Eso’s Chronicles 289 / 2  
A Civilization of Persecution
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

OF PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE

At the ‘Soklehni’ household, it was the women who did most of the work around the house—from milking cows to gardening. The men were around the house when in the carpentry room, when the household needed a new water bucket or barrel for pickling, or shoeing a horse, or beekeeping. Women took care of the cows, the sheep, the pigs, and the chickens, while the men looked after the horses; the men also ploughed the fields, did logging, and did (except for the chickens) most of the slauthtering of animals. Except for smithy work, both sexes knew how to do each other’s part if the need arose. Both went into the wood to do mushrooming and berry picking, and both knew how to milk cows. The head of the household, my aunt (and her husband), did all cooking and baking, made the dough and baked the bread, and prepared the animal parts for cooking and baking (“haven’t you seen a rams balls before?”/ “This is a cow’s udder!” http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Melkmeid_Dutch_girl_milks_a_cow.jpg ) A neighbor, whose farm was named “Skroderi” (Dress Maker), cut our hair and used it in horse collars that he made.

The children did most of the animal herding and did what the heads of the household told them to do: join the men in crayfishing, go fishing with them, pick the berries, pick up the eggs in the chicken coup in the morning, ride the horses who pulled the hay load to the hayloft. The old folks (including men) did most of the knitting, spinning of wool and cotton yarn.

In the fall and winter months, all spent time at the loom http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Hand_weaving_loom.JPG . The children mostly observed.

Because there was no electricity, the household sat around a petroleum or carbide lamp in the evening and sang, read stories from books or newspapers, or worked at knitting or spinning, perhaps braiding onions to a pole, which were later hung close to the ceiling.

Before the days of the printed letters arrived, most of the evenings were spent singing, which often led to singing ‘wars’—if the singers grew restless. It was as a consequence of these long and ‘boring’ evenings with ‘nothing to do’ that the Latvian language and culture evolved. It was a female dominated culture of which the dominant Goddess was the Sun.

The Sun meant warmth, a welcoming smile, the dawn of the day, the mysterious ‘non-event’ of the noon hour (when anything could happen).  The Sun lived in the ‘other land’ (vinya Saule), where the dead went to live out whatever there was to the rest of their lives.

The Sun also became translated into other Goddesses, the chief of who was Laima, the Goddess of Fate and Fortune. When at an earlier time, I had to translate the name of the Goddess into English, and had not yet thought to associated Her with the Sun, I simply called Her the Dearest Goddess. It was She who was the midwife called for when a child was born: it was Laima who picked him-her up in a white towel and foretold what was to come. Marija Gimbutas, the late anthropologist, once wrote me a note in which she regretted that there was no way to make a more direct translation of Laima’s name, and that it was being lost.

While the official translation of the word for the ‘Sun’ is ‘Saule’, unofficially and on the subjective level, She was called ‘Saulihte’, which translates into English as ‘Dear’ or ‘Dearest Sun’—the latter manifest through a grammatical form used for endearments. Since before the introduction of letters and writing, Latvian (and all other languages) was an oral language, it was the subjective level that prevailed and dominated our forebears’ culture.

From what I understand, the Chinese letters may retain some of the subjhective nature of Chinese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters .

As proud as people of modern times may be of their literature, literature does not stand equal to the oral culture’s ability to form culture: the subjective ‘endearing word’ creates a cultural world that stands on the opposite of the cultural world of the written and ‘legalized’ (officialised) word. Whereas in the subjective cultural world the ‘official’ or ‘straight’ word stands for the inflection of ‘naked’ reality into one’s language, the subjective cultural world never does without the ‘endearing word’.

We should make note, that the language used by our contemporary media and in our literature is always ‘officialese’, the culture it creates and maintains is plainly ‘scientific’ at best. As an example, when the Westernized homus (from homo) speaks of a ‘sunset’, which by now is as trite an image they come, my forebears used to say: “Dear Sun, wherever Thou goest, take with Thee a hundred endearments to my dear mother.”

It is unfortunate that today linguists and philosophers never point out this difference between subjective and officialise languages; and if any of these is ever primitive, it is the latter version. It is the denial of subjectivity that gives modern reality its secularist orientation.

Save the Wood! http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/

Saw Cross https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPI4FceVgDDSuUxIJcVFT6TfjBf6IQwE5T0nZB9xmrUUFmPppkD7WJte8Z2M4Hr6pCOlMRAGQ34oPcCr8n3WQK-j-acV7Yrd0kWyLS6qNQrRzzKrt2dsS-iDrr3GVqgtgSkpeSzXxbAc0i/s220-h/DSCF7743.JPG

Eso’s Chronicles 237/ 23
Dreams De-Aestheticized
© Eso A.B.
 

When one spies on dreams, dreams are being invaded. In the Western World spying on dreams began with the French Catholic Church insisting that the people of the wood, among whom they built their obscene donjons gazing over the treetops http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=donjon+photo&qpvt=donjon+photo&FORM=IGRE . Looking over the top also means an implicit desire to see what is happening below the treetops. This is where the so-called Confession and Confession of Sins came in, and why the secret police in the disguise of the Catholic priesthood was necessary. Later came Sigmund Freud and dream interpretation; and later yet behavioral psychology, which aimed to control human beings through drugs and creation of culture under the control of a Central Authority. American led Military-Bankster Culture is the result.

