Author Archives: M D

Freedom Handout

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While the notion of freedom is a high and lofty ideal, exactly what it means and how it gets implemented demands thought prior to action.  Otherwise, we may find ourselves defending a “freedom” that is nothing other than a self-serving delusion and stuck in a quagmire while the body bag count goes up.  Did anyone give us a “freedom handout” when we wanted it?  We wanted it bad enough to make great sacrifices.  We had a resolve that included the vast majority of people in the colonies.  We did not have to convince a lot of “traitors to humanity on the left” (a convenient way of dismissing the majority without thought) to break away from England.  We do not need to lose our idealism but we do need to get real.   If we try to fight every battle for freedom for every one we may end up losing the war and ourselves in the process.  The resolve we had to implement our freedom did not depend on any “freedom handout”.  We would not have appreciated it if it had been given to us from another country.  The call of freedom is the call for self-responsibility.  Anytime someone is given something they did not earn they take it for granted.  If it comes cheap it goes cheap.  This does not mean we condone brutal, self-serving aggression when we see it.  It does mean that we have a realistic understanding of what freedom means and how it has value.  Knee-jerk reaction is not what makes freedom real.  A “freedom handout” does make freedom real.   To make freedom real a majority of people must thoughtfully resolve to make it their own no matter what the consequences.   Our resolve does not effortlessly apply to everyone, everywhere.  This is magical thinking (or no thinking at all).  Our anger and indignation does not create a resolve for freedom in other countries.  It only gives us an occasion for own angry, narcissistic catharsis while we sacrifice our young and cheapen the value of freedom.

Note: While I would not want to minimize the involvement of France, Spain and Holland in the Revolutionary War I would point out that the resolve of the colonies was already demonstrated and forged in the three years it took for France to get involved (four for Spain and Holland).  Washington himself was totally surprised by the fortunate, “Divine Providence” of these countries involvement.  In any case, I think if those countries had initially invaded England to give the colonies “freedom” my point would have failed.  As it is their involvement years later for their own reasons does not negate the patriots resolve.  I might also add that “freedom” in the case of the Revolutionary War may also have more meat on it than simply a lofty ideal (i.e., taxation without representation, etc.).

A Brief Introduction to Being and Time

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Heidegger (H.) tells us we all have a pre-cognitive understanding of “being” already at work in our “everydayness”.  There are different ways that we relate to being.  For example, when we use a hammer to build something, we are relating to that hammer with a “pre-understanding” of its being.  We are relating to it in the mode of instrumentality.  In German, Heidegger refers to this as zuhanden, ready-to-hand.  In that mode, “being” shows itself as “disappearing in use”.  We relate to the being of the hammer as a “tool”.  If the hammer breaks while it is disappearing in use we immediately relate to it in another mode “present at hand”.  We look at it and say “stupid hammer” how dare you!  It becomes conspicuous, even a bit intrusive.  “Present at hand” is how science relates to being.  In this mode being is present as a thing (substance), an object of study, and shows itself to us.  In German, Heidegger refers to this as vorhanden, present-at-hand.  For H. when being is mis-understood (semblance) we relate to it in in-authenticity.  If we pre-understand our environment as instrumentality, we use it to accomplish a task such that it disappears in use, we use oil to make our cars go, we use trees to build our houses, etc. –  then, we pre-understand the being of nature/environment as “standing reserve”.  This is the problem of technology.  It comes from a confusion of how we relate to the being of “nature”, as a semblance of “nature”.  Why do I emphasize “nature””?  Because this shows something else about how we relate to being, we are historical beings.  We live in a “stretch” of time that goes from a past to a future not an instant present.  “Nature” is a term/relationship to a being that is carried with us from language, philosophy, history – metaphysics.  It tells us a pre-cognitive understanding of what something “is”, its being.  When what something “is” is a semblance we have failed to relate authentically with “it”.  The being of human (dasein) is what H. spends much of his effort on in Being and Time.  A few examples:   The experience of time – there is lived time and abstract, historical time.  Our history informs us that time is a series of abstract “now” moments and yet the way we live time is as a stretch.  When we are happy time seems/feels like it flies by quickly.  When we are depressed time drags on forever.  So the experience of time is different than the abstract notion of time as “now” moments.  Why do we privilege abstract time? – because we are historical beings and pre-understand time as an abstraction (i.e., a history defined by “now” moments) – this informs us about time – not how we experience it.  Another example:  The experience of space – history tells us that space is linear extension, “things” are x number of feet away in 3 dimensional space…but what about lived space?  – When I am looking at a glass of water while wearing glasses the glasses on my face is closer to me in terms of linear extension but in a lived sense I am closer to the glass of water, I am together with the glass of water, co-habiting its space.  So humans can de-sever regions of space and bring them close or far at will.  If I am walking down a hallway I am not calculating the feet to all the walls, floor and ceiling (as perhaps a robot would do) to orient myself, to keep from falling.  In a lived sense, I am co-habiting the region of the hallway and orienting myself accordingly.  Again, we privilege the abstract over the lived (phenomenological) experience because we are historical beings.  This is a short intro. into H. and his work.  It gets better!

