Eso’s Chronicles 202/2
How to Destroy a Nation (2)
© Eso A.B.
 

Grandfather had enough of playing second fiddle to the Latvian state (though he had bought the state a number of military biplanes (I saw them during a fly-by over his vacation home in the summer of 1938), and my father had replaced him as editor-in-chief for some time). A few years before his death, he went to consult my godfather, Mintauts, and asked his opinion about a divorce from Emiliya. The legal mind advised him to forget it, as it meant that his heirs, the children of his first marriage, might be left with little legal rights to the money he had made or properties he had bought. The heir to the Habsburg Empire, Emiliya’s adopted son George (his father was an Austrian), would most likely get to keep it.

Meanwhile, the small sovereign state of Latvia enjoyed a small economic boom. Its agricultural products: butter, bacon, wood were in demand. The country had relatively few motor engines polluting its air, because the horse still prevailed in the countryside. The car owned by my father, a Chrysler, spewed gasoline fumes so badly that I became car sick every time the family took a trip to grandfather’s estate in the region of Kurzeme. I much rather enjoyed the family motorboat, the engine exhaust being quickly dissipated by the winds of the sea.

By the time the Soviet Union crossed Latvia’s borders, I was seven years old. The Soviets quickly put a stun grenade on the family’s dining table. At the beginning of WW2 (as I was turning eight) the granade went “Boom!” and eight members of the family disappeared in the Gulags, while two (my father and maternal grandfather, a former ambassador to Moscow) were likely tortured and shot.

The country as a whole split into two halves: the survivors of Soviet carnage turned pro-German, while the former have-nots fled the country with the retreating Soviet Army, which after WW2 was to occupy the country for nearly fifty years. I, my two siblings, and mother survived, by hiding in the countryside among the relatives of my paternal grandmother. It was there that I grew to love the countryside and its direct ways: if you wished to travel, you had to yoke a horse or two to the carriage, and the eye could not avoid watching the horse raise its tail when needing to make a fart.

After surviving a string of refugee camps and forty-six years in America, I was happy by the opportunity to return to Latvia. It turned out to be an unhappy experience as political disunity heightened by extreme poverty, consequent to shock economic policies forced on the country by capitalist America gave early indications that the country would not survive as a sovereign community.

Pressures that forced the dissolution of what traditions had survived the Soviets came as quickly as the first years of so-called ‘independence’. One man (a man in early middle age) was perceptive enough to publicly sacrifice his life in front of the Freedom Monument, but his act was dismissed by the state as imbecilic and his complaints were not investigated.

Interestingly, the blade of the axe came from the ‘nationalist’ influence out of exile. In the forty-six (rough estimate) years in exile, the nationalists—most coming from Latvian urban society or, for that matter, having been born to exiles living in an urban environment—were easy converts to capitalism. Irrational denial of all notions of egalitarianism, natural to agriculturalists, forest dwellers, and fishermen coupled with easy and accustomed access to consumer goods produced at the expense of the environment and countryside, became a convenient ‘capitalist tool’. The coup de grace was delivered by the argument that Latvia was ‘unnaturally’ countryside oriented, and had a disproportionate number of people living ‘unproductively’ in the countryside.

A number of descendants of Latvian exiles, who had no familiarity with the country other than participating in folkdance groups in Western urban ‘democracies’ were let loose with their capitalist ways (their own capital or with the capital of the corporations they were employed by) on a country that had not yet had any opportunity to accumulate capital of its own. The results were pure joy to those exiles who returned to Latvia as tourists once a year for two weeks, and pure disaster for Latvians who were not prepared for such quick changes, and, worse, had no support from their own government, which for all practical purposes had turned out to be a traitor to its country as a sovereign entity.

While the traitorous nature of the government was camouflaged behind numerous legalistic excuses, the fact remains that it denied its citizens the right to hold a referendum—ostensibly over whether to forgo the local currency (lats) for the euro, but actually to deny the citizenry the right to sovereign expression and set a precedent for further such denial.