While drugs are ever more extensively used, the ‘reading’ of the subconscious mind is being replaced by an ever greater analysis of what part of our brain has what function, which function then comes under the control of tiny electrodes inserted into the brain whence by a ‘tele-’ apparatus come signals from some government facility, for example the NSA , i.e., National Security Agency, an agency without constraints when it comes to exercising  control over the population. A new God has arrived to terrorize humankind.

Be that as it may, this is the opposite to what humans perceived was necessary to form a community at the beginning of ‘civilized’ time.

As discussed in previous blogs, in dream-time, we imagined that in mythical space-time there was a castle in which resided a mythical King (sometimes also called ‘god’), who at the end of his rule died by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrificial death was understood by all the dreamers who lived in the woods as atonement by a never seen or met communal authority as a divine sign sent to beg pardon for the misfortunes that humankind living under the guidance of its own dream-space and time experienced.

One of the short-comings of government by self-sacrificial death is that it demands its leader to be an individual of great will and dedication. This is why self-sacrifice, if not forthcoming, was replaced by various forms of sacrifice of others. In the early days, failure to self-sacrifice was replaced by sacrifice that used the garotte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrote. Early on the public was never told about the king’s failure to die on the its behalf, but however he died, it was told that he died for his people and kingdom. The telling was done, of course, by those who succeeded the King and had performed the sacrificial ritual. Such a lie made leading the community by the Dream-King’s successors easier.

In later years, after many individuals had gathered up the courage to form a community through their self-sacrificial charisma, and when, for that very reason, public failures happened more often, sacrifice was replaced by a ritual theatre. The most impressive theatre of this kind was performed by the Azteks, the predecessors of the Mexican people of today. Once sacrifice reached such a high degree of ritualized and, therefore, theatrical state, the theatrical ‘devices’ employed in realizing the ritual were many, including the skinning of the sacrifice. By this time, the sacrifice no longer necessarily included the King, but was often replaced by captured ‘enemies’.  Anthropologist David Carrasco describes the ritual-theatre in his book “City of Sacrifice” thusly:

“Once the victims had been sacrificed and skinned, the ‘skins’ were worn by the captor’s assistants, in prodigious displays of male power and success. As these skins worn by Aztec males moved through the city, the experience of the ideal battlefield permeated the public spaces of Tenochtitlan, and transformed the neighborhoods into miniature battlefields….” This ritual-theatre, which introduced the ‘magic’ or ‘charisma’ that was necessary to bind individuals into a community is sometimes called as “synesthesia”, which Carrasco describes (p157) as a study in ritual and theatre that “…gives emphasis to the anthropology of experience and especially the process of synesthesia (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/synesthesia), which awakens in the ceremonial atmosphere, the whole human organism to the ontological and political message of rituals.”

The exclusion of the King from existential syneththesia rituals eventually became an existential flaw in the ritual that was meant to form and maintain the community.

To put it simply: ‘the word got out’ that self-sacrifice was being faked and the ritual ceased to be charismatic in the way it had been when the people had still lived in the wood and had survived as animal herders, root, berry, and fruit gatherers, and mushroom pickers. As governments tried to cover the lack of their charisma by increasing the numbers of the sacrificed, they thereby substituted charisma with a dread that overwhelmed society (note no longer ‘community’). It is an open secret, that society today is no longer held together by charisma, but through the threat of annihilation. Society has an implicit understanding that increased social chaos and war casualties are not something to be accepted as truisms, but are a consequence of cynicism bred by political de-aethesia http://www.thefreedictionary.com/aesthesia. No, not aesthesia, but de-aesthesia.

Widespread pessimism and a sense of despair has led society to understand that this ‘game’ of ‘de-aesthesis’ cannot, inspite the demand and insistence of governments, be long-lived. This is why on the one side of the social scale, superpowers and the elite who form their backbone are preparing for war, while the poor, on the opposite end of society, are going berserk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RVHDlPqZWE with no glue to hold them together.

Small countries, like my own Latvia, have been seized by one party governments, who get their support from one party super governments like the U.S., E.U., but also take as their examples from such other supergovernments like China, Russia, India. The war of which I speak above, is to be among the superpowers http://rt.com/op-edge/us-encircling-russia-via-nato-957/ in the inter-national realm, while intra-nationally it is waged as per the example set by NSA. Incidentally NSA’s invasion of intra-national space and private communications may not be so much to gather personal information, but to instill fear and repress individual sub consciousness.

If the wood hid the terrible deeds of our forebears, the city has no moss, grass. or leaves to hide a head torn off by an explosion, and will be seen lying in the street by every child and of course everyone else who lives in the city http://albumwar2.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/39024-728x481.jpg . Nothing will be hid, and there will be no dreams.

Eso’s Chronicles 156
I Don’t Know What to Think (1)
© Eso A.B.

