The Prayer of a House. Goldenlocks (2)

 August 3, 2012
The Prince and Princess Goldenlocks (2)

A Rewritten Fairy Tale.
See Part 1 in previous blog.


Posted by © Eso A.B.
a.k.a. Eso Antons Benjamins


“Tell me, wise Giant of the Wood,” cried the Prince (when he and King Jiant met), “what medicine will cure my father?”

“Two apples from the Garden of Paradise,” promptly answered Jiant. "One already cured me."

“How do I get the apples?” asked Prince Jean Goldenlocks.

“Whack the big rock over there with a knotted oak stump!” answered Jiant. “Grab the apples the moment you see them. Do not linger no matter how nice everything around you may seem. Else, Paradise will keep you and not let you go.”

Prince Jean struck a large stone with the mace he had in hand. Only yesterday it had served him as his garden plow.

The stone opened, and before Prince Goldenlocks's eyes stretched a space of unpolluted air and the Garden of Paradise. It was a panoramic landscape with the sun at about 3 o’clock and a rainbow to the left behind a golden apple tree that stood in the middle. The moment the stone was open, two apples fell from the tree and rolled up to Goldenlocks feet..

Prince Goldenlocks grabbed the apples and ran for the real world. It was a close call. Prince Goldenlocks had to squeeze himself as thin as he could to get out of the rock in time.

When in the evening he arrived at an inn and wanted to slake his thurst, as he walked to the table, he was engulfed by an aroma of apples. Everyone looked up from their beers as he went by. The aroma was just like the one that the prince remembered from the time when he met the kitchen maid in the apple cellar and they gathered apples for apple pie.

By coincidence, Prince Goldenlocks happened to sit down at the same table at which sat his brothers-in-law, princes Jengland and Cornwall. They had come to discuss how best to take King Lear's kingdom not only from him, but also their wives. While Goldenlocks recognized the men, they did not recognize him. After the table mates, had toasted a mug of beer to each other, the brothers-in-law asked Goldenlocks what smelled so good.

Goldenlocks pulled out from his backpack the two apples and showed them to the princes. The princes wished to examine the apples more closely. The moment the princess held an apple in their hand, nothing could persuade them from wanting to buy them. There was a good reason for this: The moment they held an apple, it felt like they were having a orgasm that would not let go of them.

Prince Jean Goldenlocks did not ask the princes for money, but if they would allow him to tatoo on their backs the picture of a gallows. (The inn had a resident tatoo artist.) The princes agreed that it was a fair bargain, and, considering the wonder of the apples from Paradise, a cheap deal. As long as they could hold the apples, they were ready to endure the tattoo artist puncture their skin with needles from the top of their heads down to their toes. When the gallows were drawn, the brothers-in-law grabbed an apple each and ran for the door.

There was one big problem, however.

Prize Winning Nature Design in Latvia.

Because the apples were never delivered to King Lear’s bedside, the King’s condition never improved.

In fact, the King had to get used to not only to being ill, but many unpleasant ideas besides.

One almost intolerable idea was that the swine herd Goldenlocks would get to sleep with his daughter Goldenlocks Struvelpeter, but he, the king, would not.
Another tormenting idea was that King Lear could not deny that he had ordered his son, Prince Goldenlocks, to be taken to the woods, and that he perhaps had been or perhaps was not killed there. This is why he was never sure that the swine herd was not the real Goldenlocks.

Despite these difficulties, the kingdom of Thebes struggled on. For all of his troubles, which actually began with his capture of the Giant of the Wood, King Lear was still the kingdom's King, and neither of his daughters, Jonerill or Le Zhan, or their respective husbands, princes Jengland or Cornwall had unseated him--yet. The best part of it all was, that the King was still alive and not dead.

This was probably the reason why the Kingdom of Thebes had not yet fallen down to the level, where a swineherd could afford it. The threat was real though: after he married Princes Goldenlocks, the swine herd now claimed to have always been a prince named Prince Goldenlocks.

Despite his illness, the old king was keen enough to hear about what had happened to the medicine that he was to receive from the Garden of Paradise.

The strange twist that the king gave to the story was that he did not blame princes Jengland and Cornwall for taking the apples from Prince Goldenlocks, but, but he was dumbfounded that Goldenlocks pretended to be such a saint that he could do without orgasms and would betray the king  by forcing him to execute his own close relatives, and had even threatened his brothers-in-law with the gallows.

However, because the king did not die of an illness, everyone in Thebes came to believe that he was indeed cured.

Life went on. The princes Jengland and Cornwall became immensely popular, at least in their respective courts, because they not only let the apples be held by their wives, but these were happy to pass them around to their friends in the court. For a time, everyone got quite a Bang out of life. What later everyone said was that this is what true democracy should be like.

One day, King Lear, however, got hold of one of the apples of Paradise. It happened by an accident. A young lady of his court, was standing before him as if to ask a favour. She was batting her long eyelashes in such an obvious way that the king decided to take hold of her hand to see if he could waken her from her seizure. It was at that moment that the king also touched the apple of Paradise.

Bang, Bang went the king’s heart. He took the young lady by her hand, making sure that the apple stayed in it, and took her into his private study. No apples ever so lived up to their reputation as the one’s taken by Prince Goldenlocks from the Garden of Paradise.

King Lear took the apple from the young lady and made it his own==at last. He then asked his first secretary to bring him the next available maiden, and thereafter the next, and then the next. This is how eventually King Lear got to be called King Lear Bluebeard, the devourer of maidens.

Again, the Kingdom of Thebes was suffering a plague.

This time Prince Goldenlocks went to consult with the court magician. The magician’s name was Tiresias. Tiresias told Prince Jean Goldenlocks that only the milk from the breasts of the Snake Queen could cure King Lear this time.

Prince Goldenlocks ran into the wood for a second time. He again called for Jiant to help him.

“Hit the rock with your plow once again!” advised Jiant, “after he had heard the story”. For a moment he wondered if he would enjoy exchanging places with King Lear.

This time , however, the rock did not open to the Garden of Paradise, but to a scene out of ancient Egypt next to the pyramids. At the foot of a large pyramid sat the Snake Queen. Her breasts were bared and the milk of Cobra seeped from her nipples as when a child has just been removed from them. No child could be seen, but perhaps he lay somewhere about the nearby desert palms.