As I wrote in a post to another internet platform, it is not that Latvia will cease to exist because of this. It surely will remain as a name for a place for some time to come; there will also remain a number of indigenous people who are lucky enough to escape the squeeze to have them flee the country as economic refugees. However, as a sovereign community, as a community that yet had the opportunity to discipline itself for survival through the practice of an economy that fully or partially accords with the principles of autarky has become fodder to foreign interests and badmouthing of planetary hegemony dominated by the West.

While the following link to a description of autarky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-8eaW3C-XY ends with a nearly full endorsement for globalization, Latvians would be wise to remember that globalization today is the result of the liberal application of violence as a facilitator to urbanist ends. On the other hand, autarky is successfully practiced by the Latvian Senate (Saeima), where autarky as in-house ‘democratic’ fascism (or do you prefer leeches to feces) rules supreme.

Eso’s Chronicles 201/ 1
An Autoholograph (1)
© Eso A.B.

I was born in Latvia in July of 1933, which was two months after control of the failing state was taken over by a patriot willing to risk his life to save it from self-destruction by politicians hypnotized by the rights of politicians to absolute ‘democratic’ rights. This is to say, politicians who, hypnotized by post Enlightenment illusions and encouragement of capitalist economics, had little or no regard for the people of Latvia as a community which had survived for thousands of years.

It was a time when the state of Latvia had just survived falling apart, because its ‘authority’ figure, the first President, Jānis Časkte,  died five years earlier (1927) at the premature age of 68. When I was old enough to comprehend something of politics, I heard some wag tell that if the man had not died that early in years, he would have become my godfather. As it is, my godfather became his oldest son, who was a judge at the Latvian High Court.

The Ariadne’s string for this labyrinthene connection derives from the fact that my paternal grandfather was a descendant of Herrnhuters, a religious offshoot of the 14-15^th century Jan Hus movement (especially concerned with the education of common man) which came to Latvia to rebuild a society destroyed by the Great Northern War (1700-1721). At the time these forebears came to Latvia, much of Europe was still under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, which made many of the lands rather interactive with their Germanic overlords. Not surprisingly, an analysis of my dna indicates that my great-forebears 5 generations removed came from the area of Herzogovina, an area once known for its religious hereticism and as home of an ancient Christian Church the members of which were known as Bogomils and Cathars.

The Herrnhuter method of reintegrating a destabilized and decimated society was to bring it together by integrating themselves within that society, then bringing everyone together by song and forming choirs. Education and preaching was another method. Dabbling in the mysteries of the Kabala was not excluded. In any case, my grandfather was a teacher, a choir master, and a moralist in that no one was allowed to speak ill of another person at the dinner table. When the Herrnhuter Church was repressed by the Latvian Lutheran Church (during the process of taking over the leadership of the Lutheran Church from its earlier German preachers), my great-grandfather Janis Benjamins lost his inn to a fire (said to have been caused by his wife, but more likely maliciously torched), and himself suffered shock and soon died. My grandfather, at the time was not yet ten years old. He and his sister were left in their mother’s charge, who earned her keep as a common farm worker.

As he grew older and proved an earnest student, the German baron (whose manager Jānis Benjamins had been) helped grandfather to get his higher education at a then well-known country school: Cimzes Seminars. Grandfather graduated to become a teacher, a choir master, married, had five children, and became a school director. However, his Herrnhuter background and Herrnhuter orientation kept him from being fully accepted in the by now recovered Latvian and fully lutheranized society, which though not denying him (he was given as consolation the third prize for a how-to play, but kept from the choir directors’ podium) kept him (probably with his irked yet tacit agreement) at arms length.

 
When the burden of his ambitions, social blocks (imagined or real), and economic situation became unbearable, grandfather chose to make a willful and radical step: he left his wife and five children, and went to the capital of then yet Germanic, Riga, where he became editor at a number of newspapers, finally founding his own. He was helped in the founding of the newspaper by a young woman then working for a German newspaper. Because grandfather had suffered bankruptcy in a hardware business he had attempted, and bankruptcy laws of the day were of a punishing nature, the young woman became the publisher of the newspaper. It is rumored that as the new couple left the employ of the German newspaper, they took with them its subscriber list.

