The Stoicism of Cool Hand Luke

It’s the tumeric.

And happy pigs.

Is that a face you can trust?

Asking for a friend.

HSF… The Rust Cohle montage hangs off the end of the post like punctuation…or punctuated-ness. (Not that I don’t empathize with the character & his analyses. His misses are still closer than the comfort of congregation can bear to allow. And Jermiah Johnson was that kind ♪♫♪) The equilibrium that got punched – Luke’s stoicism (“stoicism”) – down into the little fossil record curio shop of horrors, because displaced by Andy’s true stoicism, is the Cambrian content of my intent.

Wonder what you’d respond with if I hadn’t finished with Cohle. The same? “Hope’less’, pointless, completely nihilistic”? Because those are the general elicitations of my comments, you feel? (The senasations lead the dictionary, contrary those who believe people “think in words.”)

In younger years hope (that the stories & characterizations were true…which was more like faith, actually, a more virulent form of hope, antibody-co/dependent enhancement, original antigenic sin apples plopping out the back of Trojan Horses, etc), jabbed in pointilisms (painted true pictures of human reality & not the truer pictures of Tom Sawyer types whitewashed whitewasher “light” brigades singing “don’t fence me in,” ironically), & “socially” prescribed & sanctioned denials were impossible to see through, all the way through, & so anti-heroes like Luke, or RP McMurphy, or Kowalski in his stolen, & ultimately destroyed Challenger (white, the color of the good guys, & supercharged) martyr-suicide vehicle, were the heroes…because I *thought* I saw through the hype, jabs, & denial quite clearly. So it was, had to be, antiheroes vs proheroes. So it was I was antihero.

“Hope’less’, pointless, & completely nihilistic” describes the CHL story*. All of it. Including Luke himself.

And those words describe all the Shawshank story, too – except for Andy.

Andy, the stoic, painting his porch fantastic. And maybe also that rarest, perhaps only mythical – another supercharged white vehicle – type, a competent man (like a Heinlein character). Something beyond a renaissance man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man

So, do you understand if I say that “hope’less’, pointless, & completely nihilistic” is on the nose within the confines of the stories given to confine? There, & only within there. Pandora’s Box.

Hope supposedly didn’t escape the box (jar). But it obviously did. So the box got bigger; hope escaped into a bigger box. Hope became the box. Because hope, like Brooks in Shawshank, was already institutionalized (whether by the box it had been stuffed into by the gods, or by conception). Internalization, & projection; the medium has only got itself to message. Prisoners of “our own” device…you can check out, but you can never leave.” “Any man loses his silver spoon spends a night in the box” – cuz that’s just the boxman’s job, despite flip-flopping Nuremberg showtrials.

And does it make any sense to you that, like Oakland, according to Gertrude Stein, there is no there there? (Not to be taken completely literally, of course. “Hope’less’, pointless, & completely nihilistic” is there, & those are somethings, too, not nothings. Something wicked “evil” {banal} this way comes…never stops coming.)

*Antiheroes vs proheroes is that story.

So…clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stuck in the middle with you?

Or Zihuatanejo with me, myself, & I, handsanding a beat up hull, & possibly a few other Red headed stepchildren that might show up?

Even if Z isn’t – because in today’s more consolidated world than ever before – can’t be, a flag-planted, once & for all, over & done, place, & so must be a moveable Z-feast?

To be inside the Zeitpoltergeist (“they’re heeeeeere…”& so am “I”ndividual bit of the weus collective), or outside it, that is the question…that rhetoric has nothing to do with, let alone with answering.

That question was answered at conception.

Everybody gets what they get.

Everybody’s got, from the get.

Evolution ain’t about directional progress. Evolution is musical chairs & eternal recurrence spinning on that flat disc under that pointy needle that scratches out the music of chance, & the blood, & the sweat, & the tears.

“Outside” gets projected, put “there,” too. Of course. Andy split to Z. Nietzsche went to Switzerland. There’s articles in here from a guy that sails. The farm needs be on wheels, or under keels, cuz agrarian sufficiency stuck atop Masada is but a morsel for industrial machine to swallow, lube itself with. Cue that final scene in Apocalypto.

Gonna’ suggest a book I’m in now, cuz I think you might collect symmetry-rhyme rewards from it. The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large, by Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

As for “why, if someone has something to say, go to all the trouble of making it a labyrinth with no exit?”

