Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 22

Mom, Dad, and Hellzapoppin

The sophisticated sector of our society, e.g., the media, don’t much like simplistic analogies. Like, for instance, the notion that our smallest collective, the family, may be like our greatest, the nation. Yet this morning such an analogy arose in my mind. The occasion was a headline in the Wall Street Journal: “Gas Savings Not Spent Yet.” The essence here is that despite good numbers on December retail spending from private associations, national numbers from the Commerce Department indicate 0.9 percent decline in retail and food services spending as compared to November spending. And this despite a huge drop in gasoline costs?
The key word in the headline is that word Yet. The sophisticated understanding of people is based on an artificial notion of pure economic rationality. When people have extra money, they will spend it. If they don’t now, soon they will. Nothing else matters except having money or not having it. There is no future or social dimension present at all.
But if we use a “simplistic analogy,” our economic life today is comparable to the life of a family where mom and dad are at each others’ throats and hellzapoppin. A sign of that is a story on the next page: “House Votes to Block Immigration Policy,” just a day after a frosty meeting between the President and the Congressional leadership to discuss cooperation.
In a family in uproar, the children won’t be jolly. Consumer confidence is based on many things, not least the bigger atmosphere of the social whole. And there we have Mom determined to undermine Dad and vice versa. It’s barely safe to play, with half a mind, behind the couch, while in the kitchen things are heard to break on the tiled floor.

Bottom-up v. Top-down

I discovered Carl Gustav Jung just after I had passed my nineteenth year—and Frederic W.H. Myers as I’m approaching my seventy-ninth. Clearly Jung captured the attention of elements of my generation much more effectively than Myers. Jung was the worthy adversary (to use a phrase from Castaneda) of Sigmund Freud. Myers was associated chiefly with parapsychology as a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, an activity in shadows. Yet now I realize that the younger Jung (born 1875 versus Myers’ birth-year of 1843) owed an enormous debt to Myers. One doesn’t have to look hard or very long to discover the grounding ideas in Jung’s psychology fully developed in Myers and already published when Jung was just a little boy. Myers had the subconscious, which he called the subliminal mind; he also maintained the idea that the subliminal mind’s powers were greater and much wider than that of the conscious mind; finally, like Jung later, he also imagined the conscious mind as a subset of total consciousness or, to use Jung’s phrasing, as a small island floating in a sea of superior consciousness.
Myers had formulated this idea to explain anomalous phenomena in human behavior and experience—all those experiences we now label as paranormal. His views were in part shaped by the rise in evolutionary thought. Darwin was 34 years older than Myers and Myers 32 years older than Jung. Myers reached out to evolution in attempts to explain paranormal powers in humans; it seemed sensible to view them, in his time, as emerging by means of an evolutionary process. Evolution was in the air, you might say. Thus Myers’ explanation made use of a bottom-up model. To be sure, Myers was something of a genius; as his knowledge advanced he also came to see that what was bubbling up from beneath the threshold (subliminally) also at times seemed to come down from above the waking consciousness. But, in effect, he set the stage for a not-quite materialistic psychology which had a bottom-up framing. Start of the twentieth century.
At the start of the twenty-first, Myers is once more rising into prominence but, curiously, as a champion of a top-down theory of psychology. That theory is that the mind is irreducible to matter and must therefore in some sense either transcend matter or belong to another radically different order. (See this post on Irreducible Mind here .) Myers’ work supports that thesis because his exhaustive review of the empirical evidence for the veridical character of paranormal phenomena had already effectively undermined materialist monism back at the tail of the nineteenth century. But nobody paid it any mind. Materialism was rising like a gusher based on technological success. By the twenty-first century, despite being ignored, evidence for the paranormal had greatly increased.
It occurs to me that cycles in civilization also tend to be either bottom-up or top-down in orientation. Modernity is bottom up—whether it is in explaining reality by studying matter or ruling collective by democratic means. The age that came before was top-down in looking up towards an invisible Creator. I’ve slowly come to feel that beginning roughly in the 1820s a transition back from bottom-up to top-down began with the decay of Western civilization. Myers occupies a kind of midway point in this transition. It is not surprising, therefore, that his labors are equally useful in the support both modes of thought. He saw the one nearing its end and foresaw the other rising. These processes, needless to say, do not take place on a human time scale. Reading the papers I see a total conviction that we’re only beginning to build the Tower of Siloam. The sky’s really the limit. Poets see only cracks ( link ).

Peanuts

Herewith a repost of a 2009 item on LaMarotte, in a version of that blog that is no longer on the web. The occasion is a story in the New York Times this morning telling the world that William F. Buckley Jr. had been a “peanut butter freak.” A good day for peanut butter! Brigitte and I also count among the enthusiasts. Herewith that post.