Through an editorially supportive position for Latvians as a community (after WW1 the newspaper published ‘free’ ads for refugees looking for their dispersed relatives, had many Latvian Herrnhuters as editors, and greatly furthered literacy among the Latvian people by publishing popular novels) and favorable turns of fortune, the newspaper “Jaunākās Ziņas” (Latest News) became very profitable and made grandfather (editor-in-chief) and his partner one of Latvia’s first millionaires. In its heydays, the newspaper was a de facto bond for Latvians: though its maximum circulation (weekends) reached only two hundred thousand, the newspaper was read by up to five people, which brought to it virtually every Latvian.

Nevertheless, the long-term destructive forces borne of Enlightenment (and trust that Reason was reasonable) and Capitalism continued their destruction of society sub rosa, so to say.

‘Reason’ had dictated the founders of the Latvian state to trust that ‘reason’ would dictate every man and woman to come to basically the same reasonable conclusions. It did not. Instead, reason led to war, and war led to economic destitution, one consequence of which was near absolute self-isolation among impoverished individuals, and not surprisingly disregard of community interests.

The disintegration of the community first became visible in politics and gradually filtered itself to the community. Ulmanis, a politician, with his roots in the war for independence and military contacts, organized a successful coup and prevented the nation from disintegrating and dividing itself between the haves and have-nots. Ulmanis economic policies extended the base of the haves. His interest in the culture of folklore united Latvians in a culture that was based more on the culture prevalent in the countryside than it being overrun by urbanism.

Whether grandfather sympathized with the Ulmanis Regime, I do not know, except that the newspaper had to toe the line delineated by the State Information Ministry. As for his wife, Emiliya, she took great pleasure in dressing for and playing the role of the First Lady to a President who was an unmarried single man and often appeared in public with her.

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

Eso’s Chronicles 200/ 1
An Autoholograph (1)
© Eso A.B.

I was born in Latvia in July of 1933, which was two months after control of the failing state was taken over by a patriot who was willing to risk his life to save it from self-destruction by politicians hypnotized by the rights of politicians to absolute human rights. This is to say, politicians who, dumbed down by post Enlightenment illusions and encouragement of capitalist economics, had little or no regard for the people of Latvia as a community that had survived for many thousand years.

It was a time when the state of Latvia had just survived falling apart, because its sole ‘authority’ figure, the first President, Jānis Časkte,  died five years earlier (1927) at the premature age of 68. When I was old enough to comprehend something of politics, I heard some wag tell that if the man had not died that early in years, he would have become my godfather. As it is, my godfather became his son, who was a judge at the Latvian High Court.

The Ariadne’s string for this connection derives, briefly, from the fact that my paternal grandfather, a descendant of Herrnhuters, a religious offshoot of the 14-15^th century Jan Hus movement (especially concerned with the education of common man) which came to Latvia to rebuild a society destroyed by the consequences of the Great Northern War (1700-1721). At the time these forebears came to Latvia, much of Europe was still under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, which made many of the lands rather interactive with their Germanic overlords. Not surprisingly, an analysis of my dna indicates that my great-forebears 5 generations removed came from the area of Herzogovina, an area once known for its religious hereticism and as home of an ancient Christian Church the members of which were known as Bogomils and Cathars.

The Herrnhuter method of reintegrating a destabilized and decimated society was to bring it together by integrating themselves within that society, then bringing everyone together by song and forming choirs. Education and preaching was another method. Dabbling in the mysteries of the Kabala was not excluded. In any case, my grandfather was a teacher, a choir master, and a moralist in that no one was allowed to speak ill of another person at the dinner table. When the Herrnhuter Church was repressed by the Latvian Lutheran Church (during the process of taking over the leadership of the Lutheran Church from its earlier German preachers), my great-grandfather Janis Benjamins lost his inn to a fire (said to have been caused by his wife, but more likely maliciously torched), and himself suffered shock and soon died. My grandfather, at the time still not yet ten years old, and his sister were left in their mother’s charge, who earned her keep as a common farm worker.