Prince Goldenlocks gathered the overflow of the Snake Queen's milk in two cups, which he had with him. Then, again, he ran for the exit. As he ran, he noticed that at the foot of the great Sphinx, which in those days was surrounded by a great wood, King Lear had brought a group of children and was about to sacrificing them to make him feel better. The unexpected vision made Goldenlocks run back for the exit and to the castle all the faster.

But, again, Goldenlocks met his brothers-in-law at the inn. Again they did not recognize him. Again they were meeting to plot a coup. Some fellow called Julian Assange was listening in on their conversations on the sly.

This time, the princes, asked to dip their fingers into the snake’s milk. They waned to make sure that it was real. It was. After they had licked their fingers, they could not be dissuaded not to buy the milk. Goldenlocks again took no money, but had the princes tatoo on their backs a wheel that is used to break the bones of dead men.

What makes the milk of the Snake Queen so desirable?

Actually, the milk of the Snake Queen makes one feel as if one is embraced by a porn movie. The television set is switched on for 24 hours. There is so much sex that it makes one believe that sex may be had even after death. It is not for nothing that dead Johns, who have tasted of the milk, are said to hang with an erection.

When the sons’ in-law of King Lear had drunk of the Snake Queen’s Milk, they were no longer satisfied with just sex and a kingdom. They wanted more. They wanted the world. They persuaded their wives to tell King Lear every day that he was getting increasingly senile.

King Lear resisted as long as he could and argued that one kingdom was enough. “Only one who is totally senile would think so”, answered hhis daughters. There was nothing even Assange could do. One day King Lear broke down and cried as he had read the playwright Shakeseare cry):

“'Tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburden'd crawl toward death."


The Latvian Version of a Tunnel of Love.

Prince Goldenhair, however, remained untouched by the wonders of Paradise and Egypt. Though he had held the apples of Paradise and tasted the Milk of the Queen of Snakes, it was just long enough to learn how a permanent supply of such experiences was likely to be. He did not wish to commit or sacrifice his life for it.
What being in possession of the apples and the milk meant, he was soon able to witness with his own eyes.

Soon after having they had all the sex they could handle, Princess Jengland and Cornwall turned their attentions to asset accumulation. Each prince in turn came to the conclusion that neither wanted to see tKing Lear’s kingdom divided, but that he would have it an undivided whole for himself alone. Moreover, the kingdom would then become, eventually, an empire.

It became inevitable, that the brothers-in-law, though neither one had yet drawn blood, declared war on each other. Each had the support of their wives, Princesses Goneril and Regan, which is why the sisters became friendlier with their husbands than with each other. When the sisters passed each other, they bared their teeth and hissed as real snakes.

The time had come for Goldenlocks to call Giant to come help again.

This time, Jiant gave Prince Goldenlocks an axe that danced in the hands, of whoever held it, as if it had a life of its own. Jiant advised, however, the young prince not to let the axe have its own will. The Prince was to use the sword just enough to ensure that if the feud among the brothers-in-law broke into the open, the fight ended in a draw.

Such a fight came about two times, and both times it ended in a draw.

The third time the brothers-in-law went to war with each other, Jiant told the Goldenlocks that the time had come for a victory. The sword was to be given a free hand. Prince Goldenlocks was to seize the kingdom of king Lear for his sister Princess Goldenlocks Struvelpeter.

Prince Goldenlocks won the battle and then handed the kingdom to his sister. The Princes then returned the kingdom of Thebes to her father.

To celebrate the regaining of his kingdom, the King decided to host another Celebration. Since this time the table arrangements were decided by the king. King Lear sat Prince Goldenlocks in a seat between his brothers-in-law. “Knowing how smart you are, Prince Goldenlocks, let me see how you do” said King Lear and wincked.

Again there came the moment that struck the princes Jengland and Cornwall mute. When they saw that their lives were in the hands of the swine herd Goldenlocks, the princes fell on their knees and begged him to spare their lives.

What was Goldenlocks to do?

Goldenlocks then lifted up his left arm in such a way that everyone could see that it was missing the small finger.

“This is what you cost me!” he said to princes Jengland and Cornwall. “Do you remember the time you chased me into the forest and wanted to sacrifice me because I tried to help the King of the Wood? I want no lesser sacrifice from both of you.”

The ambassador of the United States of America then stood up to defend Jengland and Cornwall. He turned to Prince Goldenlocks and said: “You, Sir, are—by the evidence of your missing little finger—a terrorist.”

“Go tell it to the Giant of the Wood,” answered Prince Goldenlocks, “Your country is the cause of draught and fires. Besides, why are you sending the FBI to Thebes? Wood and grass here are believed to be true gifts of eternity.”

Then the ambassador of Equador spoke up: “Why is Julian Assange hinding in the Embassy of Equador in London? Why is England, edged on by the U.S., threatening to break into our embassy and arrest Assange? Is that not state terrorism?”

Princes Jengland and Cornwall continued to make a yammer as if they were the Pussy Riot team from Moscow. However, this time Goldenlocks’s heart was as if made of iron. He had his guards separate Jengland and Cornwall from their cushioned seats. He then had the guards stretch out the left arms of the princes and place the little fingers of the hand on a butcher block. King Lear’s court executioner raised his axe, and it went “Chop!” and “Chop! ” twice.

After the ‘pinkies’ of the Princes fell to the ground, the executioner wrapped them in a white handkerchief. With ceremony the two handkerchiefs were then taken to Thebe’s central marketplace and placed on an eye-high stone slab.

For a whole week, whenever the Thebans’ went to the marketplace and passed by the stande they had to smell the rot of the princes’ flesh.

"That will teach them respect," said the people as they went buy. They also squeezed their noses. Still, the children wanted their parents to raise them up to see.

On the second week, the executioner was called again. This time, it was to untie the hankerchiefs and expose the fingers. Not surprisingly, the fingers soon disappeared. Attracted by the smell, they had long bee watched by a pair of ravens sitting in nearby trees. Now they were picked up and discposed of in a way only ravens can.

But it was not many days later, that Thebans were surprised to hear that, Alas!, King Lear had died.

Princess Goldenlocks being the one who had with the help of Prince Goldenlocks salvaged the kingdom, announced that it was only right that the next King of Thebes be her husband Goldenlocks, while she would be happy to be the Queen.

Jiant of the Wood would be the guest of honor at the wedding. King Goldenlocks also announced that henceforth there was to be no hunting of wild animals, and wild pigs were to be officially enlisted as soldiers fighting on behalf of the Kingdom of the Wood.