In Blog 154, I mention that ever since God became the 'Word' and lost his 'Act'-ive Self, human beings have become passive and the norm of human life is best described as vegetative (that includes vegees bungee jumping). The fundamental problem appears to be that the ‘Word’ (capped W) always manages to inject itself between me (if presume myself as part of the public) and whatever I want to do. This ‘Word’ generally is the word of Another, who always manages to ‘suppress’ and make my word insignificant.

I trace the phenomenon to the rise of the Catholic Christian Church and the imposition of its ‘Word’ [with the help of military violence and inquisitorial torture] on behalf of a ruling elite over a civilization that has nothing to do with theirs, but which does have the means of military might and the experience of a butcher. Of course, like with most everything, there are exceptions.

One exception is the, so called, “liberation theology”, which originated in South America. It perceived the perverse doctrine of the Mother Church with a critical eye and attempted to return the Church to God as an Act. As MIT professor Noam Chomsky explains it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPp3Hykjl6s , the critics ended up dead. Had the liberation theology Activists submitted to the American led Evangelical (Wordy) theology, they would still be talking today and waiting for rapture.

While the reasons that are said to have caused the various doctrinal divergences within the Christian Church (such as trinitarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Trinitarianism or Arianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism , for example), the main split is between God as Act and God as Word. Today God as Word is the clear winner and controls ALL governments. All governments impose the Word on their subjects, and what the Word imposes at the most basic level is to tell the public “do not Act”, i.e., do not teach ‘liberation theology’, because it energizes the students to take remedial action. Since this split was begun by Western Christianity, it is justified in claiming to have brought the Bible (in so far as it is claimed by Western Christianity) to the world.

At the same time, it ought to be of a great wonder that near simultaneously with the ‘victory’ of Western or ‘Wordy’ Christianity comes its defeat not in the abstract, but real sense.

While the West has cast the entire planet into a crisis (economical, international relations, environmental, communal), the one with the most Revolutionary potential is that of the elite class. For the first time in its over a thousand year long history, the leadership of the world (China’s including) has been exposed as naked, moronic, murderous, unprincipled, and, therefore, unnecessary. There are many events that illustrate this.

Almost a fourth of Britons believe that Tony Blair should be arrested for war crimes; even as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaking from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London http://rt.com/usa/assange-kissinger-cables-wikileaks-500/ releases the so-called ‘Project K’, which consists of 1.7 million files composed of US Department of State diplomatic communications; even as this writer presents (via these blogs) the oldest known (to this time) falsified literary document, Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex (Rewritten)” http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com .

The literary falsification, behind which hides an attempt to release the ruling elites from responsibilities (mortal sins actually) incurred during their rule, does not come alone. As the reader knows, the New Testament, too, was written less to present the world with the teachings of Jesus, than to present a different account of what happened to the spiritual leader of Eastern Christianity, Basil (King) The Avenk, whom I present as ‘BasilTheBogomil’ in a series of blogs by that name.

Needless to say, I am aware that the reader is likely saying to him- or her-self that all these words seem confusing; one no longer knows what or whom to believe, what is or is not ‘real’ history. At the same time, this is precisely what I mean by writing (above) “a great wonder” at the coincidence of seeming Western ‘victory’ with the ‘rebirth’ of the Morning Star in the Eastern sky.

Even as the government of the United States of America is presumptuously exporting its fake democracy to fake dictatorships and is killing hundreds of thousands of people who have no idea why they are being killed, the killing done by the U.S. military is nevertheless Real and without meaning. How does one tell a young Iraqi that his-her life expectancy today is only about 30 years  http://rt.com/op-edge/iraq-environmental-catastrophe-hiroshima-533/

Regarding the subject of what is Real, but at the same time has no meaning, the philosopher Alain Badiou has a wonderfully succinct explanation.  Badiou states (‘A Conversation with Alain Badiou’, lacanian ink 23, 2004, pp. 100-1; toh to Žižek):

“The simplest definition of God and of religion lies in the idea that truth and meaning are one and the same thing. The death of God is the end of the idea that posits truth and meaning as the same thing….” To wit: truth and meaning become unglued; meaning without truth is the empty holy word of today’s Catholicism.

Given the crime committed by the U.S. government in its attempt to play God, and at the same time export to Iraq an incomprehensible and meaningless death, there necessarily arises a gut call for a Second Nuremberg War Crimes Trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials . Given the definitive separation of ‘God’ and ‘meaning’ that has occurred between 1945 and 2013, the ostensible God (the government of the U.S.) having rendered ‘meaning’ meaningless, the criminals should not be sentenced to death by hanging as before, but each given a capsule of an extremely  powerful painkiller, they must administer to themselves to achieve an unfelt death.

The effect of such medicine may not be a reassertion of meaning, but a doubling of the reality of Real, or as philosopher Žižek puts it: “…when the impossibility of the conjunction of meaning and truth is imposed on us: either we endorse the ‘postmodern’ stance and denounce the dimension of truth… or we engage in the effort to discern a dimension of truth outside meaning—i.e… the dimension of truth as Real.”

Impossible though it may seem to some, we may discover that this ‘truth’ was well known by the forebears of our present civilization, the so-called ‘primitive’ Adam and Eve.