Have begun a rewatch of The Game of Thrones. Several references have been made to “the common” tongue, language, vernacular, etc.

In the Seven Kingdoms, as in Oakland, writing is mostly for the reader out there. The audience, the target, is mostly external.

In Oakland the tailor fashions the emperor’s robes. & his own straightjacket simultaneously.

In Oakland the comic sizes up funnybones for prostheses to sell. $ atrophies his own skeleton simultaneously.

But on the king’s road – no phone, no pool, no pets, don’t want no cigarettes – and maybe more commonly “North of the wall, too, “writers” are just reading themselves. Reading the writing on their own walls, not filling in billboards…with stuff memorized off other billboards.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as authoring one’s own life. I think one reads one’s own life (within the confines of conceived comprehension). I think a lot of people are so well trained to read, memorize, & regurgitate billboards that they are functionally illiterate when it comes to reading the good, important, real, true stuff. But that may just be me, being too optimistic, or crypto-egalitarian.

If you saw GOT, you know it ends like it began. A no-exit labyrinth for sure. Art, imitating tragedy of the commons life.

Just a bit of the range in “Menace”:

“The second half of the 19th century sees an acceleration in the process of democratization, nationalization, centralization, & uniformization in all regions of Europe. The demand for a general ochlocratic franchise comes to the fore as the synthesis of Luther’s superstitious belief in the perspicacity & intelligence of the avegeage man (reading his Bible) & Rousseau’s assertion that man is by nature good. It was impossible to resist the demands for political control on the part of the masses, who consisted admittedly of virtuous masterminds.

The Risorgimento in the political sense was probably a boon to Italy, but from a cultural point of view it was fatal because it extinguished the many little suns which, in preceding centuries, had given ti Italy her great variety of cultural expressions so essential to the grandeur of the Italian past. Something similar also happened in the Germanies, but this process in the other half of the former Holy Roman Empire will be treated separately.

Uniformism had created the demand that all people with an identical or similar literary language should draw together in common political units.****116 Yet literary languages are usually artificial creations, coined by certain masters at a given moment in history & accepted by the upper classes. The English-speaking reader should bear in mind that the literary languages of the European continent are not of aristocratic or royal mark. “The King’s English” has no equivalent either in the Germanic countries nor in the Mediterranean area. It usually is the upper bourgeoisie who speaks the literary, i.e., the artificially standardized language, with the greatest perfection, while there is often a “low class” dialectical strain in the idiom of the nobility & even royalty. The Empress Theresa spoke broadest Viennese, & this local dialect continued to be used by the Emperors of Austria until 1848. (The Emperor Francis Joseph who ascended the throne 11 years after Queen Victoria & died 15 years later than the British ruler was, like her, aristocratic in character but bourgeoisie in his tastes. The rule of these two monarchs saw the spectacular rise of the bourgeoisie.) The late King of Saxony repeatedly used the Saxonian dialect, & argot expressions are far more widespread in aristocratic circles around Paris & Budapest than in the haute bourgeoisie, which always prided itself on a strongly standardized language, which is nothing else but an intranational Esperanto (understood & spoken everywhere inside the nation).

((All leftists {with the paradoxical exception of the Spanish leftists} had always a teeth-gnashing hatred for dialectical differences because these disturbed the herdist uniformity to which they were all intrinsically devoted. Evelyn M. Acomb writes in her scholarly work “The French Laic Laws (1879-1889)”: They (the anticlericals) held that differences in religion would only divide citizens, who should be imbued with the sense of “union, concord, & fraternity which ought to exist between the children of the mere-patrie.” Thet attacked the religious orders for not obeying the laws, for trying to elude military service, & for encouraging local dialects. It is universally agreed in all the reports of academy inspectors that wherever a language other than French is spoken, whether it is a true language like the Breton or a simple patois, in all these districts, the religious orders, supported by the clergy, who insist that the catechism should be learned in patois, exert all their efforts to prevent the French language from being used.))

Artificial languages are far more collective – they comprise more people – than local dialects. But the artificial language often lacks character & originality. It is the urban, commercial spirit of the middle classes which demands uniformity for business purposes & has already killed many a truly living language in order to supplant it by an international (or rather intertribal) jargon. Hebrew was displaced about 300 years before the birth of our Lord by the Aramaic slang of Syrian traders, spoken between Alexandria & Babylon.

