Eso’s Chronicles  210/ 2 

Responsibility to Death (2)
© Eso A.B.

As I was listening a few evenings ago to the Senators of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee grill three members of the U.S. executive branch, John Kerry, Chuck Hegel, and John Dempsey, I heard someone say: “Make statesmen responsible to laws”.

Yes, I thought, that should be, but what about asking to “…make statesmen responsible to death”?

Is ‘death’ a law? Or an office? Or a living thing?  Indeed it is—in numbers of ways.

First of all, if there were no death, there would be no laws or, better, there would be only rules. I do not much care for laws, given that in our time these are much abused, not least, by some of the highest offices and courts, the latter which appear—as in the U.S.—to have come to the conclusion that they are a law unto themselves. Rules, however, are more like traditions, and are, sometimes, imbedded in our very language. I have—so it seems to me-- endlessly repeated through my blogs the example of the ‘endearing word’, which grammarians mistakenly call ‘the diminutive’. Indeed, ‘the diminutive’ diminishes nothing, but expresses an attitude of endearment, in the worst case giving it an ironic tilt. For example, by saying “Johnny, be a darling boy”, when in fact Johnny has been a bad boy and has taken from his sister her favorite toy by force. In my country, Latvia, several centuries ago, before the universalization of the written word and ‘education’ of the ‘peasants’, the ‘endearing word’ was ubiquitous. It belonged to the oral tradition. Even at the beginning of the 20^th century, Latvian poets used the ‘endearing word’ rather frequently. For example, as the poetess Aspahziya wrote: “Mazā sirmā kumeliņā, jāj pa ceļu pasaciņa”: re: ‘on a small grey and dear foal, rides the dear fairy tale as she comes our way….’ With the oral tradition by now replaced with urban ‘news reports’, the ‘endearing word’ has almost disappeared.

Today endearment (of a rock, a mote, a knife, or a bird) has been replaced by its really real ‘hard equivalent’. For example, a spoon [karot(e)-ihte] has become an inflexibly hard ‘karote’. The loss of the suffix “-ihte” has meant the loss--even death--of the Latvian language. Of course, this does not mean that the written language of a clever writer cannot be endearing, but this is so only for the reader-connoisseur, not for the Latvian community as a whole as it used to be when it was still ‘a peasant’ in rural districts or inhabited the wood.

“Responsibility to death” is forgotten when “…responsibility to law” is imposed. As the leadership of the U.S. is proving to us at this very time as it seeks excuses to make war on Syria “…responsibility to law” is relative if you have the ‘power’ of violence on your side. The President of the U.S. may simply ignore the law ‘on the books’ and make one himself. Neither Russia allied with China can prevent ‘Obama of the U.S.’ from surrounding them with missile launchers on their geopolitical underbelly, and threatening them with evisceration, i.e., spilling their gut for those under ‘Obama care’, while leaving the office once occupied by ‘oriental’ heads and brains of these empires for himself and his military and oligarch barons.

For all that, if the world were to suddenly recover “…responsibility to death”, “…responsibility to law” would become moot. If you wish to know why (?) the answer is (:) “…because death is the only ‘law unto itself’ there is”. There are no presidents or autocrats who can escape the dictates of death. There is no physicist who with the help of a quantum computer will enable one to jump ‘the gap’ from material to organic reality, no matter how many dream of discovering a way.

During the last several decades, the ‘mechanist philosophy’ has become increasingly aggressive with ‘dreams’ of achieving equivalency with organic reality. It has begun black listing ‘the gap jumping methods’ of living organisms. For example, some internet platform will not allow you to post a link that contains words such as ‘cannabis’, ‘narcotic’, ‘X ’, and the like, simply because mathematics and ‘computer mechanics’ has come to believe that theoretically it can make calculations regarding matter that will enable them to replace the chemistry laboratory and become a religion, which like neo-Christianity will henceforth seeks miracles of its own. It is my hope that this ‘miraclemongering’ will fail sooner than neo-Christianity did. As neo-Christianity proved, ‘miraclemongering’ is a violent pastime, among its victims being such profound men as Jan Hus  and Giordano Bruno , both of who were burnt at the stake, because both took “…responsibility to death”  seriously.