As he grew older and proved an earnest student, the German baron (whose manager Jānis Benjamins had been) helped grandfather to get his higher education at a then well-known country school, known as Cimzes Seminars. Grandfather went on to become a teacher, a choir master, married, had five children, and became a school director. However, his Herrnhuter background and Herrnhuter orientation kept him from being fully accepted in the by now recovered Latvian society, which though not denying him, kept him (probably with his irked yet tacit agreement) at arms length. When the burden of his ambitions, social blocks (imagined or real), and economic situation became too unbearable, grandfather chose to make a willful and radical step: he left his wife and five children, and went to the capital of then yet Germanic, Riga, where he became editor at a number of newspapers, finally founding his own. He was helped in the founding of the newspaper by a young woman then working for a German newspaper. Because grandfather had suffered bankruptcy in a hardware business that he had attempted, and bankruptcy laws of the day were of a punishing nature, the young woman became the publisher of the newspaper. It is rumored that as the new couple left the employ of the German newspaper, they took with them its subscriber list.

Through an editorially supportive position for Latvians as a community (after WW1 the newspaper published ‘free’ ads for refugees looking for their dispersed relatives, had many Latvian former Herrnhuters as editors, and greatly furthered literacy among the Latvian people by publishing popular novels) and fortunate turns, the newspaper “Jaunākās Ziņas” (Latest News) became very profitable and made grandfather (editor-in-chief) and his partner one of Latvia’s first millionaires. In its heydays, the newspaper was a de facto bond for Latvians: though its maximum circulation (weekends) reached only two hundred thousand, the newspaper was read by up to five people, which brought to it virtually every Latvian.

Nevertheless, the long-term destructive forces borne of Enlightenment (and hope that Reason was reasonable) and Capitalism were continuing with their destruction of society out of sight, so to say.

‘Reason’ had dictated the founders of the Latvian state to trust that ‘reason’ would dictate every man and woman to come to basically the same reasonable conclusions. It did not. Instead, reason led to war, and war led to near absolute self-isolation of individuals and disregard of community interests.

The disintegration of the community became first visible in politics and gradually filtered itself to the community. Ulmanis, a politician, with his roots in the war for independence and military contacts, organized a successful coup and prevented the nation from disintegrating and dividing itself between the haves and have-nots. Ulmanis economic policies extended the base of the haves. His interest in the culture of folklore united Latvians in a culture that was based more on the culture prevalent in the countryside than it being overrun by urbanism.

Whether grandfather sympathized with the Ulmanis Regime, I do not know, except that the newspaper had to toe the line delineated by the State Information Minister. As for his wife, Emiliya, she took great pleasure in dressing for and playing the role of the First Lady to a President who was an unmarried single man.

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

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 197/ 7
Love Decoded (7)
© Eso A.B.

In his book “Looking away” philosopher Slavoy Žižek 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 (I cannot say to myself ‘now I shall fall in love with that woman’; at a certain moment, I just find myself in love….” 

Just as certainly the by-product of our ‘state of being’ can discover us in ‘love’, it can discover us falling out of love. All it takes is a loss or deprivation of ‘magic’.

Žižek explains: “…we can be sure that this ‘magic’ transformation has nothing whatsoever to do with some ‘irrational’ spontaneity: it is the big Other that produces the change.”

 

Thus, love and death, both, stand together before the big Other. We may wish to call the big Other God. Therefore the question: Who or what is the ‘big Other’? The answer comes by way of the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan whose thesis is that “the big Other does not exist”, but this non-existance exists only because the big Other “…does not exist as a subject of history”.  Maybe so, maybe not.