*   *   *This morning we got to the bottom of a jar of our favorite brand, Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter. It takes us a mere two days to finish a jar, and the final act is to scrape the last bit of tiny product from the glass. Brigitte likes to do that with a spoon, and the activity produces a kind of clicking sound. This morning that reminded me of 1947 when I first heard that sound, although then the clicking came from metal hitting metal. And the memory inspired me to write this. One cannot praise peanuts, and peanut butter, frequently and ardently enough.

Soul Source

The roots of the word meaning soul in Greek and Latin are both from “breath,” thus pneuma in Greek and spiritus in Latin. The English soul is rooted in Proto-Germanic saiwalo and takes all sorts of variant forms in Germanic languages from Seele in German to ziel in Dutch. If you produce a list of the meanings of these three words, they all agree. At the most exhaustive level, the words mean “life,” more narrowly “an animating principle,” more narrowly yet a being that “feels, thinks, and wills.” Both the Online Etymology Dictionary (OED) and the much earlier (1852) and exhaustive German Dictionary produced by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm state that the Germanic word is of “uncertain origin.” Both, however, continue on to suggest that the root may be the Proto-Germanic saiwaz, meaning “sea.” The Grimm brothers speculate that the sea might once have suggested “waves” that mark the interior swings in the soul’s inner life. OED suggests what sounds much more plausible to me. Herewith OED’s addendum:
Sometimes [soul is] said to mean originally “coming from or belonging to the sea,” because that was supposed to be the stopping place of the soul before birth or after death [Barnhart]…. Klein explains this as “from the lake,” as a dwelling-place of souls in ancient northern Europe.
This struck me as strangely wonderful for a reason. Back about three years ago I put up a post on Borderzone ( link ) in which, commenting on Tony Hillerman’s The Dance Hall of the Dead, I had discovered a very curious aspect of Zuni religious beliefs. It is that souls come from and return to a sacred lake in Arizona called Ko-thuwallawa, literally God-Town. What do they do there? They dance.
It is not very likely that the Zuni peoples originated in ancient northern Europe—however similar the beliefs might be. What we glimpse here is something else. While in these bodies we’d better be breathing at right regular intervals. The Greek and Latin words are centered on this vital but also mundane activity. But as for that much less fragile structure, the soul, it may also be seen as a “substantial entity” (OED) that keeps on dancing on….

Psychology Reexamined

A new book appeared in 2007 and then reissued in 2010 in paperback intended to nudge modern-day understanding of psychology forward—or perhaps back. What goes around comes around. The book is Irreducible Mind by Edward F. Kelley, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosse, and Bruce Greyson, Rowman & Littlefield.
I came across it just last month while doing some background lookups on Wilder Penfield for posts here ( link , link , and link ). It struck me as interesting that Amazon could not deliver the book (ordered in mid-December) until January 11—suggesting that it was in reprinting mode. The book, subtitled “Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century,” should become a widely used reference in psychology and parapsychology.
Herewith the first paragraph from the Preface:
This book originated from a seminar directed to theoretical foundations of scientific psychology, initiated in 1998 by Michael Murphy under the auspices of the Center for Theory and Research of Esalen Institute. By the year 2000 our discussions had advanced to the point where we believed we could demonstrate, empirically, that the materialistic consensus which undergirds practically all of current mainstream psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind is fundamentally flawed. We therefore committed ourselves to developing a book-length [800 page] presentation which would systematically articulate and defend this point of view.
Michael Murphy was a co-founder of the Esalen Institute and is perhaps best described as a New Age author. The authors of the book are associated with neuroscience (Edward F. Kelly), near-death experience and paranormal research and authorship (Emily Williams Kelly), psychotherapy (Alan Crabtree, Bruce Greyson), psychology and parapsychology (Alan Gauld, Emily W. Kelly), and philosophy (Michae Grosso).
The authors all have at least one foot—if not both—off the orthodox reservation of materialism. Emily W. Kelly, presumably Edward Kelly’s wife, worked closely as a research assistant with Ian Stevenson, famed for his reincarnation studies at University of Virginia. Edward Kelly had spent a decade at the J.B. Rhine’s Institute of Parapsychology. Gaunt had been President of the Society for Psychical Research (1989-1992), some of Greyson’s work has been on Near Death Experiences (NDEs), Crabtree’s work has focused on borderline matters like hypnotism, and one of Grosso’s books is titled The Millennium Myths: Experiencing the Next World Now.
The combined profile will make it easy for Orthodoxy to dismiss their collective effort in Irreducible Mind, but the claim made in that prefatory quote to “demonstrate, empirically” that Orthodoxy is flawed is quite obviously accurate so far as I’ve gotten in the book.
The book’s subtitle—and the general tone of the text—show that its authors intend seriously to nudge along a paradigm shift in the study of the human mind. They seem to be right on course.
Irreducible Mind is dedicated to F.W.H. Myers, dubbed “a neglected genius of scientific psychology,” and to Ian Stevenson and Michael Murphy. Now I’m not surprised that, when buying that book, Amazon helpfully tried to sell me Myers’ Human Personality. Since that book came out posthumously in 1903, Irreducible Mind is looking back as it looks forward, anchoring itself in the work of Myers (1843-1901) and William James (1842-1910).

