emphasis on a kind of homophobia. Card I believe refers to gay marriage as that which "marks the end of Democracy in America." Such an extremist view already puts our friend Card in the camp of individuals for whom the concept of Democracy has never fully been understood. I bid him fare well in his own stupor.
- The second point can be found on "civilization watch": That is that the "War on Terror" is one of the biggest lies sold to the "American Public" (which itself is a bizarre cavorting mass of confusion) is the "War on Terror," it is worse than a lie: it is terror precipitating itself. I am not saying we should "bury our heads in the sand" any more than we should "draw lines" in it. http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-10-29-1.html
It is not enough to use these comments to debunk Card's argument that the Democratic party might have got into bed with the Devil and refused regulation of major corporate entities. I do not know the full scope of the political nuances that might have justified these blockages of much needed regulation. Perhaps others will provide some of the sense or non-sense that situated the Democratic snare in a bubble of "trust" bursting with all the "busted" morgatages of the "American Dream." We will have to see what the outcome will be.
I have been warned not to tread where my feet do not have a solid ground of sufficient political research, however I can hardly refer to the man in question as a reliable paragon of trust, "integrity and honesty." Yes, I believe that "integrity and honesty" are what we have left to stand for, but we can see that these values mean widely different things in a world where we must watch our own shadows so carefully.
I can point to the fact that the European world of religion and politics is now transplanted onto American soil. The place we live in is ours and we belong to it only in a contested manner. The "love it or leave it" mentality espoused frequently from the "right" should begin first with those people who speak the statement.
We are immigrants: and as Europeans we know only "to take" as our value. Such a value is markedly less wise than those who eschew "taking" and espouse "acceptance."
Balduj comments on two days in Nietzsche's life: the last day of the year 1888 and the first day of the year 1889. Balduj makes a great deal of the januarial nature of such an instant: Heiroglyphs of sunlight shine on the wall of Nietzsche's room on his waking still in 1888, in 1889 he remembers that Heiroglyphs intend both what they mean and the exact opposite. Such symbolism and indeterminacy borders on the sublime.
I know that when I wake it is many times in the dark, accompanied by the sound of an annoying electronic alarm clock powered by a single AA battery. The sound is unpleasant, grindingly technological. I stumble from my bed and dictate my dreams into a digital voice recorder. While the sun is still absent I hurry to brush my teeth, dress and take my morning walk. Such provisions as a morning walk serve to keep me sane when dealing with significant excoriations of workplace stress. I wake with dreams from the night before, and these dreams are precious to me, since they are not frequently dictated to me by anyone I have mentioned here so far. They are hints at liberation, at a sense of my own telling of a story of life in this world that opposes a world of stories, some of which are right and some of which are wrong. I wake with a sense that what I had surrendured to in sleep is somehow precious to me, and moreover, that I must make every endeavor to make sense of these pronouncements.
My dreams have never told me to vote along any party lines. They have told me to look at what revolts me and to learn from it.
I do not know what our friends or their authorities wake from or wake to. I do not know if these wakings are beautiful or devilish. Waking is one of the most intimate moments of the day, regardless of the partner one shares one's bed with: the only issue is to find the "integrity and honesty" to love that partner as fully as one can.
So much waking needs to be done. The soul of the world demands that we look upon the citizens of this world with an equal sense of love, be they our own biological offspring or the children of others, who have other names for their gods. I can say that in all likelyhood the best dreams that anyone can wake from are the dreams that force us to deal with our revulsion in a significant way that carries the revulsion and our deepest care for all speaking with us on this matter.
When we wake, we open our eyes. To open our eyes is to see, but all vision that is true vision comes from grief, from a knowledge of death. Sometimes ideas and opinions have to die. Sometimes intolerance has to die. Sometimes our loved ones have to die. Sometimes we have to die. Life gains its value from right-acceptance of death, not longing for death, nor morbidly clinging to the last vestages of what we believed to be the true life. To "take" remains the provenance of death, just as it is for life to "accept" the painful stipulations, the sting of death, in order for it to be truely aware, and to awake. The true life awaits us when we see clearly through the painful doorway of grief.
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