At a time when the ‘really real word of science’ may with some justification  be proud of ‘quantum mechanics’ and the discovery of (potential) parallel universes, the same theory persuades scientists that ‘the gap’ that exists between ‘a thing’ and a thing as ‘a wave’, though ephemeral, is bridgeable by turning the ephemeral into matter. Hence physics is now engaged in the repression of the divine which cannot be reached by the agency of ‘the law’ or quantum computers, but only death.

Wherein lays the tendency to gain control over the human mind?

I have argued that it is to be looked for in the transformation of oral language into a written language, because the latter has a tendency to turn itself into bureaucratic ‘Law’, which attempts to turn the organic world into an urban setting, which ultimately is little more than a desert.

In terms of history, this transformation belongs to a book. We call it the ‘Bible’. It is the curious ‘genius’ of the Bible to order and dictate human behavior. It probably began when a Jewish ‘wise man’ determined that on the third day of ‘creation’ God said: “Let the waters under heaven come together into a single mass, and let dry land appear… and God saw that it was ‘good’” [NJB]. The judgment of ‘good’ begins the tradition of moralizing and biblical ‘miracle mongering’, which is a matter of imposing belief and demanding faith that the imposition is ‘good’, which can be achieved only through violence. The Zionist State of Israel today continues to impose the Laws of the torah over Palestine and judge its seizure of Palestinian land a ‘good’.

Now the Jews of Khazaria were not the only ones to create Laws, but it so happened that it was through their torah that this tradition of elitist violence (after all, the Vedas created the repressive and violent caste system of India) entered the West and most directly influenced what came to be known as neo-Christianity or the ‘religion’ of Western Kings, who then ordered to be written the so-called New Testament and created out of the ancient folk hero, King/Basil, the theatrical figure of  (King) Jesus Christ.

Of all the ‘Holy Books’, it is the neo-Christian ‘New Testament’ that specifically eliminates “...responsibility to death” by making death an irrelevancy by claiming ‘Christians’ to be immortals.

Eso’s Chronicles 199/ 9
Violence or Death? (9)
© Eso A.B.

In a book of interviews (“Violent Origins”), where the questions center around Rene Girard’s investigations in human sacrifice, violence, and death, in the Preface Gerard is quoted from yet another book of his (“Violence and the Sacred”) and is attributed the following statement: “Violence is the heart and secret soul of the Sacred.”

Without denying the importance of Girard’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uo3THEzEtc provocative thoughts and contributions in an age of indifference to one of the most central questions for social existence, there are several things about which Girard ‘puts words  into the mouth and thoughts into the brain of readers through omissions’ that  are patently false.

First, let us take the above statement: “Violence is the heart and secret soul of the Sacred.” If that is so, then are not the so-called ‘modern’ governments among the most sacred governments that have ever been? And is not then President Truman’s decision to drop the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima an act far superior to that of a Jesus, who drops it, so to speak, only on himself? General MacArthur, who  then confiscates all photographic and like evidence of the deaths and damage and destroyed it, was he not one of saintly disciples of presidential America? The grim fact that U.S. government refuses to sign a peace treaty with North Korea (for over 60 years), because its absence leaves it a gate through which--at some point in the future—to attack China? Is that not a guarantee for America’s future saintliness?

Second, if the reader listens to the interview with Girard at the link provided above, Girard is more than a little off when he states that all mythic violence is directed by entire communities against a scapegoat and that Jesus is the first ‘innocent’. That kind of absolute is borne of ideology and contempt for ancient history.

One of the phenomenons brought about by state (originally Frankish, then French) sponsored Catholic Christian hegemony is that its ‘Christian’ violence imposed on an older proto-Christian foundation (its own and those of neighbors) yet another violent restriction: self-sacrifice, either as a form of direct action or as sacrifice of one’s life for a cause other than dictated from those in the pyramid of power above them, though this point of view strengthens my argument that modern Christianity is but a wolf in sheep’s clothing in that it will not oppose those in the pyramid above them by pushing alarm buttons or by organizing direct actions, or by its priests sacrificing their lives in not-violent opposition. While Gerard never mentions the European Union, EU, his political support of a government under the ‘false flag’ invented in Aachen by Franks http://www.eupedia.com/europe/frankish_influence_modern_europe.shtml is evident. We can see its continuity in the French courts’ demand that Muslim girls do not wear their modest scarves to school.