Merci

A while back ( here ) I had a brief not on greeting—where, incidentally, I pointed out that in my own childhood we said “Hi” by using the Latin word “servus”; in Hungary that’s spelled szervusz. Today the French mercicame up; words keep doing that in our morning conversations. I went searching for it in that post on “Hello” but could not find it.
My spontaneous inclination was to derive it from a longer phrase, as in the English “I’m at your mercy.” The French have a very similar phrase as in the following: “Monsieur le Président, c’est un honneur pour moi d’être ici, et je vous en remercie.” Now in that usage, the speaker is re-thanking the President because, one assumes, the invitation was itself a form of “grace” or gift, hence the Spanish gracia. It’s not a bad guess to assume that endless repetition of the “je vous en remercie” would eventually been shortened to merci. The English “I’m at your mercy” no doubt was taken from that phrase. The Wiktionary ( here ) derives merci from the Latin mercēs, meaning pay, reward, wages. Hence the English “I’m in your debt” would be equivalent to be at someone’s mercy. Complicated, all this. It seems that in French saying merci means receiving something—and acknowledging that situation by using the generic for “a gift”—for getting one. Suppose that we said “dollar” instead of “thanks.” Wouldn’t that give foreigners a fit in understanding English?
But the complications associated with a word like merci are incomparably simpler than to explain that little word en in that French phrase. For that task I’d have to apply to someone who understands French at a much deeper level than I understand English. Some things you simply know—and even waterboarding could not elicit a meaningful response unless you were a highly specialized linguistic scholar.

A Micro-View of Real Estate

We sold our house in Grosse Pointe Farms on August 13, 2014 to a company engaged in updating and the reselling homes. Our property, call it the McKinley house, went on the market again January 4, 2015—which makes it 4 months and 22 days later. In the process what had been an old (1926) but mechanically very sturdy house—with the exception of a garage that, I think, was kept upright merely by the low branches of some very sturdy little trees—has been transformed, per the new seller, into a “fantastic English Colonial completely updated” and priced at nearly 74 percent above the price we got for it—a price which we considered quite adequate.
Well, the mark-up makes sense—and must have cost a pretty penny. The place has been transformed. Among the features: all new hardwood and granite flooring downstairs and in the bathrooms, completely new kitchen with marble counters, a new back drive and patio, very nice paint everywhere, a new front door, and new front stairs.
In an effort to give the house more spacious rooms and a “circular flowing floor plan,” the developers created larger openings in the living and in the sunroom thereby reducing usable space quite a bit—our old couch and big arm-chair would no longer fit in there now. They did away with storage space upstairs and shortened one hallway (at the end of which I had a huge shelf with tons of books). In the basement they erased a highly useful double tub used for laundry purposes.
Among the negatives, from our point of view, is that they took away all of the radiators and added forced air heating to the already existing air-conditioning system. One of the principal features of the McKinley house had been pleasant and very quiet heating which never dried you out like forced air does.
Now to that garage. We were certain that it would be torn down and replaced with a new one. Well, the developers fixed up the old one by adding some beams here and there. They also gave it some new siding. But it’s still the old garage. And no doubt it will do its job for another 25 years.
We wish the new owners a pleasurable use of the old McKinley house. They will not miss what we would sorely miss if by some chance we’d have to make the move back. The old becomes the new. And the location, to be sure, couldn’t be better for a family with children. The schools are within walking distance—as is the Library. But the library’s nearness isn’t noted by the e-brochure that brought us this intelligence (with our old neighbor, Paul, acting as intermediary).

Free Speech?