Jiant lived up to his reputation as wondermaker. He brought to the wedding a thousand bees' wax candles into which were imbedded the bristles of a thousand wild pigs. While the candles burned, the incense was so strong that ever since they have been used to overcome the stench of death the world over.


'A Display of Nature' sponsored by the Latvian State Forestry Service [LVM']

[The End—for the time being.] For part 1 scroll to previous blog. Remember that in this part only the swineherd, the one who saves Prince Goldenlocks, has sacrificed something--the little finger of his left hand--while all others are only promised the possibility of losing their fingers. Now his brothers-in-law, too, join the 'selects'. Now there are three who in the eyes of the American government a re‘terrorists’ http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/dec2011/jeffb126.htm .]

July 12-30, 2012

The Story of Prince Goldenlocks (1)  
and Princess 'Goldenlocks'

The enigma of Somewhere 1

A Rewritten Fairy Tale

Posted by Eso A.B.





First: A verbatim introduction from
‘The New Yorker’

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/04/a-brand-new-fairytale.html
Editors’ Note: In March on the Book Bench, Maria Tatar wrote about a cache of five-hundred Bavarian fairy tales that were unearthed recently in Germany. The fairy tales were compiled by the nineteenth-century ethnographer Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, a contemporary of the Grimm brothers, who was fascinated by the folkways and stories of his native region and whose tales are more raw, more concerned with capturing the rhythms of local storytelling, than the ones familiar to us. Tatar has now translated one of the tales, “King Goldenlocks,” from Erika Eichenseer’s 2010 compilation of Schönwerth’s tales in German, “Prinz Rosszwifl.” We give the tale to you here for the first time in English. Asked why she chose this particular tale, Tatar replied:

It gives us a persecuted hero rather than the conventional persecuted girl, a la Cinderella and Snow White, and it shows us that fathers can be just as cruel as the Grimms’ mothers and stepmothers. The tale also acts like a magnet, picking up bits and pieces of local color (laws about branding criminals, with punishments as a probation of sorts), Biblical and mythical themes (apples of paradise), and folk wisdom. What hooked me from the get-go was the parallel with the Grimms’ “Frog King,” which features a beautiful girl playing with her golden ball in the woods. Suddenly I understood the kaleidoscopic magic of fairy tales—a little twist here and another one there, and you have a completely different story, yet constructed from the very same bits and pieces.

(End of ‘The New Yorker’ Introduction.)



The enigma of Somewhere 2


The following  © Eso A.B.

I am in disagreement with Ms Tatar’s assertion that the fairy tale of “The Frog King” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_Prince_(story)  is somehow related to or is somehow on a parallel of “Prince Goldenlocks”.

A reader who knows a little German, will notice how the word “eiserne”, meaning ‘of iron’, can--by the shifting of two consonants and a vowel--make the word read “einsam” (alone, lonely). As everyone knows, the tendency of ‘our time’ is to weaponize everything probable and improbable, which is probably why Ms Tatar choses the “eiserne” version of the fairy tale as a parallel to what more appropriately corresponds to a tale of one who is 'vulnerable'.

No fairy tale, when retold, is ever the same. I hope to prove the point through the following ‘retold’ version. No doubt, the fairy tale in my version is a ‘longer’ version of the original and could be longer still, because it brought to mind certain notions that do not appear to have been in the mind of whoever told the version collected by Schönwerth. Indeed, fairy tale telling, like singing, never stops—if only we can get the stories out of the halls of Harvard into the space of an unconstipated everyday. For all that this story teller knows, the internet (the medium of adlibbers ad infinitum) may turn out to be facilitate a new age of fairy tales.

As I see it, the “The Frog King” is a story of a lonely (and most likely poor) boy dreaming of meeting a Princess. The boy's dream has little to do with wishing to become an iron willed young man who after he starts thinking about the future (probably after taking a wife) chooses to become a banker and dedicates his life to making the ‘other’ people of the world poor—as the grim story of Grimm’s Frog King seems to hint at.

The dream of King Goldenlocks (actually only a Prince before King Bluebeard dies) is about a Goldenlocked young Princess http://www.zine5.com/archive/ft08.htm . From this perspective, the fairy tale tells the tragedy that sprang of the boy’s dream, when as after a collision of protons in a “Big Bang Machine” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125346156 (the head of the storyteller), the protons of the story spin off sub-elements, which may or may not correspond to what the story teller is looking forward to telling his audience. As most of us know, scientists today are banging together protons in the hope of spinning off the “God particle”. Whether they produce such a particle, depends on, like Ms Tatar’s “Goldenlocks”, which story is more interesting: her’s , mine, or some other.

As we take a closer look and analyze some of the inversions and paraidolian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia shifts of mind that follow a subjective ‘reality check’ engaged in by the story teller, the memory memes, which have held the story together and afloat in the ether of a given community’s mindset for centuries, we may begin to puncture meanings imposed on the story in earlier times, so that older layers of meaning are released from their shackles or newer meanings emerge with no idea yet what a shackle is.

One tale that spins off the “King Goldenlocks” story is the ‘ancient’ Greek tragedy by Sophocles, “King Oedipus”—to which King Goldenlocks, runs a close parallel. However, before I come to King Oedipus, let us make use of pareidolia (of my mindset) and witness how such associations come about.

Prince Goldenlocks (1) and Princess 'Goldenlocks'

The Story of Prince Goldenlocks (1)

and Princess 'Goldenlocks'
Once upon a time--most recently in a William Shakespeare play==there lived a king named Lear. The king had three daughters and a son. The King does not appear to have a wife, who may (to leep the story from having to deal with more children and more of their stories) have died in childbirh. In some versions of the story, the son does not appear. As the reader will see, this is to avoid unnecessary complications in the attempt to retell the story in the way it actually happened,
Of the three daughters, the eldest was called Joneril or Goneril (the letters J and G in those days being both pronounced as Zh or Ž, the oversexed, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gonorrhea ).

The second oldest princess was called Le Zhan or Regan [the letters R then being pronounced as L thus Le, and G as Ž, re Le Zhan], meaning a sexual libertine. The latter meaning is still met among names used by populist folk, re Plain Jane, Crazy Jane, Pope Joan. Some of the sexual connotations are carryovers from the male John, Zhan, Huan, Hans—all of the names arising from the root ‘Yan’, which in proto human language (some say Sanscrit) may have meant ‘seed’.

The third and youngest daughter was called Princess Goldenlocks, which name was at one time pronounced Cordelia (from Cor- (heart) and –delia (tail, braid), the heart’s dilly, re http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordelia ), the braid or knot (of love). A remnant of the association remains in the crude language of soldiers, re: “I need to get me some tail.”