This brings to mind thefollowing anecdote:

A man finds himself in ‘love’ with a woman, who he knows is having an affair with another man. The man believes that in spite of the fact that his ‘love’ for the woman is prevented from being returned by her, because of the other male, a close relative of hers, he believes that wonders may nevertheless happen. He sees the possibility in the fact that her affair is not necessarily a matter of love, but of naked sexual desire, which makes her incestuous affair possible. He believes that incest will sooner or later become aware of itself as a perversion and cease of its own accord.

When (during an opportune moment) the man asks the woman whether she is sleeping with her relative, she denies it, and he accepts her answer. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that the woman has a child from yet another ‘love’ affair, whence a son, who is not yet of speaking age. One day the man invites his ‘love’ to come visit him at his home. The woman agrees to come and brings along her son. During the tete-a-tete, tea and cake, the child plays with a small pillow.

Everything goes smoothly, when quite by chance, the man turns his eyes away from his beloved to look at the boy. He sees that the child has placed a pillow on a nearby the couch and has put his head on it. At the same time the boy’s bum goes ‘bump. bump, bump’ against the edge of the couch, which movements reminds of the movement of sexual intercourse in a certain position. The man’s ‘love’, the woman, sees the same thing. However, she makes no response to what she sees and  it appears that as far as she is concerned, what she sees is ‘normal’ and needs no commentary. The man, however, sees in the child’s act a sudden intrusion, even the presence of the woman’s relative, yet recognizes that what he sees is a result of his imagination. He therefore says nothing.

There is only one apparent solution to the situation: either the woman understands what she has seen and takes actions that lead to love making, or she lets the moment pass and becomes for the man part of an ingrained memory.

The man’s response: as if nothing has happened, becomes a sign of impotence. This allows the event to become a festering memory. It is through this ‘memory’ (or big Other, or God) that the act of the child introduces before our eyes incest. This sudden revelation becomes as if a memory of something sordid, and becomes the cause that causes the man to fall out of ‘love’.

The magic of ‘love’ suddenly evaporates into ‘death’; nothing remains of the big Other, but a timely (perhaps unfortunate) turn of the head. This happenstance results in there being no affair or history except a telling anecdote, which, too, except for the turn of the head, might not have been.

To take the anecdote to its next level, it is worth reading what Žižek (and Lacan) have to tell about the transference of guilt. Žižek takes an example from Alfred Hitchcocks movie “I confess” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H43IqD7mEg . When Father Logan ‘confesses’ to the murder, because when (during confession by the murderer) he recognizes the murderer’s reasons as possibly his own, it is the moment that he becomes a Chris-tian in deed. Writes Žižek: “Jesus Christ himself… appears in a new light insofar as he assumes the guilt of sinners and pays the price for it, he recognizes the sinners’ desire as his own. Christ desires from the place of the other (the sinner), this is the ground for his compassion for sinners. If the sinner is a pervert… Christ is clearly a hysteric.”

This brings me to the point of this blog: What if the ‘pervert’ is not an individual, but the state? What if the state is represented by a mask named ‘Kazhocins’ (a name for a fur overcoat in Latvian), and who as an ‘all seeing eye’ and a policeman murders for us the spirit of the state? Might not the eye of a citizen lose the magic of ‘love’ for the government?

If one then takes the citizen and makes an analogy of him-her with Christ as Žižek (and implicitly Lacan) does, then he-she are “clearly hysterics”—in which the state the state will discover  justification for incarceration which may be compared to incest by force.

And what might citizens-‘hysterics’ do besides confessing that their  desires are the same as that of the state that wishes to kill him-her-them? Might not the citizen become like the dead-man behind a living mask disguised by a fur overcoat? Is not the state the glue or honey that keeps the bee to her hive and from freezing and dying for lack of food during winter?

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

Eso’s Chronicles 196/ 6
A Hologram in Motion (6)
© Eso A.B.

At the time of death, the history of one’s life (really known only to one’s self and God) freezes into a hologram. This hologram then becomes the plaything of biographers if the deceased was an important enough personage to warrant further public interest. If more than one biographies are written, then each biographer is likely to make different associations between this or that past event and the actions it influenced the biographed personage to engage in years later.