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221 U. S. 418, 221 U. S. 439. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.     [Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919) ( link ) Emphasis mine.]
My object here is to enlarge the context of the terrorist attack on personnel of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, in Paris—in reaction to which Free Speech is (as it were) being deified. In actual fact, there are limits to free speech, at least in the United States, when its use or abuse presents a clear and present danger. Here, anyway, according to Chief Justice Holmes back in 1919, there are substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
The case decided in Schenck v. United States dealt with  “A conspiracy to circulate among men called and accepted for military service under the Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917, a circular tending to influence them to obstruct the draft.” That action, very mild in the context of our time, was “within the power of Congress to punish.” The quotations from the case itself.
Just where these limits to Free Speech actually fall appears to have become very ambiguous, evidently depending on which side of an issue you’re on, whose ox gets gored, and so forth. If we look at the actual flavor of Charlie Hebdo, provided on this Google dump of images here , it is obvious that the paper attacks just about everything. One of their covers, visible here , cited by some to show that the paper exercises its satire on all faiths, shows the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an as rolls of toilet paper. In the secular world, such things are deemed Okay and unremarkable. But Holmes, in Schenck, noted, immediately after the quote given above, that “The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.” In today’s circumstances it may be just fine to badmouth Christianity and Judaism, but plain facts, going back some years now, indicate that Hebdowas creating a clear and present danger—to itself and all those who, by proximity to it, might become “collateral damage” to an attack on its use of Free Speech.
Pondering these matters, Brigitte had a sharp intuition. Odd, she said, that we set clear limits on attacks on bodies but attacks on human mindsare defended passionately and there is no limit whatsoever. Well, according to our Supreme Court, there are situations in which “the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment may become subject to prohibition.” But we are so busy in our selective outrage that we have no time actually to think about things at all, never mind such unspeakable horrors as limiting Free Speech.

The Word

We saw the Danish film Ordet, which means “the word,” made in 1955 by Carl Theodor Dreyer based on a play by Kaj Munk first performed in 1932. The movie is impressive in part because it embodies a kind of contradiction. It is an art film and, simultaneous, a religious film. It is long, ritualistic in its mode of presentation, yet builds incredible tension. Seen in the right company, it will generate discussion that will last at least as long as the film itself. Ordet is the kind of film best left undescribed to enable those who might want to see it to experience its full impact. It is available from Netflix.
I got to thinking about ritual. Ritual is strongly associated with religious experience at every level, even down to the trivially superstitious: touch wood, black cat, spilled salt. Art film, in my own mind, and any “art” one is tempted to put in quotes, represents the piety of Humanism. It does not contrast so much with traditional ritual behavior as it updates it for elites. For the ordinary folk sentimentality will suffice. In Ordet a kind of tension arises because the technique of Humanistic ritual is used to tell a religious story—straight, you might say. Art films are not supposed to deal with that subject seriously.
Or perhaps the times are changing. I put “Art Film” on Google. The first item that comes up, of course, is the Wikipedia article on the subject. To my surprise the first image shown in that article is a portrait of Carl Theodor Dreyer celebrating his The Passion of Joan of Arc, a 1928 film.

All They From Sheba Shall Come

Die Kön’ge aus Saba kamen dar, The kings from Sheba came— Gold, Weihrauch, Myrrhen brachten sie dar, Brought  gold, incense and myrrh, Alleluja! Halleluja! Was dort Jesaias vorhergesehn, What there Isaiah had foreseen Das ist zu Bethlehem geschehn. That did in Bethlehem take place. Hier stellen sich die Weisen The Wise men, here, they do arrive Bei Jesu Krippe ein And at the foot of Jesus crib Und wollen ihn als ihren König preisen. They stand to praise him as their king. Gold, Weihrauch, Myrrhen sind Gold, incense, myrrh are costly gifts Die köstlichen Geschenke, By means of which they honor pay Womit sie dieses Jesuskind To this small Jesus gently laid Zu Bethlehem im Stall beehren. In a stable at a place called Bethlehem.   [Beginning of J.S. Bach's Cantata 65, for the Feast of the Epiphany, authorship unknown]
The Cantata here is usually rendered as Cantata BWV 65. That acronym stands for Bach Werke Verzeichnis, thus Catalogue of Bach’s Works.
The reference to Sheba and to Isaiah comes from Isaiah 60:1-6 which says the following:
Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.
2  For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
3  And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.
4  Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side.
5  Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.
6  The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord.
In the Revised Standard version of Isaiah, Chapter 6o is headed “The dawn of Zion’s glory,” which suggests why this passage is associated with the birth of Jesus or his revelation to the Gentiles. Some very close readers of the Bible note that Isaiah mentions gold and incense (frankincense) but not myrrh, an aromatic resin used as a perfume in ancient times; they interpret myrrh as symbolizing Jesus’ death for our sins because myrrh was used at burials once.