King Lear also named his son, “Goldenlocks”. This male version of the name may be traced by the pareidolian method to the root of in the word for ‘seed’, i.e., Yan or John. In other words, the name Goldenlocks plays the role of a last name, which is why the princ’s real name originally was Jean or John or Ivan Goldenlocks.

The word and name of “Goldenlocks” itself probably arises from an association with the color of seed, that is, the color of cream-white or yellow or honey. At least, this is the path traced by the late English poet Robert Graves, who believed that the very origin of human language is closely connected to poetic association and paraidolia. Paraidolia, in turn, lends itself to “magic language”, which according to Graves is “…bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon goddess, or Muse”…. Grasves condemns in the strongest possible terms Socrates and modern philosophers, who, having gained their language through the inspiration of the Moon Goddess—easily recognized as Princess Goldenlocks—betray her gift by seeking escape in “intellectual homosexuality” or Socratic or Platonic love.

Curiously, a distant association of the name of John as seed, is retained by paraidolic association in the name of the John Deere Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Deere_(inventor) . John Deere invented the self-polishing plow, which made tilling the ground to receive seed that much more easy in clay soils.

Sometimes pareidolia works (meets the truth) by being able to transverse labyrinthine corridors. The story of Johnny Appleseed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed , too, imbeds a similar association. For example, is not the seed of an apple the result of an orgasm by an apple?

One day King Lear rode into the wood to hunt.

In the far off days, the woods were not yet, as we say today, ‘deforested’. In those days, if one wished to travel from Paris to Byzantium (later moved from Alexandria Egypt to today’s Istanbul, then Kiev, then Moscow), it took three months or more. In other words, in those days, Europe was covered by wood from one end to the other, from the far East to the far West. The same woods were filled with animals never seen today. Swamps had ponds with many fish. Often the only way to get from one end of Europe to the other was by travelling the sea shores, river routes, and following animal and human tracks trod through the forests over thousands of years.

Once he had entered the forest, King Lear became lost. He blew on his hunting horn to summon help. To his great surprise, the first helper he met was Jiant, the King of the Wood. The name “Jiant” is of course but a variant on the name “giant”. Needless to say, King Lear was taken aback.

The giant was surrounded by an unkempt group of forest men of who none could speak, except for one word: “Kal-vonc”. "Kal-vonc" is perhaps a variation of the proto-Sanscrit language. These men spoke and chanted the word over and over again in all possible tones of voice.

The longer King Lear watched and listened to King Jiant and his men, the more he was convinced that they really meant to inform him that to their way of thinking, his real name was King Vonc or Yonk or John. In the course of time, the word came to stand for the word ‘chilovek’ in Russian or “cil-vehks” in Latvian. Following yet many more thousand years later, the word acquired yet other meanings (at least in Latvian), such as “celms” (a tree stump or root), “cilts” (a tribe), “cirst” (to axe), and “celt” (to build).

While many of the words mentioned are not relevant to the story of Goldenlocks, some retain an echo, nevertheless. For example, “celms” (stump or root) echoes to names such as '(Y)adam', (C)admus’, 'Krish' or ‘Christ’ (from cross, krusts), meaning equally ‘source’ and ‘cross’.

As for the relationship of the names of ‘King Lear’ and ‘King Jiant’, it can be grasped when we imagine the names to be objects and names at the same time. Therefore, the human voice may be compared to a hazel stick. The paraidolian thought process assigns importance to a hazelstick for the same reason Romans compared (visually) man-made law with a bundle of hazelsticks bound with a lock of Cordelia’s hair.

As King Lear blew on his horn to summon help, King Jiant remained standing with his back pressed against a gigantic oak tree. He gave King Lear a friendly smile.

Nevertheless, King Lear continued to blow on his hunting horn until his hunting companions, vassals, and ‘yes-men’ gathered around him.

When all his vassals had arrived, King Lear regained his composure and lost bravery.

Among the hunters were the husbands of princesses Jon-eril and Le-Zhan. Respectively, the princes were known as Jengland and Cornwall. Both Princes were King Lear’s supporters, not least because their wives were the King’s eldest daughters. King Lear had written a Last Will that divided his kingdom between his elder daughters.

Princess Goldenlocks, the king’s youngest daughter, was excluded from the Will, because—golden haired as she was--her hair was always in a disorderly state. This caused King Lear to give his daughter an additional name, that is, he called her Princes Goldenlocks Struvelpeter. Struvelpeter amdns messed up hair in German). This the King called Goldenlocks inspite of the fact that the Princess loved him dearly.

When all the vassals had gathered about him, King ordered his sons-in-law, Jengland and Corwall, to capture King Jiant of the Wood and lock him up in the castle’s dungeon.

The capture of Jiant was no easy task. The whole wood came to King Jiant’s aid. Wild pigs, some hid behind trees, came charging from their hiding places and flattened many of the king’s men against other trees. The king’s sons-in=law suffered several broken ribs.

Incidentally, all this happened in times when democracy was still the order of the day and prevailed among all inhabitants on Earth, trees including.

Eventually King Lear and his vassals managed to separate and isolate King Jiant from the ‘chilovecs’. Prince Jengland, broken ribs and all, ordered placed a noose around the foreskin of King Jiant’s robin), while Prince Cornwall jabbed King Jiant from behind with the tip of a firehardened hazelwood spear.

King Jiant was put into an branch, which was covered with a robe net. King Jiant was also castrated. Then King Lear decided that he would hold a Celebration.

Hundred runners dispersed throughout the kingdom of King Lear, which was also known as Thebes. How the messengers got to where they were going is hard to say, because in the long ago the name ‘Thebes’ was a place name, both, in Greece as well as Egypt.

While the invited guests gathered, King Lear decided to take a nap.

Meanwhile, Prince John Goldenlocks, was playing with his sister Jane (or Joan) Goldenlocks Struvelpeter in the castle’s court yard.

Both children were kicking a gold gilt rubber ball back and forth. Then Jane Goldenlocks kicked the ball, and it went flying into the net and the cage that held the King of the wood Jiant. The Princess asked Jiant to ‘please’ return the ball. Jiant did.

A little later it was the Prince Jean Goldenlock’s turn to kick the ball. He also kicked the ball into Jiant’s cage. However, when Prince Goldenlocks asked Jiant to return the ball, Jiant refused unless the Prince promised to released him.

