Life is fragile. I almost forgot that and then BLAM!! I get gentle reminders from the universe. Friends die, get sick, get arrested. A guy I used to know was arrested for putting a camera in his 14 yr. old stepdaughters bathroom. Rot in hell, bastard. At 14 the very least you deserve is a little privacy. A sculptor I know Louis Jemenez, was killed when one of his huge monumental sculptures fell on him and severed his femoral artery and he bled to death. Killed by the art that was the out pouring of his very soul. What irony is that? Another friend's husband was diagnosed with a really fast growing brain tumor. Another with bladder cancer. The forests are burning..... ad nauseam. Now somehow in all this pain and suffering we are duty bound to find joy and peace. Action is the only answer. Reach out to those who need it. Compassion is everything. Remember those mirror neurons.

Some of us are proscriptive and some of us are descriptive. I see this in language a lot. There are those who refuse to accept changes in expression, grammar, etc. and "go ballistic'' when it happens. They are the ones, you know them, who are always correcting your spelling and grammar. The French even have an institution whose job it is is to protect the Language which may very well kill it in the end as it will become obsolete without new words. I have a friend who gives me a lecture if I use the expression, "an acre of land" as the word land is redundant. Doesn't matter that that is what everyone says, they are wrong. You can't say anxious when you mean eager either as that is the wrong usage. These are the proscriptive ones. The descriptive ones, like me, merely describe what is happening to language or culture and really don't judge it all that much. Things change and I am interested in how they change what will be the consequences of that change in the long run. For example will English be watered down so much by all the new words coming in that it will morph into something else? Will it be made stronger because of it? We have more words than any other language, they borrow from us. One of our major exports is words.

Around 800-200 BCE in all the main regions of the civilized world, people begin to create new ideas about god. Interestingly, they all developed in very similar ways even though they had no real contact with each other. Individual tribal gods of local areas were replaced with the ONE GOD. Many things were happening at this time, power was shifting to the marketplace from the kings and priests which led to a new prosperity. Perhaps the most important thing to develop at this time though was the idea of the INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE. It is not without a certain irony that we develop the idea of one god just when we start figuring out that we are separate individuals. God developed in "a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism". It would seem that the opposite would be true. If we think religious wars are bad now imagine what it would have been like if each of us had our own individual god. So who cares? except that is what the most noted theologians think we are going through now. These are the best of times and the worst of times. We are on the verge of another great change in our view of our place in the universe.

I have to add a new film to my favorites of all time.

THE MAGDALENE SISTERS (2002). it is based on a true story about young Irish women who were virtually enslaved in convents during the 1960's just before the Catholic Church lost its strangle hold over the people of Ireland (which is a whole other story). The physical and psychological damage the nuns and priests inflicted on these unfortunate girls was shocking beyond belief. Deserted by their families and accused of sexual misconduct they were given to the nun for atonement. Unable to speak to anyone in the outside world beyond the gate they were imprisoned with no release date. There were actually several older grey haired women there. It was actions like this by corrupt people of power that destroyed the social order. The rest of us in the 60's were revolting against that abuse. Perhaps it has gone to far, but who do you trust? The government? Church? Schools? what are our institutions that can sustain us. They are all broken and until we find new ones we are doomed to disorder. Entropy rules!

The Magdalene Convents were closed in 1996.

So if, as Paul Tillich says, the idea of a personal god that keeps tinkering with the universe, not to mention our personal lives, who is mean and jealous, is absurd. ( that is really a germanic sentence, sorry) Who wants a tyrant. Who wants just another petty being like us? Atheism is justified. We, since the beginning of it all, have had gods. It seems we are hard wired for it. If we are to create a new god what would we look for? What good things have gods given us in the past? What was so important about god that we actually evolved with the idea? Is it possible to believe in god and belong in our contemporary intellectual world? With very few exceptions, people who have a personal/tyrant god are not really intellectually engaged in the world. They seem to exist in a "god spell". Is this good? Well one thing that results is a cultural war. Exactly what we have now. Apparently, live and let live are irrelevant concepts when you know you are right and of course both sides are right.