Socialism and Capitalism

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The US is already a mix of socialism and capitalism.  If socialism is always evil then I guess not only are you against the recent government action to buy into private banks and bail out the economy (by the socialist Bush administration) but you also want to get rid of social security, Medicare, Medicaid and  the Department of Education.  Is any government intervention wrong i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan?  Why would you stop anywhere left of Adam Smith?  Heck, why have his “limited government”?  What not privatize the military and local government?  Hey, why not get rid of all government?  Can’t the market self-govern?  How far do you folks want to go with this?  You seem to throw these terms around as some sort of code words but I would like to know how far you want to go with the direction you imply.  Where would you stop and why?  It is always easy to make negative statements but much harder to think through the ramifications of your implications and make positive statements of your ideals.

Republican Spin

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“Perception is everything” appears to be the organizing paradigm of modern political campaigns in the US.  Technology and capital have combined into the perfect storm for managing perception.  Perceptions thrust into the early years of technology kept the Republicans largely out of office for decades after FDR and the Great Depression.  Republicans were portrayed as the elitist party of the rich.  They were opposed to the plight of the average working guy.  In the seventies with the economy worsening and gas lines growing long the Republicans saw the chance to grab the reins of perception.  Instead of the perception of concern for the working man in a time of economic affluence the Republicans saw that the economic reality of a weakening economy was a perfect moment to launch their perception of tax and spend.  The Democrats were not the party of the working man.  They opposed the working man by spending frivolously and even selfishly.  The Democrats were the true elitists.  However, the underlying necessary condition that allowed this perception its oxygen was a changing economic reality.  In a time of affluence, social programs are a plus in political marketing.  When money is not a concern it is easy to spend, to create images of ourselves as holy, caring, giving.   However, when economic needs start dominating the day to day experience of voters, the time is ripe for creating the perception that tax and spend liberals are to blame, leftist elitists bent on nothing other than benefiting themselves at the cost of the common Joe.   The Republicans seized the perceptional opportunity with Ronald Reagan and controlled the perceptions and dialogs for decades.  They cloaked their conservative ideology in the modern garbs of egalitarianism and the working Joe’s fight against the liberal elite.  Liberal, the “L” word was profane. 

Now, the managed perception of Republican ideology has become fat and ripe for takeover.  Economic realities have again given an occasion ripe for perception’s paradigm shift.  The elite have now become the ones in power, the ones to blame, the party of the elite.  The true Republican believers have fled into the concaves of their historical, conservative ideology and left the neo-cons to fend for themselves.  The righteous indignation of the true conservatives is set to blast the folks that enabled their political domination.  While Republicans were all too happy to get votes and cater to their perceptual electorate, they also discovered that managing perception came with a cost.  It cost them their conservative soul.  Now that they appear soulless, bereft of new ideas, bearing the burden of the image of fault and elitism they have retreated.  Those that are the party faithful have hunkered down into their ideological roots to regroup and try to re-forge an image for another day, an opportunist day.  Conservatives are looking at perhaps decades in the perceptual doldrums.  The smart ones know it.  The last desperate screams of the dying McCain campaign are shrill and are now working to dismantle the last bastions of their credibility.  As many Joe’s are saying, “If a Republican’s lips are moving they are lying”.

What shows itself in this spectacle is that “perception is not everything”, perception is an opportunistic infection of economic reality.  When reality happens the managers of perception lose.  They are ripe for takeover.  When “management” begins to believe its own propaganda it loses touch with the shifting sands of reality beneath their feet.  However, necessity requires that “Joes” keep a healthy stand in underlying realties, that they do not take the manufactured perceptions too seriously and, when perceptions grow thin, the perceptual power brokers find they are touch with their own economic realities.