“That is not fair!” shouted Prince Goldenlocks at Jiant. “I just saw you return the ball to Princess Goldenlocks. You even tried to give her a kiss.”

Nevertheless, because King Lear was resting, and because King Jiant was a giant, Prince Jean Goldenlocks went to his father and removed from around his neck the necklace that held the key. The Prince then gave the key, which was nothing more than a sharp stone, to King Jiant, who then gave him his ball back. Jiant snapped the branches of the cage and cut through the rope net. He then let himself go free.

Before King Jiant disappeared in the wood, he told the young Prince that: “If in the future you ever need help, just come to the forest and call out my name “’Jiant! Jiant! Jiant!’” three times. I will come and do what I can to help you.”

Jiant then disappeared into the wood. He was accompanied by song of every bird in the wood. The cranes blew their trumpets; the storks clapped their beaks in a rattle no human drummer could repeat; while the ravens “kraahed” until their happy throats turned blue; and the trees swayed as if they were alive.

The noise from the wood awakened King Lear from his nap. It may have been the yammer that was coming from the court ballroom, where the vassals, guests, yes-men, and gentlemen were discussing the case of the missing Jiant. They imagined him to be King Lear’s enemy.

When King Lear came into the midst of his guests, he was embarrassed to discover that Jiant the Giant had escaped.

“Someone let him out!” the vassals whispered among themselves.

The King and his yes-men were soon agreed, that ‘someone’ had indeed released Jiant from the cage. Everyone could see that the rope that tied the door had been cut through.

“Who did this?!” King Lear bellowed.

When no one replied, the King continued:

“Whoever did this, I will have his head on the pole by the gate until it dies! To whoever knows and tells me who did it, I will give a sack full of gold.”

Everyone in the ballroom stood silent and looked around uncomfortable. In the wood not a leaf rustled. Just when King Lear began to imagine that his question was being ignored and was about to begin yelling again, he heard a voice.

“It was Prince Goldenlocks,” said a voice.

When everyone looked who the voice belonged to, they saw it was that of Princes Goldenlock Struvelhair.

It so happened that when the Princes and the Princec played with the golden gilt ball in the courtyard, Prince Goldenlocks sometimes poked his sister from behind. He did it as if it was accidental, which it really was not. This was annoying, and Princess Goldenlocs was tired of saying: “Stop it! It was Prince Goldenlocks,” the Princess repeated just to make sure that everyone heard. “He took the flint from the King’s neck. Then he gave it to King Jiant.”

King Lear then clapped his hands and had his serfs bring from the livery his favourite donkey, the one who could not stop he-hawing gold from his throat, piddling gold dust, and dropping gold pellets from under his tail.

When the donkey was brought, King Lear had it led around princess Goldenlocks four times. The piles of gold the donkey left behind were enough to last a life-time.

When the gifting ceremony was over, everyone as if remembered to look for Prince Goldenlocks, who was nowhere to be seen. “He just ran into the wood!” said Princess Goldenlocks.

Prince Goldenlocks, who stood stunned and watching Princess Goldenlocks, slapped himself in the face and run for the wood. As he ran, he shouted something that none of the vassals had heard before:

“True democracy is possible only in the wood!” the Prince cried.

When he had entered the wood, the Prince clapped his hands and called three times: “Jiant, Jiant, Jiant!”


[Next: Continuation of the fairy tale shortly:] Meanwhile, for my best "Rewrite" see http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/

I have a new BLOGSPOT. See: http://mywealthvirus.blogspot.com/

This blog is briefly in quiescence.

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.

http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ 

Not-Violence main subject

http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/

Temple of Janis (John) site

http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/

Arguments for systems change

http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia (active!)

http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ Oedipus Rex Rewritten

Thank you.

The painting to the right is a bad photo of a numinous painting by artist Agnese Sietinsone. Title: "Symmetry 6". Ms Sietinsone was born in Latvia, the Valmiera region, and is currently residing, working, and attending school in Norwich, England.

The series of 101 blogs which preceeds this small photo gallery has been completed and awaits a new series. The former series concerned what this blogger calls ''NOT-VIOLENT TERROR''. It discussed the proposition that government by violence was not workable over the long run. In its place needs to be placed the long forgotten and even denied act of self-sacrifice.

Currently this blogger is writing a series of blogs on the subject of ''THE-NOT-VOTER''. Search it out. When the series runs its course, this site will more than likely resume.

Meanwhile, this blogger is putting a distance between former subjects and subjects of the future by way of this photo gallery. The photos record a "Birch tap", and begin from bottom left-to-right and then upward. The can was filled with birch juice in about a day and a half.

© Eso Antons Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

POSTSCRIPT 4 / Summary 2
101 The Sail

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog(s) and the blog hereafter. http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/


Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum –ONLATVIANPOPULISM vs LATVIJASLABEJIE.

The blow-up within the West is the end result of what the former President of the United States, Bush, described as the "crusade" . While for Bush the “crusade” meant war on terrorism, which he claimed was begun on-the-cusp of the 21st century by a Saudi Arabian Muslim prince named Bin Laden, curiously enough, the “crusade” actually began with the so-called Fourth Crusade (according to A. Fomenko actually the First Crusade) of 1204.

The First Crusade followed the death of Jesus, the itinerant story teller, who a decade or two earlier (? 1184) was thrown into a pit of fire (no, he was not crucified; crucifixion is a neo-Christian invention to throw the listener off the scent of what really happened) in Constantinople by Alexis I, a Byzantine king, one of the first such to overturn the sacred nature of his office in order to exploit wealth and power for the sake of—as Taussig tells it about the colonizers—“[the] gratuitous, end in itself”.

As I have often stated in earlier blogs, the chronology of history as presented by the West is unreliable for the reason that is was established as a result of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which selected one Joseph Justus Scaligeri to set straight a chronology that did not favour the Catholic Church. The Council of Trent was the main event of the Counter Reformation. While Martin Luther, the founder of the Lutheran Church and the Reformation movement hardly sympathized with the Catholic Counter Reformation, the Council’s historical revisionism suited well enough all neo-Christian sects. At the same time, many scholars have questioned the veracity of the chronology, among which doubters were Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and is Anatoly Fomenko (1945- ).

The “crusades” by the West that followed the First Crusade (1204) were the result of the rapid spread (by way of mimesis) of the desire by secular princes to expand their wealth and power. This rise of the importance of power became a scramble. The scramble took place not only among kings and princes, but at the same time involved attempts to discover ways to eliminate the arch-competitor—Constantinople, the seat of arch-Christianity some 900 years ago. This was accomplished by letting Constantinople fall (in 1453) to the Turks.