We have mirror neurons that fire in our brains when we see someone doing certain things, like smiling, for example. Even though we are not smiling our smiling centers fire in our brains. Sort of a cool monkey see monkey do type thing. They have the same neurons I presume since so much of our brain are similar. I think we are pretty much equal with chimps, brain cell for brain cell. They don't have as much myelin, the stuff that coats the neuron though. Apparently that is important. I read this at 4 am so I can't remember why. I'll reread it and relate it tomorrow. Anyway, these mirror neurons have captured my interest. Could this be the beginning of compassion? Is this how we can "know" what another feels because our neurons are firing at the same time when we witness something? Apparently Autistics lack this ability to one degree or another. That makes perfect sense. What is interesting to me and what I can't figure out is why we have what seems like a genetic tendency in some people to behave in ways that preclude their leaving descendants? Like autism. How has that survived? One would think something like that would have been selected out but natural processes long ago. There must have been some advantage to being autistic. One never knows. For example. sickle cell anemia, if processed correctly on a genetic level, causes immunity to malaria. Quite an advantage. Too much of a good thing is not an advantage however. Life is cool. Life is good.

The ancients judged their gods on their effectiveness.** I think that is a good idea. Is your god effective? If not fire him and get another one just like your ancestors did. What do you want in a god? Grace, manna, interpersonal interaction or a really angry belligerent one who is the Boss with a capital B? Totalitarian gods are quite popular now. I think my god is effective but then again I am not opposed to borrowing someone else god occasionally if it seems appropriate. I figure manna is good and if some other god gives better manna especially when I am in that god's territory then all the better. My god understands that and actually encourages it. Naturally, this doesn't work if you have a jealous god like the Israelites did. That was very problematic for them. The Hindu's pretty much fired their gods and hired religious teachers who are considered higher than the gods they fired. Apparently if you fire them they are still around. Sort of like our corporate CEO's. I wonder if some of them are in prison?


** Data from this blog courtesy, Karen Armstrong's, The History of God"

The ancients judged their gods on their effectiveness.** I think that is a good idea. Is your god effective? If not fire him and get another one just like your ancestors did. What do you want in a god? Grace, manna, interpersonal interaction or a really angry belligerent one who is the Boss with a capital B? Totalitarian gods are quite popular now. I think my god is effective but then again I am not opposed to borrowing someone else god occasionally if it seems appropriate. I figure manna is good and if some other god gives better manna especially when I am in that god's territory then all the better. My god understands that and actually encourages it. Naturally, this doesn't work if you have a jealous god like the Israelites did. That was very problematic for them. The Hindu's pretty much fired their gods and hired religious teachers who are considered higher than the gods they fired. Apparently if you fire them they are still around. Sort of like our corporate CEO's. I wonder if some of them are in prison?


** Data from this blog courtesy, Karen Armstrong's, The History of God"

Why I am a postmodernist with modernist tendencies.

"Postmodernism is all about the process. Art is process, not product. Even the definition of postmodern is process. In this, one experiences the breakdown of language, hence words like, "gay" which can mean happy, homosexual,(or the new meaning flimsy). Meaning is relative to both perspective and experience. Meaning is process as well (and morphs with unerring frequency daily.) There is no reliability in anything, thus anarchy replaces the hierarchy prevalent with the moderns. Hierarchal patterns are so much easier to comprehend." Ellen Bates ( parentheticals are mine)

It seems to me that with the moderns we begin to see the breakdown of the hierarchal system. It failed. God, the top of the system failed us most hence he is dead or in a forced state of perpetual resurrection by the religious radicals. I picture a comatose godhead tied with golden chains to his throne with the minions preying him into consciousness. Nothing worked anymore or as Yeats said," the center cannot hold, things fall apart". But interestingly enough, human in their amazing capacity to adapt, created an order in the non-order and began to define what the non ordered order was and it was postmodernism. Chaos rules and it is good. We will just redefine Chaos and all will be well. Life is good.