Swirling, Whirling, Worlding

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Swirling, whirling, worlding snow

Shimmering, soft white into half lit fog

Walking up my mountain

From home to peak

How many lives have I made this journey?

Now, frosted Aspen branches

Delicate, curling intricately

Telling their gnarly story silently

Thriving, striving, intertwining

Barely visible in blazing sun

But now, icy frost gives them voice

Burgeoning, budding a snowy history

Thinking, reflecting, working up this hill

Active, passive

Relationships, meaning, beauty, grammar, structure, analysis

Intertwined in different temporalities

With these branches, this snow, my mountain

We kiss each other as our distances

We silently mingle in ways not present

Undercurrents never seen

But shown up from time to time as history, as frost

Soon to melt and return us to our anonymity

This road, I labor to the top

Winding as the Aspen branches

Now, viewing brilliant white fields

Made by ravaging, relentless fires

Another history shown by the dark, burnt tree trunks

Set against the white snow and half lit fog

I reach my peak

This place where the earth ends and the sky begins

I kiss eternity with my frosted beard

I stand erect towards my end, my mortality, my horizon

I stare into an abyss of half lit fog blowing snow

Not seeing past this eerie gray curtain

But knowing the expansive precipice,

the mountainous splendor that awaits another day

I marvel at my swirling, whirling, worlding, shimmering, glimmering

Presence

And what remains below, underneath, silent

But giving birth to the stars and the earth

This my place under the sky, over the earth and intertwined with all

This my mountain between peak and home is my soul.

Balance of Earth and Sky

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Oh what a delicate balance of earth and sky we are

Sky never knows to forget

Earth never forgets to know

Only humankind can drink from the grail of forgetfulness

The sorrows of death

The moment of enlightenment

All washed into the same abysmal extinction

We are drenched in the future and re-invented from the fading past

Until… the future dries…The past cries it last pangs…

The sun continues speaking its ancient wisdom to our souls without a word…

And, we are no more – taken into the night

Our places shimmer on for the quickly fading moments of those left behind until they also move to dark

And then, imprints we left without our names, without our faces carry on to those we never knew.

By this then, we become the sky that never knew and the earth that never forgot and we no longer are that humankind that forgets – we are the earth and sky and we erase the steps of mortals for their pleasure.

Logos, High Ghost, Eros

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I live in your words

Where my orb is bound and measured

In the grace of your spoken moment.

Your words stake me to the ground

And lift me to soar with eagles.

They rain on my weariness

And let me stand naked

Shimmering in the ecstasy of a million new suns.

I am spoken as your erupting beauty

And cease to exist in your silence.

I blaze in your atmosphere

And burn as your presence.

Borne on your whispering wings

To the moment when all shadows

Release their darkness

To a morning that never was.

Dance

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I dance.

We dance.

This body resistance.

This old man in my sea.

This silent stranger that speaks more with silence than all words.

In youth the old man sleeps.

In mid life the old man rouses my attention.

This body resistance is my inner earth, my gravity.

My soul lites as moths to the lantern.

Our dance flys through morning lit cathedrals

And bells that rise towards the echoed horizon.

Fields of pleasure and pain glimmer through our life dance.

We play, we sleep, we eat, we love.

All the while the body resistance is quiet.

Yet overflowing with the wisdom of the earth, the mountains, the rivers.

This body that loves the dirt and always returns

Yet for a moment we played, we sang, we danced,

And…we died.

Eclipse

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Oh wistful night of a million suns.

Spawn dancing shadows from nameless orbs.

Through stellar darkness light years are thrown.

Perchance dark grace our sun or moon

And primal night fire my heart drum.

 

Oh wistful thoughts of a million souls

Spawn dancing shadows from nameless histories.

Through unconscious darkness years are thrown.

Perchance dark grace our I or other.

And primal projections fire my loves.

Earth (an old one from a young time)

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Gathering together within we move sometimes apart, sometimes mingled but always we move together.  We who are not yet the murmur of leave’s praise for wind or morning shadows setting the world afire with renewed hope.  We who dance together silently with words filling the night with songs.  Once we delight, I knew a place, we were a place.  I hear the places we were and are and will be.  Even the place where our songs have ceased, the place that knows us no more, especially that place, moves with our inner delight.  Our laughter reverberates in sun-filled cathedrals and finds crevices we know not.