The First Crusade was made possible by rousing the “Children of Johns” (I prefer to put all arch-Christians under this description, because the name “John” is ubiquitous in all European and many more languages) against those said to have slain Jesus, the Children of Johns believing Jesus to have been one of their own. The outrage of the arch-Christians was then redirected by the secular princes against the Kingdom of Israel, which at that time was not located where a nation called Israel is located in our time, but the Israel of Byzantium as Byzantium was then known among the Children of Johns. Following the plunder of Constantinople (1204) by the West, the Children of Johns were turned against themselves by introducing a new sect, re: Catholics or neo-Christians, who distinguished themselves from arch-Christians (who referred to the Divine by touching the Earth) by claiming—in the beginning almost beyond anyone’s belief—that their “John” was not mortal and lived in Heaven. By 1209, the Western princes had sufficient violent force and could use the written word in a sufficiently sophisticated a manner to confuse the population of Europe (the Children of Johns were largely of an oral tradition) to such a degree that credibility accrued to those who practiced violence, that is, to neo-Christians.

It follows from the above that arch-Europeans and their religion were repressed and the European people were turned against themselves—as they had first been turned against Constantinople. The new world order of secular kings and princes rode on the backs of the European people. The only sect of arch-Christians or Children of Johns who survived was the Jews. The reason the sect was not destroyed has to do with their service to kings and princes—most likely as tax collectors. The ability of the sect to survive against the onslaught of Catholicism attracted to them many Children of Johns making an escape from the Inquisition. Most of this happened post-?1184. Unlike the flight of the Waldensians to Bohemia and the freedoms of the Hussites (15th century and earlier), the flight of the Children of Johns by ritualistic or self-confessional conversion to Judaism remains repressed information.

Let us return to Michael Taussig, our authority on memesis and alterity, and repeat the quote that I already gave in Blog 99. Taussig writes (pgs. 70,71): “As the nature that culture uses to make second nature, mimesis cannot be outside of history, just as history cannot lie outside of the mimetic faculty…. As the nature that culture uses to create second nature, mimesis chaotically jostles for elbow room in this force field of necessary contradiction and illusion, providing the glimpse of the opportunity to dismantle that second nature and reconstruct other worlds—so long as we reach a critical level of understanding of the play of primitivism within the mimetic faculty itself.”

Let us now think of the Latvian Children of Johns back in 1209, when Bishop Albert of Riga in tandem with Pope Innocent III in southern France, Languedoc, and the Albigensian Crusade there, attacked Jersika (a local name for Jerusalem), up river from Riga on the shores of Daugava (Dvina), and put an end to arch-Christianity in the territory that became known as Livonia, and later yet as Latvia.

And now let us think of the anti-Semitism, not admitted to, but lingering on among the materially and educationally repressed Latvians. [For proof of material and educational repression, all one has to do is visit the more popular internet sites for the flavor of their content and take a look at the children’s teeth in the countryside to see the material need.] Even so, I believe that more than half a century after Hitler and the Nazis, the time has come for the “opportunity to dismantle that second nature and reconstruct other worlds”, i.e., an updated mimesis of the Children of Johns of old. It could begin in Latvia.

How is this to be accomplished?

I will quote Taussig once again. In his book "Mimesis and Alterity", the anthropologist and doctor writes (2): “…[Let us] see anew the spell of the natural where the reproduction of life merges with the recapture of the soul”. Nice sentiment, right? Then Taussig tosses us a brick: “But just as we might garner courage to reinvent a new world and live new fictions… so a new devouring force comes at us from another direction, seducing us by playing on our yearning for the true real.”

And what might the “true real” be?

It is fascism, the make-believe of neo-Christianity falling apart, yet held together by the force of violence. And violence—as Latvians of any ethnic origin ought to know—causes long-time terror. The terror lasts not just for one life time, but it lasts for many lifetimes—if possible with but occasional refreshers by way reminders. This is a perfect way to intimidate people and affect their behaviour. The terror of violence seeps into the bones of the violated ones by way of a negative mimesis and represses human nature. The entire world is infected by this mimesis of terror in our day. It is rather disingenuous of academic historians to adhere to the Scaligeri chronology when the chronology of Anatoly Fomenko fits the shoe better. Moreover, government and academia disingenuosity denies the people their right to shed the terrors of violence.

And just how does one shed the terrors of violence and the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) not only of soldiers back from war today, but the population at large, the one that has violence imposed on it for a thousand years?

For the answer, I invite the reader to Blog 1 and the beginning of my long series of blogs under the title “Not-Violent Terror”. However, the little dirty secret (and you may imagine it right after you read this) is “Not-Vote”. The act is not-violent terror. Not-violent terror to whom? Hint: to the enemies of not-voters.

© Eso Antons Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

The small secret
(which you may learn as soon as you read this)
at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ is
“Not-Vote!”
It will be an act of not-violent terror. To whom?
To the enemies of the “not-voters”.

POSTSCRIPT 3 / Summary 1
100 The Enemies of the “West”

Photos: The beginnings of mimesis: Life mimics life: Frogs eggs

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog(s) and the blog hereafter. http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/
To say that political thought and engineering in the West is simplistic is to understate the problem. A better word to describe it is “sick”. Like many illnesses, sick politics took time for a human agency to set up. It then incubated, to infect further, and then reached its virulent stage in the 20th century.

Many of my preceding blogs touch on the schism in Christianity, that is, between arch- and neo-Christians. Such a dual Christianity is not acknowledged by either the intelligentsia or historians of the West (or East), yet someday it will be obvious to anyone who understands that the rise of Catholicism was accompanied by short- and long-term repressive violence. As a consequence of the violence, of the arch-Christian sects (the Cathars, Bogomils, Waldensians, Johns Children, etc.) only the Jews remain, however and alas! no longer recognizable as their former selves.

Among the Latvians, it is the Children of Johns, the once arch-Christian sect, who are no longer remembered for who they were. All that remains of the Children of Johns is the Midsummer’s Solstice celebration at which time the celebrants may occasionally refer to the event as “Johns Eve” and even with lesser occasion refer to themselves as the Children of Johns. More specific interest in the Children of Johns it is apparent no longer exists.