As for ‘Jesus Christ’ being the first innocent who is slaughtered as a scapegoat, yes, it is true in-so-far that the story of Jesus is an invented story written over the story of king John Basil of Byzantium. Jesus himself is a fictional composite, created out of several saintly characters, that of Sts. Polycarp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarp and Basil (first name possibly John, but since Catholic repressions disguised behind the name of Disciple John) including. Yet even the invented story, invents his death in a Robin Hood setting, i.e., he is crucified between two thieves, surely meant to indicate that those who killed him wished the future to remember him as a criminal.

At the very beginning of the link there is discussion of Oedipus, but Girard, a literary critic among other things, completely or deliberately  misreads the story by failing to see the hidden story within it. For a full reveleation see my http://oedipusrex.blogspot.com Indeed, the story of Oedipus Rex is a story of a king inheriting the tradition of self-sacrifice, but fearing death escaping it with tragic and violent consequences.

Gene Girard’s faith in religion as the ‘Word’ is a word for himself. However, since very ancient times humankind has been aware that the ‘word’ has to be reinforced by ‘deed’, and if such a deed and reinforcement is lacking, the ‘word’ becomes empty. This is what is behind the act of self-sacrifice rather than its substitute—violence. This is what is behind humans working together as a community, rather than letting one individual of ‘empty word’ exploiting them together for his own gain. Yet Girard’s thought—outside of being provocative in an age where thoughtfulness suffers of malaise—ends up replacing God with Money. Whether the figures which stand behind Money are God, Gates, or Rockefeller--What a disaster for humankind!
 

Elsewhere in “Violent Origins” (p87) Girard insists that “…the imperfection of our knowledge does not deter us from interpreting these documents as reliable evidence of some kind of collective madness….”, The documents he is referring to are from the time of Black Death, when “…foreigners were killed, and Jews were massacred, and a century or two later, ‘witches’ were burned….”

 

While one may agree that the killing may have resulted from some kind of “collective madness”, the sorce of this great madness is the Church itself—that it  continues to propagate the will of the  secular leadership. Neither it or the secular leadership ever was or is capable of offering itself in self-sacrifice. It is evident that the neo-Christian dogma that “Jesus has died for our sins…” is just the right abracadabra of a  tetanus bacillus that covers the nail Christian institutions drive into the heads of their flocks and paralize the minds and bodies of the sheeple and make them part of a stupendous parade of the living dead. I can think of “resurrection” only in terms of the ‘living dead’ growing tired of being dead and shaking off this neo-Christianhomunculus for all ages to come.

Academia covering its brain with sand: http://www.globalresearch.ca/911-in-the-academic-community/5345251

 

Eso’s Chronicles 198/ 8
Death Reversal?  (8)
© Eso A.B.

In this short series of blogbuster blogs that begin with post 191/ 1

“Capitalist Radicals?”, and makes mild fun of the sometimes radical  posts at one of the more informative sites about the state of finace and business on the internet, I begin with a quate from “Looking away” by philosopher Slavoy Žižek. Žižek, who writes (p 78): “…love is an exemplary case of what Jon Elster calls ‘states that are essentially a by-product’ an innermost emotion that cannot be planned in advance or assumed by means of a conscious decision.

What if I replace the word ‘love’ with the word ‘death’? Might not ‘death’ also be “an exemplary case of what… is ‘essentially a by-product’ of an innermost emotion that cannot be planned in advance or assumed by means of conscious decisions?”

So, how do we arrive at the ‘essential by-product’? I have to resort to a rather personal dream and story in which ‘it’ manifests itself as death and as ‘nothing’ and as ‘love’.

Dream: the space I find myself in is black-and-white. I come into this space as if by a door into a room. I am gripped by a feeling of terror that comes from no one or specific place. But it appears to me to be a more than real presence. I am not sure if my fear is of death or something unknown that is generated by the ‘within of myself’.

I slowly move deeper into the room, when peripheral vision lets me see behind me an ambulatory bed. If it has a sheet, it is not white, but a dark dark red. In front of me and the bed there also appears a person, whom I guess to be a doctor. I look at him—still filled with dread—and he returns my look with a humiliating smirk on his face. Nevertheless, I make a plea for help. And ‘help’ he does.