Do we have to love that which we don't understand? I read that somewhere, Camus', The Plague, I think. Do we have to love god? I have been thinking about our relationship with god. If we look back over the centuries and think about god's role in art in literature we see radical changes. From the bible to Samuel Beckett, it becomes clear that our belief in a loving, compassionate, all powerful god is disintegrating, slowly but inexorably. Is it knowledge that weakens god, just like in the Garden of Eden? Get knowledge, loose god. It seems that way. In the modernist writers, Camus, Beckett, Joyce god is there but it is a failed god no longer loving. He is, at best, mean and resented. Now we barely see or hear about him except in the born-again books like The Left Behind series and all sorts of books and films about the anti-christ. This new god seems to be getting even for our infidelity to his greatness and good and evil battle again for dominance. This is medieval construct. Can we create a new God that embraces all the science that seems to deny his very existence? Do we need to? There is a serious battle waging over God or no god so I would imagine some kind of second coming is at hand.

I look up Yeats after I wrote my blog yesterday and rediscovered the MODERNIST, those deeply alienated, isolated, self analytical souls that formed what is now our postmodern world. I am not sure I like being defined as the thing that came after the other thing. I have never gotten a really good definition of postmodern other than to say that in art it is the garbage (my word) of all the movements of the past. So in any given piece of art you may see impressionistic, gothic and rococo influences all mushed together. Anything goes and the stranger and more anti art it is the better. Architecture is a good example, with the neo-coneyisland influences on lots of postmodern buildings. Neo-coneyisland is so preferable to the cold heartless bauhaus school of modernism with it icy steel and glass. But then that was just a reaction to all the bricka-braque of the prewar structures. Everything is just a reaction to something else. World War I, which I think was the cause and effect of the modernist movement was just a reaction to the excesses of the monarchical system in Europe. WWII was just a reaction to WWI and the harshness of the treaty of Versailles which was a reaction to the fact that everyone hated the Germans. The Germans are interesting to me. Talk about possessing the greatest and the worst. The most divine music and poetry and the bloodiest wars and most heinous crimes against their citizens all in one nation. Germany should be the poster child of humanity and its history sent up in all the space ships so other civilizations can be warned about how unstable and reactionary we are but also how pure and divine we can be. Is Germany the way it is because they were never really conquered by the Romans and never had that early civilization and uniting influence? They picked up on the aggressive militant aspects of the Romans though. Unity is not their strong suite.

Are you a postmodernist or a modernist? I am a postmodernist and I will explain why later.

June 6, 2006. 6/6/06 The sign of the beast. It puts me in mind of Yeat's "THE SECOND COMING". I thought I would share the parts I remember with you. The poem is about the second coming of Christ which if one thinks of it in Hegelian terms would be about the coming of the antithesis or the antichrist. I think this says it all even with the forgotten parts.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold:
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

......somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Joan Didion wrote a book called "Slouching toward Bethlehem". I did a painting called "Things fall Apart"

If I wanted to create an institution that taught young males responsibility and encouraged them to be good fathers and men in the community I would create something akin to Mormonism. I base this on one visit to a Mormon church yesterday for a baby blessing. It was interesting in that the blessing only involved the fathers and their male friends and relatives. One can assume here that the mother is already tied to the infant and it is the father who needs to feel that bond and publicly accept responsibility. As the father holds the infant each man touches him/her. The father gives a spontaneous blessing. He states what his responsibilities are and what his hope for the infant are. It was at times moving and tearful. There was lots of honoring of the ancestors and a blessing of the soul that this child possesses. Life and death are eternal and ongoing. From a postmodern feminist perspective it was totally sexist. From the point of view of someone witnessing the decay of a grand society, very necessary.

How much free Will is the average human capable of taking responsibility for? Does free Will only work when you really don't have free Will? Is it an illusion anyway you look at it? Does one have choice within the constraints of a society where there are strict rules of conduct? Is rebelling against rules freedom? One would think the purest state of freedom is with anarchy but ironically without society choice would be determined by biology i.e. who is strongest, meanest, etc and of course by who get eaten. Is there true choice in anarchy and chaos?