To explain the simplistic political thinking in the West (of which Latvian politicians believe themselves to be a part), I will return once more to Michael Taussig and his anthropological studies. I believe Taussig to be right-on in his explanation concerning anti-Semitism (see quote below), nevertheless, I would like to take anti-Semitism a step further and include among its transgressions anti-self-ism or anti-European-ism. By extending the reach of the anti-Semitic meme, we arrive at the insight that anti-Europeanism among Europeans (in effect, anti-Latvianism among Latvians), too, remain as much a force of fascism as ever, especially because the Latvian people (and of course the Europeans as a whole) never really understood fascism. The repression of the European people by the European elite has lasted for so long as to cause both the people and the elite to forget their history and allow it to be replaced by an artifice or as Taussing describes it—“history… outside the mimetic faculty….”. In other words, history is no longer a written history making an effort to come alive, but an artificial history written by scholars whose experience of history is as much bookishly self-referentialist as it is experientially nonexistent.

The path from colonialism to fascism is illustrated in Taussig’s book, “Mimesis and Alterity”. Though Taussig is writing of the Indians living in the Putumayo in South America, we may learn much by substituting another group of people (through a wilful act on my part) for the Indians, re the arch-Christian/Europeans. Here iTaussig (65):

“…the imaginative range essential to the execution of colonial violence in the Putumayo at the turn of the century was an imagining drawn from that which the civilized imputed to the Indians, to their cannibalism especially, and then mimicked. It should also be pointed out that while this violence was doubtlessly motivated by economic pressures and the need to create labour discipline, it was also… very much a passionate and gratuitous end in itself.

“This mimicry by the colonizer of the savagery imputed to the savage is what I call the colonial mirror of production and it is… identical to the mimetic structure of attribution and counter-attribution that Horkheimer and Adorno single out when they discuss (in “The Dialectic of Enlightenment”) not the violence of the twentieth-century colonial frontier but the blow-up within modern European civilization itself, as orchestrated by anti-Semitism.”

Taussing then quotes Horkheimer and Adorno: “There is no anti-Semite who does not basically want to imitate his mental image of a Jew, which is composed of mimetic ciphers: the argumentative movement of a hand, the musical voice painting a vivid picture of things and feelings irrespective of real content of what is said, and the nose—the physiognomic principum individuationis, symbol of the specific character of an individual, described between the lines of his countenance.”

There are several things in the above quotes which I would like to point out further and add to my own observations.

Let us turn to what Taussig describes as “the blow-up within modern European civilization”. It is my perception that the blow-up is not over. It continues in the effort of NATO to try maintaining pre-eminence of the West through the war in Afghanistan (Latvian military forces including). It also continues by means of the economic catastrophe that now spans the globe. The catastrophe was temporarily averted as a result of a temporarily successful diversion of social tensions caused by secular princes (nee neo-Christians) to Conspicuous Consumption. The mechanism through which Conspicuous Consumption was accomplished was to loosen—following WW1—the gold standard, and then replace it by fiat money in the latter half of the 20th century. The world is familiar with the consequences of fiat money through the parliamentary democracy and inflation in the Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1920s and more recently in Zimbabwe, Africa.

Though Taussig does not connect the repressions of arch-Christianity with colonialism or colonialism with fascism, he comes close enough for my purposes. Writes Taussig: “Fascism… is an accentuated form of modern civilization which is itself to be read as the history of repression of mimesis—the ban on graven images, gypsies, actors; the love-hate relationship with the body; the cessation of Carnival; and finally the kind of teaching which does not allow children to be children. But above all, fascism is more than outright repression of the mimetic; it is a return of the repressed, based on the ‘organized control of mimesis’. Thus fascism, through the mimesis of mimesis, ‘seeks to make the rebellion of the suppressed nature against dominion directly useful to dominion’”.

Even if fascism ceased being virulent as the result of physical exhaustion of societies due to WW2 and a subsequent release of tensions by taking advantage of a combination of machine production and fiat money to squelch unresolved tensions and aggressiveness, it did so also by absolving the carnal sins of sin, now identified as Conspicuous Consumption. However, fascism did not disappear (even if it sometimes so appeared), because “organized control of mimesis” (through apparent release of control over Conspicuous Consumption) cannot be sustained over the long-term.
This is why I agree with Taussig that we need to seize “…the opportunity to dismantle… second nature and reconstruct the worlds”.

This is a time when a small nation like Latvia has the opportunity to be shrewd and set its sail toward the future “within the buffeting of history” (Taussig). However, before the vessel called “Latvia” can take advantage of its small size and sail past the sinking ocean liners, it needs to deconstruct its parliamentary democracy and the Constitution which are tied by hidden ties to fascism. The most obvious way this can be accomplished is to encourage the people of Latvia to “not-vote”, dismiss the parliamentary partidocracy, and then reconfigure the future in a manner that will encourage mimesis not only among their own, but throughout the world.

The setting of the sails into the winds of history requires a radical jibe, that jibe being the “not-vote”.

© Eso Antons Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

POSTSCRIPT 2 / Epilogue
99 Let Us Have Alterity or
Come The Alternative —….

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter. http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/  

First, as to the word "alterity" in the title. According to the dictionary “alterity” means: otherness; specifically the quality or state of being radically alien to the conscious self or a particular cultural orientation

Second, I have mentioned in my blogs in the past Michael Taussig, the anthropologist. I acknowledge my debt to Taussig here by citing him and his analysis of Walter Benjamin’s thought from his own thought provoking book, “Mimesis and Alterity”, Routledge, 1993. I am referring specifically to Chapter 3, ‘Spacing Out’ (Latvians would probably use the word “iedomāties”, to think into).

Taussing quotes Walter Benjamin: “The gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.” I cite this passage, because I do not believe that for Latvia today those “former times” are past, but are of profound relevance and need to be exercised today.

This is because as things are in Latvia now, it is a state with a failed government. While there are many mundane administrative functions that can be fixed without a change of government, the chief problem is that the state’s would-be orthodox reformers et al, are insufficiently alive in their imaginations and articulations to probe and try alterity. Indeed, at a time when it is clear that the “West” (capitalism) is as failed an affair as the recent “East” (communism), and yet the ossified model of the former inspires the Latvian reformers in the midst of ongoing social turmoil—even death (suicides) and pain (look at the teeth)—one has to wonder whether the inarticulateness of the ‘picture’ of the state of Latvian society (such mimesis of the community’s self as there exists) is not in fact a process realizing the intolerability of the situation by acting out a communal dying.
Of course, the “good” reformers will not admit that the old Latvia is dead or shout with me “Long live the other Latvia!” They will ask: “What other Latvia?”