On the internet there are many examples of ‘frozen’ holograms. There are also examples of moving holograms and bioholograms”: http://sangreality.weebly.com/helix-to-hologram.html The latter are particularly interesting, because they hint at the possibility that for all the killing that science and capitalism have helped expedite, it has also opened a door to a better understanding of Life and Mind, which is likely to be necessary in the near and medium distanced future as post-modern man faces up to the damage that he has done to nature and himself.

Historian Edmund Burke III, brings a sense of holography to history by taking ‘long duree’ history a step further and transforming it into ‘big history’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHROAmkOZ-w . The holographic perception of history is essential to, both, a better understanding of societal traditions and culture as well as to world peace outside the capitalist elite’s tendency to impose its views on the population by force.

An excellent example of how to ignore an old culture and devastate it in a very short time is my country of origin==Latvia. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the great hopes of the population to return to independence and all that this implies, the mythical Ugly American, supported by Latvian exiles from WW2 times, was imposed as the model to strive for. In a very short time, the Latvian political elites (often with extensive backgrounds as Soviet apparatchiks) downloaded the capitalist model, fully aware that the imposition of the model would come as a ‘shock’ to a populace acclimated to Soviet ways for forty-six years or about two generations, yet despite this was aware of its roots in ‘old’ history. The latter awareness was indeed what in the late 1980s and early 1990s activated the Latvian drive for independence.

In this case the model for the Ugly American was Harvard University’s School of Economics, led by professor Michael Porter, an avid supporter of competion as a model of economic growth. Without any direct experience with the culture that he was to lead into the abyss by his recommendation of ‘shock’ economic therapy, the professor and his team of economists recommended a rapid (‘shock’) elimination of Soviet institutions and an instant substitution (‘shock’) with capitalist institutions.

The results were what one could expect: the country reeled. Former communist officials with experience and access to Soviet institutions (= property) almost immediately formed rather large private enterprises and in the name of democracy took control of political institutions. Naturally, there was no call for revealing the names of the persons who had previously taken their orders and done the will of Moscow.

Strangely, the Latvian exiles and descendants supported this ‘shocking’ of their countrymen or the countrymen of their forebears in the name of ‘freedom and independence’. At the same time, hardly anyone returned from America (or other places in the Western world) to live in the countryside. Most of those who did return established themselves in the political sector or tried to establish a foothold in business for their corporate employers. Very few returned to the countryside or wanted to learn anything much about it--other than a decoration.

The result of this idiocy as reform was that over 300,000 Latvians (including emigrants from the former Soviet Union), some say more, left the country and are still leaving it. The total population once was over 2 million. Today the population is closer to 1.5 million. In fact, one may say that the people of the countryside were evicted from their domicile by the policies of the Latvian government in collaboration with America’s interests to push successor governments of the Soviet Union as much as possible to their knees. The result twenty three years later is that according to a recent survey, about 20% of the population more or less supports the government’s economic policies, while 80% see no economic improvements following the 2008 financial and economic crisis that was, for Latvians, a crisis on top of a crisis.

The divide between the Latvian people and their government may roughly be measured by the above percentages. This 20/80% split and the difficulty to sustain it in the face of a rapidly approaching collapse of government and the economy was recently illustrated by the government’s refusal to hold a referendum over whether the country was willing to accept the euro over their own lats as future currency. This refusal was an obvious governmental tour de force in using force to accomplish compliance with the capitalist policies of Harvard, and U.S. (also NATO) strategy to repress (in fact eliminate) the long duree or big history that was and remains ‘on the mind’ of the country (this writer including).

Not surprisingly, the weapon of priority for the government’s policy to remain in power has been to attack citizens of Russian descent as a major factor that is sabotaging a more successful access to prosperity. The Latvian media, too, largely corporate owned (no one knows who the owners of the Latvian newspaper ‘Diena’ in Riga are) collaborates in the destruction of what is a cultural hologram. Rule and divide is the clear  policy of the Latvian political, business, and media elite.

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