We shift our positions to a right angle left, where the ‘doctor’ stands directly in front of me and I have retreated from him a step or two. Out of nowhere there appears before the ‘doctor’ a man, somewhat young by appearance. The man is unresisting, a bit like a doll, and his head comes up to about the chest cavity of the doctor. The ‘doctor’ then places both of his hands with the forefingers on the man’s throat about where the carotid arteries are. He presses his fingers down, and the man collapses as if dead.

Dread however stills fills me, and again I ask the ‘doctor’ to help me. Again he does. He picks up the limp man by his shoulders, while I pick him up by his feet, and both of us, with me moving backward, move for the door that leads out of the house and is behind me.

We walk down the steps of the house with the ‘corpse’ held by its shoulders and feet, and move across the yard to a brown wood board fence and hedge, which stands about ten yards from the door of the house. We place the body behind the hedge and beside the wood fence, then return to the house.

Once inside the house, the ‘doctor’ and ambulatory bed have disappeared. Nevertheless, I am still filled if not with dread, but great anxiety as I look to the other end of the room, where there is a floor to ceiling window with a bed to its right. Before the window stands a great guerilla like black shadow; but in the bed, her knees drawn up in a fetal position and her chin tucked to her chest lies my ‘love’.

I awaken with a hollow feeling in my stomach and ask myself: “What was that about?” still vividly recalling the sense of terror that I apparently held but a few moments ago. The question lingers with me for a few days, but no interpretation comes until I read the word ‘nothing’ somewhere. Suddenly, I realize that the shadow is Nothing. It was this Nothing who made this incursion in the dream within me. It was death itself that had come visiting.

Questions, still remain however. Or I should say there are yet facts which have to come and contribute to the interpretation. One fact that I have not mentioned yet is that I dreamt the dream about two weeks before my eightieth birthday. Another fact is that I have fallen in ‘love’ with a woman not yet thirty. Some may be tempted to say the word ‘playboy’, unfortunately, far from so. A third fact is that I am single, financially down to the basics, which allows my eye row without guilt, because I know that not only can I not pay for what my eye likes, but am forced by circumstances to remain frugal and then some. The fourth factor is that the young woman in the dream who lies in a fetal position is the young woman to whom I am attracted by desire or, if you wish, ‘love’.

Because the black shadow stands just at the foot of the bed and appears to looks out the window, this may suggest that the young woman has drawn her legs into her lap out of fear of it. On the other hand, it may be that she is in the position she is, because she feels no less dread than I do, but this is because of an entirely different reason--because I may have proposed (symbolically) to her. If I were a man of means, I indeed would do so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laBTtJJxCnw. Yet because of my age, and because I may shortly die, ‘love’ is a deadly experience for both of us. ‘Love’ becomes the curtain in front of a tabernacle for both of us

And the space before the tabernacle becomes the stage in front of which the dream performs-demonstrates to me the impossibility of my desire.

When I realize the meaning of it all, I understand and become rather contrite. I regret the circumstances for, both, me and her. Yet whoever may read this, there are yet a couple of other factors within which the unconscious dreamer, the Nothing, dreams. One is that I am on my eleventh day of a water and juice diet protesting the stone face of the government under which I live. Two is that the young woman is planning to shortly work at a nursing home.

Regarding the government which I protest: it practices what the leader of the opposition calls shadow politics, which he describes thus: “…when it comes to evaluating questions regarding the future of the nation, the commentators are always state bureaucrats or paid government advisers.”

Tibet socialist villages http://www.bbc.co.auk/news/world-asia-china-23100427  

  

 

 

Eso’s Chronicles 159
“The Capitalist ‘For Life’ Politburo” (4)
© Eso A.B.

The European elites, having formed a European Union along the lines of the English Magna Charta on behalf of English Lords and Princes, have been creepily crawling in their long tradition of unilataralist ways over the people and nations of Europe for many years, even centuries.

One does not have to look far to see how the cream has been skimmed off the top of the labours of the people of Europe, at the same time as the Europeans have been exposed to a steady stream of neo-liberalist adverts of how “good” the skim milk that the political centrifuge sends to the jar for lesser gravity products is http://creamseparatorgallery.webs.com/photos/1labelsep.jpg .