This bloggers proposal of how to achieve the “other” Latvia is suggested in Blog 98. I suggest that the only hope of projecting Latvia into alterity that is other than a dying present is to wage a successful “not-vote” campaign. It is possible for 700,000 not-voters to do so. I do not mean that being “successful” must necessarily end in a victory (though it is desirable), but that a “not-vote” campaign draws sufficient attention to itself to become the kick-start (the electric shock to a stopped heart) necessary to assemble a Constitutional Revision Assembly, a Referendum Committee, empower an Interim Government to do all that is possible to do to stop Latvia from bleeding empty of its people by out-migration and demographic death-spiral put into motion by a series of failed governments, and of course many more issues.

In order to survive, Latvia needs to imagine itself a survivor. This survival must include the possibility of seizing on radical direct not-violent actions as means to survival. The Latvia of tomorrow must shed its dead orthodox skin. This skin—a distorted history of pagans, peasants, and neo-Christian preachers—has been let overwrite a people who were in their proto-Latvian stage artisans (weavers, carpenters, potters, smiths, cobblers, gardeners, etc.) and were better known as Johns Children (Jāņu bērni). These were hobbled in the recovery of their identity, when in 1888 the figure of the itinerant teacher John (still visible on the Lihgo flag of 1874) was replaced by one Bear-Slayer, a figure lifted out of Luther’s Illustrated Bible (where he appears as Samson the Lion-Slayer).

The switch away from John in favour of Bear-Slayer happened not only because in 1881 Tsar Alexander III came to power and provoked pogroms against the Jews, but because he threatened many of the people living in the tsardom by attempting to have their language replaced with Russian. Among these people were Latvian speaking people. The tensions exploded under Tsar Nicholas II with what we know as the “1905 Revolution”. While dissatisfaction with economic development was one of its motivating forces, there were other motivations not tied to economics. This is the reason why the image (and the alterity) of Bear-Slayer, a macho character, found fertile soil in what had formerly been a kingdom held together by itinerant story tellers, who served equally well as saints. By making Bear-Slayer the hero and then leaving him to replaced John was a fatal mistake.

Indeed the institutions that diminish the proto-Latvian people (the populist substrate always at odds with a government presenting itself as neo-Christian) have a long history. And this is why the life of the Latvian community’s subjective self was permanently at odds (and often not for the better, though the why-fores are understandable) with democracy under the direction of a parliamentary government. Today direct participatory democracy is still spoken of only in the context of a President directly elected by the public rather than the Parliament. The Parliament remains a club of and for “political” parties.

At the same time, the death rattle may be just what the doctor ordered if we understand the anxieties of the subjective self of Latvians as they enter the death spiral caused by out-migration, an increasingly low birth rate, and not least by a parliamentary government believing itself to know better, though responsible for the time of troubles. This may be an opportune moment for Latvians to recapture the moment of self-identification lost in the last half of the 19th century and—with the help of alterity—re-identify themselves.

To cite Walter Benjamin (by way of Taussig) again: “If the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but, rather, in the place where we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a torment of tension and ravishment.”

If the people who once knew themselves as Johns Children still retain in themselves something of the power of “mimesis”, that curious desire to be someone, something or somewhere else, an alterity remains a possibility. Though one cannot accomplish this directly of course, one can feel one’s self into it, and there are many ways of doing it. The copy machine is as much a mimesis machine as a wreath of grasses and flowers on one’s head. The latter was how the Latvian Children of Johns felt themselves into the role of being the children of John, their hero, the maternal male storyteller come on Johns Eve to keep them awake and make sure the Sun rises on Midsummer morning. Today, however, we have for alterity the young Latvian woman, who imagines she comes from impoverished peasants (perhaps kolhozniks), who conceives a child in England with the seed of an irresponsible Latvian boy also imagining he has endless generations of impoverished peasants in his background. Such is the result of the alterity that the parliamentary government of Latvia presents its people with.

Walter Benjamin is writing about his “ravishment” (his feeling his way into an alterity) while thinking of a young Latvian woman, a theatre director, (“a Russian revolutionary from Riga”—circa 1920s) with whom he is infatuated. Asja Lācis is an object out there in Walter Benjamin’s field of vision, that—to paraphrase Benjamin in first person singular—…cuts a one-way street through me, and by that cut stimulates my commitment to Marxism…. Walter and Asja live together for two years in Berlin (no doubt this is the time when Asja cut through Walter Benjamin with arguments that she makes ever so much more profound than words on paper). An intellect bound together by love (be it infatuation) is able to make the quantum jump from singer to linden tree in blossom time, to the song of bees in the blooms, and to the Revolution. So can’t government acting as if it has the rights of state and can go riding piggy-back on the wagon of history pushed onto the steel rails of a neo-liberal capitalist economy.

An important point raised by Michael Taussig is Benjamin’s perception of history. Writes Taussig: “The radical displacement of self in sentience—taking one outside of oneself—accounts for one of the most curious features of Benjamin’s entire philosophy of history, the flash wherein ‘the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’ Repeatedly this mystical flash illuminates his anxiety for reappraisal of past in present, this understanding that ‘to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.’”

Taussig continues: “This flash marks that leap ‘in the open air of history’ which establishes history as ‘Marx understood revolution’ as ‘the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the ‘now’.’”

The government of Latvia, the one in office for the last twenty years, perceives the history of Latvia as a homogenous empty time. By so doing, the government causes the Latvian people to perceive their history as an “empty time” as well. The Latvian government of today empties the people of their “now” as a community and replaces it with visions of conspicuous consumption. In the end, conspicuous consumption is a form of cannibalism performed by the government on the people so that when everything else has been consumed, they consume themselves. The subjection of and then the limitation of the peoples’ subjectivity to Pop globalizes the world for freedom to be a Conspicuous Consumer, but it fails to impress the community of proto-Latvians, 200,000 of who have voted with their feet and left Latvia.

The Latvian people describe the consumption of their state with the phrase “the stolen state”, a word combo that is one of the top ten in Latvia. It is  "the stolen state", the nicely crisped body with green garnishes on the long dining room table, that is the centre piece of attention of the guests.

I trust this explains what alterity has to do with vision, with tomorrow, with a people at peace and a purpose. The “not-vote” campaign continues. To not-vote must be done to ensure humankind an alterity beyond that of the Conspicuous Consumer. It is worth as a consciousness raiser. My 99 blogs lead toward it.

Copy leaflet at 98 and pass it on.