The 19th or 20th century nationalist of either the “democratic” or socialist pattern would have hardly consented to the exhortation of St. Stephen, King of Hungary, who said to his sons: “A country of only one language & one custom is foolish & fragile.” It is the urban middle class which became the protagonist for the national state with one language, one law, one independent church & left its deadly centralism all over the Old World between Calais & Vladivostok.

This is the reason why the middle class revolutions of 1848 in Berlin, Italy, Vienna, Baden, Prague, Munich, & Pesth had not only an ochlocratic but also a strongly nationalistic character. Pan-Italism, Pan-Germanism & the weirdest growth of all, Pan-Slavism, revolted against the supranational monarchy. The endless, monotonous plains of eastern Europe had accepted with almost Asiatic fervor the gospel of a gigantic unification preached for the first time by Jan Kollar, a Lutheran Slovak minister in Magyar-German Pesth. Pan-Slavism differed from the two other isms inasmuch as it wanted to unite not one nation, but a whole family of nations, who show as many differences as the Icelanders from the Tyroleans or the English from the East Prussians. Pan-Latinism or Pan-Teutonism have not yet made their appearance on the political stage, & they probably never will. Yet what the disciples of these Panisms wanted was a vastly simplified Europe, consisting of 3 or 4 states, all uniform, all “democratically” goverened, a bad imitation of the American Middle West, with about 150 million “customers” each, run by lawyers, journalists, businessmen, & teachers of gymnastics.

Gymnastic teachers were not unimportant; the gymnastic leagues of central & eastern Europe wielded great political power. Supported by the bourgeoisie (& even the lower classes) they were the main carriers of Pan-Slavism & Pan-Germanism. Their performances in mass drill, their semimilitary maneuvers, their worship of health, discipline, & co-ordination, & finally their anticlericalism of varying degree, made them heralds as well as executors of a mass age. ((Later we see “Counter Leagues,” i.e., Catholic as well as Socialist Gymnastic Leagues. The Socialists did finally everything in their power to make good use of the collectivizing effects of sports & gymnastics – inside & outside of Russia. In all these Leagues the emphasis was always put on the subordination of the individual under the whole. Their influence & importance can never be overrated & it is surprising that no serious treatise has been written about them.)) The Sokol (“Falcon”) & Orel (“Eagle”) organizations among the Slavs, the numerous gymnastic leagues among the Teutons – mainly the Austrian, Moravian, & Bohemian Germans – are typical for these various movements with parallel goals. Neverteless their purpose was not primarily a military one. Their main objective was rather of a psychological nature. The spectacular collective displays organized on a scale only surpassed by the parades of the National Socialists in Nuremberg, served the feeling of collective might & a “belonging together.” The numerous men’s glee clubs, so widespread among German & Slav nationalists, had a similar purpose. Community singing was also one of the strongest magnetic features of the Lutheran Reformation. It is not surprising that these gymnastic leagues featuring a definite Weltanschauung had a deep political influence mainly on the lower middle class. Thet started out featuring certain liberal tendencies. This liberalism is still apparent in the writing of the Turnvater Jahn, the founder of the German Gymnastic Leagues. In the 30’s of this century their Austrian groups (Deutscher Turnverein, featuring an emblem remarkably like the Swastika) became violently national socialistic & dropped the liberal ideas. It is no exaggeration to say that while the Slav gymnastic leagues (the “Sokols”)* were partly responsible for the breaking up of the Austro-Hungarian Maonarchy, the Deutscher Turnverein (German Gymnastic League) had a lions share of the annexation of Austria.

*(The Czechoslovak Republic, Yugoslavia & even Poland showed great recognition for the work of the Sokols after their establishment as independent states. Czechoslovakia featured the founder of the Sokols on their stamps & the Sokol-slet’s (Falconflights: mass meetings & mass performances) were always memorable events. Yugoslavia celebrated the great slets with a special issue of her stamps. The Czechs also unofficially called some of their banknotes “Sokols.” The founder of the Sokols, Miroslav Tyrs, was, needless to say, a great admirer of Taine, a violent evolutionist & an enthusiastic monist preaching an odd political biologism, spiced with a romantic anticlericalism & anti-Habsburgism. His vistas were largely “Nazi” which did not prevent the invading Nazi hordes from suppressing the Sokols.”

Good stuff, even if Leddihn places causes in traditional externalities, and even if he, like HH Hoppe & others, paraphrasing Churchill, believes Monarchy+Catholicism the bestworst relative all the “other” forms. Published 1943. I got my copy from mises org.