The model of ‘parliamentary democracy’ has served the European elites well in spite of the French, Russian, and German Revolutions signalling warnings that the model(s) on which European society was being formed suffered from great shortcomings.

One of the reasons why the ‘model’ of parliamentary democracy has served the elites so well is because in spite of a number of deadly political upheavals, even in the face of seeming populist victories, the ultimate victor has remained the elite. In war the political elites almost never die. Why is this?

I have argued that the reasons are social separation as strict and severe as in the Indian caste system. The separation, preceded by biology driven altruism, may have evolved step by step and not necessarily in the same sequence in all species.

A. The earliest step toward inequality is theft. Theft is one of the most common traits among adult animals, say, birds, who have no compunctions about picking off the seed right in front of the beak of their neighbours. Of course, the birds do not call this ‘theft’, but merely ‘taking what the other has not yet taken’. The first sign of altruism and differentiating between theft and giving probably begins with the ‘gift’, observed in birds feeding their young. Among animals, the mother offers the young suck of her very body by way of transforming designated parts of the body into milk producing glands. At a later stage, the father may also join in feeding the young by sharing with the mother and the young in a recently killed gazelle. Later yet, comes the mating ritual, in which the male partner may court the female with a gift of food. The question of who gives the ‘gift’ first, the male or female, is a tricky one. While the above suggests it is the female, the behaviour of some spiders suggests otherwise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuptial_gift_(animal_behavior) .

B. The second step is a conscious attempt to reverse biology initiated altruism. Such is the institution of taxation. Taxation began with the imposition of a tax system on the European nomads, the Evenks of Tartaria. The early tax was in animal pelts. The taxes probably began as a result of the Viking invaders threatening and pressuring local rulers along the river basins of the Volga, Don, Dniepr, and other rivers. The rulers were then forced to pressure and repress the people of the societies they led in their capacity as ‘sacred’ (self-sacrificing; God ordained) kings.

Taxation resulted in a top-down rule even in societies where such a rule did not exist previously and was fiercely resisted. For reasons of obvious advantages it brought to the elites, the system spread quickly and introduced altogether different societal and political parameters.

C. In order to decrease the inborn (biological and genetic)—and permanent (until perhaps genetic engineering in the offing today)—opposition to taxation, the elites needed to change the religion that underlay the egalitarian social ways that prevailed among the people of the wood and the savannah.

D. ‘Religion’ of the people of the pre-taxation days had little resemblance to the ‘religion’ of our time. The ‘religion’ of the Evenks was only incidentally imbedded with moral teachings or illustrated by some particular story of origin, but came with the mother’s “coo” and lullaby. In short, religion was imbedded in the language of the people, not in the names of Gods and tribal totems. These latter may be anthropological fixtures, but have little to do with ‘religion’ in a theological sense.

E. While I have no knowledge of the Evenk language, it appears to have left its influence far and wide. Many words that suggest movement, such as avant (garde), avec, advance, and personal and place names such as Ivan, Vanka, Lithuv(enian)anka, Latv(ian)anka, etc. are derived from the name of this Tartary tribe. Of course, over time, local idiom blended the pronunciation of the word to its own ways. 

The ‘religion’ of these ancient people is closely related to what our dictionaries today pejoratively define as the ‘diminutive’ http://thesaurus.com/browse/diminutive Wilfully associated by grammarians with ‘small’ and ‘tiny’—as a result of the above mentioned change of memes in religion and theology—the ‘good news’ of the new civilization (neo-Christian) arising under the tutelage of taxation was the arrival of our present mesmerizing capitalist economic system.

Neo-Christianity through its emphasis on bodily resurrection (as opposed to the earlier meme http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme   that emphasized spiritually and psychically transmitted transmigration of souls), brought with it a heretofore unknown acknowledgement (by the superego http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego ) of the fear of death. This fear in due course closed off access to leadership by example, the example including self-sacrifice unto death in the creation, forming, and maintenance of a cultural community.

By closing off thought about self-sacrifice unto death by the leadership, we close off thought about any ‘the third way’ solution to our current political impasse.

Informative link: Capitalism hits the fan by Richard Wolff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HTkEBIoxBA